EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA

by

David Arthur Walters

For even as Love and Hate were strong of yore,

They shall have their hereafter; nor I think

Shall endless Age be emptied of these Twain.

(Empedocles of Acragas, d. 444 B.C.E.)

In re Death Instinct - Sicilian Notes in Progress

Sigmund Freud admired Empedocles of Acrabas because the Greek philosopher confirmed his hypothesis that we are subject to two primary instinctive forces, the life instinct and the death instinct.

“Empedocles... is one of the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization... Some of his theories must inevitably strike us as primitive.... But the theory of Empedocles which especially deserves our interest is one which approximates so closely to the psychoanalytical theory of the instincts that we would be tempted to maintain the two are identical... No one can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to later understanding." (Analysis Terminable and Interminable 1937)

Indeed. Our manifest guises may be disguises, yet we shall have our say nevertheless, for what would humanity be without the cultivation of the human mind? Many who say "According to Freud..." today have never read him. They cannot truly appreciate the personal influence his writings had over many people during his time, particularly among young people interested in sexual liberation. Freud made himself clear. His personal conflicts and biases are obvious; what artist does not draw a self-portrait even when his subject is a stone? He contradicts himself where a fanatic would not. Yet his prose is lucid and his concepts are easily grasped by the motivated student. His abiding interest in mythology, religion, and art made much of his writing entertaining. He was intellectually honest; he credited his sources and he even praised the virtues of people who publicly disparaged him. He readily stated what he did not know when he did not know it; he was quick to admit when he was speculating. Of course what he thought he knew for sure he was quite certain of, just as any good authority figure must be; otherwise he would not have gotten anywhere, hence, no matter how we might abject to it, nothing today would be "According to Freud." As for the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics on such perennial issues as whether evil is the absence of Good or whether Good and Evil are two independent forces, we all need some position from which to proceed; Freud need two to tango for his conflict theory.

Freud was well ahead of his time, but well behind it too, as were the radicals of ancient times who longed for prehistoric golden ages, before history became a record of man's crimes against humankind. His time was a time of sexual repression and greed and poverty, followed by world war after world war, of one massive horror after horror. It was a time in dire need of a prophet who, in profile, with one eye on the past can see the future with the other that the twain shall meet. A door was wanted, a way in and out presided over by Janus, who was a daily enigma, one most exalted in all his contradictions.

Yes, the rise of such a man and his cult is often called for during the troubled times that follow a period of carefully rationalized gross materialism attended by the usual psychological malady, a sort of neurosis whose name changes to suit the fashion: acedia, anhedonia, ennui, noia, et cetera. I prefer the romantic malaise, the proper English form being "malease", an uneasy feeling prior to the outburst of definite symptoms of physical illness. Sometimes the wait is long: for instance, Christianity had to patiently and uneasily await the troubled days - which followed a period of unprecedented Imperial prosperity - for Constantine to exalt its prophet. Alas, even the charms of Nature do not assuage the withdrawn romantic's discontent with perverse human nature, for society's reasoning has killed his romance. The paranoid schizophrenic might retreat to the woods; but he is not happy there; he must mail carved wooden bombs back to corrupt civilization to teach it a lesson, that nuclear detonations are imminent. But the hopeless poet abjures the murder of others committed for a moment of fame, and takes another path, to immortality. In ancient times he might retreat and climb Mt. Etna, not to enjoy the wonderful view of Nature, but to become a god by taking life and death into his own hands; he will not waver like Hamlet: he will hurl himself to a painful but honorable death in Typho's fiery embrace.

Suicide was an honorable way out in ancient times. Suicide is unnatural to animals such as dogs, but Cynics, the divine dogs, as well as Stoics prescribed it as the cure for all sorts of miseries. When Antisthenes was suffering, Diogenes the Cynic handed him a dagger and said, "In case you need the aid of a friend." (Julian: The Uneducated Cynics) The antisocial Cynics praised death daily pursuant to Socrates' declaration that philosophy is a preparation for death - they despised what society prized: the body. The Stoics, more sophisticated than the Cynics, elevated suicide to a virtuous art form. I think it was Seneca who said, "Do you like life or not? If you want to be miserable, live. If not, die. It is in your power to return to your origin."

For the Stoics, the fundamental principle and origin of the Cosmos, which operates cyclically according to mechanistic natural law, is the Heraclitean cosmic Fire. As for the popular, Homeric religion, the netherworld was a shadowy, usually unpleasant place inhabited by the shades of the deceased. But the salvation religions opened up Homer's pleasant Elysium field, once reserved exclusively for Zeus's favorites, for souls to enjoy after they transmigrated up the chain of being - there were hellish places of punishment along the way.

Now the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles of Acragas was under the influence of the Pythagoreans and, perhaps, the dissident Orphic cult, which was tolerated provided that it did not interfere in politics, yet he was also a natural philosopher - he was an eclectic as well as an original thinker.

Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and school inspector who deserted poetry but not his job to become a missionary critic, was feeling the malaise of his age when he wrote his dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna (1852). He withdrew it because he was ashamed of the poem; he said it represented a painful situation "in which the suffering finds no vent in action." But Arnold had the poem published again in 1853 at Robert Browning's instigation. Empedocles is his suicidal work, his Werther so to speak. He was influenced by the ancient authors including Empedocles of Acragas, with whom he deeply sympathized. While commenting on the pre-Socratic philosopher in his September 23, 1849 letter to the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold declared:

"These are damned times - everything is against one - the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical innervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, - our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties." (Letters to Clough)

Arnold's poem proceeds with the soliloquy of Callicles, a young harp-player who is resting on a rock by a pass in the forest region of Etna:

CALLICLES

....But never on so fair a morn; - the sun

Is shining on the brilliant mountain-crests,

And on the highest pines; but farther down,

Here in the valley, is in shade; the sward

Is dark, and on the stream the mist still hangs;

One sees one's footprints crush'd in the wet grass,

One's breath curls in the air; and on these pines

That climb from the stream's edge, the long grey tufts,

Which the goats love, are jewell'd think with dew,

Here will I stay till the slow litter comes.

I have my harp too - that is well - Apollo!

What mortal could be sick or sorry here?

I know not in what mind Empedocles,

Whose mules I follow'd, may be coming up,

But if, as most men say, he is half mad

With exile, and with brooding on his wrongs,

Pausanius, his sage-friend, who mounts with him,

Could scarce have lighted on a lovelier cure..."

As we unscroll the play to hear Empedocles' chief complaint and his pleas to the Four Elements before he takes the fateful leap, we should keep in mind, at least in regards to his suicide, that we speak not of the real philosopher and poet, Empedoclesm of Acragas, the Greek poet, prophet and natural philosopher whose poetic remains are fragmentary - a mere thousand lines - and whose Four Elements ruled the scientific mind for two thousand years. In one of his poems, the real Empedocles said he was an immortal god. In the Pythagorean or Orphic sense, he had become a purified or divine man; people flocked to him as if here were a god - he was a famous healer and miracle worker. His reputed leap into the crater might have been a joke devised to mock his audacity for publicly declaring himself to be a god - of course the symbolists insist the story represents him shedding his alien body and reuniting himself with the cosmic fire. Another version has him disappearing into the heavens - bright lights had been seen hovering in the night sky. Another tale presents him hanging himself, and yet another says he fell and broke his thigh, and that brought on a fatal illness. We shall visit the original Empedocles at greater length later. Suffice it to say Arnold is taking considerable poetic license with his Empedocles. Now let's examine a few fragments from Arnold's poem - Arnold and many other analysts believe the human personality itself presents itself as fragmented, hence wants interpretation to be understood. We find Empedocles at the Summit of Etna:

EMPEDOCLES

Alone! -

On this charr'd, blackn'd, melancholy waste,

Crown'd by the awful peak, Etna's great mouth.

Round which the sullen vapour rolls - alone!

...No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!

And the world hath the day, and must break thee,

Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live,

Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine;

And being lonely thou art miserable,

For something has impair'd thy spirit's strength,

And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy.

Thou canst live with men nor thyself -

O sage! O sage! - Take then the one way left;

And turn thee to the elements, thy friends,

Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers,

And say: Ye helpers, here Empedocles,

Who asks this final service at your hands!

Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid

The last spark of man's consciousness with words -

Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world

Be disarrayed of their divinity -

Before the soul lose all her solemn joys,

And awe be dead, and hope impossible,

And soul's deep eternal night come on -

Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!

....

I am weary of it.

- Lie there, ye ensigns

Of my unloved preeminence

In an age like this!

Among a people of children,

Who throng'd me in their cities,

Who worshipp'd me in their houses,

And ask'd, not wisdom,

But drugs to charm with,

But spells to mutter -

All the foul's-armoury of magic! - Lie there,

My golden circlet,

My purple robe!

....

And lie thou there,

My laurel bough!

Scornful Apollo's ensign, lie thou there!

Thought thou hast been my shade in the world's heat -

Though I have loved thee, lived in honouring thee -

Yet lie thou there,

My laurel bough!

I am weary of thee.

I am weary of solitude

Where he who bears thee must abide -

Of the rocks of Parnassus,

Of the gorge of Delphi,

Of the moonlit peaks, and the caves....

....

...We had not lost our balance then, nor grown

Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy,

The smallest thing could give us pleasure then -

The sports of the country-people,

The flute-note from the woods,

Sunset over the sea;

Seed-time and harvest,

The reapers in the corn,

The vinedresser in his vineyard,

The village-girl at her wheel.

Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye

Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,

Who dwell on the firm basis of content!

But he, whose youth fell on a different worlds,

From that on which his exiled age is thrown -

Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd

By other rules than are in vogue to-day -

Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,

But in a world he loves not, must subsist

In ceaseless opposition, be on the guard

Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,

That the world win no master over him -

Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;

Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd

To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy -

Joy and the outward world must die to him,

As they are dead to me.

....

Oh, that I could glow like this mountain!

Oh, that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea!

Oh, that my world were full of light as the stars!

Oh, that it brooded over the world like the air!

But no, this here will glow no more; thou art

A living man no more, Empedocles!

Nothing but a devouring flame of thought -

But a naked, eternally restless mind!

To the elements it came from

Everything will return -

Our bodies to earth,

Our blood to water,

Heat to fire,

Breath to air,

They were well born, they will be well entomb'd

But mind?

....

But mind, but thought -

If these have been the master part of us -

Where will they find their parent element?

What will receive them, who will call them home?

But we shall still be in them, and they in us,

And we shall be strangers in the world,

And they shall be our lords, as they are now;

And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,

And never let us clasp and feel the All

But through their forms, and modes and stiffling veils.

And we shall be as unsatisfied as now....

....

And therefore, O ye elements! I know -

Ye know it too - it hath been granted me

Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.

I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud

Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breath free.

Is it but for a moment?

- Ah, boil up ye vapours!

Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!

My soul glows to meet you.

Ere it flag, ere the mists

Of despondency and gloom

Rush over it again,

Receive me, save me!

(He plunges into the crater)

Before Arnold's Empedocles hurled himself into the volcano, he had played his harp and delivered poetic advice to Pausanias, the physician who accompanied him part of the way up the mountain. However, the medicine he recommended to Pausanias was inadequate to cure his own malady and was in part the very cause of his disease:

These hundred doctors try

To preach thee to their school.

We have the truth! they cry;

And yet their oracle,

Trumpet it as they may, is but the same as thine.

Once read thy own breast right,

And thou hast done with fears;

Man gets no other light,

Search he a thousand years.

Sink in thyself! there asks what ails the, at that shrine!

Matthew Arnold selected Empedocles and his fragmented poems as the ancient model for the modern anxiety of the Victorian age, a maladie du siecle for which the poet has no cure; so the poet, like Arnold, forsakes poetry for criticism. But criticism is the very poison slowly killing him. The critic suffers from doubt; he is given to morbid introspection and obsessive intellectual criticism. He is not able to accept the authority of any school of thought, nor does he have his own working hypothesis to stand on: he has no faith. He may through cultural analysis and self-analysis become aware of the nature of his problem, but he is unable to do anything about it: he is a slave to thought, unable to take action. And the laws of nature may be quite clear to him and useful in the material sense, but they do nothing to rejuvenate his spirit. Nature is, as Camus said some time later, deaf to his spiritual need as a living human being: god is dead and nature is the Absurd.

Arnold knowingly warned his poet-friend Clough that moping melancholic misanthropy would ruin his poetic enthusiasm and the emotional well-being necessary for good poetry. Arnold could not be a poet and a critic at the same time, so he chose criticism and became the serious, conscientious son his father wanted instead of a carefree poet. Once a critic, he criticized the fragmented character of the modern society and its poetry. The modern, doubting individual distrusts traditional customs, and his critical intellect divorces him from his emotional impulses: he is a fragmented person. And his poetry is fragmented, therefore Arnold emphasized the importance of poetic structure, the avoidance of distracting parts - he deplored the influence of Shakespeare on Keats. In the final analysis, Arnold the critic, best known for his seminal work, Culture and Anarchy, turned to conformity as the right antidote to doubt; not that nonconformity is wrong: it is simply psychologically damaging.

Speaking of Shakespeare, the malady suffered by Arnold and his contemporaries was sometimes called Hamletism. Once again, as in the case of Empedocles, artistic license was taken and the present was projected on the past. Empedocles of Acragas, as we shall see later on, was guilt-ridden, but he was not a despairing suicide: he was certain of his theology; he knew very well what to do. Likewise, crazy Amleth, unlike his wavering successor Hamlet, knew exactly what he must and would do with the sticks he was sharpening in the fire. The old heroes who acted crazy were crazy like foxes.

To Be Continued En Route

Copyright 2002 David Arthur Walters