The Wisdom of Love: A Reflection Upon Empedocles’ Fragment 35

Empedocles sees both Love and Strife as forces active on many levels and scales. But they are the same forces throughout. Everywhere their activities are essentially the same. That of Love is not merely to bring together unlike things, but to strip them of their mutually opposed properties, to assimilate them to one another, to fuse them into a homogeneous compound. That of Strife, on the contrary is to break up such compounds, and to reduce them into mutually hostile ingredients. Empedocles sees these as the two great forces that are at work in the cosmos, at the properly cosmic level, at the level of political and personal life, and at the level of “chemistry.”