TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
The Presocratic philosophy Empedocles was an interesting figure. He is most famous for the much-mythologized story about his death. He claimed he was an immortal god and threw himself into the fires of Mount Etna, with no later sign of this apparent apotheosis. Or so the legend goes, at least. He had a very strange and memorable view of the world, as well. He claimed that the world was composed, at a material level, of the four classical elements, air, fire, earth, and water. While he did not use the term "atom," he was similar to the atomists in that he believed that these elements were eternal and indestructible and that changes occurred merely in a shuffling of their positions.
He believed that the universe was eternal and cyclical and that the competing forces of "love" and "strife" caused all these elements to get re-shuffled. Namely, he claimed that the force of love brought things together and that the force of strife drove them apart, much in the way these forces operate at the human level. That is, we get "closer" to those we have love for and "move away" from those we are at odds with. At one point, Empedocles claimed, the universe was completely bound together, and all elements existed in a harmonious, joyful, spherical shape with no space between them. All was one and all was one. Eventually the force of strife began to push them apart, and difference and distinction appeared in the world as things became set apart. The final result of this was a universe where all elements were totally separated and lacked any and all attraction to each other. They were as far apart from and repellant towards each other as they could be, in a position of complete strife. But eventually love will start working its way, and, like a gravitational pull, will begin attracting them back towards each other. The sphere will eventually re-form and the cycle will repeat, back and forth, forever.
The story, of course, leaves us wondering: Where are we in this cycle? Empedocles did not seem to make that clear (at least in the small fragments we have remaining). We can clearly not be on either side of the extremes, as we do not live in a joyful monad with no distinctions of substance, nor in a barren and empty universe where there is no mixture of elements at all. Are we all coming closer together in a spirit of love and becoming more similar or all being driven apart in a spirit of strife and becoming more different?
I would say, however, that our empirical experience shows us a pattern completely contrary to what Empedocles expected: coming closer together and yet becoming more different and more at strife with each other. In a modern world with internet and social media, all traditional notions of "distance" have collapsed. Everyone in the world is much closer together. But in my case at lesat, it feels less like a loving family coming together in a reunion or moving into a house with your beloved bride and more like becoming a roommate with your best friend. At first, you liked each other a lot, but now you can't stand each other. You only notice his most annoying aspects. You could ignore some of those aspects before, because you had some distance from each other. You could go back to your own room and be alone after hanging out with him. But now you see him all the time, every day, and it drives you crazy and you'd do anything to get away from him!
This seems like an inevitable experience that people always have. It's a reason that I've always been skeptical of the ideal of the Epicurean society of friends, where you never marry and just live in a commune with your bros. I think we need more distance than that. There's a lot of reasons that modern social media is destroying the world. People talk about echo chambers, algorithms designed to stoke division, misinformation, and so on. And all of these are real factors. But I think a part of it might just be this very simple one that people aren't realizing: that we just need some space apart.
If Empedocles's view of the world is correct, then I suspect that the apex of love would not be at the "edge" with all the elements combined, but somewhere in the middle with all of them in a lovely proportion: an equal balance of love pulling them together and strife establishing some boundaries. The extreme of them together would probably be an apex of hatred, where everyone is pissed because they have no room to breathe. And the extreme of them apart would be an apex of pure indifference rather than strife. I think that we have to hold to the mean and try to live in the middle.
I remember listening to William MacAskill on Sam Harris's podcast recently. In case you don't know, MacAskill is one of the bigwigs in the Effective Altruism movement and has done a lot of work on long-term existential risk. One thing I heard him say which I really thought was interesting was that if humanity manages to not drive itself to extinction in the next couple centuries, then we will probably be fine for billions of years to come. And if we do avoid extinction, it's almost inevitable that we begin moving out into space and colonizing other plantes. If that comes to fruition, we will actually begin to start drifting apart again, much like how we were "apart" from each other and didn't have such immediate communication before the modern, globalized world. It is, then, a very special time that we live in in our history where we are all this connected to each other. And we should make the most of it to do good in the world.
I agree with this. However, I also think that we do not need to wait in order to make some "distance" in our lives. Because we all need it. Heidegger says the same thing in his very difficult essay "The Thing:" In our modern world, everything is equally far and equally near, and thus there is no real being of things coming to pass. Nothing stands out in the right way. It's a matter of deep attention and purity of vision that allows "things" to retain their distance and thus come forth in their own presence. We should all have some distance in our lives. It's a precious commodity these days. And one of the best ways to do that is to meditate for 20 minutes every day. I do it and I really can't recommend it enough. It gives you a break from stimulation and lets you have a break from all the things competing for your attention.