/lit/ - Literature

>>18647731
>My question is why is this not the most common philosophical or religious system when it is so clearly the one that describes the world we live
Zoroastrianism exists

>>18647731
Anon, love and strife aren't synonymous for good and evil for Empedocles...

>>18647740
For one thing that is not a popular religion and for another it's not really fundamentally dualist in the sense I'm proposing here.

>>18647753
No I know that, I'm not a strict empedoclean, and I came to his writing long after these ideas had occurred to me. But they are the same kind of dual approach to metaphysics, and he is the only one I'm aware that does it in precisely that way. In empedocles there is a sort of cycle happening in which each return to each other and that is not exactly the point I'm making since it's an added dimension of historical unfolding.

>>18647764
How familiar are you with E. Michael Jones? He says something similar, specifically when he criticised Hegel for viewing history as a dialectic of strife rather than love.

>>18647773
I know who he is but I haven't read his books, to me the idea that the fundamental battle is on some level of populations versus each other just isn't right. I think the battle inheres in everything, hence the dualism.

Hegel I dont understand so I can't say anything about that. If relevant to this dualism then by all means let me know

Walked into a VOLCANO
WHAT ARE YOU BLIND EMPEDOCLES?

>>18647731
Also he wrote in verse. Which is a badass way to do philosophy.

Verse > Dialogues > Letters > Aphorisms > Street Preaching > Ted Talks > Omegle Video Chat > Treatise

>>18647841
That's just a Greek thing though, many of them liked the idea of writing in verse and there's a TON of really odd (for lack of a better word) genre-defying works by the Greeks, like every Presocratic thinker has some sue generis.

You see this in the whole of Antiquity's equivalent of a novel, writing in part-verse where there wasn't the streamline prose novel we have in modern times.

>>18647731
Basic answer is because Empedocles was too Hellenic for the Christian masses that would eventually inherit Hellenic society. Plato was more favorable to them. Nietzsche says somewhere that Empedocles was a "great reformer who failed" or something to that extent. History was simply not kind to Empedocles so he was discarded and overlooked.

>>18647841
Aphorisms should be right down the bottom below treatises.

>>18647754
Yes, Zoroastrianism is fundamentally dualistic. Read Mardanfarrokh's Doubt-Removing Book. The main difference is Zoroastrians have a more linear view of time rather than cyclical like Empedocles.

>>18647731
>>18647740
>>18647754
>>18649561
Check out Mardanfarrox's Doubt Removing Book. I have given an excerpt indicating dualism:
http://www.avesta.org/mp/SGV.pdf
Also, this is a good article summarizing it in a more rigorous philosophical manner.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25676936?seq=1
The uncreated good God is delimited by what is logically possible and the uncreated evil spirit is real but does not independently exist (i.e., it can only corrupt the good).

>There is no origination of anything that is mortal, nor yet any end in baneful death; but only mixture and separation of what is mixed, but men call this 'origination.'

>But when light is mingled with air in human form, or in form like the race of wild beasts or of plants or of birds, then men say that these things have come into being; and when they are separated, they call them evil fate; this is the established practice, and I myself also call it so in accordance with the custom.

>Fools! for they have no far-reaching studious thoughts who think that what was not before comes into being or that anything dies and perishes utterly.

>For from what does not exist at all it is impossible that anything come into being, and it is neither possible nor perceivable that being should perish completely; for things will always stand wherever one in each case shall put them.

>Twofold is the coming into being, twofold the passing away, of perishable things; for the latter (i.e. passing away) the combining of all things both begets and destroys, and the former (i.e. coming into being), which was nurtured again out of parts that were being separated, is itself scattered.

>And these (elements) never cease changing place continually, now being all united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife, until they are brought together in the unity of the all, and become subject to it. Thus inasmuch as one has been wont to arise out of many and again with the separation of the one the man arise, so things are continually coming into being and there is no fixed age for them; and farther inasmuch as they never cease changing place continually, so they always exist within an immovable circle.

>For men's wisdom increases with reference to what lies before them.

>In so far as they change and become different, to this extent other sorts of things are ever present for them to think about.

>For it is by earth that we see earth, and by water water, and by air glorious air; so, too, by fire we see destroying fire, and love by love, and strife by baneful strife. For out of these all things are fitted together and their form is fixed, and by these men think and feel both pleasure and pain.

I never realized how complementary Empedocles was with Heraclitus. The former seems like a continuation of the latter. Fascinating read.

>>18649616
Empedocles and Heraclitus don't fundamentally agree though. For Heraclitus, there is an underlying complementary unity of opposites; opposites can be reconciled. However, in the case of Empedocle's cycle, it is about the one pole overpowering the other depending on the epoch of time, and thus, they are irreconcilable. The cycle in Empedocle's philosophy is produced via their irreconciliability.