The Empedoclean Renaissance

Daniel “The Empedoclean Renaissance” 1

The Empedoclean Renaissance

“In a deluge of water and fire, the volcano spits up only a single

reminder of Empedocles-‐ his lead sandal.”

-‐Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.1

Drew Daniel

Introduction: Jumping Into the Fire

Early modern studies has recently witnessed a striking resurgence of interest

in Lucretius as a crucial figure for the dissemination of Epicurean atomism into the

cultural bloodstream. Alison Brown, Catherine Wilson, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen

Greenblatt and Gerard Passannante have all contributed distinctive book-‐length

studies that track this process and theorize Lucretian aftereffects, echoes and

resonances in the theology, history, painting, and poetry of the period.2 If there was

ever a candidate for a “return of theory within early modernity”, then the return of

the theory of atoms and void from medieval desuetude into the shocked, tantalized


awareness of a particularly crucial galaxy of early modern readers from Machiavelli

to Montaigne to Spenser offers a case in point of the uncannily necromantic return

of dead ideas to virulent, contagious new life.

That the critical constellation of a “Lucretian Renaissance”-‐ to use

Passannante’s luminous title phrase-‐ has taken place largely under the rubric of

intellectual history rather than through a new theorization is unsurprising, for the

short version of this narrative of transmission arrives already bottlenecked through

the singularity of an evental date: though not all interested parties regard 1417 as

the decisive moment through which a reborn Lucretius emerges to make the world

modern, there is a sufficiently general, agreed upon consensus that this is so, and a

broader consensus about Lucretius as the tissue donor whose transplantation of a

set of Ancient Greek philosophical doctrines into hexameters of Latin poetry

brought previously unthinkable, indeed damnable ideas back into broader

circulation at precisely the tipping point when, in a more temperate and receptive

intellectual soil, a brave cognoscenti was primed to consider certain radical

possibilities anew: that the world is assembled out of atoms and void, that the soul

is mortal, that death is simply the de-‐composition of matter, and that the gods are

indifferent. If the Lucretian dissemination of Epicureanism was a “return of theory”

that already took place within the Renaissance, then the recent scholarly desire to

re-‐tell this already familiar story over the last five years could then be termed a

“return of the return of theory”.


But theory’s return has been a return as history, not as an estranged, altered,

or reconstituted theory. With a few exceptions, notably Goldberg’s methodological

intervention into Lucretius’ utility for the practice of queer theory and

Passannante’s methodological intervention into the utility of Lucretius for the

practice of philology, the discussion has been taken up with historicist re-‐countings

of the archive of transmission. Indeed if temporality itself has become noticeably

plastic within Jonathan Gil Harris’ recent formulations of “the polychronic” and

Alexander Nagel’s and Christopher Wood’s formulation of the “Anachronic

Renaissance”, there is something strikingly, insistently normative in the

chronological framing through which the story of Lucretius’ return has returned.3

Against the backdrop of this “return of the return”, I want to think about-‐

and, yes, theorize with, what does not return: the phenomena of loss, destruction,

negation, and death that haunt the historical archive of materialist philosophy as an

occluded component of these positive accounts of its successful, if sub rosa,

dissemination. And I want to think about and theorize upon an uncongenial figure

who does not return because he never left, a figure who was subject to both the pre-‐

emptive shattering of his original texts and the widespread adoption of the essential

insights reflected back at us from the surviving fragments of those texts:

Empedocles of Acragas (circa 490-‐ 435 B.C.E.), the first philosopher to posit that the

material of the universe is composed entirely out of earth, air, fire and water.

Earlier generations of scholarship have already traced the dissemination of

Empedoclean concepts and references within the English Renaissance: an early


essay by Sacvan Bercovitch constructs precisely such an archive, and I see no reason

to repeat that work.4 Rather, I hope to align what survives of Empedocles’ thought

alongside the (mistaken) accounts of his death as suicide, in order to think through

the consequences of the Empedoclean archive that are not historical but precisely

affective. That is, I propose a recuperative reading of the metaphysical pathos of

Empedocles’ death as a campy episode of “bad history”, a false history of self-‐

cancelling sublimity attached to Empedocles. Long discredited by textual scholars

keen to pare away the speculative and the false, I want to stubbornly reassert the

false history’s hermeneutic value for theory and against history. For the false

accounts of Empedocles fiery death, like the false account of Lucretius’ love

melancholy and suicide alleged by Jerome, might nonetheless do real interpretive

work in drawing out, and critically opening to speculation, a basic set of questions:

What does theory feel like? What are the emotional consequences of a materialist

ontology? What does it feel like to affectively inhabit the belief that the world and

the people within it are-‐-‐only—transient assemblages of matter?

For the readers and writers of early modern Europe, the most conventional

answer to this question came from a homosexual vegetarian mystic who supposedly

committed suicide by jumping into a volcano. Empedocles of Acragas remains at

once hic et ubique and, by virtue of the disjunction between his doctrinal rise and

personal plunge, curiously difficult to locate. If none of his writings-‐ amphibiously

perched between poetry and philosophy-‐ survive intact except as brutally truncated,

jolting tags of quotation within other writers, his core contribution to the history of

philosophy-‐ the ontological doctrine that the material universe is composed of


varying mixtures of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, sequenced and re-‐

combined by the forces of love and strife-‐ suffered not fiery annihilation but the

watering down of a seemingly ubiquitous transmission. Empedocles was

conventional not because, like Plato or Aristotle, he was actively being translated,

read and argued about, but precisely because his core ideas circulated not as living

arguments but as dead metaphors, blurry commonplaces, and elastic conceits. At

once miniaturized into a conceptual toy and distended into something universally

applicable, the elemental doctrine of earth, air, fire and water leapt across the

boundaries of disciplines, geographical continents and theological commitments to

lodge itself in love poems, political tracts, sermons and lectures with equal facility.

Indeed, Empedoclean combinatorial ontology saturates the intellectual history of

medieval and early modern Europe with such quotidian omnipresence that it

becomes curiously difficult to localize and think about clearly.

Yet if his idea was everywhere, the man responsible was not. Inevitably, the

schema came un-‐tethered from its originator, and, except among the unusually

learned, Empedocles entered a murky twilight of pseudo-‐celebrity reserved for

virtuous or vicious pagans, alternately celebrated for his poetic and philosophical

achievements, chided for his numerous eccentricities, vilified for his wilfull act of

self-‐murder. Long lost aside from occasional fragments and secondhard paraphrase,

his texts could not be read even by those educated enough to realize that they had

once existed. At the level of discursive survival, the “fact” of the famous death stood

more or less on even footing with the recognition of the void left by the lost texts.


In the methodological context of a continuing consideration of the “return of

theory“ in early modern studies, this particular stand-‐off between philosophy and

intellectual history triggers the following volcanic eruption of yet more questions:

What analogical resemblances or modes of kinship link earlier conventions of ready-‐

to-‐hand thought with the circulation of sententious and formulaic phrases, saws and

positions within the modern circulation of contemporary “theory”? Can an anecdotal

account of the death of a philosopher function as a critique of his or her thought?

Did it in this case? What was the relationship between the widespread adoption of

Empedoclean ontology and the archival afterlife of this (false) suicidal anecdote

within early modernity? Does the self-‐conflicting transmission history of

Empedocles place his thought within the archive of suicidal passion, his life within

the compass of elemental ontology, or both realms into a compromising position

with each other? What might the forcefield of relationships and/or disjunctions

between the doctrine and the death tell us about how early modern people-‐

particularly poets and dramatists in England-‐ imagined the emotional consequences

of materialist philosophy? And how might the representation of that very nexus

within English literature illuminate underlying conflicts and overlaps between two

emergent critical orientations within early modern studies today: the affective turn

and the new materialisms?

The dissemination of the mingled streams of Empedoclean ontology and

Empedoclean suicidology within early modern English literature yields a self-‐

differential archive which can be sounded for local answers to these broader

methodological questions, which will repeat and re-‐combine over the course of this


essay as elemental themes and variations. That said, my goal is not to generate a

historical account of transmission history, but to consider the theoretical question

of how affect and ontology variously intertwine in Empedocles and within early

modernity, and to ask how they might be fashioned into a new critical assemblage at

present. In order for that to happen, the twin shadows of Empedocles as hyper-‐

conventional old standby and suicidal stranger must be brought out anew and re-‐

articulated. Accordingly, I shall first revisit the fragments, papyri, and testimony of

Empedocles to reassert the vitality of his elemental ontology, and then flag its re-‐

circulation within some salient tissue specimens of early modern English literature.

Assembling Empedocles

Adapting the tetrad as an idealized four part form from Pythagorean

doctrines which are at once mathematical and mystical, Empedocles was the first

philosopher to identify earth, air, fire and water as the four distinct kinds of material

from which the universe itself is composed. Though his work or works of

philosophical poetry are largely lost and now survive only through the quotations of

other authors and the occasional intact papyrus, a corpus of discrete fragments has

been constructed by subsequent generations of sometimes fractious textual scholars

into an evocative, if deeply incomplete, composite of its own.5 Across the complex


pathways of his scholarly dissemination, the name Empedocles thus now defines

both the “author function” of the four part combinatorial ontology attributed to him,

and radiates outwards into the broader speculative web which loosely binds his

scattered utterances together. No less than the bodies he theorized, Empedocles,

too, is now an assemblage.

If this was a kind of materialism, what kind of materialism was it? Not, it

seems, a necessarily proto-‐secularizing one. In Fragment 12/6, Empedocles

identifies four “roots” from which the earth and all of its components are

constructed, symbolically invoking each “root” with a distinct god or goddess:

First, hear of the four roots of all things,

gleaming Zeus and life-‐bringing Hera and Aidoneus

and Nestis, who moistens with tears the spring of mortals.6

Regardless of how we evaluate the role of deities within this fragment, one must not

mistake Empedocles’ doctrine for the simple insistence that earth, air, fire and water

are “all there is.” Going beyond those four “roots” (he does not use the word

element), Empedocles also posits two additional forces: Love and Strife, forces

which respectively bond together the roots into temporary forms or work to

dissolve those bonds and destroy those forms. Weaving these four roots and two

forces into a unified ontological history of the universe, Empedocles bequeathed to

the Western philosophical tradition both an account of the material composition of

all matter and a vibrantly poetic account of the affective consequences of that


material compositional doctrine: the assembled fragments imply an ethical drama of

progressive reincarnation across forms in which ascension to “divinity” is held out

as a theoretical ideal placed in permanent tension with a dark vision of the ultimate

fate of total dissolution shared in common by all distinct, local forms.

The Empedocles assembled within the testimonies gathered together by

Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers constitutes a hyper-‐vivid

caricature: Laertius’ mutually contradictory accounts yield a synthetic vision of the

Sicilian philosopher resplendent in purple robes, gold belt, metal sandals, and laurel

wreath, surrounded by boy attendants, declaring his own godhead in a gravely and

serious, yet pompous and ultimately comical voice. In Death By Philosophy, Ava

Chitwood unpacks the archive of biographical material surrounding Empedocles

and finds in most of its most memorable components a kind of distorted

transformation of philosophical claims made in his vanished texts: “His perceived

character, then, is little more than a parody of his work. His god-‐like nature, attitude

and appearance, concretized and elaborated in the anecdotal examples of his

actions, character, and dress, are the result of a philosophical statement interpreted

biographically.”7 This sense of a life illicitly back projected from the contours of the

thought carries over into the death that concludes that life, for in the biographical

archive on the subject of the death of Empedocles, various accounts proliferate, but

each distinct version of that death offers some greater or lesser bid for a suitability,

an art-‐directed aptness in which a given philosopher’s death cannot fail to function

as a morbid extension, cautionary tale, or retroactive gloss upon their philosophy.


I shall consider just two of the most celebrated and widely familiar accounts

of Empedocles’ death which appear in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent

Philosophers: first, the apotheosis of his mysterious disappearance, and then the

suicidal leap into Mount Etna. The first account concerns the consequences of a

nearly necromantic act of healing in which a woman in a trance is restored to life:

For Heraclides, relating the story about the dead woman, how Empedocles got great glory from sending away a dead woman restored to life, says that he celebrated a sacrifice in the field of Pisianax, and that some of his friends were invited, among whom was Pausanias. And then, after the banquet, they lay down, some going a little way off, and some lying under the trees close by in the field, and some wherever they happened to choose. But Empedocles himself remained in the place where he had been sitting. But when day broke, and they arose, he alone was not found. And when he was sought for, and the servants were examined and said that they did not know, one of them said, that at midnight he had heard a loud voice calling Empedocles; and that then he himself rose up and saw a great light from heaven, but nothing else. And as they were all amazed at what had taken place, Pausanias descended and sent some people to look for him; but afterwards he was commanded not to busy himself about the matter, as he was informed that what had happened was deserving of thankfulness, and that they behoved to sacrifice to Empedocles as to one who had become a God.8

The second account, briefer yet far more influential, stages a fiery, dramatic act of

self-‐cancellation which comes complete with a materialist punchline:

Hermippus says also, that a woman of the name of Panthea, a native of Agrigentum, who had been given over by the physicians, was cured by him, and that it was on this account that he celebrated a sacrifice; and that the guests invited were about eighty in number. But Hippobotus says that he rose up and went away as if he were going to mount Aetna; and that when he arrived at the crater of fire he leaped in, and disappeared, wishing to establish a belief that he had become a God. But afterwards the truth was detected by one of his slippers having been dropped. For he used to wear slippers with brazen soles.9

There is a curious sense here of the assimilation of the materialist framework to the

narrative itself: there are no gods in view, only presumptuous mortals who wish to


persuade other mortals to believe in their pretensions to godhead, and those

pretensions are exposed through the material persistence of the forensic evidence

of a single charred piece of footwear. The fact of the slipper is doubly humbling.

Insofar as it is tied to the literally lowest part of the body, the foot, the malingering

slipper reveals the aspirational philosopher as kindred to the dark lady of the

sonnets: when we walks, his feet tread upon the ground. The textual production of

just this element from Empedocles’ celebrated ensemble, rather than, say, his crown

or belt, suggests the rhetorical thrust of a humanizing gesture, recalling Bataille’s

remark in Documents that “The big toe is the most human part of the human body,

in the sense that no other element is so differentiated from the corresponding

element of the anthropoid ape.”10 Read in this light, the sandal’s obstinate status as a

homely remnant of human living belies the implicit ascent towards divinity,

suggesting that there is always a material remainder, and that the transcendent

schema of an imagined apotheosis was simply a manipulative fantasy, a charade of

self-‐transcendence from a flawed, grossly embodied figure of fun.

Noting that the philosophy is used to generate the anecdotes and stories

about their philosophical authors, Chitwood regards the aptness of the Etna

narrative of fiery, volcanic suicide as the completion of a range of other proposed

scenarios for Empedocles’ death scattered across the archive (which include

drowning, hanging, and an accidental fall while getting out of the carriage):

Empedocles’ disappearance into the ether gloriously asserts his refutation of death and gives new force to his theory of the mutability of the elements and the soul’s progression in transmigration. His apotheosis, which glorifies the philosopher and negates the vain and theatrical gesture of the Etna


anecdotes, completes the biographers use of the four elements. Empedocles dies by water, by earth, by fire, and by air; his elemental death, like his soul’s progression, is complete.11

Chitwood’s sober unpacking of the aptness of the classical archive establishes a

clear historiographic precedent in which such ars moriendi anecdotes circulated, but

we might well demur from its reparative tone. The failure to achieve godhead

implicit in the sandal is not meant to ratify but to lampoon material philosophy

through the production of a lowest common denominator.

In a celebrated passage from The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze theorizes the

implications of these morbid anecdotes for the philosophy against which they are

situated in a manner clearly indebted to the historical precedent set by Nietzsche’s

remarks upon the interpenetration of philosophical and biographical discourses.

Accordingly, his own intervention into the history of Pre-‐Socratic thought is

introduced as itself an untimely continuation of the Nietzschean project:

Nietzsche had at his disposal a method of his own invention. We should not be satisfied with either biography or bibliography; we must reach a secret point where the anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing. [ . . ] Diogenes Laertius, perhaps, in his best pages, had a foreboding of this method: to find vital Aphorisms which would also be Anecdotes of thought-‐ the gesture of philosophers. The story of Empedocles and Etna, for example, is such a philosophical anecdote. It is as good as the death of Socrates, but the point is precisely that it operates in another dimension. The pre-‐Socratic philosopher does not leave the cave; on the contrary, he thinks that we are not involved enough or sufficiently engaged therein. [ . . ] The Pre-‐Socratics placed thought inside the caverns and life in the deep. They sought the secret of water and fire.12

Deleuze thus radically sidesteps the force of Laertius’ pileup of mutually

incompatible but collectively discrediting narratives in favor of a singular reading of


one story as a telling myth; Empedocles’ leap into the magma is not a symptomatic

disclosure of some pathological incapacity felt to be lurking within the doctrine but

a case of eminently admirable consistency between theory and practice. Rather than

taking this particular philosopher “from behind,” Deleuze becomes in this sense

credulous with regards to a tale whose veracity he neither affirms nor engages on a

historical level. Empedocles gesture becomes a literal descent into the ontological

depths. Deleuze goes on to align Platonic ascents to the heights and Empedoclean

descents into the depths as anecdotes attached to a fundamental vertical axis of

orientation; both Plato and Empedocles are then contrasted with an alternative style

for philosophy, which Deleuze associates with the Cynics and Stoics, and

triangulates through the terms “perversion”, “surface” and “mixture.” Yet the

ontology he invokes, one in which “in the depths of bodies everything is mixture”

and there is neither high nor low but only the ceaseless combination and re-‐

combination of materials, is in fact one which is most compatible with the

Empedoclean doctrine.13 My intention here is not to quibble with Deleuze’s project

on behalf of a historicist rapprochement in which Stoics are shown to be more akin

to the Pre-‐Socratics than Deleuze is prepared to grant (though one could do that,

and indeed he himself acknowledges this closure in an aside), but simply to build off

of what remains unresolved within this compressed sketch: how might the

combinatorial ontology of Empedocles be brought into relation with the fiery

anecdote of his death?

One model for how to do this comes from his fellow philosopher/poet,

Lucretius. The generative braiding of Empedoclean doctrine into the lurid tale of


Empedocles’ death might be lurking behind Lucretius’ own decision in De Rerum

Natura 1.714-‐733 to describe Empedocles’ ontology in terms of the Sicilian

landscape, and to identify the “root” of fire with the physical location of Mount Etna

itself. Describing the entire school of thought that posits primary elements, and then

proceeding to those who posit a fourfold of roots, Lucretius identifies Empedocles as

“primis” in taking this position:

[Quorum Agragantinus cum primis Empedocles est

Insula quem triquetris terrarum gessit in oris,

Quam fluitans circum magnis anfractibus aequor

Ionium glaucis aspargit virus ab undis,

Angustoque fretu rapidum mare dividit undis

Aeoliae terrarum oras a finibus eius.

Hic est vasta Charybdis et hic Aetnea minantur

Murmura flammarum rursum se colleigere iras,

Faucibus eruptos iterum vis ut vomat ignis

Ad caelumque ferat flammai fulgura rursum.]14

Empedocles of Agrigentum is

First among these: the three-‐coast island bore him

Fouch which the wide-‐whorled Ionian splashes and sprays

The brine of its green waves; the swift sea funnels

Into a strait and divides with its waves the limits

Of Sicily from the Italian shore.

Here is the gaping Charybdis; here the grumbling of Aetna

Warns that once more its fiery wrath will mount

And spew from its jaws the bursting and violent flames,


Flashing its lightning to the sky once more.

Many and various wonders does this place

Offer, they say, for people to visit and see;

A fruitful land, well fortified with men;

Yet this man is its greatest excellence-‐

Most wondrous, holiest, worthiest to be loved.

For out of his godlike heart he brought forth song,

Revealing in verse such brilliant findings that

It seemed he was not born out of human stock.15

The hagiographic praise within this Lucretius passage is made particularly

compelling given its context: a catalogue of the errors of the elemental ontologists

who precede Lucretius’ master Epicurus. It is noticeable that Lucretius’ text here

transmits the same basic combination of elements, so to speak, also present within

Diogenes Laertius’ archive, but strips them of pejorative implication: here we have

the fires of Etna and a claim about Empedocles as a kind of demi-‐god or semi-‐divine

being placed into a suggestive proximity, but no suicidal scenario is directly

represented, nor is there a bronze sandal to be seen. Lucretius’ curious tenderness

for Empedocles, and his clear respect for the precedent that he set is thus figured

both positively in the celebration of his example, his writing, and his personal

excellence, and negatively, in the absence of shaming details concerning suicide.

Empedocles in Early Modern England


If Lucretius’ text provided one possible model of how it feels to emotionally

inhabit an elemental ontology, a model at once scandalous and beguiling to its early

modern recipients, a more homely yet altogether more representative example of

Empedoclean feeling is provided centuries later by Nicholas Breton’s poem “Of the

foure elements”, from the collection Britton’s Bowre of Delights (1591). Keen to

assert Breton’s utility in demonstrating period-‐wide gearshifts in prosody, C. S.

Lewis minces no words regarding the value of his art: “Breton, then, is such a poet as

the historian (not the general reader) sighs for: a textbook case, a human

thermometer.”16 A perfect mid-‐point on Lewis’ long march from Drab to Golden,

Breton’s very predictability makes him exquisitely useful in tracking the historical

dissemination of Idées recues. If the reasons for this poem’s contemporary obscurity

are about to become painfully obvious to the first time reader, Breton’s modest

effort nevertheless merits quotation in full for the diligence with which it scours

every combinatorial possibility within the Empedoclean fourfold formula:

Of the Foure Elements:

The Aire with sweet my sences do delight,

The Earth with flowers doth glad my heauie eie,

The Fire with warmth reuiues my dying spirit,

The Water cooles that is too hote and drie:

The Aire, the Earth, the Water, and the fire,

All doe me good, what can I more desire.


Oh no, the Aire infected sore I finde,

The Earth, her flowers do wither and decay:

The Fire so hote it doth inflame the minde,

And Water washeth white and all away.

The Aire, the Earth, Fire, Water, all annoy me,

How can it be but they must needes destroy me.

Sweete Aire do yet a while thy sweetnesse holde,

Earth, let thy flowers not fall away in prime:

Fire do not burne, my heart is not a colde,

Water, drie vp vntill another time,

Or Aire, or Earth, Fire, Water, heare my prayer,

Or slaye me once, Fire, Water, Earth, or Aire,

Hearke in the Aire what deadly thunder threateth,

See on the Earth how euerie flower falleth,

Oh with the Fire how euery sinewe sweateth.

Oh howe the Water my panting heart appalleth.

The Aire, the Earth, Fire, Water, all do grieue me.

Heauens shew your power yet some way to relieue me.

This is not Aire that euerie creature feedeth,

Nor this the Earth where euerie flower groweth:

Nor this the Fire, that cole and bauen breedeth,

Nor this the Water, that both ebth and floweth.


These Elements are in a worde enclosed,

Where happie heart hath heauenly rest reposed.17

Breton’s curio of justly forgotten verse is helpful because of its very pitch perfect

mediocrity, the mundane exemplarity with which it exercises the ready to hand

conceit of the four elements.

Yet, as I hope to show, the seemingly everyday can come to seem

surprisingly odd the longer one looks at it. The speaker of Breton’s poem

experiences the body as a mixture of elements which both support and potentially

destroy life, and which emerge through the affective register that those

decomposable elemental combinations give rise to: a volatile, shifting drama of

one’s own material composition as an affective assemblage, swooping through

treacherously unstable mood swings before coming to rest in reassuring fixity of the

final lines. Ringing changes upon his quadratic set of handbells, Breton’s dutiful

doggerel manifests an unusual symptom at its point of closure: the rondelay of

combination, mixture and recombination encouraged by thinking somatic

materiality as assemblage triggers a cumulative anxiety that can only be shored up

through the last ditch evocation of a linguistic fantasy of divine textuality as

“heavenly rest.” That is, Breton’s poem imagines enclosure in an enduring logos that

would be somehow exempt from these dizzying cycles of formation and destruction.

In miniature, and in the very teeth of its own mediocre execution, Breton’s poem

stages the ambient conflict between the relentless blizzard of elemental


recombination proposed by Empedoclean ontology and the apocalyptic

reassurances offered by Christian temporality.

If Breton’s poem gives us a turgid but trustworthy test case of what, with

apologies to Lovejoy, we might call metaphysical bathos, the same ontological

tension between material schema and affective outcome had already surfaced one

year earlier with far greater power on the popular stage in the opening lines of a

famous speech from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part One:

Nature, that fram’d us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

(2.7.18-‐20)18

I have arrested this Marlovian set-‐piece in mid flight, before it comes to rest in its

celebrated closing evocation of the “sweet fruition of an earthly crown.” I hold us

there, strung out across the divide between the war within the breast and the

aspirations within the mind, not because of any aversion to the intoxicating

resonance of these mighty lines. Rather, I hope that, when set against the context of

the Empedoclean archive, we might think again about the very conventionality of

the received idea which functions as the bedrock premise upon which

Tamburlaine’s emotionally activated breast heaves and from which his theoretically

aspiring mind leaps.


A tempting possibility must be eliminated first. Though his play will go on to

consider with sadistic intensity the consequences of choleric excess, Marlowe is not,

here, discussing the humoral psycho-‐physiology of blood, phlegm, yellow bile or

black bile at the level of individual temperament as theorized by Hippocratic

medicine and transferred via Galen into centuries of medical practice. The claim,

which Tamburlaine assumes as much as he asserts, is simpler, and more basic than

that, and reaches further back historically and lower down, towards a foundational

habit of thought which modulated across classical, medieval and early modern

writings with wildly variable status, valence and inflection: Empedocles’ doctrine of

the four elements.

In these lines, Tamburlaine dynamically experiences the human body as an

elemental assemblage, materially composed of earth, air, fire and water, set

eternally in conflict with itself. This theory arrives coupled with its own affective

signature, the feeling-‐of-‐the-‐theory: war within the breast as reflected back within

the mind. If this pairing of wartorn breasts with aspirational minds suggests a

wellworn and dubious couplet (body/mind), it hardly bears restating that the early

modern period constitutes the cradle of both their most decisive scission

(Descartes) and their most absolute fusion (Spinoza).19 Heard at the present

moment, Tamburlaine’s articulation of how it feels to think of one’s self as an

elemental assemblage also models the confluence of two separate strains currently

operative within the humanities: the emerging focus upon new materialisms and

ontology in both metaphysics and intellectual history on the one hand, and the now

ascendant status of affect studies within a broad array of hermeneutic disciplines on


the other. Warring for regiment within the academy, practitioners in the new

materialisms and participants in the affective turn squabble over their relationship

to a particularly contested and heterogeneous field of intellectual ancestors.

One might expect, given the ostensible independence of philosophical

argument on the one hand and empirical science on the other from any pressing

need for intellectual historical ratification, that both trends would simply insist

upon their contemporary explanatory stakes; yet practitioners of both the new

materialisms and affect studies have a not inconsiderable stake in the

demonstration of an illustrious early modern origin for these developments, and

tend to converge upon Spinoza as a crucial antecedent figure. Spinoza’s Ethics has

understandably constituted the most familiar locus classicus through which to assert

the precise overlap of these separate domains within the early modern period, a still

point at which affect studies are a crucial component of materialist ontology and

materialist ontology is expressively affective.

Tamburlaine’s war within registers at a somatic and yet also affective level

the cyclic oscillation of Love and Strife as twinned principles of creation and

destruction, of what in the Deleuzian register would be termed the forces of

territorialization and deterritorialization at work within the universe outside the

body and the microcosm within. That is, Empedocles provides both a theory for the

emergence and decay of being and an implied emotional stance towards that theory:

the lived sense of the self as a site of struggle, as a place of potentiality in which

competing factions struggle for dominance, turning the body into a violent


processual site of emergence in which the push-‐pull between Love and Strife is

encountered first hand. Which means that Tamburlaine’s martial self-‐scrutiny can

help us to unpack the problem of theoretical feeling, and in particular, can provide

at least one notably popular figure from the public stage wrestling with the

emotional consequences of a materialist ontology. Tamburlaine’s briskly martial

embrace of the temperamental consequences of Empedoclean philosophy

acknowledges that selves and souls are mortal, temporary formations, doomed to

dissolve and recombine, and resolves to act accordingly, choosing strife and playing

to win. So conceived, Tamburlaine’s set-‐piece offers, among others things, a textual

“soil sample” rife with what one might term elemental sentiment.

Tamburlaine’s speech, precisely insofar as it uses a combinatorial ontology to

understand how emotions arise within and as the self, also models precisely this

dynamic of methodological double exposure: the being of feeling, the feeling of

being as an energetic multiplicity. Tamburlaine’s martial declaration provides an

exemplary early modern answer to the question of how it feels to be Empedoclean:

aspirational. Yet the theory-‐and-‐feeling pairing that this response dramatically

voices also flags a conceptual problem lingering within the intellectual archive

which Marlowe inherited, a problem that pulls downwards from aspiration to

despair, which suggest that there is a more than accidental relationship between the

materialist theory of elemental composition that Empedocles disseminated and the

false, fiery narrative of his suicide upon Mount Etna with which that theory was

repeatedly aligned. The suicidal narratives attached to both Empedocles and

Lucretius functioned within early modernity as limit cases, biographical arcs


through which early modern persons worked through the imaginary affective

consequences of material ontology, offering both roadmaps for a itinerary of life-‐as-‐

conquest and cautionary stories of the disintegrations to which self-‐understanding

assemblages might succumb.

If the war within the breast could stimulate aspiring minds, the end point of

materialist composition in ultimate de-‐composition could also destroy despairing

minds. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe returns to the figuration of the “war within the

breast” that inspired Tamburlaine to triumphalist heights; but in Faustus’ case the

proud vaunt has gone sour: “Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast.”

(5.1.1471)20 The putatively Christian framework transvalues what was a material

experience of elemental metaphysics into an allegory of sin as soul sickness; if self-‐

as-‐war was intoxicating for Tamburlaine, self-‐as-‐war proves horrific for Faustus in

its implications. Redoubled in the allure of its metaphysical pathos precisely as it

slips out of reach as a source of security, the elemental composition of bodies

resurfaces in Faustus’ final, crazed disquisition:

Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,

This soul should fly from me and I be changed

Unto some brutish beast,

All beasts are happy, for, whey they die

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,

But mine must live still to be plagued in hell. (14,104-‐109)21


The repudiation of Empedocles’ predecessor Pythagoras, made definitive by

Faustus’ wistful counterfactual “were that true”, is no sooner voiced then we see a

casually authoritative ratification of a material ontology as the conceptual bedrock

upon which the rejection of reincarnation is itself based. Pythagoras is wrong, but

Empedocles is right, at least where the material world is concerned. Note that

Faustus is not suggesting that animals have bodies that are composed of elements,

while their souls are separable and distinct; even in the midst of his tour-‐de-‐force of

panic, he takes care to insist that animal souls themselves really are dissolved back

into the elements. Yet, against this backdrop of cyclic patterns of material

emergence and negation, resolutely Empedoclean in character, the Christian soul

now suffers in an eternal state of exception. Here the metaphysical pathos of an

Empedoclean doctrine arises precisely in order to be indulged and then canceled on

behalf of an orthodoxy from which pagan error grows seductive precisely insofar as

it has been posited as proximate yet fatally out of reach. From Tamburlaine’s

warlike confidence in the implications of elemental ontology to Faustus’ curiously

simultaneous proximity and alienation from its explanatory power, Marlowe’s

drama traces both the availability and the limits of elemental sentiment as a

counter-‐schema to Christianity.

If Tamburlaine’s evocation of the Empedoclean mixture leaps upwards with

aspiration and offers a best case scenario for how it feels to feel Empedoclean,

Milton’s posthumous imprisonment of Empedocles within the Paradise of Fools as a

consequence of his volcanic suicide in Paradise Lost offers us a striking counter-‐

plunge downward into the flames. Milton inherits but extends the polemical


understanding of pagan error which Marlowe commenced in Doctor Faustus, and in

the process articulates a complex causal intersection between Empedoclean

theories, feelings, and feelings-‐about-‐the-‐theory.

Recasting aspiration as folly and vanity rather than martial ambition, in

Paradise Lost Empedocles’ reach towards godhead consigns him to a malingering

posthumous imprisonment and torture:

All who have thir reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful Superstition and blind Zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, emptie as thir deeds; All th' unaccomplisht works of Natures hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt, Dissolvd on earth, fleet hither, and in vain, Till final dissolution, wander here, Not in the neighboring Moon, as some have dreamd; Those argent Fields more likely habitants, Translated Saints, or middle Spirits hold Betwixt th' Angelical and Human kinde: Hither of ill-‐joyned Sons and Daughters born First from the ancient World those Giants came With many a vain exploit, though then renownd: The builders next of Babel on the Plain Of Sennaar, and still with vain designe New Babels, had they wherewithall, would build: Others came single; he who to be deem'd A God, leap'd fondly into Ætna flames Empedocles, and hee who to enjoy Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the Sea,

Cleombrotus, and many more too long, Embryo's and Idiots, Eremits and Friers White, Black and Grey with all thir trumperie. (3.451-‐475)22

As Hughes and others have noted, Milton’s immediate source for this section of

Paradise Lost comes from the third book of the Divine Institutes of the early Christian

father Lactantius, titled “The False Wisdom of the Philosophers”:


Many therefore of them, because they suspected that the soul is immortal, laid violent hands upon themselves, as though they were about to depart to heaven. Thus it was with Cleanthes and Chryssipus, with Zeno, and Empedocles, who in the dead of night cast himself into a cavity of the burning Aetna, that when he had suddenly disappeared it might be believed that he had departed to the gods.23

Classifying Empedocles as a Pythagorean, Lactantius omits the detail from Laertius’

of the telltale sandal, but nonetheless presents an entirely earthbound reduction of

this bid for apotheosis. At once a fanatic and a con artist, Empedocles teeters

unstably between a sincere but deluded victim of his own belief system and

something altogether more troubling: a cynical narcissist willing to die purely for

the sake of posthumous fame. In leaping “fondly”, Empedocles is figured as self-‐

indulgent, besotted with vainglory at the prospect of being “deemed” a God. But the

odd lightness of this locution also flags a kind of manic cheerfulness with which

material self-‐destruction can be embraced. This imagined “fondness” curiously

manifests the best-‐case psychological outcome of the materialist accounts of death:

since death is simply the recombination of elemental components that cannot be

destroyed, there is no real loss in the process, only changes in organization, and so

we ought to look without anxiety at the prospect of our own deaths.24 That this

attitude towards death is merely “fond” in the negative sense of “foolish” connotes

Milton’s corrosive and satirical attitude towards these figures-‐ but, surprisingly,

this does not quite carry over into a satire of material ontology itself.

Taking up Lactantius’ stance but complicating its location, Milton’s

ecumenically inclusive Paradise of Fools conjoins Catholic friars and monastic

orders together with ancient philosophers into a penal colony of error whose formal


contours weirdly recapitulate the very Empedoclean doctrine they work to

discredit: the lines “All th' unaccomplisht works of Natures hand, /Abortive,

monstrous, or unkindly mixt” recall Marlowe’s own evocation of Nature as the

framer of material and elemental mixtures, but here Strife has seemingly gone to

work and (penultimately) undone what was badly joined together in the first place.

Fittingly, in Milton’s poem Empedocles inhabits a space whose proximity to

the whirl of Chaos flags the kinship that Chaos as a space shares with the ultimate

loop-‐point fixed within the cyclic ontology of Empedocles: the triumph of strife in

the dissolution of all temporary bonds in which all mixtures are canceled and

everything returns to its state as disjunctive “roots”. That this metaphysics offers

little hope for human ambitions and aspirations is still apparent in contemporary

articulations of Empedocles’ view. Even the soberest of textual editors cannot

restrain himself from an emotional reading of this metaphysical picture as, at best, a

mixed blessing: “Empedocles’ profound pessimism about our world, like the rather

bleak metaphysics which he propounds in his poem, is designed, in part, to show

that the ultimate end of our personal identity in cosmic dissolution is a blessed and

happy event.”25

The rhetoric of having already become a “god” upon earth, which is the

source of much mockery in the biographies, might itself be understood not as

cynically undercut by Empedocles’ own imagined death in Mount Etna; rather the

bodily disintegration forced by such a death could itself be a direct expression of a

confidence in the outcome of the apparent “destruction” of his mixed body-‐ the


sooner that mixture is canceled out, the sooner the individual ascends to an

ontologically prior, and thus in a sense “higher” category, of the roots themselves.

As contemporary Empedocles textual editor and scholar Brad Inwood puts it, “On

this reading the immortality is achieved by the loss of his individual identity and

return to the gods in the sense of the six basic entities.”26

Thus, to risk a reparative reading more in the spirit of his doctrine than in the

punitive echoes of its outcome, Empedocles suicidal death might be read as

something quite different than the expression of an inherent despair or

miserabilism which a material, combinatorial ontology entails-‐ rather, it might be

taken to demonstrate a total devotion to the aspirational schema of recombination

implicit within it. Again, Inwood is helpful, “There is in Empedocles a fundamental

and inevitable ambivalence about the world of our experience: it is a world of woe,

but it is also the only means we have to redeem ourselves, to enlighten ourselves,

and ultimately to restore ourselves to the ontological purity and “immortality”

which is only achievable under the rule of hateful strife.”27 To take up Milton’s

pejorative term and subject it to a reparative transformation from an ontological

perspective, to achieve a certain kind of “fondness” for the material facts of our own

transience begins to look like something other than suicidal narcissism: it is a

rapprochement with the terms under which matter is loaned to us by the universe,

and a radical acceptance of our finitude.

Conclusion: Was There an Empedoclean Renaissance?


To repeat my refrain, for the last time: What does theory feel like? From

certain disciplinary vantage points, to even pose the question of a given

philosophy’s sentimental payoff is to miss the point.28 A philosophy is true or false

based upon its arguments, its evidence, its consistency. Yet, as Arthur Lovejoy

delicately put it, “it is not chiefly as a science that philosophy has been a factor in

history.”29 Offering some answers to the question of how theory feels, intellectual

history has been taken up with tracing not the cases for or against a belief but

simply with accounts of why a given belief, view, or doctrine did or did not take hold

based upon the satisfactions it offered, or crises of doubt or fear it palliated, or, for a

perverse vanguard, induced. And Lovejoy’s contribution to the intellectual history of

early modernity has been particularly felicitous in giving us a portable term and an

implicit theory—“metaphysical pathos”-‐-‐ through which to think about the purchase

of philosophy over and against its validity or coherence:

Metaphysical pathos is exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the part of the philosopher or his readers.30

Taking up Lovejoy’s teminology, we might then ask: what is the metaphysical pathos

of materialism?

Congeniality is not materialism’s strong suit. Indeed, those of another party

tend to forecast despair as an inevitable consequence of adopting or endorsing a

materialist philosophy: the materialist is imagined as someone permanently at risk


of succumbing to a downward spiral of depression and sorrow at the transience and

finitude of all the temporary components of a universe from which all

transcendence has been bracketed or canceled. As William James warned in “The

Sentiment of Rationality”:

A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives in one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we cherish. 31

From the position of the variously materialist stances available at the present

moment-‐-‐ which, if not quite enjoying “universal adoption”, can feel close enough-‐-‐

we might either smile or groan at James’ forthright disgust. Yet however dubious

this certitude might seem, it rather neatly captures a historically earlier era in the

reception of materialism, and precisely the one which has detained me in this essay,

and which has proven curiously productive of late as a subject for scholarly inquiry:

the late medieval and early modern dissemination of materialist ontologies.

My title is both a deliberately provocative hat-‐tip and a clinamen-‐esque

swerve away from the ongoing Lucretius publishing boom. At the present time, the

circulation of Lucretius within the Renaissance has become a critical “Just So” story

about emergence, modernity, and what one might term literary ontology. By way of

definition: to work upon literary ontology is to engage the question of literature as

matter, and to inquire into the particular contours of its being, in order to ask: are

the material conditions of literary transmission over time distinct from other kinds


of transmission? Need the total set of modes of being represented within literature

necessarily correspond with the social ontology of literature as sign-‐system,

assemblage, or practice within the world outside literature? Literary ontology is not

a historicist “history of the book” but a reframing of the being of literature that

considers literature as a particular kind of matter whose study might itself alter or

revise whatever ontological theories are ready-‐to-‐hand in novel, unforeseen ways.

Thanks to the very strength and diversity of the best of the recent

scholarship upon Lucretius, it is now retrospectively clear why the “Lucretian

Renaissance” offers a particularly rich nexus of theories and textual exempla

through which to pursue the methodological and intellectual historical implications

of literary ontology, for the De Rerum Natura provides an undeniably influential, yet

also localized and traceable history of dissemination for an irreducibly hybrid work

of philosophy-‐and/as-‐poetry. As Gerard Passannante and Jonathan Goldberg have

shown, within the literary ontology of his De Rerum Natura, a combinatorial axis of

atoms-‐as-‐letters and letters-‐as-‐atoms lets Lucretius imagine matter itself at the

atomic level as a kind of scripting, subject to revision, deformation and

recombination. In proposing an “Empedoclean Renaissance” as a conjoined,

monstrous twin to the ongoing scholarly construction of a Lucretian Renaissance, I

am hoping to re-‐animate the Pre-‐Socratic precursor from the double occultation of

conventional omnipresence and suicidal self-‐cancellation, and to suggest that there

are unresolved problems concerning the place of negative affect and suicide within

the Lucretian archive which might be broached, if not illuminated, by placing side by

side these two materialist philosopher-‐poets falsely imagined to have killed


themselves. More than kin and less than kind, it is my hope that the pairing of

Empedocles and Lucretius sparks a certain productive friction across the

history/theory DMZ within early modern studies today.

But the melancholy fact of the disparity between these two partners must be

faced. In the case of Lucretius, the once “lost” author stands now before us vividly,

vitally present in the form of a masterpiece of Latin literature which-‐ however

incomplete-‐ can be studied and admired, turned and turned again, and richly mined

for its recurrences across subsequent history. In the case of Empedocles we have

only cinders, scraps, occasional bursts of quotation and resonant paraphrase. The

asymmetry is pronounced, and the wind has scattered the letter-‐atoms of

Empedocles’ material texts we know not where. The once great works are gone, lost

long before the men and women we now regard as “early modern” were born.

Accordingly, there will not and cannot be an “Empedoclean Renaissance” to set

alongside the “Lucretian Renaissance” as the positive production of a critical and

literary-‐ontological archive (short of an archival discovery to rival the already near

miraculous recent recovery of the Strasbourg papyrus). Yet, against such bitter and

presumably irreversible loss, I hope that the poetic remainders I have here

assembled from writers as disparate as Marlowe, Breton and Milton have shown

that, at the level of the metaphysical pathos with which early modern subjects

encountered their own being as somehow composed of earth and air and fire and

water there was an Empedoclean Renaissance. Its components are small, but

durable: A sandal on a mountainside, and a war within the breast.


1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 128. 2 Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origin of Modernity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008; Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations, New York: Fordham UP, 2009; Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010; Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2011. My title is a loving nod to Gerard Passannante’s work, which inspired this essay. 3 See Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011; Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010. 4 Sacvan Bercovitch “Empedocles in the English Renaissance”, Studies in Philology, Vol. 65 (No. 1), 1968, 67-‐80. 5 Nineteenth century and early twentieth century textual scholarship of Empedocles divided the fragments along disciplinary lines, imagining that Empedocles had written a scientific text On Nature and a separate, explicitly religious text called Purifications. By contrast, recent textual scholarship, bolstered by the recovery in 1999 of a relatively intact papyrus with Empedoclean passages that range from the one the domain to the other, has shifted entirely towards a “single work hypothesis”, regarding Empedocles’ thought as necessarily connecting these areas. For a summary of the textual editing history of Empedocles and the consequences of the Strasbourg papyrus for the “two works or one?” question, see Simon Trépanier, “The Single-‐Work Hypothesis”, Empedocles: An Interpretation, New York: Routledge, 2004, 1-‐15. 6 Empedocles, The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation, ed. Brad Inwood, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 217. 7 Ava Chitwood, Death By Phillosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Life and Death of the Archaic Philosophers Empedocles, Hearaclitus, and Democritus, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004, 23. 8 Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Vol. II, Trans. R. D. Hicks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925, VIII. 67-‐69, 383. 9 Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Vol. II, Trans. R. D. Hicks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925, VIII. 69-‐71, 385.


10 George Bataille, “Big Toe”, Encyclopedia Acephalica, London: Atlas Press, 1995, 87. 11 Chitwood, 56. 12 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 128

13 Deleuze, 130. 14 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, ed. W. H. D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library, 1.716-‐733, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, 58-‐60. 15 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Anthony Esolen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 45. 16 C. S. Lewis “Verse in the ‘Golden’ Period”, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1954, 481. 17 Nicholas Breton, Brittons bovvre of delights Contayning many, most delectable and fine deuices, of rare epitaphes, pleasant poems, pastorals and sonets by N.B. Gent. Imprinted at London : By Richard Ihones, at the Rose and Crowne neere Holborne Bridge, (1591) 30.

18 Christopher Marlowe “Tamburlaine the Great, Part I”, Complete Plays and Poems, Ed. E.d. Pendry and J.C. Maxwell, London: J.M. Dent, 1976, 28. 19 Of course, such shorthand characterization belies the complexity of each author’s archive. Written at the request of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Les Passions de L’Ame (1649) constitutes Descartes’ attempt to re-‐connect these disparate elements through a materialization of affect as the work of animal spirits, infamously localized in the operation of the pineal gland. See Descartes “The Passions of the Soul”, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 328-‐405. 20 It is worth noting that this line occurs in the context of a struggle with “despaire,” signaling the affective opposite of Tamburlaine’s exultation. Christopher Marlowe, “Doctor Faustus” The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. II, Ed. Fredson Bowers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 219. 21 Christopher Marlowe, “Doctor Faustus”, The Complete Plays. Eds. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin Books, 2003, 394. 22 John Milton, “Paradise Lost”, Complete Poems and Major Prose, Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, New York: Odyssey Press, 1957, 269. 23 Lactantius, “Of the False Wisdom of the Philosophers”, Divine Institutes: Books I – VII, Trans. Mary Francis McDonald. New York: Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Book III, Chap XVIII, 443. 24 See the extended Epicurean account of death and mourning in the Third Book of De Rerum Natura: the non-‐existence of the dead self demonstrates that all of the concerns voiced by human mourners about emotional loss miss the point. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Anthony Esolen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, Book III, 890-‐900, 116. 25 Inwood, 57. 26 Inwood, 58. 27 Inwood, 63.


28 For a different answer drawn from a different critical archive, see Rei Terada Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Sublime” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 29 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of An Idea, Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1936, 13. 30 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of An Idea, Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1936, 11. 31 William James “The Sentiment of Rationality”, Essays in Pragmatism. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1948, 3-‐37, 17.