Sensing the World: Humans, Plants, and the Physicality of Life in Early Greek Philosophy
p. 95-114
Résumés
Cet essai pose la question de savoir si plusieurs penseurs présocratiques, dont Empédocle, Anaxagore et Démocrite, ont envisagé l’idée que les humains et les plantes possèdent la sensation (et la pensée), et si une telle capacité implique un mode d’existence commun. Nous nous efforçons de répondre à ces questions en nous penchant sur le phénomène de la sensation. Dans un premier temps, nous examinons les constitutions corporelles de l’homme et de la plante, en nous appuyant sur les récits de l’origine de la vie fournis par les premiers philosophes grecs. Ensuite, nous analysons le mécanisme de la sensation, en partant de l’hypothèse que les capacités partagées et les distinctions relatives entre les humains et Résumés 227 les plantes découlent d’une nature compatible, plus profonde, qui dépend de leur émergence initiale dans le monde.
This essay raises the question whether various Presocratic thinkers, including Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus, entertained the notion that humans and plants possess sensation (and thought), and whether such capacity implies a shared mode of existence. We endeavor to address these queries by delving into the phenomenon of sensation. Initially, we examine the bodily constitutions of humans and plants, drawing from the accounts of the origin of life provided by early Greek philosophers. Subsequently, we analyze the mechanism of sensation, operating under the assumption that the shared capacities and relative distinctions between humans and plants stem from a deeper, compatible nature dependent on their initial emergence into the world.
Texte intégral
An overview: from human-vegetal closeness to a radical distance
1In ancient Greek philosophy human beings and plants share forms of life to the extent to which they share similar bodies. Closeness, or conversely distance, stems from a physicality that expresses interiority.1 So Empedocles (ca. 495-435 BC) envisioned a past zoogony of living beings, the whole-natured (oulophyeis), who similarly to plants rose up from the earth drawn up by the fire wishing to reach its similar (i.e., celestial fire).2 Empedocles called them “nocturnal saplings of much-weeping men and women” (ennykhioi horpēkes andrōn te polyklautōn te gynaikōn) attributing desire to these plant-looking humans merely on account of their physical constitution and emergence.3 And even those thinkers who conceived the body in relation to the soul, they considered living beings’ participation in life in terms of how the soul impacted on and interacted with the body, and what it allowed it (or not) to do. The soul itself possessed a materiality and interacted with living beings’ bodies. Democritus (ca. 460-370 BC), for instance, pinpointed in the intake of fiery atoms (i.e., the soul), and hence the process of respiration, the phenomenon empowering all living beings to live.4 On his view, all creatures, humans and plants alike, possessed a body apt to introduce atoms of this kind and moved carrying out their living activities. Significantly, Democritus regarded fiery atoms as soul (psykhē) and mind (nous) at once, making life in any breathing body indissolubly tied to a form of awareness.5
2An unbridgeable gap between humans (along with the other animals), on the one hand (the zōa), and plants, on the other (the phyta), turning around their respective bodies, rose instead with Diogenes of Apollonia (flourishing in the second half of the 5th cent.) who broke the continuity that informed the living world for his predecessors.6 Only human beings were able to introduce air and breathe, while plants were condemned to an incommensurable distance from them. Breathing for Diogenes granted all animals, humans included, sensation and thought. By contrast, with their compact, hermetic body plants were not able to introduce air nor did they sense or think.7 Marking thus a turning point in the conception of vegetal alterity with respect to humans (and the other animals) Diogenes anticipated Aristotle who also denied plants sensation assigning them a simplest body solely functional to nutrition, growth, and reproduction.8 And true, this set of functions were supported by an organic apparatus and constituted the core form of life plants shared with humans (and the other animals)9 but however positively this link could be looked at, plants carried out these activities without sensorial awareness and without desire. Shared life still involved a radically different mode of existence. For while dependent on nutrition like humans and the other animals, plants were considered passive, solipsistic beings, lost creatures in a world of relationships. Still centuries later, Plutarch will anachronistically apply Aristotle’s philosophy of life to Empedocles claiming that “Regarding plants, their life is preserved without awareness thanks to what surrounds them as Empedocles says when they draw in for themselves the water they need; but in our case, the appetite teaches us to look for and pursue what is lacking in our mixture.”10 The notion of human-vegetal commonality is here articulated through a profound difference. Both humans and plants need the environment to survive but only the first engage actively with it, by feeling desire and expressing intentionality by moving. Plants, by contrast, possessed a physicality that is denied any interiority.
3Yet, contrary to what Plutarch tells us, Empedocles did attribute desire and motion to plants, in addition to sensation, pain and pleasure – at least according to the ancient testimonies – and held this set of beliefs together with Anaxagoras (500-428/7 BC). The author of the treatise On Plants tells us that,
Ἀναξαγόρας μὲν οὖν καὶ Ἐμπεδοκλῆς ἐπιθυμία ταῦτα κινεῖσθαι λέγουσιν, αἰσθάνεσθαί τε· καὶ λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἥδεσθαι διαβεβαιοῦνται.
Anaxagoras and Empedocles maintain that plants are moved by desire, and they assert emphatically that they can feel and experience both pain and pleasure.11
4And indeed in fragments 107 and 110 Empedocles himself claims that,
ἐκ τούτων <γὰρ> πάντα πεπήγασιν ἁρμοσθέντα
καὶ τούτοις φρονέουσι καὶ ἥδοντ᾽ ἠδ᾽ ἀνιῶνται.
<For> it is out of these [i.e. the elements] that all things are adjusted and assembled,
And it is by them that they think and feel pleasure and pain.12
πάντα γὰρ ἴσθι φρόνησιν ἔχειν καὶ νώματος αἶσαν.
For know that all things have understanding and a share of thought.13
5In tune with his “global” perspective Empedocles here attributes thinking and the feeling of pleasure and pain to “all things” (panta), without further specification,14 but Sextus Empiricus, an ancient commentator, makes it explicit that (at least with regard to B 110) this substantive adjective did in fact include plants further remarking that “Empedocles claimed rather incredibly that all things happen to possess reason and not only animals but also plants, when he expressly writes ‘all things… a share’.”15 Now for Empedocles thought too had a material basis and was continuous with sensation: note in fragment 107, quoted above, how both thought and the feeling of pain and pleasure (and hence a form of sensation)16 are made depend on the elements. More specifically, in Empedocles’ doctrine if sensation happened by means of the elements composing the body, thought was a “function” of the blood around the heart17 and it too had an elemental basis. For blood was a body component resulting from the mixture of the elements.18 How, then, for Empedocles and the other physiologoi who weaved such discourse of extensive sharedness (i.e., Anaxagoras and Democritus) could humans and plants partake of sensation (and thought)19? And what mode of existence did this capacity entail? This essay aims to answer these questions focusing on the phenomenon of sensation and discusses, first, humans and plants’ body constitutions based on the early Greek philosophers’ accounts of the origin of life (section 1) and, then, the mechanism of sensation (section 2) on the assumption that humans and plants’ shared capacities and relative differences stemmed from a deeper compatible nature that depended on their first appearance into the world.
From a shared origin to the specialization of desire
6The Presocratics’ inquiry into the origin of life unfolded as part of their inquiry into the cosmos. As Campbell remarks, zoogony “was simply a function of cosmogony, and anthopogony an aspect of zoogony,”20 which, we should add, included also plants inasmuch as they too were considered zōa, and not a separate category of living. Significantly, in Parts of Animals Aristotle unifies the Presocratics’ intellectual adventure under a single methodological approach telling us that.
Now the ancients who first began philosophizing about nature were examining the material origin and that sort of cause: what matter is and what sort of thing it is, and how the whole (to holon) comes to be from it and what moves it (e.g. whether strife, love, mind, or spontaneity). They also examined what sort of nature the underlying matter has of necessity, e.g. whether the nature of fire is hot, of earth cold, and whether the nature of fire is light, of earth heavy. In fact, even the cosmos they generate in this way. And they speak in a like manner too of the generation of animals and plants […].21
7The Presocratics appealed to the same principles and mechanisms to explain the formation of both the cosmos and all its creatures. Each theory included channeling “forces” and devices that granted structure and harmony – and therefore an explanatory basis – to the organization of the primordial matter into physical entities, big and small, animate and inanimate. In its unpredictability nature proceeded systematically. Everything in its history happened for a rational, somehow intrinsic reason. Empedocles pinpointed it in the combination and exchange of the four elements under the synergy of Love and Strife, Anaxagoras in the separation of the primordial particles under the rule of Mind and Democritus in the “law of attraction” among similars that was leading the atoms to aggregate. And the theoretical principles that guided the conception of the universe were consistently adopted to account for that of its creatures:22 a homology of treatment that reveals the homology intrinsic in nature and its processes, and the pervasive unity of its embodied manifestations. Ultimately, as Kahn has remarked, for the early Greek philosophers to know the origin (the arkhē) meant to know the true nature of something whether the object under inquiry was the world or one of the living beings that inhabited it, whether humans, animals or plants.23 Thus in sharing the same origin all forms of life shared a compatible nature, which was first realized in the exclusive relation different kinds of living beings entertained with their habitats and, then, in the mode of life such relation afforded.
8All emerging from the earth, but constituted by various elemental mixtures living beings were suitable to live in specific environments. In a scenario of the origins attributed to Democritus,24 plants and trees were the first to emerge from the earth along with the formation of some membranes resembling bubbles. Plants had more earth in their bodies and remained attached to the soil. Of the animals that were born from the bubbling membranes, those that were sufficiently baked by the sun, became males, which were hotter, while those that did not receive enough heat became females. Those animals that were more liquid accepted life in the water and those whose constitution was more earthy and hot became land animals, while the more airy and hot became winged and suitable to fly and live in the air. The formation of habitats was thus explained in terms of a harmonious relation between the living beings and their environments, a relation founded for each group on a compatible physical constitution. Significantly, on this view, plants were related to the other animals inhabiting the dry parts of our planet including the human being. For unlike fish or birds, whether rooted in the earth or not, the land animals were composed of a heavier, earthy mixture of the four elements.25 What differentiated plants from humans (and the other terrestrial animals) was a higher component of earth. And that for the Abderitan there existed an original physical closeness between plants and humans can be reconstructed also by piecing together the testimonies that pertain to them. For if plants were animals differing from the other bloodless and footless animals (i.e., slugs or worms) only by the fact that their head was rooted in the ground,26 the human beings themselves sprung from the earth like worms.27
9Interestingly, a similar notion of human-vegetal proximity survived into Plato’s Timaeus but set in a creationist framework and filtered through a logocentric view of life. If Plato defined the plant a living creature (zōon) on account of the possession of the appetitive soul, he also considered the human being a plant albeit a heavenly one (phyton ouranion), that is, attracted toward the sky on account of the possession of the rational soul, located in the head.28 In this case, while living in the same terrestrial environment (and sharing pain, pleasure, and desire), humans and plants have divergent inclinations: the first strive toward the sky, the latter toward the ground. For both life is, so to speak, gravitational but around opposite poles and through ultimately (for Plato) incompatible capacities: reason, on the one hand, and appetite, on the other.
10The attention to animal constitutions in relation to their different habitats can in fact be traced back to Empedocles who was also interested in laying out the order of emergence of life forms along with their different allocations. Like Democritus Empedocles too claimed that plants were the first living beings (prota zōa) to emerge from the earth.29 But as for the elements composing their bodies (now and at their origin) they were so distributed as to form a dynamic entity which was able to grow both downwards and upwards: the earth composing their roots pushed plants down, while the fire composing their upper part pushed them up.30 Not exclusive of plants, the same elemental basis for growth has been at work also in the formation of the nocturnal saplings of men and women, in fragment 62 mentioned earlier. In the same way as plants also this primordial generation of males and females possessed whole inarticulate bodies, on account of which they were unable to reproduce sexually through separate individuals but kept coming to life via generation from the earth and water until their ultimate extinction.31 A difference between plants and humans was subsequently established with the rise of a new (and actual) generation of human beings (and animals), the fourth, during the increasing power of Strife.32 Aëtius tells us that the members of this zoogony “no longer came from similar things, like earth and water, but henceforth from each other, in some cases because of the thickening of their food (trophē pyknōtheisē), in others too because of the women’s beauty caused an excitation of the spermatic movement.”33 Thus individuality and separation characterized the new generation of living beings who coexisted with plants from the previous generation. And while the new living beings, humans included, needed another individual to reproduce plants continued to live preserving their body wholeness with the intrinsic capacity of reproduction. A change in diet,34 incompleteness,35 a new sense of lack tied to the desire for the other sex but also the appreciation of beauty began for Empedocles to characterize the life of later humans as opposed to plants, a condition that Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium will proverbially exploit to account for the origin of sexual love.36 But humans’ difference with regard to these aspects did not constitute for Empedocles an ontological difference. In their wholeness plants constituted a sort of primitive living being, combining male and female into one individual37 but still feeling nutritive desire,38 pain and pleasure, and sensation. The difference between humans (and the other sexually differentiated animals) and plants rather lied, so to speak, in a specialization of desire (sexual but also, with regard to nutrition, for “thicker food”),39 which was due to a further articulation of the human (and other animals’) body under the divisive force of Strife (and still the aggregating force of Love).
11While unmentioned, the relative distance turning around sexual desire must have characterized also Democritus’ vision, discussed earlier. For him too, sexual differentiation did not pertain to plants, which originated first, but rose with the successive generation of males and females from the differently baked bubbles.40 As for Anaxagoras, who is the third Presocratic (along with Empedocles and Democritus) alluded to by Aristotle for having dealt with the formation of animals and plants in a cosmological perspective,41 the testimonies conjure up a compatible scenario. On the one hand, all animals were born from moisture, heat and an earthy substance and sexual differentiation was introduced later,42 on the other, plants were animals rooted in the ground and were moved by desire (albeit not the sexual one). Furthermore, Mind, the cosmogonic force that set the primordial matter in motion, still controlled all ensouled beings, large and small,43 likely determining by separation their structured growth and living functions.44 In the end, neither for Anaxagoras there existed an ontological difference between humans and plants or any other animal. All creatures entertained a relationship with Mind, the import of which had to do with the physicality of the body and the type of sensation-producing encounter it enabled the living being to establish with the world, a doctrinal point to be further discussed in the next section.
Sharing sensation
12It is from this perspective, then, i.e., that of a common natural origin and the kind of living commonality and shared nature such an origin entails, that the Presocratics’ extant fragments and testimonies about humans and plants’ capacity for sensation, pain, and pleasure should be understood. If both human beings and plants were members of the terrestrial kind of animals, what made them able to sense the world? And if humans belonged to a later generation of living beings, the bodies of which were further articulated (as in the case of Empedocles) and at any rate differentiated into male and female individuals (as in Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus) that felt a sexual desire foreign to plants, did such humans possess sensations plants did not possess either? In other words, in line with their specialized desire did humans also present a specialization of the senses or living phenomena? In this section we will pursue these questions with regard to Empedocles and Anaxagoras for whom, according to the doxography, plants felt sensation, pain and pleasure, and moved in the wave of desire.45
13In On the Senses Theophrastus’ report about the Presocratics’ doctrines regarding sensation is general enough to be applied to all living beings qua possessing a body, and when a fracture (between animals including humans, on the one hand, and plants, on the other) emerges as in the case of Diogenes, he accounts for it based on bodily structure. At the beginning of his treatise Theophratus tells us that,
The various opinions concerning sense perception, when regarded broadly, fall into two groups. By some investigators it is ascribed to similarity, while by others it is ascribed to contrast: Parmenides, and Plato attribute it to similarity; Anaxagoras and Heraclitus attribute it to contrast. The one group is persuaded by the thought that other things are, for the most part, best interpreted in light of what is like them; that it is a native endowment of all creatures to know their kin; and furthermore, that sense perception takes place by means of an effluence, and like is borne toward like. (2) The rival group assumes that perception comes to pass by an alteration; That the like is unaffected by the like, whereas opposites are affected by each other. So they give their verdict for this <idea of opposition>. And to their mind further evidence is given by what occurs in connection with touch, since a degree of heat or cold the same as that of our flesh arouses no sensation. Such then are the teachings handed down to us with regard to the general character of sense perception. As for the various senses severally, they are almost wholly neglected by these authors – save Empedocles, who tries to refer also the particular senses to similarity.46
14According to Theophrastus, the early Greek philosophers held two approaches to the question of how sensation could take place: for some (like Empedocles) sensation rose through an encounter between likes, for others (like Anaxagoras) through unlikes. That for the doxographer the early Greek philosophers, except Empedocles, neglected to discuss the individual senses should not be taken verbatim. In the course of the treatise Theophrastus does refer to the conception of the individual senses held by Presocratics other than Empedocles, and his remark seems rather to indicate that they conceived sensation along general lines that could be applied to the individual senses.47 For instance, a supporter of the doctrine that sensation happens by likes, Empedocles claimed that “It is by earth that we see earth, by water water, by aether divine aether, and by fire destructive fire, and fondness by fondness, and strife by baleful strife.”48 But when discussing the animal eye, he applied the doctrine by likes to the eye conformation, and explained the capacity to see white and black by the fact that the eye is composed of fire and water.49 Colors were seen by means of an effluence (aporroiē) and crucial in the process of any sensation was the fitting of the object of sense into suitable body passages (poroi). Empedocles used a specific verb to describe this sensation-producing encounter, enarmottein, “to fit in.”50 On this theory each elemental body could sense its similar: a body of water could at least sense water, a body of earth earth. And when a body consisted in a mixture of the elements (and presented parts constituted by a specific mixture), it would sense according to such mixture/s.51
15Plants and the human beings of the third zoogony, mentioned earlier, must have possessed a similar sensorial range and experienced a comparable existential condition: with their internal fire stretching them up toward fire, and the internal earth pulling them down toward the earth, they both lived in desire for similar components and feeling pleasure when the actual encounter occurred (but pain in the opposite event).52 Life was inexorably woven with unfulfilled desire. Empedocles called the members of the third zoogony “the nocturnal saplings of much-weeping men and women”53 likely implying the intrinsic sense of lack and pain they felt on account of their inability to reach the celestial fire. In holding a constitution similar to the humans of the third zoogony, contemporary plants must still have felt a similar upwards tension and desire, and hence lived differently from the sexually differentiated humans of the present that looked for their “likes” on the earth. From this perspective, then, an aspect of the relative distance between plants and actual humans would lie in the possibility for the second to fulfill their desire and subdue the pain intrinsic in their birth (and due to the separating force of Strife), a possibility which was denied to plants for what pertains to their upper body but fulfilled for the lower part and, at any rate, when acquiring compatible food. But another aspect of the relative distance would also lie in humans’ more differentiated range of sensations. Empedocles devoted special attention to the eye, which he praised as a creation of Aphrodite54 and described along with the mechanism of sight through an elaborate analogy with a lamp at night under the blowing winds.55 Exclusive possession of humans (and other animals), the eyes are instrumental to the recognition of beauty and the fulfillment of sexual desire,56 and imply an aesthetic inclination characteristic of humans but foreign to plants.
16What about the other senses, then? Did for Empedocles contemporary humans share the sense of hearing or that of smell with plants?57 Or did plants’ primitive, whole, and inarticulate body deny them such grasps of reality? The extant evidence suggests that humans and plants shared both. For regarding hearing Empedocles thought that it was produced in any body so constituted as to have an inner chamber in which, once introduced, the external sounds could resonate.58 Empedocles called the human ear sarkinos ozos,59 an analogy-based expression which scholars have translated in different ways60 and I interpreted elsewhere as referring to those “rings” that form on plants’ bodies when they suffer some injury. Often these conformations lead to an internal cavity where the introduced sound can indeed resonate.61 On the other hand, regarding the sense of smell, in line with a long Presocratic tradition Empedocles connected it to breathing62 and claimed that “all things have received a destined share of breath and odors.”63 Not circumscribed to the mere nostrils, for Empedocles breathing involved the entire surface of the body through epithelial passages (poroi) that let the air penetrate in but kept the blood, or its analogous in plants, from flowing out.64 If this reconstruction of Empedocles’ thought is correct, then, humans shared with some plants (i.e., those that developed “rings of flesh”) the susceptibility to sounds and scents but their further-articulated bodies afforded them, in addition, to see and recognize beauty through the eyes, the artful work of Aphrodite, whose power was still inscribing the body and effective even at the time of Strife’s rule. And accordingly, if pleasure was for Empedocles tied to sensation inasmuch as it sprung from the encounter between likes,65 only human beings were susceptible to the pleasure of sight. Be that as it may, humans’ specialization of desire and of the senses with relative pleasure was also accompanied by a specialization of the phenomenon of respiration. For like plants, the primordial living creatures of the beginning, humans still breathed (i.e., perspired) through the epithelial pores but additionally they did so also through the nostrils, the bigger pores originating under the divisive power of Strife.66 Thus in Empedocles’ doctrine the intake of air and hence a continuous exchange with the environment and the alertness to the scented fabric of the world was an ancient trait, common to all creatures, i.e., plants, humans, and the other animals, and likely to all entities that exist.
17As for Anaxagoras, he too, we have seen, considered sexual differentiation a phenomenon subsequent to the origin of animal life from the moist earth heated by the sun. Regarding the actual generation of plants, it was due to the seeds present in the air (which possessed all kinds of seeds) descending with water (into the ground).67 No sexual reproduction via separate individuals was involved. And as for Empedocles, also for Anaxagoras plants were still zōa on a pair with humans and the other animals68 with whom they partook sensation, desire, and even respiration.69 Anaxagoras too held a general principle for sensation, which he applied to the individual senses, although not systematically.70 For him sensation took place between unlikes because, as Theophrastus explains, “the similar is unaffected by the similar.” So, for instance, seeing was due to the reflection on the pupil and such reflection could only occur on what had a different hue (dark eyes at night have no sight!)71 or, again, hot and cold could not be perceived unless the sentient subject had a different temperature.72 Conceived as such, sensation was a form of alteration (alloiōsis) of the living being.73 Because of the gap inherent in the mechanism of sensation, for Anaxagoras all sense perception was linked to pain.74 Thus life was inherently painful, and only by living, that is, by undergoing painful sensations could one become anesthetized to the encounter with the unlikes.75 When Theophrastus first reports this kernel of Anaxagoras’ doctrine he speaks in the first person plural seemingly turning the human being into the subject of pain-stemming sensation (for he says, “indeed Anaxagoras declares we always do suffer pain in the act of sense perception”)76 but Anaxagoras’ general treatment of sensation shows that pain pertained to all living beings, plants included, proclaiming a tragic dimension of life.77 Aristotle himself in his treatment of pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics discussed this doctrinal principle as belonging more generally to the physiologoi and pertaining to the living being (zōon),78 a category which for him, however, included human beings and the other animals but excluded the insentient plants.
18The question to ask, then, is to what degree the human being was for Anaxagoras a subject of pain in respect to plants, and whether its later origin, sexual differentiation, and/or (possibly) expanded sensorial range made him a privileged locus of pain. The fact that Anaxagoras discussed the individual senses in relation to animals tout court without distinction as to what kind possesses them does not provide relevant information to answer this question. Obviously, Anaxagoras too would have made sight characteristic of the human being (and the other animals) possessing eyes to the exclusion of plants, a fact that indicates an additional intrinsic layer of pain for the human being, and hence, so to speak, a specialization of pain due to the encounter with the objects of vision, inaccessible to plants. Significantly, however, rather than pertaining to animals’ different kinds, for Anaxagoras the relevant difference lied in animals and their sense organs’ size. Theophrastus tells us that “The larger animals have more perfect powers of sense, and sense perception varies in general with the size <of the organ of sense>. For animals that have clear large lustrous eyes see large objects and such as are distant; while of animals with small eyes the opposite is true.”79 Not eliciting a discriminatory interest, the human being was a member of the larger animal group, and its acuity of perception and consequent intensity of pain was yet surpassed in the case of animals of a greater size. Anaxagoras also claimed that the human being was the most intelligent (phronimōtaton) among the animals because it had hands – and not as Aristotle later replied, that the human being had hands because it was the most intelligent.80 Thus in this respect too, a part of the body contributed to the development of humans’ mental capacities but this belief did not deny to the other animals without hands, including plants, a share of intelligence. Mind controlled all living beings, big and small, we have seen earlier, while plants themselves possessed reason and understanding.81 More to the point, in fragment B 12 the fact that Mind continued to control everything that has soul and is alive suggests a gap with the inanimate masses actually separated (i.e., mountains and rivers) from the primordial matter. That is, only living beings entertained a relationship with Mind and contained Mind because, as Curd has emphasized, they are compounded, structured beings (sympagēnai).82 And, we may add, it was such a composition that for Anaxagoras enabled them to be unlike their objects of sensation and, therefore, to sense and possess a pain-inclined interiority – in addition to carrying out other living activities. So in the end, for Anaxagoras humans shared with plants (and the other animals) an alterity with the (inanimate) world but, at the same time, also held a unique form of composition endowing them with a further specialized body. Besides sight and ensuing pain, which animals in plant form did not have,83 human beings possessed hands and an exclusive capacity to manipulate the world along with all its creatures,84 which was not only foreign to plants but also to the other nonhuman animals.
Conclusion
19Contextualized within the accounts of the origin of life, early Greek philosophers’ erratic claims about plants’ sensation, pain, pleasure, and desire (and thought) are eloquent. They speak of capacities and conditions shared with human beings (and the other animals) based on a common origin and ensuing body constitution and they are aligned with the creation of analogies that weave continuities between plants and other living beings rather than radical discontinuities as Diogenes and Aristotle looking at plants would have claimed. In their seeming diversity plants were simply primitive terrestrial living beings who perpetuated their mode of reproduction from the earth at the dawn of the world and did not reproduce through the ephemeral union of male and female like the human being and the other animals later did. Still, despite this apparent difference, plants and humans partook of the same body physicality and gestation – at least to a certain extent. They were composed of a mixture of the elements85 or, possessing a portion of everything, they were under the control of Mind.86 For Empedocles plants “grow in the heat of the earth that separates so that they are part of the earth just as embryos in the belly are parts of the womb.”87 By virtue of shared philogeny and then similar ontogeny plants and human beings were thus susceptible to the encounter with likes (or the unlikes, depending on the doctrine), granted them by their embodied existence, with ensuing awareness. But deeply affected by Strife, humans carried more than plants the imprint of Love. They possessed the desire for sex and thicker food, and, equipped with the organ of sight, they appreciated beauty. Their further articulated bodies determined a specialization of desire and, we may add, an extension and refinement of the senses. In feeding on thicker food, humans must have developed a range of tastes unknown to plants88 while in possessing hands (for Anaxagoras) they engaged in more activities witnessing an expansion of the dominion of sensation and likely a consequent exposure to pain.
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Notes de bas de page
1 Physicality and interiority are two key notions in this essay investigating the forms of life shared by humans and plants in early Greek philosophy. I take “physicality” to mean the body in its material constitution and “interiority” the type of awareness combined with pleasure and/or pain a given body constitution gives rise to.
2 DK 31 B 62/ Simpl. In Phys. p. 381.31-382.3 (νῦν δ᾽ ἄγ᾽, ὅπως ἀνδρῶν τε πολυκλαύτων τε γυναικῶν ἐννυχίους ὅρπηκας ἀνήγαγε κρινόμενον πῦρ, τῶνδε κλύ᾽· οὐ γὰρ μῦθος ἀπόσκοπος οὐδ᾽ ἀδαήμων. οὐλοφυεῖς μὲν πρῶτα τύποι χθονὸς ἐξανέτελλον, ἀμφοτέρων ὕδατός τε καὶ εἴδεος αἶσαν ἔχοντες· τοὺς μὲν πῦρ ἀνέπεμπε θέλον πρὸς ὁμοῖον ἱκέσθαι, οὔτε τί πω μελέων ἐρατὸν δέμας ἐμφαίνοντας οὔτ᾽ ἐνοπὴν οἷον τ᾽ ἐπιχώριον ἀνδράσι γυῖον. “Come then: how fire, separating off, drew upward the nocturnal saplings. Of much-weeping men and women-Hear this. For my tale is not aimless nor ignorant. First, whole-natured outlines sprang up from the earth possessing a share of both, of water as of heat. This fire sent upward, wishing to reach what was similar to it; as yet they displayed neither the lovely framework of limbs nor the voice and the organ that is native to men.”). When not otherwise indicated, all translations of fragments and testimonies regarding the Presocratic philosophers are from the Loeb edition by A. Laks and G. Most.
3 In fact, the mode of birth is only one of the several features shared by plants and this primordial kind of humans, see below. It may seem audacious to attribute lack and desire to these living beings given that literally the fragment speaks of the fire “wishing to reach its similar.” Yet, in B 109 it is clear that the awareness of the body elements is transferred to the subject of life. We read “It is by earth that we see earth, by water water, by aether divine aether, and by fire destructive fire and fondness by fondness, and strife by baleful strife.”
4 On the soul constituting a “simple psycho-physical structure of . . . spherical . . . mobile atoms permeating the entire structure of the body,” see Taylor 2007, p. 77.
5 DK 68 A 101/ Arist. de An. 1.405a8-13.
6 In addition to Empedocles, see Anaxagoras, discussed below.
7 DK 64 A 19/Thph. de Sens. 44; DK 64 A 19/ Thph. de Sens. 39; DK 64 B 4/ Simpl. In Phys. p. 152.18-21.
8 Aristot. DA 2 413a20-413b1.
9 DA 2 413a20-413b1.
10 DK 31 A 70/Bollack 576/ Plut. Quaest. Conv. 6.2.2 688A (τηρεῖται δὲ τοῖς φυτοῖς ἀναισθήτως ἐκ τοῦ περιέχοντος, ὥς φησιν Ἐμπεδοκλῆς, ὑδρευομένοις τὸ πρόσφορον· ἡμᾶς δ᾽ἡ ὄρεξις ζητεῖν διδάσκει καὶ διώκειν τὸ ἐκλεῖπον τῆς κράσεως).
11 Ps.-Aristot. de Plant. 1 815a15, transl. by W. S. Hett. The extant treatise On Plants is considered to be an adaptation by Nicolaus of Damascus, a Peripatetic of the Augustan age, who compiled a treatise based on Aristotle’s On Plants and Theophrastus’ botanical writings. His work was, then, translated into Syriac (of which only fragments survive) and Arabic, and subsequently into Hebrew and Latin (between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). Finally, as has been recently argued, the Greek retroversion from the Latin translation was due to Manuel Holobolos, a Byzantine orator and monk (c. 1245-between 1310 and 1314). For a discussion of the text history, see Drossaart, Lulofs and Poortman 1989, p. 1-4; for Holobolos’ involvement, Fisher 2006, p. 189-211.
12 DK 31 B 107.
13 DK 31 B 110/ Hi p. Haer. 7.29.26, with slight modifications.
14 Cf. also DK 31 B 100 in which Empedocles attributes breathing to “all things.” For an analysis of the usus scribendi of panta as inclusive of plants, see Piergiacomi, 2018.
15 DK 31 ad B 110/ Sext. Adv. Math. 8.286; see Zatta, 2019, p. 251.
16 See also DK 31 A 86/ Thph. de Sens. 10.
17 DK 31 B 105/ Porph. in Stob. 1.49.53.
18 See Theophrastus’ discussion of DK 31 B 107 (”This is why it is by means of blood that one thinks best; for, among the parts [scil. of the body], it is in this one that the elements can achieve the best mixture.” διὸ καὶ τῷ αἵματι μάλιστα φρονεῖν· ἐν τούτῳ γὰρ μάλιστα κεκρᾶσθαι ἐστὶ τὰ στοιχεῖα τῶν μερῶν) (DK 31 A 86/ Thph. de Sens. 10).
19 Empedocles conceived living beings’ bodies in terms of analogies as in fr. 82 where he states that hairs, leaves, feathers and scales are the same. While the evidence is lacking, one could argue that plants possessed a thought-producing body component analogous to blood, which Empedocles generally called moisture (hygron), see Thph. HP 1 2 3/DK 32 A 2 ; Zatta 2023, p. 254-255.
20 Campbell, 2000, p. 159.
21 Arist. PA 1.640b5-13 (Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀρχαῖοι καὶ πρῶτοι φιλοσοφῆσαντες περὶ φύσεως περὶ τῆς ὑλικῆς ἀρχῆς καὶ τῆς τοιαύτης αἰτίας ἐσκόπουν, τίς καὶ ποία τις, καὶ πῶς ἐκ ταύτης γίνεται τὸ ὅλον, καὶ τίνος κινοῦντος, οἷον νείκους ἢ φιλίας ἢ νοῦ ἢ τοῦ αὐτομάτου, τῆς δ᾽ ὑποκειμένης ὕλης τοιάνδε τινὰ φύσιν ἐχούσης ἐξ ἀνάγχης, οἷον τοῦ μὲν πυρὸς θερμήν, τῆς δὲ γῆς ψυχράν, καὶ τοῦ μὲν κούφην, τῆς δὲ βαρεῖαν. οὕτως γὰρ καὶ τὸν κόσμον γεννῶσιν. ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ περὶ τῆν τῶν ζῴων καὶ τῶν φυτῶν γένεσιν λέγουσιν, ” trans. by J.G. Lennox, with slight modifications.)
22 Longrigg, 1993.
23 In this respect, Charles Kahn has remarked that physis, nature, can denote the true nature of a thing, while maintaining its etymological sense of “the primary source or process” from which the thing has come to be. “Nature” and “origin” are combined in one and the same idea (Kahn, 1960, p. 202-203.)
24 DK 68 B 5.2/Luria 556/Hermi p. De astrol. 2.1.6-12.
25 In this respect, see also Diodorus Siculus’ account of the origin of life in a cosmological perspective grouping all terrestrial animals together based on the fact that their aggregate contained earth (D. S. 1.7.5/DK 68 B 5).
26 DK 68 B 5.2/Luria 556/Hermip. De astrol. 2.1.11.
27 DK 68 A 139/Luria 514.
28 Plat. Tim. 89A-90. For Empedocles’ influence on Plato’s Timaeus, see Hershbell, 1974.
29 DK 31 A 70/Aët. 5.26.4.
30 DK 31 A 70/Arist. DA 2.415b28.
31 These elements of characterization become clear if we think at lines 8-9 of the same fragment in which Empedocles refers to the whole-natured beings’ lack of the “lovely frame of limbs” and “the organ which is native to men” while by contrast the animals of the fourth zoogony are said to be born from one another (see DK 31 A 72). Besides trees themselves are somehow “whole” in that they combine the male and female sex (see below).
32 According to Aëtius Empedocles envisioned four distinct zoogonies of animals and plants (DK 31 A 72), from living beings consisting in parts not grown together to those whose parts had grown together and had the appearance of phantasms (eidōlophaneis) to the whole-natured (holophyeis) to a fourth generation capable of sexual reproduction.
33 DK 31 A 72. The reliability of Aëtius’ account is supported by the same B 62 in which the lack of the “lovely frame of limbs” and “the organ which is native to men” indicates the absence of sexual generation characteristic of the members of the third zoogony, foreshadowing by contrast the positive features that define the members of the fourth zoogony.
34 Now if the desire for a specific type of food is determined by the element that is lacking (see DK 31 A 95 and n. 38 below), then the desire for thicker food depends on the constitutional change of the members of the fourth zoogony, which are less dense and hence earthy and thus lack earthiness in respect to those of the third.
35 I use this word with respect to the qualification of the members of third zoogony as holophyeis (whole-natured) and hence as constitutionally different from the members of the fourth zoogony, which did not possess such wholeness on account of their emergence under the increasing divisive force of Strife.
36 Plat. Sym p. 189c2-193d5; for a discussion of Aristophanes’ myth in the context of the Greek literary tradition, see Dover (1966, p. 41-50) who, however, denies that Plato might have had Empedocles’ fragment 62 in mind when composing Aristophanes’ speech (46). But if we consider that, as Aëtius tells us, the crucial difference between the third and fourth zoogony lies precisely on the emergence of sexual attraction and that Timaeus shows the use of Empedocles’ doctrine it is undeniable that in Symposium too Plato worked with fragment 62. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the living beings of the third zoogony are called typoi, which is said of a statue not yet “trimmed.” Applied to the bodies of the holophyeis it implies that they contained all the parts that will become articulated in the members of the fourth zoogony and that they had the same stature as well (see Bollack, p. 431).
37 See DK 31 A 70/Aët. 5.26.4, in which the equilibria of plants’ mixture (symmetria tēs kraseōs) is made responsible for the compresence of the male and female principle. For the compatibility of the different modes of generations at work in Empedocles’ discussion of living beings based on his physical doctrine, see Zatta 2022. In Generation of Animals Aristotle appreciates Empedocles’ tenet quoting fragment B 79, “So the great trees lay eggs; the olives, first”. In line with the Presocratic, in this treatise Aristotle explains that plants merge in a single living individual those faculties, which in animals are separated and belong to the male, on the one hand, and to the female, on the other. Plants do not produce semen (gyē), which in Aristotelian terms corresponds to the male contribution to sexual generation. They produce, instead, already an embryo (kyema), conventionally called “seed,” from which the living being, the plant, is formed and nourished at the same time (GA 1 731a2-10). Aristotle also says that at the stage of fetation the living being seems to live the life of a plant (it takes nourishment without sensing), but as it develops the living being radically departs from being like a plant inasmuch as it acquires sensation (GA 1 736b8). On the recognition of plant male and female individuals in later botanical writings (in Theophrastus and other Greek authors), see Foxhall 1998 and (from Theophrastus to the Roman agronomists) Bretin-Chabrol, Leduc 2009.
38 Admittedly, the object of plants’ desire is left unspecified but Aëtius’ testimony (DK 31 A 95/ Aët. 4, 9, 14) clarifies that it has to do with nutrition (as in Plato’s Timaeus) and Ps.-Aristot. de Plant. 1 815a15 (quoted above in n.11) that it is manifested by plants’ body orientation; cf. Wolfsdorf (2009, p. 19) who also discusses how, according to the doxography, “desire arises through lack of a certain element and is directed at the element that is lacking” (p. 8).
39 Nutrition for Empedocles happened by means of an attraction of “like for like” and must have involved sensation and pleasure (see below). According to the doxography, Empedocles believed that animals (including plants) were nourished “by the remaining (hypostasis) in them of that which is proper to their own nature (oikeion);” see, respectively, DK 31 B 90 and DK 31 A 77/Aet. Plac. 5, 27; cf. also Hicks who attributes to Democritus a similar view (1965, p. 346).
40 See above.
41 See the passage from Parts of Animals referred to above.
42 See DK 59 A 1/ D.L. 2.9 (transl. by R.D. Hicks).
43 DK 59 B 12, line 11; for the inclusion of plants, see Sider, 2005, p. 97.
44 See Curd, 2007, p. 60-61.
45 See Ps.-Aristot. de Plant. 1 815a15, quoted above. The focus on Empedocles and Anaxagoras intersects also the two modes of sensation highlighted by Theophrastus, whether between likes or unlikes; see upcoming discussion.
46 Thph. de Sens. 1-2, transl. by G.M. Stratton. ([1] Περὶ δ᾽ αἰσθήσεως αἰ μὲν πολλαὶ καὶ καθόλου δόξαι δυ᾽ εἰσίν· οἱ μὲν γὰρ τῷ ὁμοίῳ ποιοῦσιν, οἱ μὲν γὰρ τῷ ἐναντίῳ. Παρμενίδης μὲν καὶ Ἐμπεδοκλῆς καὶ Πλάτων τῷ ὁμοίῳ, οἱ δὲ περὶ Ἀναξαγόραν καὶ Ἡράκλειτον τῷ ἐναντίῳ. τὸ δὲ πιθανὸν ἔλαβον οἱ μὲν ὅτι τῶν ἄλλων τε τὰ πλεῖστα τῇ ὁμοιότητι θεωρεῖται καὶ ὅτι σύμφυτόν ἐστι πᾶσι τοῖς ζῴοις τὰ συγγενῆ γνωρίζειν, ἔτι δ᾽ ὡς τὸ μὲν αἰσθάνεσθαι τῇ ἀπορροίᾳ γίνεται, τὸ δ᾽ ὅμοιον φέρεται πρὸς τὸ ὅμοιον. (2) οἱ δὲ τὴν αἴσθησιν ὑπολαμβάνοντες ἐν ἀλλοιώσει γίνεσθαι καὶ τὸ μὲν ὅμοιον ἀπαθὲς ὑπὸ τοῦ ὁμοίου, τὸ δ᾽ ἐναντίον παθητικόν, τοῦτῳ προσέθεσαν τὴν γνώμην· ἐπιμαρτυρεῖν δὲ οἴονται καὶ τὸ περὶ τὴν ἁφὴν συμβαῖνον· τὸ γὰρ ὁμοίως τῇ σαρκὶ θερμὸν ἢ ψυχρὸν οὐ ποιεῖν αἴσθησιν. καθόλου μὲν οὖν περὶ αἰσθήσεως αὗται παραδέδονται δόξαι. περὶ ἑκάστης δὲ τῶν κατὰ μέρος οἱ μὲν ἄλλοι σχεδὸν ἀπολείπουσιν, Ἐμπεδοκλῆς δὲ πειρᾶται καὶ ταύτας ἀνάγειν εἰς τὴν ὁμοιότητα).
47 Theophrastus’ initial clear-cut division of the Presocratics’ approaches to sensation (by likes and unlikes) may spring from his Aristotelian outlook on the evidence but with regard to Empedocles and Anaxagoras, discussed here, is at any rate supported by their doctrinal tenets: in B 109, quoted below, Empedocles sustains sensorial homology while for Anaxagoras pain is intrinsic in any sensorial encounter (see discussion below).
48 DK 31 B 109 (γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ᾽ ὕδωρ, αἰθέρι δ᾽ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον, στοργὴν δὲ στοργῇ, νεῖκος δέ τε νείκεϊ λυγρῷ). On the physiology of sensation and thought in early Greek philosophers including Empedocles, see Laks, 1999, p. 250-270.
49 Thph. de Sens. 7; for Theophrastus’ critique, see de Sens. 17; With regard to Empedocles’ doctrine of sensation Wolfssdorf constructs a doctrinal contrast between Theophrastus and Aetius’ doxography as gravitating around “structural conformity” on the one hand, and “elemental homogeneity,” on the other (2009, p. 12-14), but the fact that these two principles coexist in Theophrastus himself and in a certain order (first, “elemental homogeneity” and then “structural conformity”) indicate that they are compatible and become progressively relevant depending on the degree of bodily articulation of a given entity. For the theory of porosity as explaining the principle that sensation happens by likes, see Guthrie, 1965, p. 228-231.
50 Thph. de Sens. 7, 9, 17. For a discussion of Anaxagoras’ doctrine of sight based on effluences and focused on a tbeory of color, see Rudolph, 2015, p. 44-46.
51 I use “mixture” based on Empedocles’ conception of living beings’ life as deriving from the mixing of the roots in DK 31 B 8 (mixis) and DK 31 B 9 (mignymi).
52 It seems that these original beings experienced a plurality of desires: in addition to the desires inherent in their body upper and lower parts (for fire and earth) they also felt the desire for the element that was lacking in their constitution, i.e., the nutritive desire for “more rarefied” food (see n. 37 above); cf. Arist. de An. 2.415b28. Under Theophrastus’ analytical critique, Empedocles failed to make the due distinctions because his doctrine ultimately identified “mixture, sense perception, and growth” (Thph. de Sens. 12).
53 DK 31 B 62, lines 1-2.
54 DK 31 B 86 “From which [scil. the elements] divine Aphrodite constructed the unyielding eyes” (ἐξ ὧν ὄμματ᾽ ἔπηξεν ἀτειρέα δῖ᾽ Ἀφροδίτη).
55 DK 31 B 84/Arist. Sens. 2 437b26-438a3.
56 See Aëtius’ account stressing how “women’s beauty caused an excitation of spermatic movement” (τοῖς δὲ καὶ τῆς εὐμορφίας τῶν γυναικῶν ἐπερεθισμὸν τοῦ σπερματικοῦ κινήματος ἐμποιησάσης) (DK 31 A 72).
57 Theophrastus tells us that Empedocles did not discuss touch and taste (Thph. de Sens. 9) but a form of contact (and hence touch) must have implied in any sense because sensation occurred through the fitting of effluences in the body passages (poroi).
58 DK 31 A 86/Wright 145/ LM EM P. D226/Thph. de Sens. 9.
59 DK 31 B 99.
60 Stratton translates it “fleshy off-shoot” (1927, p. 73), Bollack (1965, p. 231) along with Laks and Most (2016 vol. 5.2 555) “branch of flesh,” Shaw “a branch made out of flesh (2022, p. 41) Wright “sprig of flesh,” and Longrigg substituting ozos with nedys “fleshy cavity” (1975, p. 168-169).
61 See Zatta, 2022, p. 293. It is noteworthy that this meaning for ozos is only attested in Theophrastus’ botanical work while the primary meaning in epic is “branch.” Still, given Empedocles’ interest in vegetal life, he may have used this term with a technical meaning, not attested in the sources. For a different interpretation that makes plants’ hearing receptive to the internal flow of water coming from the roots, see Shaw, 2022, p. 40-43.
62 The first author who held this association between breathing and the sense of smell seems to have been Alcmaion (DK 24 A5/Thph. de Sens. 25), followed by Anaxagoras (DK 59 A 92/ Thph. de Sens. 27-28).
63 DK 31 B 102 (ὧδε μὲν οὖν πνοιῆς τε λελόγχασι πάντα καὶ ὀσμῶν); for plants’ capacity to breath and smell in Empedocles’ doctrine, see Piergiacomi 2018 and for a discussion of vegetal respiration in Presocratics’ doctrines, including Menestor, see Zatta, submitted.
64 Empedocles discusses respiration in B 100 conceiving it a rhythmical movement that involves receding blood and advancing air and, in turn, advancing blood and receding air. For a discussion of this fragment in terms of epithelial respiration (and the consideration of the nostril as (bigger) pores), see Wright, 1981 p. 245-246; cf. Bollack, 1969, p. 246-247, Worthen, 1970, p. 523-528, Debru, 1996, p. 179, Ambrosano, 2012.
65 Thph. de Sens. 16-7. After asserting that for Empedocles pleasure was due to the action of similar Theophrastus further attributes to some people the notion that pleasure is either sensation or accompanies sensation, which (the latter) appears to be his own analytical interjection. Note that when he criticizes Anaxagoras that every sensation implies pain he remarks that in being according to nature (kata physin) sensation provides pleasure (de Sens. 31).
66 See Wright’s commentary on B 100.
67 DK 59 A 117 (“Anaxagoras, who asserts that the air contains seeds of all things and that these, when they descend together with water, generate plants” Ἀναξαγόρας μὲν τὸν ἀέρα πάντων φάσκων ἔχειν σπέρματα καὶ ταῦτα συγκαταφερόμενα τῷ ὕδατι γεννᾶν τὰ φυτά)
68 See DK 59 A 116/ Plut. Quaest nat. 1 911D («The followers of Plato, Anaxagoras and Democritus think that a plant is an animal in the earth. ζῷον γὰρ ἔγγειον τὸ φυτὸν εἶναι οἱ περὶ Πλάτωνα καὶ Ἀναξαγόραν καὶ Δημόκριτον οἴονται).
69 [Arist.] de Plant. 1 816b26-7.
70 Anaxagoras applies the principle that sensation happens between unlikes to the senses of touch and sight but no to that of hearing.
71 For a discussion of Anaxagoras’ doctrine of sight based on reflection, see Rudolph, 2015, p. 41-42.
72 DK 59 A 92/Thph. de Sens. 28.
73 See Theophrastus’ passage quoted on p. 12. The language may be Aristotelean as it seems to rehearse the expression alloiōsis tis in Aristotle’s On the Soul 2 5 but it still indicates living beings’ delicate exposure to environmental stimuli.
74 DK 59 A 92/Thph. de Sens. 29.
75 Aristot. NE 7 1154b7-9; see also Warren who further attributes the “sensorial lack” of pain to the weakness of the senses (Warren, 2007, p. 34-36).
76 Thph. de Sens. 17.
77 In this respect, see Romeyer-Dherbey, 1999, p. 14-39 and especially p. 25 where the author asserts that Anaxagoras’ theory that sensation is associated with pain denies the existence of pleasure, which is conceived as in Plato only in terms of escape from pain; see, however, Warren’s reservation on this issue and his speculative reconstruction of Anaxagorean pleasure (respectively, 2007, p. 25-26 and p. 36-45).
78 Aristot. NE 7 1154b7-9/Dk 59 A 94. For a discussion of this passage in relation to Aspasius’ commentary and the pertinence to Anaxagoras, see Warren, 2007, p. 20-25.
79 Thph. de Sens. 29/DK 59 A 92. For the difficulties inherent in this doctrine, see Curd, 2007, p. 228 and n. 64.
80 DK 59 A 102/Arist. PA 4.687a7-9 (“Anaxagoras says that the human being is the most intelligent of the animals because he has hands […]” Ἀναξαγόρας μὲν οὖν φησι διὰ τὸ χεῖρας ἔχειν φρονιμώτατον εἶναι τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπον […]).
81 DK 59 A 117/ Ps.-Arist. Plant. 1 815b16-17.
82 Curd stresses the connection between B 12 and B4a in which Anaxagoras pursues the “composition” of all living beings, human and not, concomitant to the separation from the primordial mass where everything was together (2007, p. 16-17, p. 161)
83 With the exclusion of sight, plants in animal form must have possessed all the other senses. Regarding smell, Anaxagoras likely followed Empedocles because he too connected it to respiration (and plants, as noted earlier, were breathing creatures) (DK 59 A 92/ Thph. de Sens. 28).
84 In this respect, see DK 59 B 21b/Plut. Fort. 3 98F (“In all these regards [scil. relative to physical strength] we are less fortunate than the wild beasts, but, according to Anaxagoras, thanks to experience, memory, cleverness, and skill we make use of their †. . .†, we collect their honey and take their milk, and, gathering them together, we drive (?) and lead them away […]” ἀλλ᾽ ἐν πᾶσι τούτοις ἀτυχέστεροι τῶν θηρίων ἐσμέν· ἐμπειρίᾳ δὲ καὶ μνήμῃ καὶ σοφίᾳ καὶ τέχνῃ κατὰ Ἀναξαγόραν †σφῶν τι† αὐτῶν χρώμεθα καὶ βλίττομεν καὶ ἀμέλγομεν καὶ φέρομεν καὶ ἄγομεν συλλαμβάνοντες […]).
85 See for instance DK 31 B 21.
86 DK 59 B 12.
87 DK 31 A 70/ Aët. 5 26. Significantly, Hippocrates’ On the Nature of the Child presents a long, elaborated analogy between the development of the seed into a plant in the earth and that of the embryo in the mother’s womb (21-27).
88 The fact that in DK 31 A 72 living beings’ (desire for) thicker food is connected to sexual reproduction suggests that, as later in Aristotle, for Empedocles nutrition was tied to semen production and sexual reproduction.
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