Yesterday in Physics 100 we started a discussion of the structure of matter. This inevitably brings up the early ideas from 400 BC about atoms, from Democritus (and others) at least in the Greek line of thought. These ideas were later brushed aside by Aristotle who declared that the elements from which everything can be constructed were Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
Of course, one is obliged to show a slide at this point. I could not resist this one:
There were some giggles, some of which were probably appreciative. I do wonder what my young audience thought…
-cvj
I’m intrigued by the metaphoric widespread use of the four ancient elements:
Air, Fire, Earth, and Water.
In a scientific sense, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire are not bad symbols for the four states of matter — solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, but this grouping is so old (many thousands of years), that I have often wondered if there exists pattern-matching in our brains to group items into these four. So i looked into this some years ago.
The Greek idea that everything being formed of these four elements was first developed by the Greek philosopher Empedocles of Sicily. Empedocles explains the nature of the universe through the interaction of two governing principles, Love (attraction) and Strife (repulsion), on the four primary elements Earlier philosophers believed that the quality of matter depends on the quantity of a particular element. For example, Anaximenes asserts that air is the primary element in the universe, condensing to form heavier matter such as water, and rarefying into fire. However, Empedocles argues that the quality of matter depends exclusively on the *ratio* of its elements. A stone, for example, is stone because of a unique ratio of air, fire, earth, and water. His preoccupation with ratio also demonstrates the strong influence of Pythagorean philosophers on him.
I suppose the line of thinking that first led me to this was Aristotle’s teleology, and then I kept noticing these four elements having a large role in a number of religious, holistic, occultic and new-age practices today. Some people have drawn all kinds of magick correpondences between these four elements. When I started asking questions of people a few years ago for why these elements appear in so many new age practices, they pointed me to “The Golden Dawn”. This is a Hermetic Order founded in 1888, that combined ideas from Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, the work of 16th-century magician John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley, a Christianized version of Kabbalah, and recent archaeological discoveries of Egyptian and Greco-Roman magic and religion.
Anyway, back to the brain. I think that these four elements appear often symbolically in our human lives because our human interaction with these elements is a basic body experience that we have internalized and made into a metaphor. In George Lakoff’s book: _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind_, he states that bodily experience adds to the basic-level of categorization: He says: (pg. 302)
“The existence of directly meaningful concepts — basic-level concepts and image schemas — provides certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations. The image-schematic structure of bodily experience is, we hypothesize, the same for all human beings. […] The consideration of certain gross patterns in our experience – — our vertical orientation, the nature of our bodies as containers, our ability to sense hot and cold, our experience of being empty as opposed to filled, etc. suggests that our experiences is structured kinesthetically in at least a gross way in a variety of experiential domains.
Cognitive models derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide a basis for an account of truth and knowledge. Because such matching is “internal” to a person, the irreconcilable problems in the objectivist theories do not arise in experientialist theories.
In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means for comprehending domains of experience that do not not have a preconceptual structure of their own. A great many of our domains of experience are like this. Comprehending experience via metaphor is one of the great imaginative triumphs of the human mind. Much of rational thought involves the use of mataphoric models. Any adequate account of rationality must account for the use of imagination and much of imaginations consists of metaphorical reasoning.” (end quote)
I’m a big fan of Metaphor…
“Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to use. We say we understand an aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model.” (Julian Jaynes in _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_, pg. 52, 53)
I do wonder what my young audience thought…
Gawd; as soon as I read “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water” the image of this album cover popped into my mind. Guess that dates me. (Though, I remember it from going through my mom’s records when I was a kid.)
Aren’t the 70’s cool again?
Hmm, Kool and the Gang for thermodynamics….