Nothing alive is alien to me

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In 55 BCE, on the final day of the celebrations marking the opening of the Theatre of Pompey, thousands of Romans witnessed theatrical performances, athletic and musical contests, and wild animal hunts. At the climax of the festivities, 20 or so elephants were ceremonially slaughtered in the Circus Maximus. This notorious hunt was seared into the minds not only of eyewitnesses such as Cicero, but of Greeks and Romans over many generations, including Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch and Dio Cassius.

Rather than fighting back when first wounded, the elephants appeared to give up. They walked around the arena with their trunks raised to the sky, trumpeting in pain, as if imploring the crowd to make the killing stop. Tearful and distressed at the awful sight, many in the audience invoked curses on the head of Pompey. Cicero described the scene:

The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.

The feeling of compassion or pity (misericordia) for the elephants went hand in hand with the belief that elephants have something in common with us. The Latin word Cicero used to describe this common ground was societas, meaning union, association, fellowship, a community of belonging. His report raised issues that recur throughout ancient Greek and Roman philosophy: who belongs with us? Our family? Our tribe? Our nation? What about strangers, foreigners? Do we share societas with fellow human beings no matter their native city-state?

These questions were considered essential because their answers determined the limits of moral obligation. The scope of our duties was thought to be restricted to those beings with whom we have fellowship. To belong to the community (koinônia in Greek) is to be akin (oikeîos). To have kinship is to be bound with your fellows by bonds of friendship (philia). It was in response to the perceived breaking of those bonds that the Roman crowd cursed Pompey, judging his slaughtering of the elephants to be a grave injustice.

Questions about who belongs to our shared community, and the duties that community demands of us, were asked long before Cicero and Pompey. Indeed, one of the earliest philosophers to articulate this perennial question was the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles, a 5th-century BCE native of the city-state of Acragas (now Agrigento) in southwest Sicily. His unusual and radical views on our moral community continue to resonate today.

In contemporary parlance, the most common framework that ancient moral philosophy operated within is known as ethical partialism. For the ethical partialist, our relationships determine the reasons we have to act (or refrain from acting). That is why the question ‘Who belongs?’ is so important: the answer informs us about the ethical relationships in which we are implicated and by which we are obligated.

This ancient way of thinking about ethical matters is comprehensively rejected by dominant forms of modern moral philosophy. Whether deontological or consequentialist, the underlying ethical framework is impartialist. For the impartialist, factoring in personal relationships when deciding what to do is to introduce prejudice, parochialism and bias into one’s moral thinking. The question ‘Who belongs?’ is rejected as a legitimate starting point. For the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the essential question is rather ‘Can they suffer?’ Whether I have a relationship to the being is morally irrelevant. Objectivity in one’s moral thinking requires strict neutrality. That is what justice is thought to demand.

What are we to make of these opposing frameworks? On the one hand, impartialism seems to have a clear advantage over partialism. Consider the immemorial horrors that have resulted from an insider-outsider logic in which one community or group is pitted against another. Historically, those who are seen as not belonging are demonised as ‘barbarians’, ‘brutes’ or ‘foreigners’, and treated accordingly.

To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment, divest yourself of your attachment to familiar body shapes

On the other hand, there is a peculiar alienation involved in the impartialist requirement to detach ourselves from our relationships and personal commitments when deciding what to do. Surely, our personal relationships matter morally? And rightly so – they make us who we are. Isn’t there something abhorrent about me treating my friend, my child, my parent as if they had no more significance to me than anyone else? Most would say there is.

So how are we to adjudicate between the two frameworks? The problem with partialism is that it seems inevitably to introduce an insider-outsider logic into our moral thinking, against which the impartialist understandably reacts. But what if that logic could be presented in a morally acceptable way? Is that possible?

That brings us to Empedocles. The significance of Empedocles lies in his view that all living beings belong to a single community or lifeworld, which is governed by a universal law of justice. As reported by Aristotle, Empedocles

bids us kill no living creature, says that doing this is not just for some people while unjust for others, ‘Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky/Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth’s immensity.’

Aristotle mentions Empedocles’ view in a passage differentiating natural law from laws grounded either on community (koinônia) or contract (sunthêkê). He takes Empedocles to be offering an example of the former. However Empedocles does not say that the universal law of justice governing the lifeworld is without community. That is Aristotle’s interpretation. On the contrary, he tells us that in a past Golden Age the spirit of friendship ‘burned bright’ amongst living things. We also know from his work Purifications that Empedocles was influenced by the Pythagorean belief in the transmigration of souls: ‘He said all souls transmigrate into every kind of living thing.’

In particular, Empedocles believed in the existence of long-lived spirits (daimones) exiled from the divine realm for the ‘original sin’ of killing and consuming living flesh, which were subsequently condemned to go through a series of ascending incarnations, from plant to animal to human being, with each form having its exemplar: the laurel bush, the lion, and, amongst humans, the prophet, bard, doctor and statesman. Taking himself to be such a daimôn, he says that, ‘Before now, I have been a boy, a girl, a bush, a fowl, and a fish traveling in the sea’. The goal of existence was to break the cycle and return to the gods. This Empedocles claimed was about to happen to him (the story goes he leapt into the fires of Mount Etna leaving only his sandals behind).

Whatever we make of the religious metaphysics, the ethical implications are stark: there is kinship between plants, fungi, other animals and humans, the living other being ‘one of us’ because either it is or might be a daimôn in reincarnated form. Therefore the basis for Empedocles’ universal law of justice are the bonds of fellowship binding us to other living things; it is the law governing a form of community – even if most of us don’t recognise it.

Empedocles’ second defence of the lifeworld concept can be extracted from the naturalism that runs through his work On Nature. This too supports the idea that the universal law of justice is based on the common ground bringing living things together. He is credited by Aristotle for many things, including being the first Western philosopher to distinguish clearly the four ‘roots’ (rhizômata) of matter: earth, air, fire and water. These he conceives as governed by two cosmic forces: Love (philia), the force of attraction, and Strife (neikos), the force of separation. Empedocles offers a dynamic, pluralist vision of reality in which life-forms result from the fusion (in Love) and diffusion (in Strife) of these fundamental, unchanging and equiprimordial (equally fundamental) roots. ‘Insofar as they never cease their continual interchange,’ he says, ‘thus far they exist always changeless in the cycle.’

The living other is ‘one of us’ because it might be a daímôn in reincarnated form

Empedocles compares the creation of a cosmos teeming with life, starting with only four rhizômata and two cosmic forces, to the way in which painters are able to represent ‘trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-bred fish’ starting from a basic palette of colours. Despite appearances, all living things are made from the combination, in various proportions, of the same material stuff. There is no such thing as absolute birth or death, only a ‘mingling and interchange of what is mingled’. One can imagine Empedocles rebuking Aristotle’s disciple Theophrastus for drawing the line separating humans and animals from everything else at the level of ‘skin, flesh and [a certain] type of fluids’. Why should a view of shared bodily origins stop at that arbitrary point, Empedocles might say, passing over the roots of matter out of which all living beings are made?

Aristotle also credits Empedocles for highlighting the functional affinity between the parts of what appear to be different living things, such as the seed of a tree and an animal fetus. Empedocles’ belief in the continuum of living species perhaps finds its deepest expression in his groundbreaking view of the origin of life. He appears to have believed that the cosmos begins in a state of Love, in which all the roots are fused and combined in a perfect sphere. Then Strife enters the fray, and the sphere begins to be pulled apart in a centrifugal, whirling motion, eventually resulting in the complete separation and segregation of the roots. Then, at the highest degree of Strife, Love begins to exert her influence, pulling the homogeneous roots into an accord, synthesising like with unlike, until the world as we know it, with its sea, sky, Sun and Earth, begins to take shape. Love increasingly holds sway until, after a vast stretch of time, it consolidates once again into a perfect, undifferentiated sphere, only to be disrupted one day by Strife, and so on, endlessly.

Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity of what seems to be different

Returning to the origin of life, Empedocles relates ‘countless tribes of mortal things pour[ing] forth’ as Love starts her centripetal ascent in the middle of the whirlpool. He paints a picture of an archaic cosmos originally inhabited by individual limbs and organs roaming about – ‘faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads’ – before coalescing under the guidance of Love to form larger entities, after which

Many creatures were born with faces and breasts on both sides, man-faced ox-progeny … ox-headed offspring of man, creatures compounded partly of male, partly of the nature of female …

Some of these beings were equipped to survive and reproduce, others not. From the accidental convergence of parts and under selective pressure, the familiar entities of today’s world – ox-faced oxen and human-faced humans – gradually came into being. By contrast, the archaic, hybrid, maladapted creatures eventually died out. For Empedocles, given the primordial promiscuity of living nature, we ought to see life forms not only as rooted in the same matter but also as products of the same generative forces. There is nothing special about human beings, no design or designer setting us apart.

Furthermore, the form, the characteristic style of bodily motion of the life forms inhabiting the lifeworld, is viewed by Empedocles as indicating something important held in common. As interpreted by Sextus Empiricus, Empedocles believed that all living things, including plants, have a share of intelligence (phrónêsis) and thought (nóêma). This view is important for Empedocles’ vision of the lifeworld. Whereas shared matter might not be taken to ground moral value, the form of a living body is crucial. For a body to have the relevant form is for its behaviour to be intelligible as displaying understanding of its situation. If it is the possession of cognitive faculties that makes humans and animals akin, shouldn’t we include plants and fungi – as recognisably intelligent problem-solvers able to make sense of their surroundings and respond accordingly – within the community to which we belong?

Although working within a partialist ethical framework, Empedocles is sensitive to its dangers. He views our cosmos during its present phase as governed by Strife, even if Love is ascendant. Strife is also anger, or grudge, rancour, wrath, symbolised by Ares, Homeric god of bloodlust, and Kydoimos, god of the din of battle. Under the governance of Strife, things originally whole fall apart, become increasingly estranged, and fight and kill each other. Here, the kind of partiality rightly condemned by the modern impartialist as ‘mere prejudice’ comes into view: tribe attacking tribe, nation against nation, with the resultant horrors of war. Likewise, under conditions of Strife, we have become estranged from our animal kin: meat-eating and the religious practices of animal sacrifice are condemned by Empedocles as one of the worst forms of human corruption.

However, Empedocles’ solution to the prejudice, dogmatism and narrow-mindedness afflicting existence differs from that of the modern impartialists. The answer is not to try to adopt an impersonal, God’s-eye perspective, foregoing all and any relationships as the inexorable source of ethical harm. It is instead to strive to forge new bonds or to recognise bonds that already exist. It is Love that allows us to do this. Whereas Strife sorts like with like, atomising the cosmos into homogenous parts, Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Thus, Love overcomes prejudice not by overcoming partiality but by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form. The highest such form is partiality towards the living as such.

To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you. Revising and widening the Stoic maxim, the Empedoclean position can be captured in the proposition: I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me. From this higher standpoint, the relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.

Do we belong to the lifeworld? One that includes not only humans and elephants, but all living things? Empedocles imagines a Golden Age before the onset of modern Strife, when such an association existed:

Among them was no war-god Ares worshipped nor the battle-cry, nor was Zeus their king, nor Kronos nor Poseidon, but Cypris [Aphrodite] was queen. Her they propriated with holy images, with paintings of living creatures … Their altar was not drenched by the unspeakable slaughters of bulls, but this was held among men the greatest defilement – to tear out the life from noble limbs and eat them … All things were tame and gentle to men, both beasts and birds, and their friendship burned bright.

The peace of the Golden Age was grounded on bonds of friendship governing relations between humans and other animals. The lifeworld remains a possibility as long as the drive to cultivate new forms of friendship and fellow feeling animates our existence. If the spirit of friendship burned bright long ago, can it not burn bright again?

There is a difference between having relations with individuals to whom we owe special obligations and a world governed by the spirit of friendship. After all, we cannot be friends with everyone. Authentic friendship demands the intimate sharing of a life, which limits the number of friends we are able to have. Empedocles’ point is that friendship is possible across the species-barrier because we belong with living beings within the same world, one able to be animated, once again, by the spirit of Love. It is just that we are too blind to see it, as we are naturally drawn through Strife to what is comfortably familiar, to those who are ‘one of us’. The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other, not by impartially observing them or adopting a theoretical attitude, but by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view. Excessive, dogmatic partiality can be overcome only by widening the scope of our relationships – by opening our eyes – and not by sundering the ties that connect us to the world and to each other.

It can appear absurd to speak of friendship with animals, let alone laurel bushes. But is it so strange? A friend is someone with whom you spend your time, living alongside them, getting to know their ways, enjoying their company, sharing your lives together. Is it possible to spend time in the company of an old, familiar tree, resting against its trunk and shaded by its branches as you read a book? Can the emotional intimacy with which individual trees shape our lives and lift our spirits count as friendship? I think it can. And what about a tardigrade? Can I be friends with a tardigrade? Why not? The fact that a being is microscopic represents a factual constraint rather than a moral limit. If there existed a tardigrade the size of a dog, I cannot see why friendship of a kind would not be possible, once we have overcome our unease at the unfamiliar appearance.

It is wrong to harm a plant for no good reason because it wrongs the plant

Nonetheless, assuming the possibility of friendship with lower life forms, the positing of an all-embracing law against harming any living thing seems a reductio of the entire position. If we cannot kill and consume plants, what are we supposed to do? Eat rocks? It would seem that self-purification logically culminates in the demand to end our embodied existence for moral purposes. Hardly a satisfactory conclusion.

However, ancient ethical partialism is not an all-or-nothing affair. It is not as if, occupying the highest standpoint of the lifeworld, from which the universality of the law derives, the inner circles of the moral landscape are thereby flattened. Such a levelling process would give to all living beings equal moral significance, an equality motivated by the identification of morality with impartiality. But justice in ancient times was giving to each the proportion they are owed. The justice each is owed is determined by its degree of moral significance. The degree of moral significance is determined by the closeness of the relationship between the agent and the moral patient, with the degree of significance constituting the strength of the reasons the agent has to take the patient into their consideration when deciding what to do. Hence, as Aristotle remarks in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is more unjust to wrong a friend or fellow citizen than a stranger.

Furthermore, we might say it is more unjust to harm a human being than an animal, and more unjust to harm an animal than a plant. Hence, under conditions of necessity, it follows that it is less unjust to kill and consume a plant than an animal – so that should be our choice, all things considered. But it is still wrong to harm a plant for no good reason, as when a person cuts down a mature tree in their garden for a thrill or tramples on wildflowers on a whim. The wrongness is not grounded in our duty not to damage our moral disposition or any proto-moral sentiments we might have; it is wrong because it wrongs the plant. It wrongs the plant not because it reasons or suffers, but because it is alive. The fact that it lives is a moral consideration because as a living body, it belongs with us in the community (koinônia, societas) of life. Belonging with us in the lifeworld – which for us is the homeworld we call Earth, to which we are bound – the living being is our kin.

The lesson taught by Empedocles is that the way to imprint this fact is not by objectively calculating the interests of living beings, thereby disregarding species-membership, human solidarity, or any more intimate relationship of belonging – the approach of the biocentric impartialist. Rather, it is to learn to love in due proportion what has been separated under conditions of Strife. With love comes recognition, identification, and the desire to help our fellows when they are in need or protect them when their bonds with us are unjustly violated. It is their belief that such an injustice had occurred that explains the moral outrage of the Roman crowd hearing the plaintive cries of elephants being put to the slaughter.

The ground of such ethical attention, considered in its broadest extent, is expressed in the governing principle we can extract from Empedocles’ fragments. I am a living being. Nothing alive is alien to me.