Empedocles
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Empedocles “has been regarded variously as a materialist physicist, a shamanic magician, a mystical theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a living god, and a fraud.” Evidently not a “stable genius”, then, and, very likely, someone who would utilise Twitter to his own aggrandizement, but, nevertheless, someone who is regarded as “one of the most important of the philosophers working before Socrates”, to quote, once again, the IEP.
Empedocles it was who gave us the perennially popular idea of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Out of these four elements all things stem. According to Empedocles, all that exists is some mixture of these four, with the whole being something other than its constituents, while they, in turn, retain their own individual nature.
Just think on that for a moment. Before Socrates – that is, before Athens and all that it gifted to the political, philosophical and literary world – Empedocles’ thought perfectly encapsulated, despite his weird science, the complexity of what it is to be human.
That he believed himself, or, at least, convinced others, that he was daimôn, or divine being, implies that he was maybe a sandwich or two short of a picnic, yet was he clearly some kind of genius. If you’ve ever seen the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, you should understand that stability is not a defining characteristic of genius.
Empedocles thought that there were two opposing forces in the Cosmos – Love and Strife. Existence cycles between the dominance of these two forces. The feminine, Love, draws all things together to a point where existence is impossible, while the masculine, Strife, separates all things to a point where existence is impossible. It is an incredibly powerful idea and one that should resonate in the current climate.
With ‘Empedocles’ we, once again, must ask ourselves whether there is any relation between the title and the story of the episode. Titles like ‘Oubliette’, ‘Schizogeny’, ‘Tithonus’ and ‘Sein und Zeit’ all require either a higher level of education or a little thought and Googling. One thing is clear, we are not meant to simply sit and consume the X Files; we are required to put in some effort of our own if we are to fully understand what we’re watching.
For instance, poor Jeb Dukes, does he just catch evil, like some kind of contagious disease? If he hadn’t been on that street corner at precisely that moment, would he have gone to some bar and cried into his beer, bemoaning his fate while his ex-colleagues went on with their lives?
Jeb Dukes is, as Empedocles taught, a complex mixture of whatever it is that makes us human. We can recognise many of the constituent parts of this complexity, even if we don’t fully understand how they all work together in each individual. Bandy Lee and her 27 contributing psychiatrists and mental health workers are quite proficient in recognizing the symptoms in a given person that might cause concern. Whether they should write about an individual with whom they have had no personal interaction is a question of professional ethics. But, even to my semi-trained eye, after nearly six years of teaching Personal Psychology in the hostile environment of one of Her Majesty’s Prisons, let alone the eye of an experienced psychologist or psychiatrist, there are signs and behaviours that indicate underlying issues. There are also predictable outcomes, for, despite our desire for unique individuality, there are only a limited number of avenues a human being can walk down.
I choose not to agree with them0vieblog.com when it says that “On The X-Files, episodes like Aubrey and Grotesque suggested that evil was something that could be passed from person to person.” And “[l]ooking at Ten Thirteen’s output as a whole, it seems that Carter believes wholeheartedly in the idea of evil as an external force.”
Rather, the X Files, for the sake of plot, story and entertainment, externalizes factors that each of us must deal with in the real world. Jeb Dukes did not need to be standing on that street corner or witness that car crash or be invaded by some external force of evil to make him a killer. The incidence of the sacked employee returning to his former work-place to wreak havoc is – or was - far too prevalent in the United States for there to be a necessary external factor as precipitator.
If Empedocles, a man before science and psychology, was able to grasp the complexity of what it means to be human, why are we so reluctant to do the same?
Empedocles it was who gave us the perennially popular idea of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Out of these four elements all things stem. According to Empedocles, all that exists is some mixture of these four, with the whole being something other than its constituents, while they, in turn, retain their own individual nature.
Just think on that for a moment. Before Socrates – that is, before Athens and all that it gifted to the political, philosophical and literary world – Empedocles’ thought perfectly encapsulated, despite his weird science, the complexity of what it is to be human.
That he believed himself, or, at least, convinced others, that he was daimôn, or divine being, implies that he was maybe a sandwich or two short of a picnic, yet was he clearly some kind of genius. If you’ve ever seen the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, you should understand that stability is not a defining characteristic of genius.
Empedocles thought that there were two opposing forces in the Cosmos – Love and Strife. Existence cycles between the dominance of these two forces. The feminine, Love, draws all things together to a point where existence is impossible, while the masculine, Strife, separates all things to a point where existence is impossible. It is an incredibly powerful idea and one that should resonate in the current climate.
With ‘Empedocles’ we, once again, must ask ourselves whether there is any relation between the title and the story of the episode. Titles like ‘Oubliette’, ‘Schizogeny’, ‘Tithonus’ and ‘Sein und Zeit’ all require either a higher level of education or a little thought and Googling. One thing is clear, we are not meant to simply sit and consume the X Files; we are required to put in some effort of our own if we are to fully understand what we’re watching.
For instance, poor Jeb Dukes, does he just catch evil, like some kind of contagious disease? If he hadn’t been on that street corner at precisely that moment, would he have gone to some bar and cried into his beer, bemoaning his fate while his ex-colleagues went on with their lives?
Jeb Dukes is, as Empedocles taught, a complex mixture of whatever it is that makes us human. We can recognise many of the constituent parts of this complexity, even if we don’t fully understand how they all work together in each individual. Bandy Lee and her 27 contributing psychiatrists and mental health workers are quite proficient in recognizing the symptoms in a given person that might cause concern. Whether they should write about an individual with whom they have had no personal interaction is a question of professional ethics. But, even to my semi-trained eye, after nearly six years of teaching Personal Psychology in the hostile environment of one of Her Majesty’s Prisons, let alone the eye of an experienced psychologist or psychiatrist, there are signs and behaviours that indicate underlying issues. There are also predictable outcomes, for, despite our desire for unique individuality, there are only a limited number of avenues a human being can walk down.
I choose not to agree with them0vieblog.com when it says that “On The X-Files, episodes like Aubrey and Grotesque suggested that evil was something that could be passed from person to person.” And “[l]ooking at Ten Thirteen’s output as a whole, it seems that Carter believes wholeheartedly in the idea of evil as an external force.”
Rather, the X Files, for the sake of plot, story and entertainment, externalizes factors that each of us must deal with in the real world. Jeb Dukes did not need to be standing on that street corner or witness that car crash or be invaded by some external force of evil to make him a killer. The incidence of the sacked employee returning to his former work-place to wreak havoc is – or was - far too prevalent in the United States for there to be a necessary external factor as precipitator.
If Empedocles, a man before science and psychology, was able to grasp the complexity of what it means to be human, why are we so reluctant to do the same?
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