[In the following essay, originally written in 1975, McLuhan explores Empedocles's influence on poets T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, particularly in the preference for auditory imagery and “double truths.”]

The vision of Empedocles may have made its entrée into English literature via Lewis Carroll rather than Matthew Arnold, in the image of Humpty Dumpty (the Sphairos) rather than the haggard suicide of Mount Aetna (Empedocles on Aetna). Lewis Carroll, the non-Euclidean geometer, was a more suitable person than Her Majesty's Superintendant of Schools to bring Empedocles and the Sphairos to the British public. The playful mathematician was better qualified than the Victorian moralist to bring the space-time vision of Empedocles to English literature and to the rocking-horse world of the nursery. The nursery world of myth and mutations was where Empedocles first established a major beach-head in the Victorian age.

It is when Alice has gone through the Looking-Glass that she encounters Humpty Dumpty “with his legs crossed like a Turk, on the top of a high wall—such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance.” At once they plunge into the world of words and names and the magical transformations inseparable from language. Carroll, whose own name, Dodgson, is full of puns, took the pen name of Lewis Carroll, which involved him immortally in the acoustic world of song and resonance. He is able to speak from both sides in the Looking-Glass at once, even as Empedocles does in the words of Dr. Lambridis: His phrase “I shall speak a double truth,” repeated again and again … means that Love, which unites the elements in due proportion and produces such varied forms of life, also destroys them; and Strife, which creates monsters and havoc, also makes a beginning in the formation of live creatures, but again destroys them before the Sphairos returns to wipe out all differences. Hence: “Double is the birth of mortal things and double their demise.”

“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: my name means the shape I am. … With a name like yours, you might be any shape almost.”

Carroll is having some rather profound fun, for Alice is the Greek sound for alas, which is salt. And salt as sign of life and preservation is put on the tongue of the infant in Catholic baptism when the name is given. So, Humpty Dumpty rightly says: “With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”

There is another aspect to the doubleness of the traditional Humpty Dumpty verses which emerges when they are given a phonetic translation into French:

Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés fallent.
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Q'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Requennes.

Mots D'Heures Gousses Rames, Luis d'Antin Van Rooten

Read aloud, these verses are transformed into English, as in the whole of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, who said of it: “What the reader sees will not be what he hears.” It is quite fitting therefore, that Alice and Humpty Dumpty should discuss words, since, as the very informing principle of cosmic action, it is language itself that embodies and performs the dance of being. Humpty Dumpty, the cosmic egg, says: “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.”

This remark by Humpty Dumpty invites a look at the work of T. S. Eliot, whose essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” explains that a traditional writer will have the historical sense … “and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own Country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” Dr. Lambridis brings out this quality of the nourishment of the individual talent by traditional or corporate awareness, in Empedocles (page 85):

But if thou adherest to these things steadfastly in thy strong mind, considering them with good intent and selfless pure study, they'll all be with thee throughout thy life in high degree, and thou wilt have acquired much else from them; for they by themselves increased in stature, in the direction of each one's nature.”

Having studied Eliot for decades, but having only recently been introduced to Empedocles by Dr. Lambridis, I can say that my sense of the bearings and significance not only of Homer but of the work of Eliot and his contemporaries has been changed and deepened.

T. S. Eliot spent his life in philosophical as well as poetic endeavors, having had long training at Harvard, and in France and Germany, in the thought of East and West. His devotion to the pre-Socratic philosophers is evident in his citation from them, but it is Empedocles whose vision pervades The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Eliot was not alone in his recourse to Empedocles. It would be quite easy to show how deeply W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound and James Joyce had also studied Empedocles. Many of their most memorable figures and images are central to the work of Empedocles, and perhaps the reason is to be found in a single phrase of T. S. Eliot, “the auditory imagination.” The process to which this phrase refers is central to all the great poets of the West from Poe to Valéry.

The visual imagination had insulated the poets from many of their traditional resources for several ages. The acoustic space created by the simultaneous information environment, from the telegraph on, related men and societies in a new world of resonant interface. The visual separations and definitions, of words and peoples alike, could no longer hold. Freud's breakthrough into the “unconscious” was a recognition that private consciousness was created by the suppression of corporate awareness. Eliot transferred this awareness to language:

What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word: sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and the surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

The “auditory imagination” is a norm in Empedocles and is the reason why the merely visual imagination of Aristotle, the classifier, could not apprehend Empedocles. It is only now in the electric age, when both Greek and Newtonian “Nature” can be seen as merely visual systems of classification, that the “Nature” of Empedocles resumes its relevance.

W. B. Yeats concludes his poem “Among School Children” with a meditation that is not only typical of Yeats but Empedocles:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Even more congenial to Empedocles is the Yeats idea of “The Emotion of Multitude” or universality:

The Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond shadow, till it has pictured the world.

A sense of universality is magically evoked by this parallel without connections:

In Hamlet, one hardly notices, so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling up before us the image of multitude.

The reader of The Waste Land encounters a musical structure of Love and Strife celebrating life-in-death and death-in-life:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire

Dr. Lambridis cites the biological theory of Empedocles as “a primitive forestalling of Darwin's theory of evolution,” but the reader of Four Quartets will find a fulfilment of Empedocles' cosmology ever more satisfying. Each of the four parts of this poem is assigned to celebrate one of the four elements:

Burnt Norton (air)
East Coker (earth)
Dry Salvages (water)
Little Gidding (fire)

Each poem also celebrates a specific place, for,

If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

It is the space-time of the particularized intersection of a space and a time that transforms and purifies:

To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden …
Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Re-membering, re-structuring, the re-cognition, the re-tracing of the labyrinth of perception is central to the mode of Empedocles:

I shall now retrace my step and come back to my song's beginning.

This is the opening of the second Quartet, East Coker:

In my beginning is my end.

This motto of Mary Queen of Scots proclaims Love as the final cause or pattern. But the process itself manifests more of Strife than love, as in the first Quartet Burnt Norton:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.

History is made by time as time is made by meaning, and the meaning is revealed by the replay or the retracing of an experience. Thus, Four Quartets is “a series of images of migration” by which the circulating life of man is enclosed and held in place.

And so we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the empty pool.

“The box circle” is a witty arrest of the Sphairos between the complementary modes of vegetation and wooden artifact, between the outer garden and the inner theatre. The arrested music of the Sphairos is caught again at the end of Burnt Norton:

Only by the form, the pattern
can words or music reach
the stillness, as a Chinese jar still
moves perpetually in its stillness

Eliot has placed the sayings of Heraclitus at the beginning of Burnt Norton: Although the Law of Reason (logos) is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding (wisdom) of their own. The ways upward and downward are the same. Both of these are spoken from the world of acoustic space in which there is no private identity, nor any upside-down. Yet they sound paradoxical to a literate or visually oriented person. Nobody could have been more literate than Eliot, and yet nobody could have had more empathy for the non-visual world of the preliterate. Probably, by comparison with the intense literacy of the print-accustomed man, Empedocles and his contemporaries would have seemed to us to be men of oral rather than literate culture, able to move easily across cultural boundaries by resonant sympathy, recognizing that opposites are complementary aspects of the same thing. The sayings of Heraclitus provide Four Quartets with themes relevant to both Christian and Hindu thought, and the verses of Empedocles which Dr. Lambridis presents on page 68 seem almost to have been embodied in Four Quartets:

I shall speak a double truth; at times
one alone comes into being;
at other times out of one several things grow.
Double is the birth of mortal things and double their demise.
For the coming together of all both causes their birth
and destroys them; and separation nurtured in their
being makes them fly apart. These things never stop
changing throughout, at times coming together through
Amity in one whole, at other times being violently
separated by Strife. Thus, on one side, one whole
is formed out of many, and then again, wrenched from
each other, they make up many out of one. This is
the way they become, and their life is not long their
own, but in as far as they never stop changing throughout
in so far they are always immobile in a circle.
But come, listen to my words; for knowledge makes
the mind grow.
As I said once before, revealing the outer limits of my
thought, I shall tell a double truth: At times one alone
grows out of many, at other times they grow apart, the
many out of the one. Fire and water and earth and the
immeasurable height of air, and, away from them all, the
awful Strife all over. Amity among them, equal on all
sides in length and breadth. Look thou at her, don't
sit there astounded by sight. Amity is believed by
men to be innate in their bones. …

Each of the Empedocles passages stresses “a double truth.” This is a matter central to Eliot, but it is also closely involved in the work of Yeats, who, as I have suggested, has elucidated the procedure in his brief essay on “The Emotion of Multitude.” This emotion, or sense of the universal in the particular, is born of “a double truth,” somewhat in the mode of Quantum Mechanics where the chemical bond is the result not of a connection but of a “resonant interval” such as must obtain between the wheel and the axle. The means indicated by Yeats for achieving the emotion of multitude are familiar to modern students of Shakespeare under the head of “double plots,” and these means were taught in antiquity as essential to the aitiological epic or the Epyllion. (See Marjorie Crump's The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.)

Paradoxically the sudden intrusion of Empedocles in the midst of his account of the cosmic process has exactly the effect that Yeats describes in “The Emotion of Multitude.” The sudden encounter between the author and his readers, or between the author and his medium (language), creates an unexpected involvement in the very making process itself. As Dr. Lambridis says on page 86:

Empedocles feels keenly that what he has to say about the higher level is inconceivable and almost impossible to express by the available linguistic means. … As far as I know, he is the only philosopher (pre- or post-Socratic) to have acknowledged himself baffled by the gap between what he has conceived and what it is possible to express adequately.”

The gap was never more strikingly indicated than by Baudelaire in his envoi: hypocrite lecteur mon semblable, mon frère; or by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground:

I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write only in that form. It is a form, an empty form—I shall never have readers.

It is precisely this gap that has, paradoxically, afforded Eliot some of his most effective expression in Four Quartets. Where Empedocles says self-deprecatingly: “I too talk like that by force of usage,” Eliot says in East Coker:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion. …

But the big moment comes in Little Gidding, the last quartet when Eliot confronts il miglior fabbro as in another world:

So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Knowing myself yet being someone other.

Not only is there the dramatic play between Eliot and Pound but between themselves and their medium:

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight. …

Here, as everywhere in Empedocles, there is concern with the need and means for purification. It is the common measure, speech itself, the agent of perception that is the prime responsibility of the poets; for, as Dr. Lambridis explains (p. 87), in Empedocles there is no direct way to the higher levels:

The wise man must try to join the peaks of thought by many different ways. He must experiment in his mind … and mould the pieces together with ‘pure intent’.

Immediately after the words quoted above from Eliot, he gives an eloquent inventory of “the gifts reserved for age” in a way that recalls his earlier Gerontion. In Gerontion too there is a dramatic dissolution and retrieval of the four elements, he is a kind of Sphairos or Humpty Dumpty “driven by the Trades.” Everywhere, Eliot is concerned with what Dr. Lambridis calls the spiritualization of the Sphairos:

With great diffidence I venture to suggest that the conception of the spiritualisation of the Sphairos … may be due to a more remote influence: that of Buddhism.

(p. 120)

Eliot is deeply aware of this great current, but also urges attention to the perversity of Adam, the “ruined millionaire.” Adam, too, is a Sphairos in Four Quartets and “the ultimate cure of rebirth depends upon the wounded surgeon, Christ, who plies the steel and the dying nurse, the Church, that reminds us that the agony of dying is necessary to rebirth.” (See Geo. Williamson A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot, N. Y. Noonday Press, 1953, p. 221)