Sunday, September 18, 2016

Essential Thinkers #3 Xenophanes of Colophon, a Poet and Freethinker


It takes a wise man to recognize wise man
Men create the gods in their own image
If horses could draw, they would draw their gods like horses

Like many of the pre-Socratic philosophers whom we know of mainly through mention by later authors, exact dates for Xenophanes are uncertain. What is known is that Heraclitus mentions him as a contemporary and critic of Pythagoras, and we can thus date him as living roughly at around the same time.

Exiled by the Persian wars in Ionia to southern Italy, Xenophanes wandered the polities of Ancient Greece as a poet and freethinker. Following Thales, he criticised the Homerian concept of anthromorphic gods. Homer’s gods, Xenophanes complained, had all the immoral and disgraceful traits of flawed human beings and should hardly be the object of veneration.

In one of the earliest known expressions of cultural relativism, Xenophanes remarked that Homer’s gods were simply a reflection of Homerian culture. As he proclaimed, “the Ethiopians make their Gods black and sub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair.” If oxen and horses had hands and could paint, Xenophanes said, oxen would no doubt paint the forms of gods like oxen and horses would paint them like horses. Likewise, he criticized Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmigration of souls, making fun on the idea that a human soul could inhabit another animal. Xenophanes held a concept of a single deity that was “in no way like men in shape or in thought” but rather “causing all things by the thought of his mind.”

Like Thales before him, Xenophanes speculated about the underlying principles of natural phenomena. Whereas Thales had conceived the first principle to be water, Xenophanes proposed the rather less glamourous possibility of mud. The speculation was not entirely unreasonable at the time, having the virtue of at least being based on observation. For Xenophanes had noticed the fossil remains of sea-creatures embedded in the earth, and guessed that perhaps the world periodically dried up, returning to its original muddy state, trapping and preserving the earth’s creatures as it did so before reversal of the process.

Xenophanes was also the first known thinker to anticipate Socrates’ caution regarding claims of certain knowledge. Philosophical certainties could not be had, according to Xenophenas, for even if we chance to hit upon the truth, there is no way of knowing for certain that things are as we think they are. Nevertheless, this does not make philosophical inquiry useless, for exposing errors in our thinking can at least tell us what is certainly not the case, even if it cannot tell us what certainly is the case. This idea has a modern counterpart in the falsificationist methodology in Karl Popper.

There is little coherent or underlying structure to Xenophanes’ thought, or at least not that we can tell from the fragments that have come down through history. This is perhaps unsurprising for someone who was essentially a refugee of the political turbulence in Asia Minor and who propagated his thoughts and speculations mostly in the form of oral poets and stories. Nonetheless, Xenophanes clearly had enough influence to be remembered and mentioned by those that followed him. Quite probably it is his criticism of the Homeric gods, still revered throughout the Hellenistic world during and long after Xenophanes’ time, that attracted a great deal of attention to him.
[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012. Read also short parts of Xenophanes in History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell page 41-42, Routledge]

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