“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]
Lord, Give
Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)
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