Early Greek Philosophy

5. A Systematic Xenophanes?

J. H. Lesher 5 S A Systematic Xenophanes? I. Introduction To what degree was Xenophanes of Colophon a systematic thinker? That is, to what degree were the different aspects of his philosophy interconnected ? In what follows I argue that Xenophanes achieved a unified understanding on three broad fronts—on the physical makeup of the cosmos, the nature of the divine, and the prospects for human knowledge—and that, in at least some respects, his findings in one area linked up with those in others. This seems to me a point worth making, partly because Xenophanes stands so early on in the Western philosophical tradition, barely two generations after the first philosopher-scientists of ancient Miletus ,1 and partly because he has not always been considered a significant thinker. Aristotle dismissed his views as “a little too naïve” to merit detailed discussion,2 and in our own time Harold Cherniss described Xenophanes as “a poet and rhapsode who [became] a figure in the history of philosophy by mistake.”3 In any case, a volume devoted to the study of “the nature of the rationality represented by the advent of philosophy in the West” seems an appropriate venue in which to explore such a question. 77 I am grateful for criticisms and suggestions made by Patricia Curd, Patrick Miller, Derek Smith, and many of those present during the presentation of this paper at the Catholic University of America in September 2007. 1. Accepting 585 B.C. as the date for Thales’s prediction of a solar eclipse, assigning Xenophanes ’s birth to the year 570 B.C., and assuming roughly twenty-five years per generation. 2. At Metaphysics A.5.986b27–28, Aristotle calls Xenophanes and Melissus mikron agroikoteroi—“a little naïve” or “rather naïve.” “Naïve” actually lies toward the nicer end of the spectrum of possible translations; LSJ also gives “countryman,” “rustic,” “boorish,” and “rude.” 3. Cherniss, “The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy,” 18. 78  J. H. Lesher Xenophanes was indeed “a poet and rhapsode”—a performer of Greek epic verse—who left his hometown of Colophon when the Medes invaded western Ionia (modern Turkey) in 546 B.C. By his own account, he spent most of his long life “tossing his thought around the Greek land” (see fragment B8), living for a period in Greek-speaking communities in Sicily and southern Italy, including Elea, where he may have met Parmenides.4 Thirteen of the approximately forty-five surviving fragments of Xenophanes’s poetry touch on the standard topics of Greek sympotic verse—on how to behave at a symposium (B1, B5, and B22), the true measures of personal excellence (B2 and B3), and the virtues and vices of various well-known individuals—Thales, Pythagoras, and the poet Simonides, among others (B6–8, B10, B19–21, and B45). In a group of seven fragments (B27–33), Xenophanes followed the lead of his Milesian predecessors in linking various natural phenomena with one or more basic physical substances and natural processes. In the well-known fragment B34, he appears to set limits on how much any mortal being can know, in the process drawing the fundamental distinction between knowledge and mere true opinion. In B18, however, he sounds a more optimistic note when he sets aside divine revelation in favor of a form of “seeking” that leads, in time, to the discovery of “something better.” In fragments B11 and B12, he rebukes Homer and Hesiod for their attributions of shameful conduct to the gods, and in B23–26, he sets out a contrasting account of “one greatest god not at all like mortals in either body or thought.” In two of his best-known remarks he appears to discredit all anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine: Ethiopians gods snub-nosed and black, And Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. (B16) If horses or oxen or lions had hands Or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men, Horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, And the oxen similar to the oxen, And they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had. (B15) 4. English translations of the Greek texts are my own. I regard B14 and B23 as genuine expressions of Xenophanes’s views, inasmuch as the view of the divine they express appears to have left its mark on Greek thinkers as early as Aeschylus (cf. Suppliants 86–92 and 96–103) and Euripides (cf. Heracles...