Xenófanes

Xenophanes (c.570–c.478 bc)

Xenophanes was a philosophically minded poet who lived in various cities of ancient Greece. He is best remembered for an early comment on the limits of knowledge, a critique of anthropomorphism in religion and an advance towards monotheism. The surviving fragments of his poems span a wide range of topics, from proper behaviour at symposia and the measures of personal excellence to the nature of the divine, the forces that rule nature and how much can be discovered by mortals concerning matters in either realm. Both Plato and Aristotle characterized him as the founder of Eleatic philosophy, a view echoed in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias, and in ancient doxographical summaries. But in many of his poems Xenophanes speaks as a civic counsellor and inquirer into nature in the tradition of the philosopher-scientists of Miletus. While his one, unmoving, whole and eternal divinity bears some resemblance to Parmenides’ ’being’, in other teachings he anticipates the views of Heraclitus and Empedocles. His comments on divine perfection, the limited utility of the victorious athlete and the need to restrict poetic expression all foreshadow views expressed by Plato in the Republic.

 

1 Life and writings

Xenophanes is reported to have been the son of Dexios (or Dexinos or Orthomenes) of Colophon. In fragment 8 he claims to have lived in Colophon for twenty-five years before leaving to spend the next sixty-seven as a travelling bard ’tossing about the Greek land’. If we tie his departure from Colophon to the conquest of Ionia by Harpagus the Mede (in 546/5 bc) and accept the report of the historian Timaeus that Xenophanes lived in the reign of Hieron of Syracuse (478–467 bc), we may date his life to the years 570–478 bc.

Ancient reports of his contacts with other philosophers are few and inconclusive, but the reference in fragment 7 to a puppy which possessed the soul of a friend shows some awareness of Pythagorean teachings (see Pythagoreanism §3) and the remarks about earth, sun, sea, waters and rainbow in fragments 27–32 display an interest in matters investigated by the Milesians. Herodotus (I 74) reports Xenophanes’ ’admiration’ or ’wonder’ (or perhaps ’amazement’) regarding Thales’ successful prediction of a solar eclipse (see Thales §1); Heraclitus’ fragment 40 disparages him as a (mere) polymath; and Empedocles’ fragment 39 challenges the view of the earth’s ‘unlimited’ depths expressed in Xenophanes’ fragment 28.

Xenophanes wrote in verse, a fact which reflects both his chosen profession and an age that drew no sharp distinction between poet, sage and teacher. Most of his poems eschew complex argument in favour of simple and emphatic dissent (the Greek words de and alla – both meaning ’but’ – appear often), but fragments 2, 15, 30, 34 and 38 employ hypothetical suppositions or ’thought experiments’ to establish unnoticed contrasts and connections, and the different aspects of his teachings can be placed within a coherent overall scheme. He is the first Greek philosopher for whom an appreciable body of work has survived, but his difficult terminology and phrasing, along with the conflicting ancient testimonia, have spawned radically different interpretations of his teachings and sharply divergent appraisals of his importance as a thinker.

 

2 Social criticism

The material contained in five fragments (1, 5, 8, 22 and 45) appears to have been composed for performance at symposia; seven others (2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 20 and 21) mention individuals or issues suitable for discussion in such a setting. Although often considered of little philosophical interest, these verses establish Xenophanes in a role subsequently assumed by Heraclitus and Socrates – the philosopher as civic gadfly.

The detailed description of a wholesome banquet scene with which fragment 1 opens prepares the way for a concluding injunction to a parallel purity in speech and conduct, particularly in the songs sung on such festive occasions. Xenophanes’ disapproval of the old stories of divine warfare and factional strife reflects the concern for the wellbeing of the city evident in his criticisms of the honours lavished on athletes (fr. 2), the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of old Colophon (fr. 3), the stories told about the gods by Homer and Hesiod (frs 11–12) and Homer’s exalted status as the educator of Greece (fr. 10). His description of himself as a travelling counsellor (frs 8 and 45), a reference to the Lydians as the inventors of coinage (fr. 4), a preferred method of wine-mixing (fr. 5) and a listing of topics suitable for discussion at symposia (fr. 22) reflect similar concerns.

Since Xenophanes lived before the time of the Sophists he had nothing to say on the many questions their sceptical and relativist views generated. Nevertheless, a number of his teachings – that the divine is incapable of immoral conduct, that wealth and luxury pose a threat to the survival of the city, that a civic good outweighs any individual good, and that the songs sung by poets must be censored for the sake of the city’s welfare – survive in the work of Plato and Aristotle.

 

3 Religious views

Since ’greatness’ for a Greek god typically meant ’greatness in power and honour’ (Homer, Iliad II 412 and Odyssey V 4), Xenophanes’ assertion that ’one god is greatest among gods and men’ (fr. 23) helps to explain a number of his remarks about god’s powers and perfections: god’s capacity to shake ’all things’ simply by thinking (fr. 25); the ’whole’ character of god’s thinking and perceiving (fr. 24); the degree of seemliness appropriate to god (fr. 26); various denials of divine births, bodies and voices (frs 14 and 23); the call to honour the gods (fr. 1); and the repudiation of the poets’ tales (frs 1, 11 and 12). While the ’one greatest god’ of Xenophanes embodies some qualities popularly ascribed to Zeus, his unchanging and isolated form of existence (according to frs 25 and 26) rules out many other popular beliefs – for example, that a god might reside in pine branches (fr. 17), that gods intimate their intentions to mortals (fr. 18, A52); and that the sun, sea, earth, moon and rainbow are themselves gods or goddesses (frs 30–32, A39, 41–6).

Xenophanes’ repeated use of the plural ’gods’ has sparked debate concerning the depth of his monotheism. Fragment 23 speaks merely of one greatest god, and it was the immoral conduct of Homer’s and Hesiod’s gods that prompted Xenophanes’ criticism, not their plurality. We may also reasonably doubt ’whether a convinced monotheist in an unreceptive polytheistic society would cloud the issue by a mention of plural gods which is at best ambiguous in the very context in which he is stating his revolutionary view’ (Stokes 1971: 76).

Fragment 16 asserts that ’Ethiopians [say that their gods are] snub-nosed and black/Thracians [that theirs are] blue-eyed and red-haired’ (similarly, fr. 15: ’… if horses or oxen or lions had hands… horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses and the oxen as similar to oxen… ’). It is not clear whether these famous remarks were meant to refute all anthropomorphic conceptions of the gods, or merely to explain how the gods came to have the qualities popularly ascribed to them (that is, rightly or wrongly, people always assume that the gods are like themselves). Fragment 34 concedes that even unintelligent opinion occasionally enshrines the truth (see §5) and, since a different bodily feature is mentioned in each case, fragment 16 does not actually point to inconsistencies in popular views of the gods.

Later doxographical summaries report that Xenophanes identified god with the entire (spherical) physical universe, but many scholars consider the doxographers’ accounts to have been inspired mainly by Plato’s and Aristotle’s loose identifications of Xenophanes as the founder of Eleatic thought, and the practice of crediting the putative founder of a school with discoveries made by his followers.

 

4 Natural science

The seriousness of Xenophanes’ interest in natural science has been generally discounted, in part as a consequence of the bizarre character of some of the views ascribed to him and also (as in the case of Aristotle) because his real interests were assumed to lie elsewhere. But neither of these lines of thinking can withstand scrutiny.

Fragment 29 gives earth and water as his dualist response to the ’basic substance’ question raised by the Milesians. Fragments 27–33 and testimonia A1, 32, 33 and 36–48 all address standard Ionian scientific topics. Fragment 18 asserts in part that ’as mortals search they discover (a) better’, and A33 (from Hippolytus) reports that Xenophanes based his theory of periodic flooding on the discovery of fossilized sea creatures at inland locations. The view of all atmospheric and celestial phenomena as essentially ’cloud’ (see A38–41 and 43–6) fits nicely with the description of ’great sea’ in fragment 30 as the source of all winds, clouds and waters, together with the view of fragment 27 that ’all things come from and return to (the) earth’. The breadth of Xenophanes’ scientific interests, his evident appreciation of the value of inquiry and observation, and the internal coherence of his explanations make it unlikely that he pursued scientific inquiry merely to acquire a weapon to wield against popular religion.

To charge Xenophanes with a belief in the earth’s ’infinite’ depth (fr. 28), ’infinite’ worlds (A1), and the sun’s ’infinite’ travels (A 41a) we would have to translate apeiron by ’infinite’ rather than the more plausible ’indefinite’. His eccentric view that the sun cannot shine without someone present to observe it (A41a) has been plausibly reinterpreted as the argument that since the sun is generated from rising moist vapours it cannot continue to exist in arid (hence unpopulated) regions. While Xenophanes’ scientific understanding was deficient in a number of respects, he remains a central figure in the Ionian scientific revolution.

 

 

5 Theory of knowledge

Xenophanes’ brief remarks about human knowledge were the subject of competing interpretations as early as the fourth century bc. Although sometimes regarded as an early statement of philosophical scepticism, they are best understood in the light of a traditional poetic contrast between the narrow scope of human experience and the synoptic view enjoyed by the gods (Homer, Iliad II 484–7; Semonides, fr. 1; Archilochus, fr. 70). Fragment 37 speaks in this vein when it links what mortals think to what they have experienced: ’If god had not made yellow honey, they would think that figs were much sweeter’. Fragment 36, ’… however many they have made evident for mortals to look upon’, suggests that what we can experience is neither unlimited nor entirely within our control. Fragment 35, ’let these be accepted, of course, as like the realities, but… ’, presents a similarly divided outlook: one should accept these (perhaps what Xenophanes presents as his account of the nature of all things) as true, but… (that is, certain knowledge exceeds our grasp).

In fragment 34 Xenophanes denies that anyone has known or ever will know ’the clear and certain truth (to saphes) about the gods and what I say about all things’, adding (in yet another ‘thought experiment’) that ’even if one were to say precisely what is brought to pass, he himself would still not know’. Since other ancient writers linked the possession of knowledge of to saphes with direct observation (Herodotus, II 44; Thucydides, I 22.4; Alcmaeon, fr. 1), Xenophanes’ argument can be analysed as a combination of a common view of the requirements for knowledge with the recognition that no account of the nature of the divine or the forces controlling the cosmos (including his own novel proposals on both topics) could possibly be confirmed on the basis of direct observation.