Xenophanes of Colophon

Xenophanes of Colophon and the Eleatic School

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«But if oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw figures of gods similar to horses and oxen similar to oxen, and they would fashion bodies just as each of them is fashioned».

This is the most famous fragment of Xenophanes of Colophon, the Pre-Socratic philosopher whom some have considered the champion of radical skepticism, or even a pioneer of monotheism. The figure of Xenophanes is, in reality, far more complex; anyone wishing to deepen their knowledge of his thought must take into account the book by Prof. Renzo Vitali, which is the most substantial monograph written in Italian on the subject: Senofane di Colofone e la scuola eleatica (Xenophanes of Colophon and the Eleatic School).

Vitali’s book takes its cue from K. Reinhardt's study Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn, 1916). In that publication, which exerted great influence throughout the 20th century, Reinhardt argued that Xenophanes was not part of the Eleatic school and therefore had no direct relationship with Parmenides. Furthermore, many scholars have viewed Xenophanes as a kind of religious reformer, whereas an assessment more attentive to the historical context shows how Xenophanes' presumed theology is nothing more than an expressive mask. Despite the lucubrations of modern scholars, the doxography of ancient authors is unanimous in taking Xenophanes' belonging to the Eleatic school for granted, with Aristotle maintaining that Parmenides had been a pupil of Xenophanes.

Only about thirty fragments of Xenophanes' works have survived. He wrote poetic works as well as a monumental historical poem on the foundation of Colophon. Xenophanes was likely convinced that this poem was his most important work; instead, the Greek thinker has gone down in history for the philosophical fragments born in an era when Hellenic literature began to abandon the ancient values of warrior heroism to outline a model of man who acts in accordance with justice (dike) and the utility of the city (polis).

Into this cultural climate bursts the thought of Xenophanes, who contests the archaic religiosity of Homer and Hesiod and opens a cultural path more suited to new anthropological models. Human science is not absolute knowledge, but rather an effort of inquiry aware of its own limits. Truth—the absolute certainty—is the exclusive domain of the gods and cannot be bestowed all at once upon men. Instead, by searching over time—which is the phenomenal veil of Being—men move toward the reconstruction of the original unity. Vitali believes that by virtue of this path of inquiry (zetesis), Xenophanes is far from a skeptical attitude; rather, the philosopher wishes to emphasize the relativity of judgment, the difference between opinion and reality. As for the alleged Xenophanean "monotheism," it must be noted that while Xenophanes often speaks of a god in the singular (in opposition to the anthropomorphic gods of the older Greek tradition), he believed that the god was identified with the world considered in its unity. It is clear, therefore, how this conception was entirely distant from the idea of the personal God of the Bible.

Vitali then draws attention to the terms dokos and doxa used by Xenophanes and other Pre-Socratics. The term dokos anciently indicated the beam of a roof in a building; the semantic indication remains the same even in the different meaning acquired, as the acceptance of an opinion is the very "covering" through which one sees and regards the new spatial reality of the constructed house. Doxa is the covering put together by the aesthetic frameworks through which man arrives at the construction of the entity (ens) seen and known in such a scientific manner. What gives sense to human perceptions is the noos common to gods and men: the connecting point that allows the divine to be linked to the human, as can also be seen in the ancient Orphic conceptions, according to which gods and men breathe from the same mother.

Vitali devotes a chapter of the book to a comparison between the terminology of Xenophanes and that of Parmenides, contrasting lexical modules, stylistic features, and the conceptions of the two philosophers. The extraordinary consonance of words and concepts makes it highly probable that Xenophanes was Parmenides' teacher, or at least that Xenophanes' influence on Parmenides was decisive. In particular, there is no difference between Xenophanes' god and Parmenides' Being: both represent the Absolute.

The final part of the book is dedicated to Xenophanes' conceptions of physics, which, as is well known, was the privileged field of research for these early thinkers. The theme is particularly interesting for its philological implications. Indeed, it is first necessary to establish what meaning certain terms had in such ancient times and within the context of a scientific language. Exemplary, for instance, is the case of apeiron, generally translated as "infinite," but which requires specific in-depth study (recall, in this regard, the imaginative hypotheses of Giovanni Semerano). Furthermore, Xenophanes' use of the word psyche is the first evidence of this term being used in a sense different from the Homeric one.

The cultural experience of Xenophanes represents a significant moment in the history of philosophy: with him, thought failed the requirement to grasp the unity of the whole of reality; the results of its efforts were always lacking and distorted. Since then, the recurring doubt that man, instead of discovering the laws of the universe, creates them himself, has run through all of Western thought up to the contemporary outcomes of existentialism and "weak thought" (pensiero debole). As we can see, the cultural space separating modern man from the first Greek thinkers is indeed narrow, and the philosophical themes of the Pre-Socratics—which we know only in fragmentary form—contain in potential all the themes that would be developed in over two thousand years of philosophical speculation.

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Renzo Vitali, Senofane di Colofone e la scuola eleatica, Società Editrice «Il Ponte Vecchio», Cesena 2000, pp.160

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