Xenophanes

When I think of Xenophanes I think of the good things he contributed to Greek culture, academics, and most importantly, Greek thought. He represents skepticism of his society’s ideas, the Homeric world view, and assumptions about “Gods”, yet ironically employs societal tradition in conveyance of his ideas.  His contributions to philosophy, for me, represented a good example of a sort of “meta-philosophy”, in that it was not only the inquiry and study of the fundamentals of knowledge, but also the study of the knowledge of that knowledge and our true belief in that knowledge. Whether you are in accordance with this or not there are certainly several contributions that we can attribute to Xenophanes.

We can thank Xenophanes for what could be called the first suggestion of monotheism. He was going directly against the Homeric thought with his five contentions against their view of the Gods. It was problematic though for there to be many Gods, especially with anthropomorphic qualities, because his inquiry led him to know there is “one god, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in form or thought”. I think for him the Greeks had personalized the Gods too much which was, by extension, removing them from their divinity. The true God is one and omniscient and greater than man thus unable to be conceptualized by man as a product of man.

Another important aspect that I think came from Xenophanes was the development of a premature perspectivism.  He distinguished between true belief and knowledge, which he further developed into the prospect that you can know something but not really know it. Meaning, that if all human knowledge is not true knowledge, it is at the very least true to each individual and their reality. To the extent that that’s true, I feel this was a minor concession to perspectivism since it represents a kind of epistemic humility. Whether this acknowledgement was purposeful or not one could argue both ways, but the key is that Xenophanes successfully bounced between powerful philosophic questions and Homeric answers to expose society to something deeper.