Philosophical Works of the Late James Frederick Ferrier/Lectures on Greek Philosophy (1888)/Xerophanes
ELEATICS.
XENOPHANES.
1. This sect derived its name from the town where its principal philosophers resided, Elea or Velia, a Greek settlement in southern Italy. The leaders of the Eleatic sect were Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, to whom may be added Melissus. The general character of this school is, that its speculations rose into a higher region of abstraction or pure thought than those either of the Ionic or of the Pythagorean philosophers. While the tendency of the Ionic inquirers was physical, and while that of the Pythagoreans was mathematical or arithmetical, the Eleatic sect may be characterised as dialectical in their procedure. We shall see by-and-by what the movement in thought was which procured for this school the title of dialectical.
2. Xenophanes, a native of Colophon, one of the principal Ionic cities in Asia Minor, was the founder of this philosophy. A contemporary of Pythagoras, he lived during the sixth century B.C., and as his life was protracted to an extreme old age, we may regard it as extending almost from 600 B.C. to 500 B.C.
3. At this time the art of prose writing had not begun to be cultivated. The opinions and sentiments of Xenophanes were accordingly delivered in verse. He seems to have been a composer and reciter of various kinds of poetry, some fragments of which have been preserved in the writings of Athenæus, Sextus Empiricus, and some other ancient authors. These relics have been collected, along with those of Parmenides, by Karsten, a Dutch scholar, and were published by him in 1830.
4. The doctrines of Xenophanes were rather theological than speculative. One of his principal aims was to disabuse the minds of his countrymen of the ideas about the gods which had been instilled into them by the poems of Homer and Hesiod. In his opening fragment he proclaims a doctrine of monotheism, and condemns anthropomorphism, or that creed which fashions God after the likeness of men.
Εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος,
Οὔτε δέμας θνητοῖσιν ὁμοίιος οὔτε νόημα.
"There is one mightiest God among gods and men, like to mortals neither in body nor in mind." Of this being he says: "Without labour he governs all things with the power of reason,`" ἀλλ᾽ ἀπάνευθε πόνοιο νόου φρενὶ πάντα κραδαίνει. "Men, however," he adds, "imagine that the gods are born, are clothed in our garments, and endowed with our form and figure. But if oxen or lions had hands, and could paint and fashion things as men do, they too would form the gods after their own similitude, horses making them like horses, and oxen like oxen." He then finds severe fault with Homer and Hesiod on account of the disgraceful actions which they attribute to the gods, and strongly reprehends the prevalent superstition in regard to the generation or genealogy of the gods. Aristotle refers to this (Rhet. ii. 23), where he remarks, "It is a saying of Xenophanes that those who assert that the gods are born are equally impious with those who maintain that they die. For both equally affirm that there is a time when the gods are not." But opposed as Xenophanes was to the popular superstitions, and anxious as he was to correct them, he professes himself unwilling to dogmatise about the gods or about anything else. "For," says he, "naught is with certainty known; mere opinion cleaveth to all things—δόκος δ᾽ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τέτυκται.”
5. Nevertheless, in his philosophy, of which I now proceed to speak, he aims, to some extent at least, at certainty and truth. The great distinction or antithesis around which the whole Eleatic philosophy revolves and gravitates is the antithesis of the one and the many, the permanent and the changeable, the universal and the particular, in Greek, the ἓν and the πολλά. This antithesis is merely a variety of expression for the antithesis between reason and sense. Or, if we may distinguish between the two forms of the opposition, we may say that the one expression, the permanent and the changeable, or the ἓν and the πολλά, denotes the antithesis in its objective form; the other expression, reason and sense, denotes the antithesis in its subjective form.
6. To adjust rightly the terms of this fundamental antithesis, to determine the nature of the relation which subsists between its two extremes, is the main problem of the Eleatic philosophy. We have to consider, then, how Xenophanes its founder went to work. Xenophanes seems to have dwelt more steadily than any other philosopher, whether Ionic or Pythagorean, on the conception of the one or of unity as the essence of all things. His conception of unity as the principle of the universe and as a primary necessity of thought seems to have been more determinate than that of any of his predecessors or contemporaries. He held that the one was everywhere; and Aristotle adds, that Xenophanes, looking forth over the whole heavens, that is, the universe, declared that the one was God. The first position of Xenophanes, accordingly, is that there is a unity in all things, and that this unity is God. It is in and through God that the universe is a universe, that is, has unity.7. Another predicate of unity is permanence. The unity which is God is also the permanent and unchangeable, that is to say, it is exempt from generation and corruption. It cannot be born or produced, for that which is produced proceeds either from that which is the same as itself, or from that which is not the same as itself. But the permanent cannot proceed out of what is the same as itself; because this being already the permanent, cannot produce or give rise to the permanent. Neither can the permanent proceed out of what is not the same as itself; for this would be the production of the positive out of the negative—the generation of Being out of not-Being, and a violation of the Eleatic axiom, Ex nihilo nihil fit. Or, more shortly stated, the reasoning of Xenophanes is this: What is, or the permanent, cannot arise out of what is, or the permanent, because the two are identical. Again, what is, or the permanent, cannot arise out of what is not, or the non-permanent, because what is cannot spring from what is not Nonentity has no power of generation. The one permanent and unchangeable, the unity in all things, or, according to Xenophanes, God, this principle is from everlasting to everlasting. This is the ground of all, the ultimately and absolutely real. This alone is the certain and the true.
8. Such being the primary position of Xenophanes and the Eleatics, a question arises in regard to the other member of the fundamental antithesis of which I spoke, namely, the changeable. What does this school of philosophy say about that? Change or "motion" (which was the generic word usually employed by the older systems to denote every species of change), this was too obtrusive and prominent a feature in the constitution of things to be overlooked. It is in dealing with this question that the dialectical, i.e., the logical and metaphysical, character of the Eleatic school reveals itself. It is here for the first time that the dialectical movement of human thought comes distinctly into play. In the Ionic school the adjustment of the relation between the unchangeable and the changeable was not attempted at all, or attempted after the crudest fashion. In the Pythagorean school the conciliation of the one and the many was rather taken for granted than discussed and explained. They either ignored or touched but lightly on the problem and the difficulties which it involved. The Eleatics, I say, were the first who seriously addressed themselves to its consideration. And it is on this account, in part at least, that their school has been characterised as dialectical or logical and metaphysical, while the Ionics were characterised as physical, and the Pythagoreans as arithmetical and mathematical.
9. When we take up this question—the question in regard to the relation between the unchangeable and the changeable, the one and the many—what first strikes us is the repugnancy of the two terms of the antithesis. The antithesis is ultimate or fundamental, that is to say, there is nothing higher than it in the region of thought, no higher category under which these two extremes may be conciliated or reduced to unity. It denotes a radical and thoroughgoing opposition. This, at any rate, is the point of view from which at first we are compelled to regard it, and this is the point of view from which Xenophanes and the other Eleatic philosophers regarded the antithesis. The necessities of thinking seemed to them to declare that the distinction was absolute and irreconcilable. A strict logic seemed to necessitate this conclusion
10. But now observe what follows from this conclusion. This follows from it, that whatever epithet or predicate is applied to one of the terms of the antithesis, the counter-predicate must be applied to the other term. Unless this were so, the opposition would not be absolute and complete. It follows, then, that if we call the unchangeable, or the one, true, we must call the changeable, or the many, untrue; that if we call the unchangeable, or the one, real, we must call the changeable, or the many, unreal. In short, if we say that the one, the permanent, or the unchangeable, is, we must say that the many, the fluctuating, the unchangeable, are not. Such was the logic by which the Eleatic school found themselves compelled to maintain the nonentity (the comparative nonentity at least) of all sensible existence. For it was the data of sense, the universe as apprehended by the sense, it was this which constituted the changeable element in the fundamental antithesis with which they had to deal.
11. This dialectical movement—a movement not urged against them by their adversaries, but one forced upon them by the logical necessities of their position, and one to which they readily yielded—this movement comes more to the surface in Parmenides and Zeno than it does in Xenophanes. But it showed itself to some extent in Xenophanes, and in him we first find an implied though not explicit severance made between the intelligible world and the sensible world, between the world of reason and the world of sense, and the former represented as the sphere of reality, the latter as that of unreality.
12. Xenophanes did not hold that there was no sensible world; no idealist ever maintained that, although we shall see by-and-by that under the stricter interpretation of his system Parmenides is forced to such a conclusion. But I say Xenophanes did not hold that there was no sensible world. He held, however, that it had no reality, no reality in itself, but only a reality in and for the mind of man, which reality was, in fact, no reality at all. It was a mere subjective phenomenon, and possessed no such truth as that which reason compelled us to attribute to the permanent one, which, according to Xenophanes, was God. His tenets on this point may be illustrated as follows: Suppose that the sun is shining on the sea, and that his light is broken by the waves into a multitude of lesser lights, of all colours and of all forms; and suppose that the sea is conscious, conscious of this multitude of lights, this diversity of shifting colours, this plurality of dancing forms; would this consciousness contain or represent the truth, the real? Certainly it would not. The objectively true, the real in itself, is in this case the sun in the heavens, the one permanent, the persistent in colour and in form. Its diversified appearance in the sea, the dispersion of its light in a myriad colours, and in a myriad forms, is nothing, and represents nothing which substantially exists, but is only something which exists phenomenally, that is, unsubstantially and unreally, in the sea. Take away the sea, and these various reflections no longer are. This dancing play of lights is a truth only for the sea, not a truth for the land; there the light falls differently; therefore it is not a universal truth, and nothing in strict philosophy being admitted as true which is not universally true, it is not, strictly speaking, a truth at all. Such is the way in which we may suppose Xenophanes to illustrate his position in regard to sensible existence. This form of existence has no existence in and for itself, no existence irrespective of the mind and the senses of man, no existence at all resembling that which must be conceded to the one, the permanent and the real; but an existence in all respects the opposite of this, and therefore an existence in all respects unreal and untrue.
13. Finally, we may say of Xenophanes that he seems to have approximated more nearly than had yet been done to the realisation of what may be called a double consciousness; a rational consciousness, on the one hand, cognisant of the permanent One, as positive existence, as the real and true in itself; and a sensible consciousness, on the other hand, cognisant of the changeable many, as negative existence, as unreal and untrue in itself, and as possessing, in comparison with the genuine and absolute reality of the unchangeable one, only a spurious and relative reality. Keep well in mind the thoroughgoing repugnancy between the one and the many, the intelligible and the sensible, inculcated in this school; remember that whatever predicate is applied to one member of the antithesis, the opposite predicate must be applied to the other member of it, and you will obtain a clue to the doctrines of these philosophers, and will understand, however hard you may find it to agree with, their dogmas in regard to sensible existence, and the phenomena of the material universe.