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A Fragment from Xenophanes

xenophanes

Xenophanes, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, observed,

"Ethiopians say that their gods are snub nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.

"But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own -- horses like horses, cattle like cattle."

What was he trying to do via these assertions? We don't know much about the context. But they are intriguing.

Was he trying to suggest that the truth about the gods is unknowable? This could be akin to Kant's antinomies. Kant told us that it is possible to prove, for example, both that the universe must have had a beginning and that the universe could not have a beginning. Thus, we can only conclude that the ultimate reality is unknown to us.

Perhaps Xenophanes was saying likewise, and we should simply read "the gods" as "noumena."


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  1. HenryJune 12, 2018 at 8:20 PM

    Based solely on the quotation, it seems obvious to me that Xenophanes was saying that people create their gods in their own image. I agree, but, even if I believed that a god or gods created us rather than vice versa, I do not see how Xenophanes' statement says anything about whether gods are knowable. I suppose that, by your final comment, you mean that, even if we don't create our gods, we see them in our own image and not as they really are. But even one who believes in a god or gods must acknowledge that we don't see them at all. If gods really exist and we don't create them in our own image, we at least create their images in our own image.

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  2. ChristopherJune 15, 2018 at 7:42 AM

    There was probably a time when humans speculating about the mind imagined an abacus inside our heads. There was certainly a time when humans speculating about the mind imagined a telephone exchange inside our head, with incoming signals from sense organs more-or-less quickly transferred into outgoing signals to the muscles (you and I are old enough to remember such analogies). Then computers became the analog of choice for what was going on inside our head. Even more recently, the dominant metaphor seems to be a culinary one, where the brain is a "soup" of chemicals, and the task of neurological pharmacology is to get the balance just right. "Yum, brain balance." In this case, as in Xenophanes', the quick resort to and the range of metaphors is an acknowledgement of ignorance.

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