XENOPHANES THE MYSTIC SINGER

As I said in the previous entry, neither Nietzsche nor Russell attach very much importance to Xenophanes as an independent thinker, but he is surely treated by Nietzsche with considerable respect if not as a philosopher, then at least as a “rhapsodist, singer of mystic nature deification.” But having attributed philosophical value to Homer, Hesiod, and several other such “rhapsodists,” I am not going to parse words as to what Nietzsche’s determination on the philosophicality of the Colophonian precisely is.

Nietzsche seems to be of two minds about Xenophanes, which underscores his exceptional sensitivity with regard to genius, and implicitly confirms the purported change of mind about the great Greek’s importance, which may have occurred as late as in the 1950s.

On the downside, Xenophanes is not included in Nietzsche’s “idealized company of early Greek masters,” nor is he given a separate chapter, being discussed as a sideshow to Parmenides. But, on the other hand, he is showered with epithets which, as we know, have been particularly close to Nietzsche’s heart, and we can say with some assurance that in Xenophanes he has recognized a fellow mystic and a kindred spirit and has paid him tribute. The following are excerpts from the Parmenidean Chapter 10 of Nietzsche’s master work on the pre-Socratics, Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks:

There came the day when a strange insight befell Parmenides, which seemed to withdraw the value from all his old combinations. It is assumed that some external influence shared in the invention of that fateful day. This external event is thought to be Parmenides’ acquaintance with the theology of that ancient far-traveled rhapsodist, singer of mystic nature deification, the Colophonian Xenophanes…

In this assumption already hides the explanation of why both Parmenides and Xenophanes are claimed as the founders of the Eleatic school of philosophy. Having provided such a powerful stimulus to Parmenides, Xenophanes must really have some share in the historiographic spoils.

Throughout an extraordinary lifetime, Xenophanes lived as a traveling poet, and became a widely informed and widely informative person through his travels, who understood how to ask questions and to tell stories. Heraclitus counted him among the polyhistorians, and among “historical” natures in general. Whence and when he picked up the mystical tendency toward the One, and the “One forever at rest,” no one can now reconstruct. Perhaps, it was the concept of an old man finally settling down,--- one, before whose soul there appeared, after all his wanderings and after all his restless learning and looking, the highest and the greatest thing of all, a vision of divine rest, of the permanence of all things within a pantheistic archetypal peace. To me, by the way, it seems no more than accidental that in the same place-- in Elea-- two men should be living for a while, who both carried in their minds a concept of unity. They did not form a school; they had nothing in common, which one might have learned from the other and then passed along to others in turn. For the origin of their concepts of unity was a totally different one in each case, a downright opposite one, in fact. If one of them did know the doctrine of the other, he would have had to translate it into a language of his own even to understand it. But even in such translation the specific importance of each would surely have been lost. While Parmenides came to the unity of the existent purely by adherence to his supposed logic, spinning it out of the concepts of being and nonbeing, Xenophanes was a religious mystic who, with his mystic unity, belongs, very typically, to the sixth century (BC). Even though he was not as cataclysmic a personality as Pythagoras, he shared his tendency and compulsion to improve human beings, to cleanse and to heal them, as he wandered from place to place. He is a teacher of ethics still on the rhapsodic level; in later times he would have been a Sophist. In his daring disapproval of the current mores and values he has not his equal in Greece. And to disapprove, he by no means withdraws into solitude, like Heraclitus or Plato, but he stands up before that selfsame public, whose jubilant admiration of Homer, whose passionate yearning for the honors of the gymnastic festivals, whose worship of anthropomorphic stones he scourged wrathfully and scornfully, yet not in the quarrelsome fashion of a Thersites. The freedom of the individual finds its high point in Xenophanes, and it is in this almost boundless withdrawal from all conventionality that he relates more closely to Parmenides, not in that ultimate divine unity which he once saw in a vision befitting his era, and which has hardly the expression, or terminology, in common with the Parmenidean One Being, not to mention the origin.

And now, in order to understand and appreciate what Nietzsche has in mind, concerning Xenophanes, the time has come to introduce Xenophanes himself through his surviving fragments, which are not many, but are enough to reconstruct his basic ideas as expressed in his own words.