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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Look Who’s Talking

posted by on February 14 at 11:49 AM

Xenophanes, my favorite of the Pre-Socratic philosophers (the sophist Gorgias is second on that list), is famous for mainly one thing: he attacked the anthropomorphization of Greek gods with the reasoning that “if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,/And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods/Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape.” The habit of imaging God as a human being is as common today as it was 2400 years ago, during Xenophanes’s age of the gods. We will grant that. But here is something truly strange to consider. About 400 years ago, the greatest philosopher of the 17th century, Spinoza, wrote this in a letter to a man, Hugo Boxel, who was not happy with the philosopher’s concept of an impersonal and asexual God that lived not in the sky, looking down on us with human eyes as He sat on a seat that fit his human behind, but in the world, through all of life, as the “universal individual”:

Further, when you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, wishing, &c., can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in Him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is; I suspect that you believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforesaid attributes. I am not astonished; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular.

What is strange about this letter, and tells us so much about the time in which Spinoza lived, and as a consequence the mind of Spinoza and his whole philosophical project, is that it imagines a talking triangle. This is the actual change that has occurred between his time and that of Xenophanes. Spinoza believes that a human life is nothing more than (and can be understood as) a geometric shape. And he says as much in his geometrically shaped masterpiece The Ethics. Such faith in geometry, which, admittedly, can be traced back to the Pythagoreans and also Platonic forms, defines the “age of reason,” a period of time that could dream up talking triangles.

But what of this passage from Nietzsche’s wonderful essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”:

[H]ow aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.
What’s important here is that God is gone and has been replaced by the intellect, by reason. The mosquito imagined 150 years ago doesn’t speak of a Mosquito God, as Xenophanes’s horse spoke of (or painted) a Horse God, but of itself, “the flying center of the world.” Nietzsche’s century is the one that killed God and prepared the way for “the engineers and bridge builders of the future.”


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1

Xenophanes name is singular and has an 's' on the end. To create the possessive, use Xenophanes's (or Xenophanes' is ok, too).

Posted by john | February 14, 2007 12:32 PM
2

It's six up and a half-dozen down. The rejection of the universalization of the particular is merely being spoken of in different terms. The gods of Xenophanes and the gods of Nietzsche are very different - so I would recommend against bringing Nietzsche's abjuration of god into the comparison.

Posted by Dakota | February 14, 2007 1:32 PM
3

"Xenophanes name is singular and has an 's' on the end. To create the possessive, use Xenophanes's (or Xenophanes' is ok, too)." Or just go greek - Xenaphanou.

Horses and such would still pick a human god I think. The most likely explanation for the cosmos if one buys something as improbably as a designing intellectual being, is something more like man.

I suspect that they would believe in the coming of horse messiah, with more human like attributes, who would ultimately vanquish the humans and their god.

Posted by kinaidos | February 14, 2007 1:40 PM
4

Call me when you get up to David Hume, which is when philosophy starts to get interesting.

Posted by Fnarf | February 14, 2007 1:53 PM
5

I doubt that.

Posted by Chris | February 15, 2007 12:31 AM

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