色诺芬尼（古希腊哲学家、诗人）

生平及学术想形成

色诺芬尼原是科洛封（Colophon）地方（属于小亚细亚西岸的伊奥尼亚）的人。他在25岁左右，因为躲避波斯的统治 而漂流各地，晚年居留在埃利亚，在那里形成他的中心思想。本地的巴门尼德就是此时期受他影响，成为他的学生，后来的芝诺也继而宣扬色诺芬尼的学说，便成了历史上的埃利亚学派。

据说他是巴门尼德的老师。他为巴门尼德哲学和埃利亚派的形成奠定了基础。嘲笑人们把神描绘成人的样子，并抨击古希腊诗人荷马和赫西俄德把人类的种种丑行和罪恶强加到神的身上。他说道，如果马和狮子也能够塑造神的话，那么它们就会造出马形和狮形的神来。我们对他的观点的了解来自其残存的诗，所有片段都是被后世的希腊作家作为引文而流传下来。他的诗批评和讽刺广泛的思想，包括对万神殿中拟人神的信仰和希腊人对运动的崇尚。

色诺芬尼拒绝相信许多标准的神像，而且不认为神的思想和外形像人一样。他一段经典的嘲笑名句，如果牛能想象神，那它们的神一定像牛。因为他对一神论观念的发展，认为它是抽象的、普遍的、不变的、固定且总是留在记忆里，色诺芬尼常被视为西方哲学的宗教信仰方面第一个一神教信徒。

色诺芬尼认为在内陆甚至高山上发现海贝壳是海陆变迁的证据。

哲学观念

（1）通过批判和反对传统观念中关于诸神起源的传说，以此揭示自己对世界本原的理解和看法。他说：“一切都从土中生，一切最后又都归于土。”“一切生成和生长的东西都是土和水。”“我们都是从土和水中生出来的。”在荷马史诗中，天上的一切都来自海洋，海神育养着天上诸神。色诺芬尼对海的理解则是：“海洋是水的源泉，风的源泉。因为如果没有大海，在云中就不会刮出来风暴，也不会有任何泛滥，也不会有天上的雨水；大海可以说是风、云和江河之父。”按照赫西俄德的说法，混沌之神生出大地女神该亚，而色诺芬尼对大地的形成则诉诸于自然的观察：“随着时间的推移，大地不断地受到冲刷，渐渐归入大海。”“大地和海正在混合，……当大地冲刷入海，变成泥潭的时候，全人类就毁灭了。然后又开始新的大地的生成，所有的世界就是这样形成的。”希腊神话中人是从土里产生出来的：腓尼基王子卡德摩斯寻找被宙斯拐走的妹妹欧罗巴，到了希腊，杀死毒龙，它的牙齿从土中长出全身披挂的武士。最后卡德摩斯遵照阿波罗的命令，同从泥土中长出来的五人一起建立底比斯城。而色诺芬尼则将泰坦诸神、百手巨人和其他传说都当作前人的虚构，提出了土是万物本原的思想。

（2）塑造出了依靠心灵和思想左右世界的“神”——一个完全没有形体的神。这是比较明显的“一神论”倾向，代表着“希腊神话不仅在宇宙起源的幻想的涵义中而且在伦理解释的涵义中所曾经经受的转变无处不趋向于一神论的顶峰。”色诺芬尼积极描述了神的特质：不生，不灭，永恒存在。“但当他进尔阐述神的积极属性时，色诺芬尼就变得较为晦涩了。一方面神既是个体又是全体（一与全），从而与宇宙合而为一了。于是米利都学派的关于‘始基’的所有属性都归于这个‘宇宙上帝’（永恒、不生、不灭）；在另一方面，赋予神性的性质中，有些是属于空间的，如球状，而另外一些又是心理上的功能。在心理功能中，明确地提出了到处都有认识活动，到处都存在对事物的理性指导。在这方面，色诺芬尼的宇宙—上帝只不过是作为其余的‘众神众人’之中的最高者出现而已。”（文德尔班《哲学史教程》第53页。）

（3）色诺芬尼对世界本原的理解虽然没有米利都诸哲深刻，但我们在他身上似乎又看到了他神学立场到宇宙论立场的对世界的解释当中。他说世界的本原是土，一切的生成都来自于土和水。这与泰勒斯等米利都诸哲的主张——通过自然的物理的世界现象的透视，通过较为理智的对世界和人生的省察和审视——从而将对世界的起源和生成纳入到一个“科学”的理解的纬度，至少表明他在通过“人”的方式在对世界进行哲学观念的思考进程当中没有后退。只不过他解释世界的方式没有伸入到或进展到：“万物的始基永远处于自发的运动当中”。他砍掉了迄今为止，人们用以解释“自然”的这一假设。所以文德尔班认为，他与米利都学派在观念上的分歧也因此表现了出来，在色诺芬尼的观念里“哲学突出的神学特色已经明显地显示了出来”，而“阿那克西曼德所采取的形而上学和自然科学的观点替代了色诺芬的宗教观点，表现在两种根本的分歧上”。

（A）“对色诺芬尼来说，宇宙—上帝的概念是宗教崇拜的对象，几乎不是理解自然的手段”。文德尔班评价说：“这个科洛封人要想认识自然的意图是很少的，他的观念有些是非常幼稚的，比起米利都学派的观念来，还是不成熟的。所以对他的观点来说，米利都科学所认为在宇宙物质中不可缺少的那种无限性，也可以不要；相反，据他看来，将宇宙物质理解为自身有限的，理解为完全封闭或完整的，最终在空间方面理解为球形的，才更符合神圣的自然界的尊严。”

（B）“米利都学派认为万物的始基永远处于自发的运动中，它的特性是本身内部结构中的生动的多样性，而色诺芬尼则砍掉了迄今为止一直用来解释自然的这种假定，并宣称宇宙—上帝是不动的，各个部分都是完美无缺、均匀和谐的。他究竟怎样将他自己认为无可置疑的个别事物的多样性与这种意见调和起来，当然始终是一个不明确的问题。”

(4)作为一个诗人，一个游吟者之所以能够作为古代思想世界格外关注的角色，除过他本人留下了世人本来就难以在古代作品的留存中获得古代思想真貌的文本，还在于他是一个时代精神的过渡，一个通过诗歌的语言谈论“真理”与“意见”的开端者。后人几乎无可非议地将他安排到了“爱利亚学派”——这个在古代西方世界里本身具有启蒙和过渡色彩的学派当中，以此触探到持守于“真理之路”而试图摒弃“意见之路”的巴门尼德哲学。

他说：

“既无人明白，也无人知道，

我所说的关于神和一切东西是什么，

因为纵使有人碰巧说出最完备的真理，

他也不会知道。

对于一切，所创造出来的只是意见。”

这几句诗语确实使我们确信到色诺芬尼身上所渗溢着的一种背叛者的气质。我们说不出“真理”，即使与“真理”相遇，我们也不知道那就是“真理”。我们之所以与“真理”相遇而无知，那是因为我们根本就不知道“真理”是什么，所以我们知道的仅仅是我们“创造出来的只是意见”。除过“真理”与“意见”在他的诗歌语言当中的明确分界，色诺芬尼传达给我们的还不仅仅是开始用理性的寒光塑造“存在”之路的巴门尼德哲学，在他的身上我们似乎过早地看到了“苏格拉底”的影子——既作为一个诵诗者对荷马式立场的反对，也作为一个爱智者，在诗性直观中承认到了人对“真理”的“无知”。而承认自己“无知”，不正是在思想史上最光彩夺目的苏格拉底吗？

色诺芬尼留给世界的遗产已够丰富了。这种丰富性，还表现在他的怀疑论倾向，而这似乎是后来的赫拉克里特哲学中透射出来的一种力量。而这种力量同样呈现在苏格拉底对哲学本身的标界当中。无论他本人与这些哲学家有无关系，但作为诗人——一个真正意义上的思者，他能够让我们回顾和展望的东西实在太多了。因为诗人的作品是诗。而诗因为具有纯粹的被言说性，它才从真正意义上呈现：所谓“思”，其实就是被“思”。

英文介绍

(570 BC-480 BC) was a Greek philosopher, poet, and social and religious critic. Our knowledge of his views comes from his surviving poetry, all of which are fragments passed down as quotations by later Greek writers. His poetry criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and the Greeks' veneration of athleticism.

Xenophanes rejected the then-standard belief in many gods, as well as the idea that the gods resembled humans in form. One famous passage ridiculed the idea by claiming that, if oxen were able to imagine gods, then those gods would be in the image of oxen. Because of his development of the concept of One God that is abstract, universal, unchanging, immobile and always present, Xenophanes is often seen as one of the first monotheists in the Western philosophy of religion.

He also wrote that poets should only tell stories about the gods which were socially uplifting, one of many views which foreshadowed the work of Plato. Xenophanes also concluded from his examination of fossils that water once must have covered all of the Earth's surface. His epistemology, which is still influential today, held that there actually exists a truth of reality, but that humans as mortals are unable to know it. Therefore, it is possible to act only on the basis of working hypotheses - we may act as if we knew the truth, as long as we know that this is extremely unlikely. This aspect of Xenophanes was brought out again by the late Sir Karl Popper and is a basis of Critical rationalism.

Until the 1950s, there was some controversy over many aspects of Xenophanes, including whether or not he could be properly characterized as a philosopher. In today's philosophical and classics discourse, Xenophanes is seen as one of the most important presocratic philosophers. It had also been common to see him as the teacher of Zeno of Elea, the colleague of Parmenides, and generally associated with the Eleatic school, but common opinion today is likewise that this is false.

Founder of the Eleatic School of Philosophy, Xenophanes was a native of Colophon, and born about 570 BCE. It is difficult to determine the dates of his life with any accuracy and the facts of his life are also obscure. Xenophanes early left his own country and took refuge in Sicily, where he supported himself by reciting, at the court of Hiero, elegiac and iambic verses, which he had written in criticism of the Theogony of Hesiod and Homer. From Sicily he passed over into Magna Graecia, where he took up the profession of philosophy, and became a celebrated teacher in the Pythagorean school. Give way to a greater freedom of thought than was usual among the disciples of Pythagoras, he introduced new opinions of his own opposing the doctrines of Epimenides, Thales, and Pythagoras. He held the Pythagorean chair of philosophy for about seventy years, and lived to the extreme age of 105.

was an elegiac and satirical poet who approached the question of science from the standpoint of the reformer rather than of the scientific investigator. If we look at the very considerable remains of his poetry that have come down to us, we see that they are all in the satirist's and social reformer's vein. There is one dealing with the management of a feast, another which denounces the exaggerated importance attached to athletic victories, and several which attack the humanized gods of Homer. The problem is, therefore, to find, if we can, a single point of view from which all these fragments can be interpreted, although it may be that no such point of view exists.

Like the religious reformers of the day, Xenophanes turned his back on the anthropomorphic polytheism of Homer and Hesiod. This revolt is based on a conviction that the tales of the poets are directly responsible for the moral corruption of the time. 'Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceiving of another. And this he held was due to the representation of the gods in human form. Men make gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair. If horses or oxen or lions had hands and could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after their own fashion (fr. 15). All that must be swept away along with the tales of Titans and Giants, those 'figments of an earlier day' (fr. 1) if social life is to be reformed.

Xenophanes found the weapons he required for his attack on polytheism in the science of the time. Here are traces of Anaximander's cosmology in the fragments, and Xenophanes may easily have been his disciple before he left Ionia. He seems to have taken the gods of mythology one by one and reduced them to meteorological phenomena, and especially to clouds. And he maintained there was only one god -- namely, the world. God is one incorporeal eternal being, and, like the universe, spherical in form; that he is of the same nature with the universe, comprehending all things within himself; is intelligent, and pervades all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind.

He taught that if there had ever been a time when nothing existed, nothing could ever have existed. Whatever is, always has been from eternity, without deriving its existence from any prior principles. Nature, he believed, is one and without limit; that what is one is similar in all its parts, else it would be many; that the one infinite, eternal, and homogeneous universe is immutable and incapable of change. His position is often classified as pantheistic, although his use of the term 'god' simply follows the use characteristic of the early cosmologists generally.

There is no evidence that Xenophanes regarded this 'god' with any religious feeling, and all we are told about him (or rather about it) is purely negative. He is quite unlike a man, and has no special organs of sense, but 'sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over'. Further, he does not go about from place to place, but does everything 'without toil. It is not safe to go beyond this; for Xenophanes himself tells us no more. It is pretty certain that if he had said anything more positive or more definitely religious in its bearing it would have been quoted by later writers.