Part 1

Der Gott der Philosophen (the God of the Philosophers), was a project and year and a half long lecture series by Professor Jens Halfwassen (link is in German) of Uni. Heidelberg. This lecture series took a look at the Western tradition of philosophy using God, or an idea of an absolute, as its theme. I was able to attend the lectures for a year and listened to Prof. Halfwassen make it up to Meister Eckhart (in the last semester he ended with Kant). Prof. Halfwassen was sketching not the whole philosophy of the Western tradition but the history of metaphysics, connecting one system of metaphysic to the next.

Step 1 was to discuss polytheism, henotheism and monotheism in terms of a metamorphosis from poly- to monotheism.

  • Polytheism: gods are part of the world and include one god that is stronger, more powerful than the others.
  • Henotheism: being devoted to one god but recognizing the existence of lesser gods (a proto-Monotheism).
  • Monotheism: accepting the existence of a God that is distinct from this world.

Enter Xenophanes. Xenophanes critiqued the anthropomorphic view of the Homeric gods. If the gods of the humans look human and act like humans than the gods of the horses are horses and act like horses. As a consequence of this critique he argued that god must be distinct and beyond the world (neither human or horse) – leaving him with a view of god that was more powerful than Zeus and larger than all gods that had been thought of. The world, for Xenophanes, represented change and multiplicity and God represented the absolute and unchangeable, indivisible oneness. He also argued that the idea of an all-powerful god necessitated the existence of only one god. Prof. Halfwassen declared Xenophanes, in being the first to separate god from the world, as our first monotheist.

Enter Parmenides. Parmenides followed Xenophanes’ idea of an absolute God and followed through on what he thought were the consequences. If there is an absolute and indivisible oneness, than there can be no such thing as multiplicity. Something absolute cannot be separated from something else because it implies a negation. That which is absolute cannot be divided or separated. Everything is existence (or absolute) without the possibility of changing. Xenophanes’ God turned into Parmenides’ Being (something cannot arise out of nothing, that which exists has always existed and is one, the world as we know it is a delusion). Xenophanes took God away from the world and Parmenides took the world away, leaving God (which he called “Being”).

What happens to this absolute Being? Part two will discuss Plato and Aristotle and how they moved forward from Parmenides.