시와 철학 그리고 향연 －크세노파네스 단편 1을 중심으로

Abstract

Why did Xenophanes obstinately insist on doing philosophy with poems, turning down the prose-style mode of communication which his preceding philosophers had initiated and developed? Was theology really the alpha and omega of his philosophy? Such questions have long been beyond most Xenophanean scholars’ ken, as the scholars largely paid too much attention to the thesis about Xenophanes’ conclusive contribution to the history of philosophy being the development of new theology challenging the Homeric conception of gods to get interested in such questions. However, this understanding of Xenophanes does not do justice to some important parts of his works. His sympotic poems, in particular, do not receive as much recognition as they deserve, in spite of being both worth noting and illuminating in quantity and in content as well. Thus, this paper examines Xenophanes’ sympotic poems, especially fragment 1, the longest fragment among them, challenges the existing evaluation that depreciates the philosophical significance of such poems, searches for the reasons behind his choice of verse, and proposes an alternative to the theology-centered approach to his philosophy. In these poems, Xenophanes presides over symposium as the symposiarchos while treating symposium itself as the object of his symposium. The question of what the story presented in symposium should be like becomes the object of his story. Thus, his poem is a symposium, and, at the same time, a meta-symposium as well; it is a story and also a meta-story. While Homer’s self-awareness is focused on the external side of the poet’s own activities, Xenophanes’ is on the heart of it. His sympotic poems reveal that, based on such self-awareness, Xenophanes tried to surpass the Homeric culture of symposium and story, which in turn was instantiated in his theological and physical fragments. He on purpose makes use of multi-layered ring compositions, and deliberately applies ambiguity to his main concepts like good temper. This suggests that his choice of poem as medium was rather enterprising pace accepted scholarly opinions; he deliberately chose poem in order to surpass poem.