Peter Kingsley (scholar) - Major Themes

Major Themes

Kingsley’s work argues that the writings of the presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles, usually seen as rational or scientific enterprises, were in fact expressions of a wider Greek mystical tradition that helped give rise to western philosophy and civilization. This tradition, according to Kingsley, was a way of life leading to the direct experience of reality and the recognition of one’s divinity. Yet, as Kingsley stresses, this was no “otherworldly” mysticism: its chief figures were also lawgivers, diplomats, physicians, and even military men. The texts produced by this tradition are seamless fabrics of what later thought would distinguish as the separate areas of mysticism, science, healing, and art.

Parmenides, most famous as the “father of western logic” and traditionally viewed as a rationalist, was a priest of Apollo and iatromantis (lit. healer-prophet). Empedocles, who outlined an elaborate cosmology that introduced the enormously influential idea of the four elements into western philosophy and science, was a mystic and a magician. Kingsley reads the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles as esoteric, initiatory texts designed to lead the reader to a direct experience of the oneness of reality and the realization of his or her own divinity. A significant implication of this reading is that western logic and science originally had a deeply spiritual purpose.

Kingsley’s reading of early Greek philosophy and, in particular, of Parmenides and Empedocles, is at odds with most of the established interpretations. However, Kingsley contends that later ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, among others, misinterpreted and distorted their predecessors; hence, conventional scholarship that uncritically accepts their misrepresentations of the presocratics is necessarily flawed. Kingsley’s procedure is to read presocratic texts in historical and geographical context, giving particular attention to the Southern Italian and Sicilian backgrounds of Parmenides and Empedocles. Additionally, he reads the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles as esoteric and mystical texts, a hermeneutical perspective that, according to Kingsley, is both indicated by the textual and historical evidence and also provides the only way to solve many problems of interpretation and text criticism. In his more recent work, Kingsley argues that esoteric texts designed to record or induce mystical experiences can never be understood from an “outsider’s perspective”; understanding must come from a reader’s lived experience—or not at all.