[B] Not only Aristotle but most philosophers aim at being hard to understand; why? – if not to emphasize the vanity of their subject-matter and to give our minds something to do! Philosophy is a hollow bone with no flesh on it: are they providing us with a place to feed in, where we can chew on it?176
[C] Clitomachus maintained that he could not tell from Carneades’ books what his opinions were.177 [B] That is why Epicurus avoided perspicuity in his writings and why Heraclitus was surnamed ‘Dark’. Difficulty is a coin [C] which the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and [B] which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.
Clarus, ob obscuram linguam, magis inter inanes,
Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque
Inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernunt.
[Clear was his fame, especially among the empty-headed, simply because his language lacked clarity: for stupid people are filled with awe and wonder when they find ideas wrapped up in words turned inside out.]178
[C] Cicero reproached some of his friends with being accustomed to give more time than they were worth to such subjects as astrology, law, dialectic and geometry: it kept them away from the more useful and honourable of life’s duties. The Cyrenaic philosophers held physics and dialectic in equal contempt. At the very beginning of his books on the Republic Zeno pronounced all liberal disciplines to be useless. [A] Chrysippus said that what Plato and Aristotle wrote about logic must have been written for sport or as an exercise; he could not believe that they had anything serious to say on so empty a subject. [C] Plutarch makes a similar remark about metaphysics.179 [A] Epicurus would have spoken similarly about rhetoric, grammar, [C] poetry, mathematics and all subjects of study other than physics – [A] and Socrates, about every one of them, with the sole exception of the study of how we should behave in this life. [C] Whatever question Socrates was asked, he first made the speaker give a detailed account of his way of life, both present and past; he made that the basis of his inquiries and judgements, believing as he did that any other approach was secondary to that and superfluous.
‘Parum mihi placeant eae literae quae ad virtutem doctoribus nihil profuerunt’ [I take no pleasure in the kind of writings which do not increase the virtue of those who teach them].180
[A] Learning181 itself has despised most disciplines, but men have thought it not inappropriate to train and entertain their minds even by studying subjects where nothing solid is to be gained. Moreover, some have classified Plato as. Dogmatist; some, as a Doubter; others as both, depending on the subject.
[C] Socrates, who takes the lead in the Dialogues, always asks questions designed to provoke discussion: he is never satisfied and never reaches any conclusion. He says that the only thing he knew how to do was to make objections.
All schools of philosophy derive their foundations from Homer, but it was a matter of indifference to him what direction we then took; to show that, he gave equally good foundations to all of them. They say that ten distinct schools sprang from Plato. And indeed, as I see it, if his teachings are not faltering and unaffirmative, then I do not know whose are!182
Socrates said that midwives were Sage-women who stop producing children of their own once they help others to do so; when, therefore, the gods conferred the title Sage on him, he too gave up his capacity for producing brain-children of his own by acts of manly love, in order to encourage and help other men to deliver theirs: he opened the genitals of their minds, lubricated the passages and made it easier for their child to issue forth; he then made an appreciation of that child, washed it, nursed it, strengthened it, swaddled it up and circumcised it. He used and exercised his own ingenuity: the others faced the perils and the risks.183
[A] What I said just now is true of most other philosophers in the third category, [B] as the Ancients already noted in the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Zenophanes and others: [A] their substance induces doubt; their purpose is inquiry rather than instruction, even though, in their works, they do at times interlard184 [C] their style with Dogmatic cadences. Is that not equally true of both Seneca and Plutarch? Go into it closely and you see they are constantly talking from different points of view. As for those jurisconsults whose task it is to harmonize the various legal authorities, they first ought to harmonize each authority with himself.
Plato seems to me to have quite knowingly chosen to treat philosophy in the form of dialogues: he was better able to expound the diversity and variety of his concepts by putting them appropriately into the mouths of divers speakers. Variety of treatment is as good as consistency. Better in fact: it means being more copious and more useful.
Let us take one example from our own society. The highest degree of dogmatic and conclusive speaking is reached in parliamentary rescripts. Of the judicial decrees which French Parliaments hand down to the people, the ones which are most exemplary (and the most proper to encourage the respect which is rightly due to such high office, mainly on account of the ability of those who exercise it) do not draw their beauty from their decisions as such. Decisions are everyday affairs, common to all judges. Their beauty lies in the disquisitions and that pursuit of varied and opposing arguments which legal matters can so well accommodate.
When philosophers find fault with each other, their widest field of action lies in the internal contradictions and inconsistencies which entangle them all – either deliberately (so as to show the vacillations of the human mind over any subject whatever) or else quite unintentionally, because all matters are shifting and elusive.
[A] What else can that refrain mean: ‘In slippery, shifting places, let us suspend our judgement’? For, as Euripides said, ‘The works of God, in divers ways, perplex us,’185 [B] which is similar to the words which Empedocles strewed throughout his books when he was shaken as by divine mania and compelling truth: ‘No, no! We feel nothing: we know nothing! All things are hidden from us: we can determine the nature of nothing whatsoever,’ [C] words which conform to that holy saying: ‘Cogitationes mortalium timidae et incertae adinventiones nostrae et providentiae’ [For the thoughts of mortal men are timorous, and our devices and foresight prone to fail].186
[A] We ought not to find it strange that people who despair of the kill should not renounce the pleasure of the hunt: study is, in itself, a delightful occupation, so delightful that, among the forbidden pleasures which need to be held on a tight rein, the Stoics include pleasure arising from exercising the mind.187 [C] They find intemperance in knowing too much.
[A] Democritus ate some figs which tasted of honey. He at once began to rack his brains to try and explain this unusual sweetness. He was about to abandon his dinner and set out to trace and examine the place where the figs had been picked, when his servant-girl heard the cause of the commotion and began to laugh; she told him to stop worrying about all that, since she had put the figs in a jar which had previously held honey. He flew into a rage with her because she had deprived him of the chance of finding things out for himself and had robbed his curiosity of something to work on: ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘you have offended me. I shall continue to look for the cause as though it were to be found in Nature.’ [C] And he did manage to find some sort of ‘true’ explanation for a false and imaginary fact!
[A] This story about a great and famous philosopher clearly illustrates that passion for study which keeps us occupied, hunting after things we can never hope to catch. Plutarch relates a similar anecdote about a man who did not want anyone to enlighten him on a subject of doubt, so as not to lose the pleasure of the search – like that other man, who would not allow his doctor to cure a thirst brought on by fever, so as not to lose the pleasure of quenching it! [C] ‘Satius est supervacua discere quam nihil’ [Better to learn something useless than nothing at all].188 It is the same with food of all kinds. Sometimes we eat just for pleasure: there are things we eat which are neither nutritious nor sustaining. So too for the pabulum which our spirits draw from erudition: it may be nei
ther nutritious nor sustaining, but it gives great pleasure.
[B] This is how they put it: contemplating Nature supplies good food to the spirit: it replenishes it, helps it to soar aloft, makes it despise low and earthly things by comparing them with heavenly things. It is delightful merely to study great and abstruse subjects: that remains true even of the man who acquires nothing from study except a sense of awe and a fear of making judgements on such matters.189
That, in a few words, is what they profess.
An express image of the vanity of such sickly curiosity can be better seen from another example, which philosophers are always honouring themselves by quoting. Eudoxus prayed to the gods, hoping to be allowed to have just one sight of the sun from close at hand, so as to apprehend its shape, grandeur and beauty. Even if it meant being burned alive, he would pay the price. He wanted to learn, at the cost of his life, something he would lose as soon as he had acquired it. For such a brief and fleeting glimpse of knowledge he was prepared to surrender all the knowledge he already had or could later have acquired.190
[A] I cannot really convince myself that Epicurus, Plato and Pythagoras genuinely wanted us to accept their Atoms, Ideas and Numbers as valid currency. They were too wise to base the articles of their belief on foundations so shaky and so challengeable. Each of these great figures strove to bring some image of light into the dark ignorance of this world; they applied their minds to concepts which had at least some subtle and pleasing appearance of truth, [C] their only proviso being that they could stand up to hostile objections: ‘unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiae vi’ [such theories are fictions, produced not from solid knowledge but from their individual wits].191
[A] One of the Ancients was reproved for not judging philosophy to be of much account yet continuing to profess it; ‘That is what being a philosopher means,’ he replied.192 Such men wanted to weigh everything in their mental balances; there is curiosity in all of us: this, they found, was a proper way to keep it occupied. Part of what they wrote was simply designed to meet the social needs of the general public – their accounts of their religion, for example.193 With that end in view it was reasonable not to strip popularly held opinions of their living feathers. They had no wish to spawn ideas which would disturb the people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their land.
[C] When treating religion Plato plays a very open game. Writing in his own name he lays down nothing as certain, but, whenever he acts as Lawgiver, he adopts an assertive professorial style. Even then, he is bold enough to work in a few of his most fantastic notions (which were as useful for convincing the people as they were ridiculous for convincing himself), well aware how receptive our minds are to any impressions, especially to the wildest and most extraordinary ones. That explains why, in the Laws, Plato is careful to allow no poetry to be recited in public unless its fables and fictions serve some moral end: it is so easy to impress fancies on the human mind that it is not right to feed minds on useless, harmful lies, when you can feed them on profitable ones. In the Republic he says quite bluntly that you must often deceive the people for their own good.194
You soon discover that some schools of philosophy were chiefly concerned to pursue truth, and others – gaining credit thereby – moral usefulness. Our human condition is pitiable: often, the things which strike our imagination as the most true are ones which appear least useful for the purposes of life. Even the most audacious of the schools, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonians and the New Academy, are constrained in the end to bow to the laws of society.
[A] There are other subjects which philosophers toss to and fro in their sieves, trying to dredge them (whether they deserve it or not) into some appearance of likelihood. Having discovered nothing so profound as really to be worth talking about, they are obliged to forge some weak and insane conjectures of their own, treating them not as bases for truth but for studious exercises. [C] ‘Non tam id sensisse quod dicerent, quam exercere ingenia materiae difficultate videntur voluisse’ [They do not seem to believe what they say, but, rather, to exercise their wits on difficult material].195
[A] If you will not take it that way, how else can we explain the obvious inconstancy, diversity and vanity of the opinions produced by such excellent and, indeed, awesome, minds? What can be more vain, for example, than trying to make guesses about God from human analogies and conjectures which reduce him and the universe to our own scale and our own laws, taking that tiny corner of intellect with which it pleases God to endow the natural Man and then employing it at the expense of his Godhead? And since we cannot stretch our gaze as far as the seat of his Glory, are we to drag him down to our corruption and our wretchedness?
Of all the ancient opinions of men touching religion, it seems to me that the most excusable and verisirnilitudinous was the one which recognized God as some incomprehensible Power, the Origin and Preserver of all things, of all goodness and of all perfection, who took and accepted in good part, the honour and reverence which human beings rendered him, under any guise, under any name and in any way whatsoever.
[C] Jupiter omnipotens rerum, regumque deumque
Progenitor genitrixque.
[Almighty Jupiter, Father and Mother of the world, of rulers and of gods.]196
Such devotion has always been regarded by Heaven with favour.
All forms of government have profited from their allegiance to it; under it, men and impious deeds have met their just deserts; even pagan histories acknowledge the dignity, order and justice of the portents and oracles manifested in their fabulous religions for the benefit and instruction of men. With such temporal benefits as these God in his mercy may perhaps have deigned to protect those tender principles of rough-and-ready knowledge of Himself which Natural Reason affords us, amid the false imaginings of our dreams. But there are religions Man has forged entirely on his own: they are not only false but impious and harmful.
[A] Of all the religions which St Paul found honoured in Athens, the most excusable, he thought, was the one dedicated to a hidden, ‘unknown God’.197
[C] Pythagoras closely adumbrated truth when he concluded that any conception we have of that First Cause, of that Being of beings, must be free of limits, restrictions or definitions; it was in fact the utmost striving of our intellect towards perfection, each of us enlarging the concept according to his capacity.
But if Numa really did attempt to make his people’s worship conform to this model, tying them to an entirely cerebral religion with no object set up before their eyes and no material elements mixed in with it, then his undertaking could serve no purpose.198 The human mind cannot stand such wanderings through an infinity of shapeless thoughts: they must be brought together into some definite concept modelled on man. The very majesty of God allows itself to be, in some sense, circumscribed for us within physical limits: God’s sacraments are supernatural and celestial, yet they bear signs of our own condition, which is earthly; and we express our adoration in words and duties perceptible to the senses. After all, it is Man who does the believing and the praying.
I shall leave aside other arguments marshalled on this topic; consider the sight of our crucifixes and the piteous chastisement which they portray; the ornaments and moving ceremonial in our churches; the voices so aptly fitted to the reverent awe of our thoughts, and all the stirring of our emotions: you will have a hard time making me believe that such things do not set whole nations’ souls ablaze with a passion for religion, with very useful results.
[A] Of all the deities to which bodies have been ascribed (as necessity required during that universal blindness), I think199 I would have most willingly gone along with those who worshipped the Sun:
la lumiere commune,
L’æil du monde; et si Dieu au chef porte des yeux,
Les rayons du Soleil sont ses yeux radieux,
Qui donnent vie à tous, nous maintiennent et gardent,
Et les faicts des humains en ce monde regardent:
Ce beau, ce grand so
leil qui nous faict les saisons,
Selon qu’il entre ou sort de ses douze maisons;
Qui remplit l’univers de ses vertus connues;
Qui, d’un traict de ses yeux, nous dissipe les nues:
L’esprit, l’ame du monde, ardant et flamboyant,
En la course d’un jour tout le Ciel tournoyant;
Plein d’immense grandeur, rond, vagabond et ferme;
Lequel tient dessoubs luy tout le monde pour terme;
En repos sans repos; oysif, et sans sejour;
Fils aisné de nature et le pere du jour.
[… the Common Light, the Eye of the World; if God himself has eyes they are radiant ones made of the Sun’s rays which give life to all, protect and guard us meri, gazing down upon our actions in this world; this fair, this mighty Sun who makes the seasons change according to his journey through his dozen Mansions; who floods the earth with his acknowledged power; who, with a flicker of his eye disperses clouds; the Spirit and Soul of the World, ardent and aflame, encompassing the world in the course of one single day; full of immense grandeur, round, wandering and firm; who holds beneath him the boundaries of the world; resting, unresting; idle, never staying; the eldest Son of Nature and the Father of Light.]200