Philosophy Cuts Itself Down

The truth is still thought to lie hidden in the dark. It is kept there either by ordinary people, who go wrong out of ignorance and are slaves to a crowd of foolish superstitions, or by the philosophers, whose twisted reasoning clouds the truth instead of throwing light on it. Because of that, I could wish that the power of eloquence had fallen to me — not what Marcus Tullius Cicero had, for that was extraordinary and beyond imitation, but something coming somewhere near it. Then the truth, propped up by talent as much as it already carries weight by its own force, might at last come forward, scatter and refute the errors of the public and the errors of men who are counted wise, and bring a blazing light in among the human race. [a]

I could wish it for two reasons. Men might believe the truth more readily if it came dressed up, since they will believe even a lie once the ornament of its language and the bait of its words have caught them. Or, failing that, we might overpower the philosophers with their own weapons — the very things they are used to boasting of and relying on.

But God has willed the case to stand this way: plain, undisguised truth is the clearer thing, because it carries ornament enough of its own, and is spoiled when it is painted over with decoration brought in from outside; while falsehood pleases by a brilliance that is not its own, since, being rotten in itself, it fades and melts away unless it is dressed up and polished with trim fetched from somewhere else. So I take it calmly that only a moderate share of talent was granted to me. It is not on eloquence but on the truth that I have taken up this work — a work perhaps too great for my strength to hold up. Even if I should fail, the truth itself will finish it, with the help of God, whose business this is.

I know that the greatest orators have often been beaten by advocates of middling ability, because the power of truth is so great that even in small matters it defends itself simply by being clear. Why then should I imagine that in the greatest case of all it will be buried by men who are clever and eloquent — I grant them that — but who say false things? Why should it not stand out bright and plain, if not by my speech, which is a feeble thing running from a small spring, then by its own light? And if there have been philosophers worth admiring for their learning in letters, I still will not hand them the knowledge and understanding of the truth as well; no one arrives at that by reflection or by argument.

I am not now running down the effort of men who wanted to know the truth, since God made human nature hungry to arrive at it. What I assert and maintain against them is this: their honest, well-aimed will did not produce the result, because they did not know what was true in itself, or how, or where, or in what frame of mind it must be looked for. And so, while they wanted to cure the errors of men, they became tangled in traps and in the largest errors of all. The very order of the subject I have taken up has therefore brought me to the task of refuting philosophy.

All error springs either from false religion or from wisdom, so in refuting error both have to be knocked down. Since it has been handed down to us in the sacred writings that the thoughts of philosophers are foolish, that very point must be proved by fact and by argument, so that no one, drawn in by the honorable name of wisdom or dazzled by the glitter of empty eloquence, will trust human things rather than divine ones.

These matters, in fact, are set down briefly and plainly. It would not have been fitting for God, when he was speaking to man, to back up his words with arguments, as though he would not otherwise be trusted. He spoke, as was right, as the mighty Judge of all things, whose part is not to argue a case but to pass sentence. He himself, being God, is truth. But we, who have divine testimony for everything, will certainly show by how much surer arguments the truth can be defended, when even false things are defended so well that they regularly pass for true.

There is no reason, then, to honor the philosophers so far as to be afraid of their eloquence. As learned men they could speak well; they could not speak truly, because they had not learned the truth from the one in whose power it lay. And in fact we shall accomplish nothing very great by convicting them of ignorance, since they confess it themselves often enough. In that one point alone — the one point where they ought to have been believed — they are not believed. So I will try to show that they never spoke so truly as when they gave their verdict on their own ignorance.

In the two books before this one the falsehood of the religions has been shown, and the origin of the whole error has been set out. The business of this book is to show that philosophy too is empty and false, so that with every error cleared away the truth may be brought out and stand in the open. Let us begin, then, from the common name “philosophy.” Destroy the head, and an easier way opens for pulling down the whole body — if a thing can be called a body at all when its parts and limbs are at odds with one another and are held together by no joint, but lie scattered and strewn about, and seem to twitch rather than to live. [e]

Philosophy is, as the name says and as the philosophers themselves define it, the love of wisdom. What better argument can I use to prove that philosophy is not wisdom than the meaning of its own name? A man who devotes himself to wisdom is plainly not yet wise; he devotes himself to the subject in order to become wise. In the other skills you can see what such devotion accomplishes and what it leads to: once a man has learned them by study, he is no longer called a devoted student of the trade but a craftsman.

It was modesty, they say, that made them call themselves devoted to wisdom rather than wise. Not so. Pythagoras, who invented the word, had a little more wisdom than the men of earlier times who thought themselves wise, and he understood that wisdom cannot be reached by any human study, and therefore that a perfect name ought not to be attached to a subject that is unfinished and cannot be grasped. That is why, when he was asked what his profession was, he answered that he was a philosopher — that is, a searcher after wisdom. And if philosophy searches after wisdom, philosophy is not wisdom itself, since the thing that searches and the thing searched for must of necessity be two different things. Nor is the searching even done correctly, since it can find nothing.

But I am not prepared to grant even this much — that philosophers are devoted to the pursuit of wisdom — because that pursuit never arrives at wisdom. If the power of finding the truth went along with this pursuit, and if the pursuit were a road to wisdom, the truth would have been found by now. So much time and so much talent have been spent on the search, and it has still not been gained; plainly there is no wisdom there. So the men who take up philosophy are not devoting themselves to the pursuit of wisdom; they only imagine that they are, because they do not know where the thing they are looking for is, or what sort of thing it is. Whether they pursue wisdom or not, they are not wise, because a thing can never be discovered that is either looked for in the wrong way or not looked for at all. Let us look at this very question: whether anything can be found by this kind of pursuit, or nothing.

Philosophy seems to be made of two things and nothing more: knowledge and guesswork. Knowledge cannot come out of the understanding, and cannot be laid hold of by thinking, because having knowledge in oneself as one’s own property does not belong to man but to God. The nature of mortals takes in no knowledge except what comes from outside. That is why the divine intelligence opened eyes and ears and the other senses in the body — so that knowledge could flow in through those doorways to the mind. [g]

As for investigating the causes of natural things, or wanting to know them — whether the sun is as big as it looks or many times bigger than this whole earth; whether the moon is a ball or a hollow bowl; whether the stars are fixed to the sky or carried on a free course through the air; how large the sky itself is and what it is made of; whether it stands still and unmoved or is spun around at an unbelievable speed; how thick the earth is, or on what foundations it is balanced and hung — to want to take in these things, I say, by debate and by guessing, is like wanting to discuss what some city in a far country is like, when we have never seen it and have heard nothing about it but the name.

If we claimed knowledge for ourselves in a matter of that kind, which cannot be known, would we not look insane for daring to assert something we can be refuted in? How much more, then, are they to be judged insane and senseless who imagine that they know things in nature that no man can know! Socrates was right, then, and so were the Academics who followed him, in taking knowledge away, since knowledge is the business of a fortune-teller, not of a debater. That leaves guesswork alone in philosophy; whatever knowledge has left is wholly taken up by guessing. Everyone guesses at what he does not know. Men who debate about nature are guessing that things are as they describe them. So they do not know the truth, because knowledge deals with what is certain and guesswork with what is uncertain.

Let us go back to the example I used. Come — let us guess at the state and character of that city we know nothing about except the name. Likely it stands on a plain, with stone walls, tall buildings, many streets, and splendid, richly decorated temples. Let us describe the manners and bearing of the citizens too, if you like. But when we have described them, another man will say the opposite; and when he has finished, a third will stand up, and others after him, and they will guess very differently from us. Which of them all is nearer the truth? Perhaps none of them. And yet everything has been said that the nature of the case allows, so one of them must necessarily be right. But there will be no knowing who told the truth. It may well be that all of them went wrong somewhere in their description, and that all of them hit the truth somewhere.

So we are fools if we go after this by arguing; someone may turn up who laughs at our guesses and thinks us mad for wanting to guess at what we do not know. But there is no need to hunt for distant cases, where perhaps nobody will come along to refute us. Come — let us guess what is going on right now in the forum, or in the senate house. That is still too far off. Let us say what is happening with nothing but a single wall in between. Nobody can know that except a man who has heard it or seen it. So nobody ventures to say it, because he would be refuted at once, not by words but by the fact standing there in front of him.

But this is exactly what the philosophers do when they debate what is going on in the sky. They think they get away with it, because there is nobody to refute their errors. If they thought that someone was about to come down who would prove them mad and false, they would never debate subjects they cannot possibly know. All the same, their shamelessness and nerve should not be counted the more successful for going unrefuted. God refutes them, who alone knows the truth, even though he may seem to be turning a blind eye to what they do; and he reckons such wisdom of men to be the greatest folly.

Zeno and the Stoics, then, were right to throw guesswork out. To guess that you know what you do not know is not the mark of a wise man but of a rash and foolish one. So if nothing can be known, as Socrates taught, or if nothing ought to be guessed at, as Zeno taught, philosophy is removed altogether. And why should I say it is overthrown only by these two, who were the chiefs of philosophy, when it is overthrown by all of them, so that it now looks to have been destroyed long ago by its own weapons? [i]

Philosophy has been divided into many schools, and they all hold different opinions. In which of them do we place the truth? It certainly cannot be in all. Let us point to one: it follows that all the rest are without wisdom. Let us go through them one at a time: in the same way, whatever we give to one we take away from the others. Each school overturns all the rest in order to confirm itself and its own doctrines. It grants wisdom to no one else, for fear of confessing that it is foolish itself; but as it takes the others away, so it is taken away by all the others. And the men who charge it with folly are philosophers all the same.

Whatever school you praise and pronounce true is condemned by philosophers as false. Are we to believe the one that praises itself and its own doctrine, or the many that blame each other’s ignorance? What great numbers hold must of necessity be better than what only one holds. No one can judge rightly about himself, as the famous poet testifies; for the nature of men is so arranged that they see and sort out other people’s affairs better than their own.

Since everything is uncertain, then, we must believe either all of them or none. If we are to believe no one, there are no wise men, because each of them separately asserts different things and thinks himself wise. If we are to believe all of them, it is just as true that there are no wise men, because all of them deny the wisdom of each one. So all are destroyed in this way; and like the sown men in the poets’ fable, these men cut each other down until none of them all is left. It happens because they have a sword but no shield.

If, then, the schools are convicted of folly one by one, by the verdict of many schools, it follows that all are found empty and worthless; and so philosophy eats and destroys itself. Arcesilaus, the founder of the Academy, understood this. He gathered up the charges they all made against each other, along with the confessions of ignorance made by distinguished philosophers, and armed himself against them all. In this way he set up a new philosophy of not philosophizing. From that founder onward there began to be two kinds of philosophy: the old one, which claims knowledge for itself, and a new one set against it, which takes knowledge away.

Between these two kinds of philosophy I see disagreement, and something like civil war. On which side are we to place wisdom, which cannot be torn in two? If the nature of things can be known, this troop of recruits will be wiped out; if it cannot, the veterans are destroyed. If they come out equal, philosophy, the guide of them all, still perishes, because it is divided; nothing can be set against itself without destroying itself. But if, as I have shown, there can be no inward knowledge of a man’s own in man, given how frail the human condition is, then the party of Arcesilaus wins. And yet not even this will stand firm, because it cannot be the case that nothing at all is known.

For there are many things that nature itself, and constant use, and the necessity of living force us to know. You are bound to die unless you know what things are useful for life, so that you can go after them, and what things are dangerous, so that you can keep clear of them and avoid them. There are many things, besides, that experience finds out. The various courses of the sun and moon, the motions of the stars, and the reckoning of time have all been discovered; students of medicine have found out the nature of bodies and the strength of herbs, and the men who work the land have collected the kinds of soil and the signs of coming rain and storm. In short, there is no skill that does not depend on knowledge.

Arcesilaus, therefore, if he had any wisdom, ought to have distinguished between the things that were capable of being known and the things that were not. Had he done that, he would have brought himself down to the level of the common crowd — for common people sometimes have more wisdom, because they are wise only so far as they need to be. Ask them whether they know anything or nothing, and they will say that they know the things they know, and will admit that they are ignorant of what they do not know.

He was right, then, to take away other men’s systems, but he was not right to lay the foundations of his own. Ignorance of all things cannot be wisdom, whose own property is knowledge. And so, when he had overcome the philosophers and taught that they knew nothing, he lost the name of philosopher himself, since his system is to know nothing. A man who blames others for being ignorant ought to have knowledge himself. But when he knows nothing, what perversity it is, what nerve, to set himself up as a philosopher on the very ground for which he takes everyone else away! For it is in their power to answer him like this:

“If you convict us of knowing nothing, and of being unwise on that account because we know nothing, does it not follow that you are not wise either, since you confess that you know nothing?”

What progress, then, did Arcesilaus make, except that, having finished off all the philosophers, he ran himself through with the same sword?