Wisdom Fit for Robbers

But when they hand themselves over to unbroken idleness, take on no exercise of virtue, and spend their whole lives practicing how to talk, what else should we take them for but triflers? Wisdom that is not set to work on something where it can exert its strength is empty and false. Cicero is right to rank the men engaged in public business above the teachers of philosophy: the men who govern the state, who found new cities or keep the ones already founded on a fair footing, who protect the safety and freedom of the citizens by good laws, by sound advice, or by weighty judgments in court. It is better to make people good than to hand out rules about duty to a few men shut away in a corner — rules that the men who state them do not even keep themselves. And since they have pulled back from real action, it is obvious that they invented the whole system of philosophy in order to give the tongue its exercise, or for the sake of pleading a case. Men who only teach and never act take away the weight of their own rules. Who is going to obey, when the very men who lay down the rules teach disobedience by the way they live? It is a good thing, of course, to lay down rules that are right and honorable; but unless you also do them, it is a fraud. To keep goodness on the lips and not in the heart is inconsistent and frivolous. [a]

So what they are after in philosophy is not usefulness but enjoyment. Cicero himself said as much. “All their debating does contain the richest springs of virtue and knowledge; and yet, set beside the things these men actually did and achieved, I am afraid it may look as though it brought less profit to the business of life than enjoyment to their hours of leisure.” He had no reason to be afraid, since what he said was true. But he behaved like a man worried that the philosophers would put him on trial for giving away a secret of the mysteries, and so he did not dare to state flatly what was true: that they do not argue in order to teach, but for their own enjoyment in their spare time. They advise action and never act at all, and so they are to be counted as nothing but talkers.

Certainly they brought no benefit to life. They did not obey their own rulings, and in all these generations no one has been found who lived by their laws. So philosophy must be set aside altogether. We are not to give ourselves to the pursuit of wisdom, which has no limit and no stopping point; we must be wise, and be wise quickly. We are not given a second life, so that we could spend this one looking for wisdom and be wise in the next. Both have to happen in this one. Wisdom ought to be found quickly so that it can be quickly taken up, before any part of a life slips away whose end nobody knows. In Cicero, Hortensius argues against philosophy and is caught by a neat move: in saying that people ought not to philosophize, he appeared to be philosophizing himself, since deciding what should and should not be done in life is exactly the philosopher’s business. We are clear of that charge. We take philosophy away because it is something human thought invented; we defend wisdom, because it was handed down by God, and we insist that everyone should take it up. Hortensius took philosophy away and put nothing better in its place, so he was thought to be taking wisdom away — and that made it easy to push him off his position, since everyone agrees that a human being is born for wisdom and not for folly.

Another argument the same Hortensius used carries real weight against philosophy too: you can tell that philosophy is not wisdom from the fact that its beginning and origin are on record. “When did philosophers first appear? Thales, I think, was the first, and his time was recent. Where, then, among the older generations, was that passion for investigating the truth hiding?” Lucretius says the same thing:

And Seneca says: “It is not yet a thousand years since the beginnings of wisdom were taken in hand.” So for many generations the human race lived without any system at all. Persius makes fun of this when he writes:

as though wisdom had been shipped into Rome with the rest of the grocery. For if wisdom fits human nature, it must have begun when human beings began; and if it does not fit human nature, then human nature would be incapable of receiving it. But human nature has received it. It follows that wisdom has existed from the beginning — and philosophy, which has not existed from the beginning, is not that true wisdom. The truth is that the Greeks never reached the sacred writings of the truth, and so they never knew how wisdom had been spoiled. Since they supposed that human life had no wisdom in it, they invented philosophy: that is, they set out to dig up by argument a truth that was lying hidden and unknown to them. Not knowing the truth, they took that occupation for wisdom itself.

I have said what I could about philosophy itself, as briefly as I could. Now let us come to the philosophers — not to fight men who cannot hold their ground, but to chase men who are already in flight and driven off our field. The system of Epicurus had a far wider following than any of the others, not because it puts forward anything true, but because the appealing name of pleasure draws a crowd. Everyone leans toward vice by nature. And to pull the crowd toward himself he says something fitted to each character separately. He tells the lazy man not to bother with learning. He lets the tight-fisted man off paying for public shows and handouts. He forbids the man with no energy to take on the business of the state, the sluggish man to exercise his body, the coward to serve in the army. The man with no religion is told that the gods pay no attention to what people do. The hard-hearted and selfish man is instructed to give nothing to anybody, on the ground that the wise man does everything for his own sake. For the man who avoids company, solitude is praised. The miser learns that life can be kept going on water and barley meal. If a man hates his wife, the blessings of staying single are listed for him; to a man with bad children, the happiness of the childless is announced; to a man whose parents have behaved badly, he says there is no bond of nature at all. The man who is delicate and cannot bear anything is told that pain is the greatest of all evils; the man of courage is told that the wise man is happy even under torture. The man set on influence and distinction is told to pay court to kings; the man who cannot stand being bothered is told to keep away from a king’s house. So the sly man gathers his assembly out of all sorts of different characters; and while he puts himself out to please everybody, he ends up more at odds with himself than any of them are with one another. But I must explain where this whole system comes from, and what its origin is. [k]

Epicurus saw that good people are always meeting with hardship — poverty, hard labor, exile, the loss of people they loved. He saw, on the other side, that the wicked were doing well: raised up with influence and loaded with honors. He saw innocence left undefended and crimes going unpunished. He saw death rampaging with no regard for character, in no order and with no distinction of age: some reach old age, others are carried off in infancy; some die when they are strong and in full vigor, others are cut down before their time in the first flower of youth; and in wars it is the better men above all who go down and are killed. What moved him most, though, was this — that religious men were visited with the heaviest troubles, while those who neglected the gods altogether, or worshipped them in an irreverent way, met with fewer troubles or none at all; and that even the temples themselves were often set on fire by lightning. Lucretius makes the same complaint when he says of the god:

But if he had been able to gather even a small particle of the truth, he would never have said that the god throws down his own temples. He throws them down for exactly this reason: they are not his. The Capitol, which is the chief seat of the city of Rome and of its religion, was struck by lightning and set on fire — not once, but again and again. What the clever men thought about it is plain from Cicero’s remark: the flame came from heaven, he says, not to destroy that earthly dwelling of Jupiter, but to demand a loftier and more magnificent one. About the same event, in his books on his own consulship, he writes to much the same effect as Lucretius:

So in the stubbornness of their folly they not only failed to understand the power and majesty of the true God; they made the irreverence of their error worse, by trying, against every divine law, to restore a temple that heaven’s own judgment had condemned so many times.

So when Epicurus turned all this over, driven, as it were, by the unfairness of it (that is how it looked to him, since he did not know the cause or the subject), he decided that there is no providence. Having convinced himself of it, he set out to defend it as well, and so tangled himself in errors he could not get out of. For if there is no providence, how was the world made with such order and arrangement? There is no arrangement, he says, since many things were made in a different way from the way they ought to have been made. So this godlike man found things to criticize. If I had time to answer these matters one at a time, I could easily show that the man was neither wise nor in his right mind. Again, if there is no providence, how is it that the bodies of animals are laid out with such foresight that the various parts, arranged in a remarkable way, each discharge their own duty? Providence, he says, contrived nothing in the making of animals: the eyes were not made for seeing, nor the ears for hearing, nor the tongue for speaking, nor the feet for walking, since all of them were produced before it was possible to speak, hear, see or walk. So they were not produced for a use; the use was produced out of them. If there is no providence, why does rain fall, why do crops come up, why do trees put out leaves? These things, he says, are not always done for the sake of living creatures, since they are of no benefit to providence; everything must be produced of its own accord. Then where do they come from, and how is everything that goes on brought about? There is no need to bring in a providence, he says: there are seeds floating through the empty void, and out of these, gathered together in no order, all things are produced and take their shape. Then why do we not perceive them or pick them out? Because, he says, they have no color, no warmth, no smell; they are also without taste and without moisture; and they are so tiny that they cannot be cut and divided.

So, because he had taken up a false principle at the start, the demands of the subjects that followed drove him into absurdities. Where are these atoms, and where do they come from? Why did nobody dream them up except Leucippus? Democritus took his lessons from him, and left Epicurus the folly as an inheritance. And if these are tiny bodies, and solid ones at that, as they say, then they must certainly be able to fall under the notice of the eyes. If the nature of them all is the same, how do they make up different objects? They come together, he says, in varying order and position — like the letters of the alphabet, which are few in number and yet by variety of arrangement make up countless words. But letters, someone objects, have a variety of shapes. So do these first elements, he says: some are rough, some are fitted with hooks, some are smooth. Then they can be cut and divided, if there is any part of them that sticks out. But if they are smooth and have no hooks, they cannot hold together. So they have to be hooked, to be linked one with another. Yet since they are said to be so tiny that no blade’s edge can cut them apart, how do they come to have hooks or corners? Those must be capable of being torn off, since they project. Next: by what mutual agreement, by what discernment, do they come together, so that anything can be built out of them? If they have no intelligence, they cannot come together in such order and arrangement, because nothing but reason can carry anything through according to reason. How many arguments could be brought against this triviality! But I must get on with my subject. This is the man who

I can never read those lines without laughing. They were not said about Socrates or Plato, who are reckoned the kings of the philosophers, but about a man who — sound in mind and vigorous in health — raved more senselessly than any sick man. And so this emptiest of poets did not so much decorate the mouse with the praises of the lion as bury it and crush it under them. But this same man also releases us from the fear of death. These are his own exact words: “When we exist, death does not exist; when death exists, we do not exist. Therefore death is nothing to us.” How cleverly he has taken us in! As though what we fear were death already finished, which has taken sensation away, and not the very act of dying, by which sensation is being taken from us. For there is a moment in which we ourselves still exist and death does not yet exist; and that is exactly the moment that looks wretched, because death is beginning to be and we are ceasing to be.

It is not said without reason that death is not wretched. What is wretched is death’s approach: to waste away with disease, to take the thrust, to receive the weapon in your body, to be burned with fire, to be torn by the teeth of wild animals. These are the things people fear — not because they bring death, but because they bring great pain. Better to make out that pain is not an evil. He says it is the greatest of all evils. So how can I help being afraid, if what comes before death, or brings it about, is an evil? And why should I say that the argument is false because souls do not perish? Souls do perish, he says: whatever is born with the body must perish with the body. I have already said that I prefer to put this subject off and keep it for the last part of my work, so that I can refute this conviction of Epicurus — whether it was really Democritus’ or Dicaearchus’ — both by argument and by divine testimony. But perhaps he was promising himself that he could indulge his vices and get away with it. He was an advocate of the most disgraceful pleasure, and said that a human being is born to enjoy it. Who, hearing that laid down, would hold back from vice and wickedness? If the soul is doomed to perish, let us chase after riches, so that we can afford every kind of indulgence; and if we do not have them, let us take them from those who do — by stealth, by trickery, or by force — especially if there is no God who watches what people do. As long as the hope of getting away with it is on our side, let us plunder and kill. For it belongs to the wise man to do evil, if it is to his advantage and it is safe; since even if there is a God in heaven, he is angry with nobody. And it belongs just as much to the fool to do good, because as God is not stirred to anger, so he is not moved by favor either. So let us live in the enjoyment of pleasures in every possible way, since in a little while we shall not exist at all. Let us not let a single day — not a single moment — slip past us without pleasure; or else, since we are doomed to perish ourselves, the life we have already spent will perish along with us.

He does not say this in so many words, but he teaches it in fact. When he maintains that the wise man does everything for his own sake, he refers everything he does to his own advantage. And so a man who hears these disgraceful things will not think that any good ought to be done, since doing a kindness serves somebody else’s advantage; nor that he ought to keep clear of crime, since doing evil comes with a profit. If some pirate captain or leader of a gang of robbers were urging his men on to acts of violence, what other language could he use than the very things Epicurus says? That the gods take no notice. That they are moved neither by anger nor by kindness. That punishment after death is not to be dreaded, because souls die when the body dies, and there is no state of punishment to come at all. That pleasure is the greatest good. That there is no fellowship among human beings. That everyone looks out for his own interest. That no one loves another except for his own sake. That death is not to be feared by a brave man, nor any pain — for even if he is tortured or burned, he should say that he takes no notice of it. There is plainly reason enough for anyone to call this the language of a wise man, seeing how neatly it fits a band of robbers.