You are in quest of what is. Why on earth do you set out to walk that road with a man who has neither pace nor style? We do no wrong to the subject-matter if we depart from it in order to examine the way to treat it – I do not mean a scholastic donnish way, I mean a natural way, based on a healthy intellect. But what happens in the end? One goes east and the other west; they lose the fundamental point in the confusion of a mass of incidentals. After a tempestuous hour they no longer know what they are looking for. One man is beside the bull’s eye, the other too high, the other too low. One fastens on a word or a comparison; another no longer sees his opponent’s arguments, being too caught up in his own train of thought: he is thinking of pursuing his own argument not yours. Another, realizing he is too weak in the loins, is afraid of everything, denies everything and, from the outset, muddles and confuses the argument, or else, at the climax of the debate he falls into a rebellious total silence, affecting, out of morose ignorance, a haughty disdain or an absurdly modest desire to avoid contention. Yet another does not care how much he drops his own guard provided that he can hit you. Another counts every word and believes they are as weighty as reasons. This man merely exploits the superior power of his voice and lungs. And then there is the man who sums up against himself; and the other who deafens you with useless introductions and digressions. Another is armed with pure insults and picks a groundless ‘German quarrel’ so as to free himself from the company and conversation of a mind which presses hard on his own.
Lastly, there is the man who cannot see reason but holds you under siege within a hedge of dialectical conclusions and logical formulae. Who can avoid beginning to distrust our professional skills and doubt whether we can extract from them any solid profit of practical use in life when he reflects on the use we put them to? ‘Nihil sanantibus litteris.’ [Such erudition as has no power to heal.]* Has anyone ever acquired intelligence through logic? Where are her beautiful promises? ‘Nec ad melius vivendum nec ad commodius disserendum.’ [She teaches neither how to live a better life nor how to argue properly.] Is there more of a hotchpotch in the cackle of fishwives than in the public disputations of men who profess logic? I would prefer a son of mine to learn to talk in the tavern rather than in our university yap-shops.
Take an arts don; converse with him. Why is he incapable of making us feel the excellence of his ‘arts’ and of throwing the women, and us ignoramuses, into ecstasies of admiration at the solidity of his arguments and the beauty of his ordered rhetoric? Why cannot he overmaster us and sway us at his will? Why does a man with his superior mastery of matter and style intermingle his sharp thrusts with insults, indiscriminate arguments and rage? Let him remove his academic hood, his gown and his Latin; let him stop battering our ears with raw chunks of pure Aristotle; why, you would take him for one of us – or worse. The involved linguistic convolutions with which they confound us remind me of conjuring tricks: their sleight-of-hand has compelling force over our senses but it in no wise shakes our convictions. Apart from such jugglery they achieve nothing but what is base and ordinary. They may be more learned but they are no less absurd.
I like and honour erudition as much as those who have it. When used properly it is the most noble and powerful acquisition of Man. But in the kind of men (and their number is infinite) who make it the base and foundation of their worth and achievement, who quit their understanding for their memory, ‘sub aliena umbra latentes’ [hiding behind other men’s shadows],* and can do nothing except by book, I loathe (dare I say it?) a little more than I loathe stupidity.
In my part of the country and during my own lifetime school-learning has brought amendment of purse but rarely amendment of soul. If the souls it meets are already obtuse, as a raw and undigested mass it clogs and suffocates them; if they are unfettered, it tends to purge them, strip them of impurities and volatilize them into vacuity. Erudition is a thing the quality of which is neither good nor bad, almost: it is a most useful adjunct to a well-endowed soul: to any other it is baleful and harmful; or rather, it is a thing which, in use, has great value, but it will not allow itself to be acquired at a base price: in one hand it is a royal sceptre, in another, a fool’s bauble.
But to get on: what greater victory do you want than to teach your enemy that he cannot stand up to you? Get the better of him by your argument and the winner is the truth; do so by your order and style, then you are the winner!
I am persuaded that, in both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates debates more for the debater’s than for debating’s sake; more to teach Euthydemus and Protagoras their own absurdity than the absurdity of their sophists’ art. He seizes hold of the first subject which comes to hand, as a man who has a more useful aim than to throw light on his subject as such: namely, to enlighten the minds which he accepts to train and to exercise. The game which we hunt is the fun of the chase: we are inexcusable if we pursue it badly or foolishly: it is quite another thing if we fail to make a kill. For we are born to go in quest of truth: to take possession of it is the property of a greater Power. Truth is not (as Democritus said) hidden in the bottom of an abyss: it is, rather, raised infinitely high within the knowledge of God.
This world is but a school of inquiry. The question is not who will spear the ring but who will make the best charges at it. The man who says what is true can act as foolishly as the one who says what is untrue: we are talking about the way you say it not what you say. My humour is to consider the form as much as the substance, and the barrister as much as his case, as Alcibiades told us to. Every day I spend time reading my authors, not caring about their learning, looking not for their subject-matter but how they handle it; just as I go in pursuit of discussions with a celebrated mind not to be taught by it but to get to know it.
Any man may speak truly: few men can speak ordinately, wisely, adequately. And so errors which proceed from ignorance do not offend me: absurdity does. I have often broken off discussing a bargain, even one advantageous to me, because of the silly claims of those I was bargaining with. For their mistakes I do not lose my temper above once a year with any of those who are subject to my authority, but when the point is the stupidity of their assertions or the obstinacy of their asinine excuses and their daft defences, then we are daily at each other’s throats. They understand neither why nor what they are told: they answer accordingly. It is enough to make you despair. It is only when my head bangs against another head that I feel a big bump: I can come to terms with the failings of my servants better than with their thoughtlessness, insolence and downright silliness. Let them do less, provided that they can do something! You live in hope of making their wills warm to their work: but there is nothing to get from a blockhead, nothing to hope for.
Yes, but what if I myself am taking things for other than they are? That may well be: that explains first of all why I condemn my inability to put up with it, holding it to be equally a defect in those who are right and those who are wrong, since there is always an element of tyrannical bad temper in being unable to tolerate characters different from your own. Secondly, there is in truth no greater silliness, none more enduring, than to be provoked and enraged by the silliness of this world – and there is none more bizarre. For it makes you principally irritated with yourself: that philosopher of old would never have lacked occasion for his tears if he had concentrated on himself.* One of the Seven Sages, Myson, was of the same humour as Timon and Democritus: when asked what he was laughing at all by himself, he replied, ‘At the fact that I am laughing all by myself.’
How many statements and replies do I make every day which are silly by my norms – so even more frequently, to be sure, by the standards of others! If I bite my lips for them, what must the others be doing! To sum up, we have to live among the living and let the stream flow under the bridge without worrying about it or, at very least, without making ourselves ill over it. Indeed, why can we encounter a man with a twisted deformed body without getting irritated, yet are unable to tolerate a deranged mind without flying into a rage
?* Such harshness is vitiated and derives from the critic rather than the fault. Let us always have Plato’s saying on our lips: ‘If I find ill in something may it not be because I myself am ill? Am I not the one at fault? May my own criticism not be turned against me?’ A wise and inspired refrain which chastises the most common and universal error of mankind. It is not merely the reproaches which we make to each other which can be regularly turned against us but also our reasons and our arguments in matters of controversy: we run ourselves through with our own swords. As it was ingeniously and aptly put by the man who first said it: ‘Stercus cuique suum bene olet.’ [Everyone’s shit smells good to himself.]†
Our eyes see nothing behind us. A hundred times a day when we go mocking our neighbour we are really mocking ourselves; we abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own, and, with a miraculous lack of shame and perspicacity, are astonished by them. Only yesterday I was able to watch an intelligent nobleman making jokes, as good as they were pertinent, about the silly way in which another nobleman went bashing everyone’s ear about his family-tree and his family alliances, more than half of which were false, that kind of man being most inclined to launch out on such stupid subjects when his escutcheon is more dubious and least certain: yet he too, if he had stood back and looked at himself, would have discovered that he was hardly less extravagant in broadcasting and less boring in stressing the claims to precedence of his wife’s family. What a dangerous arrogance with which a wife is seen to be armed at the hands of her very husband! If they understood Latin we ought to say to such people:
Age! si haec non insanit satis sua sponte, instiga!
[That’s the way! If she is not mad enough herself, egg her on!]*
I do not mean that nobody should make indictments unless he is spotless; if that were so no one would make them. What I mean is that when our judgement brings a charge against another man over a matter then in question, it must not exempt us from an internal judicial inquiry. It is a work of charity for a man who is unable to weed out a defect in himself to try, nevertheless, to weed it out in another in whom the seedling may be less malignant and stubborn. And it never seems to me to be an appropriate answer to anyone who warns me of a fault in me to say that he has it too. What difference does that make? The warning remains true and useful. If we had sound nostrils our shit ought to stink all the more for its being our own. Socrates was convinced that if there was a man who, together with his son and a stranger, was found guilty of violence or injury, that man should begin with himself, first presenting himself to be sentenced by the judge and to beg for expiation at the hands of the executioner; next, he should present his son; then the stranger.* If that precept pitches it rather too high, at least he should be the first to be presented before his own conscience for punishment.
Our first judges are properly our senses, which perceive things only by their external accidents. No wonder then that in all the elements which contribute to our society there is such a constant and universal addition of surface appearances and ritual; with the result that the best and most effective part of our polities consists in that. We are always dealing with Man, whose nature is wondrously corporeal. Those who in recent years have wished to build up for us so contemplative and nonmaterial an exercise of worship should not be astonished if there are those who think that it would have slipped and melted through their fingers if it did not keep a hold among us as a mark, sign and means of division and of faction rather than for itself.
It is the same in discussion: the gravity, academic robes and rank of the man who is speaking often lend credence to arguments which are vain and silly. Who could believe that so redoubtable a lord with so great a retinue does not have within him some more-than-ordinary talent, or that a man who is entrusted with so many missions and offices of state, a man so disdainful and so arrogant, is not cleverer than another man who bows to him from afar and whom nobody ever employs! Not only the words of such people but their very grimaces are watched and put to their account, each man striving to give them some fine solid significance. If they condescend to join in ordinary discussions and you show them anything but approval and reverence, they clobber you with the authority of their experience: they have heard this; they have seen that; they have done this: you are overwhelmed with cases. I would like to tell such men that the fruit of a surgeon’s experience lies not in a recital of his operations nor in his reminding us that he has cured four patients of the plague and three of the gout, unless he knows how to extract from them material for forming his judgement and unless he knows how to convince us that he has been made wiser by the practice of his medical art. So, in a consort of instruments, we do not hear the lute, the spinet and the flute but a global harmony, the fruit resulting from the combination of the entire group.
If they have been improved by their missions and their travels that should appear in the products of their understanding. It is not enough to relate our experiences: we must weigh them and group them; we must also have digested them and distilled them so as to draw out the reasons and conclusions they comport. There never were so many writing history! It is always good and profitable to listen to them, for they furnish us with ample instruction, fine and praiseworthy, from the storehouse of their memory: that is certainly of great value in helping us to live. But we are not looking for that at the moment: we are trying to find out whether the chroniclers and compilers are themselves worthy of praise.
I loathe all tyranny, both in speech and action. I like to brace myself against those trivial incidentals which cheat our judgement via our senses; and by keeping a watchful eye on men of extraordinary rank I have discovered that they are, for the most part, just like the rest of us:
Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
Fortuna.
[Common sense is rare enough in that high station.]*
Perhaps we esteem them and perceive them for less than they are, because they undertake to do more and so reveal themselves more. The porter must be stronger and tougher than his load. The man who has not had to use all his strength leaves you to guess whether he has any more in reserve, whether he has been assayed to the ultimate point: the man who succumbs under the weight betrays his limitations and the weakness of his shoulders. That is why, more than other people, so many of the learned can be seen to have inadequate souls. They could have been good farmers, good merchants, good craftsmen: their natural forces were tailored to such proportions. Knowledge is a very weighty thing: they sink beneath it. Their mental apparatus has not enough energy nor skill to display that noble material and to apportion its strength, to exploit it and to make it help them. Knowledge can lodge only in a powerful nature: and that is very rare. Feeble minds, said Socrates, corrupt the dignity of philosophy when they handle it; she appears to be useless and defective when sheathed in a bad covering.*
That is how they grow rotten and besotted,
Humani qualis simulator simius oris,
Quem puer arridens pretioso stamine serum
Velavit, nudasque nates ac terga reliquit,
Ludibrium mensis.
[Like an ape, that imitator of the human face, which a boy dresses up, for a laugh, in precious silken robes, leaving the cheeks of its backside bare to amuse the guests at table.]
It is the same for those who rule over us and give orders, who hold the world in their hands: it is not enough for them to have an ordinary intelligence, to be able to achieve what we can. They are far beneath us if they are not way above us. Since they promise more, they owe more too; that is why keeping silent is not, in their case, merely a courteous and grave demeanour; it is also more often a profitable and gainful one. For when Megabysus went to see Appelles in his studio, he long remained silent. But when he began to discourse on the works of art, he received this rude reprimand: ‘While you kept silent you appeared to be a great Somebody because of your chains-of-office and your retinue, but now we have heard you talk the very apprentices in my workshop despise you.’* Those mag
nificent decorations, that grand estate would not tolerate ordinary plebeian ignorance in him, nor inappropriate comments on paintings: he should have maintained that outward presumed connoisseurship. For how many men in my time has a cold, taciturn mien served their silly souls as signs of wisdom and ability!
Of necessity dignities and offices are bestowed more by fortune than by merit: you often do wrong to blame kings for that. On the contrary, it is a wonder that they have such good luck, enjoying as they do so few ways of finding out.
Principis est virtus maxima nosse suos,
[For a prince, the chief merit is to know his subjects,]†
for Nature has not given them eyes which can extend over so many peoples, distinguishing pre-eminence and seeing into our bosoms, where is lodged the knowledge of our will and of our better qualities. They have to select us by fumbling guesses: by our family, our wealth, our learning and the voice of the people – the feeblest of arguments. Anyone who could discover the means by which men could be justly judged and reasonably chosen would, at a stroke, establish a perfect form of commonwealth.
’Yes. But he brought this great matter to a successful conclusion.’ – That means something, but not enough; for we rightly accept the maxim which says that plans must not be judged by results. The Carthaginians punished bad counsels in their captains even when they were put right by a happy outcome. And the Roman people often refused to mark great and beneficial victories because the qualities of leadership of the commander were inferior to his good luck. In this world’s activities we often notice that Fortune rivals Virtue: she shows us what power she has over everything and delights in striking down our presumption by making the incompetent lucky since she cannot make them wise. She loves to interfere, favouring those performances whose course has been entirely her own. That is why we can see, every day, the simplest among us bringing the greatest public and private tasks to successful conclusions.
On Friendship (Penguin) Page 4