The Complete Essays (103 page)

As for the licence of philosophical opinion about vice and virtue, there is no need to go lengthily into that; it is better to pass over some of the notions in silence than to trumpet them abroad [C] before weaker intellects. [B] Arcesilaus said that in lechery proclivities [C] and occasions [B] were irrelevant.’
⁴⁰⁷
‘Et obscoenas voluptates
… si
natura requirit, non genere, aut loco, aut ordine, sed forma, aetate, figura metiendas Epicurus putat’
[Epicurus thinks that when Nature demands to be satisfied by lascivious pleasures, we need not consider family origin, position or rank but only beauty, youth and figure].
‘Ne amores quidem sanctos a sapiente alienos esse arbitrantur”
[They even think that forbidden
affaires
are not incompatible with being a Sage].
‘Quaeramus ad quam usque aetatem juvenes amandi sint’
[Let us investigate up to what age it is proper to love young men]. The last two quotations are Stoic; together with the reproach which Dicaearchus made to Plato himself on this subject, they show how far even the sanest philosophy will go in tolerating quite excessive licence, far from common practice.
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[A] Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength. But just look at those Ancient concerns which gave the original impulse to that mighty stream, famed, full of dignity, awesome and venerable: you then see them to be so light and so delicate that it is not surprising that these people here – philosophers who weigh everything and reduce everything to reason, never accepting anything on authority and trust – reach verdicts far removed from those of the generality. These people, who model themselves on their concept of Nature as she originally was, not surprisingly stray from the common path in most of their opinions. Few of them for example would have approved of the constraints we impose on marriage; [C] most of them wanted a community of wives without binding obligations. [A] Courteous conventions like ours they rejected.
⁴⁰⁹
Chrysippus said that, for a dozen olives, a philosopher will turn a dozen somersaults in public, even with his breeches off.
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[C] He could hardly have advised Clisthenes against giving his fair daughter Agarista to Hippoclides, just because he saw him stand on his head on a table with his legs wide apart in the air.
⁴¹¹

In the midst of a discussion, and in the presence of his followers, Metrocles rather injudiciously let off a fart. To hide his embarrassment he stayed at home until, eventually, Crates came to pay him a visit; to his consolations and arguments Crates added the example of his own licence: he began a farting match with him, thereby removing his scruples and, into the bargain, converting him to the freer Stoic school from the more socially oriented Peripatetics whom he had formerly followed.
⁴¹²
What we call ‘honourable’
behaviour – not to dare to perform openly actions which are ‘honourable’ when done in private – they termed silliness. As for ingeniously concealing or disowning those of our actions which Nature, custom and our very desires publish and proclaim abroad, they reckoned that to be a vice. They thought it a desacralizing of Venus’ mysteries to take them out from the discreet sanctuary of her temple and exhibit them to the public gaze: draw back the curtains, and her sports are debased. (Shame has a kind of weight: concealment, dissimulation and constraint form part of our esteem.) They thought that it was most ingenious that Lust, out of regret for the dignity and convenience of her traditional bedchambers, should don the mask of Virtue, seeking to avoid being prostituted at the crossroads and trampled underfoot before the eyes of the mob. That is why [A] some say that abolishing the public brothels would not merely take the fornication at present restricted to such places and spread it everywhere, but would also stimulate that vice in men by making it more difficult:

Moechus es Aufidiae, qui vir, Corvine, fuisti;
Rivalis fuerat qui tuus, ille vir est.
Cur aliena placet tibi, quae tua non placet uxor?
Nunquid securus non potes arrigere?

[Corvinus! You used to be the husband of Aufidia; she has married your rival and you are her lover. Now she has become the wife of another, she pleases you (she never did when she was your own). Why? Are you unable to get it up without risking a beating?]
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You can find a thousand variations on that experience.

Nullus in urbe fuit tota qui tangere vellet
Uxorem gratis, Caeciliane, tuam,
Dum licuit; sed nunc, positis custodibus, ingens
Turba fututorum est. Ingeniosus homo es
.

[Caecilianus: when you left your wife free, nobody in the whole of Rome wanted to touch her: now you have put guards round her, she is besieged by a huge crowd of fucking admirers. Clever chap!]
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Once a philosopher was surprised in the very act; asked what he was doing, he coldly replied: ‘I am planting a man’; he no more blushed than if he had been caught planting garlic.
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[C] It is, I think, too tender and respectful an opinion when one of our great religious authors holds that Necessity actually compels this act to be carried out in modest seclusion: he could not convince himself that the Cynics actually consummated it in their licentious embraces, but were content with imitating lascivious motions in order to display that absence of shame which formed part of their teachings. He thought that they had to find a secluded place later on, so as to be able to ejaculate what shame had constrained them to hold back. But he had insufficiently plumbed the depths of the Cynics’ debauchery: for when Diogenes was masturbating in the presence of crowds of bystanders, he specifically said he wanted to give his belly
complete
satisfaction by rubbing it up like this. To those who asked why his ‘hunger’ had to be satisfied in the street, not in some more suitable place, he replied, ‘I was in the street when I felt hungry.’ Women philosophers who joined this school joined in with their bodies –everywhere and indiscriminately: Hipparchia was only admitted into the group of disciples around Crates on condition that she followed the customary practices and rules in every particular.
⁴¹⁶

These philosophers attached the highest value to virtue; they rejected all other disciplines except morals; nevertheless, they attributed ultimate authority, above any law, to the decisions of their Sage: they decreed no restraints on pleasure [A] except moderation and the respect for the freedom of others.

Heraclitus and Protagoras noted that wine tastes bitter when you are sick, delightful when you are well, and that an oar looks crooked in the water but straight out of it; from these and similar contradictory appearances they argued that every object contains within itself the causes of such appearances: that there was a bitterness in wine which was related to the
taste of the sick man; a quality of bentness in the oar which was related to whoever was looking at it in the water; and so on, for all the rest. That is equivalent to saying that everything is in everything; from which it follows that nothing is in anything: for where everything is, nothing is.
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It was this opinion which reminded me of an experience which we have all had, that once you start digging down into a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter, sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there.

Take that clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy which has not discovered ample evidence there for its foundation and continuance? That is why there is one proof which the founders of such erroneous doctrines will never give up: evidence based upon exegesis of words.

A man of some rank, deeply immersed in the quest for the philosopher’s stone, wanted to justify it to me recently on authority: he cited five or six Biblical texts which he said were the ones he chiefly relied on to salve his conscience (for he is in holy orders). The choice of texts he produced was not only amusing but most applicable to the defence of that egregious science.

That is how divinatory nonsense comes to be believed in. Provided that a writer of almanacs has already gained enough authority for people to bother to read his books, examining his words for implications and shades of meaning, he can be made to say anything whatever – like Sybils. There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind
not
to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. [C] That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. (He may achieve that not so much by merit as by some chance interest in his subject-matter.) Then, whether out of subtlety or stupidity, he can contradict himself or express himself obscurely: no matter! Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all of them doing him honour. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the
Lendit
fair.

[A] This has lent value to many a worthless piece, making several books seem valuable by loading on to them anything at all; one and the same work is susceptible to thousands upon thousands of diverse senses and nuances – as many as we like. [C] Is it possible that Homer really wanted to say all that people have made him say,
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and that he really did provide us with so many and so varied figurative meanings that theologians, military leaders, philosophers and all sorts of learned authors (no matter how different or contradictory their treaties) can refer to him and cite his authority as the Master General of all duties, works and craftsmen, the Counsellor General of all enterprises?

[A] Anyone on the lookout for oracles and predictions has found plenty of material there! I have a learned friend who is astonishingly good at producing wonderfully apt passages from Homer in favour of our religion: he cannot be easily prised from the opinion that Homer actually intended them (yet he knows Homer as well as any man alive). [C] And the very things he finds favouring our religion were thought in ancient times to favour theirs.

See how Plato is tossed and turned about. All are honoured to have his support, so they couch him on their own side. They trot him out and slip him into any new opinion which fashion will accept. When matters take a different turn, then they make him disagree with himself. They force him to condemn forms of behaviour which were quite licit in his own century, just because they are illicit in ours. The more powerful and vigorous the mind of his interpreters, the more vigorously and powerfully they do it.

[A] Democritus took the very foundations of Heraclitus – his assertion that things bear within themselves all the features we find in them – and drew the contrary conclusion, namely, that objects have none of the qualities we find in them: from the fact that honey is sweet to some and bitter to others, he concluded that it was neither sweet nor bitter. The Pyrrhonists said that they did not know whether it is sweet or bitter or neither or both, for they always reach the highest summit of doubt.
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[C] The Cyrenaics held that nothing is perceptible which
comes from without: the only things perceptible are those which affect us inwardly, such as pain and pleasure. They did not even recognize the existence of tones or colours, but only certain emotional impulses produced by them; on these alone Man must base his judgement: Protagoras thought that whatever appears true is true for the man concerned; the Epicureans place judgement – in the case of both knowledge and pleasure – in the senses. Plato wanted judgements about Truth, and Truth herself, to be independent of opinion and the senses, belonging only to the mind and thought.
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[A] Such discussion has brought me to the point where I must consider the senses: they are the proof as well as the main foundation of our ignorance.

Without a doubt, anything that is known is known by the faculty of the knower; for, since judgement proceeds from the activity of a judge, it is reasonable that he perform that activity by his own means and by his will, not by outside constraint (as would be the case if the essence of an object were such that it forced us to know it). Now knowledge is conveyed through the senses: they are our Masters:

[B]
via qua munita fidei
Proxima fert humanum in pectus templaque mentis
.

[the highway by which conviction penetrates straight to men’s hearts and to the temple of their minds.]
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[A] Knowledge begins with them and can be reduced to them. After all, we would have no more knowledge than a stone if we did not know that there exist sound, smell, light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, roughness, colour, sheen, breadth, depth. They form the foundations and principles on which our knowledge is built. [C] Indeed, for some thinkers, knowledge is sensation. [A] Anyone who can force me to contradict the evidence of the senses has got me by the throat: he cannot make me retreat any further. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge.