Cicero, knowledge, and naming all the birds

Dare to know.

Where we were hiking… Pacific coast, home to ‘bird rocks’ near the shore

My younger daughter and I were out for a hike by the Pacific coast, when I spotted a bird. It was a pelican. I knew from past hikes that this was a brown pelican, but for the life of me, it looked completely gray! So I started a soliloquy about how this bird was misnamed. Soon after, I began wondering aloud about other bird names, trying to figure out what they were, and how to identify them. I decried my lack of knowledge.

My daughter, listening throughout, interrupted. “Mom, we don’t have to know ALL the birds’ names. We can just enjoy our hike. It’s not a big deal.” Her frustration was palpable.

Calmness. A connection with nature. Aesthetic beauty. This is what my daughter wanted to experience on her hike. (Her approach reminds me a bit of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, whom I wrote about here.) Meanwhile, I was searching my brain for scientific information about nature. It made me stop and think. Why did I want to know all the names of these birds, and why did I want to question why they were named the way they were? Why did I want to identify all the trees? Why did I need to understand the types and ages of the rocks we were standing on?

The pelicans!

“Dare to know” was a concept popularized by philosopher Immanuel Kant during the Enlightenment. It’s derived from the Latin phrase “Sapere aude,” which has also been loosely translated as “Have courage to use your own reason” or “Dare to know things through reason” or “Dare to be wise.” It was originally a quote from the Roman poet Horace’s First Book of Letters.

I do dare to know. I am dying for information, and often, my curiosity eats away at me if I don’t know things. But I know that sometimes, with all this data, I reach the limits of what I can remember. Maybe I’ll become a bird watcher in my later middle age, but surely I’ll tap into a book or an app to help me out. I’ll never keep all that knowledge in my head. Yet I still want access to that knowledge and to grow my own as I experience the world, to understand more than what meets the eye.

My quest has deep philosophical roots. For Socrates, knowledge was the root of wisdom, which was in turn that central pillar of virtue. So it has had value in the philosophical tradition ever since.

But the Roman Cicero took it to another level. In On Duties (De Officiis), he explained that the virtue of wisdom had an important component: the human desire for knowledge that is part of our very nature.

Believe what you want about human nature, but without knowledge and science, we wouldn’t be able to be reading this on a device driven by electricity and a superconducting chip and using the cloud, etc., etc., etc. So there is a drive to know and to produce knowledge that gives us more knowledge.

In Book 1 (Moral Goodness) of On Duties, in a section of his discussion of the four primary Stoic virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, moderation—he writes:

Now, of the four divisions which we have made of the essential idea of moral goodness, the first [wisdom], consisting in the knowledge of truth, touches human nature most closely. For we are all attracted and drawn to a zeal for learning and knowing; and we think it glorious to excel therein, while we count it base and immoral to fall into error, to wander from the truth, to be ignorant, to be led astray. In this pursuit, which is both natural and morally right, two errors are to be avoided: first, we must not treat the unknown as known and too readily accept it; and he who wishes to avoid this error (as all should do) will devote both time and attention to the weighing of evidence. The other error is that some people devote too much industry and too deep study to matters that are obscure and difficult and useless as well.

If these errors are successfully avoided, all the labor and pains expended upon problems that are morally right and worth the solving will be fully rewarded. 

What a beautiful, and idealistic, vision of the pursuit of learning and knowing! Cicero frames this as a fundamental human trait, embedded in our nature, and that it is in fact morally right. Yet he also did point out the pitfalls of this pursuit of knowledge: too quickly accepting something for truth that we don’t really know (political disinformation, anyone?) …. And delving too deeply into the arcane or the “useless” kinds of information (for me, football statistics have always been in this category, one of the many reasons why I will never play fantasy football!).

The Stoics did contend with a fundamental problem in the field of knowing, as all philosophers do: how could we be sure of what we think we know? In the ancient literature, the Stoic sage—that once in a 500-year span person who has mastered the virtues and principles of living the Stoic way—is the only person who could really trust that what she thought was true, was actually true, due to her powers of judgment and discernment. All the rest of us are kind of guessing, using our sense data and the information around us to judge what’s true.

The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on Stoicism (by Marion Durand, Simon Shogry, and Dirk Baltzly) gives us this perspective:

…it is useful to consider the Stoics’ three-fold distinction between knowledge (epistêmê), cognition (katalêpsis), and ignorance (agnoia) (on which Chrysippus wrote four books, now lost; Diogenes Laertius, 7.201). Whereas knowledge is found only in the Sage, only the non-Sage is afflicted by ignorance.

The cognition stage can lead from ignorance to knowledge in this formulation. So, if we’re not Sages, we’re aiming for accurate cognitive impressions that we can base our decisions on. According to the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, here’s some insight into how the ancient Stoics defined a cognitive impression that could be judged to be true:

Zeno eventually settled on the following three-clause definition of the cognitive impression, which was retained throughout the history of the school. According to the Stoics, “a cognitive impression is one which:

1.        arises from what is, and

2.        is stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is,

3.        of such a kind as could not arise from what is not.” (Sextus, 40E)

These three clauses are construed by the Stoics as providing individually-necessary and jointly-sufficient conditions for an impression to be cognitive (Nawar 2014). Together, they are supposed to capture the feature(s) shared by all and only cognitive impressions, in virtue of which they serve as criteria of truth (Diogenes Laertius, 40A).

Like everything else in philosophy, this was a contested definition, and one that didn’t lend itself to an easy practice. But at least it gives us non-Sages something to hang out hats on. We can aim for these solid cognitions and hope to not be led astray into opinion (“doxa”) masquerading as fact.

To add one more wrinkle here that gets us back to Cicero: The Stoics (and those writing about them, such as Cicero) viewed the virtues as forms of knowledge. If you knew how to practice wisdom, or how to be courageous, you had knowledge that was both ethical and true to the real world, too. One more phrase from the Stanford encyclopedia stands out:

For the Stoics, comprehensive knowledge of reality (including but not limited to moral facts) is what is necessary and sufficient to live in agreement with nature and be happy.

So I’ll defend my “dare to know” approach, hoping that increasing my knowledge of “reality”—both scientific and human/ethical—will lead to a life the flows freely from nature and that guides me towards happiness. Despite not being to learn ALL the names of the birds and the trees, I want to understand as much as I humanly can about the world around me, and I derive satisfaction from that pursuit. I hope to improve my wisdom as I go!