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Cicero’s political philosophy — II — Skepticism, wisdom, and politics
[This series is based on Walter Nicgorski’s Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy. See part I.]
There are two chief priorities in philosophy, according to Cicero in his Academica: judicium veri, the search for a criterion of truth, and finis bonorum, the determination of what is good. In other words: epistemology and ethics. After all, it’s all well and good to talk about what a happy or fulfilling life for a human being ought to be, but such talk is empty unless one can reasonably answer the obvious question: how do you know? (I’ve argued in the past that a very similar coupling with epistemology should apply also to another major branch of philosophy: metaphysics.)
It is because of this attention to the criterion of truth that Cicero clearly allied himself with one of the two major skeptical schools of the Hellenistic period, the so-called New Academy. He rejected the approach typical of the other skeptics, Pyrrhonism, as explained by Walter Nicgorski in his Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy: Cicero couldn’t “take seriously a skepticism which he found disabling because it undermines human responsibility by leaving man unable to know standards and goals of action.” That is why Cicero’s style of skepticism is often referred to as moderate or, better yet, Socratic, as it arches back to the sort of open inquiry for which Socrates was most famous.
Indeed, Cicero’s attraction to Stoicism and partial endorsement of Stoic philosophy is exactly in synch with his attitude as an Academic Skeptic. In his mind, the Stoics got a number of things probably right, so it makes sense to provisionally follow them, always being ready to abstain from or even reject some of their specific teachings, should they appear philosophically questionable.
A major reason to reject the more radical, Pyrrhonian type of skepticism is that it doesn’t provide us with any criterion for philosophical investigation of the nature of a eudaimonic life. Pyrrhonists did adopt several criteria for action, but these were simply based on the cultural habits of the society in which they happened to be living, as well as in basic human drives such as anger, thirst, and the like. Such a life has very little “philosophical” about…
