234 //-100 to //-101
Cicero On Goals 5.16-21 [11-100]
- Since there is so much disagreement about this [the goal of life]
we should employ the division of Carneades, which our friend Antioch us
is so fond of using. Carneades discerned not only all the views which
philosophers had yet held about the highest good, but also all the views
which are possible. So he claimed that no craft took its starting point
from itself, since there is always something external which is the object
of the craft. We need not prolong this point with examples; for it is
obvious that no craft is concerned with itself, but the craft is distinct
from its object. So just as medicine is the craft of health and helmsmanship
is the craft of navigation, in the same way prudence is the craft of
living; therefore it too must be constituted by and take its principle from
something else. 17. It is a matter of general agreement that the concern
of prudence and its goal must be what is adapted and accommodated to
nature and such as to stimulate and stir up, all by itself, an impulse in
the mind (which the Greeks call horme). But there is no agreement about
what it is which thus moves us and which nature seeks from the moment
of birth-and that is the source of all the disagreement among philoso-
phers when they are considering what the highest good is. For the source
of the entire debate about the limits of good and bad, when they investigate
the extreme limits of each, is to be found in the primary natural affiliations;
and when that is found, the whole debate about the highest good and
[worst] bad [thing] is derived from it as from a source. - Some philosophers think that our first impulse is to pleasure and
that our first avoidance is of pain. Others think that freedom from pain
is what we first welcome and that pain is the first object of avoidance.
Others again take their start from the things which they call primary
according to nature-a class in which they include the integrity and
preservation of all of our parts, health, sound sense organs, freedom from
pain, strength, good looks, and other things of this kind; similar to these
are the primary natural things in the soul, which are as it were the sparks
and seeds of the virtues. Since it is some one of these three which first
stirs nature into action, either to pursue something or to avoid it, and
since there can be no additional possibility beyond these three, it follows
necessarily that the tasks of pursuit and avoidance are to be referred to
one of these. Consequently, that prudence which we called the craft of
living is concerned with some one of those three things and takes from
it the basic principle for all of life. - One's theory of what is right and honourable is derived from
whichever of these three which one has decided is the thing which
stimulates nature into action, and this theory can correspond with any