I forget which YouTube video turned me on to it, but I have been reading Cicero’s De Officiis off and on for the last few days. Having recently gotten to the end of Book I, wherein Cicero identifies what he believes are the most important virtues, I find myself disagreeing.

In paragraph 157, he says:

And again, as swarms of bees do not gather for the sake of making honeycomb but make the honeycomb because they are gregarious by nature, so human beings—and to a much higher degree—exercise their skill together in action and thought because they are naturally gregarious. And so, if that virtue [Justice] which centres in the safeguarding of human interests, that is, in the maintenance of human society, were not to accompany the pursuit of knowledge, that knowledge would seem isolated and barren of results. In the same way, courage [Fortitude], if unrestrained by the uniting bonds of society, would be but a sort of brutality and savagery. Hence it follows that the claims of human society and the bonds that unite men together take precedence of the pursuit of speculative knowledge.

My understanding of his argument is that if we had only wisdom but not justice, then the knowledge gained through wisdom would be wasted, and courage unrestrained by justice devolves into brutality. He discusses temperance in the following paragraph (subjugating it under justice, as well), but that is not the source of my disagreement, so I’ll leave that alone.

First, I do not universally grant that “the claims of human society and the bonds that unite men together take precedence of the pursuit of speculative knowledge”. I do grant that this is often the case: if all able-bodied people are needed to fight off a foreign invasion, then an able-bodied person studying underwater basket-weaving while the rest of the country fights is decidedly not providing the same utility. This is, of course, a straw man argument that I have handily defeated, but I will provide a stronger one: the existential threat faced by Britain during World War II did necessitate the participation of all able-bodied persons to defeat the Nazi threat. Yet, not all of those people were on the front lines; some—like Turing and his team—were engaged deeply in speculative knowledge, trying to decrypt Nazi communications to save their kinsmen. My point here is that not all speculative knowledge is worthless.

But, since I have offered a stronger version of my own argument, let me do the same for Cicero: let us instead say that “…the bonds that unite men together take precedence of the pursuit of wisdom in a vacuum“—that is, wisdom gained that is not applied to anything, is not shared or disseminated, but that is hoarded by those who collect it. In that case, I do grant that wisdom in a vacuum is not useful, and frankly any societally imposed duty takes precedence. Yet, it does not follow that because justice (or other societal duties) supersedes this narrow slice of wisdom (well vacuumed), justice also supersedes all wisdom.

To paraphrase Socrates: justice cannot exist without wisdom, and neither can courage nor temperance, for that matter. How can you behave justly if you cannot differentiate justice from injustice? Wisdom is how you do that. How can you be courageous rather than rash or cowardly if you cannot identify what is truly dangerous or harmless, or cannot assess your preparedness to face those risks? Wisdom, again, is the differentiator. How can you know how much to partake of something rather than giving oneself over to gluttony, lust, or anger, versus abstaining entirely? Wisdom to the rescue once more. Wisdom is the catalyst that makes all the other virtues possible; one could call the other virtues “applied wisdom”. Without it, you have nothing. Therefore, I disagree that justice is more important than wisdom; wisdom is a prerequisite to justice, but justice is not a prerequisite to wisdom.

Having said that, I reiterate that I don’t disagree with the steel man that Shop-Vac wisdom is useless. A mortal person sitting and collecting all the wisdom of the ages and then dying, having passed none of that wisdom on, was—in the most hard-nosed, utilitarian sense—a waste of resources. Yet, if that same person writes, teaches, discusses, and shares that wisdom with others, then mankind is better for it, whether that is through a more just* society, increased courage on the battlefield or courtroom, or temperance in personal life.

Moreover, wisdom is inherently useful if taken from its vacuum; it need not be applied to the other virtues to have utility. If we can consider wisdom to be the power of discernment in the abstract; justice to be the specialized discernment of just and unjust; courage to be the specialized discernment of risk versus non-risk and preparedness versus non-preparedness; and temperance to be the specialized discernment of propriety versus impropriety, then surely there are other other areas of discernment that do not fit into those specializations. As an example, history-based wisdom (that is, wisdom derived from the application of historical knowledge to predict the outcomes of modern situations and learning from the accuracy or inaccuracy of those predictions) can help one prepare for adverse eventualities. Being able to predict, for instance, that a petty person with a grievance, granted power, will try to use that power to crush his enemies, grants one a general playbook to use when dealing with that person. Some of that playbook does indeed fall under the other virtues—courage to stand up to him when the time is right, temperance in speech and action to avoid unnecessary hostility, and justice in restoring those harmed by his reign of terror—but the playbook is broader than that. Wisdom of this nature can lead one to preemptively set up safeguards to prevent his overreach in the first place, or can train one to spot and monitor in individuals the signs of pettiness, vindictiveness, and the craving for power to settle those urges, and to intervene before he is capable of harming others. These preventative measures might at times require the other virtues to enact, but conceiving the plan is pure wisdom. Thus wisdom is more than just a catalyst for the other virtues; it is the most general-purpose of them and a necessary ingredient for the rest.

* Fun fact: “juster” is technically correct, but “juster society” feels weird to say.