Cicero's Concept of Knowledge

Marcus Cicero had an interesting way of describing a human being's attempt to grasp and gain knowledge. He said to think of your left hand and your right hand. First, feel the right hand. That is the sensation that is the bedrock of all knowledge: the senses. Second, feel the right hand beginning to form a fist. That is the grasping at understanding, or the ascent to knowledge. Third, squeeze the right hand fist tightly into a ball. This is your comprehension of ideas and facts. Last, true knowledge comes when you firmly grasp your right fist with your left hand and join the two together.

Cicero, like John Locke, believed that all knowledge comes to us through the senses, it is not innate to us. But our senses are configured in a way that allows us to use the data they collect in unusual and creative ways, this is called reason, centered in our brain but not exclusive to it. In Cicero's analogy, this is the left hand grasping the right:the force within us that orders the facts and ideas we perceive, our Reason.

In this light, we might say reason is simply another form of sense like touch, taste, sight, or smell. But it is the sense that integrates all the others when they arrive in our bodies. For instance, when we hear music why don't we just hear a jumble of sounds? What is it that perceives patterns in the sound that move us to tears, anger, love, or war? It is not the ears, they are merely the conduits. What perceives or "senses" the pattern in the sound is our reason, which is centered primarily in our brain but also partly in our heart. This is why our heart rate can rise when we hear music we enjoy, or hear the voice of someone we love.

Now think of a night sky in the country filled with thousands of stars. What do our eyes perceive? Thousands of dots of light. If we simply believed our eyes why should we assume that they are anything else but little lights in the sky? If a dog or cat looked skyward at night and saw the same little lights what would he/she think it was seeing??....little lights, nothing more. For us, a being that is also human, our reason tells us something about those little lights is more interesting than what we simply see. They must be gods, or planets or stars or something. That part of our reason is called our imagination.

So we see that our reason and imagination are simply the same perception in different forms. Our reason in its pure form is the ability to see or detect patterns in sight, sound, etc. Our reason in its Imaginative form is the ability to discern the possibility that a pattern may exist even when we do not see it. Related to this, it is also the ability to CREATE patterns that do not exist yet. This is called art. It is our reason, through the power of our imagination that allows us to be creative, to create patterns......in painting, architecture, music, politics, business, cooking, writing, medicine, acting, engineering, computer science, or any number of human endeavors.

Discovery and invention are the healthy children of reason and imagination. It is not necessity that mothered invention but imagination. Indeed, we often imagine a necessity to justify an invention. We seek to cloak our passion to imagine in the proper homespun of utility while secretly sporting the more garish garments of whimsy and spontaneity of which our imagination adorns itself.

So, imagine this: was fire discovered or invented? Of course both. We discovered that it existed through simple reason that it might be useful to us and not simply something to avoid. But we invented those uses through our imagination. The fire did not create its uses, human beings created uses for fire through imagination. Imagine that next time you are roasting a marsh mellow by a campfire.