The Hand and the Fist

I do my best not to inflict my love of epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, on unsuspecting victims, so I will keep this brief. 

For all of the theoretical complexities, the problems really boil down to what we can truly know, and how we might come to knowing it. 

The Stoics stood apart from the Skeptics, whether Academic or Pyrrhonian, and also, to a lesser degree, from the Epicureans, by insisting that the mind possessed the power to understand the identity of things, and thereby to learn about its own place within the order of the whole. 

Such knowledge was, however, not instantaneous, and it demanded long commitment and rigorous discipline. 

The process of coming to awareness moves gradually through stages, from receiving an impression, to granting or withholding assent through belief, to comprehending how and why something is true, and to finally acquiring the certainty and conviction of wisdom. 

Given the dominant skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism of contemporary philosophical fashion, we see yet another way in which Stoicism goes against the grain. I am regularly told how we can never really know anything at all, and that hasty assumption becomes a convenient excuse for avoiding any genuine responsibility. 

A task may well be difficult, but that hardly makes it impossible. Indeed, the difficulty may itself be a mark of its merit. 

In his Academica, Cicero offers a wonderful account of how Zeno of Citium would illustrate the progress of knowledge. I find myself turning to this image, time and time again, to ground myself whenever I feel overwhelmed by confusion. One step at a time: 

Zeno would display his hand in front of one with the fingers stretched out and say "A visual appearance is like this." 

Next he closed his fingers a little and said, "An act of assent is like this." 

Then he pressed his fingers closely together and made a fist, and said that this was comprehension (and from this illustration he gave to that process the actual name of katalepsis, "grasping", which it had not had before).  

But then he used to apply his left hand to his right fist and squeeze it tightly and forcibly, and then say that such was knowledge, which was within the power of nobody save the wise man. 

IMAGE: Theo van Doesburg, Study of a Fist (c. 1906)