Knowledge of nature and knowledge of human beings. Knowledge of things and knowledge of oneself.
What is interesting and decisive is not knowing the world's secrets but knowing man himself.
Useful knowledge vs. useless knowledge.
Knowledge through cause is useless. Knowledge through causes as cultural, ornamental knowledge.
Demetrius (a Cynic): to be a good athlete it is enough to know only those actions that can actually be used and that are used most frequently in the struggle. And these well-mastere actions must have become so familiar that they are always available an can be resorted to whenever the opportunity arises.
Demetrius: You may not know what causes the ebb and flow of the ocean tides; you may not know why every seventh year imprints a new character on the life of man; why it is that twins are conceived separately, but are born together; why those who are born together have different destinies...
Everything that can make us better or happier, Nature has placed in plain sight and within our reach. If man has fortified himself against the accidents of fortune, if he has risen above fear, if, in the greed of his hopes he does not embrace the infinite but learns to seek his riches in himself; if he has cast out the dread of men and gods, convinced that he has little to fear from man and nothing from God; if, despising all frivolities which are the torment as well as the ornament of life, he has come to understand that death produces no evils, and ends many; if he has dedicated himself to Virtue, and finds every path to which she calls him easy; if he sees himself as a social being born to live in a community; if he views the world as the universal home of mankind, if he has opened his conscience to the gods and always lives as if in public---then , respecting himelf more than others, from from storms, he is settled in an unalterable calm; then he has gathered withing him all truly useful and necessary science: the rest is only the diversion of leisure.
A soul alreay retired to shelter may occasionally lose itself in these speculations which serve to embellish the mind rather than strengthen it.
So what we should know are relations: the subject's relations with everything around him. These kinds of knowledge such that the subject's mode of being is transformed when he has them, when he possesses them, he becomes better.
It is thanks to this also that, respecting ourselves more than we respect others, free from storms, we are settled in an unalterable calm. In solido et sereno stare: We can stand in the firm and serene element.
Cultural embellishment is something that may well be true but does not change the subject's mode of being in any way.
ethos: the individual's way of being, his mode of existence.
Knowing, knowledge of something, is useful when it has a form and functions in such a way that it can prouce ethos.
Epicurus (Vatican Sayings 45): You must preactice philosophy for yourself and not for Greece.
The study of nature does not form men who are fond of boasting and who are verbal performers, or those who make a show of the culture which is envied by the asses, but men, rather, who are haughty and independent, and who take pride in what is theri own and not what comes from curcumstances.
Epicurus's phusiologia: it gives individual boldness and courage, a kind of intrepidity, which enables hi to stand firm not only against the many beliefs that otherw wish to impose on him, but also against life's dangers and the authority of those who want to lay down the law, Absence of fear, boldness, a sort of recalcitrance and spiritedness.
The effects from phusiologia:
autarkeis: they will depend only on themselves.contenti: to be satisfied with oneself. They need nothing other than themselves, but will find a number of resources within themselves, and the possibility in particular of experiencing pleasure and delight in the full relationship they will have with themselves.
another effect is that of enabling individuals to take pride in what is their own and not what derives from circumstances.
At every moment being able to say whether or not it depends on oneself; putting all one's pride, all one's satisfaction, and all one's self-affirmation with regard to others, in the fact that one can recognize what depends on oneself; and establishing a total, absolute, an limitless mastery over that which depends on oneself.
Epicurus: You must convince yourslef that knowlege of celestial phinomena has no other end than peace of mind and firm confidence.... Our life, in fact, does not need foolishness and empty opinion, it needs untroubled renewal. **
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