Curiosity Is Not Yet Wisdom
Lucius, Psyche, and the hunger for hidden things
Lucius wants magic. Psyche wants to see Cupid’s face. Both desire knowledge. Both discover that curiosity becomes dangerous when it seeks spectacle, power, or possession rather than truth.
Curiosity is one of the great engines of human life.
Without it, no one investigates, invents, studies, explores, asks questions, enters libraries, opens archives, looks under floorboards, or wonders why a symbol has been placed where it has.
Curiosity is not the enemy.
But curiosity is not yet wisdom.
Lucius wants magical experience. Psyche wants to see Cupid. Both desire hidden knowledge. Both act under the pressure of imagination, fear, attraction, and the intoxicating belief that the answer lies just beyond the boundary they have been told not to cross.
Both discover that knowledge sought for the wrong reasons can make a person less free.
Curiosity as appetite
The Roman word curiositas can suggest inquisitiveness, restlessness, excessive meddling, appetite for novelty, and the desire to know what is hidden from one.
Lucius has this appetite in abundance.
He does not merely want to understand magic. He wants to experience it. He wants to possess it. He wants to become one of those people for whom ordinary rules no longer apply. He wants the story.
This is why his curiosity differs from philosophy.
Philosophy asks what is true.
Lucius asks what will happen if he tries it.
The difference is not trivial.
A person can seek knowledge in order to become wiser. Or he can seek knowledge in order to become more interesting, more powerful, more exceptional, more entertained, or more certain that he possesses something others lack.
The first kind of inquiry is disciplined by truth.
The second is disciplined by appetite.
Psyche’s lamp and Lucius’ ointment
Psyche lights a lamp to see Cupid’s face.
Lucius applies ointment to become an owl.
Both scenes involve a desire to cross a boundary between ordinary life and hidden reality.
Psyche wants to know whether her beloved is what he appears to be. Her desire is intensified by fear and the envy of her sisters.
Lucius wants to enter the world of magic because the ordinary human condition feels insufficiently exciting.
Psyche’s curiosity wounds Love.
Lucius’ curiosity transforms him into an ass.
The stories are different, but their moral pattern overlaps.
Knowledge is not neutral.
The soul brings motives to it.
A person who seeks hidden knowledge from vanity may become vain with it.
A person who seeks it from fear may become more frightened.
A person who seeks it from the need for control may become captive to what he hoped to master.
A person who seeks it from wonder, humility, patience, and love of truth may become wiser.
The question is not simply, “What do you want to know?”
It is, “What do you hope knowing it will make you?”
The cave and the hidden room
Plato’s Cave offers another version of the problem.
The prisoners see shadows and take them for reality. One might assume that the answer is simply more information: turn around, see the fire, learn how the images are made.
But Plato’s prisoner must continue upward. The fire behind him is more real than the shadows, but it is not yet the sun.
This is a useful warning for the curious person.
Discovering that there is a hidden mechanism behind appearances does not make one wise automatically. A person may leave one illusion and become enchanted by a more sophisticated one. He may learn a secret and mistake the possession of that secret for enlightenment.
The seeker of truth must remain teachable.
He must be willing to find that what he hoped would make him important may instead reveal his own immaturity.
Curiosity becomes wisdom only when it is willing to be corrected by what it discovers.
The Masonic use of curiosity
Freemasonry naturally attracts curiosity. It has symbols, history, ritual, architecture, degrees, artifacts, famous members, disputed origins, old books, and enough overlapping traditions to keep a serious researcher occupied for years.
Curiosity is not a defect in the Mason.
It is often the beginning of study.
But curiosity becomes thin if it seeks only novelty, secrets, superiority, or an identity that makes the seeker feel more interesting than ordinary life permits.
The better question is not, “What hidden thing can I acquire?”
It is, “What visible duty have I failed to understand?”
The symbol is not more profound because it is obscure.
It is more profound when it changes a person’s conduct.
The secret worth seeking is not a phrase, a sign, or a hidden genealogy.
It is the difficult knowledge of what governs oneself.
Lucius wants to know how to fly.
He learns, more painfully, how much he does not know about walking.
Endnotes and further reading
Apuleius, Metamorphoses Books 1–3, on Lucius’ fascination with magic and his transformation.
Apuleius, Metamorphoses Books 4–6, on Psyche’s lamp and curiosity.
On Psyche’s curiositas and moral development, see scholarship on Apuleius’ tale.[5]
Plato, Republic VII, on the Cave and the gradual ascent from shadows toward truth.[6]
Related reading: “Why Psyche Was Told Not to Look” and “The Symbol Is Not the Thing.”
