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Hermotimus and the Futility of Philosophy
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Authored by Frank Redmond, 2011
I am glad you do not palter with the truth. But what are your hopes in pursuing philosophy, then? You see that neither your own teacher, nor his, nor his again, and so on to the tenth generation, has been absolutely wise and so attained Happiness. It will not serve you to say that it is enough to get near Happiness; that is no good; a person on the doorstep is just as much outside and in the air as another a long way off, though with the difference that the former is tantalized by a nearer view.
The Hermotimus likes to evoke the concept of infinitude to explain why Philosophy as a subject and discipline is ultimately futile. If one man is not wise, and his teacher is not wise, and his teacher was not wise, and so on - who then is wise from the teachings of Philosophy? Infinitude is a great way to show futility as almost everything over the course of time gets degraded including in this case Philosophy.
Philosophy by its very nature is indeterminate - look at how Socrates refused to acknowledge that he knew anything. Lucian's contention is that when philosophers turned into dogmatists, that is when the discipline turned sour. There are a few examples of people who eschewed this characterization. One is Lucian's own example the Life of Demonax. However, Lucian's view is that Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, etc. have all lost the original impetus of Philosophy, wonder and ignorance (e.g. indeterminate things).