The Pyrrhonean Skeptic
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The Pyrrhonean Skeptic © 2008
Erik Wiegardt, Tutor
College of Stoic Philosophers
* *
Doubt grows with knowledge.
Goethe (1749-1832)
Preface
After several years of focused study on the lives and thoughts of the ancient Stoa, one day for no
apparent reason, I stopped and asked myself how I knew any of what I had learned was true. How did I
know whether the Stoics just made it all up, that Stoicism was anything other than a rational and
internally consistent version of a religion? That thought bothered me considerably, and I puzzled over it
at length.
As fortune would have it I had some time earlier established an E-mail correspondence with a
Professor Keith Campbell, Chairman of the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. I
considered him my mentor in philosophical matters and had pestered him many times with questions he
must have considered amusing or annoying. He never said. Not knowing a finer way to phrase it, I
came right out and directly asked him the question that was troubling me: how can I know anything I
had studied and we discussed about the Stoa were true? He answered as directly as I asked and said that
we can’t, then recommended I read George Santayana’s work, Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover,
1955).
I read it, twice, and understood some of it. But I still wasn’t satisfied. I began reading other
philosophers that Santayana’s work referenced and gradually traced my new obsession, the skeptical
philosophy, back to it origins. Only then did I begin to understand philosophy in general and Stoic
philosophy in particular. And, for Dr. Campbell’s kindness, for pointing the way at the moment it was
most needed, I am deeply grateful.
* * *
1. The Origins of Doubt
Xenophanes (570-478 BCE).
The brightest light of Pyrrhonean doubt shined on Aenesidemus,
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creator of Pyrrhonism, but the first
glimmer of this light began nearly five centuries earlier with Xenophanes, a wandering poetphilosopher from Ionia born in the town of Colophon who lived in a number of Greek city states during
his exceedingly long life. He was often claimed by the ancients to be the first true skeptic based
especially upon one preserved fragment of his work, a comment he purportedly made about
knowledge:
...and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will there be anyone
who knows about the gods and what I say about all things. For even if, in the best
case, one happened to speak just of what has been brought, still he himself would
not know. But opinion is allotted to all.
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Contemporary academic philosophers argue over the exact interpretation of this text, but the gist of it is
that there never has been and never will be anyone who can achieve certain knowledge.
Heraclitus (c.535-475 BCE) and Parmenides (early 5th century BCE).
Heraclitus disagreed with Xenophanes and believed it was possible to provide an explanation of the
world by the relationship of the Logos, the divine intelligence, to the human psyche, the seat of human
knowledge whereby we come to know the intelligence of the Logos. This is thought to be the origins of
epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge, in Western philosophy. Then Heraclitus went on to
describe the processes of nature as the emanation of the One, the Logos, into the many, the many parts
of our familiar world, and back again in a continuous state of flux. Existence as we know it is in such a
state of flux that at any given moment one could not describe the nature of any object because by the
time it was described it would have changed again and become slightly different. Heraclitus maintained
that all objects in our world were in a state of becoming from birth and growth to deterioration and
death, from the life of planets to the aging of our own physical constitution.
Parmenides disagreed with Heraclitus and believed that God, the One could not become the many,
all the many parts of our familiar world. He thought it was impossible. In fact, if the One were perfect
why would it extend itself into a state of imperfection? No, the One was an immovable being, the world
was in a state of being not becoming, the Heraclitean notion of flux, and the changes we see in life as
we know it was an illusion. In his work The Way of Truth, Parmenides states that the One is “whole,
immobile, eternal all together,
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one and continuous.” There were two kinds of knowledge: true
knowledge and common knowledge, and what most of us see with our senses and believe is of the
common sort, mere opinion.
Democritus (?460-357 BCE).
Not long after Xenophanes’ death, Democritus of Abdera and Miletus, became renowned as one of
the two founders of ancient atomic theory. Democritus was a contemporary of Socrates but apparently
unknown by him – although Diogenes Laertius says that Plato (?427-347 BCE) considered this “prince
of philosophers” his chief intellectual rival and refused to mention him so as not have to refute him.
Democritus systematized the work of the other founder of atomism, his teacher Leucippus, and
proposed that there were two kinds of reality: atoms and void. As a materialist, he believed that even
the soul was comprised of atoms, fire atoms in this case, and proposed that thought was itself caused by
the movement of atoms. However, because atoms were not directly perceptible, there would always be
doubt as to their true nature. In addition, it was Democritus who coined the phrase ou mallon (literally,
‘no more’), frequently used by Pyrrhoneans to describe conflicting evidence of the senses that tell us
no more this than that.
Protagoras (481-411 BCE).
The doubt that was accumulating incrementally towards a real philosophy was carried even further
by Protagoras, a pupil of Democritus, who is credited with the first realization that there were two sides
to every question, that each has its opposite. Protagoras is also the author of the famous quotation used
throughout history: “Man is the measure of all things.” The quote in its entirety: “Man is the measure
of all things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.” One of his most startling
statements
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was that everything is true. In the introduction to his book, On the Gods, he wrote, “As to
the gods, I have no means of knowing that they exist or that they do not exist.” For this, he was
expelled from Athens, and a herald was sent throughout the city to collect and burn every copy of that
book.
Socrates (469-399 BCE) and Plato (427-347 BCE).
Finally, two more philosophers added their voices to the doubt that we can know anything, Socrates
and Plato. Just as Protagoras incurred the wrath of the Athenians for his lack of piety so did Socrates
who was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and forced to drink hemlock for his philosophy.
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But it was his commonly heard assertion that he knew that he knew nothing (despite the obvious
internal conflict of such a statement) that was most sympathetic with the claims of later philosophers of
skeptical minds.
Plato immortalized Socrates, who left no writings, by introducing the world to that sage’s life and
dialectic method of questioning. Plato also attempted a reconciliation between Heraclitus’ flux and
Parmenides’ rejection of the senses in the proposition of his own Doctrine of Ideas. In short, the
Doctrine of Ideas states that behind the surface reality of our familiar world lie ideas, universal laws
and ideals, perfect idealizations of reality, more real than what we actually perceive with our senses.
For example, we see many different kinds of dogs in our lifetime, each of which is a mere
representation of the idea of dog. The idea of some thing, then, is universal and permanent, and
therefore more real than the many variations of that idea represented in the world. This is not meant to
be an exhaustive explanation of Plato’s doctrine, barely an introduction, and it should also be
remembered that such a doctrine was only one of many early influences on the development of
skeptical thought.
2. Pyrrho (?360-270 BCE)
Skepticism comes from the Greek word skepsis which means investigation, the work of the
philosopher, which commonly begins with finding a criterion that distinguishes the true from the false.
The Skeptics were unable to find a satisfactory criterion of truth. The fullness of skeptical thought
didn’t arrive until the first century BCE when Aenesidemus and later philosophers of this persuasion
such as Sextus Empiricus developed skepticism to an advanced level of sophistication built upon the
foundations of earlier work done by a number of great
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thinkers, including those mentioned above.
However, it was Pyrrho that Aenesidemus returned to in the establishment of his school because he
apparently believed that the life and work of Pyrrho marked the true beginnings of this most pure
branch of ancient skeptical thought, which was known thereafter as Pyrrhonism.
Early Pyrrho
Little of Pyrrho’s early life is known except that he appears to have been born in Elis and was an
older contemporary of Epicurus and Zeno the Stoic. He was an obscure painter by trade, and he may
have studied philosophy with the Megarians and the Cynics. We also know that Pyrrho traveled to India
with Anaxarchus who was court philosopher to Alexander the Great. Little is known of Anaxarchus or
his philosophy except that it was reputed he had disposed of the notion there was a criterion of truth,
indicating he had a skeptical orientation. And, according to Diogenes Laertius (D.L. 9.67) he admired
Democritus above all others. Whether Pyrrho accompanied Alexander on his eastern campaign as a
court painter or as a second philosopher is unknown, but such a journey was not that unusual. By the
time Pyrrho made his trip to India there was already a tradition of Greek intellectuals traveling to that
remote extremity of Alexander’s expanding empire.
Pyrrho and the Gymnosophists
Pyrrho traveled with Alexander to Persia (Iran), where he studied with the Magi, a class of
Zoroastrian priests who lived in Media and Persia and who were reputed to have supernatural powers.
He continued on with the Army to the Indus Valley where he studied with the gymnosophists, naked
philosophers, who may have been early Buddhists. Although the majority of scholars tend to gloss over
this period in Pyrrho’s life and education, there has been work done that suggests that the
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descriptions
of Pyrrho after his travels to the Indus Valley are those of a Buddhist arhat, one who has attained
nirvana. There are scholars who suggest he wasn’t a skeptic at all but lived and taught as an ascetic and
quietist. However, scholarly research of the evidence is so fragmentary as to make speculation
inconclusive.
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The best evidence we have for a gymnosophist influence on Pyrrho’s philosophy comes from
Flintoff who compares Pyrrho’s thought with early Buddhist teachings. By the time of the earliest
sutras and onward, polarities and antinomies – a contradiction between two statements, both apparently
obtained by correct reasoning – are common. The so-called agnosticism of the Buddha comes from his
use of antinomial argument in answering questions that he considered insoluble. The Buddha
considered all speculation as dogma and refused to commit himself to an answer. By doing so, he
taught that he was delivering the human mind from unnecessary entanglement, and that this freedom of
the mind was a necessary stage in the process of enlightenment. As Flintoff says, “...it is integral to
Pyrrhonism and to Buddhist, and other Indian, thought to formulate the antinomies in order to make
them disappear, the consequence and aim of the process being so that a certain tranquility can
supervene.”
Flintoff goes on to describe an Indian mode of thinking called the quadrilemma (four dilemmas),
and states that this form of thought was unprecedented in Greek philosophy. In Buddhism, the
quadrilemma called the Avyakrta (literally, “the inexpressibles”) is central to their philosophy and takes
the following form:
1. Whether the world is eternal or not, or both, or neither.
2. Whether the world is finite, or infinite, or both, or neither.
3. Whether the Tathagata (the Buddha) exists after death or not, or both, or neither.
4. Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it.
In both Pyrrhonism and Buddhism the antinomial argument is used to alter our way of thinking
about our familiar world to show that it is, in fact, an illusion, unreal – what Indians called Maya. The
goal or end of
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both philosophies is tranquility (ataraxia). The achievement of tranquility is a process,
which is as follows:
1. Cessation of all conceptualization takes place, leading to...
2. Cessation of all speech, leading to...
3. Cessation of all troubling thought (ataraxia), nirvana, moksa, leading to...
4. “A state of beatitude at the end of the philosophical quest!”
The striking similarity between early Buddhism and Pyhhro’s thought also continued in his personal
life and practice. As was the case with all ancients, unlike modern philosophers, practice was expected
to complete a philosopher’s theory. It’s clear from the numerous and various reports that Pyrrho
practiced what he taught, and that his practice was similar to that of an arhat. For examples: As is
common among advanced Hatha yogis, Pyrrho was said to be able to withstand the most extreme pain
without even an involuntary frown; he was said to spend a lot of time wandering the fields and living
on grass and herbs, as is common practice in the third and fourth stages of asceticism; finally, it was
said that he lived as a vagrant, often leaving home without any attachments and to travel with anyone
for as long as it interested him.
Teachings of Pyrrho
Remnants of Pyrrho’s teachings are scarce and fragmentary and therefore difficult to appraise both
in terms of content and inspiration for later skeptics. What little we do know comes to us in fragments
of the thought of his student and follower Timon of Phlius (c.320-230 BCE) found in the works of
other writers in antiquity. Although an admirer of Democritus, Timon certainly took skepticism further
than the atomist, rejecting atomism as well as all common opinions. By so doing, he is said to have
given up on philosophy and on any attempts to establish a criterion of
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truth (D.L. 9.69.65; Sextus, PH
1.28-29 & AM 11.1 from Groarke). Also from Diogenes Laertius we learn that Pyrrho denied there was
any such thing as the morally good or morally bad, and said that all such labels were a matter of
convention. He also denied knowledge of the external world and was especially critical of the Stoic and
Epicurean Epistemology (theories of knowledge), although there is no evidence that he attacked either
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school personally. Pyrrho’s greatest innovation as a Greek philosopher was holding that freedom from
disturbance by the suspension of judgment (ataraxia) could be an ethical goal.
One of the most useful of these fragments is found in Aristocles’ work, On Philosophy, that ascribes
the following essential teaching to Pyrrho as reported by Timon:
His pupil Timon says that the man who means to be happy must consider these three questions:
1.) what things are really like; 2.) what attitude we should adopt towards them; 3.) what the
consequence of such an attitude will be. According to Timon, Pyrrho declared that things are
equally indistinguishable, unmeasurable and indeterminable. For this reason neither our acts
of perception are true or false. Therefore we should not rely upon them but be without
judgments, inclining neither this way nor that, but be steadfast saying concerning each
individual thing that it no more is than is not, or that it both is and is not, or that it neither is
nor is not. For those who adopt this attitude the consequence will be first a refusal to make
assertions and second, freedom from disturbance. (Eusebius, Prep. Ev. 14.18.2-5, Long)
As seen from the above, Pyrrho’s answer to the basic question of Greek philosophy, ‘what things
are really like’, must be rejected because things are ‘indistinguishable, unmeasurable, and
indeterminable’. In other words, unknowable. Such an assertion flew in the face of Greek philosophers
who assumed that nature could be studied, analyzed, and drawn upon as a resource for knowledge. But
Pyrrho is saying reason as well as sense perception is unreliable and cannot be a criterion of truth. We
only have our senses to perceive the external world. Since we don’t know if our sense perception
portrays the world as it