Pyrrho of Elis · Philosophy
The hardest question for skepticism is practical: how do you <em>live</em> if you suspend judgement about everything? Pyrrho’s answer is that the skeptic lives by appearances, guided by nature’s feelings, the customs of his country, and acquired skills - acting fully, but without dogmatic belief about the hidden nature of things.
Of all the objections to skepticism, the most immediate and the most powerful is the practical one: how can a skeptic live? If you genuinely suspend judgement about everything - if you neither affirm nor deny that the food before you is nourishing, that the cliff at your feet is dangerous, that fire burns and water drowns - then surely you cannot act at all. To act is to choose, and to choose is to take one course as better than another, which is to make a judgement. A being that judged nothing, the critics urged, would sit motionless until it starved, never reaching for food (since it cannot judge food good) nor avoiding the precipice (since it cannot judge falling bad). The skeptic’s theory, they charged, is refuted by the mere fact that the skeptic goes on living - eating, walking, talking, fleeing danger - exactly as if he held the beliefs he claims to suspend. This is the apraxia (‘inactivity’) objection, and it was pressed hardest by the Stoics, for whom action and assent were inseparable.
Pyrrho and his successors took this objection with the utmost seriousness, because they recognised that a philosophy one cannot live is no philosophy at all - and that their whole appeal rested on the promise of a better life, a tranquil one. If skepticism made life impossible, it could not deliver the tranquillity it advertised. So the skeptics developed a careful and subtle account of how the suspended life is not only possible but, they claimed, especially calm and well-functioning. The key, once again, is the distinction between appearance and the hidden nature of things - and the recognition that appearances, all by themselves, are entirely sufficient to guide a human life.
Sextus’ fourfold account of how the skeptic lives repays close study, because it shows that a complete and recognisable human life can be built entirely out of appearances, with no dogmatic foundation underneath. First, the guidance of nature: by our natural constitution we are equipped to perceive and to think. The skeptic does not switch off his senses or his reason; he sees, hears, reasons, and remembers, as nature made him to. Second, the compulsion of the feelings: hunger conducts us to food, thirst to drink, cold to shelter. These are not beliefs but bodily affects, forced on us by our nature, and they move us to act regardless of any theory. The skeptic, like everyone else, feels them and responds.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the skeptic answers the ‘inactivity’ objection by living ‘by appearances’ - adhering to the everyday world without dogmatic belief about its hidden nature. Sextus gives a fourfold practical guide: (1) the guidance of nature (we perceive and think), (2) the compulsion of feelings (hunger leads to food)…
Leads to Socrates.
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