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.
Third, the handing down of laws and customs: the skeptic accepts, in the conduct of daily life, the practices, rules, and pieties of his society - honouring the gods of his city, obeying its laws, observing its conventions - not because he has proved them true or grounded in the nature of things, but simply as the customs in which he finds himself, which appear to him to be the done thing. Fourth, the instruction of the arts: the skeptic practices the crafts and skills he has learned - medicine, navigation, music - exercising acquired expertise without claiming to know the ultimate principles behind it. Together these four make a full life: the skeptic perceives, eats and drinks, participates in his community, and plies his trade. And notice what is absent from the list: dogma. At no point does living require the belief that things really are as they appear. The appearances, the feelings, the customs, and the skills carry the whole weight of practical life on their own. This is the heart of the skeptic’s answer: you can do everything a human being does, and never once need to claim you have grasped the hidden truth of things.
The skeptic’s account of how to live carries a startling and liberating implication: that an enormous amount of human life runs perfectly well on far less belief than we imagine. We tend to assume that to act we must be certain - that to eat the bread I must know it nourishes, to obey the law I must believe it just, to practice my craft I must grasp its ultimate principles. The skeptic quietly demonstrates that none of this is so. We can eat, obey, and work guided merely by how things appear, by what we feel, by the customs we have absorbed, and by the skills we have picked up - needing nowhere along the way the heavy, anxious conviction that we have grasped the real nature of things. Strip away the dogmatic certainty, and the life remains; what departs is only the worry.
This is, in the end, the skeptic’s case for his way of living as a better way: not merely possible but more tranquil, because lighter. The dogmatist carries his certainties like a heavy pack - he must defend them, fears to lose them, suffers when the world contradicts them. The skeptic walks the same roads, does the same work, keeps the same customs, but carries no such load; he holds the appearances loosely, as appearances, ready to be revised, never staked upon as final truth. There is something genuinely attractive in this picture of a life fully engaged yet inwardly unburdened - and something genuinely troubling in it too, for a life that never commits to any truth may also be a life that stands for nothing. The skeptic’s art of living undogmatically is at once an enviable serenity and a disquieting detachment. To weigh it fairly is to confront a real question about ourselves: how much of what we carry as certain knowledge do we actually need in order to live - and how much of it is only the weight we have agreed to bear?
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.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.