The Complete Essays (87 page)

[A] Cicero himself, who owed such worth as he had to his learning, was said by Valerius to have begun to think less of literary culture .in his old age.
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[C] And even while he was still writing he felt bound to no sect; he followed the teachings of this school or that as seemed to him most probable, remaining always within that Doubt taught by the Academy:
‘Dicendum est, sed ita ut nihil affirmem: quaeram omnia, dubitans plerumque et mihi diffidens’
[I have to write, but in such a way as to vouch for nothing; I shall always be seeking, mostly doubting, rarely trusting myself].
¹⁵⁶

[A] It would be too easy a game if I limited myself to the ordinary run of men considered
en masse
; I would be justified in doing so by Man’s curious convention that votes are not to be weighed but counted. But let us leave aside the ordinary people,

Qui vigilans stertit,
Mortua cui vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti;

[Who snore whilst they are awake and whose lives are dead even while they live and keep their eyes open;]
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they have no self-awareness; they never judge themselves and let most of their natural faculties stand idle. I want to take Man in his highest state. Let us consider only that tiny number of outstanding, handpicked men who are born with a fine natural endowment peculiar to themselves and who then take care to strengthen and sharpen it by skill and study; by such means they raise it to the highest point [C] of wisdom [A] that it can attain to. They mould their souls in ways which keep them open on every side to every tendency; they assist their souls with the help of every appropriate outside support; they adorn them and enrich them with every advantage which they can discover both within and beyond this world. The highest possible form of human nature finds its home in such men. These are men who have given laws and constitutions to the world; it is their arts and sciences which have taught the world; so, too, the example of their astounding moral integrity. I will take account of the testimony and experience only of men such as these. Let us see how far they got and what they concluded. They form a fellowship such that any ills and defects found in them can confidently be accepted by the world as inherent ones.

Whoever sets out to find something eventually reaches the point where he can say that he has found it, or that it cannot be found, or that he is still looking for it. The whole of Philosophy can be divided into these three categories; her aim is to seek true, certain knowledge.

Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics
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and others think they have discovered it. They founded the accepted disciplines and expounded their knowledge as certainties.

Clitomachus, Carneades and the Academics despaired of their quest; they conclude that Truth cannot be grasped by human means. Their conclusion
is one of weakness, of human ignorance. This school has had the greatest number of adherents and some of the noblest.
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As for Pyrrho and the other Sceptics or Ephectics, [C] (whose teachings many of the Ancients derived from Homer, the Seven Sages, Archilochus and Euripides, and associated with Zeno, Democritus and Xenophanes), [A] they say they are still looking for Truth. They hold that the philosophers who think they have found it are infinitely wrong. They go on to add that the second category – those who are quite sure that human strength is incapable of reaching truth – are overbold and vain. To determine the limits of our powers and to know and judge the difficulty of anything whatsoever constitutes great, even the highest, knowledge. They doubt whether Man is capable of it.

Nil sciri quisquis putat, id quoque nescit
An scire possit quo se nil scire fatetur
.

[Any man who thinks that ‘nothing can be known’, does not know whether he can know even that thing by which he asserts that he knows nothing.]
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Ignorance which is aware of itself, judges itself, condemns itself, is not complete ignorance: complete ignorance does not even know itself. Consequently the professed aim of Pyrrhonians is to shake all convictions, to hold nothing as certain, to vouch for nothing. Of the three functions attributed to the soul (cogitation, appetite and assent) the Sceptics admit the first two but keep their assent in a state of ambiguity, inclining neither way, giving not even the slightest approbation to one side or the other.

[C] It was by gesture that Zeno illustrated his conception of the three functions of the soul: a hand stretched out open meant probability; half-closed, with the fingers bent over, meant assent; clenched, it meant understanding; with the other hand pressing it tighter still, it meant knowledge.
¹⁶¹

[A] Now the Pyrrhonians make their faculty of judgement so unbending and upright that it registers everything but bestows its assent on nothing. This leads to their well-known
ataraxia
: that is a calm, stable rule of life, free from all the disturbances (caused by the impress of opinions, or
of such knowledge of reality as we think we have) which give birth to fear, acquisitiveness, envy, immoderate desires, ambition, pride, superstition, love of novelty, rebellion, disobedience, obstinacy and the greater part of our bodily ills. In this way, they even free themselves from passionate sectarianism, for their disputes are mild affairs and they are never afraid of the other side having its say. When they assert that heavy things tend to fall downwards, they would be most upset if you believed them. They want you to contradict them in order to achieve their end: doubt and suspense of judgement. They only put forward propositions of their own in order to oppose the ones they think we believe in. Accept theirs, and they will gladly maintain the opposite. It is all the same to them: they take no sides. If you maintain that snow is black, they will argue that it is, on the contrary, white. If you say that it is neither, their task is to say that it is both. If you conclude that you definitely know nothing, they will maintain that you do know something. Yes, and if you present your doubt as axiomatic, they will challenge you on that too, arguing that you are not in doubt, or that you cannot decide for certain and prove that you are in doubt. This is doubt taken to its limits; it shakes its own foundations; such extremes of doubt separate them completely from many other theories including those which in many ways do indeed teach doubt and ignorance.
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[B] If some Dogmatists call green what others call yellow, why, they ask, cannot they doubt both of them? Can there be any proposition capable of acceptance or rejection which it is not right to consider ambiguous?

Other people are prejudiced by the customs of their country, by the education given them by their parents or by chance encounter: normally, before the age of discretion, they are taken by storm and, without judgement or choice, accept this or that opinion of the Stoic or Epicurean sects. There they stay, mortgaged, enslaved, caught on a hook which they cannot get off – [C]
‘ad quamcumque disciplinam velut tempestate delati, ad eam tanquam ad saxum adhaerescunt’
[they cling to any old teaching, like sailors washed up on a rock]. [B] But why should people like these not also be allowed their freedom, making up their own minds without bonds and slavery? [C]
‘Hoc liberiores et solutiores quod integra illis est judicandi potestas’
[They are all the more independent and free in that they enjoy the full power of judgement].
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There is some advantage, surely, in being detached
from the reins of the Necessity which curb others. [B] Is it not better to remain in doubt, than to get entangled in the many errors produced by human fantasy? Is it not better to postpone one’s adherence indefinitely than to intervene in factions, both quarrelling and seditious?

[C] ‘What ought I to choose?’ – ‘Anything you wish, so long as you choose something.’ A daft enough reply! Yet it seems to be the one reached by every kind of dogmatism which refuses us the right not to know what we do not know.

[B] Try siding with the school enjoying majority support: but it will never be safe enough: to defend it you will have to attack opponents by the hundreds. Is it not better to keep out of the fray altogether? You allow yourself to espouse, like honour and dear life, Aristotle’s beliefs about the eternity of the soul; to do that you must reject and contradict Plato. In that case, why should others be forbidden simply to go on doubting?
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[C] Panaetius was legally permitted to suspend judgement about dreams, oracles, prophecies and divination by entrails; yet his school, the Stoics, never doubted them. Why cannot a wise man dare to doubt anything and everything, if Panaetius could dare to doubt doctrines which were taught by his own masters and founded on the common consent of the school he adhered to and whose doctrines he claimed to profess?

[B] If it is a child who makes the judgement, he does not know enough about the subject: if it is a learned man, then he has made up his mind already! – Pyrrhonians have given themselves a wonderful strategic advantage by shrugging off the burden of self-defence. It does not matter who attacks them, as long as somebody does. Anything serves their purpose: if they win, your argument is defective; if you do, theirs is. If they lose, they show the truth of Ignorance; if you lose, you do. If they can prove that nothing is known: fine. If they do not succeed in proving it, that is fine too. [C]
‘Ut quum in eadem re paria contrariis in partibus momenta inveniuntur, facilius ab utraque parte assertio sustineatur’
[So that by finding equally good cases, for and against, on the very same subject, it is easier to suspend one’s judgement about either side].
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They make it their pride to be far more ready to find everything false than anything true and to show that things are not, rather than that they are. They prefer to proclaim what they do not believe, rather than what they do. [A] Their typical phrases include: ‘I have settled nothing’; ‘It is no more this than that’; ‘Not one rather than the other’; ‘I do not
understand’; ‘Both sides seem equally likely’; ‘It is equally right to speak for and against either side’. [C] To them, nothing seems true which cannot also seem false. [A] They have sworn loyalty to the word
: ‘I am in suspense’; I will not budge.
¹⁶⁶

These sayings, and others like them, form refrains which lead to a pure, whole, complete suspension of their judgement, which is kept permanently in abeyance. They use their reason for inquiry and debate but never to make choices or decisions. If you can picture an endless confession of ignorance, or a power of judgement which never, never inclines to one side or the other, then you can conceive what Pyrrhonism is.

I have tried to explain this notion as clearly as I can, because many find it hard to grasp, and its very authors present it somewhat diversely and rather obscurely.

Where morals are concerned, they conform to the common mould. They find it appropriate to yield to natural inclinations, to the thrust and constraints of their emotions, to established laws and customs and to the traditional arts.
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[C]
‘Non enim nos Deus ista scire, sed tantummodo uti voluit’
[For God did not want us to know such things: merely to make use of them]. [A] They let their everyday activities be guided by such considerations, neither assenting nor adhering to anything. That is why I cannot square with these conceptions what is told about Pyrrho himself. They
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describe him as emotionless and virtually senseless, adopting a wild way of life, cut off from society, allowing himself to be bumped into by wagons, standing on the edge of precipices and refusing to conform to the law. That goes well beyond his teaching. He
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was not fashioning a log or a stone but a living, arguing, thinking man, enjoying natural pleasures and comforts of every sort and making full use of all his parts, bodily as well as spiritual – [C] in, of course, a right and proper way. [A] Those false, imaginary and fantastic privileges usurped by Man, by which he claims to profess, arrange and establish the truth, were renounced and abandoned by Pyrrho, in good faith.

– [C] Yet there is not one single school of philosophy which is not
forced to allow its Sage (if he wishes to live) to accept a great many things which he cannot understand, perceive or give his assent to. Say he boards a ship. He carries out his design, not knowing whether it will serve his purpose; he assumes the vessel to be seaworthy, the pilot to be experienced and the weather to be favourable. Such attendant details are, of course, merely probable: he is obliged to let himself be guided by appearances, unless they are expressly contradicted. He has a body. He has a soul. He feels the impulsions of his senses and the promptings of his spirit. He cannot find within himself any sign specifically suggesting that it be appropriate for him to make an act of judgement: he realizes he must not bind his consent to anything, since something false may have every appearance of particular truth. Despite all this, he never fails to do his duty in this life, fully and fittingly.