Pyrrho of Elis

Pyrrho of Elis

Pyrrho went looking for happiness and found it by giving up the search. Like every philosopher of his age, he started from the premise that to be happy you must first know the truth, that the anxiety gnawing at human life comes from confusion about how things really are, and that the cure is to work it all out. So he set about deciding which of the warring philosophies was the correct one. And he failed, not for lack of effort, but because the contest could not be settled: for every argument he found a roughly equal argument on the other side, and the scales never tipped. Worn out, he stopped trying. And then the strange thing happened. The tranquility he had been chasing through certainty arrived the instant he abandoned the chase, following, as his school later put it, like a shadow follows a body. He had stumbled onto a discovery that would unsettle philosophy for the next two thousand years: that the peace we hope to win by having the answers may be more reliably found by giving up the demand to have them.

Equal and opposite. The engine of Pyrrho's suspension is a simple and devastating observation: to every argument there is an equal argument opposed. His followers turned it into a method. Take any confident claim about how things really are, the Stoic's, the Epicurean's, your own, and instead of refuting it, set beside it the strongest possible case for the opposite, until the two stand balanced, neither able to knock the other over. Faced with that balance, an honest mind has nowhere to land, and so it does the only reasonable thing: it suspends, withholds assent, neither affirms nor denies. The word skeptic is Pyrrho's, and it does not mean a person who denies things; it comes from the Greek for inquirer, one who keeps looking. He never claims that nothing is true. He reports only that he has not yet found the thing that would force his assent, and refuses to pretend otherwise.

The traps under every argument. What gives the method its teeth is a set of traps the skeptics found waiting underneath every attempt to prove anything, and the traps are as sharp today as they were then. Try to justify a claim and you must give a reason; but the reason needs its own reason, and that one another, and you are off down an infinite regress that never reaches the bottom. Stop the regress by simply assuming a starting point, and you have helped yourself to an unproven assumption your opponent need not grant. Avoid the assumption by letting your premises lean on each other, and you are arguing in a circle. Add that the experts never stop disagreeing, and that every appearance is relative to whoever is perceiving it, and you have the five modes of the skeptic Agrippa, five exits all blocked. Every chain of justification, the skeptics showed, ends in the regress, the circle, or the bare assumption. Two thousand years later this is still the trap at the floor of the theory of knowledge; David Hume rebuilt it against the science of his own century, and every modern argument about foundations is fighting the same five modes.

The pig on the ship. The emblem of the whole school is a pig. Caught in a violent storm at sea, with the sailors panicking around him, Pyrrho is said to have pointed to a pig that went on calmly eating its food through the chaos, and held it up as the model: this, he said, is the untroubled state the wise should reach. The point is easy to misread, and the hostile cartoon of Pyrrho is a man so paralyzed by doubt that he would walk off a cliff if his friends did not steer him clear. The real teaching is the opposite of paralysis. The Pyrrhonist goes on living perfectly well, eating when hungry, stepping out of the way of carts, following the customs of his country, guided by how things appear without any anxious commitment to how they are underneath. What he has put down is not action but the second, suffering layer of belief, the insistence that he knows, and with it go the fear and the disappointment and the endless quarreling that the insistence drags along. He meets the storm like the pig, not because he is stupid, but because he has stopped adding his own dread to it.

Suspending, not denying. There is a trap the skeptic himself can fall into, and Pyrrho's tradition was sharp about it. A generation later, at Plato's old Academy, a rival school of skeptics arose who concluded, flatly, that nothing can be known. But that, the Pyrrhonists pointed out, is itself a confident claim about how things are, a piece of dogma in a skeptic's costume; the person who is certain that certainty is impossible has quietly stopped being a skeptic and become a believer in one more doctrine. The genuine Pyrrhonist will not assert even that. He does not say "nothing can be known"; he says only that he, so far, has not found what would settle the matter, and he keeps on looking. It is a fine distinction and a decisive one, the difference between an open suspension that goes on inquiring and a closed denial that has made up its mind to doubt, and the whole later history of skepticism turns on it. The other side of the quarrel, the dialectical assault on certainty mounted at the Academy, has a room of its own here under Arcesilaus.

The grain of sand. The room reads Pyrrho the only way it can, since he wrote nothing: through his ancient biography and through Sextus Empiricus, the later encyclopedist who set the school's moves down four centuries on; the citations point into those texts. For so quiet a philosophy, the afterlife has been deafening. When Sextus was rediscovered in the Renaissance, the suspension of judgment detonated through European thought. Montaigne took it for his motto, Que sais-je, "what do I know," and turned doubt into a way of writing. Descartes ran the Pyrrhonist doubts out to their very limit in order to find the one thing that could survive them. Hume rebuilt the ancient traps against modern reason so forcefully that they jolted Kant, by his own admission, out of his "dogmatic slumber." Hegel gave skepticism a chapter as a stage the mind has to pass through. Husserl borrowed the skeptic's own word,epoche, for the core of his method. And Wittgenstein spent his last book circling the same question of what, in the end, can be doubted at all. Skepticism is the grain of sand the entire modern theory of knowledge formed itself around.

Pyrrho is easy to mistake for a defeatist, a man who simply gave up on truth. He is better understood as a man who refused one particular bad bargain: the trade of your peace of mind for a certainty you cannot actually have. He did not stop caring how things are; he stopped pretending to a knowledge he had tested and found wanting, and he discovered that the pretense had been costing him far more than the ignorance ever did. In an age as loud with confident opinion as ours, his is a strange and useful voice: that you are allowed not to know; that holding a question open is not the same as failing to answer it; and that much of the misery people carry comes not from uncertainty itself but from the refusal to make peace with it. The pig, eating calmly through the storm, is not a fool. It simply never agreed to be afraid.