"Doubt serves life": Why you shouldn't listen to philosophers

They will just sell you books on how to scratch your backside

There are reasons eyes roll at philosophising. I don’t blame you, I do too, although I sit here writing a letter apparently on philosophy. But perhaps this best summarises Pyrrhonian scepticism: it is the anti-philosophy philosophy. This, I suspect, is also why philosophers often offer such weak and silly arguments against it. Why develop clever arguments against a stance that doesn’t offer a combative: “your philosophy is BS!”, rather the more frustrating: “I find your philosophy is indistinguishable from BS”. Remember: Pyrrhonian scepticism is not there to negate peoples’ arguments, rather to suspend judgement on them. This is Pyrrhonian scepticism’s greatest strength. It is a way of interacting with the world which keeps things as simple as possible, the leading of suspension of judgement to a tranquil mind. This is a simple method that leads to the original goal of the Hellenic Greek philosopher: living well¹.

Unfortunately the philosopher (whether university tenured professor or ancient Athenian sophist) may not understand this. After all, if the goal is to live well, who would give over their lives to a desk-bound job theorising and arguing over things unexperienced in the stuffy old halls of the academy? The practicality of the philosophers of ancient Greece is lost. This impracticality of philosophy leads to problems, particularly in the confusion between scepticism and apathy, and between a suspension of judgment and negation.

So, our philosopher, who may consider Pyhrronism an apathetic philosophy may point out a story related in Pyhrro’s biography²: when faced by a cart in the street, he would not move out of the way, and only his companions would save him from being trampled underfoot. This sounds like a man completely detached from reality, which is absurd (Pyrrho lived to be 90 after all). This represents the inability of some to distinguish between the non-evident and theoretical and the evident things like a large mammal bearing down on you in some Peloponnesian market town. We don’t need to suspend judgment on this. This recounting I suspect is misconstrued, as it clearly fails to distinguish scepticism from apathy. Other stories show him to be very engaged with life: one story describes him ardently defending his sister, another of him being fearful of attack by some scoundrel. Yet another perhaps described him best: When at sea in a storm, he stood calm, when his fellow passengers cowered from the wind and waves. He pointed to a pig happily eating on deck, as an example of an unperturbed state they should try to copy. These stories point to a man of sang-froid, but a man who was also human: “it is not easy entirely to strip oneself of human weakness”. It is easy to confuse a cool head for apathy.

The above paint a picture of a real man trying, but sometimes failing, to achieve ataraxia, the unperturbed state of the sceptic. Later sceptics developed practical criteria that easily distinguish the sceptic from the apathetic. The following is a reminder: Pyrrhonian scepticism is a practical philosophy. A sceptic will interact with the world as it appears to them, not from some theory as to how worlds appear, or an argument on the hidden nature of appearances. Sceptics sleep when tired, eat when hungry and move out of the way of traffic (you get the idea by now). That is because these are acts governed by practical criteria, not theoretical ones:

“We see that a man moves, and that he perishes; how it happens we do not know. We merely object to accepting the unknown substance behind phenomena.”

-Diogenes Laërtius, Pyrrho

Not only does this avoid dogmatising over things that are not evident (which is the real target of scepticism), but keeps our life simple, another key to tranquil living. To ignore the senses we have, that are experienced involuntarily, would lead us at the very least, to hunger, thirst, even death³. Remember also, the story above of Pyhrro’s fear of being attacked, which gives a good example:

“Nevertheless, we do not suppose the sceptic to be altogether free from disturbance, rather, we say that when he is disturbed, it is by things which are unavoidable.”

-Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyhrronism

It is this confrontation with the immediate issues of life that show us the Pyrrhonian sceptic is actively engaged with it. Let’s contrast this sceptical and practical way of living with an example which comes to us by another student of Pyrrhonian scepticism:

“I know a man who, when I ask him what he knows, asks me for a book in order to point it out to me, and wouldn’t dare tell me that he has an itchy backside unless he goes immediately and studies in his lexicon what is itchy and what is a backside.”

Michel de Montaigne, Of Pedantry

The problem is not only that there are people who doubt their own experience of an itchy backside and would rather study the nature of itchy backsidedness. There is also an industry of rent-seeking intellectuals who make their living describing the phenomena of itchy backsides beyond experiencing and dealing with the immediate sensation. The follower of Pyrhhonian scepticism, as we now know, would have no issue dealing practically with such a problem, but the dogmatic philosopher would be paralysed by theory.

There are some reasons then, that philosophers might level silly accusations of apathy at the Pyrhhonian sceptic: the suspension of judgement publishes no papers on the non-evident nature of reality, and living simply, by our senses, sells no dictionaries on itchy bottoms. Rather, the doubt of the sceptic that removes dogmatism makes space not only for action, but also for living well, a goal that is at the heart of Greek philosophy. In this manner, as the title of this letter tells us: doubt serves life⁴.

1. There is more to the concept of eudaimonia (here ‘living well’) than this, such as human flourishing or fulfilment. I won’t go into details here, only that the Pyrrho may have added simple living to this list.

2. These stories are from the 3rd century AD writings of Diogenes Laërtius, Phyrro, Lives of Eminant Philosphers, Book 9.

3. Sextus Empricus, Outlines of Pyhrronism, chapters 11-12. He gives the practical criteria thus: “ Therefore, while living undogmatically, we pay due regard to appearances. The observance of the requirements of daily life seem to be fourfold, with the following particular heads: the guidance of nature, the compulsion of feelings, the tradition of laws and customs, and the instruction of the arts”. More details to be given in a future letter.

4. This line taken from A polemical Introduction to Philip Hallie’s selected works by Sextus Empiricus: “But the sceptic, as we have discovered, is a eudaimonist, and his doubt serves life…”