04_Doubt.pdf

The Book of Doubt

4c37

84i3

84g37

Erik Wiegardt

wordsmith press · san diego · california

CONTENTS

pages

Introduction

Origins of Doubt

Pyrrho

Skepticism in the Academy

Pyrrho Codified

Modern Pyrrhoneans

Ou Mallon

Addendum

Specific References

General Bibliography

* * * *

Cover design by Erik Wiegardt.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

Goethe (1749-1832)

Introduction

I came to Stoicism because I needed to know what was wrong with my own life.

Although I had read The Discourses several times over a period of about 25 years, I

didn't really go any further or deeper into Stoic thought until I was in my late

forties. At that time, I had experienced a succession of personal failures, what I

considered failures then, and came back to the Stoa for sustenance and

encouragement. That was when I decided I needed to know more about this

philosophy than Epictetus had offered.

After a couple of years of focused research that provided the background for my

first book, The Path of the Sage , one day, for no apparent reason, I stopped and

asked myself how I knew any of this was true. How did I know whether the Stoics

just made it all up, that Stoicism was anything other than a rational and internally

consistent version of a religion? That thought bothered me considerably, and I

puzzled over it at length.

As fortune would have it, I had some time earlier established an e-mail

correspondence with Professor Keith Campbell, who was then the Chairman of the

Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. I considered him my mentor in

philosophical matters and had pestered him many times with questions he must

have considered amusing or annoying. Not knowing a finer way to phrase it, I came

right out and directly asked Dr. Campbell the question that was troubling me: how

can I know any of the things about the Stoa I had studied were true? He answered as

directly as I asked and said that we can’t, then recommended I read George

Santayana’s work, Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover, 1955).

I read it, twice, and understood some of it. When I complained about my difficulty

with comprehension and gave Professor Campbell a passage to explain, he said he

had forgotten about Santayana's “turgid prose” and to forget it. “Life is too short,”

he said. I wasn’t satisfied and could not be turned aside that easily. I began reading

other philosophers that Santayana’s work referenced and gradually traced my new

obsession, skeptical philosophy, back to it its origins. Only then did I begin to

understand philosophy in general and Stoic philosophy in particular.

For Dr. Campbell’s patience and kindness, for pointing the way at the moment it

was most needed, I am deeply grateful.

* * *

The Origins of Doubt

Xenophanes ( 570-478 BCE )

The darkest night of Pyrrhonean doubt settled on Aenesidemus, but the first prophet

of uncertainty began nearly five centuries earlier with Xenophanes, a wandering

poet-philosopher from Ionia born in the town of Colophon who lived in a number of

Greek city states during his exceedingly long life. He was often claimed by the

ancients to be the first true skeptic based especially upon one preserved fragment of

his work, a comment he purportedly made about knowledge:

...and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will

there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all

things. For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of

what has been brought, still he himself would not know. But opinion

is allotted to all.

Contemporary academic philosophers argue over the exact interpretation of this

text, but the gist of it is that there never has been and never will be anyone who has

or will achieve certain knowledge.

Heraclitus ( c. 535-475 BCE ) and Parmenides ( early 5 th century BCE )

Heraclitus disagreed with Xenophanes and believed it was possible to provide an

explanation of the world by the relationship of the Logos, the divine intelligence, to

the human psyche, the seat of human knowledge whereby we come to know such

intelligence. This is thought to be the origins of epistemology, the study of the

nature of knowledge, in Western philosophy. Then, Heraclitus went on to describe

the processes of Nature as emanation from God, the One, into the many parts of our

familiar world and back again in a continuous state of flux.

Existence as we know it is in such a state of flux that at any given moment one

could not describe the nature of any object, because, by the time it was described, it

would have changed again and become slightly different. Heraclitus maintained that

all objects in our world were in a state of becoming, from birth and growth to

deterioration and death, from the life of planets to the aging of our own physical

constitution.

Parmenides disagreed with Heraclitus and thought it was impossible for God, the

One, to become all the many parts of our familiar world. In fact, if the One were

perfect, why would it extend itself into a state of imperfection? No, the One was an

immovable being, the world was in a state of being, not in a state of becoming, as

Heraclitus maintained, and the changes we see in life as we know it was an illusion.

In his work, The Way of Truth , Parmenides states that the One is “whole, immobile,

eternal, all together, one and continuous.” There were two kinds of knowledge: true

knowledge and common knowledge, and what most of us see with our senses and

believe with our minds is of the common sort, mere opinion.

Democritus ( ?460-357 BCE )

If rain falling on the just and unjust alike implies unconditional love, does an

earthquake swallowing up the righteous and wicked alike imply unconditional

loathing? Neither. Such statements imply only that those who make them are

anthropomorphizing Nature in the most primitive way possible. Zeus is NOT

responsible for thunder and lightening, Eros is NOT responsible for love, and all the

finest rituals and sacrifices to the gods of Olympus will NOT guarantee a good

harvest.

Not long after Xenophanes’ death, Democritus of Abdera and Miletus, became

renowned as one of the two founders of ancient atomic theory, and it was he who

came up with this amazing deduction:

Since nothing can come from nothing,

and change really occurs,

and motion requires a void,

reality must consist of atoms moving in a void.

Democritus presents such a liberating point of view, and, by accepting the notion

that there are no gods or spirits, but only atoms moving in a void, one is suddenly

freed from the burden of otherworldly accountability. Unfortunately, after the party

is over, after the celebration of liberation recedes into silence, comes the realization

that if reality is only indivisible atoms moving in a void, then life itself has no

meaning or purpose, and death is our only goal. More on that later.

Democritus was a contemporary of Socrates but apparently unknown by him –

although Diogenes Laertius says that Plato (?427-347 BCE) considered this “prince

of philosophers” his chief intellectual rival and refused to mention him so as not

have to refute him. Democritus systematized the work of the other founder of

atomism, his teacher Leucippus, and as a materialist he believed that even the soul

was comprised of atoms, fire atoms in this case, and proposed that thought was

itself caused by the movement of atoms.

However, because atoms were not directly perceptible, there would always be doubt

as to their true nature. In addition, it was Democritus who coined the phrase ou

mallon (literally, ‘no more’), frequently used by Pyrrhoneans to describe conflicting

evidence of the senses that tell us no more this than that .

Protagoras ( 481-411 BCE )

The doubt that was accumulating incrementally towards a real philosophy was

carried even further by Protagoras, a pupil of Democritus, who is credited with the

first realization that there were two sides to every question, that each has its

opposite. Protagoras is also the author of the famous quotation used throughout

history: “Man is the measure of all things.” The quote in its entirety: “Man is the

measure of all things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are

not.”

One of his most startling statements was that everything is true. In the introduction

to his book, On the Gods , he wrote, “As to the gods, I have no means of knowing

that they exist or that they do not exist.” For this, he was expelled from Athens, and

a herald was sent throughout the city to collect and burn every copy of that book.

Socrates ( 469-399 BCE ) and Plato ( 427-347 BCE )

Finally, two more philosophers added their voices to the doubt about knowing

anything, Socrates and Plato. Just as Protagoras incurred the wrath of the Athenians

for his lack of piety, so did Socrates who was accused of corrupting the youth of

Athens and forced to drink hemlock for his philosophy. It was his commonly heard

assertion that he knew that he knew nothing (despite the obvious internal conflict of

such a statement) that was most sympathetic with the claims of later philosophers

with skeptical minds. “All I know is that I know nothing,” Socrates said.

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