SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS

(An important preambular note: The “Sextus” in Marcus Aurelius’ Thoughts (Meditations) is often confused with Sextus Empiricus, which is a ridiculous anachronism. He is Sextus of Chaeronea, a Stoic philosopher and Marcus Aurelius’s erstwhile teacher.)

This entry is on Sextus Empiricus (160-210 AD), the great Skeptic philosopher, whose greatness has been determined not so much by the originality of his ideas, which is doubtful, as by the fact that he left behind him a magnificent body of work, outlining the principles and basic ideas of Pyrrhonism, or Skepticism. It is impossible for us today to distinguish the origin of some (not of all!) ideas of Pyrrho from those of Timon, or Carneades, or other Skeptics, including Sextus himself, in his writings, but this is not as important as the fact itself that it is through Sextus that the world has become familiar with these basic ideas and principles, influencing such great philosophers of the later times as Montaigne, Hume, and Hegel.

Before we proceed with Sextus, a curious question is in order. How do we distinguish scepsis from doubt in the first place? We know that doubt is at the heart of scepsis as doubt is at the heart of the Cartesian method and yet David Hume is famously known as a skeptic, while nobody uses the same name for Dèscartes! How do we, then, tell the difference?

It can be argued that Dèscartes’ doubt is a philosophical method for obtaining truth, whereas for the Skeptic it is the reason for denying induction and sometimes even going so far as to deny knowledge as such. But in the works of Sextus Empiricus there is no indication of such intellectual extremism. On the contrary he is in explicit disagreement with the view of Carneades that nothing is knowable, calling it a definitive judgment, which as such must be doubted. He calls only for a suspension of judgment in all matters of belief.

How does this affect the social behavior of a Skeptic, according to Sextus? “We skeptics follow in practice the way of the world” he writes, “but without holding any opinion about it; we speak of the gods as existing and offer worship to the gods and say that they exercise providence, but in saying this we express no belief, and avoid the rashness of the dogmatizers.”

The question of faith and knowledge thus comes to the fore, and Sextus makes the fallacious argument that makes belief somehow dependent on proof. In this confusion, I see the main weakness of skepticism in all ages, ancient and modern. For, with regard to religion, proof must not be required, whereas by the Skeptic’s own logic, the proof to the contrary is equally non-existent.

Moving on from religion, where positive knowledge is irrelevant by definition, to science, where it seems necessary, we, however, find that there is not that much difference anyway, in so far as positive knowledge is concerned. The history of science tells us that what constitutes scientific progress is exactly the rejection of old “knowledge” in favor of the new, which itself will be rejected in the next spurt of progress. There is no such thing as solid knowledge anyway (Kant was wrong seeing it in mathematics, where everything is based on mere hypotheses!) and skeptics are perfectly right in this. They go wrong when they take it to extremes, like Carneades, but Sextus Empiricus appears fairly reasonable in that particular regard. His two mistakes, though, are confusing belief with knowledge, as I mentioned before, and then, ignoring the fact of practical presumption, which (rather than some chimera of absolute knowledge) commonsensically guides us through our everyday existence, exactly as he describes the social behavior of the Skeptic in the excerpt above.

In my view, the key to healthy epistemology is in opening up all channels of acquiring knowledge, practical and mystical alike, while realizing our limitations, and especially the scientific impossibility of acquiring an absolute scientific knowledge of anything, knowing in advance that one day our best practical knowledge is too, destined to be refuted.