(360-270 B.C.E.)
Pyrrho, the first great Skeptic, or inquirer (which was the meaning of the Greek word skeptikos) was born and died in the city of Ellis on the Greek Peloponnesus. For awhile he made a very modest living as a painter, but in 334 B.C.E., one year after Aristotle had founded the Lyceum, he joined Alexander the Great as a court philosopher and traveled with Alexander and his armies in India, where he is said to have met and been influenced by the ascetic morally exemplary Gymnosophists and Magi. In that same court was Anaxarchus, the eudaemonist, the "happy man," who was Pyrrho’s teacher. Anaxarchus, a follower of Democritus, shared with the great atomist the doctrine that sense perceptions contradict each other and are therefore not trustworthy, but he emphasized more than Democritus had done the eudaemonistic function of philosophy. Upon Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E. Pyrrho returned to Elis in poverty and spent the rest of his life there, living with his sister Philistia, who was a midwife. In Elis he apparently lectured to some large groups, as well as discussing philosophy with a few students as they wandered across the countryside. The city of Ellis made him a high priest and exempted philosophers from paying taxes because of his services to the community.
Pyrrhonism as a Way of Life
Pyrrho did not leave any philosophical writings, but his most distinguished student, Timon of Phlius, insisted, as did all philosophers of antiquity interested in Pyrrho, that what he contributed was not so much a body of doctrine or a dialectical method as an agoge, a way of living. To be a Pyrrhoian was to imitate Pyrrho himself. But because only a few fragments of Timon’s writing and a paucity of first hand accounts of Pyrrho have come down to us. That agoge is rather difficult to ascertain. None of the accounts reveal a logically agile philosopher; and all of them reveal a man primarily interested in living a happy, peaceful, independent life within the limits set by the customs and laws of his country. But beyond these facts discrepancies arise among the various biographical accounts available to us. According to one tradition, his was a life that emphasized heroic indifference, apathy toward phenomena and external objects, to such a great extent that his health was always in danger. Diogenes Laertius in his life of Pyrrho tells us that he would not look where he was going and that only his more commonsensical friends preserved him from death or maiming from "carts, precipices, dogs or what not." Diogenes also tells us that once, when his teacher Anaxarchus was stuck in a slough, Pyrrho walked right by him without offering any help. In this same tradition of heroic skepticism is the story of Pyrrho and the wild dog. Pyrrho was suddenly attacked by a dog and became terrified; but shortly thereafter he apologized for his terror, saying that it was not easy to strip oneself of human weakness, even though one should try with one’s might to do so.
However, there is another tradition, subscribed to by Aenesidemus and others, that claim such stories to be alien to the agoge of Pyrrho. This tradition, followed by Moneaigne, saw Pyrrho as man of common sense and good judgment in everyday matters, who would not endanger his health or life out of a doctrinaire indifference to the senses, who avoided carts, precipices, and dogs in everyday life, who was indifferent only to the dogmatic opinions of philosophers, and who moderated his feelings when faced with the brutal, inevitable forces of nature (metriopathie). In this second tradition belongs another story, this one told by Posidonius. Once Pyrrho was on a ship whose passengers were unnerved by a storm while Pyrrho himself remained calm and confident. At the height of the storm he pointed out to them a little pig standing on the deck calming eating its food, and he told them that such was the unperturbed way as wise man should live in all situations. This tradition emphasizes similarities between men and other animals, at least when men are wisest and makes indifference not an end in itself, but an instrument that the commonsensical man uses only in order to preserve his peace of mind and health of body. It reveals a Pyrrho willing to accept and live in a world of phenomena, not an ascetic trying to act as if he had no body.
Philosophical Grounds
We do have one quite fragmentary account of the teachings of Pyrrho that gives us some idea of the philosophical grounds of his agoge, whatever it was in detail. Timon tells us that according to Pyrrho, a philosopher - if he would be happy - should ask himself three questions and answer them honestly. The first question is: how are things constituted? Pyrrho answered that our mutually contradictory sensations of things reveal that all we know are phenomena, not the inner constitution of things - phenomena that cannot be classified as either true or false, since we do not know the things in themselves beyond them. If we knew the hidden things (adela), we could compare the phenomena to them.
Pyrrho may have learned from Democritus by way of Anaxarchus the notion of isosthenia, the balancing of opposing evidence or arguments against each other so that they cancel each other out. But whatever its origin the concept of equally probable, mutually contradictory claims became the main stratagem of Pyrrohonism. It was symbolized by a pair of scales whose two plates are in perfect equilibrium, neither containing matter more weighty than the other.
The second question is: in what relation do we stand in things around us? Pyrrho’s answer to this question was a direct consequence of his answer to the first question. We must suspend judgment, must neither accept nor reject these things, since all we know of them are our own sensations. We must, through our epoche, or suspension of judgment acknowledge our akatalepsia, or lack of comprehension of these things, and we must embody this awareness of our lack of comprehension in aphasia, or silence concerning them.
The last question Timon mentions is: what will result from the relationship of our epoche, akatalepesia, and aphasia? And the answer Pyrrho gave was tranquility of mind, ataraxia. We shall be content to live a peaceful life with phenomena, without yearning to possess or know things themselves and without dogmatically and zealously defending any set of conclusions about those things, again, the upshot of wisdom or philosophy for Pyrrho, as for Anaxarchus, was happiness.
Pyrrho and other Skeptics
The differences between later Academic Skepticism and what we know of Pyrrho’s philosophy are great. Apparently Pyrrho felt that philosophy should teach men to dispense with elaborate dialectic and should cause them to seek, above all to make themselves morally and psychologically independent of both philosophical methods and external things. But Archesilaus and Carneades, like Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, were masters of dialectic, used it as an important philosophical tool, and felt that the philosopher should acquire both philosophical skills and goods of a worldly sort. The indifference to strict methods and external things that Pyrrho had taught, whether it was in fact heroic indifference or commonsensical poise, was considerably mitigated by the Skeptics who succeeded him.
Philip P. Hallie from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Last Updated: 10/19/22 |