Category Archives: philosophy

Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy

In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.

Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?

Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.

You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.

A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.

A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.

But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.

Print by Toyoharu Kunichika from Toshidama Japanese Prints

Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.

The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.

There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.

And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.

Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).

Rilke, The Grownup

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The Grownup

All this stood on her and was the world
And stood on her with everything, fear and grace,
As trees stand, growing and straight,
All image and imageless like the Ark. 
And solemnly, as if placed on a people.

And she endured it, bore it--
The flying, escaping, distant,
The immense, not yet learned--
Calm as a woman bearing water
In a full jug. Right in the midst of the game,
Transforming and preparing for something else,
The first white veil, gently gliding,

Fell over her open face
Almost opaque and never lifting again
And somehow to all your questions
Only vaguely offering an answer:
In you, you who has been a child, in you. 

        — Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Peter Levine)

The original poem, “Die Erwachsene” from New Poems (1907), is here. The title is the ordinary German word for “adult,” but etymologically, it means “one who has accomplished growth.” Rilke invents a word in his final line, “Kindgewesene,” which I translate here as “one who has been a child.” All of us (even the youngest) are both things at once.

The first lines describe a female person in the past tense. Every reading that I have seen presumes that she is a child, but that is not explicit, and the poem’s title names an adult.

She is with something. The phrase “all this” or “this all” (das alles) suggests that the narrator is referring to everything we perceive, the world. It exceeds representative language–being immense and fleeting–yet it has a heavy weight, which she bears calmly. It is likened to a tree and to the Ark of the Covenant. Trees do not intend anything; they simply grow. The Biblical Ark incorporated golden images of cherubim (Ex. 25:18), but it also contained the written prohibition against graven images, so that it was ganz Bild und bildlos–“all image and imageless.” A tree, the Ark, and perhaps a child are alike in that they have meanings for us but do not intend meanings.

At a specific moment, in the middle of an absorbing activity (a Spiel or game), a second object enters, a veil that descends permanently over this person’s face. Until now, she has seemed oblivious or absorbed in her context, but now there are things that are concealed from her, and vice-versa.

This veil–not the girl or woman–responds unclearly to “your” questions. With this evocation of “you,” there is another person in the poem: presumably, Rilke’s adult reader. The poem advises “you” to look for answers not through a veil but within yourself as someone who has been a child.

We might think of time as a series of instants, of which the present is merely one. That is how the time of clocks and calendars works: a system with which we analyze and control aspects of nature. One year we are children; another, we are grown. But consciousness is not simply located in the present. What we experience at any given moment is a set of meaningful objects that have various durations and histories, often extending into the future as well back into the remembered past. Like the objects that we experience, our selves have histories and hopes. Sometimes we are aware of the kind of time that clocks measure, and sometimes we are absorbed in an activity (bis mitten unterm Spiel) when a sudden change occurs.

Put another way: I am not merely an organism located at a time and a place but also a person who has been a child, who has grown, and who feels the weight of things “not yet learned.” The good and bad things that matter–both fear and grace–extend in time and carry me backward and ahead.

Kant deduced from the fact that we experience objects with duration that there must be a lasting self, but his deduction yielded an “I” that was invisible, simple, and identical for all who reason. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Kant’s argument “rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. … There is nothing hidden behind … faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow [the self] which owes its very existence to the light” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, xiii).

Looking inward, we should instead find a self that is complicated, dynamic, elusive, and situated. Rilke explores opacity and transcendence in this poem, which is about having both a past and a present.

Quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (Routledge, 2002). The Rilke translation is mine and misses the tight rhythm and rhyme-scheme of the original. See also: Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall“; phenomenology of nostalgia; Kieran Setiya on midlife; three great paintings in dialogue (addressing Rilke’s 5th Duino Elegy); and the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s “Lines Above Tintern Abbey“.

how thinking about causality affects the inner life

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For many centuries, hugely influential thinkers in each of the Abrahamic faiths combined their foundational belief in an omnipotent deity with Aristotle’s framework of four kinds of causes. Many believers found solace when they discerned a divine role in the four causes.

Aristotle’s framework ran afoul of the Scientific Revolution. Today, there are still ways to be an Abrahamic believer who accepts science, and classical Indian thought offers some alternatives. Nevertheless the reduction of causes from Aristotle’s four to the two of modern science poses a spiritual and ethical challenge.

(This point is widely understood–and by no means my original contribution–but I thought the following summary might be useful for some readers.)

To illustrate Aristotle’s four causes, consider my hands, which are currently typing this blog post. Why are they doing that?

Efficient cause: Electric signals are passing along nerves and triggering muscles to contract or relax. In turn, prior electrical and mechanical events caused those signals to flow–and so on, back through time.
Material cause: My hand is made of muscles, nerves, skin, bones, and other materials, which, when so configured and stimulated, move. A statue’s hand that was made of marble would not move.
Formal cause: A hand is defined as “the terminal part of the vertebrate forelimb when modified (as in humans) as a grasping organ” (Webster’s dictionary). I do things like grasp, point, and touch with my hand because it is a hand. Some hands do not do these things–for instance, because of disabilities–but those are exceptions (caused by efficient causes) that interfere with the definitive form of a hand.
Final cause: I am typing in order to communicate certain points about Aristotle. I behave in this way because I see myself as a scholar and teacher whose words might educate others. In turn, educated people may live better. Therefore, I move my fingers for the end (telos, in Greek) of a good life.

Aristotle acknowledges that some events occur only because of efficient and material causes; these accidents lack ends. However, the four causes apply widely. For example, not only my hand but also the keyboard that I am using could be analyzed in terms of all four causes.

The Abrahamic thinkers who read Aristotle related the Creator to all the causes, but especially to the final cause (see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:1 or Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q44). In a well-ordered, divinely created universe, everything important ultimately happens for a purpose that is good. Dante concludes his Divine Comedy by invoking the final cause of everything, “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

These Jewish and Christian thinkers follow the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, who even considers cases–like scratching one’s beard–that seem to have only efficient causes and not to happen for any end. “Against this objection, Avicenna maintains that apparently trivial human actions are motivated by unconscious desire for pleasure, the good of the animal soul” (Richardson 2020), which, in turn, is due to the creator.

However, writing in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon criticizes this whole tradition. He assigns efficient and material causes to physics, and formal and final causes to metaphysics. He gestures at the value of metaphysics for religion and ethics, but he doubts that knowledge can advance in those domains. His mission is to improve our understanding and control of the natural world. And for that purpose, he recommends that we keep formal and final causes out of our analysis and practice only what he calls “physics.”

It is rightly laid down that true knowledge is that which is deduced from causes. The division of four causes also is not amiss: matter, form, the efficient, and end or final cause. Of these, however, the latter is so far from being beneficial, that it even corrupts the sciences, except in the intercourse of man with man (Bacon, Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, II;2).

In this passage and others related to it, Bacon proved prescient. Although plenty of scientists after Bacon have believed in final causes, including divine ends, they only investigate efficient and material causes. Perhaps love moves all the stars, but in Newtonian physics, we strive to explain physical motion in terms of prior events and materials. This is a methodological commitment that yields what Bacon foresaw, the advancement of science.

The last redoubt of final causes was the biological world. My hand moves because of electrical signals, but it seemed that an object as complicated as a hand must have come into existence to serve an end. As Kant writes, “it is quite certain that in terms of purely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible.” Kant says that no Isaac Newton could ever arise who would be able to explain “how even a mere blade of grass is produced” using only “natural laws unordered by intention” (Critique of Judgment 74, Pluhar trans.). But then along came just such a Newton in the form of Charles Darwin, who showed that efficient and material explanations suffice in biology, too. A combination of random mutation plus natural selection ultimately yields objects like blades of grass and human hands.

A world without final causes–without ends–seems cold and pointless if one begins where Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas did. One option is to follow Bacon (and Kant) by separating physics from metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics and assigning the final causes to the latter subjects. Indeed, we see this distinction in the modern university, where the STEM departments deal with efficient causes, and final causes are discussed in some of the humanities. Plenty of scientists continue to use final-cause explanations when they think about religion, ethics, or beauty–they just don’t do that as part of their jobs.

However, Bacon’s warning still resonates. He suspects that progress is only possible when we analyze efficient and material causes. We may already know the final causes relevant to human life, but we cannot learn more about them. This is fine if everyone is convinced about the purpose of life. However, if we find ourselves disagreeing about ethics, religion, and aesthetics, then an inability to make progress becomes an inability to know what is right, and the result can be deep skepticism.

Michael Rosen (2022) reads both Rousseau and Kant as “moral unanimists”–philosophers who believe that everyone already knows the right answer about moral issues. But today hardly anyone is a “moral unanimist,” because we are more aware of diversity. Nietzsche describes the outcome (here, in a discussion of history that has become a science):

Its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to ‘prove’ anything any more; it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there, – it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and ‘describes’ . . . All this is ascetic to a high degree; but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, make no mistake about it! You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, – an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as not to peer in? or peer back? . . .). Here there is snow, here life is silenced; the last crows heard here are called ‘what for?’, ‘in vain’, ‘nada’ (Genealogy of Morals, Kaufman trans. 2:26)

Earlier in the same book, Nietzsche recounts how, as a young man, he was shaped by Schopenhauer’s argument that life has no purpose or design. But Nietzsche says he detected a harmful psychological consequence:

Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? to nothingness? – precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sickness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of compassion [Mitleid], casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a new Euro-Buddhism? to – nihilism? (Genealogy of Morals, Preface:6)

After mentioning Buddhism, Nietzsche critically explores the recent popularity of the great Buddhist virtue–compassion–in Europe.

Indeed, one of the oldest and most widely shared philosophical premises in Buddhism is “dependent origination,” which is the idea that everything happens because of efficient causes alone and not for teleological reasons. (I think that formal causes persist in Theravada texts but are rejected in Mahayana.)

Dependent origination is taken as good news. By realizing that everything we believe and wish for is the automatic result of previous accidental events, we free ourselves from these mental states. And by believing the same about everyone else’s beliefs and desires, we gain unlimited compassion for those creatures. Calm benevolence fills the mind and excludes the desires that brought suffering while we still believed in their intrinsic value. A very ancient verse which goes by the short title ye dharma hetu says (roughly): “Of all the things that have causes, the enlightened one has shown what causes them, and thereby the great renouncer has shown how they cease.”

I mention this argument not necessarily to endorse it. Much classical Buddhist thought presumes that a total release from the world of causation is possible, whether instantly or over aeons. If one doubts that possibility, as I do, then the news that there are no final causes is no longer consoling.

Secondary sources: Richardson, Kara, “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History, Harvard University Press, 2022. See also how we use Kant today; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?; spirituality and science; and the progress of science.

one supple line

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than a quarter of a million Americans work professionally as graphic designers. Each designer produces many images, many of which are reproduced widely. Of course, other countries also have designers and commercial artists. Thanks to them all, we are awash in billions of images: illustrations, logos, advertisements, cartoons, explanations, warnings, decorations, and more.

Coming after modernism, today’s designers often produce abstracted images of real-world objects, highly simplified for impact and legibility. I assume that we can interpret such images because of conventions that we learn, plus the natural inclination of the human eye and brain to match patterns to observed realities (Gombrich 1961).

I illustrate this post not with a contemporary graphic image but with a painting by the noble courtier Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614) entitled “Meditating Daruma.” Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, who probably lived about one thousand years before Nobutada and is credited with introducing Chan Buddhism to China. In turn, Chan evolved into Japanese Zen.

One of the main stories about Bodhidharma tells that the Emperor Wu of Liang asked this barbarian monk how much merit he had earned for his generous support of Buddhism. Bodhidharma said “none,” because the emperor had acted with worldly intent. The monk then meditated in front of a wall for nine years. I assume this is what he is doing in this painting. The text says: “Quietness and emptiness are enough to pass through life without error.”

I would submit that this image is very fine. I tried copying it freehand, and every version that I made was worse than Nobutada’s. Thus the image passed Leon Batista Alberti’s test of beauty (“nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”). However, I was the one conducting the test. I can easily imagine that many of the professional graphic artists working today could reproduce it perfectly, or indeed rival it.

In the process of trying to copy this painting, I discovered that each of my outlines of a hooded figure looked like a person who was staring into the distance, albeit at a different distant point each time I drew it. Although Bodhidharma is often depicted as irascible, here we cannot see his expression, and his back conveys peace.

The design of a meditating monk is simple, and today we are surrounded with highly effective simplified designs; but I find this one far more moving that most others. The reason is its source. This is not a logo for some modern business. Instead, it is an object that is about four centuries old (from long before the deluge of mechanically reproducible images), made by an artist who pioneered a new form of Zen art. The simplification here is his invention, not a prevailing style.

In his discussion of Nobutada, Stephen Addiss writes, “Ignoring the colorful and delicate style of court artists of his day, he brushed simple ink paintings of Zen avatars on coarse, sometimes recycled paper. Like his new style of calligraphy, these paintings were revolutionary” (Addiss 1989, p. 23).

Furthermore, by representing Daruma in meditation, this artist presented an aspirational self-portrait. Although Nobutada was a rich courtier rather than a monk, he must have performed sitting meditation, or at least honored it. Thus the image is a trace of a real person’s life, which, in turn, was inspired by the person he depicts.

We might consider that art, in general, has these two dimensions. One is the form of the object as perceived by human beings, with our naturally evolved eyes and brains. We tend to match the form to objects in our environment. The other is the story of the object’s origin within a larger historical context. Here, for example, we see a single line that conjures the idea of person wrapped in a robe, and we also see also an artifact of Konoe Nobutada, of early 17th-century Japan, and of the Zen tradition extending back for a thousand years. The provenance of the painting not only raises its monetary value but also makes it more genuinely moving than a contemporary image would be.

This idea–an abstract and universal concept is also the outcome of a human act–seems resonant with Buddhism. Although Bodhidharma is quasi-mythical, he has long been associated with the Lankavatara Sutra. That text begins with the standard formula, “Thus I have heard,” and it purports to be a recollection of the actual Buddha by his disciple Ananda (he of the perfect memory). But it can’t possibly be historical, or told by Ananda, or written by Bodhidharma. Its authorship is a fiction excused by the thesis that it conveys: namely, that “There is no one who speaks, nor is there anyone who hears. Lord of Lanka, everything in the world is like an illusion.”

Sources: Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1961); Stehen Addiss, The Art of Zen (Echo Point, 1989); The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Red Pine (Counterpoint, 2013). The digital image and translation of the Chinese verse come from the Mountain Cloud Zen center. See also Verdant mountains usually walk; the sublime and other people; Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery; on inhabiting earth with inaccessibly beautiful things; and (from 2004), aesthetics and history.

varieties of skepticism

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If you are a skeptic–or tempted by skepticism–you might want to consider which varieties of skepticism appeal to you and why. Here is a list of types that differ in significant ways:

Pyrrhonian skepticism (named after Pyrro of Elis, ca. 300 BCE, who founded the Skeptical School): A cultivated habit of refusing to believe or disbelieve all important matters, including skepticism itself. Its purpose is to accomplish mental peace by abandoning troubling questions and commitments. It advises the regular use of techniques that reduce our anxiety about the things we might believe or about not knowing what is true. For example, we can rehearse arguments on both sides of important questions to teach ourselves to suspend judgment.
Academic skepticism (the position adopted by the Academy, which Plato founded, but roughly six centuries after his death): A method that employs the arguments invented by the Pyrrhonists to refute the views of other philosophical schools, without a goal of landing in permanent agnosticism or promoting mental health. The term “academic” is apt, because this kind of skepticism is more like a toolkit for specialists than a way of life.
Cartesian skepticism (named after Rene Descartes, although practiced by others before and after him): A philosophical method that begins by doubting everything that is possible to doubt, especially deep and general beliefs, in order to identify any indubitable beliefs, which then become the foundations of a more secure philosophy. Here, the psychological goal is to accomplish certainty, not to escape from belief.
Edmund Husserl’s epoche: A more radical form of Cartesian skepticism, in which the analyst drops all the categories and vocabulary developed in the history of philosophy and tries to describe experience itself without preconditions. Although Husserl’s motives seem academic, there are similarities with meditative techniques that aim to transcend various kinds of dualities; and Husserl admired the Buddhist Pali Canon. As with Cartesian skepticism, the goal is truth, not freedom from belief.
Fallibilism: A belief that I could be wrong, which accompanies my other beliefs. This ancillary belief reminds me to check for errors, hedge against uncertainty, plan cautiously, and revisit assumptions. The psychological goal is more like permanent disquiet than calmness, although it may be possible to enjoy the constant pursuit of truth.
Intellectual humility: If fallibilism is about beliefs, humility is about people. (At least, that is how the words ring for me.) It’s the attitude that people who disagree with me may be right and I may be wrong. Its consequences can include a genuine receptivity to other people’s claims, an investment in generous listening, and a tolerance for rival views. Humility can be uncomfortable if it means self-reproach; but if it means an appreciation for our fellow human beings, it can satisfying.
Organized skepticism (one of the definitive features of science, according to Robert K. Merton): A set of procedures and practices that guide interactions among people who pursue truth together. Examples include double-blind peer-review or replicating other people’s experiments. Many of these techniques are supposed to be proof against the mental state of the scientist. Scientific methods do not attempt to make people humble in their hearts, but rather convert doubt into procedures.
Liberalism as self-correction: This is a cluster of ideas about how to design institutions that begins with worries about our ability to understand, judge, and plan wisely and thus recommends constantly challenging and revising the status quo. Proponents differ in their enthusiasm for elections, adversarial trials, individual rights, debate and deliberation, and/or markets as mechanisms for self-correction. For myself, I prefer a mix of these tools, because then each can check the others.
Specific distrust: This is belief that a given belief, person, group, or institution is probably wrong. It can be warranted, based on evidence–such as a record of lying or incompetence–or it can itself be mistaken. Unlike doubt about a belief, which is about content, distrust focuses on the source. If I say P, and you think not-P, that is a disagreement. But if you think, “I doubt that guy Peter Levine would be right about P,” that is distrust.
Social distrust: This is a variable measured by social scientists, and one classic measure is a question about trusting other people that has been included on the General Social Survey for decades (see the graph below). Although the question is vague and does not distinguish among kinds of trust or categories of people, individuals’ responses predict many valuable outcomes. Thus the measure is conceptually vague yet empirically valid. Distrust is a character trait that can be affected by social circumstances.
Institutional distrust: In contrast to a view that a specific institution should not be trusted, this is a general stance of skepticism about the influential institutions of a society, or at least a wide swath of them. It does not accept that institutions exhibit organized skepticism or liberal self-correction but takes them to be self-interested or even hostile. Like social distrust, this is a character trait that relates to social circumstances.

To put my own cards on the table: I admire fallibilism, humility, and institutionalized skepticism, in both science and politics. I accept that they can promote disquiet, but discomfort may be necessary for responsible action.

I also think there is a limited wisdom in Pyrrhonism. Although radical skepticism encourages passivity and removes motivations to care about other people, Pyrrhonist techniques for promoting doubt can counter anxiety and what Keats called an "irritable reaching after fact and reason." We need to know when to pursue truth and when to let it go. Furthermore, recognizing that there are matters beyond our ability to know or to capture in language is (for me) a source of comfort.

Specific distrust can be warranted, although we should strive to replace doubt about the source of a given claim with justified doubt about the claim itself. Disbelieving something because of who said it is an ad hominem argument, which is a logical fallacy. It is better to consider whether the claim is valid or not. The problem in the modern world is that no individual can assess most important beliefs, because they depend on countless people's previous contributions. To a large extent, we must trust or distrust the messenger, such as a teacher, physician, or engineer. And, in turn, that messenger learned from other specialists, who learned from others. The whole structure depends on trust.

Distrusting other people and institutions is understandable. The solution is not to hector people that they should trust more. Nevertheless, general distrust is harmful. It robs people of the advantages of modernity, such as the results of science.

An optimist might hope that by making institutions actually more fallibilist and self-correcting, we can encourage wider trust. However, in a world of propaganda and ideology--and deep inequality--such solutions may fail, and people may continue to distrust ideas that merit their belief.

One more version of skepticism is my favorite:

Michel de Montaigne read the Skeptics, particularly a 1562 translation of Sextus. He remained an active participant in public life--indeed, much better respected as a statesman than a writer during his own lifetime. However, his moderate skepticism influenced his politics. "I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as the enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable" (1145). "During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow" (1114). He felt that he had generally done his civic duty (1115), yet he reserved most of his time for private reflection. And in that domain, he avoided trying to know what was true (or whether previous authors were right or wrong) but rather made a study of himself. "I would rather be an expert on myself than on Cicero" (1218). When he looked within, he found numerous inconsistencies and imperfections. Rather than making him dissatisfied or irritable, these explorations gave him some "peace of mind and happiness" (1153). His equanimity palpably improved between "To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die" (before 1580) and "Of Experience" (ca. 1590).

I quote Montaigne from M.A. Screech's translation. See also: Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; Montaigne and Buddhism; against the idea of viewpoint diversity; Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness; thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition