I think of myself as less sure about most important matters than are most people I know–more equivocal and conflicted. Maybe I shouldn’t be so confident about that comparison! Regardless, my self-perception often makes me wonder about skepticism as a stance. Is being skeptical a flaw, a virtue, or (most likely) a bit of both?
The virtues and drawbacks of skepticism have been an explicit topic of discussion for at least 23 centuries. In this mini-essay, I organize some of that conversation–from Greek, Indian, and modern sources–and conclude with a proposal, meant mostly for myself. As the great skeptic Montaigne wrote, “This is not my teaching, it is my studying; it is not a lesson for anyone else, but for myself. [But] what helps me just might help another” (ii.6).
On one hand, it seems that our duty is to glean what is right and then to act accordingly, to the best of our ability, always with an awareness that we could be wrong. Whenever we decide, act, and stand ready to reflect on the results, we are entitled to derive satisfaction.
For instance, if an election is coming up, we should decide whether voting is a worthwhile way to affect the world. If it is, we should determine whom to vote for. We should remain attentive to what happens, because we could have been wrong. Yet as long as we reason and participate–not only in politics but in innumerable other domains–we may and should feel content.
Socrates presents a particularly strong version of this view. Arguing with Protagoras, who espouses some form of relativism or skepticism, Socrates recommends a “science of measurement” (metrike techne) that gradually improves our objective understanding of right or wrong by detecting and overcoming various kinds of bias. This techne, “by showing the truth, would finally cause the soul to abide in peace with the truth, and so save its life” (Prot. 356d). Similarly, near the end of The Republic, Socrates advises that when misfortune comes, we should not “waste time wailing” but “deliberate” about what has happened and then “engage as quickly as possible in correcting” the problem (Rep. 10.604b-9). Here, Socrates likens this approach to a medical art for the soul.
In these passages, Socrates has not proven that knowledge is possible, but he has claimed that lacking knowledge is–and should be–a cause of discomfort, for which the only appropriate cure is to pursue the truth.
David Hume reaches a comparable conclusion in a somewhat different way. Hume reports that when he considers fundamental questions (“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?”), he is struck by the “manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason” and feels “ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and [to] look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.”
But this is not a happy conclusion. Instead, “I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.”
For a time, Hume is able to cure himself of this “philosophical melancholy and delirium” by distracting himself with ordinary life. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” But this mood must also pass, for it is “impossible for the mind of man to rest, like those of beasts, in that narrow circle of objects” Ultimately, “we ought only to deliberate concerning the choice of our guide. … And in this respect I make bold to recommend philosophy” (Hume, 1739, 1.4.7).
Hume says that he cannot be “one of those sceptics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood” because it is naturally impossible to remain in that posture. We make judgments for the same reason we breathe; because what we are designed to do. “Neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly” a skeptic (1.4). The only way forward is to reason about what is true.
On the other hand, it seems that to hold any strong views about the world is a source of disquiet. Our thoughts rarely influence matters or convince others, and they may prove incorrect. Opinions are sources of frustration. Therefore, members of the ancient Skeptical School advised that we should attain mental peace by convincing ourselves that we do not know what is true.
The Greek verb epekho usually means to “present” or “offer,” but in the Skeptics’ jargon, it meant actively convincing yourself that it is impossible to know what is true, either in a specific case or generally. This “suspension of judgment” (as the related noun is usually translated) is an accomplishment, not a passive state. Effort is required to counteract the tendency to make judgments, which Hume claimed was natural. Epikhe is not a shrug-of-the-shoulders but a deep realization that knowledge is impossible.
The Skeptics provided lists of techniques or practices (generally translated “modes”) to induce such suspension. One mode that sometimes works for me is to reflect on how fundamentally different everything would seem to a different species. This form of relativism has impressed people as diverse as William Blake; Friedrich Nietzsche (“Man, a small, wild animal species …”: Will to Power, 121); the Zen master Mumon Yamada; and the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, who suggests that the way “this world embraces and exceeds [the family cat] Soapy’s understanding of it” opens the “possibility of an existence beyond this one” (pp. 162-3).
These people have reached divergent conclusions from their shared premise that each kind of sentient being perceives a fundamentally different world. Blake concludes that “everything is holy.” Nietzsche sees “unbelief” as a “precondition of greatness” and “strength of the will” (Will to Power, 615). In Zen, the moral is to be aware of one’s experience. For Robinson’s Rev. Ames (as for St. Augustine), an awareness of human limitations permits a faith in the things not seen that are disclosed in Scripture.
For the Greek Skeptics, the outcome of suspending all belief was calm or equanimity. Sextus Empiricus says, “The skeptics at first hoped [like Socrates] that untroubledness would arise by resolving irregularities of phenomena and of thought, but, not being able to do this, they held back, and when they suspended judgment, untroubledness [ataraxia] came as if by chance, like a shadow after a body. … For this reason, then, we say that untroubledness about opinions is the goal, but about things that we experience by force, moderation” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1:29).
Nearly two millennia later, John Keats praised “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1817). For a writer, the easier path is to adopt and promote one’s own views. Negative Capability is a difficult alternative with the potential to cure “irritability.” Keats’ main example is Shakespeare, who depicts myriad characters without divulging (or perhaps even holding) opinions of his own.
The Buddha and Nietzsche on Skepticism
I would like to draw attention to two (or two-and-a-half) thinkers who have discussed skepticism in a somewhat similar and interesting way. These people could be described as skeptics, and they use some of the techniques–those that the ancient Skeptics called “modes”–for undermining beliefs. Yet they explicitly disparage practitioners of skepticism on the basis of character. In other words, although they are skeptical, they think that the main proponents of skepticism lead bad lives.
I mainly refer to the Buddha as described in the Pali Canon (1st century BCE?) and Friedrich Nietzsche. (Ironically, in the relevant passages, Nietzsche disparages the Skeptics as “Greek Buddhists,” but he did not know the Pali texts). I also refer to Michel Foucault, who can be classified as a kind of skeptic and who writes in detail about the ancient Greek philosophical schools, but who interestingly omits any mention of Skepticism.
In the first Long Discourse in the Pali Canon, the Buddha canvasses 62 possible views about metaphysical matters, such as whether the cosmos and the soul are immortal. (These are much like the questions that troubled Hume). After summarizing each position, he repeats a close variant of this formula:
The Realized One understands this: ‘If you hold on to and attach to these grounds for views it leads to such and such a destiny in the next life.’ He understands this, and what goes beyond this. And since he does not misapprehend that understanding, he has realized quenching within himself. Having truly understood the origin, ending, gratification, drawback, and escape from feelings, the Realized One is freed through not grasping (S?lakkhandhavagga, DN 1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).
Among the 62 views are four that sound like Skepticism. The Buddha calls proponents of these four views “endless flip-floppers.” (Maurice Walsche translates the same word as “eel-wrestlers.”) Presented with each major issue, some of them think, “‘I don’t truly understand … If I were to declare [a view], I might be wrong. That would be stressful for me, and that stress would be an obstacle.’ So … whenever they’re asked a question, they resort to verbal flip-flops and endless flip-flops: ‘I don’t say it’s like this. I don’t say it’s like that. I don’t say it’s otherwise. I don’t say it’s not so. And I don’t deny it’s not so.’”
The three other types of “flip-floppers” behave the same way but for different reasons. Some fear that they would feel “desire or greed or hate or repulsion” as a result of holding beliefs, some fear that they would be defeated in a debate, and some are simply “dull and stupid.”
Apart from the dull and stupid, the “flip-floppers” sound like Skeptics, and the Buddha rejects them with the same formula that he uses in response to all the dogmatists: “‘If you hold on to and attach to these grounds for views it leads to such and such a destiny in the next life.'” The Realized One “understands this, and what goes beyond this. …”
In short, the Buddha is a skeptic about Skepticism. Near the end of the Discourse, he elaborates his own view. All opinions, he says, “are conditioned by contact.” In other words, we believe everything we do as a direct and unavoidable result of previous events. Specifically, the events that lead people to hold philosophical opinions are feelings of craving. This is as much the case for the flip-floppers as for everyone else. They have chosen Skeptical opinions because of their feelings, which include an aversion to being moved or criticized. The real path to enlightenment is to see all opinions as fully conditioned, a realization that permits one to escape from the whole fisher’s net of beliefs.
Is the doctrine that everything is conditioned (“dependent origination”) just another metaphysical position that could be explained away on psychological grounds? Or is it self-refuting?
One answer might that it is self-refuting, but in a good way, a ladder that we can push aside once we have climbed it. Meanwhile, it offers insights about specific positions. When you adopt any given idea and find yourself committed to it, you can ask what prior psychological experience must have generated it and thereby release yourself from it, as a form of therapy.
I think a similar view can be attributed to Nietzsche. His supposed doctrine of Will to Power alleges that all beliefs result from “will,” including the doctrine itself. Like dependent-origination, Will to Power it may be self-refuting, but in a good way.
Deeply distrustful of epistemological dogmas, I loved to look now from this window, now from that, was careful not to get stuck in them, considered them harmful – and finally: is it likely that a tool can criticize its own suitability?? – What I was more careful to note was that no epistemological scepticism or dogmatism ever arose without ulterior motives – that it has a secondary value as soon as one considers what basically forced this position (Will to Power, 179).
Nietzsche’s treatment of the ancient Skeptics (whom he calls Pyrrhonists, after their founder, Pyrrho of Ellis) parallels the Buddha’s analysis of “flip-floppers.” Nietzsche criticizes the Pyrrhonists psychologically. They manifest a “desire for disbelief” that has base motives. “What inspires the sceptics? Hatred of the dogmatists – or a need for rest, a weariness, as in Pyrrho” (193).
Nietzsche argues that the earliest Greek philosophers had been creative, noble (vornehme), and “fertile.” They weren’t right (nothing is right), but they left behind beautiful works. Pyrrho was “necessarily the last”: he killed this creative tradition. His philosophy was “wise weariness”:
Living among the lowly, lowly. No pride. Living in the common way; honoring and believing what everyone believes. On guard against science and the mind, even everything that puffs you up…. Simple: indescribably patient, carefree, mild, apatheia, or even prautes [a word for ‘mild’ in the New Testament]. A Buddhist for Greece, brought up amid the tumult of the schools; late comer; tired; the protest of the tired against the zeal of the dialecticians; the disbelief of the tired in the importance of all things. He has seen Alexander, he has seen the Indian penitents. To such late comers and refined people, everything low, everything poor, everything idiotic has a seductive effect. That narcotizes: that makes you stretch out (Pascal). On the other hand, in the midst of the crowd and confused with everyone else, they feel a little warmth: they need warmth, these tired people…. Overcoming contradiction; no competition, no desire for distinction: denying the Greek instincts. (Pyrrho lived with his sister, who was a midwife.) Disguising wisdom so that it no longer distinguishes itself; giving it a cloak of poverty and rags; doing the most menial tasks: going to the market and selling milk pigs…. Sweetness; brightness; indifference; no virtues that need gestures: equating oneself even in virtue: ultimate self-conquest, ultimate indifference.
Nietzsche’s epithet for Pyrrho, a “Buddhist for Greece,” may turn out to be true (if Pyrrho was a practicing Buddhist), yet a bit unfair if we attend to the Buddha’s reported criticism of eel-wrestling skeptics.
Michel Foucault can also be seen as a kind of skeptic. He describes his project as “making things more fragile” by showing that the combinations of concepts and practices that shape our world arose recently, have contingent origins, and therefore “can be politically destroyed” (Foucault 1981). He does not offer prescriptions but shakes his readers’ confidence in what they think they know. Foucault’s practices of genealogy and archaeology sound like Skeptical modes and strikingly resemble the Buddha’s technique of demonstrating that beliefs arise contingently.
Especially in his last four years, Foucault turned from critically investigating forms of power-and-knowledge to exploring ways that individuals have cared for themselves. In this period, he focused on the ancient Greek philosophical schools that offered various forms of therapy. Citing Carlos Lévy, Frédéric Gros comments;
Foucault, in fact, takes the Hellenistic and Roman period as the central framework for his historico-philosophical demonstration, describing it as the golden age of the culture of the self, the moment of maximum intensity of practices of subjectivation, completely ordered by reference to the requirement of a positive constitution of a sovereign and inalienable self, a constitution nourished by the appropriation of logoi as so many guarantees against external threats and means of intensification of the relation to the self. And Foucault successfully brings together for his thesis the texts of Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Musonius Rufus, Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch. [However,] The Skeptics are not mentioned; there is nothing on Pyrrhon and nothing on Sextus Empiricus. Now the Skeptical school is actually as important for ancient culture as the Stoic or Epicurean schools, not to mention the Cynics. Study of the Skeptics would certainly have introduced some corrections to Foucault’s thesis in its generality. It is not, however, the exercises that are lacking in the Skeptics, nor reflection on the logoi, but these are entirely devoted to an undertaking of precisely de-subjectivation, of the dissolution of the subject. They go in a direction that is exactly the opposite of Foucault’s demonstration (concerning this culpable omission, Carlos Lévy does not hesitate to speak of “exclusion”). This silence is, it is true, rather striking. Without engaging in a too lengthy debate, we can merely recall that Foucault took himself for . . . a skeptical thinker. (Foucault 2001, p. 548).
Foucault’s silence about Skepticism is impossible to explain conclusively but provocative. One possibility is that he did not know how to address thinkers like Sextus because they were too close to his own approach.
Despite some similarities, it is worth distinguishing these thinkers’ goals. The Buddha of the Pali Canon promises “a complete and permanent end to desire, attachment, and aversion” (Segal 2020, 110)–let’s call that “enlightenment.” The Skeptics offer “untroubledness about opinions” and a moderate response to suffering in this life–a version of worldly happiness. Nietzsche admires greatness. The Will to Power bears the epigraph: “Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak with greatness: with greatness, that is, cynically and with innocence.” And Foucault seems to offer some kind of liberation, albeit always partial and provisional.
For myself, I cannot endorse what I take to be the fundamental goal of the Theravada texts: permanent release from a cycle of literal rebirth into suffering. Although there is an enormous amount to learn from these works, their core purpose doesn’t work for me. My view is closer to Rev. Ames’: “this life has its own mortal loveliness” (Robinson, 184).
Foucault was engaged in something deeply important, and it’s tragic that he wasn’t able to continue his exploration of how to cultivate the self. We are left with impressive critiques and hints of a positive program focused on the inner life. I’d like to think Foucault would have written explicitly and interestingly about Skepticism, but he did not have that opportunity. Foucault also recommends that “Montaigne should be reread … as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self” (Foucault 2011, p. 251), but he was not able to offer that re-reading.
As for Nietzsche: I agree with him that most cultural and intellectual figures, and some political leaders, who leave a significant creative legacy are firmly committed to opinions of their own. They are often “hedgehogs” (those who know one thing, even if it’s cynicism or nihilism), not “foxes” (those who know many things and are prone to change their theories). I admit that I sometimes resent the disadvantage that arises from being an equivocal fox or an eel-wrestler–from being chronically unsure. However, at least for me, the point is not to be great (which is surely out of reach), but to live reasonably well. And if I can make progress on that, “what helps me might help another.”
Thus the questions reduce to these: Should we want worldly happiness in the form of untroubledness, and if so, does suspension of belief help us get there?
How circumstances have changed
Jonathan Barnes, an expert on Sextus (with whom I studied many decades ago) finds the Skeptics’ therapeutic promises implausible and even “reprehensible” (Barnes 2000, xxxviii). He acknowledges that “Skepticism is offered as a recipe for happiness…. Sextus thinks that we should read Sextus in order to become happy.” However, he writes, “I find it difficult to take this sort of thing seriously” (p. xxx)
Barnes offers an example: “Suppose that I suspect that I have a fatal disease: unsure, I worry, I become depressed; and in order to restore my peace of mind I decide to investigate — I visit my doctor.” Unfortunately, the doctor is a Skeptic, so he persuades Jonathan that it is impossible to tell whether or not he has a fatal illness. He “lets me leave … in the very state of uncertainty which induced me to enter it.” This result shows that the purported therapist is “a quack” (xxi).
We might think that it’s actually better to suspend belief about whether one has an incurable, fatal disease rather than to learn that one is dying. This question seems debatable. But I would like to draw attention to the genuine value of–in this case–medical knowledge. Sextus is said to have practiced as a physician, but there was rarely much that an ancient doctor could do for you. Matters were not much better in 1811-14, when John Keats received his medical training. Nowadays, however, a doctor has a pretty good chance of determining what ails you and may be able to assist, if not with a cure than at least with effective palliatives.
It’s not that a modern doctor, as an individual, has far more knowledge and better perception than Sextus had. Rather, medical science is deeply collaborative and cumulative. Your physician sends your blood samples to a lab, which uses protocols and instruments developed in other labs, based on previous findings from still others. Much of the physician’s individual knowledge is about how to navigate this human system. Socrates’ metrike techne has become a group effort.
Trust is essential: not only trust in one’s own senses and reason (which Skepticism challenges), but also trust in other people and institutions. This is the case not only for medicine but also for engineering, academic research, government statistics, journalism, market data, and other forms of organized knowledge.
By displaying appropriate amounts of trust in cumulative human knowledge, we can find partial solutions to human suffering. Even if we agree with the Buddha that suffering always remains, compassion compels us to do the best we can. Blanket skepticism interferes with our ability to help ourselves and others. That is what happens when people who doubt medical science or professional journalism or government statistics refuse to do things like take vaccines or use currency or participate in politics.
Yet we must always remember that we and others can be wrong and should build the possibility of error and bias into our institutions and processes. Robert K. Merton saw “organized skepticism” as one of the defining features of science, and constitutional democracy offers mechanisms for identifying and challenging errors.
At the personal level, we might learn from both the Theravada texts and the Greek Skeptics about the drawbacks of identifying too strongly with our own ideas. A moderate kind of Skepticism encourages not to cling to what we believe, because that is a cause not only of dogmatism but also of disquiet. It increases the odds that we will be frustrated when our ideas fail to persuade.
One of the Skeptics’ techniques, “The Mode of Dispute,” attempts to attain peace by observing the unresolved disagreements among previous thinkers. The Buddha also practices this mode. At one point, he is asked, “The very same teaching that some say is ‘ultimate,’ others say is inferior. Which of these doctrines is true, for they all claim to be an expert?” The Buddha replies that sages “take no side among factions.”
Peaceful among the peaceless, equanimous, they don’t grasp when others grasp. Having given up former defilements and not making new ones, not swayed by preference, nor a proponent of dogma, that wise one is released from views, not clinging to the world, nor reproaching themselves. They are remote from all things seen, heard, or thought. With burden put down, the sage is released: not formulating, not abstaining, not longing (“The Longer Discourse on ‘Arrayed for Battle,'” trans. by Bhikkhu Sujato.).
Here I would emphasize the Buddha’s attitudinal stance. The takeaway is not to be skeptical about everything but rather to avoid clinging to one’s views, submitting to mere preferences, or reproaching oneself for one’s errors and failures to change the world. The text recommends a mild detachment, which is compatible with trying to determine the best thing to do and acting accordingly. This, I think, is the form of skepticism that encourages a tranquil mind.
[I revised and expanded this post on 8/27/24.]
Sources: I translate Montaigne from the 1598 Middle French edition (“Ce n’est pas icy ma doctrine, c’est mon estude : & n’est pas la leçon d’autruy, c’est la mienne. … Ce qui me sert, peut aussi par accident servir à un autre”); the Greek texts from Project Perseus; and Nietzsche from the Max Braun 1917 edition (which seems to omit some valuable material). Also quoting: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739; Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel, Farrar (Straus and Giroux); John Keats, letter to his brothers (Dec. 21, 1817); Jonathan Barnes, introduction to Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Scepticism, translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge 2000); Michel Foucault, “What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth; Gros’ note to Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France (1981-1982), Palgrave, 2001; and Seth Zuiho Segall, Buddhism and Human Flourishing (Palgrave 2020). The Pali translations are by Bhikkhu Sujato via the amazing SuttaCentral.net.
See also: Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?