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"Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine, but a way of intellectual life, a way of thinking, talking, and acting." (Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP 1996, p. 66) Mates is a careful writer and his meaning is clear: Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine at all. It involves no beliefs or teachings or doctrines or dogmas. There is no Skeptic credo. The whole point of it is to live without beliefs, belieflessly, adoxastos.
Nice work if you can get it. In these days of bitter controversy and unremitting acrimony, would it not be great to be able to float through life belieflessly?
Before asking whether it is possible to live without beliefs, we should consider why a life without beliefs might be thought to be desirable. But before that we need to understand what the Pyrrhonian skeptic means by 'belief.'
What is belief?
According to Mates, and I follow him on this, belief is "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60) To illustrate, suppose our skeptic tastes some honey. Speaking with the vulgar, he may say 'This honey is sweet.' But he will think with the learned and intend 'This honey is sweet' as elliptical for 'It seems to me at present that this honey is sweet.' Thus he does not go beyond the sensory appearances, nor does he allow himself to fall into dispute with a cantankerous table mate who, tasting honey from the same jar, claims that the honey is not sweet. There is nothing to dispute because there is no one proposition that the skeptic affirms and his table mate denies.
Sticking to the sensory seeming, our skeptic refuses to accept or affirm the proposition that the honey is sweet, a proposition that purports to describe a feature of the external world. Of course, he does not reject or deny this proposition ether. He takes no stand on its truth or falsity. He suspends judgment. He may even take a further step and doubt whether there is any proposition to take a stand on. He may question whether the sentence 'This honey is sweet,' taken at face value and not as elliptical for the modalized sentence above, expresses any proposition. He would then not be suspending judgment as to the truth-value of a proposition, but suspending judgment on the question whether a declarative sentence the constituent words of which possess meaning also possesses a unitary propositional sense or meaning capable of attracting a truth-value. More on this later, perhaps, in a subsequent entry.
As for 'external world,' I take it to refer not only to sense objects as they are in themselves, if there are any, but to any and all objects and state of affairs whose nature and existence are independent of us, whether physical or not. On this use of 'external world,' God and Fregean propositions are in the external world.
Given this understanding of 'belief,' why should living without beliefs be thought to be a good thing?
The beliefless life as the happy life
To put it briefly, the ancient skeptic thinks that belieflessness is the way to happiness. But what is required for happiness? According to the luminaries of late antiquity, ataraxia is at the core of happiness or well-being as a necessary component thereof.
Ataraxia is a concept central to the Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. My concern at the moment is solely with the skeptics, and their main man, Sextus Empiricus. Ataraxia (from Gr. a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, freedom from emotional and intellectual disturbance, tranquillitas animi, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus (circa 200 anno domini) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that "Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquillity." (Hallie, p. 35)
The skeptic's goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness or well-being) by way of ataraxia (tranquillity of mind). The central means to ataraxia and happiness is the withholding of assent from all contents of assertion or belief, including such mundane contents as that honey is sweet, but especially those that transcend the mundane and give rise to contention and bitter strife. To use some contemporary examples, beliefs about abortion, gun control, capital punishment, wealth redistribution, illegal immigration, foreign policy, the nature and existence of God etc. lead to strife and in extreme cases bloodshed. Given the difficulty and seeming irresolvability of the issues, the skeptic enjoins the withholding of assent for the sake of ataraxia. The latter is supposed to supervene upon the practice of epoché, the practice of withholding assent.
A quick illustration. Suppose a political conservative maintains the thesis T that capital punishment is morally justified in some cases, while his liberal opponent maintains the opposite (the contradictory proposition, ~T): in no case is capital punishment morally justified. The propositions maintained cannot both be true given the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Each side is passionately convinced of the truth of his thesis and each side marshals arguments in support of it. But the best arguments on either side 'cancel out.' Or so the skeptic claims. Upon careful examination of the arguments for and against T, he finds no compelling reason to take one side over the other. This puts him in a state of doubt with respect to T and its negation. He then takes a further step: he suspends judgment about T. This further step is not logically required because one who has no compelling reason to accept one or the other of a pair of contradictory propositions might decide to accept one or the other for no reason at all, or for prudential reasons. Let's think about this.
Is suspension of judgment rationally motivated by lack of demonstrative evidence?
The following is a non sequitur:
1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T. Therefore:
2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.
The inference is invalid, moving as it does from 'is' to 'ought.' Why must I suspend judgment when I can plump for one or the other of the contradictories? An auxiliary premise, however, will validate the inference:
0) One must withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling.
In the presence of (0), the inference from (1) to (2) goes through.
Is the principle of intellectual integrity a belief?
Call (0) the principle of intellectual integrity. It seems that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the skeptic. In plain English, it seems that this is a belief of his. But then he has beliefs after all, which gives the lie to his claim to live adoxastos, belieflessly. Our skeptic obviously needs the principle of intellectual integrity, and I don't think I am dogmatizing if I call it a belief.
We agreed with Mates that, for a skeptic, a belief is " "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60) It seems obvious that (0) is a proposition and that the skeptic has an affirmative attitude toward it. That is, he accepts or affirms it. He believes it. You might object that this proposition does not describe anything. But I think it does. It describes an ideal of human behavior. It describes what a person of intellectual integrity is like. Such a person withholds assent to the non-evident. He doesn't dogmatize in the manner of the Platonist or the Stoic or the Christian.
Our Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, firmly maintains, over time, an affirmative attitude toward a proposition that describes something transcendent of his fleeting sensory states, namely, the person of intellectual integrity, the man who apportions his assent to the evidence and does not irresponsibly affirm beyond the evidence. With respect to (0), the Pyrrhonian is not merely saying how things seem to him at present. He is holding before us an ideal of the sage or wise man that is external to our fleeting mental states.
After all, a way of life cannot be founded upon a subjective seeming that might be overturned tomorrow by a contrary seeming. The skeptic's commitment to his way of life transcends the moment and what seems to him to be the case in the moment.
Interim conclusion
Pyrrhonism, while obviously not merely a doctrine, rests on doctrines. Others of these I will discuss later. So it is false to say that Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine. It is also false that we can live without beliefs. If anyone can, it is the Pyrrhonist. But we have just seen that he needs beliefs too.
Since it is not possible to live without beliefs, it cannot be desirable to live without beliefs. One cannot rationally desire the impossible.
Fred Barnes argues, very plausibly, that the National Rifle Association played a "critical role" in putting Trump over the top. Of course, the foolish and mendacious Hillary was very cooperative:
"I respect the Second Amendment," she [Hillary] said in the second debate. In the third, she went further. "I also believe there is an individual right to bear arms." But she quibbled with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld that right. She would gut the right by mandating that guns in homes be kept in pieces "to protect toddlers."
The stupidity of this beggars understanding. Apparently, for Hillary, the only safe gun is a useless gun, an instance of what philosophers call a scattered object:
February brings to the Sonoran desert days so beautiful that one feels guilty even sitting on the back porch, half-outside, taking it all in, eyes playing over the spring green, lungs deeply enfolding blossom-laden warmish breezes. One feels that one ought to be walking around in this earthly heaven. And this despite my having done just that early this morning. Vita brevis, and February too with its 28 days. The fugacity of February to break the heart. It's all fleeting, one can't get enough of it. All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity.
And now I head back outside, away from this too-complicated machine, to read simply and slowly some more from Stages on Life's Way and to drink a cup of java to stave off the halcyon sleepiness wrought by lambent light and long vistas on this afternoon in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.
The graphic infra may help clear things up for those of you lefties who are not permanently lost to TDS. I will add that if Trump is not your president, then you are not my fellow citizen. You are a subversive element, and due no respect, if you do not accept our system of government and the procedurally correct outcome of an election.
See Prager's Note to the Left: Four Years Ago, Conservatives Were Just as Depressed:
Many of us believed that President Obama was doing great damage to America. Now we are convinced that he did more damage to America domestically, to America’s position the world and to the world at large than any other two-term president. He left office with racial tensions — many of which he exacerbated — greater than at any time since the civil rights era half a century ago. He left the world’s worst regimes — Iran, China, Russia, North Korea and radical Islamist terror groups — stronger and more aggressive than before he became president. Economic growth never rose above 3 percent, a first for a two-term president. He nearly doubled the national debt and had little to nothing to show for it. Obamacare hurt more people financially than it helped medically, including physicians. More people than ever are on government aid. The list is far longer than this.
A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"
The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question. (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.) Now what exactly am I being asked? The question is ambiguous as between:
Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?
Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God?
My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God. My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day. Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore). It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body -- can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? -- but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.
By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did. Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.' (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)
So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist. But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists. The evidence is a lot slimmer. This is not to say that there is no evidence. There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling. There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets. But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.
When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists. Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun." In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things. But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.
The difference could be put like this. The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God. Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know. But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.
In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil. It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil. How do you know there is evil? No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain. But is pain evil? Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil. Pain is given. But is evil given? Pain is undeniable. But one can easily deny the existence of evil. Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.
As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God. Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value. I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists. As certain as I am that I have hands? More certain. I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way. But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?
It's been said of Aquinas.
On Aristotle's hylomorphic ontology, form and matter are 'principles' or ontological factors involved in the analysis of sublunary primary substances. These factors are not substances in their own right. Now Thomas is an Aristotelian in ontology. But when it comes to God and the soul he goes Platonist. God is forma formarum, the form of all forms, and yet self-subsistent. The soul after death is capable of existing in separation from matter while it awaits the resurrection of the body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. But in the human case the soulic form is more than a principle invoked in hylomorphic analysis. It is capable of existence independent of matter.
The sublunary Aristotelianism and the superlunary Platonism exist together in a certain tension. Whether this tension gets the length of a contradiction is a further question.
"Get the length of" is a classy phrase which has long languished in desuetude. I resurrect it from the writings of F. H. Bradley.
Related articles
Leftists complain that President Trump is 'authoritarian.' But given the abdication of authority on the part of university administrators who refuse to stand up to leftist thugs and refuse to defend such ideals of the university as free speech and free inquiry, a little 'authoritarianism' looks to be exactly what is needed. It is the surrender of the university admins to the know-nothing and 'transgressive' rabble that would justify Trump's withholding of federal funds from institutions such as Cal Berkeley and NYU. In fact, that is exactly what he should do.
'Progressives' have an Orwellian understanding of tolerance. There is nothing (classically) liberal about them.
Conservatives are the new liberals.
Q. Does God command X because it is morally obligatory, or is X morally obligatory because God commands it?
1. Necessarily, God commands X iff X is morally obligatory.
(1) expresses a broadly logical equivalence and equivalence is symmetrical: if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p. But metaphysical grounding is asymmetrical: if M metaphysically grounds N, then it is not the case that N metaphysically grounds M. For example, if fact F is the truth-maker of sentence s, then it is not the case that s is the truth-maker of F. Truth-making is a type of metaphysical grounding: it is not a causal relation and its is not a logical relation (where a logical relation is one that relates propositions, examples of logical relations being consistency, inconsistency, entailment, and logical independence.)
(1) leaves wide open whether God is the source of the obligatoriness of moral obligations, or whether such obligations are obligatory independently of divine commands. Thus the truth of (1) does not entail an answer to (Q).
The 'because' in (Q) cannot be taken in a causal sense if causation is understood as a relation that connects physical or mental events, states, or changes with other physical or mental events, states, or changes. Nor can the 'because' be taken in a logical sense. Logical relations connect propositions, and a divine command is not a proposition. Nor is the obligatoriness of the content of a command a proposition.
So I say this: if the content of a command is morally obligatory because God issued the command, then the issuing of the command is the metaphysical ground of the the moral obligatoriness of the content of the command. If, on the other hand, the content of the command is morally obligatory independently of the issuing of the divine command, then the moral obligatoriness of the command is the metaphysical ground of the correctness of the divine command.
Either way, there is a relation of metaphysical grounding.
My argument in summary:
1. (Q) is an intelligible question.
2. (Q) is not a question about a causal relation.
3. (Q) is not a question about a logical relation.
4. There is no other ordinary (nonmetaphysical) candidate relation such as a temporal relation or an epistemic relation for (Q) to be about.
5. (Q) is an intelligible question if and only if 'because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.
Therefore
6. 'Because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.
Therefore
7. There is a relation of metaphysical grounding.
OK, Noble Ostrich, which premise will you reject and why?
What is time? Don't ask me, and I know. Ask me, and I don't know. (St. Augustine) This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.
On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon, at worst an illusuion. Either way, not something that really occurs. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming. My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death approaching from the future, getting closer and closer. Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality. At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.
The B-theorist does not deny that there is time. He does not hold that time is an illusion or mere appearance. What he denies is that the sense we all have that time passes or flows is an ingredient in real time. His claim is that real or objective time is exhausted by the B-series and that temporal becoming is at best subjective.
If there is no temporal becoming in reality, then change is not a becoming different or a passing away or a coming into being. When a tomato ripens, it does not become ripe: it simply is unripe at certain times and is ripe at certain later times. And when it ceases to exist, it doesn't pass away: it simply is at certain times and is not at certain later times.
You could say that that the B-theorist has a static view of time that strips way its 'dynamism.'
Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality. Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago. Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say, lies in the future. (But this future event is not approaching or getting closer.) Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period. And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.
This is to say that the present moment enjoys no privilege. There is nothing special about it. So you can't say that the present alone exists.
This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.' He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned. Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t. An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.
Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is. But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.
The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege. Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter. This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness. There just is no irreducible monadic property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it. To exist is to exist tenselessly. The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property. Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent. If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not just now (which is trivial) but at all.
Please note that the B-theory is incompatible not only with presentism, but with any theory that is committed to irreducible A-properties. Thus the B-theory rules out 'pastism,' the crazy theory that only the past exists and 'futurism,' the crazy view that only the future exists. It also rules out the sane view that only the past and the present exist.
Why be a B-theorist? McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction. We should examine that argument in a separate post. The argument is endorsed by Hugh Mellor in his Real Time.
Another consideration is that the physics of Einstein & Co, has no need of temporal becoming. So if physics gets at the world as it is in itself apart from our subjective additions, then real time is exhausted by the B-series.
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