Both Pyrrhonists and dogmatists aim at and achieve a sort of psychological security: the former by ceasing to inquire and by living more or less adoxastos, without beliefs; the latter by the rigid and unquestioning holding of contentious beliefs. The dogmatists hold on, the skeptics let go. The former live tenaciously, clinging to their tenets; the skeptics live or try to live without beliefs and tenets. (The Latin tenere means to hold.)
What the two opposing groups have in common is that they cease inquiry. The dogmatist, secure in his dogmas, feels no need to inquire. "We don't seek the truth; we have the truth." The Pyrrhonian skeptic, despairing of finding truth, and sick of the agitation consequent upon discussion and debate, gives up inquiry. "We don't seek the truth; the truth is not to be had."
Neither form of doxastic security is to be recommended.
Peter Wust in his excellent but largely forgotten Ungewißheit und Wagnis (1937), speaking of dogmatists and skeptics, writes that:
Beide wollen sich von dem Zustand des Unterwegsseins befreien . . . (UW 236)
Both want to free themselves from the state of being on the way . . .
. . . when man, here below, is and must remain homo viator.
In this world we are ever in statu viae, on the road, coming from we know not where, headed for we know not where. The Whither and Whence remain shrouded in darkness, and the light that guides us is but a half-light. On this road there is no rest from inquiry. Rest, if rest there be, lies at the end of the road.
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