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Skepticism as a Philosophy of Life (Episode 63)
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How do you live in an uncertain world?
In this episode Caleb and Michael talk about the life philosophy of Skepticism. Skepticism was one of the Stoic’s rival philosophical. Michael and I discuss what skepticism is, what living like a skillful skeptic looks like, and our impressions of the philosophy.
(01:15) Introduction
(04:22) What is Skepticism?
(12:37) Questioning Skepticism
(23:29) Skeptic Ethical Exercises
(31:53) Areas of Agreement with the Stoics
(35:56) Disagreements between the Stoics and Skeptics
(43:13) Is Skepticism Self-refuting?
(49:09) The Ancient Stoic Response
(54:02) Summing Up
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Skepticism vs Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
The skeptic versus stoic debate is one of negation versus positivity. The stoic goal is to live in accordance with nature by achieving knowledge. It's to let in the true while avoiding the false. The skeptic goal is to just avoid the false. So in a way, the skeptic view is also about understanding our nature as the kinds of beings that cannot understand the universe.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Exploration of Skepticism
00:00:41
Speaker
And in this episode, Michael and I talk about the life philosophy of skepticism. Skepticism was one of the rival philosophical schools to ancient stoicism. We discuss what it is, what living like a skillful skeptic looks like, and our impression of this philosophy that aims to make sense of how to live in an certain world. Here is our conversation.
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about a rival school, another philosophy of life. And it's one we haven't talked about as much, skepticism or academic skepticism. Yeah, and I think part of the reason why we haven't talked about it as much is it's easy to
00:01:35
Speaker
dismiss skepticism as not really being committed to anything or as being school or just a negative school just says, hey, you know, nothing's real. How can we know anything's the case?
Skepticism and Stoicism: Philosophical Exercises
00:01:45
Speaker
But as we'll discover in this episode, it had a number of compelling arguments, both for skepticism, but it also had some ethical arguments. It was a kind of a conception that this skeptics school provided a conception of how best to live.
00:02:04
Speaker
and provided something that I don't think they get credit for a number of actual therapeutic exercises. We talk a lot about the dichotomy of control. We talk about contemplation of the sage, premeditation of evils or bad things. And those are kind of stoic exercises and skepticism had a number of those exercises. And another reason I think that skepticism is fun to talk about as stoics is that the skeptics really pushed the stoics. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of infighting, a lot of kind of philosophical beef.
00:02:34
Speaker
between these two schools and it really helped shape stoicism into the school that it is today. It's partly the school that it is because it had to respond to these skeptic arguments. So I thought it would be a fun one to dig into. Yeah, absolutely. I personally think, theoretically, skepticism is pretty silly, but the
00:02:53
Speaker
exercises they introduced are very interesting, underrated, and perhaps in some sense that should make one think that the philosophy is less silly. I'm not so sure about that. It's only kind of
Skeptical Practices and Their Alignment with Stoicism
00:03:09
Speaker
silly. Yeah, I'm glad to talk about skepticism some more just because
00:03:15
Speaker
they had so many ethic exercises and I just I suppose it's general a general stance this sort of skeptical stance is one that the Stoics advocated you know suspend judgment when you should and perhaps something we need some more of. Yeah maybe we shouldn't be skeptic but we could all maybe use a bit more skepticism in our lives.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I think that's a good objective for this episode. If you leave the episode thinking that skepticism, not as silly as you maybe thought it was. Well, that that's a, I think that's a job well done as a successful, successful hour of your time. So I'm going to go into four. I have my notes here. I divided them up into four sections. First. What is skepticism?
00:03:56
Speaker
Second, where does it agree and disagree with Stoicism? So where were they fighting? What did they have in common? What did they disagree on?
Historical Context of Ancient Skepticism
00:04:03
Speaker
Third is the Stoic rebuttals to the skeptical position. How did the Stoics combat the claims of skepticism, the ones that the skeptics were arguing the Stoics were getting wrong? And fourth, just some closing thoughts and reflections on our end. So with that, I'll jump into it.
00:04:20
Speaker
So the first thing about skepticism, I mean, I think we're all familiar with a kind of the same way. If you don't study philosophy, you're familiar with stoic as an adjective. You're familiar with skeptic as an adjective or skepticism as a concept. That means people, you know, who. Maybe I think in today's language means it's generally hard.
00:04:41
Speaker
to convince them of something. They're difficult to be persuaded. They're very, I guess, interrogate beliefs. Don't go along with things easily. And just the same way stoicism has come along from that, skepticism derived from this ancient school as well, the Skeptic School of Philosophy. And there's two main types of ancient skepticism.
00:05:03
Speaker
So there's Pyronism, which comes from Pyro, and then there's Academic Skepticism, which comes from the Academy Plato School and their brand of skepticism. And so I want to make that distinction pretty clear. So Pyro was the first real skeptic, the first Greek skeptic to establish this. He was born around 360 BC, making him around 30 years older than Zeno.
00:05:28
Speaker
So this is around, you know, a little bit after Socrates, but before Zeno and that kind of transitionary period. And he founded what was called Pyronism. And we don't have a lot of his writing left, but we have accounts of one of his famous pupils, Timon. And so he was one strain of skepticism. And then the other was the academic one. So Plato had his school, which was called the Academy. So when we talk about academic this, academic that, we're not referring to
00:05:58
Speaker
university in the way we would say academic today. There's another kind of adjective or descriptor we've taken from this. We're referring literally to Plato's Academy or coming from Plato's Academy. So one specific school in Athens. And so after Plato, there was a number of leaders of the school and Arca Salleus was one of those. And he founded academic skepticism where he became the head of the Academy in 260 BC. So around 100 years after the birth of Pyro, and that's around 40 years after the founding of Stoicism.
Epistemological Claims of Skepticism
00:06:25
Speaker
And he made skepticism one of the main tenets of the platonic school and basically turned the emphasis of platonic philosophy away from where it was before and towards skepticism. So there's these two brands. I guess I just want to clarify that. And for the sake of this podcast, we're going to focus on academic skepticism because we have the most of their writings.
00:06:48
Speaker
But it's important to note that there are two of those. And Sextus Empiricus is a famous later Pyronist, and I have a quote from Sextus Empiricus, and he says that the School of Academic Skepticism is quote, basically the same as ours, basically the same as Pyronism.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I'm sure, you know, if you're an expert in this, you'd say these are different, but I'm going to take that as sufficient evidence to say, look, even though there might be some differences between pyronism and academic skepticism, even though these two similar schools came about separately, they have nothing common that we're going to squish them together for the sake of this episode and focus on academic skepticism.
00:07:25
Speaker
So that's a bit about the history. In terms of academic skepticism's main epistemological commitments, so when we talk about epistemology, that's the theory of knowledge, that's the theory of what we can possibly know. We typically think of skepticism as an epistemological position.
00:07:42
Speaker
that it is very difficult or impossible to come to knowledge. And I would say that was the differentiating claim that the fact that it's impossible to come to knowledge understood as an accurate conception of the way the world actually is outside of our own perception.
00:07:59
Speaker
That key skeptical claim is going to be the motivator of all of these ancient skeptical schools. That's what they're going to have in common. That's where that idea in modern sense comes from is this ancient conception that, look, we can't know the nature of reality. We can't connect with things outside of ourselves to understand them as they truly are. Or really, we can't have confidence in that.
00:08:22
Speaker
and not to the epistemological commitment. We're going to go in further that they have ethical claims as well, but I really want to start with that epistemological claim. And I have a long quote here from Cicero, quoting Archisoleus and his position. And so Cicero says, Archisoleus was in the practice of denying that anything could be known, not even the one thing Socrates had left for himself.
00:08:46
Speaker
the knowledge that he knew nothing. Such was the extent of obscurity in which everything lurked on his assessment, and there was nothing which could be discerned or understood. For these reasons, he said, no one should maintain or assert anything or give it the acceptance of assent. But he should always curb his rashness and restrain it from every slip. For it would be extraordinary rashness to accept something either false or incognitive.
00:09:15
Speaker
And incognitive is a technical term, we'll get into it a bit later, but it means not clearly true, not clearly the case. So if we go through that quote, I think we break down three main claims here. Nothing can be known. That's one of the ancient skeptic commitments, not even that we know nothing. The second claim, so that's a kind of a descriptive claim. Then there's another claim that I would say is a prescriptive claim. It's very bad to assent to something that's false.
00:09:45
Speaker
in some way that's actually harmful. It's rash. You're making a mistake if you assent to something that's false. So therefore, no one should assent to anything.
00:09:57
Speaker
Because we can't know if what we assent to is true or false, and it's very bad to assent to something that's false, we should abstain from assenting at all. And one thing that's interesting here is that the skeptics are really co-opting this stoic psychology.
00:10:16
Speaker
So we talked a lot about stoic psychology, these four faculties of, you know, you receive an impression, you reflect on it, you decide to assent to it as true or null or not. And then you receive, that becomes a belief that motivates action if it has something to do with value. We talk a lot about that, but what's really cool is that the skeptics actually endorse
00:10:37
Speaker
or go ahead with that psychology of impression, ascent, belief, impulse. But then they, they take a different spin around. They don't, they don't say, well, it's not an impression. It's not a scent. That's not how human psychology works. They say, yeah, that's how human psychology works. But we can't ever actually confidently ascent. We can't ever actually jump from impression to belief with confidence in that belief. So we should never ascent. We should always remain at that stage of impression.
Ethics and Tranquility in Skepticism
00:11:08
Speaker
Which is, I think it's just so much fun, honestly. I just think it's really fun because they're not arguing against the Stoics by throwing everything out. They're arguing against the Stoics on their own terms. They're arguing against the Stoics with the same kind of pieces in play. They're just coming at it from a different angle. And yeah, so that's the key epistemological comment of skepticism. And I think about this
00:11:34
Speaker
The basic claim here, I think, is actually a pretty compelling one. Maybe you think it's silly and interested to see why you think it's silly. But the claim is something like this, right? It's that we have access to impressions. So, you know, if I see a tree, I have access. This is my favorite example. I don't know if the tree is a good example, but it's helpful for me. You've talked about trees before. I love the tree. If you see a tree, you only have access to your psychological representation of something that appears to you as a tree.
00:12:03
Speaker
There is then an essential gap between the tree itself, the creator of the impression, and the impression you receive.
00:12:10
Speaker
And we have no, the skeptic position is how do we clear that gap? We can't clear that gap, right? There's no way to get over it. There's no way to understand, to perceive the world itself. We only perceive our perceptions of the worlds. We only have access to our perceptions of the worlds. And so there's a gap there that can't be cleared. And I find that at least intuitively quite compelling. Interested in what you think, Caleb. Yeah, yeah. So I guess the issue is,
00:12:38
Speaker
Does the skeptic think that in order to know something, you need to know it with absolute certainty? I think throughout most of our lives, we see trees and we're happy to say that we're correctly seeing a tree there, and that means we shouldn't make a beeline directly into the tree.
00:12:59
Speaker
If we do, that would be a painful experience. And for most of us, I think that's good enough. Of course, there are some circumstances where maybe, you know, we're especially fatigued or for some reason don't trust our faculties of perception. So maybe there won't be a tree there in particular occasions. But generally, when we see a tree, we're justified in thinking there is, in fact, a tree there. So I suppose there's two things there.
00:13:27
Speaker
What are we after here is absolute certainty. That's one bit. And then pragmatically, it seems like we generally behave as if, at least for a lot of these ordinary beliefs around trees and around material objects, what's surrounding us in the environment and so on. The fact that there are other people, we're not just, as modern philosophers say, we're not just brains in a vat somewhere or running at some computer simulation or being tricked by some evil demon. You know, you can come up with all these differences.
00:13:56
Speaker
skeptical scenarios as philosophers have done throughout history. Pragmatically, we operate under the assumption that those are false or either, if not false, irrelevant. So those are two things there. A question and then a pragmatic point.
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll be devil's advocate for the skeptics here. I will adopt the skeptic position, counter argue against you like a skeptic would, or I'll do my best here. So this is the exact argument the Stoics would take against them, right? Like, and they did, they did actually take this argument, which is to say, how can you, how can you live without beliefs? It's not possible, right? What would stop you from walking off a cliff? What would stop you from
00:14:38
Speaker
stepping out of your boat into the water and drowning in the ocean. The fact that skeptics live means that you have beliefs. The fact that the school is self-sustaining and not just everybody's just immediately dying means that you're having beliefs. And so the question is, how can you live without belief? Is that even possible? Or are the skeptics refuting their own position by not
00:15:00
Speaker
walking off the cliff, right? And the skeptic response to this, whether you find it compelling or not, is the idea that the skeptics have impressions, but they never endorse them as true. And so they never fully commit to them or experience the stronger impulses that come with belief.
00:15:17
Speaker
But they're fine to act on the soft impulse, the kind of gentle motivation that comes from the way things seem to be or how things seem to be reasonable. So Epictetus provides this example in the discourses I often talk about where he says skepticism is stupid. You know, if I throw a pan at your head, you duck, right? You're clearly not a skeptic. And the skeptic response to that is like, look, it seems to me like there is a pan coming at my head.
00:15:47
Speaker
So it seems to me the reasonable thing to do is to duck. That's very different than me making absolute claims about the nature of the world. And when I abstain from those absolute claims, I abstain from the, I guess the negative consequences of belief as absolute certainty.
00:16:05
Speaker
So yeah, you were kind of raising that level, I guess, about kind of degrees of belief and the skeptic, like, does belief mean you think something's 100% the case? The skeptics, I think when we're talking about ancient vocabulary, a belief does mean that. A belief is an assent to something being 100% the case.
00:16:24
Speaker
But what the skeptics do instead is they say, well, we're going to exist in the realm of what seems reasonable, what seems to be the case without fully assenting to it to be true, and that's going to provide motivation without providing commitment. And this connects to the academic skeptical arguments. So they're not just an epistemological school. They're a Hellenistic school, which means they're a philosophy of the way of life. They conceptualize what the goal of life is. I guess they conceptualize what seems reasonable to be the goal of life.
00:16:53
Speaker
And their ethical argument is that the ethical ends is peace from disturbance. This is very similar to what you hear from the Epicureans, where the Epicureans argue that the ethical ends is peace from suffering. The maximization of pleasure understood as a minimization of suffering. The Stoics think that the ethical ends is virtue, right? So that's the difference. They think the ethical ends is peace from disturbance. That's one. Two, the academic skeptics say that disturbance comes from desires and beliefs.
00:17:22
Speaker
So that's the idea is that, you know, when I'm sad because I believe something bad's happened or my desire to achieve something has been frustrated, right? So these disturbances are coming from desires and beliefs. It's coming from wanting the world to be otherwise. It's coming from having my desires be frustrated. Um, and so suspension of belief provides freedom from disturbance.
00:17:49
Speaker
So if the ethical ends as a freedom from disturbance and disturbance comes from desires and beliefs, if you suspend your beliefs, you will no longer suffer.
Practical Applications of Skepticism
00:17:57
Speaker
And so that's the ethical argument of skepticism. And then so then the question remains, OK, well, you know, what's the point of no longer suffering if I walk off a cliff? Well, that's when they come in with this doctrine of what seems to be the case or what's reasonable.
00:18:10
Speaker
And I guess if you could put this charitably, I'm going to try to frame it charitably. There's this idea that, you know, I think they're right that a lot of the things that we suffer about or a lot of the reasons our lives go worse than they could are because we really commit ourselves to conceptions of the way the world is or the way we are or the way other people are. And those conceptions
00:18:38
Speaker
are subjectively what causes suffering, right? I think that is the case. I think the stones would agree with that as well. So there's something, I think there's something quite compelling there.
00:18:48
Speaker
Well, you're absolutely right that there's a large overlap between the stoic approach and the skeptical one, especially when it comes to belief and, you know, it's not things in themselves that cause us suffering, but our opinion of them. And then the stoic approach more or less is, well, come to the correct opinion about what is valuable and what is not, and then live.
00:19:15
Speaker
And the skeptics approach is just refrain from having an opinion and then you will not be harmed. And I think in life as a general rule, there is a lot to that strategy. You know, if you give someone a gift and you expect them to be overjoyed of receiving the gift and then they're not, that's, you know, mismatch between your expectation and reality is going to result.
00:19:44
Speaker
in some amounts of psychological pain. And the skeptics are right to say that, look, if you just didn't have that kind of expectation across so many other dimensions of your life, you will live a much more tranquil one.
00:19:58
Speaker
But here's another thought too. It seems also that sometimes beliefs themselves make pain more manageable. So Cicero, when he's talking about this view of cognitive emotions, he says, look, we know that someone who is enduring suffering for a great cause, say, serving their country,
00:20:16
Speaker
is far more able to do so than someone who's doing so for some lesser cause. So I wonder if the skeptics chatted about that or with a skeptical view on that sort of cases where, look, you've got someone who has a strong belief, I'm doing this because it's really good in my country.
00:20:34
Speaker
And yes, that is going to expose them to some amount of psychological pain. Perhaps they're deceived. It turns out their country is asking bad things of them, whatever. But it also means that, you know, if their rights being asked to serve a just cause, they're going to be able to use that belief to better weather physical pain and push through. Yeah, that's a really interesting argument.
00:21:00
Speaker
I'm not sure if that was the one made in ancient times, but I'll try my best here to think of the answer. What's interesting is that you ground it in physical pain, right? Because I think the skeptic argument has a good one for psychological pain. So if the person is finding it psychologically difficult to fight on behalf of their country, but the fact that, you know,
00:21:21
Speaker
they build their patriotic gives them the strength to endure that psychological pain the skeptic would say you know you're you're using a belief as a band-aid for a wound that was caused by a belief like just take both away and you won't need the band-aid for the because there won't be an injury right to band-aid
00:21:38
Speaker
I'm not sure in my research if I saw the skeptics talk about physical pain, because that's an interesting example. Although, ironically, something that the Stoics are also going to say is not really a bad though, or is not really an evil in the same way, just preferred and different, but not really an evil or a bad thing. The view that physical pain is an evil or bad thing has to come from a belief, a response to a physical sensation.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess I, I guess I would be worried about that. You know, you were talking about somebody fighting. I think about somebody, I think about like, I competed in make martial arts. I competed in a lot of sports and often people will come up with psychological defense mechanisms to survive and push through.
00:22:23
Speaker
other self-imposed pressure, right? So they've created all this pressure on themselves to succeed. And then they create this kind of belief, well, I'm the best ever. I can't be stopped. I'm unbeatable. They become kind of like a Conor McGregor mentality. And so again, that's I guess the bandaid on the womb thing, which is
00:22:41
Speaker
You have this belief that you need to succeed at fighting, and now that's very difficult to do, so now you've created another belief to sustain that. And I do think there's something to be said for the skeptic strategy of just stop playing that game in general. It's beliefs all the way down, and if you cut those out, you really get around a lot of the problem. But I think interesting point. Yeah, yeah. I do think they'll probably make the move that
00:23:07
Speaker
They'll grant that beliefs can help one pursue a limited form of tranquility, but they do expose you to suffering when they're mistaken. And you could alleviate suffering just as well by refraining from having beliefs to begin with and not playing that game. More effectively. Yeah.
00:23:29
Speaker
So one thing that I wanted to go into now is the kind of skeptic ethical exercises, which is something that I think we could tap into as stoics. And whenever I read these, I get really inspired. I go, Oh, I should do this. I should do these more often. So these are ways to eliminate disturbance. These are actual things that you should be practicing. If you were a skeptics that they were telling people to practice as skeptics.
00:23:50
Speaker
The first is what I call the suspension of assent. This is a very similar to stoicism. This is another thing that we recommend in stoic practice. The difference in stoicism is that you recommend to suspend assent until you can be sure, you know, what you're assenting to is true or not. And the skeptic position is to just suspend it forever.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so the skeptics had a number of phrases they would use or carry around to help in the suspension of assent. And one of them that I liked the most was, perhaps it is possible, maybe. So whenever you think something, whenever anything comes up, you can think, perhaps it is possible, maybe.
00:24:29
Speaker
And that the idea there again is not, because this is another important part of skepticism, I think I didn't say yet. The skeptics are not saying your image of the tree is wrong. They're saying you don't know, right? So it's not, it is false. That's not the answer because that's also a type of ascent. That's also a type of belief. The answer is actually the suspension. And what that looks like in practice is, as I just said,
00:24:55
Speaker
Perhaps it is possible, maybe. So that's one exercise. And something that I think I'll try to use a bit more. Well, I would say that this suspension of judgment does work very well with many or stoic practice where several stoics explicitly advise suspending judgments.
00:25:17
Speaker
as a first step to becoming more stoic because we do have so many beliefs about the nature of what is good, what is bad, the way the world is that are mistaken or if not mistaken, we're at the very least not justified in holding and these sorts of things are going to lead to making poor decisions.
00:25:42
Speaker
And more importantly, from the stoic perspective, they just they will not constitute knowledge. So it's better to suspend our judgment about many matters. And what I like here is like.
00:25:54
Speaker
Again, I really like this phrase because instead of just, Oh, you should be more careful with the judgment. It says, well, what do you do? You introduce an alternative phrase, right? A kind of something to keep on hand in a stoic sense, you know, whether that is, you know, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, or in this case, perhaps it is possible. Maybe just as this kind of self reminder or mindful reflection on the uncertainty of things. But yeah, absolutely right. That it's.
00:26:20
Speaker
It's very, very, very stoic until it's not, until it differs. The second ethical exercise the skeptics use, which I think is a really fun one and something that I try myself a lot, is what is called the argument for and against, or the argument, you know, pro and contra. And so to quote Cicero, who's talking about Arcas Elias, the founder of academic skepticism, Cicero said, by arguing against everyone's opinions, he drew most people away from their own.
00:26:50
Speaker
So that when reasons of equal weight were found on opposite sides on the same subject, the easier course was to withhold assent from either side. And so the exercise is to, whenever you think A, to argue for B as hard as you can. And if you continue to do that, you will end up with a B that's so strong,
00:27:12
Speaker
that you'll have to argue for A and then you'll end up stuck because both A will be convincing, both B will be convincing. You'll be left in a position, well, how could I pick either of these? Because I have strong arguments for both. So the exercise is kind of, it is almost kind of one of mindfulness, which is to say, it's one of, there's perfectly good reasons for both A and B. So if you think one is best, you're just forgetting the good reasons for the other one. So introduce those reasons, think about them.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so there's this famous story that I really like of Crenades, who's the fourth head of Plato's Academy after the founding of academic skepticism. And he travels to Rome and delivers an amazing speech on justice to the admiration of all present. Everyone's like, wow, this person is such an amazing philosopher of justice. Like that was such a great view. I'm so persuaded. And then the next day he comes back and he delivers a speech that is a criticism of what he said yesterday, a criticism of his previous position, why his speech yesterday was wrong.
00:28:10
Speaker
And everyone in the crowd is just stunned. They can't believe it. And this is kind of this example of somebody doing the argument for or against. It's a skeptic demonstrating their capacity to argue convincingly for both sides. And you might think of this as kind of being sophistry. So the sophists
00:28:29
Speaker
where a school of thought around Plato's time who were famous for not actually believing things, but being able to very persuasively argue for anything in exchange for money, they could write you a speech. The skeptic thing is that this isn't sophistry. The point is not to persuasively argue for anything for the sake of money. The point is to show if I can persuasively argue for option A and not option A, then I can't pick either. I have to kind of suspend
00:28:59
Speaker
And so that's the strategy. And I think of this, it doesn't have to be something big and dramatic. It doesn't have to be some speech on justice. But you know, I imagine somebody is kind of doesn't text you back and you think, well, you know, they don't like me. They don't want to be friends with me. They're mad at me. And then you think of, well, maybe they're busy. Maybe they're stuck in traffic. Maybe their phone died. Right. And so now you're kind of left at this point of suspended judgment. And the point, the skeptic point is not
00:29:28
Speaker
Well, don't believe their phone died just because that makes you feel good. The point is you don't have enough information for either of these cases and you kind of suspend your position. So that's a, it's something that I use quite a bit, I think, actually to get out of, I guess, incorrect thought patterns, or if I begin spiraling around kind of anxiety or anxiousness around something, you say, well, whatever I'm worried about, it's either just as likely or at least plausible that that's not the case.
00:29:54
Speaker
And that kind of allows a suspension of negative emotion for me when I find myself kind of falling into those feelings. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you'll hear the term equipolence for this exercise. And the thought is that.
00:30:12
Speaker
You can set the opposition between the claim of A versus not A for any position, any belief. And from there, once you have that opposition between something being the case and not being the case clearly in mind,
00:30:33
Speaker
you won't be so fixated on a single one and of course a skeptic line then is and is that is how you find tranquility and I think and just in general it is useful if you are thinking of
00:30:49
Speaker
a problem you might be facing, even very practical ones to think about, okay, what if I just assumed my thinking about this was false? What is the most likely way the world, what would the world look like if it was false? What's the best case I can make for that?
00:31:09
Speaker
being so and then from there maybe you won't find tranquility but at the very least it can be informative for coming up generating new ideas or thinking of different ways to attack attack a Problem. Yeah, and the same kind of thing with an exercise the same way non Stoics will use the dichotomy of control
00:31:29
Speaker
for their own purposes you know as stoics or if you if you think of your stoic maybe you maybe you don't think of yourself as anything but you think of yourself as a stoic totally helpful exercise to use it's just the ending we just the stoics just don't end at suspension they just ended okay well and now that i've like i've stopped focusing on one option what does genuinely seem to be the most likely case what is the truth here
00:31:51
Speaker
And on that note, I want to get into the next section, which is where does this agree or disagree with stoicism? So I tried to give an overview of skepticism more generally. And now let's dig into this particular debates. They would have a stoicism. So starting with the agree, we've already talked about a lot of ways that they do agree. One thing I mentioned earlier is that they have the same human psychology. So they think of the mind in terms of impressions, reflections, a centing, and then there's a sense leading to beliefs or impulses.
00:32:18
Speaker
So that's something that's really cool. They're kind of working with the same framework. I think that makes the discussions really, really fun to read about. The second thing is that the Stoics and skeptics agree that believing something false is bad and that we should suspend judgment when unsure. So there's this there's this default to skepticism in cases of uncertainty in both schools. Both schools say if you don't know the case,
00:32:41
Speaker
suspend judgment because bad things happen when you make beliefs that are false. So it's better safe than sorry. Um, and in both cases, they have this, this view of the pragmatic downsides of a sentient incorrectly. And so kind of caution around a scent that comes from that.
00:32:59
Speaker
The third similarity I say is that in both cases, the perfect person always suspends judgment when unsure and only ascends when sure. That just builds from the previous point. The perfect person is kind of defensive by nature. This inner citadel or Epictetus gives this metaphor of a city.
00:33:18
Speaker
where your mind becomes the watchman at the gate. So there's this kind of defensive approach to impressions, false beliefs seen as kind of assaulting the tranquility of the mind. And you have to be carefully guard against it. So again, I would say that the stoic are skeptics until they're not. So they're skeptics all the way until they think you can actually let something into your city. Let the thing that's true in.
00:33:45
Speaker
But otherwise, they're the exact same in terms of being defensive, keeping the false things out. I think one other similarity that's worth noting here is that both schools are attentive to skill and skill building. So for the skeptic, that looks like building up the skeptical skill, the ability to hold these different possibilities in mind, to suspend judgments. And that looks like Sextus and Periscus, who you mentioned earlier, comes up with.
00:34:15
Speaker
these different modes of skepticism and the modes serve as reminders, tactics for bringing a suspension of disbelief about looking at things, different properties, reminding yourself of the relativism in the world.
00:34:31
Speaker
a number of other practices. So by doing that, you're building up that kind of skill and that's the kind of thing that the Stoics focus on as well as self-improvement as skill building, even moral excellence as skill building.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. They're both Hellenistic life philosophies that conceptualize an end, but they see you achieving that end through skillful action, through skillful navigation of the world that involves a degree of mindfulness and adeptness, not just the kind of assent to theory. Because the default state is to be unskeptical, right? The default state is to be relaxed. It is to be unvigilant.
Comparative Analysis: Stoicism vs Skepticism
00:35:16
Speaker
So you actually have to train yourself to be in this perpetual state of kind of vigilance, attention, skepticism.
00:35:23
Speaker
and avoid everybody else in the world. Same with the Stoics. As a Stoic, when you're around the world, you're constantly getting information about, well, you should care about your reputation. You should care about material possessions. You should care about all these external things. We're constantly getting media or information saying that. Skeptics are given the same thing. They're constantly being bombarded with the idea that you shouldn't believe things. You should commit to things. You should endorse things. And so the skeptic has to train that skill otherwise. Yeah, it's a great point.
00:35:54
Speaker
I also wanted to jump into the disagreements, so that's where they agree. And now the disagreements between the skeptics and the stoics. So I previously just gave this metaphor that the stoics use about a city. Evictetus talks about, you know, you're guarding against impressions, so you have the guards at the gate, and before anybody can come into the city, you, you know, I guess that's for their passport, so to speak.
00:36:16
Speaker
They're proof of being true. And so the disagreement comes then between the skeptics and the stoics. They're 100% the same way. Have a city, have somebody at the gate, ask for the passport, or whatever metaphor you want. But the stoics just say some people have good passports. Some people are allowed into the city. Some impressions are true, and some impressions we can know to be true. Because the skeptics also think maybe some are true, maybe some aren't. We just can't tell.
00:36:44
Speaker
Why do Stoics believe this? Why do Stoics think we can know some of our impressions are true? Well, they argue for what's called a cataleptic impression.
00:36:52
Speaker
And that's an impression. So some Greek for a second, katalepsis, lepsis is to grab something. Catalepsis is to kind of grab through. So it's to kind of to thoroughly grasp something. And the Stoics talk about lepsis all the time. It's interesting when you jump from Greek to English as you lose some of the similarities. We talk about preconceptions in Epictetus.
00:37:15
Speaker
which are kind of built in ways that people view the world that are shared, which is like, everybody has the preconceptions of good, evil, just, unjust. Well, preconceptions are pro-lepsis. Lepsis being, again, grab, pro-being before. So they're things that we grasp before. So the preconceptions are things that we understand before we actually experience the world. We're just built with an understanding of them. And so catalepsis are things that we thoroughly grasp when we experience the world. And that's a cataleptic impression.
00:37:44
Speaker
And so that impression also has a kind of phenomenological experience, which means that it is experienced differently. The same way you might say, if you listen to a symphony on your iPod, or you go and actually sit in a symphony hall and listen to music, there's a difference in the way that those are being experienced, even though the content might seem similar.
00:38:09
Speaker
And so the stoics are saying there's kind of a different phenomenological experience to a cataleptic impression that we can believe in.
00:38:16
Speaker
And so there's this nice quote here from, from an ancient source talking about Arcasileus and Zeno. And the quote is, when Arcasileus saw that Zeno was a professional rival and challenger, Zeno being the founder of stoicism, he launched an all out attack on the arguments that streamed from Zeno and observing the fame at Athens of that doctrine and its name, which Zeno first discovered, the cataleptic impression. He used every resource against it.
00:38:43
Speaker
So we just have this philosophical beef where Arcaecilius was like, you came up with this new thing. Nobody talked about it in a cataleptic impressions before stoicism. You came up with this new thing. I think it's garbage. I think it's wrong. And they just debated against it, which is fun. And so what, what is the skeptic argument against cataleptic impressions? Well, it's this, and to quote, it is of impressions. Some are true, some are false.
00:39:10
Speaker
But every true impression is such that a false one, just like it, can also occur. And where impressions are such that there is no difference between them, it cannot turn out that some of them are cataleptic, but others are not. Therefore, no impression is cataleptic.
00:39:27
Speaker
And that's from Cicero. So the argument is something like this, which is to say, there is no. So let's say I see my, I see my friend, I bumped into my friend, you know, Jimmy. And I say, Oh, this is clearly Jiminy. I'm hugging him. I'm seeing him. We're, we're, we're right next to each other. The Stokes would say that's a, you haven't had a leptic impression of Jimmy.
00:39:49
Speaker
And the skeptics would say, well, maybe Jimmy has a identical twin that you've never met. You've never heard about. Maybe Jimmy didn't even know he had an identical twin. So maybe you didn't meet Jimmy. You've met his identical twin.
00:40:03
Speaker
that impression experientially would be identical. You'd be receiving the same visual information, the same smell, you'd be getting all the same information from Jimmy's twin and you'd be wrong. So the point is, I mean, you can go even further if you want to do sci-fi impressions of being, really the argument here is also being locked into the matrix, right? Everything you can experience, you could be in a matrix that could send you these impressions the same way. But the skeptic spaces argument is that
00:40:33
Speaker
Give me any example of a cataleptic impression, and I can give you an example of where you could receive that you could see the exact same thing, feel the exact same thing, experience the exact same thing, and be wrong. And if there can always exist a case where that impression is wrong, then it can't be an impression that you can rely on for truth. They're just disqualified as a criteria of truth. Yeah, it's interesting seeing this debate, and of course it comes up later in philosophy in a variety of different forms.
00:41:02
Speaker
where you have debates between directory lists and indirect realists during the Enlightenment and then in modern days, both in the academy and in popular thought.
00:41:14
Speaker
It's exactly that. It's a precursor even today in our obsession with The Matrix, Descartes obsession with absolute knowledge. This kind of skeptical hurdle is something that philosophy is obsessed with getting over and our kind of access to absolute reality or I guess true reality or realism. It's something that understandably is concerning to people.
00:41:37
Speaker
I guess I like here that the ancients were taking this also as kind of an ethical concern, right? We can't really move on to ethics until we clear this hurdle or what it means to look at ethics is going to look very different depending on if we get over this hurdle or not. So to summarize that disagreement, I think the skeptic versus stoic debate is one of negation versus positivity. The stoic goal is to live in accordance with nature by achieving knowledge. It's to let in the true while avoiding the false.
00:42:06
Speaker
The skeptic goal is to just avoid the false. So in a way, the skeptic view is also about understanding our nature as the kinds of beings that cannot understand the universe. So to stop attempting to do so. Because if we attempt to understand the universe when we're the kind of beings that can't, we're going to get in trouble. We're going to lose our tranquility. We're going to suffer.
00:42:29
Speaker
Well, it's not just that they were kind of beings who may not understand the universe. It's not that we cannot. I think they need the stronger claim. We cannot be certain.
00:42:43
Speaker
We cannot be certain of our ability to understand the universe. I guess it's something like that. Everything I say, everything I say, I even, I fall in this habit of talking about skeptics in terms of what they believe this, they believe that, but you're absolutely right that most of the things they're framing is well, maybe, maybe we're right. Maybe we're not. It's not, we're wrong. That's a, that's a really good distinction. They don't, they don't think we're wrong with the universe. They think we might be right. We might be wrong. We can't know. Mm-hmm.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yep. I mean, that does bring up something we haven't chatted about so much, or at least not named is this idea that skepticism is going to be self refuting. So if you think about this first, another key epistemic commitments is that nothing can be known, not even that we know nothing. And of course the common challenge was, there are different forms of the challenge. One is, well, do the skeptics have beliefs at all?
00:43:41
Speaker
If no, what exactly are you talking about? And if yes, then it seems like those beliefs cannot be known. That's sort of the general challenge. But to make it more precise, you have these other claims, like the idea that it's bad to assent to something that's false or it's good to be free from disturbance.
00:44:03
Speaker
these ideas, even the descriptive claim that disturbance comes from the mismatch between desires and beliefs seem to be things that the skeptic is committed to. But if it's true that nothing can be known, then it seems like they don't have the privilege to make claims of that sort. Yeah, as you were saying that, I was like, what would a skeptic say? A skeptic would say, well,
00:44:31
Speaker
I don't think that, I don't believe that it's disturbances come from beliefs. It seems to me that believe that disturbances come from beliefs, like everything kind of reduces or it gets back into this shell of, well, it seems to be
Modern Skepticism and Practical Living
00:44:44
Speaker
the case. It's likely that this is the case. But then at that case, you're just kind of left with just a regular person who's just calling all their beliefs.
00:44:53
Speaker
you know, how things seem instead of beliefs. And they're just going about their life. They're shopping at the grocery store. They're, you know, worrying about their diet. They're like catching up with friends. They're pursuing money. They're just doing all these regular things, but just causing them seeming, see if this is the way things seem to be instead of the way they are. It doesn't seem to be that much of a robust difference. So I was trying to think of what a skeptic would look like in practice. What does an actual skeptic look like? As charitable be as possible. I think it looks like somebody who's very open
00:45:22
Speaker
who is non-dogmatic, very receptive. I don't know. I don't even know if that's the case because you'd have to always be doing this argument for and against. I'm trying to think of what it would be like to live as a skeptic in the 21st century. And I think in one case, you're going to have the benefit of dropping dogmatic beliefs, of being open to other answers, to being ready to have what seems to be the case be persuaded to you or be convinced otherwise.
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I guess it's hard for me to kind of put meat on those bones and kind of flush that out in further detail. They just end up in my view, I guess, looking a bit like a normal person.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's another skeptic, David Hume, much later, and he comes in during the Enlightenment, has a number of skeptical arguments, but he makes a division between, you know, these beliefs where you can know anything and then convention and against the claim that the skeptics kind of can't live as a skeptic. He says, no, we just go all go about
00:46:27
Speaker
conventionally living as if these things, these claims we make about there being an external world, things causing others happen. In which case you think, well, okay, skepticism is theoretically interesting, but it sounds like it doesn't have much import. If, going back to the ancient world again, you could be a skeptical stoic, right? You just say, instead of believing all these claims, it just seems to me that...
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. This is just the line I'm gonna take as a skeptical stoic. So I think that sort of thought that it seems like there's a strong that the skeptic often makes a strong division between their theoretical beliefs and then acting conventionally has been a sticking point for me about skepticism in general where it seems like
00:47:19
Speaker
they'll make all these large claims. You can't really know anything and therefore you ought to live these kinds of ways. But then move to something like we're owed at least the fact that we can let certain things seem like it being the case or we can act according to convention. And once you make that concession, then you can say, well, let's just argue about things at the conventional level then and
00:47:45
Speaker
Once you make that move, then these other ideas like you ought to be a skeptic in the sense of always holding these counterbalancing ideas in your head, thinking that the good is freedom from disturbance. Those ideas can be challenged in conventional language. And it seems to me that those aren't going to hold up as the ultimate end of a human life.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'm persuaded by this. It kind of comes, it reminds me of the thing you were saying earlier, Kil, I've been a past conversation about like, you know, if we're having this big discussion and it doesn't really make a change to what you, how you act or how you behave, you know, sometimes we should kind of reevaluate that discussion. And maybe there is a kind of empirical argument
00:48:38
Speaker
I just think that the stomachs get the good without the bad, right? They get the, yeah, be cautious, be careful, but then they also kind of get to have these, as you said, as you were concerned about, these kind of philosophical foundations for how to live that they can kind of commit to. Because I just, I'm persuaded by the fact that there's something beneficial. Most people would benefit from being more skeptical, right? But that's just different from saying people would benefit from being a skeptic. Those are just different things.
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah, super interesting. One thing I, so I wanted to get to my last point here, which is on the Stoic rebuttals. Because we've kind of left with, we got, we got kind of left with this picture of the Stoics think they're cataleptic impressions. The skeptics say, well, you're a big dumb, dumb. That's not possible. And then how did the Stoics get around that? Right? How do they, how do they counter argument? And I'm actually kind of disappointed by the Stoic play here. I'm interested in what you think. Cause the Stoics really do make an appeal to nature here.
00:49:36
Speaker
So there's two arguments the stoics make to say why we should trust catalyptic impressions. So why we should trust, even if something has a kind of a subjective experiential difference, why should we trust that thing? And there's two arguments the stoics make. One is that it's nature's will that in soul beings, so human beings, and especially those with reason, have the mental equipment to make accurate judgments, the accurate judgments necessary to live in accordance with nature.
00:50:06
Speaker
And Cicero here, quote, says, Zeno judged the senses to be reliable because nature had given them as the standard of scientific knowledge and as the natural foundation of that knowledge. So the idea was that, look, God gave us the ability to understand the world and that He gave us that ability through our senses, the providential universe gave us that ability through our senses.
00:50:30
Speaker
Argument two is that the faculty of assent is naturally determined or inclined to assent to cataleptic impressions. And this, again, Cicero, he says, it is no more possible for a living creature to refrain from assenting to something self-evident than for it to fail to pursue what appears appropriate to its nature. And so I didn't really talk about this, but the Stoics argued that cataleptic impressions pulled you to assent. You couldn't actually refrain from them.
00:50:58
Speaker
at least when they were clearly cataleptic to you. So something like, uh, I would see this again, makes this argument. If you try to believe that it's nighttime, when it's daytime, you can't, you just, if you go outside and it's sunny, you just think it's daytime. Um, so there's this kind of argument of.
00:51:15
Speaker
Not only did God give us the ability or the divine universe give us the ability to perceive it through our senses, it also inclined us correctly to trust that inclination because we'll get pulled in the direction by trustworthy impressions.
00:51:30
Speaker
I think that's a little messy because I think we also get pulled in the direction by untrustworthy impressions, but I think the view here is that a sage or somebody with knowledge would have access to which motivations to assent are correctly founded and which ones are born out of ignorance.
00:51:47
Speaker
But at the end of the day, those are both arguments that are appealed to God. There are arguments to say, well, why do you believe in God? Well, because of my cataleptic impressions. Why do you believe your cataleptic impressions? Well, because God gave them to us.
Conclusion: Defensive vs Positive Philosophies
00:51:59
Speaker
And that kind of out is always a bit frustrating to me. Yeah, I think the appeal, I think I would understand why a skeptic or anyone else wouldn't.
00:52:09
Speaker
accept the appeal to God. There is this thought that, well, for certain impressions, you just cannot think otherwise. And if you have two oranges, adding two more oranges will result in you having four oranges, this sort of thing. It's very difficult to think about what it would even mean for
00:52:35
Speaker
there not to be four oranges after a simple operation of addition. Of course, people will, you know, just to correct one confusion, people sometimes will say things like, well, under some mathematical systems, you know, you can have two plus two not equal four. But clearly, that's not what we're talking about here. We're just talking about ordinarily. We're just, we're just two guys with four oranges, just ordinary oranges here.
00:53:00
Speaker
Right, we're just trying to count proofs. And, you know, that sort of thing might not get you much by way of knowledge. There are only so many impressions like that. But it does get you at once somewhere, I suppose. It gives us that it's daytime. Well, that's daytime. It gives us that.
00:53:24
Speaker
Yeah. And then I guess the stoic view, this is again, the thing of the frying pan coming at the head or whatever. It's like, you're just going to believe it's coming and you're going to duck. And I guess the skeptic play again, it would be something like this, the matrix. Well, you know, there could be, there is a type of situation you can imagine where we receive the exact same impression that it's a day, but it's not day. But.
00:53:47
Speaker
You know, the stelic of a battle to that would be like, has that ever happened to anybody? Maybe in cases of severe hallucination, but even then there's probably some argument about it being a kind of a different subjective experience. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that seems right. Well, summing up, I'm not a skeptic. I don't find it theoretically that plausible for some reasons we've gotten into here. And then maybe some other reasons we can get into later, but at least the core one, I think I've stayed to try to stay here.
00:54:13
Speaker
But the skeptics, what is admirable, useful about their general approach is they practice a kind of knowledge via negativa, you know, living well by ensuring that you don't believe what is false, by ensuring that you don't make terrible mistakes.
00:54:35
Speaker
And I think that is an important strategy to have, especially in a world like ours, where it just is very difficult to know what is going on in our personal lives, what's going on in the larger scheme of things, and a reminder to suspend judgment more often. Think about, as the Bertrand Russell said, hanging a question mark next to your fundamental assumptions now and again.
00:55:04
Speaker
And by doing so, you can avoid making tremendous mistakes and also avoid having false beliefs. Now, perhaps I think you still should have a positive vision.
00:55:20
Speaker
there needs to be some kind of positive vision driving a life. And the Stoics give you that, other life philosophies will give you that. But nonetheless, I think in terms of what the skeptics offer, there's that reminder to be more skeptical and then specific practices to develop that skill.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, I was thinking defense versus offense. The skeptics were the greatest, greatest defensive players. They just never won any games because they could never score a goal. So it's, it's gotta be that right balance, right? And most of us could work on our defense. Skeptics maybe gave you some reasons to think about that and some strategies, hopefully from this podcast to implement and about the argument for and against about the kind of suspension of belief by thinking could be so maybe it's possible repeating that to yourself.
00:56:04
Speaker
I'm reminding yourself that you don't have sufficient information a lot of the times when we just assume things. But without a positive vision, you know, that's not really compelling to me. And I do think stoicism and as you said, other life philosophies can offer that. What I like about stoicism is that it's so defensively strong. It so emphasizes these skeptical values while also letting the positive in. And I think that's great.
00:56:30
Speaker
but something to be learned from, from any school. And the skeptics definitely were, were a successful major school for a reason. And that's that they had, they had value to provide. Perhaps it is possible. Maybe. Yes, maybe they did. Possibly. Perhaps. Awesome. All right. Excellent. Anything else? No, that's it. All right. Thanks, Michael.
00:56:53
Speaker
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00:57:23
Speaker
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00:57:46
Speaker
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