Book 9, where Diogenes discusses Pyrrho and Timon, is more of a mixed bag. He begins with lives of the Pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Xenophanes, whom he presents as sporadic (scattered) philosophers (9.1–20), before returning to the Italian tradition, the subject of Book 8, with a life of Parmenides (9.21–23). There follow lives of Melissus, Zeno of Elea, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, Anaxarchus, and then Pyrrho and Timon. Apart from Diogenes of Apollonia, all of these figures are connected by a master-pupil relationship, real or imagined. In any case, the lineage that links Pyrrho to the atomist Democritus is likely both real and important.
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The Greek adjective skeptikos derives from skeptesthai to “look into” or “inquire.” The Pyrrhonists applied it to themselves in order to emphasize commitment to open-minded inquiry that, in their view, set them apart from those whom they labeled “dogmatists”—so called because they took themselves to be in firm possession of the essential truths of philosophy (their dogmas), obviating the need for further inquiry. Though the Academics did not call themselves Skeptics and were not referred to as such by others until much later, the description “open-minded inquirer” applied at least as well to them as to the Pyrrhonists, and the affinity between the two schools was widely recognized and much discussed in antiquity.3 Even Sextus Empiricus, who reserved the title Skeptics for his fellow Pyrrhonians and dismissed the Academics as negative dogmatists who were convinced that knowledge is impossible, had to concede that Arcesilaus came close to being a Skeptic in the Pyrrhonian sense (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.220–35).
Ancient Skepticism was characterized by two teachings. The first was akatalēpsia, the thesis that nothing is or can be apprehended, which often amounts to, and is translated as, the denial that knowledge exists or is possible. The second teaching was epochē (suspension)—the recommendation that one suspend judgment or withhold assent on all questions as a result of akatalēpsia.4 These were often couched in terms of the ancient philosophical ideal of the wise person: even the wise person is not capable of secure apprehension and will therefore suspend judgment.
Diogenes Laertius presents both Arcesilaus and Pyrrho as pioneers of Skepticism. The former, he says, was “the first to suspend judgment” (though he may have meant that he was the first philosopher to do so in the Academy) (4.28); the latter, he says, introduced the practice of akatalēpsia and epochē, though both terms were likely first used in the Academy (9.61).
As a philosophy that challenges the very possibility of knowledge, Skepticism inevitably invites questions about its relation to its own teachings. Do the Skeptics judge them to be true and represent themselves as knowing this? How can they do either consistently with their own Skeptical teachings? It comes as no surprise, then, that critics in antiquity argued that Skepticism was self-refuting: its teachings could not be asserted without making implicit claims to knowledge. Critics also charged that Skepticism in practice produced paralysis (apraxia): by prohibiting the exercise of judgment, the Skeptic sabotaged our ability to act. These charges and the responses they elicited from both Academic and Pyrrhonian Skeptics did much to shape the development of both varieties of ancient Skepticism (see 9.102–5).
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Arcesilaus and Pyrrho both belonged to the category of nonwriting philosophers (1.16, 4.32). Their choice not to write may have been related to the nondogmatic character of their philosophies (4.32). In any case, as a result, the biographical lore that is such an important part of Diogenes’ book assumes an even greater significance in his treatment of these two major Skeptics, especially Pyrrho.
The story of Arcesilaus according to Diogenes is exceedingly simple in outline. Against a backdrop of undoubted institutional continuity, the Skeptical turn initiated by Arcesilaus is presented as a radical rupture in the history of Platonism and of Plato’s Academy. Diogenes credits Arcesilaus with three innovations (4.38). He was the first to argue for suspension of judgment (epochē) in response to the opposition between competing arguments; the first to argue on each side of the question; and the first to alter the teaching handed down from Plato by making it more contentious (or “eristic”) through the practice of argument by question and answer. As a result, Arcesilaus came to be viewed as the founder of the so-called Middle Academy (cf. 1.19).
Arcesilaus was unquestionably a major innovator, but this account should give us pause. We may well wonder whether the Academy, before Arcesilaus became scholarch, was really as dogmatic as Diogenes maintains. (Plato laid down a fixed set of doctrines, he says, to which his immediate successor, Speusippus, and by implication all Academics before Arcesilaus, adhered; a selection is included [3.67–80].) Other classical sources suggest that the Academy from its inception welcomed a variety of research programs and fostered a philosophical culture of dialogue and debate. There is also an ancient tradition of interpreting Plato as a kind of Skeptic.5 Diogenes himself acknowledges a debate over whether or not Plato was dogmatic in his philosophizing (concluding that he was [3.51–52]). The idea that Plato was a Skeptic may well have been the work of Skeptics within the Academy, who wanted to present themselves as the founder’s legitimate heirs. (In his life of Pyrrho, Diogenes suggests that some Pyrrhonians held a similar view [9.72].)
We do not have to endorse the view that Plato was a Skeptic, however, to see how effectively the considerations assembled in support of it undermine the opposite view, that he was a dogmatic philosopher. Plato’s dialogues abound in expressions of doubt and hesitation. Views are advanced tentatively; the unresolved problems they face and the need for further investigation are constantly emphasized. The Socrates depicted in a number of the dialogues practices a dialectical method of inquiry that permits him, despite his professed ignorance, to subject positions and the claims to knowledge of those who hold them to Skeptical examination.
Against this background, the third innovation with which Arcesilaus is credited by Diogenes—that he altered the teaching transmitted from Plato through arguing by question and answer—looks more like a revival of the Socratic method so vividly illustrated in several of Plato’s best-known dialogues.6 In this regard, one biographical nugget preserved by Diogenes is especially illuminating: Arcesilaus was such an enthusiastic admirer of Plato that he possessed a copy of his complete works—a fact that, if true, set him apart from his Academic contemporaries (4.32). One could conclude from it that Arcesilaus was, and saw himself as, a philosophical practitioner of dialectic in the mold of Socrates.7
The second innovation should be understood in this light. Mastery of dialectic permits a philosopher like Arcesilaus to argue on either side of a question with a real or imagined interlocutor. The premises that, as questioner, he offers to his opponent are ones to which the latter—the answerer—is committed or which he will find it difficult to reject. They need not represent Arcesilaus’ own views, if any, and the conclusions drawn from them will be consequences to which the opponent and not Arcesilaus is committed. Arcesilaus’ preference seems to have been to have his partners in discussion take a position against which he would then argue dialectically, rather than taking both sides of the argument himself (as the most eminent of his successors, Carneades, would sometimes do).
Suspension of judgment (epochē), the first innovation, is the basis for regarding Arcesilaus as a pioneer of a new form of Skepticism and as the founder of the Middle Academy. To see how his practice of Socratic dialectic prepared the way for this development, it is essential to take into account the philosophers whom he chose as his principal opponents and partners in debate, the Stoics. One piece of lore transmitted by Diogenes is suggestive: like Arcesilaus, Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, studied in the Academy. Other formative influences on Zeno, like Crates the Cynic, also belonged to the Socratic tradition, albeit other branches of it, and Zeno, like Arcesilaus, should be viewed as a philosopher inspired by Socrates.
From Socrates, Zeno and the Stoics took an ideal of virtue as wisdom, which in their view was the s
ole necessary and sufficient condition for a life of perfect happiness (eudaimonia). They also took the radical view that wisdom was completely immune to error, a claim based on their school’s distinctive understanding of knowledge. They identified apprehensive impressions (katalpētikai phantasiai) as the criterion of truth, the ultimate basis for our grasp of the truth (cf. 7.54). These are self-evidently true impressions, usually sensory, that arise in ideal (though not uncommon) conditions. Apprehension (katalēpsis), the assent to an apprehensive impression, is a necessary condition for knowledge—but is not knowledge itself, which the Stoics define as firm apprehension, which is unshakable by argument. This requires that the truths apprehended also be understood in their systematic relations to one another. By avoiding assent to nonapprehensive impressions, someone who realizes the Stoic ideal of wisdom eliminates one source of error; he protects himself against the other source, faulty reasoning, by a mastery of dialectic, a discipline the Stoic version of which corresponds to modern logic.
Assent to impressions that fail to meet all these conditions the Stoics define as (mere) opinion; and the wise person will, they hold, suspend judgment rather than harbor opinions. Some of the terminology the Academics used (“suspension of judgment,” “apprehension,” etc.) was of Stoic origin. And the stringent prohibition of opinion, which would require total suspension of judgment in the absence of apprehensive impressions, was also Stoic in origin (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.157). The Academics’ arguments for the Skeptical theses, then, include crucial assumptions taken over from their Stoic opponents.
Arcesilaus and the Academics who came after him argued that the Stoic conditions for knowledge were impossible to meet. For every true impression formed in the ideal conditions specified by the Stoics, they argued, there could be another impression that was indistinguishable from it but false. In support of this contention, they raised many doubts of a kind familiar to us from the later Skeptical tradition, based on dreams, madness, other abnormal states of mind, optical illusions, and the like. Though they did not deny that many of our impressions are likely true, they argued that none is self-evidently true, and none therefore is fit to serve as a criterion of truth as the Stoics understood it. The Stoics in contrast argued that action, and therefore life, was impossible without assent, which they insisted was warranted only by apprehensive impressions. The implication was that the Academic argument must be mistaken. Arcesilaus responded by trying to show that action without assent was possible, so forestalling this line of criticism.
On a strictly dialectical interpretation—according to which the Academics’ premises are borrowed from their opponents’ position and assumed for the sake of argument in order to deduce consequences that are problems for those opponents—the Academics themselves were not committed to the conclusions of their arguments. It was the wise person as conceived by Stoic philosophy, and not the wise person as conceived by the Academics, who would be required to suspend judgment if those arguments were sound.
Nonetheless most of the philosophers of the Academy after Arcesilaus’ time—with variations and exceptions—seem to have adopted a stance or an outlook summed up in the two key teachings of akatalēpsia and of epochē, both of which they plausibly imputed to him. The fullest account we have, Cicero’s Academica, suggests that these terms were used by at least some Academics to characterize the attitude of open-minded inquirers who have so far been unable to resolve the difficulties uncovered by their investigations, and who therefore provisionally suspend judgment.8 In other words, the best ancient testimony indicates that Arcesilaus and his followers did not fall into the kind of contradictory position the ancient Skeptics were sometimes accused of holding by claiming to know that nothing can be known (and which modern scholars call “negative dogmatism” or “dogmatic skepticism” with regard to knowledge).
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Diogenes’ account of Pyrrho in Book 9 combines a biography of the founder with an extensive exposition of the philosophy of his school in its late form (9.74–108),9 an approach similar to that in Book 7, covering the life of Zeno of Citium and Stoic philosophy. I will concentrate on the sections Diogenes devotes to Pyrrho’s life, philosophy (9.61–69), students (9.70), and alleged precursors (9.71–73).
According to Diogenes, Pyrrho was a painter before turning to philosophy under the influence of Anaxarchus, who introduced him to Democritean teachings. Both men seem to have been most influenced by Democritus as an ethical thinker rather than a natural philosopher, although Pyrrho may also have been influenced by Democritus’ occasional expressions of doubt about the possibility of reliable knowledge. He and Anaxarchus are said to have accompanied Alexander the Great. This enabled Pyrrho to mingle with the “Naked Sages” (or Gymnosophists) of India and the Magi of Persia (9.61).
Diogenes assigns the encounter with Eastern wisdom a crucial part in Pyrrho’s approach to philosophy, inspiring his introduction of two novel teachings: that nothing is apprehensible (akatalēpsia), and that therefore a suspension (epochē) of judgment about all claims to know the truth is warranted. As we have seen, however, there is reason to think that these two terms were first used in the Academy.
The gloss on Pyrrho’s views that Diogenes immediately goes on to offer does not help clarify matters: “For he said that nothing is beautiful or ugly, or just or unjust, and that likewise in all instances nothing exists in truth, but men do everything by custom and by habit; for each thing is no more this than that.” The view expressed here sounds less like a form of Skepticism—that we lack knowledge and should suspend judgment—than a dogmatic denial that certain things exist and an explanation for the illusion that they do: custom or habit. What is more, the emphasis is plainly on moral properties. Indeed Cicero knew Pyrrho only as a moral thinker, whom he classifies together with the heterodox Stoic Ariston of Chios as an “indifferentist”—someone who holds that nothing apart from virtue is of the slightest value, including those items to which most ordinary human beings and many philosophers attach importance—health, wealth, good reputation, status, pleasure, and so on.
Diogenes relates the story of how Pyrrho was allegedly prevented from straying in front of carts or walking over cliffs and the like only by friends concerned for his safety (9.62). The anecdote invites an epistemological interpretation: because he distrusted the evidence of his own senses, Pyrrho was a menace to himself, rescued only by the good sense of his friends. But most of what Diogenes says about Pyrrho’s character and the anecdotes offered about his life invite an ethical reading.
Calmness, tranquillity, peace of mind, imperturbability, and detachment from worldly affairs—these are the traits Diogenes stresses in his portrait. Pyrrho’s student Nausiphanes reports that his own student Epicurus often quizzed him about the man whose life and attitude he admired greatly (9.64). Ataraxia, or freedom from distress, one of the qualities for which Pyrrho was most celebrated, is one of the chief characteristics of the fully happy human being, according to Epicurus, as it had been for Democritus. The flavor of Pyrrho’s reputation is conveyed by a story related by the Stoic Posidonius (c. 135–c. 51 BC). On board a ship in a stormy sea, Pyrrho directed the attention of his panicky fellow passengers to a pig, which continued eating in complete indifference to the danger. That, he said, was the kind of tranquillity (ataraxia) the philosopher should cultivate (9.68).
Thus, though the sources cited in Book 9 see Pyrrho as a Skeptic in the mold of later Pyrrhonists, much of what Diogenes relates about him supports Cicero’s picture of a moral indifferentist who embodied to an especially high degree the ancient ideal of wisdom as a kind of supreme imperturbability and detachment.
Later Skeptics in fact raised various doubts about the existence of a continuous succession connecting Pyrrho with later Pyrrhonism (9.115–16); some even questioned whether the school’s members should be named after him. The Pyrrhonian answer to such doubts recorded by Diogenes is instructive: “someone who resembles Pyrrho in thought and life could be call
ed a Pyrrhonian” (9.70). Sextus Empiricus takes a similar line: “the school is called ‘Pyrrhonian’ because Pyrrho seems to us to have approached skepticism more bodily and visibly than anyone before” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.7). This tends to confirm that it was Pyrrho’s manner of life and attitude that impressed later followers at least as much as his teachings.
Diogenes has hardly anything to say about those teachings. For help we must turn to Eusebius, quoting Aristocles’ summary of Timon’s account of Pyrrho’s views.
[Pyrrho’s] pupil Timon says that whoever wants to be happy must consider these three questions: first, how are things by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt toward them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have this attitude? According to Timon, Pyrrho declared that (i) things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and inarbitrable. (ii) For this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. (iii) Therefore for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted, and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it is no more than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not.10
The context (in both Eusebius and in Aristocles) suggests that Timon’s point is epistemological, and the passage may describe a possibly dogmatic form of skepticism about the impossibility of knowledge.
Probably the most widely accepted reading of this passage is epistemological. It endorses a plausible emendation that would have Pyrrho deduce (i) from (ii) by reading “through the fact that” instead of “for this reason” in (ii).11 On this reading, (ii) is about the weakness of our mind or our senses, presumably established by familiar Skeptical arguments based on conflicts among appearances and judgments, and the conclusion in (i) is about the impossibility of knowledge. According to an alternative metaphysical interpretation, which retains the manuscript reading “for this reason,” Pyrrho’s point of departure is an insight into the indeterminate nature of reality from which he concludes that our minds and senses cannot be trusted, not because they are defective, but because reality lacks the determinate nature it would need in order to be grasped. According to a third, ethical interpretation, which also retains the manuscript readings, (i) describes things insofar as they relate to action and conduct. The epistemological emphasis in (ii) would, according to these interpretations, be due to Timon rather than Pyrrho.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 85
