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Pyrrho’s Three Questions
I wrote about philosophical skepticism elsewhere, but I just noticed this great summation of it’s founder Pyrrho’s basic approach to thinking:
The proper course of the sage, said Pyrrho, is to ask himself three questions. Firstly we must ask what things are and how they are constituted. Secondly, we ask how we are related to these things. Thirdly, we ask what ought to be our attitude towards them. As to what things are, we can only answer that we know nothing. We only know how things appear to us, but of their inner substance we are ignorant. The same thing appears differently to different people, and therefore it is impossible to know which opinion is right. The diversity of opinion among the wise, as well as among the vulgar, proves this. To every assertion the contradictory assertion can be opposed with equally good grounds, and whatever my opinion, the contrary opinion is believed by somebody else who is quite as clever and competent to judge as I am. Opinion we may have, but certainty and knowledge are impossible. Hence our attitude to things (the third question), ought to be complete suspense of judgment. We can be certain of nothing, not even of the most trivial assertions.
A lot of people probably quail before the idea that we can’t ever really know anything. But the way I read Pyrrho’s philosophy is that either we can or can’t know anything for certain. But that’s not important. What is important is that it doesn’t matter. Once we stop worrying about who’s right and who’s wrong, and stop living life through an exclusively intellectual lens, we’ll experience a sense of peace and freedom.
August 31st, 2005 at 3:49 pm
A Zen koan “can you clear your vision and open yourself up to life?”
Also of Krishnamurti who said “Now, if one can really come to that state of saying, “I do not know,” it indicates an extraordinary sense of humility; that there is no knowledge; there is no self-assertive answer to make an impression. When you can actually say, “I do not know,” which very few are capable of saying, then in that state all fear ceases because all sense of recognition, the search into memory, has come to an end; there is no longer inquiry into the field of the known. Then comes the extraordinary thing. If you have so far followed what I am talking about, not just verbally, but if you are actually experiencing it, you will find that when you can say, “I do not know,” all conditioning has stopped. And what then is the state of the mind? We are seeking something permanent in the sense of time, something enduring, everlasting. We see that everything about us is transient, in flux, being born, withering, and dying, and our search is always to establish something that will endure within the field of the known. But that which is truly sacred is beyond the measure of time; it is not to be found within the field of the known. The known operates only through thought, which is the response of memory to challenge. If I see that, and I want to find out how to end thinking, what am I to do? Surely, I must through self-knowledge be aware of the whole process of my thinking. I must see that every thought, however subtle, however lofty, or however ignoble, stupid, has its roots in the known, in memory. If I see that very clearly, then the mind, when confronted with an immense problem, is capable of saying, “I do not know,” because it has no answer.
To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd. If you knew what truth is, what God is, you would neither be a theist nor an atheist, because in that awareness belief is unnecessary. It is the man who is not aware, who only hopes and supposes, that looks to belief or to disbelief, to support him, and to lead him to act in a particular way. Now, if you approach it quite differently, you will find out for yourselves, as individuals, something real which is beyond all the limitations of beliefs, beyond the illusion of words. But that the discovery of truth, or God, demands great intelligence, which is not assertion of belief or disbelief, but the recognition of the hindrances created by the absence of whole intelligence”
August 31st, 2005 at 4:06 pm
That was a great quote! Thanks so much