Episode #013 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground on the Hellenistic Age so far, and I kind of want to tie it together a little bit. There were four main schools of philosophy in the Hellenistic Age: the Epicureans, the stoics, the skeptics, and the cynics—all these schools trying to cope with all the problems for the average citizen in the Hellenistic Age that were seemingly impossible to deal with. The goal of all these schools was to achieve this freedom from disturbance—sometimes described as ataraxia, sometimes described as just a tranquil state of mind. But although the end goal of all these schools was the same, if you looked at a member from each one of them on the streets, they would look completely different from each other because each of them had a very unique way of achieving this tranquil state of mind.

One way to think about it is if you lived back then, which one of them would you be a member of? Your first option is to be an Epicurean. If you were an Epicurean, you wouldn’t worry about the fact that your family just got sold into slavery or that your town just got burned down to the ground, because all you really are anyway is a random collection of atoms. There’s no God that you’re beholden to. There’s no afterlife that you got to be scared of. So why worry about it? You should position yourself as best you can to do what you were put here to do—to experience the higher pleasures and achieve a complete freedom from disturbance. You’d dress modestly; you’d eat in good proportion. You wouldn’t have a bunch of stuff or big dreams about being a figure in politics one day. You would resign from public life and live on a commune away from the busy city, living a subsistent lifestyle with your friends. And these friends were extremely important to you. They were your personal way of cultivating the complete removal of pain.

Your second option was to be a cynic. For the sake of keeping it simple, think of the extreme version. Think of Diogenes. You wouldn’t worry about losing your house or your job or your status among society in the Hellenistic Age. Because if you’re a cynic, who cares about all that stuff? They’re all meaningless social conventions that have been imposed upon us as humans. Other people have somehow convinced themselves that there’s something to worry about, but not you. Through not caring about these things, you’d achieve a state of flourishing and a tranquility of mind that comes with it. You would live in squalor, maybe in a tub like Diogenes. But I guess in modern times it would be more like a cardboard box. But to you it wouldn’t feel like squalor. It would feel natural. You’d do whatever you wanted to do. You’d go wherever you wanted to go. You’d wear whatever clothes you wanted to wear if you wore any at all.

Your third option was to be a stoic. If you were a stoic, you wouldn’t worry about some evil dictator riding into town, because no matter what happens, it was destined to happen. All things that happen are part of the providential plan of God, the guiding hand of reason that’s inside of everything, and questioning it was as unwise as it was futile. You were tied to the inevitability of fate like a dog was tied to a moving cart being pulled by a horse. How much are you going to whine about where you’re going to go whether you like it or not? Through this acceptance of fate and cultivation of realistic expectations of the world, you achieved that freedom from disturbance. Knowing the right way to act in every situation was using your ability to reason to live virtuously and in accordance with nature.

Now, each morning you would perform a preemptive meditation to start the day, telling yourself that you will be met with those morons that bother you throughout the day. You are going to be met with inconsiderate people, thus rendering you unaffected by anger or dissatisfaction. Then throughout your day you would review and reference your stoic handbook, refreshing the content and keeping it at the top of your mind. You’d be constantly working on yourself: being mindful of your thoughts, brainwashing yourself into productive habits of thought kind of like modern cognitive behavior therapy. You’d be active in politics, or at least in the community, because it was your oikos to assist others in their quest to develop and use their ability to reason as best they can. And what better place to influence others than in the senate of the most powerful civilization on the planet?

Well, your last option was to be a skeptic. And of all the schools, this one was probably the one that when it comes down to achieving ataraxia by actually practicing all the ideas, this one has got to be the hardest. It’s borderline impractical. But I don’t think there’s any other school in the Hellenistic Age that changed philosophy more. Just to get an idea of how this wave of skepticism rolled over all the other schools of the Hellenistic Age and to understand where skepticism found that obvious and convenient foothold that it did, I think it’s illustrated best when talking about it in relation to stoic epistemology.

These schools of the Hellenistic Age were in such constant heated competition with each other that it’s easy to think of them as being on completely different ends of a spectrum, you know, like this school and this school are completely different from each other. But that’s not really the case. They all influenced each other a ton. And really, they were all just talking about different answers to the same questions. Maybe a better way to think of it is, if you were a school in the Hellenistic Age, the other schools wouldn’t be your enemies. They’d be like ambitious rival coworkers all shooting for the same promotion that you want at work. They’d be showing up early to work like you do. They’d be working hard like you do. And if you want that promotion that’s coming up, if you don’t want them to get it before you do, you better keep working hard.

Those rival coworkers would keep you honest. And that competition would end up making you a lot better in many ways. Well, the same thing applies to the schools of the Hellenistic Age. When any one of these schools made a claim about something, the other schools found the flaws in it. They jumped on them; they argued about it. They offered a counterargument, etc. And one of the biggest claims around this time was in regards to the concept of epistemology.

Now, if you remember, the Epicureans were all about disproving any sort of supernatural explanation for anything happening. And in the process of this, sometimes they were guilty of prematurely accepting anything that seemed like a reasonable explanation simply for the sake of having some rational explanation for it. Well, Zeno was no doubt responding to this line of reasoning in some way when he put together his multi-faceted, visual explanation for stoic epistemology that we talked about last time, remember, with the varying degrees of hand-closed-ness indicting varying degrees of knowledge.

Well, when it comes to epistemology in the Hellenistic Age, you can sum it up this way. The Epicureans thought we could attain true knowledge, but we’re a little too cavalier about it. The stoics thought we could attain true knowledge; certainty for them is possible. But they had a multi-part system of qualifications of what constitutes real knowledge. And the skeptics thought having knowledge was impossible. Let’s go back to Zeno and his example. Zeno would be giving a lecture in the Painted Stoa, and he’d hold his hand out, palm completely open. And he’d say, this is perception. Well, he kind of says it right there. Perception isn’t knowledge; it’s perception. Perception is just the first step towards having knowledge.

Well, the stoics would eventually settle with calling what we receive during this perception phase as “impressions.” Now, it’s a little complicated, and we can’t call the stoics strictly empiricists. But we can rest assured knowing that the information received by the senses was incredibly important to the stoics. These impressions that our sense organs pick up are how we gather information from the physical world around us. And they’re important because they’re the first step towards arriving at knowledge. Zeno and Cleanthes compared these impressions to imprints made in wax.

Let’s just do an example of an impression. Let’s say you’re sleeping. You’re having a pleasant dream. You’re finally getting that eight hours of sleep you’ve been wanting all week. And then, bam, a car alarm goes off in front of your house. It sounds like it’s coming from your neighbor’s driveway, and it just keeps going and going and going. Nobody’s shutting it off. And you’re just laying there with your red eyes, staring at your ceiling saying, “Really? Has a car alarm ever actually prevented a single auto theft in the history of the world?” These thoughts are racing through your head, right?

Now, you can’t see the car. You’re lying in bed. You can’t touch the car, obviously. All you can do is hear it. The alarm—the sound of the siren—is giving your sense organs, in this case your ears, an impression that a car alarm is going off. Well, how do you know that a car alarm is going off? You can’t know that for sure, right? What if that siren is actually an air raid siren? What if a foreign army is invading your country? What if it’s a vindictive ambulance driver just sitting in your neighbor’s driveway, blaring his siren, and not stopping it? You know, he’s trying to filibuster your sleep schedule. You can’t know for sure.

Now, the Epicureans would say that the impression you received was true. But if it turns out that it wasn’t a car alarm, your mind wrongly assigned an interpretation to that impression. The stoics don’t think this way. They think that some impressions are true and some impressions are false. The stoics would say, yeah, it sure does sound like a car alarm is going off, but it’s your decision to assent to that impression. I mean, you could easily go to your window and see that it is an ambulance driver sitting there. But on the other hand, you could go to your window; you could look at your neighbor’s driveway. You could see the car’s headlights flashing on and off and the noise clearly coming from that direction. And at that point, you could be pretty certain that it was a car alarm that woke you up.

Well, this leads me to the second phase of Zeno’s visual teaching example, the one where he takes his open palm extended in front of him and closes his fingers a little bit. I said last time it was like Zeno with arthritis. I guess, it’s kind of like Zeno if he was pretending to be a cat. He’s about to claw someone. This phase is called assent. Assent is a belief in something. It’s an agreement with something. You believe it was a car alarm that woke you up. It’s certainly not a mere impression. I mean, it’s not just hearing what sounds like a car alarm and assuming that it is one while you’re still laying in bed. You’ve processed the sound and sight impressions through your ability to reason and arrived at a belief in something.

Just getting impressions from your sense organs wasn’t enough. I mean, a cow has sense organs. He has impressions of the world, right? But humans can question those impressions. They can use reason to determine that things aren’t what they seem. And not surprisingly to the stoics, reason was important in arriving at true knowledge. A stoic sage would suspend judgment on whether something was true or not until they were absolutely certain of it, until they had what they called a cognitive impression.

Now, these cognitive impressions are the third part of Zeno’s hand analogy. He’d close his hand completely and make a fist and say, this is comprehension. Sometimes we have impressions that are really solid, impressions that are so clear it almost seems impossible for them to be wrong. Let’s go back to the car alarm example. Let’s say you don’t just go to the window and see the car alarm going off. Let’s say you actually go outside and really examine the car. You find the exact part of the engine compartment that the alarm is coming out of. You touch the car. You make sure it’s not a hologram. You know, stuff like that. You could leave that experience almost certain that it was a car alarm that woke you up. Well, this is what the stoics would call a cognitive impression, an impression that’s crystal clear and reinforced.

But hold on, it’s important to note that we still don’t have knowledge as far as the stoics are concerned. These cognitive impressions were an essential element when arriving at knowledge, but knowledge really lies in understanding the relations between all cognitive impressions. There’s a famous story about a stoic philosopher that was a follower of Zeno named Severus where he’s having a conversation with King Ptolemy. And the king asks him, will a wise man ever allow himself to be guided by opinion alone? And Severus says no. But little did he know, the king knew he would say that. And way beforehand he had someone manufacture some fake pomegranates made out of wax. They looked just like real pomegranates. But in reality, they were fake. And he served them to Severus. And he bites into one of them. He’s fooled by the wax pomegranates, and he spits it out. And the King goes, hey, what now? Who’s falsely assenting to things now, son?

Well, Severus said that he didn’t assent to the fact that they were pomegranates. He only assented to the idea that it was reasonable to assume that they were pomegranates. The wise man will always suspend judgment until he’s absolutely certain of something. And it’s this crossroads where the skeptics found a foothold in the Hellenistic Age. The stoics say you should suspend judgment on everything until you’re absolutely certain. And the skeptics say you should always suspend judgment because you can never be absolutely certain as far as we can tell. See, because a big part of knowledge for the stoics were these cognitive impressions that we just talked about. And what the skeptics said is that every cognitive impression, no matter how solid it may seem, will be indistinguishable from some other impression—impossible to tell the difference between the two.

For example, let’s say you just paid for your groceries at the grocery store. You come out into the parking lot, and you see your car. But is it really your car? I mean, everything seems the same. It’s parked in the same spot you parked it in when you went into the grocery store. It’s the same color. It’s got your air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Some wild and crazy 12-year-old kid wrote “Wash me” in your dirty back window in the same spot. You’re pretty certain this is your car, right? But the skeptics would say that even despite all this checking that you’ve done, you can’t know that for sure. Right now you could be on a hidden camera, Japanese prank show. Someone could have orchestrated all of this. I mean, they could have towed your car away. They could have gotten an identical replica of your car, parked it there, made it dirty, wrote “Wash me” in the back window just to fool you. I mean, how do you know it’s your car absolutely? Can you?

Well, the skeptics would say no. This uncertainty, no matter how ridiculous it may seem in a practical sense, is impossible to escape with anything because everything has this plague of doubt attached to it. And how can we honestly say that we know something for certain if this doubt exists at any level?

This is probably a good time to talk about the man who’s widely considered to be the first skeptic in the history of the world, Pyrrho. Now, I’m starting to notice a pattern here. If you’re a figurehead for a particular movement, if you’re one of the founding fathers of something and you live during a time when historical details are pretty scarce, you instantly inherit a sort of mystical, legendary status where stories are told about you exhibiting extreme behaviors that are in line with your particular movement. Pyrrho was really skeptical, apparently. He didn’t believe in anything.

There are stories of him getting surgery in 300 BC, and despite being completely awake during the surgery, no anesthesia, he was unaffected by it. He just lied in silence without so much as a twitch on his face as someone dug into him and performed surgery on him because he wasn’t under the delusion like everyone else that pain was a bad thing necessarily. There’s another story of his good friend falling into a hole, and he’s unable to get out of his hole. Pyrrho’s going for a walk. He comes across him. He sees him in the hole. And he just leaves him there. And his friend wasn’t even mad at him. I mean, he was impressed. He deeply respected his ability to be so skeptical about stuff.

There’s all kinds of stories. There’s stories of Pyrrho walking around with complete skepticism of everything around him. He seems like an elderly woman sometimes. He’d just walk into people. He’d walk in front of oncoming wagons. Apparently, his friends would have to save him from the brink of walking into his death all the time. And despite all these stories, he lived to the very old age of 90. Well, these stories are obviously fiction, but they do illustrate an extreme version of Pyrrho’s line of skeptical thinking.

Now, it probably isn’t a shock to you guys that Pyrrho didn’t believe in writing things down either. So, the only information we really have about him is from one of this lead disciples Timon. And this next passage that I’m about to read actually comes from a later philosopher that’s giving commentary on Timon. So, there’s kind of a game of telephone going on here. But anyway— “Pyrrho declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and inarbitrable. For this reason, neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. 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 no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon, will first be speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance.”

See, the skeptics were in heavy competition with all the other philosophical schools of the time that claimed to bring you a state of tranquility. And the skeptic’s method of achieving it was through realizing that negative feelings come from negative judgments about things. But you don’t know whether those things that you’re making negative judgments about are actually bad. You certainly can’t prove that they’re absolutely bad. So, how can you arrogantly assume that you know that they’re bad? How do you know that pain is a bad thing, necessarily? How do you know that losing your farm is going to be a bad thing in the long run? Pyrrho said that we should suspend judgment on everything until we know for certain that it is the truth, which we never can.

Well, it was a new way of thinking, and many historians think that when Pyrrho was a soldier in the army of Alexander the Great when he was young, he travelled east, and he was either heavily inspired by or he just outright stole the idea from what they called the naked philosophers of India. We talked on the Buddhism episode about this way of looking at the mind as being misleading, and that by conceding to the impulses of the mind, a lot of times it accomplishes the opposite of what you were intending. Now, couple this with a few strands of skepticism that can be found in earlier Presocratic philosophers, and you get a pretty good idea of where Pyrrho was coming from when he developed his version of skepticism.

There’s several examples from the Presocratics that we’ve already discussed. I mean, Parmenides talked about how everyone thinks the world is moving around them, but in reality nothing is moving. It’s all part of one giant whole. Not to mention one of my favorite quotes ever as said by Democritus, “By convention sweet, by convention bitter; by convention hot, by convention cold; by convention color: but in reality atoms and void.” See, skepticism had been around for a while but not as an attitude that you apply to everything, not as a Hellenistic school designed to bring you freedom from disturbance. And that was the novelty of it.

Look, that’s another thing. Like the other schools that claim to be heavily influenced by Socrates at the time, the skeptics could say they were too. Remember, it was Socrates that said the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Well, when Socrates says it that way, it’s sort of clever and paradoxical. And really he’s just making a deeper point underneath it. But when Pyrrho says it and lives it, it starts to look like hypocrisy. Pyrrho thought that “nothing is honorable or base, or just or unjust, and that likewise in all cases nothing exists in truth; and that convention and habit are the basis of everything that men do, for each thing is no more this than that.”

Well, the problem with this way of thinking is, if you’re supposed to suspend judgment on everything until you know what it is for certain, how can you claim to know it’s impossible to be certain? You should suspend judgment on that too, right? How can you know that you know nothing if you in fact know nothing? Well, this extreme stance is really what separates Pyrrho from the rest of the other skeptics that came in generations after him. And to be fair, some people don’t even think he thought this way. But nonetheless, as we’ll see later, it was this doctrine that was attached to him as a man. This is what he ended up representing later on.

Look, don’t hate on Pyrrho. I mean, it’s easy to get distracted by language. It’s easy to spend your efforts trying to be critical of an argument written in 300 BC. But let’s not forget that skepticism really was a practical philosophy as well. You were supposed to apply it to your life and achieve ataraxia. That was the point. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in skepticism. There’s a lot of ways to benefit from it that don’t involve something ridiculous like laying down on the ground and not believing in pain as somebody performs surgery on you.

I want to tell you guys about someone named Jack Whittaker. Jack was a small business owner from West Virginia who was pretty successful. He’d walk around in a black cowboy hat, a nice dress shirt, a black suit coat, you know. He probably had some kind of flashy bolo tie that tied the outfit together. He seemed to have a loving family. He had friends. He employed people at his business. He donated to charity. He paid his taxes. He had a lot of good things going for him. But then on December 25, 2002, on Christmas morning, he rechecks his lottery ticket from the night before that he thinks he lost on and finds out that he just won the largest lottery jackpot in history at the time, $319,000,000.

Now, at first glance, this may seem like a dream come true. I’m pretty sure it’s a common thing for people to think that the greatest thing that can ever happen to you is to win the lottery, let alone the largest lottery prize in the history of the world. And like most things that appear to be good on the surface, at first things were. He did a lot of great things with his money. He hired back a bunch of people he unfortunately had to lay off about a month before. He gave a couple local pastors millions of dollars so they could build themselves new churches. I mean, he cashed his novelty-sized cardboard check, and he started giving it out to people that were in need.

But something I didn’t know until just recently is that part of winning the lottery is forfeiting a certain temporary amount of privacy. It’s actually in the lottery rules that if you win the major jackpot you need to do press for the lottery office. You actually are required to stand there with the giant check on stage, have people take pictures of you and answer questions for reporters. You need to make yourself accessible to the press. Well, Jack won the biggest lottery jackpot in history. And after he was on TV and in the newspapers, he started getting letters from people, a lot of letters from people.

This is a quote from an article by ABC news, “‘There were so many letters that they wouldn’t even deliver the mail. I mean, it was nothing for us to sit for ten hours just opening envelopes,’ said Jill, who asked that her name be kept private. Jill says the foundation received all kinds of requests, such as, ‘people wanting new carpet, people wanting entertainment systems, people wanting Hummers, people wanting houses—just absolutely bizarre things.’”

So, this guy Jack Whittaker just starts getting hundreds of letters a day from people just asking him for stuff. I mean, when I was reading the story, I was picturing his house as being like Harry Potter’s house in the first book with the letters just coming through the fireplace and through the mail slot, flying all around the house. He got so many letters, he had to hire a full-time staff of people to just open them for him. But he wasn’t just opening them. He was responding to them. He was actually buying people stuff. He spent more than $50 million buying people stuff.

And once everybody saw that he was giving stuff away to people that just sent him a letter, he became like that guy at the beach that gives a seagull a french fry, and then all the other seagulls and crows just start swarming him and surrounding him and stuff. He talks about how his life became here. “Any place I would go, they would come up. We went to a ballgame, a basketball game…and we must have had 150 people come up to us…and they’d be going right back to asking for money.”

It wasn’t long before Jack’s life started going downhill really fast. One night when he was hanging out at a strip club, ironically probably giving money to the people that need help the most, he was drugged and robbed of tens of thousands of dollars directly out of his car. Then, a couple months later, he was arrested for drunk driving directly into a concrete median. He started getting into trouble with the law. People started randomly filing lawsuits against him. His wife left him. His family grew distant from him. He gave his granddaughter pillowcases full of money, and she became addicted to OxyContin, fell in with the wrong crowd, and eventually tragically overdosed and died very young.

After it was all said and done, Jack said he wished that he had never won the lottery. He wishes he had just torn the ticket up when he realized that he won. He said that winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Well, just as philosophers make judgments about what the criteria of having true knowledge is or about what the universe is made of, just as someone in the Hellenistic Age might make judgments about whether losing their home was a bad thing or being sold into slavery was a bad thing, in modern times we make judgments about things in our everyday lives. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that thinks that winning the biggest lottery jackpot in the history of the world was a bad thing for somebody.

But this story is not unique, people. Most lottery winners say that a couple years after winning the lottery they’re no more happy than they were before they won the money. And many of those people say that they’re less happy. But why? Well, I think it comes down to a couple things. I once heard a very wise man say that if he could wish one thing upon his worst enemy it would be that he was forced to get whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Now, that sounds crazy on the surface, right? Well, suspend judgment like Pyrrho for a second. If you had to make an argument on the other side of the spectrum, if you had to argue why it would be a terrible thing, what would you say?

Well, this is another great example of something that seems like everyone’s dream come true, and it is in the short term. But think about it after a year or so. I mean, if that was a curse that a witch cast upon you that you couldn’t lift, your life would become terrible. I mean, think about it. So much of the satisfaction we get out of life comes from the struggle. It comes from wanting something really, really badly, but you can’t have it. And then you work really hard, and you get it. And then you feel great.

Maybe there’s a car that you really want, but you can’t afford it. So, you work hard all summer long. You save up for that down payment. And then when you get it, there’s a tremendous sense of achievement and satisfaction that comes with it. Maybe someone tells you that you can’t take them out on a date. And then you work really hard; you improve yourself. And suddenly now they’re interested in you, and you feel great. Maybe there’s just a scarcity of something that you want like a rare collectable. Or maybe it’s something as simple as needing to go to the bathroom really bad, and there’s no bathrooms around. There’s a scarcity of bathrooms. So when you finally get to go, it feels wonderful, right?

If every time you ever wanted something, even for a split second, it just appeared in front of you, think of all the great feelings you’d miss out on over the course of your life. Absolutely everything would lose its value to you because it would just appear when you wanted it. You’d never feel a sense of achievement ever again in your life. And that sounds like a great thing to wish upon your worst enemy.

Well, Pyrrho would have agreed with it. Pyrrho would have been a big fan of the saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” There are real overtones of skepticism in there. How can we know what is good in reality? How can we know we aren’t just falsely attributing good to something that we think seems like it should be good? Take the last example. You spend eight hours a day working so you can get what you want. And you don’t like working. So, why wouldn’t it be wonderful to just get what you want without any of the work? It’s all the good and none of the bad, right?

Well, skepticism applied in this practical context is similar to skepticism applied to questions in metaphysics or epistemology. The ground looks flat, so the earth must be flat. Well, take a few steps back. Look at it in a more far-sighted way, and you see that that’s not the case. Pyrrho said, “Things are never one way or another. Impossible to measure or judge, our perceptions or beliefs render neither truth nor falsehood. So we should remain without belief, inclining neither this way or that, so we avoid making any assertions and achieve ataraxia.”

This wisdom from Pyrrho could have saved me so many negative feelings throughout my life if I just applied it well. Many years ago, I remember being 16 years old and really wanting a job. I wanted any job. I was desperate. There’s a giant road by where I lived at the time that’s like 10 miles long, and every store in the area is along this road. I remember walking for hours, just miles, up this road, stopping and filling out an application at every single store. I seriously must have filled out 100 applications. There was nothing I wanted more than a job. I remember, a grocery store called me in for an interview, and I was really excited.

And I went in for the interview, and I sat down at the table. And the lady just instantly loved me. I was making her laugh. I was answering all the questions perfectly that she had. If Hollywood was making a scene for a movie where they were trying to depict a perfect job interview and they took this scene out of my life and this job interview, the director would have thrown it out and said, “No, it’s too perfect to be realistic. Nobody’s going to believe that that actually happened.” No, it happened. And at the very end of the interview, she looked down at her paper and said, “We already hired somebody for this yesterday. Hey, but don’t worry. If anybody quits in the next several weeks, I’m going to keep your application in my desk, and we’re going to hire you. I promise.”

And I walked out of that grocery store, and I thought the world had just ended. I remember being miserable for a week and a half. A week and a half of my life that I will never get back I sat there and moped about the fact that I was never going to get a job, that even if I got a job it was never going to be as good as the grocery store job that I almost got. And then all of that ended when a week and a half later some other grocery store asked me for an interview. They hired me. And it was bagging groceries at that grocery store that I met my future wife.

Was not getting hired at that first interview a bad thing? No. I should have suspended judgment about it until I was certain. I should have accepted my own ignorance like Socrates did. I should have admitted that I knew nothing. You know, things that seem bad are not always bad. Plus, even if it is bad, adversity is what prepares you to navigate the future hurdles in your life. Your level of success is not determined by whether there are hurdles in your way but by how well you can jump over those hurdles. If something bad happens to you and you approach it head on, you deal with it; you grow from it; you become stronger and come out the other side a better person—was that bad thing that happened to you still a bad thing?

Pyrrho said to suspend all judgments because by suspending all of them, you suspend the negative ones. And by suspending them, you’re impervious to them. Think of all the ways this applies to you. Let’s say you got fired from your job. Yeah, that seems bad. But in six months you might find a job that’s twice as fulfilling and pays twice as much as your last job. Let’s say your spouse leaves you. Let’s say your girlfriend or boyfriend leaves you. Yeah, that seems bad. But you might meet the love of your life the next day.

Let’s say you contract some terrible illness. Yeah, that seems terrible. But what if that illness made you exercise more, it made you think positively, it built your confidence in yourself, and it made you appreciate every second of life after you beat it? Was that illness a bad thing? Maybe we should take a page out of the skeptic’s book and suspend judgment on things for a while. Alright, I’ll get off my soap box.

Many of the things that made skepticism so important to Hellenistic philosophy lied in the abolition of any potential monopoly that may have formed at the time. See, Pyrrho died in 270 BC. But he passed the torch to future philosophers who carried on and improved skepticism. The word “skepticism” comes from the Greek word “skeptikós,” which meant inquiring or searching. And skepticism became a critical philosophy, one that was centered around looking at the beliefs that other people hold and looking for weaknesses in them. Are these beliefs the truth, or is there room for doubt? And if there was room for doubt, then their beliefs couldn’t be true knowledge. And now the people with the faulty beliefs had to fix something.

Just realize where the skeptics were coming from with all this. I mean, it wasn’t about tearing other people’s arguments down so they can feel better about themself. It was about finding the truth. They didn’t think that anyone had found the truth yet. Just like you can think of the Hellenistic schools as rival coworkers, you can also think of them as rival companies that are all competing for market share—all providing the same general service, but each one of them appealing to a different group of people according to their own individual way of doing business, kind of like McDonald’s versus KFC.

They both are companies that fill the need of busy Americans to have quick, convenient, good-tasting food at an affordable price while simultaneously subtracting decades from your life. But these two companies do things completely differently from each other. They provide the same service in a slightly different way. If fried chicken is your thing, you’re going to go to KFC. If hamburgers are your thing, you’re going to go to McDonald’s. In modern times, this competition between companies keeps them constantly working to get better. The absolute worst thing that can possibly happen is that one company gets a complete stranglehold over an entire niche market, because then they have a monopoly over it. When one company has a monopoly over a particular market, they grow complacent. There’s no incentive for them to improve themselves.

Well, the skeptics provided this constant competition in Hellenistic philosophy, constantly nipping at the heels of the stoics, questioning everything they said, keeping them honest. I mean, heaven forbid the stoics said anything that wasn’t entirely substantive or based on sound logic, because the skeptics would call them on it. Just like if McDonald’s started charging ten bucks for a hamburger, all their customers would go to Burger King instead. We should thank the skeptics. Monopolies in the corporate world are bad. Just imagine a monopoly of thought with no competing ideas.

Keeping the other schools honest became the primary role of skepticism. Plus, it makes sense. I mean, if one of the central tenants of your philosophy is that it probably is impossible to ever attain certain knowledge, what are you going to write down for other people to read? Are you going to write a treatise that’s two sentences long? The skeptics didn’t really have much to do creatively, so what they ended up doing is spending all their time refuting what other people had to say, especially the stoics.

I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that the stoics thought the skeptics were pretty annoying—I mean, not offering up anything of their own, just refuting what they had to say. But it’s interesting to think about whether stoicism would have been compelling enough to win the hearts and minds of Rome a couple centuries later if the skeptics hadn’t sharpened and refined Zeno’s teaching down and made them a lot stronger. Just to continue the analogy—just like how companies have really smart people strategizing at the top of their ranks trying to find any way to cut costs or to expand or to make their product better, the competing schools of the Hellenistic Age also had brilliant people at the top trying to improve their product. And the skeptics were no exception.

So, Pyrrho died, and he didn’t write anything down let alone set up a philosophical school. But his ideas lived on. Plato set up his Academy as we talked about before. And after he died in 347 BC, someone else took over the Academy. And for 75 years after his death, all they did was just talk about Plato and what he had to say. Just think about that—a period of time as long as the time period between the end of the Second World War to today, the people teaching and studying at the Academy only expanded upon and argued about what Plato taught. And then everything changed.

The Academy chose a guy named Arkesilaos as the new headmaster. And being a philosopher living during the Hellenistic Age, Arkesilaos looked at philosophy with a more Socratic approach. He was a skeptic, and he was even willing to question and refute the teachings of the founder of the school himself, Plato. This change of power into the hands of the skeptics marks a period in the Academy that historians call the skeptical Academy.

Arkesilaos spent most of his life and time as headmaster of the Academy refuting stoic epistemology. We actually talked about some of his arguments earlier. And he attacked it right at his roots. The stoics said that certain knowledge was possible and that it relied heavily on what they called “cognitive impressions,” impressions that were so crystal clear that they were self-evident.

Well, Arkesilaos attacked the idea that impressions can be self-evident at all. He said, “No impression arising from something true is such that an impression arising from something false could not also be just like it.” And what he was touching on is the same idea we talked about in the pomegranate story earlier or in the example where you’re coming out of the grocery store and you see your car. How do you know that that’s your car? There isn’t anything that you can possibly perceive that can’t be hallucinated or have a fake replica made of it, or something that would make you think that the impression was self-evident, but it actually wasn’t. Now, Arkesilaos argued, if this is the case, how could you ever be sure enough about anything to deem it self-evident?

When you constantly attack the views of others, you should expect to get your fair share of attacks back at what you think. One attack that Arkesilaos had to deal with during his time as the head of the Academy was the obvious inconsistency that we talked about earlier in Pyrrho’s skepticism: how can you know for certain that nothing is knowable for certain? I mean, that’s a contradictory statement. Plus, if you were going to apply skepticism in a practical way—if you were going to try to apply it in everyday life, how do you do that while having the super extreme view that you should suspend judgment on everything? I mean, it seems like that wouldn’t bring freedom from disturbance. You’d really just be confused all the time about stuff, not sure what to do about anything. Well, Arkesilaos responded to this by saying that an ideal skeptic would suspend judgment on knowing anything for certain but realize that there are things that definitely seem to be the case and live in accordance with them.

One common example that people use in philosophy books is, let’s say you’re out on a walk in the middle of the woods, and out of the corner of your eye you see a tiger leap towards you. He’s trying to attack you. Now, you’re not going to sit there and take the time to check whether the tiger is real or whether it’s a hallucination. You’re not going to take samples of the fur on the tiger and sit there and analyze the lighting conditions to see if your eyes are deceiving you. You’re just going to run and try to climb a tree really quick. Arkesilaos would say that this doesn’t mean that you’re certain that there’s a tiger there; you’re just acting in accordance with the way things seem. And that’s what a good skeptic should do.

Now, we could talk about Arkesilaos for a long time. There’s a lot to talk about. But the most important thing to take from him, if you’re looking at Hellenistic skepticism as a whole, was this particular concession that he made. This standpoint of his would later divide the skeptics. It created a spectrum of—just how skeptical are you? Do you believe that knowledge isn’t possible at all and that you should reject everything like Pyrrho thought? Or should you suspend judgment on knowing things for certain and live in accordance with the way things seem? It divided the skeptics.

The next big headmaster of the Academy after Arkesilaos was Carneades. You might recognize his name from the story that I told at the beginning of one of the stoic episodes about philosophy coming to Rome. He was the guy that impressed the Romans with his argument for the merits of justice and then the next day equally well against the merits of justice. This kind of behavior—making an argument for both sides of something—was what being a skeptic was all about. You believed that truth didn’t lie on one side or another. As far as you knew, truth was impossible to attain. And as someone argues one side of an argument well, it’s possible to argue the other side equally well. And if your job is just to refute what other people argue and shine light upon their weaknesses, then you would need to know both sides of an argument extremely well. And Carneades was a master of this.

The story of Carneades arguing justice in Rome illustrates it pretty well, but there’s a lot of other people that say the same thing. One of Carneades’ students heaped praise upon him, writing about him, saying that he’s impossible to understand. But he wasn’t insulting him when he wrote that. For the skeptics, that was actually seen as a compliment. It’s some crazy, alternate world where the merit of someone’s intellect lies in just how skeptical they were. “He's the most skeptical guy I’ve ever seen. You got to respect that.” It’s crazy. I mean, the first time I read that, I just started laughing. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems pretty arbitrary to determine that “You are more skeptical than I can ever dream of being. I respect you, my friend.”

Well, ever since I read that, I’ve thought of all the people that were skeptics in the Hellenistic Age as characters that they resemble on The Smurfs. See, the Smurfs also have a very strange criteria of determining what gets people respect in Smurfland or wherever they live. I mean, these people say things like “He’s the Smurfiest Smurf in the Smurfin’ world.” You know, things like that. The Smurfs get respect for being Smurfy. Carneades gets respect for being skeptical. And luckily the characters of The Smurfs correspond with the characters of skepticism in the Hellenistic Age.

Personally, I like the think of Carneades as Papa Smurf—the Smurfiest guy around, right? I think of Pyrrho and his really extreme viewpoint of rejecting everything all the time, sitting on one end of the spectrum of skepticism—he reminds me of that really evil guy that wears a robe and has male-pattern baldness and an evil cat. And for some reason he has a problem with all the blue Smurfs. I’m not really sure what his name is, but he’s the antagonist of the show.

Pyrrho reminds me of this guy because once the skeptics started making these concessions about acting in accordance with the way things seem, there was a die-hard group of skeptics that didn’t agree with them. They thought that you should reject everything. And when this die-hard group were looking for a philosopher to model themselves after, they went to Pyrrho who had long been dead, but his views were the closest to what encapsulated theirs. This die-hard group of people became known as one type of skepticism known as Pyrrhonism.

Well, if Pyrrho was the balding guy with the evil cat that hates the Smurfs, then the opposite of him has to be the rational Smurf, the one that always wants everyone to get along and loves everyone. That would be Smurfette, the only female Smurf, completely inexplicably. And the skeptic philosopher that represents the opposite end of the spectrum, and thus represents Smurfette, would be a guy named Philo. Now, almost everyone doesn’t really like what Philo had to say because they saw him as being too soft, too committed to the cause of trying to bridge the gap between stoicism and skepticism.

Philo moved to Rome later on in life, and his theory makes it clear that he doesn’t agree with the definition of stoic epistemology that former heads of the Academy had argued against and taken to be the way that the stoics thought for sure. Instead, he said that the stoics had a different view of what actually constitutes knowledge, a flimsy definition that made decades of argument that came before him completely worthless. And it actually made some people wonder, if you believe what Philo believes, what is the difference between stoicism and this abomination that skepticism has become?

Carneades was Papa Smurf, the Smurfiest guy around. Pyrrho was the crazy guy with the evil cat because of his mean-spirited rejection of everything. And Philo was Smurfette, the peacemaker.

Now it’s time for the question of the week. Skepticism is all about suspending judgment, not pretending that you know something for certain simply because it seems to be the case. Well, I want you to think about how this applies to you in your life. Philosophize this. Was there ever a time in your life where something happened to you that seemed really bad, but after the dust settled it turned out to be a great thing?

Thank you for listening. You guys are awesome. I’ll talk to you soon.