Dealing with doubt.

"Do you comprehend that you are awake?

 " 'I do not,'  the man replies, 'for I do not even comprehend when in my sleep I imagine that I am awake.'

"Does this appearance then not differ from the other?

 " 'Not at all,' he replies.

"Shall I still argue with this man? And what fire or what iron shall I apply to him to make him feel that he is deadened? He does perceive, but he pretends that he does not. He's even worse than a dead man. He does not see the contradiction: he is in a bad condition.

"Another does see it, but he is not moved, and makes no improvement: he is even in a worse condition. His modesty is extirpated, and his sense of shame; and the rational faculty has not been cut off from him, but it is brutalized."

--Epictetus, Discourses 5 (tr Long)

As Socrates taught us, it is right and proper to question and doubt a claim of truth in order to come nearer to certainty. But skepticism becomes a danger when we doubt simply to doubt, and deny the very possibility of knowledge itself. Ancient skepticism, whether Academic or Pyrrhonian, asked us to always defer certainty in judgment, either because there was no real truth, or because it was beyond our ability to apprehend.

Skepticism has found a new home in modernity. How, after all, can we be expected to speak of anything as being necessary or certain? Aren't all perceptions and judgments equally true? "Who's to say?" I can never really know what anything means, consider what is absolute, or discern right from wrong.

Epictetus makes an interesting claim. The extreme skeptic, whether he recognizes it or not, is crippled by doubt not because he cannot see what is apparent, but because he chooses not to. He pretends not to see what is real, or even deliberately looks away when he perceives his error.

This is, indeed, a bad condition, or the state of a brutalized mind. Why would a man put himself in this state?

I should only speak for myself, but I know this all too well from my own flawed thinking. I don't doubt a truth away because I can't really understand it. I doubt a truth away because I don't really want to accept it, or to face my own commitment and responsibility to serve what is right and good. It is, as Epictetus says, shameless.

I need only look outward at the world of things in my experience, or inward to my experience of myself, to apprehend what is real. I need not prove what is self-evident, that all things in Nature share in existence, and that each has its distinct form and identity. To see the real in the apparent may not be easy or immediate, but with the ordered practice of reason the true becomes distinct from the false. Don't assume that simply because something my be difficult, that it is therefore impossible.

But I don't think I've ever run away from the truth because I thought it was too hard to grasp. I've always run away from it because I didn't want to face it, and I make excuses. My denial may be unconscious or conscious, but the error is in the attitude of my own thinking, not in the content of what is thought.

Such destructive skepticism is nothing more than a symptom of my arrogance. It's like a child who cover his ears and yells "I can't hear you!"

Written on 5/1/2002

Image: Arcesilaus and Carneades, early Academic skeptics.