Skepticism and the Eurocentric Tradition

Belief seems to be a universal aspect of human behavior--typical of children, fanatics, psychotics, and primitive tribesmen as well as most of today's normal well adjusted adults in advanced societies. According to the Bhagavad-Gita, we are all the product of our beliefs--as we believe, so we are--and in fact, according to Chekhov, no cause and effect need be involved: simply enough, we are what we believe. W.V. Quine more specifically treats belief as a disposition or bundle of dispositions that exists, as opposed to thinking, which does or performs, and Charles Saunders Peirce argues that such a disposition is necessarily rooted in habit as determined by our entire experience since childhood, including our need for self-esteem, our affirmative quest for something better in life, and, as explained by Montaigne, our wish to cope with what we don't know. In fact, according to Montaigne, nothing is so firmly believed as what we don't know. As opposed to knowledge, which features facts and theories that may be accepted or rejected with relative indifference, belief features what we want to know-facts we want to be true or feel ought to be true.

As an exercise in willed knowledge, belief stretches from raw superstition to the most sophisticated theories of theology and metaphysics. Even pet dogs seem capable of rudimentary belief when they anticipate a reward for doing what they are asked, just as Einstein believed in his theory of relativity, as did most of the intellectual community within just a few years of its formulation. Why is belief so pervasive? At the simplest and most abstract level, I would suggest, because we need to feel confident of the truth value of our ideas, but also, and perhaps more basically, because we need to buttress our sense of personal worth and social acceptance, and here belief takes on entirely new ramifications. As opposed to empirical knowledge, which features facts and theories that may be judged with relative indifference, belief features what we want to know--facts we want to be true or feel ought to be true. Idea thus settles into belief, and this in turn congeals through habit into dogmatic certitude typical of faith. Described by Santayana as "alleged knowledge," faith confirms our desires by conferring upon them the status of an objective truth we can believe in, presumably because they are time-tested and universally accepted by everybody who matters. If belief is habitual idea, faith is unexamined belief. Everywhere belief tantamount to faith--what Paul Kurtz has described as the "transcendental temptation"--is honored for its redemptive and socially integrative powers.[i] It buttresses self-confidence and seals social relationships. It provides the adhesive that binds us together--as individuals, as a society. Because personal experience is focussed by belief into a relatively simplistic conceptualization easy to share with others, there is social cohesion. The same values prevail as well as the same dedication to shared goals and the same aversion to shared enemies. Society becomes a team of like-minded believers, and everybody has a useful role to play. Outsiders are never truly outside if they can identify themselves as good believers.

However, the capacity for doubt, or disbelief, has played a complementary role no less important in the history of civilization. Belief binds social relationships, and this is of vital importance, but disbelief sets the stage for improvement, for the necessary advances so important to social and intellectual progress. Without disbelief science would not have been possible, nor philosophy, nor the political evolution that has produced all the benefits of democracy we take for granted today. All the most backward societies thrive on belief, but to such an extent that disbelief cannot take root, and with the effect that improvements become difficult, if not impossible. These societies can only stagnate, and the doxological certitude they emphasize is precisely the source of their misery. Why? Because the levels of disbelief crucial to advances in physics, chemistry, and biochemistry as well as the obviously practical benefits of such innovations as electricity and the gasoline engine derive from an intellectual freedom that lets any idea be proposed whether or not it challenges or poses any threat to another. This freedom extends from the ability to disagree with family, teachers, and sundry authority figures on issues one considers important to the more disciplined skills to be cultivated in deferring judgment until more information has been gathered, no matter how compelling the evidence at hand might seem at its face value and no matter how convincing various authorities might seem in drawing their conclusions from this evidence.

Historically, the capacity for disbelief has played a unique role in having spurred the advancement of western civilization since the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, when disbelief could first be articulated at the expense of religion, patriotism, and orthodox belief in general. All societies in the world have fostered various belief systems, and many of them to a rather extraordinary degree. Only a couple of non-western societies--most notably China and India preceding the time of Christ and Arab civilization from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, A.D.--have tolerated disbelief for any length of time. The unique advantage of western tradition has not been Christianity, one of many similar ancient belief systems, but in fact its extraordinary skeptical tradition that began in ancient Greece many centuries before Christ was born. Skepticism has been tolerated, if not encouraged, from the Age of Pericles in the fifth century, B.C., to, say, the first half of the third century, A.D., and, after a millenium of medieval Christian hegemony, from the late fourteenth century, A.D., to the present. Even earlier, in fact, the materialist achievement of the earliest Greek philosophers beginning with Thales probably resulted from their inability to accept the Homeric gods. Sophists rejected both Homer and the pre-Socratic materialists, Plato rejected the sophists, Aristotle did the same with Plato, the so-called "Academic" skeptics both Aristotle and Plato, Augustine the academic skeptics as justified by Cicero, and on down the line to Russell and Wittgenstein. The key to this entire linear dialectic has been disagreement, and, whether its principal figures chose to identify themselves as skeptics, they in fact catapulted themselves into prominence by finding good reasons to challenge the authority of their predecessors. Their disagreement was rooted in skepticism.

Indeed, priority must be granted to belief as a preliminary disposition in both individual and collective behavior. But when belief falls short of its claims to certitude, disbelief, with any encouragement, initiates search behavior in pursuit of alternative answers. One believes, then doubts, and, spurred by dissatisfaction, very quickly finds more suitable grounds for recovering one's belief, even if this obliges the abandonment of portions of what one had previously held to be true. Western tradition's unique achievement is that it has formalized and institutionalized this process, specifically in the testing of hypotheses typical of scientific methodology, more generally in the skeptical tradition of philosophy that extends from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the most recent philosophical assumptions in currency today.

Yet disbelief is generally understood. Kant argued, for example that skepticism is a resting place of reason, but this is exactly opposite the truth.[ii] If anything, skepticism destabilizes received assumptions, thereby putting reason to work in the pursuit of a new and more defensible intellectual resting place in which belief may be at least temporarily invested. Only by rigorous effort--precisely the goal of skepticism--can the intermediate activity of doubt be sustained to any appreciable extent pertaining to issues for which a general consensus has already been established, for example the existence of god(s), the need for conventional morality, the justification of patriotism right or wrong, etc.

What I want to propose here is that the sequential advancement from belief to doubt followed by adjustments permitting a recovery of belief on a more inclusive scale may be observed not only in individual behavior on an ontogenetic basis, but also on a phylogenetic scale as the single most important ingredient of the intellectual history of western civilization. Like the dialectic pursuit of intellectual freedom explained by Hegel, this advancement from belief to disbelief and back again to belief has entailed the historically progressive choice dominant since ancient Greece between dogma and its skeptical rejection, but with the significant advantage over Hegel's dialectic that the process has not been limited to a simple and necessarily terminal three-stage movement from dogma to its denial followed by a transcendent reassertion of dogma (a kind of intellectual judgment day) through the final attainment of absolute Idea rooted in Christian theology. Instead, the dialectic persists without apparent end. Today, we may reject for its naiveté Hegel's paradigm that extended from oriental despotism to the Hellenic discovery of freedom and then its fully realized Christian achievement in German civilization. This sequence might have been convenient for Hegel--also for Bismarck, Wagner, and Hitler--but it totally distends western civilization's more pervasive skeptical tradition as guaranteed by intermittent periods of relative intellectual freedom. Germany's admittedly remarkable nineteenth century enlightenment becomes the culminating apex of western civilization rather than one particular phase in a far bigger, more inclusive, and more extraordinary continuing dialectic.

In effect I am suggesting that a basic intellectual standoff may be demonstrated to have taken place between belief and disbelief beginning with a seven-century period of classical enlightenment during which a large segment of the educated classes abandoned polytheistic worship for an unprecedented skeptical perspective begun by pre-Socratic materialists and Sophists, later codified by Pyrrho, and still later refined as a systematic methodology by the so-called New Academy of Plato's successors led by Arcesilaus and Carneades among many others. This intellectual vision played a substantial role in ancient philosophy between 300 B.C. and the retrospective assessments of Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius toward the end of the second century, A.D. During the first century, B.C., Cicero wrote Academica to summarize the so-called Academic approach (it is the only text in this tradition that survives today), but at almost the same time Aenisidemus revitalized Pyrrho's approach to dominate the terminal phase of ancient skepticism at the beginning of Rome's decline. Skepticism's final death knell for ancient civilization, at least, came with Saint Augustine's apostasy from the New Academy in the late fourth century as explained in probably his earliest book, Contra Academicos, written as a critique of Cicero's text.

Meanwhile, the Roman populace's countervailing pursuit of sheer belief antithetical to uncompromising skepticism steadily mounted in intensity. Since the reign of the emperor Augustus at the time of Christ, there was a rapid erosion in popular belief from polytheism to a large assortment of oriental mysteries that came to a focus on the choice between Mithraism and Christianity and finally ushered in Christianity's twelve-century period of intellectual hegemony during the "dark" and Middle Ages. In effect skepticism had terminated polytheism, only to be terminated by Christianity, and well enough to initiate a millenium of orthodox sacerdocracy enforced by a bloodthirsty Inquisition starting in the thirteenth century. Only with the rediscovery of ancient skepticism during the Renaissance (literally, skepticism's rebirth) did the countervailing principles of belief and disbelief once again lock into direct historic competition with each other, now as an ongoing struggle between philosophers of constructive doubt usually identified as empiricists or materialists (e.g., Pomponazzi, Bacon, Hobbes, Gassendi, Hume, d'Holbach, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Mill, Huxley, and Russell) and philosophers of Christian reaffirmation (e.g. Descartes, Pascal, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead). Constructive doubters shifted from a tentative pursuit of "double truths" during the Renaissance to deism, then atheism and agnosticism; in contrast, reaffirmationists shifted from a fideistic justification of Christian faith during the Renaissance to a variety of metaphysical suppositions, almost all of which were brought to bear in defense of Christianity, however subtle their lines of attack.

What complicates this dialectic interplay has been the choice of Christian reaffirmationists to use skepticism as a methodological stance preliminary to renewed faith. Just as Pyrrho and his followers argued that doubt's inevitability justifies the pursuit of ataraxia (or peace of mind) through the acceptance of whatever dogma seems paramount at the time, a principle of obvious benefit during the final stages of Roman civilization, Renaissance fideists led by Pico della Mirandola argued that this inevitability justifies the acceptance of Christianity since it cannot be disproven and its guaranteed dispensation of rewards and punishment justifies its acceptance on the assumption that its eschatology just might turn out to be true. Descartes accordingly reverted to skepticism as a preliminary assumption in order to justify his single presumably undeniable axiom, "I think, therefore I am." As did Pascal to justify his famous wager, "If we can't be sure, we should opt for Christian belief simply to avoid eternal hellfire whether or not Christianity is true." As did Berkeley to reject the material universe in favor of God and Lockean perception. As did Kant to discount the noumena as that portion of the material universe inaccessible to human insight as opposed to transcendent idea shared with God. As did Hegel to concede antithesis preliminary to the transcendent principle of synthesis. As did Kierkegaard to challenge one's faith in order to purify and intensify it even further. As did Wittgenstein to challenge the certainty of empirical knowledge as opposed to his own private and unpublished certitude in religion's final apodictic superiority.

In effect, the grand dialectic between belief and disbelief has advanced since the middle ages into two versions of disbelief, first Pyrrhonian skepticism (later identified as fideism) preliminary to renewed Christian faith, and the other Academic, preliminary to empirical investigation identified as science. As explained by Pringle-Pattison, this dialectic assigns belief an initial role and doubt (or skepticism) a more advanced status. And just as this priority occurs in individual consciousness, it determines the sequence between belief and disbelief on a collective historic scale:

In the history of philosophy affirmation precedes negation; dogmatism goes before scepticism. And this must be so, because the dogmatic systems are, as it were, the food of scepticism. Accordingly, we find that sceptical thought did not make its appearance till a succession of mutually inconsistent theories as to the nature of the real had suggested the possibility that they might all alike be false.[iii]

As I have already indicated, the dialectic history between belief and disbelief may be traced back to ancient Athens, which stood alone as the birthplace of skepticism. Nowhere else among ancient societies; not in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Israel--was skepticism both practiced and tolerated as a secular philosophy that challenged received opinion, especially pertaining to religion. Nowhere else, therefore, could this dialectic have dominated philosophical discourse. Granted, Hindu and Buddhist doctrine conceded disbelief, but with sufficient obfuscation to liberate worshippers from the task of exercising it. Indian philosophers, for example, designated all temporal experience as a lie, but only to justify their pursuit of spiritual alternatives not to be doubted. It may also be granted that the Jewish heretic Hiwi as well as such pre-Islamic figures as Ibn al-Rawandi and al-Warraq challenged the existence of God, but their influence was utterly nullified by the orthodoxies that followed in their respective societies. It may even be granted, as argued by Paul Radin in Primitive Man as Philosopher, that other societies might have included individuals who asked whether the gods were tricky or hostile, or whether they really cared, but there is no published evidence to document whether such individuals might have doubted the existence of these gods. If such individuals existed, they did not write about it, and what they thought was not written about by others.

Let me repeat for emphasis: Greek skeptics during the Age of Pericles--Democritus, Protagoras, Socrates, etc.--were the first documented individuals to have systematically pursued the question whether the god(s) exist, whether mankind knows enough or can ever know enough to be able to tell if they do, whether one should even bother trying, and whether religious answers have any value whatsoever as the source of truth. Later Greek philosophers such as Pyrrho, Arcesilaus, and Carneades refined and consolidated skeptical doctrine as summarized by Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Dionysius Laertius, whose works survived to be studied and used during the Renaissance to resurrect both secular philosophy and the scientific method. Greek philosophy thus paved the way for the subsequent advancement of both skepticism and its foundationalist rejection in western civilization, and this extraordinary contribution deserves to be more fully appreciated.

I further want to argue here that for all practical purposes our Eurocentric tradition's skeptical heritage is likewise unique, that the capacity for skepticism acquired from ancient Greece is the sine qua non that differentiates our intellectual background from all others, and that it may be traced step by step, with a brief interlude promoted by such Arab philosophers as Averroes, from early Greek philosophers to their modern European descendents inclusive of Montaigne, Gassendi, Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty. I also want to demonstrate that almost all major intellectual achievements in this tradition have either directly or indirectly resulted from a sustained dialectic between skeptics and the most effective defenders of belief, the latter having been described as dogmatists by the ancient skeptics, but more recently as realists and foundationalists. These dogmatists, confident of a self-evident objective reality congruent with orthodox opinion have included theologians, metaphysicians, teachers, politicians, journalists, cracker barrel philosophers, and most of the poets. As skeptics have kept advancing new arguments to challenge their assumptions, these soldiers of faith have kept devising new and more sophisticated defenses of orthodox belief--defenses that might never have been conceived except for the challenge posed by the skeptics. Likewise, of course, their theoretical innovations in defense of belief obliged further modifications in skepticism, necessitating even further innovations on both sides. Like the offensive and defensive technologies of warfare (as well as chess and the game of football), the dialectic between belief and disbelief has accordingly advanced from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each side having gained in intellectual sufficiency from its conflict with the other.

Quite the contrary, the dominant force of Eurocentric tradition has been the dialectic standoff between belief and disbelief, with everything of interest to Eliot derivative of the effort to defend belief--Christianity included--from the demands of skepticism. This is something entirely different, since it demotes Christianity to its proper status as the most important foundationalist response to skepticism. That Christianity has played a very major role cannot be denied, but it has been essentially reactive in the overall dialectic whose primary intellectual achievement on balance must in the final analysis be assigned to the proponents of skepticism. The skeptic may reply to Eliot's assertion that Voltaire and Nietzsche were only possible in a Christian culture by maintaining the obverse, and truer, insights, (a) that skepticism preceded Christianity in the history of western civilization by at least four hundred years, as did the entirety of Greek philosophy inclusive of the Age of Pericles; (b) that only a skeptical tradition as tenacious as ours, stretching from Protagoras to Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Russell could have produced Christianity; and (c) that it took a religious belief system as forceful as Christianity to give orthodox belief any kind of a chance against the thrust of skepticism over this period of time. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, Christianity has played a major role in the dialectic I am proposing, so it seems appropriate to use the attitude toward Christianity and religious belief in general as the acid test to differentiate hard-core skeptics from their adversaries.

What complicates the issue is that skepticism itself has become the major battlefield between belief and disbelief, with some skeptics having used their doubts to confirm their earlier beliefs and with others having used their doubts to initiate the pursuit of new and presumably superior beliefs. These two essentially antithetical categories thus replicate the dialectic between belief and skepticism in a contest seemingly limited to skepticism alone, with one faction (Pyrrhonian) having emphasized the inevitability of uncertainty to justify the acceptance of orthodox belief, as opposed to the other faction (Academic), which has acknowledged this inevitability, but only to insist upon probing empirical data as accurately as possible in order to determine the probable truth on a tentative hypothetical basis. The division between these two versions of skepticism first occurred at the time of Plato, and it has diffused and complicated the impact of skepticism ever since. The so-called Pyrrhonian version advanced by Pyrrho, Aenisidemus, Sextus Empiricus, Erasmus, Charron, Pascal,Berkeley, Kierkegaard, William James, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty has at least tacitly granted belief--and, more specifically, religious faith--its "truth" value based on the expedient premise that the absolute truth is ultimately inaccessible, so we might just as well achieve quietude (ataraxia) by accommodating social custom and orthodox belief. Often enough the tacit support of belief has been the primary purpose of this approach, as was certainly the case with the fideism promoted during the Renaissance by such figures as Pico della Mirandola and Pascal. The primary assumption of fideists was that nothing was certain in the universe, so peace of mind (again, ataraxia) was only possible through orthodox faith.

In contrast, the Academic version of skepticism advanced by Arcesilaus and Carneades (described as such because Arcesilaus had inherited the leadership of Plato's Academy) emphasized epoche as a suspension of judgment (inclusive of belief) in order to establish the most accurate truth strictly on the basis of probability and common sense. Arcesilaus seems to have borrowed the notion of epoche from Pyrrho to provide the keystone of Academic skepticism. He also emphasized the reasonable (eulogon) as the final criterion in ascertaining the truth, whereas Carneades added the consideration of probability with levels extending from simple to tested and irreversible, the latter two apparently necessitating empirical investigation. Also important, Strato, the second head of the Lyceum following Aristotle--and a friend of Arcesilaus--had proposed the so-called Stratonician Presumption that limited the truth to empirical data independent of metaphysical speculation. During the most recent four centuries these simple principles were also important to such figures as Bacon, Gassendi, Bayle, Voltaire, d'Holbach, Hume, Nietzsche, Mill, Huxley, Russell, Dewey, Carnap, Ayer, and Quine, all of whom rejected unexamined belief in favor of making the best possible effort to ascertain the relative probability of truths as established by empirical methodology. The only surviving texts explaining the principles of Academic skepticism are Cicero's two dialogues, De Natura Deorum and Academica, and certain portions of Sextus Empiricus's works. Henceforth I shall be capitalizing the word Academic to refer to any sceptical theory that emphasizes scientific empiricism and can accordingly be linked with the empirical tradition that extends back to the New Academy.[vii]

Which came first, the Pyrrhonian or Academic version of skepticism? Pyrrho preceded Arcesilaus, but Protagoras, obviously a forbear of the Academic approach, preceded Pyrrho. What seems certain is that the Pyrrhonian approach declined very rapidly in the third century, B.C., but was revived by Aenesidemus at about the time of Christ and survived the Academic approach into the fourth century, A.D. The Pyrrhonian approach was revived before the Academic approach during the renaissance, but empiricism and materlialist philosophy traceable to the Academic approach have gained momentum over the most recent four centuries, and it is only in the twentieth century that Pyrrhonism seems to be on the brink of a major comeback. It may be argued based on a distinction proposed by Hume that the Academic version of skepticism has been mostly "antecedent" in the sense that it uses doubt to initiate the necessary search behavior to establish probable truths through empirical investigation. In contrast, the Pyrrhonian version is "consequent" in the sense that seemingly inexplicable paradoxes such as those recounted by Sextus Empiricus (that a stick thrust in the water seems bent, etc.) can be used to justify the rejection of all truths on a final basis.[viii] The Academic version presumably induces anxiety by adducing contradictions that cannot be resolved, whereas the Pyrrhonian version encourages a final peace of mind (ataraxia) through the paradoxical certainty that all is uncertainty, thus guaranteeing that one's expedient acceptance of conventional wisdom--whatever its presumed certainty--is perfectly acceptable under the circumstances.

Academic skeptics seem to have been fully as concerned as the Pyrrhonians with vulnerability of experience to error, and the Pyrrhonians were no less prone than the Academics to draw their own conclusions based on their skepticism, in their case the advisability of accepting received orthodoxy as a comfortable "fit" no less vulnerable to doubt than any other belief system. If all belief may be challenged on skeptical grounds, the Pyrrhonians suggest, why not go with the crowd, or with one's irrational inclinations, letting need and social acceptance take precedence over impossible standards of certainty? But this latitudinarian choice is no more "final" than the sustained pursuit of empirical probability, whether or not it falls short of the absolute truth. Both the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism thus possess antecedent and consequent features, each beginning with doubt and concluding with a particular strategy for coping with this doubt.

Of course significant differences may be found among the figures I have clustered together in either of these two complementary rosters--for example between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein as Pyrrhonists and between Nietzsche and Russell as empirical (or Academic) skeptics. However, their similarities outweigh their differences relative to the basic choice at stake between belief and skepticism. This may be seen in their respective attitudes toward religion, Kierkegaard having taken skeptical doubt to its extreme as an exercise in Christian genuflection, as opposed to Wittgenstein, whose mature speculation about language excluded the topic of religion except in having left enough space for the pursuit of Christianity. What Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein nevertheless shared was their effort to justify their Christian belief. Likewise, Nietzsche extended evolutionary doctrine to philosophical theory in order to challenge the western tradition's entire history of orthodox belief epitomized by religion, as opposed to Russell, who paid little more than lip service to uncertainty in the essentially dogmatic empirical philosophy he advocated, but who was no less hostile toward religion. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche may be compared as having been more or less contemporary existentialists, and Russell and Wittgenstein as having been personal friends for at least a few years with similar approaches to the study of language. However, their respective theoretical differences pertaining to religion put them in essentially different camps, Kierkegaard aligned with Wittgenstein, not Nietzsche, and Nietzsche aligned with Russell, not Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein. This basic watershed extends to include all the rest of the figures listed above, Descartes aligned with Pico della Mirandola rather than Bacon, Hume aligned with d'Holbach rather than Berkeley, and Schopenhauer aligned with Mill rather than Kant and Hegel. In each instance, no matter how sophisticated the argument, the primary choice between the skeptical defense of Christian belief on one hand, and its skeptical rejection on the other almost inevitably establishes the category to which the philosopher belongs.

One must emphasize that both Pyrrhonists and empirical skeptics have agreed that the absolute truth is very probably beyond the capacity of human intelligence to determine. The principium divisionis that separates the two camps is, as I have already indicated, that the Pyrrhonists have either tolerated or encouraged the blind acceptance of belief because of our unavoidable ignorance of the final truth, while the Academics have chosen to cultivate empirical methods to estimate as well as possible the relative probability of competitive truths. Pyrrhonists have argued that skeptical doubt justifies the pursuit of quietude through an acceptance of unexamined belief, while the Academics have favored a laborious if only partially successful pursuit of systematic observation wherever it leads us. Pyrrhonian skepticism has advanced the cause of Christianity as an increasingly sophisticated belief system, while Academic skepticism has been the midwife of both secular philosophy and the scientific method, neither of which has been cultivated to any appreciable extent outside the western tradition. This simple difference has borne monumental consequences in the history of western philosophy.

There should be no doubt that the combined influence of Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism has totally imbued itself in the intellectual history of western civilization. Everything we know and think we know is directly or indirectly linked to the effort either to use or to cope with skepticism. Kant's metaphysics, Dostoevsky's fiction of Christian redemption, Jung's theory of archetypes, and even Eliot's poetry of kaleidoscopic Christian despair were only possible in a climate of skepticism. Ultimately, it was skepticism that abolished slavery, imposed universal sufferage, and sparked the feminist movement despite Biblical pronouncements to the contrary. This extraordinary success of scepticism at the expense of received tradition may be suggested by comparisons with non-western societies still almost entirely devoid of skepticism. Even our fads in art, music, architecture, and popular culture may be traced to skepticism through their pursuit of the new to supplant the old. For it has been the struggle to cope with skepticism --to absorb or deny it, or to find some kind of an intermediate compromise--that has given us the ideas, innovations and architectonic accomplishments of our so-called great tradition. Some of western civilization's geniuses have built to deny skepticism, others to deny that denial is necessary. All have tried to deal with its implications one way or another.

Additional factors might have been important in the advancement of Eurocentric civilization, but I would conjecture that most, if not all, of these have either directly or indirectly derived from skepticism. An orthodox Marxist theory of our cultural heritage, for example, emphasizes the emergence of a democratic tradition in mercantile societies that began in Athens and then spread to Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and modern European nations--the same societies as those in which skepticism occurred. This coincidence is striking: wherever capitalism and democracy have flourished, so too has skepticism. What might have been the connection? One may speculate as a Marxist that the rejection of aristocratic hegemony encouraged the systematic cultivation of disbelief in its culture and institutions. Then again, the capacity for disbelief--necessarily entailing both courage and intelligence--could only have facilitated the rejection of the ideological orthodoxy supportive of aristocratic hegemony. So which came first? What can be suggested at least on a tentative basis is that in the struggle between two classes, oppressors and the oppressed, the tools of skepticism have always played a major role--as much a cause as an effect--in sorting out progressive and retrogressive belief systems as alternative versions of the truth. Also important in the history of western civilization, logic served the goals of skepticism by dispensing with false propositions starting with Aristotle's principles of deduction, followed by Bacon and Descartes's rules for the direction of the mind during the seventeenth century, Mill, Russell, and Dewey's versions of inductive logic coming into the twentieth century, and finally the procedures of statistical verification emphasized since early in the twentieth century to determine probability at levels of accuracy never anticipated by Carneades and Cicero. Other variables might also be isolated that helped to define the Eurocentric tradition, but I am confident that these too can be either directly or indirectly linked to skepticism as an intellectual predisposition. The point I am trying to make here is that skepticism's role in Eurocentric history has been pervasive, however obscure its impact might first seem--whether pertaining to economics, logic, or anything else. In contrast, its role for most non-western societies remains fragmentary and essentially foreign--the product of incomplete and piecemeal cultural diffusion.

I would go so far as to argue that the core of western history--its history that matters--is rooted in the evolution of skepticism as a more or less linear progressive movement that may be traced to the simple choice between belief and doubt, between orthodox acceptance and its skeptical rejection. The continuing struggle between these alternatives has generated a cumulative forward progression with a cutting edge to be discerned in the most compelling arguments of its best authors on both sides of the issue at any particular stage in its history. Just as the marvelous harmonic risks of Chopin's music would have been inconceivable preceding Haydn and Beethoven, Aquinas's metaphysics would have been inconceivable preceding Averroes's interpretation of Aristotle, and Kant's metaphysics would have been inconceivable preceding Decartes and Hume; and in literature (no less a battlefield between belief and skepticism) the rural nostalgia of Wordsworth's poetry would have been inconceivable preceding Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Hume, or Shaftesbury and Hartley. Goethe acknowledged the historic importance of skepticism when he declared, "The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance is the conflict of skepticism with faith."[ix] Goethe made it plain that he himself preferred faith, or belief, but this was necessarily his choice as a poet, as, in fact, it has been the choice of the overwhelming majority of the public, a choice so compelling that the role of skepticism has been almost entirely banished from polite discourse among the partially educated public. The tiniest minority of intellectuals actively pursue skepticism in its purest distillation, but these individuals have catalyzed its benefits for society as a whole and have thereby made their contribution to the cumulative advancement of civilization.

Today, many scholars and intellectuals with multicultural pretensions neglect or actively challenge our skeptical tradition by encouraging the uncritical appreciation of other societies still almost entirely devoid of the stimulus provided by skepticism. "We hold a peculiar assortment of beliefs," the argument goes, "these other societies likewise hold their own peculiar assortment of beliefs. Aren't we therefore--all things considered--basically the same?" But we're not, and the difference should be obvious, since our own beliefs--Eurocentric to the core--necessarily fly in the teeth of skepticism that reduces belief to absurdity unless it is buttressed by philosophical distinctions that rationalize our choice well enough to give it adequate credibility. And this we do, taking pains to reinforce our arguments as well as possible with the authoritative expertise of such figures as St. Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and myriad others for the purpose of finding new grounds to confirm old beliefs. Just as important as skepticism has been the manner of coping with it, and here western belief systems substantially differ from those of societies still lacking sufficient critical mass in skepticism for anybody to be able to question the status quo, much less to defend it on a truly sophisticated basis.

It is to be conceded that skepticism is now making inroads throughout the entire world, and to such an extent that the middle-class American citizen who habitually divides his Sundays between church and televised spectator sports might indeed benefit as much as anybody from the technological byproducts of our skeptical tradition, but without truly participating in this tradition as much as a Japanese or Nigerian engineer who plays chess, keeps track of the world press, and reads Plato, Kierkegaard, or Kurt Vonnegut. Nevertheless, skepticism is only beginning to gather critical mass in these essentially pre-skeptical societies which still comprise the overwhelming majority of our world's population. Custom, superstition and elaborate rituals of politeness continue to thwart intellectual honesty with a sufficient dose to catalyze skepticism. Devoid of the challenge of skepticism, non-western religion continues to lack a theology, much less a metaphysics. Raw faith still metastasizes, and a fundamental sameness predominates. Knowledge consists of rote memory without really asking or answering, and as a result there is be much less to be said. One may conjecture that without skepticism our modern Eurocentric civilization would be pretty much the same, for it would never have emerged from the Dark and Middle Ages and would be no more advanced than the many societies where economic deprivation is, if anything, exceeded by intellectual poverty, and with a determinate relationship that functions in both directions, intellectual stultification both the cause and effect of economic stagnation. These are the societies in which Trotsky's concept of combined and uneven development finds its nightmarish enactment in the contradictory mixture of technology derivative of skepticism (immunology, weaponry, cargo planes to supply emergency food, etc.) and a pre-skeptical absence of social and cultural benefits (genuine democracy, for example) that precludes outstanding intellectual achievement except as a cry of victimization.

How, then, does belief persist today as an antidote to skepticism among the educated classes of Eurocentric societies? One answer is the reliance on sanctioned fictions, for example through the experience of literature. As already indicated, our "high" literature in western civilization has played an important role as an instrument of public gratification by absorbing and denying the impact of skepticism at the most sophisticated levels. Whereas the skeptical methodology explained by both Cicero and Sextus Empiricus emphasized epoche as a suspension of assent, literary experience as explained by Coleridge emphasizes a "suspension of disbelief," exactly the opposite mental disposition. And, indeed, most of our literature resembles and somewhat extends the benefits of religion by its resourceful manipulation of fantasy to exaggerate the experience of belief, though more often than not as a quick fix that need not survive the duration of the reading experience.[x] The fiction we enjoy also produces satisfaction by combatting skepticism, for example when it links villainy with skepticism to justify its rejection and when it evokes both comic relief through the depiction of skeptical absurdity (Falstaff, Touchstone, etc.), and tragic catharsis through the depiction of flawed skeptics prone to introspective self-flagellation. Beginning with Sophocles, this essentially defensive response to skepticism has suffused our literary tradition, and the most remarkable achievements in this tradition--for example Shakespeare's Hamlet, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness--bring skepticism into play at almost every level of experience preliminary to its rejection on the most tentative basis. Granted, today's postmodernist fiction might seem an exception, since it voices skepticism without penalizing it, but this particular literary risk serves only to prove the rule, since it deprives itself of a popular audience, which continues to depend on literature--like spectator sports--as a quickly accessible and dispensable pseudo-belief system. Thus the current success of TV and Hollywood movies, whose receipts totally dwarf the income of our serious authors beholden to skepticism.

But of course the most effective defense of belief remains the Pyrrhonian tactic of turning skepticism against itself. This may be done, for example, by answering the question, "How can we be certain our beliefs are true?" with its orthodox negative version, "But how can we be any more certain our beliefs are false?" And then by asking the still broader, more invidious question, "So why, then, should we ask any questions whatsoever?" This stoic epistemology is both remarkably profound and readily accessible to the average mind--thus a wonderful instrument for dispensing with issues by the average mind. It is possible to avoid all questions whatsoever on the assumption that this particular sequence of questions can inevitably be asked, so it need not be brought into debate. Many today have fallen into this particular strategy. The justification of the unexamined life defensible on these grounds was first used by Pyrrho to reject all philosophical inquiry whatsoever, and it cropped up again when sixteenth and seventeenth century "fideists," most notably Piero della Francesca, challenged excessive inquiry that might undermine the authority of established institutions. The fideists's ultimate purpose was to demonstrate the need for sheer belief--unadulterated faith in God as guided by church doctrine.

In similar fashion, if with different complications, the so-called neopragmatists and poststructuralists who emerged during the Reagan decade have stretched skepticism even further to make room for belief, this time by having promoted the assumption that no "foundationalist" belief system--science included--takes precedence over any other. There is no such thing as a capital-T truth, Derrida, Rorty, Fish and their many epigones argue, so all knowledge, all belief, must be provisional. This absolute commitment to skeptical relativism might seem to challenge any faith or belief system whatsoever, but its primary target, whether acknowledged or not, has been the presumably totalitarian certitude of scientific empiricism emphasized by the empirical skepticism of such philosophers as Russell and Carnap, and its predictable attendant effect, tolerated if not acknowledged, has been to encourage renewed dedication to orthodox religious belief as well as the current proliferation of bizarre and potentially dangerous fads, creeds, and good causes. For if all discourse is expressive of belief and no belief is more credible than any other, one may take faith in whatever belief one chooses, confident of its justification by the most advanced tenets of philosophy. If the truth can no longer be ascertained, neither can error, falsehood, or the lie. Anything goes--let diversity prevail. As in fact it does. One can only hope that the current trend is nothing more than a brief interlude in the last four centuries primarily dominated by Academic skepticism and that it does not auger a new "dark" ages comparable to the twelve centuries of Christian orthodoxy anticipated, if not initiated, by the Pyrrhonian speculation of Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus.

The absence of skepticism outside the Eurocentric tradition may be documented by the dearth of texts antagonistic to orthodox belief, particularly the worship of god(s). We have no evidence of skepticism systematically practiced for this purpose in any society preceding ancient Greece, and its pursuit subsequent to ancient Greece can usually be traced to the Greek influence. Indian mysticism might seem to pose an exception to this rule, for example with the pronouncement quoted by Schopenhauer.

The "veil of deception" was used here to suggest the existence of spiritual truths that transcend perception, so something akin to Pyrrhonism was intended, to believe in these truths despite the physical evidence that might suggest otherwise. However, the validity of these truths was not called into question, merely the usefulness of empirical perception in confirming their validity, as opposed to Pyrrhonism's extension of the principle of uncertainty to these truths as well. Dogma thus receded a level from the realm of perception, and individuals were expected to negotiate this process of abstraction without jeopardizing their belief. Likewise, the skeptical aspect of the antirationalist doctrine of Muslim and Jewish authors such as Al Ghazali and Jehudah Ha-Levi during the Middle Ages might seem to have been achieved independent of western tradition, but they may be almost certainly attributed to cultural diffusion, suggesting the breadth of Hellenic influence as well as the extent to which skeptical theory could be revised, indeed perverted, by others outside the Eurocentric tradition. This seems to have been the case, for example, when Al Ghazali proposed in The Collapse of Philosophy that there is no need for philosophical speculation independent of revelation, since all truth is in the Koran. Such an approach might seem duly skeptical of ideas external to one's faith, but the use of skepticism to reject these ideas because of one's absolute dedication to one's faith smacks of fanaticism rather than skepticism. It was supposedly this use of logic, as told by Abulfaragius, that led to Omar's earlier destruction of the library of Alexandria in 640 A.D.--what was left of it subsequent to its destruction by the Christian bishop, Theophilus, in 389 A.D.

Elsewhere in the world--for example in Persia, China, Africa, and the Americas--there seems to be no evidence whatsoever of systematic skeptical philosophy. Paul Radin claims to have observed skepticism in primitive societies, but his research reveals not the rejection of their existence, but a fear of the gods and an uncertainty whether they are friendly and can be trusted. This more radical version of disbelief--tantamount to atheism or agnosticism--is entirely different from fearing and despising the motives of the gods, and Radin cites no evidence of its practice in native societies.[xii] Have individuals in non-western countries held skeptical views but kept them to themselves, or confided them in private conversations with others with whom they felt safe to do so, as some anthropologists have argued?[xiii] Very probably they have, but that such individuals--perhaps millions of them--might have harbored skeptical views without having ventured to put them on record would indicate the extent to which skepticism has been discouraged, if not punished, in those societies in which belief tantamount to raw credulousness predominated. As a general rule, it may be stated that the great majority of the world's population has taken faith in exactly what has been obliged by custom and cultural tradition, and that this universal homage to shared dogma has been enforced by a righteous priesthood literally bestowed with the power of life and death. More often than not, to verbalize or otherwise manifest doubt was literally to jeopardize one's existence. The Spanish Inquisition illustrated this tyranny of orthodox belief in Europe, but comparable oppression has occurred throughout the rest of the world, as would be indicated by the total lack of documented skepticism. It was the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece who found the concepts and vocabulary to challenge the truth value of belief, and to sustain and perfect this challenge both in public dialogue and in written texts, and this accomplishment turns out to have played a major role--I would argue the primary role--in the birth and advancement of modern civilization.

In his spirited defense of western civilization, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Ernest Gellner ascribes to our Eurocentric cultural history a unique "cognitive style" and argues that nobody knows just how and why it works.[xiv] The answer, simply enough, I would argue, is that it entails a persistent and organized commitment to critical inquiry which entirely derives from Greek skepticism. As opposed to the emphasis upon custom and tradition that has suffused non-western cultures, western civilization was propelled by skeptical inquiry for seven centuries from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics who held forth up until the fourth century, A.D.; and then, after a twelve-century interlude--the Middle (or "dark") Ages--skeptical inquiry revived during the Renaissance, which was as much as anything a rebirth of skepticism. Pyrrhonian skepticism set the stage for this major achievement, but it was empiricism--the scientific method as fostered by Academic skepticism--that flourished from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and that has brought major changes in every aspect of our lives, especially our willingness both as individuals and as members of society to judge the relative merits of facts, stories, and general information based on a healthy balance between doubt and belief. That's the difference Gellner was looking for!

The first significant contribution to the skeptical tradition seems to have been Heraclitus's theory that the world is in total flux--such continuous motion that the truth can never be fully accepted at its face value. Democritus found comparable difficulties with an atomistic composition of the world too small to be discerned by our naked senses. Cratylus extended this principle of unavoidable ignorance to all acts of communication; Xenophanes generalized that there is no sure way to differentiate true knowledge from the false; and Gorgias argued that nothing exists, that if it did it would be unknowable, and if it were knowable, it could not be communicated. Even more nihilistic in his skepticism, Metrodorus of Chios argued, "I deny that we know whether we know something or know nothing, and even that we know the mere fact that we do not know (or do know), or know at all whether something exists or nothing exists."[xv] The thriving school of Sophists in Athens--led by Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Hippias, Isocrates, Critias, and others--likewise emphasized human ignorance as the most fundamental truth of all.[xvi] Rhetorical persuasiveness therefore took precedence over knowledge, theory, or logic, and apparently epistemological skepticism soon degenerated into moral skepticism as well.

Protagoras, the first and most important of the Sophists, insisted that mankind is the measure of all things in the sense that everything we perceive and judge in the world about us is necessarily the projection of our own minds. Protagoras made this point in the first sentence of his book On Truth--one of the only two passages of his entire body of works that survive today. The sentence deserves to be quoted in its entirety, since it adds a caveat that imposes an additional and potentially awsome responsibility upon the skeptical philosopher: "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not" [italics added].[xvii] There is nothing we know that exists in and of itself, so we are burdened with the task of isolating the are's from the are not's among what we think we know. But how can we measure are not's unless they exist at least as the product of wrong thinking? The primary role of skeptics is therefore to explore with thoroughness and effectively challenge "things that are not"--false theories and beliefs without foundation--in order to demonstrate their lack of existence--i.e., their falsehood. This obligation may obviously be applied to scientific methodology in the testing of hypotheses to determine their accuracy, but it also applies to any belief or assumption relevant both religious and political issues and to human experience on a more casual basis.

Protagoras also distinguished between physis (freedom) and nomos (traditional usage), and he anticipated Locke by arguing that the soul is nothing apart from its perceptions.[xviii] He likewise proposed a primitive phenomenology based on the assumption that all objective appearances are true at least as appearances and that absolutely nothing exists beyond them. His Antilogic first established dialectics as a methodology for weighing the relative merits and liabilities of any idea, and his final contribution, his infamous treatise On the Gods, challenged the existence of the ancient Greek gods as being very probably among the things that are not. As he explained in his only other passage to have survived, "As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life."[xix] Here what seems to have been agnostic evasiveness with a touch of irony anticipated twentieth-century logical positivists who rejected religion as a "pseudo-question" that can neither be proven nor refuted, and can therefore be ignored. Because of his treatise, all of Protagoras's writings were gathered and burned, and Protagoras fled from Athens to avoid being forced to drink hemlock. He was martyred--some would argue punished by the gods--when the ship taking him to Sicily sank during a storm, apparently killing all aboard. Everything Protagoras wrote has thus been lost except the two sentences quoted above, but his influence has been indelible.

The first documented reaction to skepticism was strictly literary, the product of the stage. Aristophanes's comedy repeatedly scapegoated Socrates for his role as a sophist, while Greek tragedy offered a subtler critique that must nevertheless have been obvious to contemporary Athenian audiences. Sophocles, for example, very likely used Oedipus Rex to depict Pericles as the victim of skepticism. Like Oedipus, Pericles was prophesied to be a "pollution" who would bring the downfall of his lands, endured the plague (indeed, died of it), and was aligned with a woman capable of impiety--the courtesan Aspasia, who, like Protagoras, was indicted for doubting the existence of the gods. Indeed, Oedipus himself resembled Protagoras as well as Pericles in the crucial third scene of the play in which he ignored the desperate admonition of Jocasta to remain in ignorance of his destiny and instead declared, "No-one could stop me from finding out the truth." Suddenly the truth was even more important than his acceptance by the gods. Earlier, he and Jocasta shared the same goal of proving oracles wrong, but Oedipus alone took the final step of seeking out alternative truths in secular answers from the testimony of knowledgeable witnesses. Trapped by his circumstances, Oedipus rejected the authority of the Greek gods for an alternative deification, Tyche (or luck), later personified as the goddess Fortuna, who may be understood at a more abstract level as having represented raw chance, the what-really-happened that was best understood through the quest for probability independent of religious belief. But of course all the prophecies came true, the power of the gods was confirmed, and Oedipus was brought to ruin by his skepticism. Similarly, in Antigone Creon was destroyed because he rejected the importance of social custom (the burial of the dead) imposed by the edict of the gods; and in The Bacchae Pentheus was destroyed because he refused to accept the existence of a particular god, Dionysus, whose uncanny resemblance to Christ as a sacrificial deity linked with the spring fertility ritual has been noted by mythologists since Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough was first published in 1890. As a general principle, it seems the tragic flaw (hamartia, or, more specifically, hubris) of the protagonists of Greek tragedy came of their effort to usurp both the power and knowledge of the gods, and this put them in the same category as the pre-Socratic skeptical philosophers. This was no accident. Like Protagoras and his friends, these protagonists went the limit in their rejection of the gods, and Greek tragedy punished them for their audacity, much to the delight of contemporary audiences offended by the skepticism of the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Previous to Greek tragedy, literature only spradically described figures who might be considered to have been precursors of the skeptics, and these were very severely punished for their transgressions. The Sumerian king Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu actually killed the nature god, Humbaba, then insulted the powerful goddess Ishtar and killed the Bull of Heaven sent to punish them. For these transgressions against the authority of the gods, Enkidu died and Gilgamesh, like Adam and Eve, was later denied eternal life. As for Humbaba's status as a prehistoric Christ figure, perhaps the earliest nature god sacrificed by man, he first needed to exist, contrary to skeptical doctrine, and of course the other gods and goddesses--Anu, Enlil, Ishtar, etc.--continued to exist after his killing.[xx] In Biblical tradition, Adam and Eve were punished for eating of the tree of knowledge, as opposed to Job, who was rewarded for his enduring unexamined faith. Of all the books in the Bible, only Ecclesiastes offered a consistent skeptical vision of human destiny, but Biblical scholarship indicates it was apparently written late enough to have been influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, and it seems to have been only grudgingly admitted to the Bible's final canon by its editors. Similarly, in the Greek tradition, the Homeric figures of Thersites and Antinous were severely punished for their willingness to reject both aristocratic priority and the authority of the gods, whereas Penelope and Eumaius, Odysseus's swineherd, were generously rewarded for their unexamined faith. As a general principle, to doubt or ignore the power and prophecy of the gods prefigured catastrophe throughout Homer's two epics.

Nowhere, in fact, in pre-tragic ancient literature, with the possible exception of the story of Gilgamesh, was skepticism either explicitly or implicitly identified with figures who might otherwise have been considered virtuous. Greek tragedy was the very first literary genre to grant skepticism at least its status as a flaw--albeit an important life-threatening flaw--of characters who otherwise possessed heroic stature rooted in traditional belief. This significant achievement must be recognized to have resulted from the prevalence of skepticism at the time tragedy flourished in ancient Greece, and the primary value of this achievement seems to have been that it denied skepticism its validity within a literary context acceptable to the public at that time. Skepticism was acknowledged only if it could be confessed and renounced by the very individuals who had succumbed to its temptation.

Perhaps fifteen years younger than Protagoras, Socrates was no less prominent as a sophist who played the role of a skeptic by challenging our knowledge of the external world. He was primarily known for his frequent assertions that he knew nothing except his own ignorance, and that nothing could be known except that he knew nothing.[xxi] However, Socrates was followed by his disciple, Plato, who, like the playwright Sophocles, reacted against skepticism, in his case by using Socrates's dialogues to propose a higher world of ideal forms in which we can once again invest our belief. When Socrates spoke as a skeptic in his Dialogues by challenging orthodox assumptions, we may assume it was Socrates himself who was speaking as faithfully recorded by Plato; however, when Socrates went on to propose an alternative realm of ideal forms, we must question the extent to which Plato put in Socrates's mouth his own theory of the universe. Plato may therefore be treated as having been a "dogmatist," as opposed to a skeptic, for he was the first major philosopher to have reacted against skepticism, in his instance by using Socrates to answer his own skeptical questions with a theory of transcendent reality presumably impervious to skeptical doubts--a "higher" truth of ideal forms.[xxii] Thus the perversity of Alfred North Whitehead's remark that the entirety of western civilization has been a series of footnotes to Plato.[xxiii] Quite the contrary, Plato was--after Greek tragedy--the first major footnote to the history of skepticism as the primary catalyst of western civilization. And of course the second (or third) major footnote was Aristotle's no less dogmatic empirical philosophy, which lay the foundation for science by seeking out ideal forms imbedded as categories in the material universe inclusive of society, literature, and the dynamics of human behavior. The fourth such footnote would have been Plotinus's theory of Neoplatonism, and the fifth the philosophy of Augustine, Aquinas, and their scholastic brethren.

What modern historians tend to overlook is that the skepticism of the sophists survived Greek tragedy, Plato and Aristotle. Rudiments of skeptical theory may be found in the philosophy of the Stoics, Cynics, and Megarians. Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 B.C.), the first of the Greek philosophers specifically identified as a skeptic, seems to have accompanied Alexander the Great into India, where he learned to pursue quietude (ataraxia), mental imperturbability (ataraxia), and detachment from worldly matters (apragmosyne)--principles he later merged with Athenian philosophy to be able to propose skepticism as a defense of stoic morality totally free of knowledge.[xxiv] Paradoxocally, he argued that skepticism guarantees freedom from anxiety, since it permits one to disregard contradictory theoretical assumptions. All things are false, Pyrrho claimed, since there is no truth that cannot be refuted by other truths, so their equal probability lets us abandon the fruitless pursuit of answers. As explained by Aristocles in summarizing the philosophy of Timon, Pyrrho's single major disciple:

For some individuals this rejection of potentially unpleasant ideas might provoke anxiety and a compensatory pursuit of alternative "truths" that justify their rejection of the malignant ideas they cannot altogether forget, but for the true Pyrrhonian philosopher the mystic confidence that the truth is totally unobtainable guarantees quietude. According to Diogenes Laertius, this extreme epistemological skepticism also necessarily implies an ethical skepticism as well: "He [Pyrrho] denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. . . . Universally, there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action."[xxvi] Here custom and convention may be understood to refer to received orthodox belief, whatever belief system is in vogue at the time where one lives (for example, conservatism among today's mainstreet businessmen, and liberalism among today's English and anthropology professors). Though Pyrrho must be understood to have doubted the truth value of custom and convention, his emphasis upon quietude obviously encouraged finding an acceptable compromise with their universal pursuit. Pyrrho's arguments were later codified by Aenisidemus (c. 90-80 B.C.) and provided the basis for Sextus Empiricus's summary of skeptical theory (c. 200 A.D.) which survives today.

Far more influential in ancient times, the so-called New Academy succeeded Plato's Academy under the sway of major skeptical philosophers such as Arcesilaus (316-241 B.C.), Carneades (214-129 B.C.), and Clitomachus (ca. 129 B.C.). Carneades was particularly famous as a consummate polemicist willing and eager to debate the merits of any issue, particularly religious disbelief. On a visit to Rome, Carneades gave a public lecture in which he argued that the perpetrators of injustice suffer more than their victims, but the following day he gave another lecture that just as persuasively argued the opposite case. His purpose, it turned out, was to demonstrate the uncertainty of truth through a dialectic examination of alternative perspectives. Shocked by his cynicism, Cato the elder imposed his expulsion from Rome in order to prevent his further contaminating the morals of its youth. Carneades' contribution to philosophy, like that of Socrates, was primarily oral, and nothing survives that was written by him. However, his disciple, Clitomachus, was a prolific author, and though all of his publications were lost during the Middle Ages, they could be used by Cicero in De Natura Deorum and Academica, both of which have survived, and by Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius in texts which have also survived.[xxvii]

The New Academy's version of skepticism did not emphasize the value of quietude, as had Pyrrho's version of skepticism, but instead, beginning with Arcesilaus, featured an epistemology based on the suspension of assent (epoche) when weighing the merits of alternative theories to help explain any single or clustered "presentation of experience" (fantasia in Greek, visum in Latin--better translated, depending on its context, as perception, phenomenon or perceived data). Carneades maintained that there is no totally reliable criterion (or objective standard of confirmation) to determine the truth, since each and every presentation (i.e., perception) manifests both what it perceives and its own intrinsic limitations as an act of perception:

Truths might exist, Carneades seems to have implied, but the subjective limitations of our perceptual capacity unavoidably prevent their recognition except as a matter of probability. The truth of any particular question is nothing more than its probable truth, for we lack the means to establish the finality of any of our ideas. Carneades therefore agreed with Protagoras that each and every presumed truth needs to be debated on both sides (in utramque partem) in order to determine its relative probability (Pithanon). All knowledge, Carneades proposed, can be divided into two categories, the apparently false and the apparently true, and the latter category--limited to credible impressions--may be further subdivided on an incremental basis into (a) the probable in and of itself (b) the probable and uncontradicted, and finally (c) the probable, uncontradicted, and tested--the latter by means of potentially unlimited inquiry typical of scientific methodology.[xxix] Carneades apparently used the terms "uncontradicted" and "irreversible" interchangeably, and by "irreversible" he meant that the data observed by the skeptic is supported by other data that is either directly or indirectly relevant:

A particular observation (for example the sighting of a ghost) cannot be accepted if it contradicts all other observations that might be either directly or indirectly related to it. Once all three of these criteria--of probability, contradiction, and methodological confirmation--are met, "truths" can be accepted on a provisional basis until they are superceded by other, yet more probable truths.

Though Carneades and the rest of the Academic skeptics shared with Pyrrho the conviction that the absolute truth is finally inaccessible, they sought relative truths that could nevertheless be determined on a tentative basis by carefully weighing the merits of alternative arguments. Here they parted company with Pyrrho. Whereas Pyrrho used doubt to advocate the acceptance of established custom, Carneades used doubt to advocate the pursuit of systematic investigation in order to sort out those appearances that were the most likely to be true. This single difference between the approaches of Pyrrho and Carneades established the watershed that has differentiated the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism that have persisted ever since, one of them providing the matrix of later trends in Christian belief, the other providing the matrix of later trends in scientific inquiry. Pyrrho's influence on modern thought was important, but Carneades's seminal contribution to Eurocentric intellectual history was even more important because of his treatment of empiricism as a necessary byproduct of epistemology. Just as Plato had categorized ideal forms and Aristotle the structures he found in nature, Carneades both categorized and refined the investigation of data crucial to the success of empirical inquiry. The bulk of his contribution was relatively small, but as shall be documented in the next chapter his impact upon the later evolution of modern science has been of major significance. For Carneades, every issue was debatable, and all data was seen to be of potential value in establishing the relative probability of the issues under debate. Knowledge predominated rather than social acceptance. The school of skeptics that followed Carneades, often simply described as the Academy, degenerated into sectarian rivalry, but the pivotal role of Carneades remained uncontested.

The confusion about the purpose of ancient skepticism--whether to achieve quietude or to promote scientific methodology--was primarily the responsibility of Aenisidemus, a skeptical philosopher perhaps of the first century, B.C., who started out aligned with the New Academy but then rejected the orthodox skeptical doctrine popular at that time by resurrecting the non-probabilistic (at least pre-probabilistic) version of skepticism first offered by Pyrrho of Elis. Pyrrho's contribution three centuries earlier seems to have been almost entirely obscure at the time, but for Aenisidemus it provided a useful precedent, the leverage he needed both for isolating skepticism from stoic and Epicurean dogma and for isolating the approach to skepticism that interested him from what had become Academic orthodoxy. As with most everybody else in the skeptical tradition, the works of Aenisidemus have been lost, but according to Sextus his main contribution to skepticism was his systematic list of tropes (or modes) to challenge the truth value of all perceptions. This uncompromising format for skeptical inquiry was expanded by later skeptics and finally given textbook status by Sextus Empiricus. However, Aenesidemus also argued the radical majoritarian position that universal experience is necessarily true, inviting the corollary that universal opinion (e.g., a flat earth, God's existence as a bearded patriarch, etc.) is also true.[xxxi] Pyrrho's disciple, Timon, had already denied that his (and Pyrrho's) philosophy had "gone beyond ordinary custom," and Aenisidemus went even further in treating social custom as one particular version of universal experience to be accommodated in order to achieve quietude.[xxxii]

Sextus Empiricus, the last and most influential of the Pyrrhonian skeptics, wrote his monumental treatise on skepticism between the second and early third century, A.D. Sextus brought into his discussion as many perspectives as he could, but his own views were in the tradition of Pyrrho and Aenesidemus rather than the Academic skeptics. This may be seen in his initial definition of skepticism, in which he declared that its aim was the achievement of quietude:

Sextus's theories of perception, verifiability, and phenomena in general extended Carneades's arguments, but he used a fairly tenuous logic to reject systematic empirical inquiry as a useful source of information:

What Sextus overlooked was the use of adequate sampling to establish the relatively probability of universals, much as is done today through the use of statistics. Sextus also advocated the acceptance of conventional belief without challenging its assumptions. This seems plain in Chapter 8 of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, "Has the Sceptic a Doctrinal Rule," in which he summarized his skeptical approach:

He extended this principle to include religion among the customs with which he was willing to conform: ". . . Following the ordinary view, we affirm undogmatically that Gods exist and reverence Gods and ascribe to them forknowledge."[xxxvi] He did not want to disprove the existence of god(s), but to demonstrate that there was no way to prove it:

Without being confronted with the task of proving the existence of god(s), Pyrrhonian skeptics could worship them/Him as a prudent choice in their conduct of their personal lives:

The allusion here to statements with "dogmatic subtlety" and "at the farthest remove from the usage of life" seems obviously intended to refer to the cryptic pronouncements that must have been commonplace even then in the defense of orthodox religion. Let the cabalistic mysteries thrive, Sextus seems to be recommending, for they may be granted their "truth" no less attractive than any other beliefs one might choose to accept. Contextual arguments have been offered to minimize the importance of these passages which respectively attack science and defend religion, but Sextus's intended meaning seems unequivocal, clearly aligning him with Pyrrho, Timon, and Aenesidemus rather than with Carneades and the Academics.[xxxix]

Sextus devoted Chapter 33 of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, "Wherein Scepticism Differs from the Academic Philosophy," to list the basic differences he thought were important between the Pyrrhonian and Academic approaches to skepticism. Significantly, he identified the Academic approach as Academic philosophy, thereby excluding it from his preferred category of skeptical philosophy. Academic skeptics were to be treated as Academics aone, but not as skeptics. Speaking of Plato at the very beginning of the chapter, but with an argument of obvious relevance to the Academic skeptics too, Sextus rejected the importance of probability as an issue important to skepticism:

Sextus also rejected the Academics' willingness to extend the principle of probability to apply to the interpretation of both sense impressions and ethics. In the latter instance he criticized the Academics for supposing, "that it is more probable that what they call good is really good."[xli] Total uncertainty was his aim, even in moral behavior, rather than the tentative acceptance of qualified truths. Sextus likewise criticized the Academic skeptics for arguing on a presumably categorical basis that nothing is certain, as opposed to Pyrrhonians, who could not even accept the certainty of this particular conclusion:

Sextus likewise differentiated between two kinds of belief, the Pyrrhonian version, which means, "not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination," and the alternative version, which means "to assent to a thing of deliberative choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire." Academic skeptics, he argued, commit themselves to the alternative version:

Social adjustment thus took precedence over the often dangerous pursuit of empirical truths typified by the fate of Protagoras, Socrates, Bruno, Spinoza, and many thousands of others who have been martyred for their unpopular views. Apparently the paradox did not occur to Sextus that one's willing acceptance of laws, customs, and natural affections virtually guarantees one's submission to dogma, and that only the determined commitment to probability affords any chance of minimizing its importance.

Perhaps because of Sextus's willingness to ignore this paradox, his works survived the censorship of the Middle Ages, and as a result almost the entire ancient Greek skeptical tradition later came to be linked with his advocacy of the Pyrrhonian approach based on Pyrrho's somewhat modest initial contribution rather than the far more substantial output of the New Academy, which had totally dominated ancient skeptical philosophy for approximately six centuries with little or no reference to Pyrrho's ideas. Nevertheless, the objectives of the Academic approach articulated by Carneades reemerged as the basis for scientific methodology during the renaissance through the continuing influence of Cicero's two books as well as those portions in Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes's works that summarized the Academic contribution.

In retrospect, the Pyrrhonian and Academic skeptical traditions must be understood to have shared certain basic assumptions, but to have differed relative to the final choice that must be made between the acceptance and rejection of unexamined belief. It should therefore be no surprise that they persisted for centuries on almost completely separate tracks, as would be demonstrated by Cicero's two books having contained only one reference by name to Pyrrho and none whatsoever to Aenesidemus, and by the total absence of any reference whatsoever to Cicero in Sextus Empiricus's works.[xlv] Moreover, the difference between the Pyrrhonian and Aacademic versions of skepticism turned out to be of major importance in the philosophical methodologies they respectively encouraged. Both approaches emphatically denied the accessibility of the human mind to absolute truths, but the Pyrrhonian approach promoted the acceptance of this inevitability as justification for orthodox belief, whereas the Academic approach promoted a rigorous empirical investigation to determine as well as possible the truths that seem probable. As it turned out, sixteenth and seventeenth century Catholic theologians adopted the Pyrrhonian version of skepticism when they resorted to "fideism" to justify Christian faith by challenging the validity of pure reason both in secular knowledge and in the Protestant interpretation of the Bible independent of church doctrine. In contrast, the advancement of science during the same period may primarily be traced to the Academic approach. Empirical methodology was necessarily influenced by both Sextus Empiricus and Cicero's reconstructions of ancient skeptical philosophy, but the essential assumptions of the scientific method emerged as being Academic, not Pyrrhonian.

Last but not least was Cicero's accomplishment as an Academic skeptic, for it is still not fully appreciated for having perpetuated the context and texture of ideas typical of Carneades's Academic approach. Sextus merely summarized a relatively small portion of Carneades's works; Cicero breathed life into Carneades and his disciple Clitomachus as debaters in the thick of argument as they made their case in defense of Academic skepticism. In his youth, Cicero studied skepticism in Athens under the direction of Antiochus, a founder of the so-called Old Academy, actually a modernization of the New Academy that combined skepticism with stoicism and Platonism. In line of descent, Antiochus followed Philo, who followed Clitomachus, the disciple of Carneades. Cicero's sympathies remained with the original New Academy dominated by Carneades, and his two major books in skeptical theory, De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods) and Academica (the Academy), were both written in 45 B.C., the year before his murder, as philosophical dialogues that promoted an Academic skepticism based on the writings of Clitomachus.[xlvi] In De Natura Deorum, Cicero surveyed various religious beliefs before launching in Book III into an extended critique of every religious belief that came to his attention. Cicero spoke in the voice of the persona, Cotta, to express the arguments of Clitomachus, and he was sufficiently prudent to insert a pro forma disavowal that "less could befit a philosopher" than atheism (III.44). But with this caveat having been granted, he proceeded to mount a relentless attack on religious belief with ample reference to Carneades in support of his arguments. Cicero left out of his dialogue any effective rejoinder by the other participants, so one comes away from his text with the sense that very few adjustments were needed for Cicero to have also targeted Christianity once it had established itself as a religion just a few decades later. That Judaism was not included in his attack, we may assume, is that he did not know of it or take it seriously enough to mention it.

In Academica, Cicero turned to more philosophical issues, in particular the question of probability (II.32-35, 98-115, etc.), and it was here that he explored in depth the necessity of witholding assent to weigh the merits of alternative theories for explaining any "presentation" of experience. Like both Protagoras and Carneades, he emphasized the importance of "arguing on both sides to draw out and give shape to some result that may be either true or the nearest possible approximation to the truth" (II.7-8--italics added for emphasis). And since the absolute truth was all but impossible to discern, the purpose of philosophers was to refine their approximations as much as possible. "The wise man," Cicero argued, "will make use of whatever apparently probable presentation he encounters, if nothing presents itself that is contrary to that probability" (II.99). Cicero also argued that this wise man "is guided by probability, and wherever this confronts him or is wanting he can answer 'yes' or 'no' accordingly" (II.104). Like Protagoras, Cicero treated the senses as the highest truth (II.19), but he also praised science as a second set of senses, i.e., an extension of the senses (II.31). He therefore treated skeptical discourse as the pursuit of the most probable truths resulting from the systematic investigation of nature.

Cicero's genius seems to have provided the high water mark of Roman civilization, more advanced as a perpetuation of the achievement of Greek civilization than anything that either preceded or followed. As an orator and rhetorician, Cicero made an extraordinary contribution, but his role was even more important as a democratic leader and skeptical theoretician, in both respects having brought Rome's greatest successes just before it began to fall into decline. Just as skeptical theory and democratic practices that emphasize the freedom of speech have been interdependent since the Age of Pericles, Cicero's singular identity as an educated Roman statesman embodied this convergence between politics and epistemology, though, in fact, it was his rejection in both categories that was of crucial importance to Roman history, both in his having been murdered to set the stage for supplanting Roman democracy with the creation of the Roman empire and in his later having been attacked and presumably refuted by St. Augustine to help justify his own conversion to Christianity. Cicero did not directly participate when Caesar was assassinated, but he was generally recognized as Brutus's mentor (he actually dedicated De Natura Deorum to Brutus seven months earlier), and his Philippics speeches attacking Antony in the days that followed also linked him with the conspirators and clearly established his role as the foremost enemy of imperial Rome. When Antony joined in a triumvirate with Augustus and Lepidus, he therefore insisted that Cicero be murdered. Antony's demands were reluctantly accepted by Augustus, and Cicero's killing contributed to the political turmoil that led to Augustus's installation as emperor, followed by a disastrous succession of emperors who finally brought Roman civilization to its ruin. Of course this elongated concatenation of events cannot be traced on a strictly cause-and-effect basis to Cicero's murder, but Cicero can be admired as Rome's last great democratic leader, and his elimination seems to have deprived the democratic forces in Rome of their most effective advocate.

At a second and perhaps more important level, Cicero's Academica was sufficiently influential to have been attacked by St. Augustine in Contra Academicos, the first of his published Christian treatises, which was written immediately following his conversion to Christianity (c. 385 A.D.). Augustine had temporarily accepted the skepticism of the New Academy when he first read Cicero's now lost manuscript, Hortensius, but after his conversion he sought to defend his choice on a logical basis by attacking Academica through a rigorous use of deductive reasoning. The most impressive of his deductions was the foundationalist proposition, "If I am deceived, I am" (Si fallor, sum). In other words, to be wrong is to exist, and to think incorrectly at least confirms that one exists well enough to do this. Other variants may be suggested: I err, therefore I know I think; I err when I think, therefore I exist; (and obversely) I think I exist, therefore I know I err. Augustine's purpose was to establish a basic and unassailable truth which escaped the suspension of assent (epoche) that the Academic skeptics automatically applied in making any judgment of potential truths. Uncannily, Augustine's axiom anticipated Descartes's famous principle, "I think, therefore I am," which derived from essentially the same purpose, to establish the basis for Christian dogma free of skeptical doubt. It also anticipated the existential speculation of such future authors as Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, who tortuously documented their spiritual fallibility as the source of their faith in Christian revelation. Contra Academicos may be treated as having been a somewhat flawed exercise in Aristotelian logic for Christian ends, but it was also the first major step in Augustine's career as a Christian apologist who helped to initiate the transition from both the skepticism and pagan religion in currency at the height of Roman democracy to the Christian dogma that swept Europe and then held sway over it over the following twelve centuries.

The important point to recognize here is that Christian belief did not refute pagan belief. Quite the contrary, pagan belief had become too obviously vulnerable to the critique of Academic skepticism, and too many of the wealthy classes, including the membership of the Roman Senate, had converted to the doctrine of skepticism. Educated Rome was not pagan: as educated Athens had been (and as we are today), it was for all purposes a skeptical society led by agnostics, and the pagan deities were only taken seriously by the lower classes (or proletariat) otherwise satisfied by bread and circuses. Typically, this secular trend spearheaded by skepticism was a major threat to those elements of society in desperate need of something to believe in. Christian belief therefore came to the rescue and supplanted pagan belief as a more effective dogma to counteract skeptical doubt. And, indeed, Christianity was far better packaged for this purpose than pagan belief, since it emphasized one incorporeal deity (Jahweh--the great God "I am"), one relatively credible sacrificial rite (the crucifixion), an impossible ethical code that gave the priesthood a guaranteed role in society (as unavoidable sinners we incessantly need to be absolved), and, last but not least, an eschatology that bestowed extravagant rewards and punishment in an afterlife that stretched to eternity.[xlvii] Christ had made himself plain: "Verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life," and "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John, 6.47, and 11.26). Eternal bliss in heaven could be anticipated for simply believing in Christ's role as the Son of God and savior of mankind. But to doubt Christ's role guaranteed eternal perdition: "And he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John, 3.36). The choice was simple: either to believe and go to heaven or to doubt and go to hell. Extravagant delusions of grandeur would be suspected if anybody else (the present author, for example) had the audacity to declare, "I, Edward Jayne, am the Son of God, and I have descended from heaven to save mankind. Everybody in the whole world who believes this shall be sent to heaven, but anybody who doubts it shall be banished to an eternity of hellfire." How could such a doctrine gain universal support? In Christ's instance, I would conjecture because belief languished in ancient Rome, and Christianity filled the void by promoting irrational faith--faith at the very brink of absurdity--to exaggerate its differentiation from the principle of suspended belief (epoche) emphasized by the Greek skeptics. Other pagan religions had a chance to do this, but Christianity was utterly totalitarian, hence victorious, in imposing its particular version of absurdity. Though suggestive of bizarre and extravagant megalomania in the opinion of non-believers, Christ's self-declared holy status focussed both ethics and epistemology on the simplest act of faith, and with the promise of rewards (or punishment) vastly in excess of the effort expended to gain them.

Thanks to Christianity, belief could once again thrive, this time as a gentile byproduct of semitic religion produced by ten centuries of ethnic conflict less than eight hundred miles from Athens. Thus began what might seem to have been an intense twenty-century dialectic between an aggressive skepticism uniquely derivative of Greek civilization and Christianity's no less aggressive faith in Christ's holy mission based on prophecies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. More accurately, the diametrically opposite alternatives of this dialectic have consisted of Christianity's insistence upon sheer faith as opposed to Greek civilization's ability to accommodate skepticism's sheer lack of faith by seeking out foundationalist alternatives relatively immune to its thesis, as illustrated, for example, by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and also by both the Pyrrhonian quest for spiritual quietude and the probabilistic methodology first suggested by Arcesilaus and Carneades that anticipated modern science. It has been the cosmic struggle between these two antithetical compulsions--Judaeo-Christian belief and Hellenic skeptical accommodation--that has both defined and propelled our cultural heritage as we know it today. Matthew Arnold's distinction between the Hellenic emphasis upon seeing things as they really are and the Hebraic emphasis upon conduct and obedience may be granted its validity, as may Erich Auerbach's distinction between the Hellenic emphasis on the foregrounding of externalized forms and the Hebraic emphasis on making claims to inexpressible truths deserving of belief.[xlviii] However, these distinctions are relatively superficial compared to the belief/disbelief dialectic I am proposing, and whenever Arnold and Auerbach's insights come in conflict with this dialect--for example, when Arnold argues that the love of God is common to both traditions, and when Auerbach uses Homer's example to suggest that the Bible puts more emphasis on the truth--they are simply wrong. Belief is different from the truth, no matter how hard believers try to ignore this difference, and the systematic pursuit of the truth typical of Hellenic philosophy is necessarily antithetical to the comforting shortcuts afforded by one's belief in revealed religion.

Predictably, the Jews had exaggerated religious belief to reinforce tribal loyalty in their conflict against their neighbors, and their acquisition of monotheism from Ikhnaton helped to emphasize their beleagered role as the chosen people--one tribe led by one god. Christians adjusted the formula to meet the needs of gentiles living under the tyranny of the Roman empire, and, no surprise, Christianity eventually prevailed. In just a couple of centuries, Christianity chewed, digested, and eliminated Roman civilization. Skepticism was temporarily bested, and belief prevailed to such an extent that a relative poverty of intellectual curiosity dominated the next twelve hundred years. The European mind adjusted to a new and more formidable set of dogmatic constraints and limitations--somewhat comparable to those experienced today among fundamentalist religious sects in the non-western world. The essentially dogmatic foundationalist theories of Plato, Aristotle (one-fifth of them, at least), and a few others were permitted to survive, but almost the entire literature of skepticism, including more than four hundred treatises by Clitomachus, was obliterated, as if dogma had won the argument--indeed, as if skepticism had never really existed except for its retrospective assessment by Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius. Even today the majority of the population in western civilization still adheres to a relatively simple Christianity unadulterated by skepticism, though its support tends to predominate in rural communities rather than cities, among the poor rather than the wealthy, among the uneducated rather than the educated, among the old rather than the young, among women rather than men, and among those of a Catholic rather than a Protestant background (the ultimate Protestant achievement apparently entailing the rejection of religion altogether).[xlix] Of course there are many exceptions to these categories, but on the whole one would assume that poor and uneducated Catholic great-grandmothers from rural communities are more likely to put their faith in orthodox religion than educated young men from Protestant backgrounds who live in relatively comfortable circumstances in major cities. If a forty-five year old psychiatrist from Amsterdam, Frankfurt, or Chicago finds himself as a tourist in Madrid sitting at a table and talking with an older Spanish woman obviously from a local village, their conversation might be entirely cordial, but chances are strong they would concur in avoiding the topic of religion. And with good cause.

From Erasmus to Hume From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, skepticism played a major role in bringing what has been described as "the Great Secularization" of European life and thought.[l] Scholasticism had dissolved, and in its place there gradually emerged a dependence on scientific methodology no less dominant in its ideological demands. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pyrrhonian skepticism was resurrected by Catholic theologians to combat Protestantism, then by Protestants against the Catholics. Meanwhile, the Academic version of skepticism came into vogue as a justification of science, and metaphysicians found it necessary to come to the defense of Christianity by proposing foundationalist theories of the universe intermediate to God's authority, Decartes by resorting to geometry, Hobbes by drawing upon Galilean mechanics, Spinoza by depicting an elaborate pantheistic universe, and Leibnitz by proposing a universe full of monads, i.e., atomic particles expressive of the soul each of which is aware of all the rest. God's authority was assured, but his role as a personal God capable of intervening in human affairs was diminished, if not obliterated. Toward this end, Descartes employed a "method of doubt" to establish what may be described as having been a "preemptive skepticism," since it let him use skeptical methods to be able to dispense with skepticism by proposing a more internally sufficient Christian cosmology.[li] Skepticism was conceded, but only to set the stage for a better and more inclusive dogmatic system in which God and orthodox religion continued to reign. During the eighteenth century Enlightenment, many tried to salvage religion based on a deistic theory of the universe which an impersonal God created the universe to run on its own. But by the nineteenth century skeptics in the empirical tradition attacked the credibility of all versions of religion, deism included, and the process of secularization culminated in the mid-twentieth century when logical positivists treated religion as a belief system dependent on pseudo-statements unworthy of serious theoretical consideration.

Much of this post-medieval intellectual history may be viewed as having been an extended dialogue between the two versions of skepticism, Pyrrhonian and Academic, but also it also pitted skepticism itself, whatever its stripe, against alternative versions of dogmatism inclusive of metaphysics, spiritualism, nationalism, and the uncompromisingly materialist theoretical systems of such diverse figures as Comte, Spenser, Marx, and Freud. Unavoidably, skepticism has remained at the very center of debate in its valorization of doubt preliminary to the intensified pursuit of a priori truths presumably immune to challenge. Montaigne's admixture of fideism and Academic skepticism put into play the Renaissance double truth first suggested by Averroes of conceding orthodoxy in order to explore its alternative on a more favorable basis in the spirit of dialogue--in Montaigne's case a broad admixture of multiple voices. Desartes made a more rigorous use of skepticism--his only truth being his assurance of his own existence in order to guarantee his satisfaction with God's existence as the creator of our universe best described by coordinate geometry. Later Pascal reformulated fideism to reach even closer to godhead without the help of Descartes' tortuous methodology. Bacon and Gassendi were more constructive in their use of skepticism to establish a strictly empirical approach to science, while Berkeley and Hume's skepticism--the first fideistic, the second essentially agnostic tantamount to atheism--helped to launch the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel later rejected by Nietzsche. Kant's response to Hume through his restriction of reason to the sphere of experience has been argued to have limited the impact of skepticism, but no such luck. Kierkegaard could resurrect Pascal's fideistic strategy through an entirely new and more tortuous use of introspective meditation, and at almost the same time Nietzsche used skepticism to dismantle metaphysics. For Mill, Russell, Dewey, and the logical positivists who dominated the first half of the twentieth century, skepticism provided the methodological basis for scientific discovery.

Skepticism primarily survived the Middle Ages in Byzantium and among Arab and Hebrew scholars. At the turn of the twelfth century, Al Ghazali's Tahafot al-Filasifa ("The Collapse of Philosophy") used skepticism with the Pyrrhonian goal of promoting orthodox Mahommedanism. Almost a century later, Averroes used skepticism with an Academic emphasis in his investigation of Aristotle, and his approach was influential with European free-thinkers identified as Averroists, most notably at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century and at the University of Padua during the fourteenth century. Traces of skepticism may also be observed in the works of such medieval scholars as Agathias (ca. 530-580), John of Salisbury (ca. 1125-1180), Henry of Ghent (ca. 1293), and Nicolas of Autrecourt (fl. 1347).[lii] Diogenes Laertius was first translated by Ambrogio Traversi in the 1430s and his work survives in dozens of fifteenth century manuscripts and editions. The manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus were first brought to Italy from Constantinople by Francesco Filelfo in 1427 and later provided the basis for skeptical speculation by such figures as Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533), Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (ca. 1434-1514), and Francesco Robertello (1516-1567). Two influential works, Pico's Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium (1520) and Agrippa von Nettesheim's The Vanity of the Sciences (1526), supported the pursuit of unexamined faith based on Pyrrhonian skepticism as explained by Sextus Empiricus. And, finally, Cicero's Academic version of skepticism was first discussed in a commentary by Pier Vettori published in 1536, and later in commentaries by Omer Talon (1547-1550) and Giulio Castellani (1558). When Copernicus published his monumental heliocentric treatise, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in 1543, he declared in his Preface and Dedication that he first encountered the idea of the earth's motion around the sun in a passage of Cicero that mentioned the ancient astronomer, Hicetas of Syracuse. Copernicus did not identify his source any more specifically than this, but his reference was undoubtedly to Cicero's discussion of Hicetas in Academica (II.123). It therefore seems likely that Copernicus might also have encountered Cicero's explanation of the Academic theory of presentations (visa, or empirical observations) just a few pages before he mentioned Hicetas, and that Copernicus might also have taken this explanation into account while trying to establish the superior probability of heliocentric to geocentric astronomy.

The version of skepticism that first spread north of Italy seems to have emphasized a Pyrrhonian emphasis upon uncertainty to confirm the superiority of orthodox belief to the independent speculation of both Protestant theology and the early pursuit of scientific investigation. The celebration of sheer willful ignorance as a Christian virtue came to be identified as Fideism, based on the simple second-order enthymeme, "I know that I know nothing; therefore I must put my faith in God as explained by the church." The initial premise that ignorance is inescapable could be traced both the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism, but its conclusion that one must therefore turn to the authority of God as interpreted by the church was exclusively Pyrrhonian adopted to the needs of the Catholic church as exemplified by the German dictum, "Selig sind die Geistig arm sind, denn sie waren Goddes reich schauen" (Blessed are those who are spiritually poor, for they shall see God's realm). "Spiritually poor" was euphemistic for ignorant--devoid of knowledge--and the meek, of course, were the believers, those individuals who immediately and unconditionally accepted the authority of the church as well as the state and received custom without any suspension of judgment. If the mythical Eve had damned mankind by eating fruit of the tree of knowledge, Christ's sacrifice had restored the possibility of salvation for those capable of grace through their acceptance of their ignorance except for their confidence in God's generosity in rewarding this ignorance--call it belief, in fact total credulousness free of any trace of skepticism.

The first major text north of Italy to promote Catholic belief through a fideistic challenge of secular knowledge was Erasmus's De Libero, published in 1524 as an attack on Luther's theory of free will. Citing the Academics as a precedent, Erasmus argued that human affairs are so variable that nothing can be clearly known, so he concluded that it was important to cultivate simple Christian piety. A year later, Luther replied in De Servo Arbitrio that a Christian cannot be a skeptic: "A Christian ought . . . to be certain of what he affirms, or else he is not a Christian."[liii] As explained by Popkin, Luther was confident of a body of religious truths that were of crucial importance to men, and felt that the reading of Scripture would show us these truths.[liv] The Catholic church rejected Luther's reasoning, and, though it excluded from church doctrine any use of Pyrrhonian skepticism for this purpose (having condemned it as early as 1276), it tolerated its use by independent philosophers in defense of the church. Gentian Hervet, an editor of Sextus's Adversus Mathematicos, published in 1569, promoted fideism as an effective answer to Calvinism, and he was followed by Cardinal Bellarmine and the Jesuits Juan Maldonado and Jean Gontery. Influential fideists hostile to both Protestantism and secular empirical philosophy over the next two centuries included Jean-Pierre Camus, Veron, Pascal, and, as English Protestants, Browne, Glanvill, and Berkeley. This use of Pyrrhonian skepticism verged on atheism and amorality in the early part of the seventeenth century by the so-called libertins erudits, including Naude, Patin, de La Mothe Le Vayer, Sorbriere, La Peyrere, and, at the beginning of his career, Gassendi. Protestant apologists who used skepticism to launch a counterattack against Catholicism included Jean La Placette and J. A. Turretin. Whatever the perspective of theologians and philosophers, their arguments almost inevitably touched upon skepticism.

Montaigne's essay, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," written in 1575-76, was the most influential of the early fideistic polemics. This was Montaigne's longest and most ambitious essay (more than 15 percent of his total prose), in which he repeatedly shifted between the Academic and Pyrrhonian versions of skepticism until his final pages, when he suddenly closed down his double truth by asserting an orthodox fideistic statement of faith that brought his text to a close. By an admittedly loose tabulation, he cited or quoted the materialist Lucretius at least 68 times and Cicero 109 times (Academica alone at least 30 times!), while referring to Diogenes Laertius only 30 times, and Sextus Empiricus only 17 times, thus rather dramatically weighting his presentation favorable to Academic skepticism. In his final words, however, with obvious reference to the Pyrrhonian modes, he explained that perception cannot be trusted, since "the conception and semblance we form is not of the object but only of the impression and effect made on the senses."[lv] With equally obvious indebtedness to Heraclitus he likewise explained:

Man's proper aspirations thus became plain: "He will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himself be raised and uplifted by purely celestial means." Decartes's Meditations, published in 1641, may be understood as an effort to reject Montaigne's argument through establishing a verifiable system of objective truths first by imposing absolute Pyrrhonian skeptical demands that reduced the scope of a priori truth to the single axiom, "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito, ergo sum), and then by constructing an entire philosophy through a deductive accumulation of truths drawn on this axiom. That Decartes's strategy did not entirely succeed inspired Pascal's Pensees as well as much of the metaphysical speculation that ensured over the next two centuries. As late as the nineteenth century, Lamennais, Newman and Hamilton resorted to fideistic skepticism in defense of Christian belief.

The resurrection of classical skepticism also encouraged the pursuit of scientific methodology, and, whether understood or not, this development was more attuned to Carneades's Academic version of skepticism than the Pyrrhonian version. Sextus Empiricus's translations overshadowed Cicero's, and the emphasis upon the probability of data--so important to the Academic approach--seems in many cases to have been extrapolated from Sextus rather than Cicero, yet in the final analysis the Academic approach better anticipated sixteenth and seventeenth century empirical methodology. The advancement of empiricism had been interrupted for the twelve centuries constituting the "dark ages," and when it resumed during the renaissance there was initial confusion as to its origins, but without hampering its momentum in the direction already established by the Academic skeptics. It may be conceded that the direct or indirect exposure to Academic skepticism cannot be isolated as the single factor to have catalyzed modern science, yet it should be recognized that many of the scientists and philosophers who pursued empiricism as a substitute for orthodox belief were familiar with the classical philosophers in the Academic tradition, and there should be no doubt that the skeptical theory of presentations as explained by both Cicero and Sextus Empiricus played a central role in clarifying scientific methodology for many of the leaders in the scientific movement.

Included among those who modernized Academic skepticism to promote science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were such figures as Pomponazzi, Sanchez, Foucher, Mersenne, Sorel, Huet, and Fontanelle, all of whom were remarkable scholars in their day. In England, William Chillingworth, Bishop John Wilkins, and Reverend Joseph Glanvill sought to bring science in harmony with religion by explaining the difference between reasonable and unanswerable doubt. Herbert of Cherbury, England's first deist and the elder brother of the metaphysical poet, George Herbert, may also be added to the list, if only because of his division of the truth into four stages, including objective truth, truth of the appearance, truth of the apprehension, and truth of the intellect. But undoubtedly the most important of these figures in the British empirical tradition was Sir Francis Bacon, who sought to establish a scientific methodology independent of both logic and mathematics. Bacon began his Preface to Novum Organum, published in 1620, by telling of the unacceptable choice in the sixteenth century between an injurious dogmatism and its equally harmful antithesis in the creed of those who have "asserted that nothing can be known"--obviously the contemporary Fideists. He argued for pursuing an acceptable compromise based on the example of "the more ancient Greeks (whose writings have perished), [who] held a more prudent mean, between the arrogance of dogmatism, and the despair of skepticism."[lix] Here Bacon might have referred to Democritus, Epicurus, and others, but he was probably referring to the Academic skeptics as much as anybody, since their writings were almost totally destroyed. Bacon also praised skepticism for saving philosophy from errors and falsehoods and for encouraging readers to "draw use of knowledge."[lx] Again, whether he was entirely aware of what he was doing, he seems to have been aligning his approach with Academic skepticism, especially with his reference to the use of knowledge. Later, Bacon identified these Greeks as the New Academy, but in this context he also complained that they "dogmatized in their scepticism," that they "hold doctrines which they can follow as probable, though they cannot maintain them to be true," and that they "consider everything which has been either unknown or unattempted by themselves or their teachers, as beyond the limits of possibility." As a result, he argued, their influence tends to be harmful, causing a deterioration in morale and intellectual inquiry: ". . . everything begins to languish. Hence men turn aside into pleasant controversies and discussions, and into a sort of wandering over subjects rather than sustain any rigorous investigation." Instead, Bacon proposed, "we are not to deny the authority of the human senses and the understanding, although weak, but rather to furnish them with assistance."[lxi] Again, the Academic skeptics would have entirely concurred about the value of providing assistance to the human senses.

Bacon agreed with the New Academy's doubts about language, but not about perception, which can be accurate, he maintained, if it is properly used. The chief error of the skeptics of the New Academy, Bacon asserted, was that "they charged the deceit upon the senses; which in my judgment . . . are very sufficient to certify and report truth." Instead, he argued, "they [the Academic skeptics] ought to have charged the deceit upon the weakness of the intellectual powers, and upon the manner of collecting and concluding upon the reports of the senses."[lxii] What is needed, he declared, is to pursue a "fitting certainty" by assisting and directing the senses, for "it is better to know what is necessary, and not to imagine we are fully in possession of it, than to imagine that we are fully in possession of it, and yet in reality to know nothing which we ought."[lxiii] Here, without realizing it, Bacon was once again in full agreement with the Academic skeptics. What he was proposing was a methodology much the same as theirs, but with a modernized nomenclature for empirical data whose similarity with their interpretation of presentations (Cicero's wording) escaped his attention. Bacon's celebrated four idols--of the tribe (inherent in human nature), of the den (unique to the individual), of the market (derivative of social intercourse including language), and of the theater (derivative of systems of philosophy)--were also reminiscent of the Academic skeptical modes, since they categorized the sources of error in human discourse that need to be sifted by the skeptic in order to establish the probability of any particular belief. However, Bacon did not intend his idols to be considered insurmountable, but impediments to be minimized in the scientific pursuit of knowledge, again in harmony with Academic goals.

The French scientist, Pierre Gassendi (nee Gassend), made a theoretical contribution to the advancement of science no less important than Bacon's, and no less vulnerable to the recognition that it was beholden to Academic skepticism more than its author realized. As a scientist, Gassendi proposed the first correct law of inertia and made numerous useful discoveries in physics and astronomy in support of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. To challenge the mathematical cosmology of Descartes, Gassendi also succeeded in reviving Democritus's theory of atomic matter as formulated by Epicurus. His modernization of atomic theory was successfully adopted by Boyle for chemistry and Newton for physics, and it paved the way for future discoveries in atomic and molecular structure. Seventeenth century scientists were thus confronted with a basic choice between the Cartesian mathematical approach to physics and the strictly materialist approach by Gassendi. It was almost three centuries later before the two approaches could be adequately brought into a synthesis. Gassendi began his career as a Pyrrhonian skeptic at war with both Aristotelian and Cartesian theories of philosophy, but he later shifted to what he described as "constructive scepticism," an approach that bridged the gap between Academic scepticism and later trends in empirical philosophy. Gassendi sought to formulate an empirical methodology that might confirm atomic theory by drawing upon his own formidable knowledge of classical philosophy. According to Frederick Lange, "Atomism by his [Gassendi's] means drawn again from antiquity, attained a lasting importance, however much it was gradually modified as it passed through the hands of later inquirers.[lxiv] [italics in the original] More inclusively, according to Popkin, Gassendi's so-called constructive scepticism was "perhaps, the formulation, for the first time, of what may be called the 'scientific outlook.'"[lxv] Gassendi's influence overshadowed that of Bacon during the seventeenth century, then fell into relative decline in later centuries.

Like Descartes, Gassendi sought to justify his approach on philosophical grounds, and, again like Descartes, he did so by drawing upon skeptical theory. He was concerned with skepticism from the beginning of his career as a scientist-philosopher, but in Part I "("The Logic") of his culminating work, Syntagma Philosophicum, more simply described as the Syntagma, first published in 1649, he dealt with the issue on a systematic basis. Gassendi cited numerous classical sources to suggest the extraordinary difficulty of establishing the objective truth of any theory, and he concluded by seeking out a compromise between skepticism and the various dogmatisms in currency at the time:

Instead of totally adhering or rejecting a particular "truth," Gassendi proposes, it would be better to find a "middle way" to determine probability, exactly as had been maintained by the Academic skeptics. Paradoxically, just a few pages earlier Gassendi discounted the relevance of Academic skepticism to this important task: Concerning the Academics . . . there is nothing for us to add; for although Arcesilas accepted "reasonableness" (eulogon) or a deed or act for which a decent or fitting reason can be given, and although Carneades accepted the "probable" (pithanon), or that which, all things considered, seemed probably the best thing to do, nonetheless it is clear that these are not so much criteria for determining the truth as criteria for leading one's life.[lxvii]

Here Gassendi was simply wrong, perhaps because his memory of Cicero's Academica was stale at the time he wrote this portion of the Syntagma. Carneades's theory of probability was indeed primarily epistemological, and Gassendi's effort to argue the merits of probability on an epistemological basis by drawing upon Aristotle and the stoic theory of Xenocrates and Chrysippus as recounted by Sextus only served to put him in the camp of the Academic skeptics, including both Carneades and Cicero, the latter whom Gassendi otherwise treated as one of the classical philosophers he most admired. Gassendi's defense of the theory of God in the second section of the Syntagma, devoted to physics, and his defense of happiness on Epicurean grounds in the third section, devoted to ethics, would seem to have kept him in the Pyrrhonian camp of skeptical philosophers, but these apparently contradictory features of his theory did not diminish the importance of his defense of empiricism through the pursuit of a compromise between skepticism and dogmatic philosophy, and this defense effectively aligned him with the Academic school. There is much confusion to Gassendi's approach, partly the result of his impressive erudition, but his methodology and his circuitous use of classical philosophy to justify it brought him into the Academic skeptical tradition.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke's systematic exploration of the dynamics of consciousness introduced exactly the issues that had originally been emphasized by Academic skepticism despite Locke's purpose to establish a foundationalist basis for ascertaining objective truths presumably at odds with Academic doctrine. Reminiscent of Carneades, Locke warned against "demand[ing] certainty, where probability only is to be had." He explained, "If we will disbelieve everything because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much-what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly." On the other hand, if we extend our inquiry beyond our capacity, "it is no wonder that [we] raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase [our] doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism." Locke concluded:

Locke accordingly gave the senses an a priori status of their own, providing the basis for conscious associations as organized by the mind, more or less as Cicero had earlier emphasized visum as perceived data to be sifted by the skeptical philosopher. The skeptical emphasis upon the suspension of assent likewise anticipated Locke's concern about the effective use of the intellect in sorting out the truth of perceptions and associations. Locke did not specifically draw upon Academic skepticism, but, whether he realized it or not, he belonged to the same tradition, and his conclusions were in harmony with those of Carneades and Cicero. Locke's interest in parliamentary democracy was also reminiscent of Cicero and once again brought into play the pecular affinity between skepticism and the pursuit of democratic institutions that encourage the freedom of speech.

David Hume was probably the most radical skeptic of the eighteenth century, and his influence has been substantial. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1748), he explained that "all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv'd from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures."[lxix] Obviously, Hume used the word sensitive to describe the emotional sensibilities and the word cogitative to refer to the intellect. He concluded, ". . . that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion as even more probable or likely than any other."[lxx] Here, Hume's skeptical views might seem to have been equally in accord with both the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of ancient skepticism. However, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume rejected total skeptical doubt as being "excessive" in its Pyrrhonism and instead proposed a "mitigated skepticism" that entailed both intellectual modesty and a narrowing of inquiry to what may be quantified and/or justified by scientific experimentation.[lxxi] Because of his preference for "mitigated" skepticism, Hume aligned himself with Academic skepticism, as he himself seems to have recognized, since he specifically associated the approach he advocated in this passage with "academical philosophy."[lxxii] In his essays, "Of Miracles" and "Of the Immortality of the Soul," his Natural History of Religion (1757), and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death, Hume applied his concept of mitigated skepticism to religion without identifying himself as an atheist or agnostic, and once again his views were predominantly Academic. His final opinion may be indicated by his argument:

Hume's willingness to criticize religion this severely and his emphasis on a "total suspension of judgment" (epoche) without taking into account the advantage of emotional equipoise likewise put him in the tradition of Academic skepticism.

Bayle's Dictionary, published in 1697, was a responsible as any single text for having launched the Age of Reason in France. In his final "Clarification," Bayle apologized for his use of skeptical ideas, arguing that he had never deviated from his original faith and that "our reason, being as weak as it is, ought not to be the rule or measure of our faith."[lxxiv] Nevertheless, his view of orthodox scholarship was thoroughly skeptical, and his persistent questioning of standard assumptions encouraged others to find their own answers. An entire generation of French iconoclasts and philosophes followed born within approximately two decades of each other at the beginning of the eighteenth century. These included Voltaire, Lamettrie, Buffon, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Alembert, d'Holbach, and Condorcet, all of whom tested the boundaries between deism and agnosticism. The first eighteenth century European author to have proposed an unapologetic atheistic model of the universe that might have been acceptable to Protagoras, Carneades, or Cicero was the village priest Jean Meslier, who left three hand-written copies of his extraordinary manuscript "Last Will and Testament" on his dining room table when he died in 1733. This posthumous manifesto seems to have been followed by a variety of anonymous pamphlets by others, but the next outspoken atheist whose works can be read today, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was sufficiently wealthy to produce a flood of anonymous pamphlets at a secret site located on one of his estates. Until Meslier and d'Holbach, atheism was mostly a catchword (like communist in recent decades) to defame those charged with it, including Spinoza, Hobbes, Uriel Da Costa, Isaac La Peyrere, Naude, Voltaire, and Hume, among many others. D'Holbach authored several works under pseudonyms (Good Sense, The Natural History of Superstition, Letters to Eugenia, etc.), but his primary contribution, also under a pseudonym, was The System of Nature, first published in 1770, an eloquent and brilliantly lucid attack on orthodox belief--Christianity in particular. The book also had a singularly influential impact upon the French revolution because it linked Christianity with the ancien regime. D'Holbach's cosmology was dogmatic in its rejection of Christian belief, so it might seem to have been relatively negligible as a contribution to skeptical theory, except that it was translated and frequently reprinted in the decades that followed, establishing a major breakthrough in the advancement of empirical philosophy. Moreover, d'Holbach wrote virtually all the entries in the Encyclopedie pertaining to biology, and his country estate near Paris, described as a "clearinghouse" of radical ideas, was an enormously influential salon often visited by such major figures of the French enlightenment as Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvetius, Condillac, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Buffon. D'Holbach also included on his guest list such figures in the Anglo-American tradition as Hume, Gibbon, Smith, Priestley, Walpole, Garrick, Sterne, and Franklin. Writing under their own names, these others diluted and refracted their skepticism to avoid social censure, whereas d'Holbach, having resorted to anonymity, was better able to say what he thought. In doing so he able to pursue his assumptions to the limit, beyond anything these others might have felt safe to acknowledge, even to themselves.

Like Montaigne and Descartes, Kant therefore found skepticism to be useful only because it tested and helped to perfect the metaphysics necessary to justify one's commitment to orthodox belief. His theoretical machinery was more complex, but his objectives were the same. He too belonged to the Pyrrhonian camp.

Kant's successors proposed metaphysical systems that extended his perspective, culminating in Hegel's treatment of rationality as "absolute knowledge" in a dialectic history of civilization that subordinated the struggle between belief and disbelief to the pursuit of freedom. Like Kant, Hegel was able to praise skepticism as a method useful in establishing the truth, in his case by assigning it the dialectical status and function of negation (antithesis) that challenges simplistic dogma (thesis) to set the stage for the achievement of the Absolute Idea (synthesis) identified with the final authority of God. However, like Kant, Hegel was also hostile to the unfettered pursuit of skepticism whereby negation feeds upon itself and brings social and intellectual anarchy. Early in his career, Hegel was entirely generous in his praise of skepticism. In one article, published in 1802, he traced its "free aspect" to the philosophy of Parmenides and declared this to be the sine qua non of philosophy:

Dogmatists exaggerate determinism, while skeptics redeem philosophy by "rais[ing] the freedom of Reason above this necessity of nature."[lxxx] In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel again lauded the benefit of skepticism, this time as a "determinate negation" [italics in the original] that initiates the transition into a new form, but he also warned of skepticism "which always sees in the result only pure nothingness," or "emptiness," and which is exclusively motivated by the opportunity to cast new offered ideas "into the same abysmal void."[lxxxi] Moreover, since skepticism causes consciousness "to know itself as a consciousness containing contradictions within itself," skepticism threatens to double itself, thus "dualizing self-consciousness within itself," and producing the "Unhappy Consciousness [of] the Alienated Soul [as] a doubled and merely contradictory being [with an] unhappy consciousness, divided and at variance within itself."[lxxxii] [italics in the original] In short, excessive skepticism is the primary source of alienation, the separation of consciousness from itself emphasized by Hegelians (as opposed to Marxists, who trace alienation to estranged labor). Hegel conceded that alienation might in itself bear productive results, but he warned against "the merely restless thought of Scepticism" unable to rise "to that level of thinking where the particularity of consciousness is harmoniously reconciled with pure thought itself."[lxxxiii] At this point, he argued, skepticism becomes--a broken gibber of negation, which without adopting any permanent form strays from one contingent mode of being and thinking to another, dissipates them indeed in absolute independence, but just as readily creates them once more. In fact, it is simply the contradiction of consciousness claiming to be at once independent and yet devoid of independence.[lxxxiv]

In other words, unless skepticism can be limited to its appropriate supportive role in the pursuit of the Absolute Idea, it necessarily bears destructive results.

Hegel's most extensive treatment of skepticism, published posthumously in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, conveys essentially the same position.[lxxxv] Hegel's prose is particularly impenetrable throughout most of this particular text, perhaps in part because it was published as the transcription of his lecture notes by his disciples. However, many passages may be quoted for their metaphysical insight to help clarify Hegel's attitude toward the role of skepticism in the dialectic he was proposing--first with respect to dogmatic philosophy presumably at the most basic level of intellectual achievement:

Positive philosophy may have the consciousness that it has the negation to Scepticism in itself; thus it does not oppose it, for Scepticism is a moment in it.

But the logical Notion [i.e., Idea] is itself this dialectic of Scepticism, for this negativity which is characteristic of Scepticism likewise belongs to the true knowledge of the Idea.[lxxxvi]

Next with respect to skepticism's limitations due to its intermediate status in the transition from basic dogmatic philosophy to the Absolute Idea:

The function of Scepticism is wrongly termed the inculcation of proneness to doubt. . . . Doubt, however, is only uncertainty, irresolution, indecision, the thought which is opposed to something held to be valid. . . . But the older Scepticism does not doubt, being certain of untruth, and indifferent to the one as to the other; it does not only flit to and fro with thoughts that leave the possibility that something may still be true, but it proves with certainty the untruth of all.

Sceptical self-consciousness is . . . subjective liberation from all the truth of objective Being, and from the placing of its existence in anything of the kind; Scepticism thus makes its end the doing away with the unconscious servitude in which the natural self-consciousness is confined, the returning into its simplicity, and, in so far as thought establishes itself in a content, the curing it of having a content such as this established in thought.[lxxxvii]

And finally, with respect to skepticism's subordinate role to the Absolute Idea:

Thus the method of its [skepticism's] procedure against the rational is this, that it makes the latter into a determinate, and always first of all introduces into it a finite thought-determination or idea of relationship to which it adheres, but which is not really in the infinite at all; and then it argues against the same. That is to say it comprehends it falsely and then proceeds to contradict it. Or it first of all gives the infinite the itch in order to be able to scratch it.[lxxxviii]

What offended Hegel was the effort to pursue skepticism for its own sake without playing a role both preliminary and subordinate to the Absolute Idea. What results, Hegel maintained, is a "subjectivity and vanity of consciousness" as well as a "decay both of Philosophy and of the world."[lxxxix] He reviled this subjective decadence in modern skeptics (for example Hume, though without mentioning him by name), but also, surprisingly--in Philosophy of History, another of his posthumous texts--he criticized it in the Athenian sophists for having corrupted ancient Greece through the misguided pursuit of "subjectivity obtaining emancipation for itself."[xc] [italics in the original] He praised Greek freedom as the "self-emancipation of thought" that initiated western civilization, but he found the Sophists to have exaggerated this achievement to the extent that thought became a "principle of decay." He acknowledged that for western civilization the Sophists "began the process of reflection on the existing state of things, and of ratiocination," but he deplored their intellectual decadence when they "turn[ed] the subject of discussion this way or that way at pleasure," and when they subscribed to Protagoras's principle [here Hegel refrained from identifying Protagoras by name] that "Man is the measure of all things," thereby reducing the more compelling principle of right to "mere liking."[xci] What he neglected to explore was the role of Sophists in anticipating the theoretical accomplishment of both the Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptics over the following six centuries.

Hegel's bias in favor of the Pyrrhonists instead of the Academics would be suggested by his treatment of the Academics as a closely related school rather than a particular branch of skepticism and by his shift in tone whenever he tangentially mentioned either of them. However, in his Preface to The Philosophy of Right, the last of his major works published during his lifetime, in 1821, he launches an angry attack on "self-styled 'philosophy' [that] has expressly stated that 'truth itself cannot be known," and that displays the "quintessence of shallow thinking [by basing] philosophic science not on the development of thought and the concept but on immediate sense perception."[xcii] The result, he claims, is an abandonment of both religion and ethics:

Everything falls into place here--the rejection of any philosophy that puts undue emphasis upon empiricism and the vigorous--even angry--defense of both religion and the acceptance of knowable truths. At last it becomes obvious that Hegel, like Kant, used metaphysics to contextualize skepticism preliminary to the Absolute Idea linked with a rather orthodox concept of God's role in the universe, and that his Absolute Idea was no less dogmatic a commitment to belief than any other belief system. Once again belief was being defended from disbelief, and once again the defense was just another version--albeit an entirely new version--of Pyrrhonian skepticism. For it was skepticism that was the primary threat to Hegel's conventional Prussian Weltanschauung, but by granting skepticism its subordinate role, he met and eliminated this threat. Just as both Bacon and Gassendi had twisted their understanding of Pyrrhonian skepticism to arrive at a theory of empirical truth aligned with the Academic version of skepticism, Kant and Hegel--each after his own fashion--reorganized the essentially Academic version of skepticism promoted by Bacon, Gassendi, Hume, and so many others to subsume its principle of doubt to the demands of orthodox belief. The aim was strictly Pyrrhonian--a justification of belief through the acceptance of uncertainty--and its methodology, far more elaborate than anything preceding, was sheer metaphysics. Pyrrho had used skepticism to grant the validity of belief as an indifferent assent to the orthodox opinion of others; Kant and Hegel more vigorously organized the use of skepticism to impose this choice through presumably irrefutable metaphysical deduction. The methodology was different, but both the sequence and results were the same.

In the final analysis, German metaphysicians preceding David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach were devout Christians, and the ambitious metaphysical systems they proposed gave a final role to their respective concepts of God. Other defenders of the faith included Coleridge, Newman, Kingsley, Gladstone, and Arnold, as well as Kierkegaard, Hamann, Lamennais, and the numerous philosophers who identified themselves as Kantians and Hegelians. The level of sophistication among these Christian apologists was remarkable, and their efforts helped to give a measure of intellectual justification to the revivalist movement that thrived among the uneducated classes throughout the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, scientific methodology as a product of skepticism continued to obtain impressive results, especially the theory of evolution which culminated with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, followed by its debate by Gladstone, Thomas Henry Huxley (who coined the word agnostic), and many others. As a result, there was widespread reverse conversion--described as Newman as "the great apostasy"--from Christianity to agnosticism undertaken by such figures as Comte, Burckhardt, Troeltsch, James Mill, Darwin, Clifford, Stephen, Bradlaugh, and even Newman's younger brother, Francis Newman, who published Phases of Faith (1850) as an attack on Christianity.[xciv] Paine's The Age of Reason (1794, 1796) challenged the accuracy of scriptures, David Friedrich Strauss's treatment of Christ as a mythical figure in Life of Jesus (1835-36) broke the spell of metaphysics for the German intellectual community, and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841), which probed the anthropomorphic aspect of religious belief, completed the demolition of metaphysical idealism among German intellectuals. Feuerbach thereupon devoted the rest of his career to an attack upon religion even more relentless than d'Holbach's, and for perhaps a decade he played a pivotal role in Germany no less important than Kant's and Hegel's at an earlier time.[xcv] Marx and Engels extended Feuerbach's theory of individual evasiveness to explain religion's oppressive function as an "opiate" of the people to the benefit of the ruling classes.[xcvi] Later in the century atheism became almost a fad promoted by such effective popularizers as Ralph Ingersoll, Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, and numerous others.[xcvii]

With the publication of The World as Will and Idea in 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer suddenly emerged as the first modern professional philosopher who was avowedly an atheist. Though profoundly indebted to both Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer proposed as a modification of their theories an absolute distinction between idea and will (energy, force, libido, etc.) that indirectly gave a role to skepticism by having established will as the primary impetus of experience and idea as a relatively small realm of conscious representations which are derivative of the will and influenced by it but which for the most part cannot explain it. In other words, the matrix of consciousness is inexplicable in rational terms--a modification of Kant's noumena that anticipated Freud's unconscious--and the effort to obtain this rationality in explaining or trying to cope with it is doomed to failure. Among the principal victims of this inadequacy, Schopenhauer proposed, are the various religions, which, "like glow-worms . . . shine only when it is dark." For, claimed Schopenhauer, "A certain amount of general ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist."[xcviii] Since "truth cannot appear naked before the people," Schopenhauer argued, allegorical mysteries become necessary that actually make a virtue of absurdity--

Indeed, perhaps it might be asserted that some absolute contradictions, some actual absurdities . . . [as] essential ingredient[s] in a complete religion, for these are just the stamp of its allegorical nature, and the only adequate means of making the ordinary mind and the uncultured understanding feel what would be incomprehensible to it, that religion has ultimately to do with quite a different order of things, with an order of things in themselves, in the presence of which the laws of this phenomenal world, in conformity with which it must speak, vanish; and that therefore not only the contradictory but also the comprehensible dogmas are really only allegories and accommodations to the human power of comprehension.[xcix]

The belief compulsion obliges irrationality to confirm its function, and so it becomes almost a waste of time to try to convince "the ordinary mind" of the inadequacy of its ideas. Skepticism might be a valid philosophy of life, but only for the superior mind that is able to confront the truth.

Following in Schopenhauer's footsteps, Nietzsche declared war on all dogma extending back to Plato and before. Ignorance, he argued, has not been so much the product of deprivation but of mankind's universal aversion to genuine knowledge:

Nietzsche nevertheless praised skeptics, who presumably reject the "dome of ignorance," as "the decent type in the history of philosophy," as opposed to non-skeptical philosophers, architects of this dome, whom he described as "the next development of the priestly type."[ci] Nietzsche likewise defined "man's truths" as "his irrefutable errors," i.e., as those of his mistaken beliefs that elude refutation, and, to combat the dogmatic insistence on the truth of these errors, he argued, "What is needed above all is an absolute skepticism toward all inherited concepts."[cii] All beliefs, he argued, must be submitted to rigorous verification:

By insisting upon the need for verification, Nietzsche situated himself in the Academic tradition, as he did by arguing that metaphysicians (specifically the Eleatic philosophers)-- . . . kept their eyes shut to the fact that they also had reached their doctrines in contradiction to valid methods, or through their longing for repose or for exclusive possession or for domination.[civ]

Here he seems to have included Pyrrhonists among the philosophers he criticized, for though they have made no issue of domination and exclusive possession, the emphasis on repose has been central to their doctrine. The same implicit rejection of Pyrrhonism may be observed in Nietzsche's casual distinction: "What inspires the skeptic? Hatred of the dogmatist--or a need for rest, a weariness, as in the case of Pyrrho."[cv] Here, indeed, Nietzsche used the quest for repose to describe the Pyrrhonian version of skepticism, as opposed to the "hatred" of dogmatists, obviously more typical of the Academic tradition, which he could only have praised. Nietzsche never mentioned the contribution of Arcesilaus and Carneades to skeptical theory, and unlike others in the Academic tradition he mostly ignored science, but his use of evolution to justify his skepticism was plain, as was his treatment of the superior mind (or superman), supposedly at the pinnacle of human evolution, as being skeptical: "The great man is necessarily a skeptic."[cvi] Here once again Nietzsche was in the same camp as Cicero and Hume, and of Bertrand Russell who followed him, though their definitions of superiority, to the extent that they might have been expressed, would have been demonstrably less megalomaniac.

Also typical of the Academic tradition was Nietzsche's willingness to challenge the authenticity of religion, for example by having repeatedly declared his thesis that "God is Dead." In The Antichrist Nietzsche more inclusively attacked Christianity, going so far as to claim that Pontius Pilate's question addressed to Christ, "What is truth?" (John, 18.38) was the "only saying [in the entire New Testament] that has value--one which is its [the Bible's] criticism, even its annihilation."[cvii] [italics in the original] And of course this deceptively simple overarching question, "What is the truth?" was exactly the most basic issue for skeptics in the Academic tradition at the time of Christ.

British empiricism remained one of the principal bulwarks of Academic skepticism throughout the nineteenth century, though the ancient philosophers who belonged to this movement were seldom mentioned by name. The theory of utilitarianism dominant at the time emphasized the social consequences of an act or idea rather than its truth per se, and Jeremy Bentham's Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822) accordingly rejected religion as "a deduction from the pleasures of the individual without at all benefiting the species."[cviii] As explained by John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography (1873), his father James Mill, one of Bentham's principal supporters, similarly attacked religion for its harmful impact on morals--

with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy or morality: first by setting up fictitious excellences,--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind,--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals.[cix]

As a genius of remarkable intelligence, John Stuart Mill himself had numerous interests beyond religion (logic, economics, politics, women's rights, etc.), so his discussion of the issue remained peripheral throughout his career, principally limited to random passages in On Liberty, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and Three Essays on Religion, published posthumously. Nevertheless, Mill could argue-- Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.[cx]

Therefore-- Whatever power such a being [God] may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.[cxi] But of course this Promethean rejection of God had become almost faddish by the mid-nineteenth century and may be observed, for example, in Emerson's "Self-Reliance," in which nature itself, as opposed to religion, was treated with more reverence:

The same level of defiance may be found in Huckleberry Finn's decision in Chapter 31, at the primary moment of crisis in his novel, when he declares, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," and thereby makes his choice to commit an unforgivable sin by helping Jim to escape slavery.

What seems to have been generally overlooked in Mill's philosophy was his very major accomplishment in having advanced both an epistemology and inductive logic that brought the central principles of the Academic tradition into the nineteenth century. When Bertrand Russell, for example, dismissed Mill as having been "not quite in the first rank among philosophers," he neglected to take into account the theoretical core of Mill's various books which resurrected both the methods and goals of Carneades and his followers, if without Mill's having directly acknowledged (or perhaps even recognized) the connection.[cxiii] Whereas Hume had advocated a "mitigated skepticism" through empirical investigation, but without having explored the principles of scientific inquiry with any thoroughness, Mill wrote his A System of Logic to bring unprecedented specification to the study of the relationship between cognition and inductive methodology. Mill's approach tended to be positivistic in its emphasis upon the discovery and integration of scientific laws, but he also took into account the uncertainty of knowledge where he felt truths to be less immediately definable, most notably in the investigation of social relationships.

Like Carneades and Cicero, Mill sought as well as possible to discern what happens in the objective universe by clarifying the linkage among related sensations (or "presentations") and then drawing the most probable conclusions. Mill explained how objective reality has been taken for granted through the general acceptance of what he described as "permanent possibilities of sensation" independent of our fleeting sensations from one moment to the next. Our idea of the external world, he explained, "consists, in only a small portion, of present sensations [which] are in any case a most insignificant portion of the whole which [we] apprehend." Instead, we tend to give permanent status to the groups of sensations we have come to expect to find joined together:

Eventually, we begin to take for granted the independent existence of these groups as permanent possibilities different from the way they are experienced as particular sensations: "Their groundwork in sensation is forgotten, and they are supposed to be something intrinsically distinct from it."[cxv] We also come to recognize that our willingness to reify our experience in this fashion is universally experienced, if without anybody else having had our exact sensations: "We find other people grounding their expectations and conduct upon the same permanent possibilities on which we ground ours. But we do not find them experiencing the same actual sensations."[cxvi]

And thus the mind creates its own universe from the welter of sensations it receives through the body. It is important to recognize here that Mill did not adduce from this constructionist tendency in human intelligence any justification for either the solipsistic rejection of external reality or the dogmatic "cosmothetic" belief in a material universe exactly the same as we see before our eyes. By explaining our ability to project "things" into our perceptual field, he put this ability in its place and established the necessity of refining our empirical methodology well enough to differentiate valid conclusions from the invalid relevant to the world we perceive. Hence Mill devoted even more attention to the methods of induction than deduction in his central text, A System of Logic, published in 1843, toward the beginning of his career.

Among the uses of induction explored by Mill in his System of Logic were the methods of agreement, disagreement, and the combination of the two, as well as the methods of residues and concommitant variations. These five methods have been discussed at length both by Mill and subsequent theoreticians responding to his ideas. Overlooked by many was Mill's treatment of probability (or chance) as what essentially amounted to a sixth method in chapter seventeen, "Of Chance and its Elimination," in which Mill drew upon the theories of Laplace, Herschel, and Venn to propose a primitive use of the theory of statistics to draw conclusions about relationships with too many variables to be definitively explained based on particular laws of nature. In chapter twenty-five, "On the Grounds of Disbelief," Mill likewise discussed improbability, and in Book Six, "On the Logic of the Moral Sciences," he plunged into the empirical investigation of human behavior fully aware that the issue of probability was necessarily more important in this particular area than in most of the physical sciences. I would propose that Mill's relatively primitive treatment of probability in A System of Logic bridged the gap between Carneades's basic treatment of probability as believability based on the appropriate investigation of available evidence and the sophisticated uses of probability theory taken for granted today in all the behavioral sciences.

What connection exists, then, between scientific induction and the ordinary beliefs most of us take for granted? In his classic essay, On Liberty, Mill estimated, "on any matter not self-evident there are ninety-nine persons totally incapable of judging of of it for one who is capable; and the capacity of the hundredth person is only comparative."[cxviii] The only reason why there is a preponderence among mankind of rational opinions, Mill proposed, is because we rectify our mistakes by discussion and experience based on the "steady habit of correcting and completing [our] own opinion by collating it with those of others."[cxix] Thus Mill insisted on the importance of continuous debate--exactly the dialectic exchange favored by Protagoras and Carneades: "On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons."[cxx] Otherwise, orthodoxy sets in, and idea degenerates into the thoughtless litany of opinions typical of orthodox belief, described by Mill as hereditary creed:

The ready acceptance of custom recommended by Pyrrho, Aenisidemus, and Sextus Empiricus thus leads, if Mill is to be believed, to an intellectual stultification disastrous to civilization. Science is good, unexamined belief bad--this seems to be Mill's most basic assumption. Just as the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel betrays what might be described as a Pyrrhonian "syndrome," anybody who takes into account the connection between Mill's treatment of epistemology and the inductive method in his several major books finds a very decided Academic syndrome. Whereas Kant and Hegel updated Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus by reinvigorating metaphysics, Mill updated Carneades and Cicero by reorganizing the linkage between epistemology and the scientific method. Kant and Hegel came first and dominated intellectual trends in Germany; Mill came later and dominated subsequent intellectual trends in England.

Just a couple of decades later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mill's disrespectful lay-godson, Bertrand Russell, took materialistic philosophy to its limit by joining with Alfred North Whitehead to reinvent logic as a sentential calculus with sufficient versatility to derive from its principles the entirety of mathematics, thus letting both logic and mathematics be treated as instruments of scientific inquiry. As a logician/mathematician, Russell experienced a measure of affinity with such precedessors as Descartes and Leibnitz, while he seems to have been vague about, if not totally ignorant of, the history of skeptical theory beyond the particular contributions of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. There is, for example, almost no reference in his enormous output of books and articles--not even his popular History of Philosophy--to Carneades, Cicero, Sextus, Gassendi, or even Mill, though his ideas frequently touched upon theirs and he might easily have improved some of his arguments by acknowledging theirs. Nevertheless, Russell's willingness to link science and common sense finally put him in the Academic skeptical tradition, often with remarks unusually plain for a philosopher:

In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), which Russell intended as a primer to philosophy, we encounter the first of his books to link empiricism with epistemology. Here he actually brought his text to a close by warning against the "widespread philosophical tendency" to view man as the measure of all things--the argument first proposed by Protagoras, one of the major forerunners of Academic skepticism. Russell also advocated the pursuit of uncertainty as a philosophical virtue, since--

In the first instance, Russell attacked Protagoras's thesis without identifying Protagoras by name, and he seems to have overlooked Protagoras's intention to challenge religious creationism based on the gods' status as the measure of all things, not to reject science or objective reality as being antithetical to man's central role in projecting the universe he thinks he perceives well enough to measure. In the second instance, in which Russell's argument echoed that of Mill in many passages of On Liberty, Russell failed to take into account the Pyrrhonian use of uncertainty to promote exactly the ends he himself wanted to reject--going through life imprisoned by common-sense prejudices and habitual beliefs. Indeed, Russell attacked the attitude of the "complete sceptic" in another context (p. 150), but as an alternative he recommended Descartes's "methodological doubt" (p. 151) without acknowledging its fideist ends, likewise Pyrrhonian, and apparently without recognizing the better suitability of Hume's less presumptuous theory of "mitigated" skepticism to illustrate his own preference based on his epistemology, if not his mathematical predilections.

Elsewhere in The Problems of Philosophy, however, Russell fell in with the Academic skeptical approach by treating knowledge as probable opinion (pp. 134-5, 140), by treating induction as "the ultimate ground" for establishing probability (pp. 66-67, 107, 112, etc.), and by identifying philosophy with science (p. 149). Russell acknowledged in the final analysis, "that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences" (p. 22), but, like others in the Academic skeptical tradition, he rose to the challenge by seeking to clarify as well as possible the interaction that might be ascertained between objects and sense data (his designation for what Carneades and Cicero described as "presentations"). As Russell declared:

Much as Carneades explained with his principle of irreversibility, Russell's third requisite obliges a better efficiency in judging the relative truth value of particular beliefs based on their linkage with all the rest: Though the possibility of error remains, its likelihood is diminished by the interrelation of the parts and by the critical scrutiny which has preceded acquiescence. (p. 26) With the concurrence of other individuals with comparable experience, truths gathered from one's sense data may be granted their probability as "a permanent public object" (p. 21)--the "External World" earlier described by Mill.

In 1914, Russell published Our Knowledge of the External World to present what might seem to have been an entirely new theory of epistemology different from what he had proposed just two years earlier in The Problems of Philosophy. Once again Russell attacked absolute skepticism as a "barren" philosophy that can therefore "give a certain flavour of hesitancy to our beliefs, and cannot be used to substitute other beliefs for them."[cxxv] The question remained, then, how exactly truths might be calculated with a reasonable degree of certainty. The answer, Russell suggested, was to conceive of the objective "thing" as a logical construction the sum total of its potential momentary appearances, each of which he described as an "aspect" or "perspective." The thing, then, he argued, "has the merit of being neutral as between different points of view, and of being visible to more than one person" (pp. 93-94). What Russell proposed here, whether he realized it or not, was almost exactly the same model for reconstructing objective reality independent of its perception as Mill had proposed with his theory of "permanent possibilities of sensation." Russell's nomenclature was more convenient, but his idea was essentially the same. This becomes obvious in Russell's later essay, "The Relation of Sense Data to Physics," in Mysticism and Logic, published in 1929, in which Russell explained that we can learn nothing by observation and experiment "except immediate data of sense: certain patches of colour, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., with certain spatio-temporal relations." However, Russell reminded us, the physical universe discovered by science is entirely different: "Molecules have no colour, atoms make no noise, electrons have no taste, and corpuscles do not even smell." How can such objects be verified? According to Russell, "It must be solely through their relation to sense-data: they must have some kind of correlation with sense-data, and must be verifiable through their correlation alone." But how, Russell asked, may such a correlation be ascertained? Russell's answer: "A correlation can only be ascertained empirically by the correlated objects being constantly found together." The problem here, Russell suggested, is that, "only one term of the correlation, namely, the sensible term, is ever found: the other term [the thing-in-itself] seems essentially incapable of being found." Therefore, Russell concluded, "it would seem, the correlation with objects of sense, by which physics was to be verified, is itself utterly and for ever unverifiable."[cxxvi]

How may we escape this epistemological trap? Again, as Carneades had implied and Mill had argued, and as Russell himself had likewise argued in Our Knowledge of the External World, this can only be done by inductive approximations. To explain exactly how, Russell shifted his emphasis from "sense data" to its metaphysical equivalent, sensibilia: "those objects which have the same metaphysical and physical status as sense-data, without necessarily being data to any mind" (p. 148). Like the monads proposed by Leibnitz, sensibilia persist without being perceived, so by selectively using sense data to organize them into a multiplicity of perspectives, observers obtain by Occam's razor (the law of parsimony) the confidence that they are describing objective reality:

Kant's noumena persists, but with a sufficient collection of sensibilia, we may isolate physical things as "series of appearances whose matter obeys the laws of physics" (p. 173). Here we resort to exactly the same strategy as used by the Academic skeptics in acknowledging our ignorance of reality in order to establish a more effective way to study it on an empirical basis. We cannot entirely penetrate beyond the limitations of our senses to the thing-in-itself, but through systematic investigation we may achieve approximations tantamount to virtual certainty.

Many of Russell's books and articles may be seen to consist of new strategies for obtaining this empirical certainty despite the unavoidable limits of perceptual experience. In The Analysis of the Mind (1921), Russell more thoroughly examined the dynamics of consciousness that interfere with accurate perception. He also treated at greater length the issues of belief as a reference of thought to object and of perception as a mnemonic response to sensation mixed with the expectation of future sensations. In both instances, without declaring his intentions, he used contemporary psychological theory to internalize and better package the complex dynamics whereby sensibilia may be reconstructed to obtain approximations of the truth. In The Analysis of Matter (1927), Russell explored the possibility of treating the truth as a "neutral stuff" neither exactly mind nor matter, and of conceiving of elementary induction as habit preliminary to belief. In An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Russell proposed a correspondence theory between the structure of language and the structure of reality based on their shared universals. And in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), his final major contribution in the field of epistemology, Russell sought an overview that explained with greater thoroughness than before the role of probability in obtaining postulates of scientific inference. Throughout his career Russell declared his ambivalence toward skepticism, and his restless pursuit of empirical certainty attests to his remarkable ingenuity in addressing himself to the issues posed by skepticism.

Russell's highly controversial status as the single most eminent philosopher over six decades in Anglo-American intellectual tradition resulted from his uncompromising rejection of orthodox belief based on his negative thesis, expressed in the very first sentence of his collection, Skeptical Essays (1928), "that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."[cxxvii] Here Russell seems to have refined skeptical doctrine to its most perfect distillation. Actually, W.K. Clifford had stated this thesis with even greater decisiveness in an earlier essay, "The Ethics of Belief," published in 1887: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."[cxxviii] Combined with Protagoras's original argument that there is no ground whatever for supposing religious belief to be true, the Clifford/Russell thesis becomes the major premise in a Barbara syllogism for drawing the obvious conclusion that religious belief is undesirable, Q.E.D. The principle seems obvious enough when one conjectures, for example, that the entire universe might rest on a gigantic tortoise shell, but it also seems relevant to the myriad orthodox beliefs now in currency, for example in a personal God, in Christ's resurrection and transubstantiation, and, at a secular level, in the justification of war and harmful but popular economic doctrines, social programs, and political ideologies. Virtually every social and political issue may be included whose public support draws upon orthodoxy of one sort or another. To repeat: always, everywhere, the Clifford/Russell principle establishes that without sufficient evidence it is wrong (not merely in error) to believe, and if Montaigne was correct that most of our beliefs rest on insufficient evidence, we may conclude that almost always, almost everywhere, most of our thinking rooted in belief is wrong--period. A syllogism might draw correct conclusions from incorrect premises, but in real life the willingness to exercise this privilege too often brings harmful consequences.

To Russell's credit, he made the leap from theory to propaganda in mid-career by mounting an iconoclastic attack on a large variety of conventional beliefs with the necessary lucidity to be understood by the lay reader. A couple of his passages dealing with religion may be quoted to illustrate the vigor of his argument:

Russell's many collections of popular essays written from this stance included Sceptical Essays (1928), Mysticism and Logic (1929), Religion and Science (1935), In Praise of Idleness (1935), Unpopular Essays (1950), The Will to Doubt (1958), and of course Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). All of these were part and parcel of his commitment to an empirical theory of knowledge, a commitment that generally dominated philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century. One may calculate the pervasiveness of Pyrrhonian assumptions among today's intellectual circles by the throwaway cost of these books as they gather dust in our warehouse used book stores. Russell's iconoclastic vitality is not even reviled--it's ignored--now that orthodox religion once again thrives.

More generous to Christianity, the American philosopher William James advanced pragmatism as a justification of unexamined belief that was typically Pyrrhonian in its relativist bias. He argued that the truth of ideas depends on how well "they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience," and that what primarily matters for any belief is, "what concrete difference its being true will make in any one's actual life."[cxxxi] As maintained by ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics, this "concrete difference" important to most believers entails in the final analysis the problem of social acceptability. As perhaps to have been expected, John Dewey came to the rescue of pragmatism as an empirical methodology derivative of Academic skepticism by emphasizing the primacy of science based on the assumption of "warranted assertability" tentatively granted to experimental observation.[cxxxii] Dewey also quoted Peirce to maintain essentially the same position as Russell (prior to Russell) in shifting from probability to a notion of approximations: "'We cannot say that the generality of inductions are probably true, but only that in the long run they approximate the truth." Dewey insisted, this determination is necessarily "a long run issue," implying that empirical methodology is necessarily methodical and cumulative, again suggestive of classical Academic skepticism.[cxxxiii] In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey explained,

There is no knowledge self-guaranteed to be infallible, since all knowledge is the product of special acts of inquiry. Agnosticism as a confession of ignorance about special matters, in the absence of adequate evidence, is not only in place under such circumstances but is an act of intellectual honesty. But such skepticism and agnosticism are particular and depend upon special conditions; they are not wholesale; they do not issue from a generalized impeachment of the adequacy of the organs of knowing to perform their office. . . . Doubt and skepticism attach only to the adequacy of the operations used in achieving the issue which transforms a problematic situation into a settled and resolved one. Instead of being impotent and paralyzing, they are opportunities for bettering concrete methods of inquiry.[cxxxiv] By describing agnosticism (hence skepticism) as an act of intellectual honesty, and by linking it with a methodological pursuit of valid scientific data, Dewey made his Academic bias entirely plain.

Despite his more traditionalist approach to pragmatism, George Santayana actually sided with Dewey against James, rejecting as "the worst of dogmas" the indiscriminate suspension of judgment obliged by the "radical" version of skepticism which he traced to the endless "forensic" debate of Greek sophists. Instead, he preferred the "animal faith" he found in Academic skepticism based on the judgment of probability as a "rational instinct":

Without identifying either Arcesilaus or Carneades by name as "sceptics of the academy," Santayana put himself in their camp rather than that of the Pyrrhonians, as might otherwise have been expected based on his Catholic predilections. The title of his book, Scepticism and Animal Faith would suggest that Santayana wanted to explore the polarity between Greek philosophy and Christian religion, but instead he was engaged in a private joke with his educated readers willing to follow his argument to the very end: skepticism referred to Pyrrhonian disbelief, while animal faith referred to the Academic pursuit of empirical probability as an act of confidence in man's ability to probe the universe. Not unexpectedly, the exponential growth of skepticism through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the proposal of various theoretical models that were skeptical in their initial formulation but that rather quickly evolved into orthodox belief systems in their own right. The two most obvious examples of this tendency have been the Marxist and Freudian ideologies whose more or less valid foundationalist assumptions eventually led to their status as dogmatic ideologies no less vulnerable to orthodoxy than Christianity had been during the previous two millenia. Thus the admirable prescience of Marx's famous remark that he himself was not a Marxist, implying that he did not want to consecrate his necessarily tenuous findings as a theoretical system impervious to further refinement. The same insight could have been applied to evolutionary doctrine by Darwin, the notion of relativity proposed by Einstein, and the various phenomenologies, positivist and structuralist theories, almost all of which began with skepticism and then degenerated into their own versions of dogma. Nevertheless, the kernal of skepticism was important to their formulation, so the ideas of such figures as Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Boas, Sartre, and many others, reinforced the general skeptical trends acceptable to almost the entire intellectual community.

Marxist skepticism, for example, entails the assumption that presumably objective "truths" are necessarily colored by the social bias of those who declare them. One cannot sift the validity of ideas proposed by others without taking into account the economic winners and losers implicit in the acceptance of these ideas. Cicero's laconic question, cui bono? ("To whom the good?" "Who benefits?" or, more to the point, "Who cashes in?") thus expands to challenge group assumptions ultimately rooted in class conflict and the dynamics of exploitation with the more inclusive question: "Whose class interests does this express?" Unless social bias is accounted for, Marxists argue, it will necessarily contaminate the objective validity of the truths we are expected to accept. Things observed by the bourgeois mind will necessarily differ, if ever so slightly, from things observed by the victims of bourgeois exploitation. Likewise, Freudian skepticism entails the assumption that presumably objective "truths" necessarily integrate conscious and unconscious impulses, the latter including both the libido and major portions of the superego as well as primary-process dynamics of thinking almost entirely at odds with the traditional principles of logic. Unless this latent dimension of consciousness is accounted for, it can also contaminate the objective validity of truths we are expected to accept. For repressed unconscious needs in one area of experience are too easily displaced to warp objectivity in another for us to take for granted our presumably unbiased opinion of the truth as being altogether valid.

As demonstrated by both Marxism and psychoanalysis, the skeptical rejection of presumably unassailable truths therefore extends beyond epistemological considerations alone as emphasized, for example, by Hume and Russell, to include social status, class interest, moral compulsion, and even one's sense of sexual adequacy. The obvious complementary relationship between Marxist and Freudian skeptical criteria--the first primarily based on social relationships and the second primarily based on conscious dynamics--has thus encouraged efforts to obtain their synthesis, and such figures as Adorno, Erikson, Fromm, Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown, have thrived in the populated no-man's land between these two ideologies by expanding this synthesis to almost universal proportions. As to be expected of skeptics of the Academic "syndrome," however tenuous the linkage, they even went so far as to treat orthodox Christianity as social pathology. Fromm, for example, explained:

Fromm's reference to intimidation, authorities, and the masses bears obvious Marxist connotations, while his reference to psychic dependence, infantile docility, induced satisfaction, and a son's choice between obedient and rebellious behavior bears no less obvious Freudian connotations. Religion justifies this seemingly flamboyant diagnostic synthesis, Fromm argued, because of its guaranteed fantasy satisfaction:

This is not to say that whatever illusions linked with orthodox religion were entirely abandoned during the first half of the twentieth century. Barth, Bergson, Bradley, Buber, Collingwood, Croce, Jaspers, Koestler, Marcel, Maritain, and Whitehead, among many others, persisted in advocating religious belief, but their defense of Christianity seems to have been a rear-guard effort, and a climate of doubt reminiscent of the Ages of Pericles and Cicero was paramount among the educated classes through the middle of the twentieth century.

Before turning to the contemporary shift in skeptical theory since the 1960s, I want to deal specifically with literature, for, like metaphysics, our literary tradition emerged during the Renaissance, as it had earlier in Greek drama, as a major battlefield between belief and skepticism. Whereas metaphysics contextualized the pursuit of an acceptable teleology to mediate God's authority in the physical universe, literature took on the more immediate task of giving skepticism enough of a voice to be exposed and punished--often enough by death--for excesses unacceptable to the orthodox mind. Literature thus tended to vilify skepticism in its depiction of tricky, unsympathetic characters, but it also drew upon the virtuosity of skepticism, typically, as explained by Cleanth Brooks, through its use of irony--saying something different from what was implied to suggest the rejection of received truths at their face value. Here poets themselves tested the perimeter of orthodox belief, relying upon their figurative audacity to preserve them from plummeting into social ostracism.[cxxxviii] Like metaphysics, literature evolved over the past four centuries in the sense that its conflict between belief and skepticism advanced from one skirmish to the next, always taking into account the gains and losses of earlier skirmishes as they squared off to engage each other once again. The American Revolution provides an apt analogy, having shifted from Boston to New York, then having spread among dozens of battlefields before culminating at Yorktown. Different troops, different generals, and different engagements necessarily yielded different results, but always with the same basic choice at stake. And thus the struggle between belief and skepticism in the history of literature central to the western tradition, but with no Yorktown in sight yet. Belief has necessarily predominated in literature, since the public inevitably demands its victory at the expense of hard-core Academic skepticism. However, authors with intellectual aspirations have necessarily shared in current intellectual trends by taking their readers to the very brink of uncompromising skepticism. And though the quality of literature necessarily entails numerous variables irrelevant to the choice between belief and skepticism, as a general rule our best and most revered works of literature seem to have been imbued with the issue of skepticism.

As in classical literature, the easiest and most obvious treatment of skepticism since the Renaissance has been to ridicule or vilify it. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (like Goethe's Faust) was a skeptic who surfeited himself on knowledge, and the villains of the Elizabethan stage were almost always despicable Machiavellians whose amorality could be traced to their skepticism on the assumption that if nothing were exactly true, nothing was exactly ethical. Shakespeare's major tragic villains--Iago, Richard III, Claudius, Edmund, Goneril, and Regan--were likewise clearly skeptics, as was Cassius, whose subject in real life, one of Caesar's assassins, turns out, appropriately enough, to have been an ally of Cicero, who, we recall, had dedicated De Natura Deorum to Brutus. Similarly, the ability of Falstaff and Shakespeare's clowns to turn the truth on its head identified them as skeptics. But Shakespeare also cast skepticism in a more sympathetic light in his depiction of his most profound tragic protagonists--Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth--all of whom suffered from an excess of skepticism--especially Hamlet, who confessed in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy his uncertainty that an afterlife exists. His fear that it might in fact await him led to his decision to forego committing suicide. However, by the end of the play Hamlet exhorted Horatio to avoid suicide by declaring, "Absent thee from felicity a while,"--felicity, no less--suggesting an entirely different viewpoint, that no hell exists as the inevitable destination of those who take their own lives. Hamlet's final line, "The rest is silence" may be construed as a pun that implies the same--a fate after death devoid of language, hence existence itself, as might have been implied by Hamlet's extended dialogue with the gravedigger in the previous scene in which they joked about death for over two hundred lines with no reference whatseover to any kind of an afterlife. Quite the contrary, the gravedigger spoke of returning to dust (5.1.214), obviously alluding to passages in both Genesis (3.19) and Ecclesiastes (3.20) in which the possibility of an afterlife was denied. Then again, Shakespeare sandwiched between his graveyard dialogue and Hamlet's final words his comment at the very beginning of the final scene, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Thus the tortuous choice presented itself between Christian eschatology and its skeptical rejection, and there is no clear indication that Shakespeare was able to declare his preference while writing Hamlet. Apparently, he was first exposed to the influence of Montaigne at the time, and it seems he might have sought to use Montaigne's skepticism to articulate his doubts--doubts even more profound than those of Montaigne.[cxxxix] For the play takes skepticism to its very limit through the problematic implications of its final outcome. As a contemporary of Shakespeare, John Donne toyed with skepticism through his bizarre use of metaphysical conceits to compare ordinary experience with the divine. Similarly, Milton's Satan was entirely skeptical as he made his arguments to lure Eve to eat fruit of the tree of knowledge. In contrast, Dryden wrote both "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther" to explain the merits of Pyrrhonian skepticism, almost as if he were drawing upon it to refute Milton's broad-stroke rejection of skepticism in his depiction of Satan.[cxl] A better skepticism was possible, Dryden implied, through the pursuit of a faith, "not built on disquisitions vain," but limited to "things few and plain" that would be conducive to "common quiet [as] mankind's concern."[cxli] As a Catholic, Pope proposed a deistic theory of the universe in "Essay on Man" to reaffirm God's role in its design, though Bolingbroke, who had inspired his effort, seems to have wanted to diminish God's role as much as possible. Swift used Gulliver's Travels not to argue theology, but to depict the banality of a godless society devoid of Christian faith. A century later, Blake took a more positive approach by capturing in poetry his religious vision that emphasized the virtues of humble belief entirely at odds with skepticism. Most of the other romantic poets found their compromise with skepticism by emphasizing their personal inspiration as the ultimate truth at the root of their poetry. Wordsworth rejected orthodox dogma by using Lockean associational psychology to retrieve his childhood memories, and Coleridge did so by cultivating a theory of the imagination as a product of the intellect as explained by Kant; and Shelley by pursuing Platonic abstractions presumably expressive of his radical individuality.

Hostile to theory, Keats settled for turning skepticism against itself. Just as Coleridge emphasized the suspension of disbelief as opposed to the suspension of assent featured by Academic skeptics, Keats advocated the "negative capability" which occurs when one is comfortable with "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Here Keats very decidedly played the Pyrrhonian skeptic hostile to methodological inquiry. In his narrative poem, "Lamia," Keats vilified Apollonius as an aged sophist devoid of poetic inspiration who commits himself to the pursuit of the truth even if it meant the destruction of both Lycius (with whom Keats identified) and Lamia, the woman he loves, who had been transmogrified from a snake into a beautiful temptress eager to seduce him into marriage. Obviously, Lamia plays the role of artistic inspiration verging on Satanic excess, while Apollonius makes harsh empirical demands typical of Academic skepticism that can only terminate Lamia's inspiration. Here, ironically, Keats seems to have inverted the Biblical archetype that linked the snake with sexual temptation identified as "knowledge" by using it to depict poetic creativity threatened by Greek skepticism, presumably a more dangerous versionof knowledge. Lycius is eager to sin--in marriage with Lamia, as if marriage itself were the original transgression rather than its punishment, as implied in Genesis--but vindictive truth prevents its occurrence, thus killing both.

Tennyson and Browning's poetry was fraught with doubts, in response to which Arnold's poetry seems to have been almost shrill in its defense of belief while the sea of faith was continuing to recede. Eliot and Hardy's fiction situated their characters in a hostile secular universe, and Conrad's celebrated short novel, The Heart of Darkness, more specifically demonstrated the failure of nerve typical of Pyrrhonian skepticism that led its narrator, Marlow, to reject his earlier commitment to veracity ("You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie") in favor of the lie needed to sustain the blissful ignorance of Kurtz's fiancee (that her name had been Kurtz's last word before he died), thereby linking her ignorance to the imperialistic crimes committed on her behalf. George Bernard Shaw's characters such as George Tanner and Andrew Undershaft were somewhat superficial--even boyant--in their skepticism, so there should be no doubt that their stories were told as a vehicle to articulate this skepticism.

Flaubert offered a sympathetic portrait of Madame Bovary as a skeptical heroine brought to her destruction by provincial society for her misguided effort to escape its stultification. Flaubert totally identified with his heroine, but he let her pay the full terrible price for her unwillingness to accept the conventional standards of her neighbors. With less ambivalence, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky both wrote morality novels that favored belief at the expense of skepticism. In War and Peace, for example, Prince Andrei was described as a skeptic who only finds his faith when he dies, as opposed to Pierre, who has discovered his faith much earlier. Likewise, Anna Karenina Anna destroys herself because she neglects conventional morality, whereas Levin prospers resulting from his acceptance of this morality. In Crime and Punishment, the same Manichaean choice takes place between Svidrigaylov and Raskolnikov, and in The Brothers Karamazov between Ivan and Alyosha. On the other hand, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg's characters seem numb, secularized, and disabused of their previous generations' most cherished illusions. A few decades later, Sartre's narrator in Nausea has trouble sifting the truth of his trivial daily experience, while Meursault in Camus's The Stranger learns from his gratuitous act of homicide that he can only be confident of two truths--that he lives this moment and that he will eventually die. A decade later, the truth of the Theater of the Absurd was that Godot [God?] isn't ever going to arrive and that life totally lacks any coherent meaning. Almost inevitably, the Eurocentric fiction with "high" cultural aspirations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries featured the choice between belief and skepticism, as opposed to the popular literature which mostly limited itself to Manichaean victory of unexamined virtue at the expense of the unexamined bad. Of course there was a far bigger market for this popular literature, but those who mattered--the intellectuals--were looking elsewhere.

As an American belatedly infected by romantic philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson rejected conventional belief by emphasizing his own belief system based on radical individuality--the sheer potential of personal genius to be found in those with the courage to assert themselves. "Whoso would be a man must be a noncomformist," he insisted, for "if I know your sect, I anticipate your argument." To be predictably orthodox was not to be able to know. When asked as a child to adhere to the doctrines of the church, he had rejected them, arguing, "But if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil," for, as he later explained, "No law can be sacred to me but my own nature."[cxlii] In reaction against Emerson's version of transcendentalism, Hawthorne and Melville reaffirmed the Manichaean standards of Christian orthodoxy by vilifying Chillingworth, Jaffrey Pyncheon, Hollingsworth, and Captain Ahab's pursuit of unconventional goals. Even more a Devil's child than Emerson, Mark Twain made a virtue of skepticism in his depiction of the Connecticut Yankee and Huck Finn ("All right, then, I'll go to hell," Huck declared when he chose to try to save Jim from slavery). Mark Twain's skepticism continued to mount in his increasingly angry iconoclastic essays in his later years. The fiction of Dreiser, Sinclair, Lewis, Faulkner, and Steinbeck applied skepticism to social issues as well, as did the plays of O'Neill and Arthur Miller. If a national laureateship could be bestowed for skepticism, our laureates would have advanced from Emerson to Twain and then H.L. Mencken, who joyously excoriated orthodox belief throughout most of his career, followed, perhaps, by Mailer or Vidal, both of whom are now growing old--Vidal still in possession of his iconoclastic edge, Mailer unfortunately not. Appropriately, Twain wrote "Advice to Youth" and "On the Decay of the Art of Lying," in 1882, the year Emerson died; Mencken co-authored Men Versus the Man in 1910, the year Twain died; and Mailer wrote "The White Negro" in 1957, the year after Mencken died.

Emily Dickinson stubbornly adhered to orthodox Christian belief, yet skepticism incessantly crept into her best poems as a philosophy to be denied. Such figures as Irving Babbitt and T.S. Eliot sought to recover traditional belief as the best antidote to skepticism, while others such as Yeats and D.H. Lawrence pursued belief on a more idiosyncratic basis, and again with great success, Yeats by inventing his own cosmology, Lawrence by merging belief with sexual passion. Still later, as a Catholic novelist Graham Greene succeeded in turning skepticism on its head, for example in Brighton Rock by treating the vicious teenage murderer, Pinkie, as a hero capable of belief, as opposed to his righteous pursuer, Ida, whose virtue is contaminated by her secular disbelief.

However, the tide of skepticism was steadily rising even in literature through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the nineteen-sixties, such authors as Bellow, Pyncheon, Nabokov, Roth, Barth, Vonnegut, and Burroughs were telling stories of heroes seeking to fulfill themselves in for the most part a very godless universe. Of course these authors did not specifically advocate skepticism, but orthodox belief was for the most part irrelevant to their stories of human fallibility. Belief continued to play a role, but more often than not it was secularized in the pursuit of closure through insight acceptable to sophisticated readers. Christian doctrine might have been passe, but other versions of consolation were sought to replace it. John Updike resisted this secularization, and with extraordinary effectiveness in his most successful novel, Rabbit Run, the story of Harry Angstrom, a confused and highly unorthodox young Christian believer whose irresponsibility is rightfully despised by the two women in his life, both of whom are identified as skeptics. Unable to fit his needs to theirs, Harry keeps running, both irresponsible and potentially superior in spiritual attainment. However, Updike's depiction of Harry Angstrom was unique in 1960, the year his novel was published. The authors who simply vilified skepticism orminimized its role as much as possible, as had been typical of fiction a hundred years or more earlier, have primarily addressed themselves to popular audiences eager to reject skepticism without engaging it, without confronting its fullest implications except in the guise of literary experience.

As perhaps to be expected, the advancement of science and empirical philosophy since the sixteenth century has merely scattered orthodox belief in a variety of unpredictable directions without having completely diminished its appeal. If what seems an army of distinguished scholars and intellectuals has relentlessly attacked religion, the pursuit of belief has simply dispersed to regroup elsewhere on safer grounds. Also, new "truths" have emerged that have been less vulnerable to refutation. Aestheticism and diversionary excursions in scientism have afforded new and more dazzling substitute belief systems, as have Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and all the rest of the gleaming isms one can think of. As an empty shibboleth almost totally devoid of meaning, Freedom itself (with a capital F) has become a belief system, as have liberalism, conservatism, justice, cultural identity, and the guarantee of an education devoid of knowledge. Even spectator sports has become a belief system--perhaps the most primitive of all.

Even more dangerous varieties of belief have also materialized. By the end of the nineteenth century, for example, fascism emerged as an extraordinarily virulent mixture of nationalism and warmed-over religion that augmented the sense of one's special (or "chosen") status (French, Italian, German, Serb, Jewish, etc.) pitted against presumably inferior but threatening outsiders. Sorel, Barres, Maurras, Schoenerer, Lueger, and, yes, Herzl, anticipated Mussolini, Hitler, and the myriad tin-pot patriots since World War II who have been able and willing to invest their neo-fascistic ultra-nationalism with something akin to religious fanaticism in its aversion to skepticism.[cxliii] Of course fascism dominant at the beginning of our century was discredited with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini during World War II, and well enough that few of today's sanitized fascists would accept their ethno-religious elitism and pursuit of nationalist conflict at the expense of others. Nevertheless, fascist belief systems thrive at present, if without identifying themselves as such, in large part because of social and economic decline throughout the second and third worlds over the last three decades. All that is needed is half-baked theories of national victimization linked with collective mythologies that feature the special heritage of the nations so victimized. Voila, belief has been harnessed once again in the service of a seemingly meaningful life.

Thus the transcendental temptation persists at virtually every level of human intercourse from religion and politics to astrology, palmistry, and philosophy itself. Indeed, the compulsion to believe has intensified to such an extent that there has been a theoretical effort to resurrect its credentials as an intellectually respectable choice. Toward this end, the empirical (or Academic) version of skepticism has been challenged once again at the most basic level--by questioning one's need, right or ability to question. A brand-new Pyrrhonian version of skepticism has thus emerged to reject the laborious commitment to empiricism that has persisted since the sixteenth century. This is the struggle that has dominated the intellectual world since the 1960s, though the basic conflict has been obscured by a variety of diversionary issues. Few realize quite what is at stake, but our "high" intellectual discourse persistently challenges science, lucidity, and any historic perspective that might promote their attainment in favor of an anti-intellectual cultural perspective that either directly or indirectly makes a virtue of primitive belief systems inclusive of religion and group loyalty, call it patriotism--the enthusiasm of the Hutu, the Serb, and the German skinhead. Belief remains the central issue, and Pyrrhonian apologetics have once again been resurrected to rationalize and justify belief, this time by mustering the intellectual firepower--often extraordinary in its refractory obfuscations--to contextualize and thus rationalize anti-intellectual goals.

The three most important precursors of this current trend in Pyrrhonian skepticism were the two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later writings. All three of these were early-to-mid twentieth-century central-European philosophers (Husserl of German Jewish background, Heidegger of German background, and Wittgenstein of Austrian Jewish background), and they brought remarkable intelligence to bear in the effort to reject skepticism and salvage the intellectual respectability of belief. Prior to World War I, Edmund Husserl established his philosophy of "transcendent immediacy" as a neo-Kantian substitute for empirical science, but only to set the stage for Martin Heidegger's ambitious revision of phenomenology as an elaborate justification of belief--first in existentialist ontology, later in National Socialism, and still later, perhaps through shame, in aestheticism, the decline of western civilization, and what might be described as hybrid Greek etymology. Husserl converted Kant's concept of noumena as a thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), the elusive and presumably unknowable aspect of reality that Kant was willing to concede to skepticism, to the more optimistic challenge, "To the things" (Zu den Sachen!), an expression that also implied "down to business," as if spoken by a businessman who wants to deal right away with hard reality. Things are presumably immediate--there is nothing about them that exceeds or falls short of their conscious reception. Immediate experience (i.e., the direct awareness of the things we perceive, or, more generally, of whatever is before our minds) is the only truth we possess, Husserl asserted, and we grasp its self-validating essence on a synthetic a priori basis that precludes the need for testing empirical data. The merely phenomenal perception of things as explained by psychology is necessarily clouded by indeterminacy, but phenomenological perception of purely imminent things as a "presentation" separate from nature exposes us to the "thing itself," if not to Kant's "thing-in-itself." Science becomes redundant, as does the calculation of probabilities so important to skeptics since the time of Carneades. Philosophy itself becomes a substitute for science that guarantees "apodictic certainty" through its emphasis on the pure consciousness of intuited essences.

Though Husserl felt that skepticism descends to "radical absurdity" when applied indiscriminately (i.e., with total consistency), he also felt, like Kant, that it could play a useful limited role in helping to expose one to the phenomenological implications of experience that might otherwise seem devoid of philosophical implications. He accordingly borrowed ancient skepticism's term epoche (the suspension of judgment) to describe the process of "bracketing" whereby one suspends one's belief in the existence of an object or phenomenon as something one had earlier understood on a conventional, hence distorted, basis. Reexamined, the idea or phenomenon may be appreciated for its "pure immanence" typical of immediate experience. Thus, skepticism became an instrument for belief at least to the extent that it compelled the acceptance of this immanent experience as being superior to the empirical data that obliges scientific verification. Husserl was apparently indifferent to religion, but he did grant God's role its primacy as "the ideal representative of absolute knowledge" whose immanence that "transcends the world" can only be grasped via "intuitive manifestations to which theorizing thought can adjust itself."[cxliv] It may be acknowledged that Husserl played down the religious aspect of the phenomenology he was proposing, but the fact remains that he coupled his attack on science and unconstrained skepticism with an approach that at least implied, or conceded, the defense of religion, thus putting him with Kant and Hegel in the camp of the Pyrrhonian skeptics. The more elaborate uses of belief came later with the innovations of Heidegger, but what should be emphasized here is that it was Husserl who invented phenomenology as a "science" of a priori experience that is believable and immune to the systematic and overriding reliance upon skepticism typical of the empirical sciences.

Martin Heidegger, a protege of Husserl during the 1920s, published in 1927 his monumental contribution to metaphysics, Being and Time, in which he advanced from sheer immediacy (Husserl's "things themselves") to the more focussed ontological issue of human existence (or "being"), which Heidegger chose to describe as Dasein:

Central to Heidegger's approach was his confidence that this presumably more basic awareness entails, as explained by Richard Wolin, an "embodied subjectivity," whose "Being-in-the world" is "subject to the prescientific forestructure of practical and social relations."[cxlvi] In other words, Dasein comprises an a priori experiential substratum which gives simple universally shared ideas primacy over science, logic, epistemology, etc., since it extends the external dynamics of "thing-ness to consciousness itself. In effect, it merges things themselves as featured by Husserl with their conscious apprehension:

On one hand, "Dasein is an entity whose Being has the determinate character of existence," but, on the other, "Dasein also possesses, as constitutive for its understanding of existence--an understanding of the Being of all entities of a character other than its own" (p. 34). By thus expanding the concept of Dasein, Heidegger was able to propose an enormous variety of existential modalities relevant to human consciousness--care (Sorge), Being-with (Mitsein), everydayness (Alltaglichkeit), facticity (Faktizitat), thrown-togetherness (Geworfenheit), "they" (das Man), decisiveness (Entschlossenheit), historicity (Historizitat), the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens), etc. Moreover, he could elaborate upon the interaction among these modalities with sufficient ingenuity to give metaphysics the vitality of poetry.

Apropos to the issue of skepticism, the most important of Heidegger's concepts was aletheia, the state of being that is unhidden or readily discovered. Heidegger argued, contrary to the most basic tenets of skepticism, that the truth almost inevitably presents itself in its manifest disclosedness--i.e., plain and exactly what meets the eye (or senses)--and thus affords an immediate accessibility to individual consciousness characterized by aletheia. As Protagoras had first suggested, what we see is what we get--essence is as essence seems. "We must presuppose the truth," Heidegger maintained, since its disclosedness "belongs to Dasein's essential thrownness into the world" (p. 271). Noien, the "perception of the simplest determinate which entities as such may possess," necessarily entails aletheia, since it "can never cover up; it can never be false" (Being and Time, p. 57). In contrast, Being false (pseudesthai) "amounts to deceiving in the sense of covering up [verdecken]: putting something in front of something (in such a way as to let it be seen) and thereby passing it off as something which it is not" (p. 57--italics in the original). To be noticed here is Heidegger's categorical assumption that "covering up" derives from effort on the part of an individual, not from the unavoidable bias of human consciousness emphasized by skeptics in both the Pyrrhonian and Academic traditions. Intentional lying takes place, Heidegger seems to have implied, rather than ignorance or functional indeterminacy resulting from biological factors such as sound wave frequencies too high for human ears, spatial gaps too small to be seen by the human eye, ideas too complex to be remembered, and so forth. We get things wrong only because we make the choice to get things wrong, not because of intractable cognitive difficulties.[cxlvii]

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1935, Heidegger once again discussed aletheia as appearance, and once again he envisaged it with an emphasis on visual perceptibility:

The truth is obvious and stands before us naked to behold in its immediacy. However, Heidegger explained, aletheia should not be translated from Greek as if it refers to the simple truth, but should be understood based on its Greek usage that gives it independent status as being's apprehended manifestation rather than being itself:

The truth thus derives from the experience of disclosure and constitutes an a priori self-divulgence even more basic than Dasein's existential modalities. Heidegger also seems to have contrasted aletheia to both logic and "correctness," intellectual virtues usually linked with the pursuit of the truth (pp. 120, 190). But in his opinion the major impediment to aletheia remained pseudesthai, the act of conceptual distortion:

In this particular context, Heidegegger seems to have conceded the existence of "entities of being that are forever concealing themselves," exactly the stuff of skepticism, but he argued in the same context that science as an effort to "expose" (i.e., investigate) these entities bears no impact on destiny, undoubtedly linked with the political objectives of National Socialism to which he sought to associate himself at the time. In retrospect, Heidegger's aversion to skepticism and his doubts about science were entirely predictable, since his primary tendency throughout his career as a philosopher was as an arch-enthusiast committed to finding, indeed building, a dogma he could fully believe in. Belief was his pursuit and disbelief his aversion as he boldly shifted from one conceptual system to another. His theoretical advance from his phenomenology of the nineteen-twenties to aestheticism and etymological historicism subsequent to his year of intense political activism as a Nazi has often been described as his Kehre (or "turning"), but in fact apostasy characterized his entire career, as amply demonstrated in the recent studies of Hugo Ott, Victor Farias, Richard Wolin, and many others. Heidegger actually began his university career as a brilliant student of Catholic theology, then shifted to his own version of Protestant theology and a brief flirtation with mathematics, followed by phenomenology, Nazi ideology, and finally the aestheticism and etymological historicism that characterized his books and articles in his later years.

In a 1919 letter to his friend and teacher, Engelbert Krebs, Heidegger had justified his decision to abandon his Catholic faith by arguing that he felt he could serve God more effectively as a philosopher: Epistemological insights applied to the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable for me--but not Christianity per se or metaphysics, the latter albeit in a new sense. . . . I believe that I have an inner calling for philosophy, and that by answering the call through research and teaching I am doing everything in my power to further the spiritual life of man--that and only that--thereby justifying my life and work in the sight of God. (Ott, pp. 106-7)

As Heidegger later explained in his habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus, he sought not to abandon religion, but to focus his religious studies on the pursuit of an adequate "metaphysical-theological interpretation of consciousness" (pp. 112-13) By the 1930s, however, Heidegger was often scathing in his attacks upon organized religion. According to Heinrich Buhr, Heidegger argued, for example, at the 1933 academic camp he established in Todnauberg for the purposes of indoctrinating Freiburg students into Germany's new order, that Christ was not the son of God and that the world was not created and sustained by a God. This misconception, Heidegger explained (according to Buhr), was "the source of that false feeling of comfort and security, founded on subjective ideas about the world that are untrue compared with the great noble awareness of the insecurity of 'existence'" (Ott, p. 227--italics in the original). The insecurity of existence a great noble awareness, indeed! Heidegger's pursuit of ontology earlier in his career seems as much as anything to have been to deny the insecurity of existence usually to be expected in a godless universe. Nevertheless, at this stage Heidegger reversed himself to justify his shift in allegiance. As late as his 1942/43 Parmenides lecture, Heidegger maintained that the "Romish character of the truth" necessarily "blocked" aletheia: The 'imperial'power [of Catholicism] appears in the guise of the curial power wielded by the papal curia in Rome. The pope's dominion is likewise founded on the power to command. Command is of the essence of Church dogma. Consequently the latter reckons equally with what is 'true' in the 'true believer' and with what is 'false' in the 'heretic' or 'unbeliever.' The Spanish Inquisition is one embodiment of the Roman-curial imperium. (Ott, p. 82)

Here Heidegger's critique of Catholic totalitarianism would seem to have been even more obviously applicable to National Socialism, since its concentration camps turned out to be at least as repressive as the Spanish Inquisition. But just as the pursuit of ontology encouraged Heidegger's abandonment of Christianity for phenomenology, the existential modalities of "care," the "call of conscience," and especially "historicity" encouraged his advancement from phenomenology to the politics of National Socialism. When Karl Lowith, a former student of Jewish parentage suggested to Heidegger that "it was his belief that Heidegger's support for National Socialism lay in the very nature of his philosophy," Heidegger readily agreed, explaining "that his concept of 'historicity' furnished the basis for his political 'service' (Ott, p. 134).

Another of Heidegger's students, Herbert Marcuse, later described Heidegger's recruitment to the Nazi cause as a "self-abasement . . . that is without equal in the whole of intellectual history" (Ott, p. 166), but the more cautious opinion of Karl Jaspers, an estranged friend of Heidegger, should also be acknowledged, ". . . that Heidegger was unpolitical by nature, and that the special brand of National Socialism he concocted for himself had precious little to do with the real thing" (Ott, p. 339). As for Heidegger himself when Germany's new order was established in the early thirties, his conversion to the Nazi faith--and faith it was in the guise of patriotism--was a source of enormous enthusiasm. As Heidegger explained in his capacity as Rector of the University of Freiburg at the beginning of the 1933/34 winter semester:

Ideas in and of themselves no longer mattered, Heidegger declared, not that they had played a major role when Heidegger had devoted his attention first to Catholic dogma and then phenomenology in order to establish the a priori validity of truths anterior to issues important to such contemporary philosophers as Russell, Moore, Dewey, and Santayana. As for ontology, Heidegger actually contorted its significance into the recognition of the Fuhrer's status as Germany's salvation, the "he alone" that could be described as "the German reality." Resulting from his effort to take the lead in reorganizing German universities to fit the new order, Heidegger further elaborated this bizarre caricature of metaphysics in his Leipzig proclamation of 11 November 1933, which deserves to be quoted at length:

We have renounced the idolization of groundless and powerless thinking. We see the demise of the philosophy that was subservient to it. Of this we are certain: that the clear hardness and workmanlike assurance of an unyielding, simple questioning of the essence of Being is now coming back. The primordial courage either to grow or to perish in the encounter with the entities of being is the innermost motive of the inquiry conducted by an ethnic and national science. . . . And so we declare, we who are in future to be entrusted with the safekeeping of the will-to-knowledge of our nation, that the National Socialist revolution is not simply the assumption of a power already present in the State by another party that has grown large enough to wield it: this revolution brings with it the total transformation of our German being. From now on all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Of this we are certain: when the will to answer for oneself becomes the law by which nations coexist, then every nation can and must become the instructor of every other nation in the riches and power of all the great deeds and works of human existence. The act of choice that the German nation now has to perform--that event in itself, regardless of the outcome--is the strongest possible manifestation of the new German reality of the National Socialist State . . . the Fuhrer has brought this will to its full awakening throughout the nation, and forged it into a single mighty resolve. No man can stand aside on the day when that will is made manifest. Heil Hitler! (Ott, p. 205--italics in the original) Of course there were others who signed this proclamation, and some of these might have had a hand in drafting it, but its use of metaphysical constructions--for example its references to an "essence of being," "entities of being," a hyphenated "will-to-knowledge," and the "event in itself"--seem typically Heideggerian, though grotesquely perverted to justify political ends. Heidegger's more inclusive references to "the clear hardness and workmanlike assurance of an unyielding, simple questioning of the essence of Being," and to "the primordial courage either to grow or to perish in the encounter with the entities of being" seem particularly salient as fascist vulgarizations of his earlier phenomenology.

Ironically, Heidegger's role as a major philosopher supportive of the Nazi movement was terminated by the Nazis, not by Heidegger himself, contrary to his arguments when he strove to exculpate himself in the decades that followed World War II. In a crucial internal memo fatal to Heidegger's career as a top-echelon Nazi in Germany's educational establishment, Erich Haensch, a former colleague at Marburg University, described him as "one of the biggest scatterbrains and most eccentric cranks we have in our university system." Haensch argued that Heidegger's "hairsplitting distinctions" bore a Talmudic quality more acceptable to Jews than anybody else, that his thinking featured "a special sort of sophistry, so extreme as to border on the pathological," and that it betrayed "the wanderings of a schizophrenic mind" whose appeal to students would put German universities "in the grip of an epidemic intellectual sickness, a kind of mass psychosis" (Ott, p. 257). So it was because of his philosophical style as well as the animosity he provoked among colleagues by his exaggerated pursuit of Nazi aims that Heidegger was quickly shunted aside by the Nazi party. In his disappointment he turned to aestheticism and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, committing himself to his new pursuit once again with unadulterated enthusiasm. Inventing hybrid Graeco-Teutonic etymological constructions, he calculated on a fresh basis the modern significance of Plato and Aristotle as well as Heraclitus, Parmenides and their Eleatic contemporaries. But his omissions were fully as important as his inclusions, for he divested Heraclitus's theory of change of its skeptical aspect to give it antithetical parity with Parmenides's theory of permanence, and, more important, he entirely neglected such figures as Protagoras, Pyrrho, Carneades, Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and all the rest of the ancient philosophers specificially linked with the skeptical movement. Belief remained the most basic item on his agenda, and the ancient apostles of disbelief he chose to ignore.

According to both Ott and Gadamer (the latter one of Heidegger's more prominent disciples, along with Sartre, Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt), Heidegger continued to be haunted by his early Catholicism throughout his entire career.[cl] He accordingly lived and died a brilliant lapsed Catholic, and his substitute excursions in philosophy resulted from his effort to justify his will-to-belief in terms he himself could fully accept. However, I would want to add that he thoroughly enjoyed the risk of the chase. Like Nietzsche, he was a poet-philosopher, a metaphysical gambler who at one Faustian, devastatingly self-destructive juncture in his career sought to parlay his iconoclastic role into the status of philosopher-king--at least a philosopher-czar of his nation's universities. And he failed. By himself, Heidegger did not fit the profile of a Pyrrhonian skeptic who exaggerates the issue of doubt to justify unexamined belief, but as a protege of Husserl he did. Husserl doubted, if ever so slightly, but his use of doubt in the bracketing of immediate experience was sufficient to catalyze Heidegger's exaggeration of belief as aletheia, permitting his use of Dasein to expand immediate experience in excess of anything anticipated by Husserl. As a result, the two philosophers--according to many, the two most important in twentieth century continental Europe as opposed to Russell's dominance of the Anglo-American tradition--may be understood to have proposed their complementary versions of phenomenology as an integrated whole with a before and an after. Husserl's rejection of skepticism except for bracketing as a limited subordinate function--comparable to the function it had been granted by Kant--unleashed Heidegger's extravagant pursuit of belief to the edge of Dasein and beyond. To this extent Husserl's use of skepticism followed by Heidegger's creativity in his quest for an ontology contingent upon this use of skepticism put the two of them in the Pyrrhonian camp.

The third major precursor of our current renaissance of belief was Ludwig Wittgenstein, a protege of Russell whose first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, extended the essentially Academic implications of Russell's philosophy by proposing a so-called picture theory of meaning that explained the structure, or grammar, of sentences as a representational tool equivalent to the denotative significance of words. Not much skepticism was in evidence in this initial offering by Wittgenstein. However, in Philosophical Investigations, published after his death in 1953, Wittgenstein reverted to a Pyrrhonian approach by shifting his emphasis to the conventional aspect of language--its use as a social instrument as opposed to its mimetic (or pictorial) accuracy. If the meaning of a word is the sum total of its possible uses, Wittgenstein argued, meaning should be pegged to the use of words for whatever "language-game" [Sprachspiel] happens to be in play. We cannot escape language, and language inevitably expresses social custom, once again making room for religion as one particular variety of the language game. In other words, we have no access to reality beyond the truths we express with words, and religion is no more limited than any other discourse in its expression of its particular variety of truths, so religion must be granted its full parity with science and philosophy as one type of language-game shared by a significant portion of the language community. This linkage with religion is not specifically declared in Philosophical Investigations, nor elsewhere in Wittgenstein's publications, but its possibility cannot be overruled, and, indeed, Wittgenstein's religious predilections become obvious in his recurring casual discussion of religious matters with Paul Engelmann in Engelmann's brief collection, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein With a Memoir.[cli] One speculates that the intensification of Wittgenstein's interest in religion helped to influence the transition from his emphasis upon "picture grammar" in his first book to his emphasis upon the social aspects of language in his second. But whatever the connection, Wittgenstein more or less shifted his perspective from Academic to Pyrrhonian concerns by downplaying the representational accuracy of language in favor of its social expressiveness, beyond which lurks the final Pyrrhonian obligations of custom and convention.

Significantly, there is little discussion of skepticism by Wittgenstein in his two major books, so his very limited speculation may be observed to serve the purpose of skepticism without his having been fully aware of his ideas or his intentions. His one reference to the issue toward the end of Tractatus, where it assumes disproportionate importance, actually puts into play disjointed sorites in order to subordinate its assumptions to some kind of a mystical alternative:

Doubt can be justified only where there is an answer? Only where something can be said? Both of these assumptions impose serious limitations on the investigation of questions for which answers cannot be immediately adduced. Moreover, one asks what problems Wittgenstein had in mind that are left untouched by science? And does "no questions left" provide a valid answer? This has been a standard argument of orthodox religion since the very beginning. Here argument shifts into the Pyrrhonian mode with the assurance that a problem's solution its vanishing. And is all of this inexpressible, better yet mystical? At this point Pyrrhonian skepticism diverges into outright fideism, submitting the entire sequence to the fideist assumption that unresolvable doubts oblige the acceptance of supernatural mystery. The final sentence of Wittgenstein's book, only a page later, argues, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," and for the reader the most salient application of this principle is the jumble of arguments that culminate in this hoary apothegm. The most basic question, one suspects, is how its author can be revered as an intellectual colossus who actually refuted and reduced to utter irrelevance Bertrand Russell's enormous synthesis among science, language, and philosophy articulated in over fifty books.

As early as 1946, Arthur Koestler anticipated the "spontaneous emergence of a new type of faith which satisfies the 'great sober thirst' of man's spirit."[clii] Fourteen years later, in 1960, Franklin Baumer drew attention to Koestler's prediction to suggest, "that a significant segment of the educated western community may even now be entering still another stage of the sceptical tradition, the chief characteristic of which is some sort of creative combination of scepticism and religion."[cliii] But how, exactly, might there be a creative combination of skepticism and religion? Obviously, through reclaiming Pyrrhonian skepticism as an extension and modification of its sixteenth-century fideistic variety. The best defensive response to the probabilistic emphasis of Academic skepticism has always been its uncompromising Pyrrhonian critique, so what has been needed has been a streamlined modernized Pyrrhonism that would update and secularize its emphasis upon uncertainty in order to put belief back on its feet once again. If others choose to use their Pyrrhonian defense of belief to justify religious fundamentalism, militant nationalism, or total absurdity (e.g., astrology and numerology), that's their business. The task of our latest wave of Pyrrhonian skeptics has been limited to the task of clearing the path to let this happen. "How do we know that we don't know?" Pyrrhonians ask, simply enough, and Academic skeptics have been obliged to grant their caveat. If the Academics have tried to defend their version of disbelief by mentioning the need to draw upon probabilities, the Pyrrhonians have always been able to interrupt by repeating their bland and infuriating question, "But how do we know that we don't know?" Followed by the demand: "So grant us the privilege to believe in what we want." And once again anti-intellectualism has won the argument, quite aside from the extraordinary advances in science and philosophy that have been attained by settling for the Academic emphasis on common sense and the uses of probability.

It was at about the time of the Vietnam war that belief as a healthy and defensible organization of consciousness began to make a major comeback in its conflict with skepticism. The primary advocates of both existentialism (Sartre, Camus, etc.) and logical positivism (Russell, Carnap, etc.) were either dead or growing very old, and, paradoxically, the rejection of nationalism both in the United States and Europe because of the Vietnam war led to the pursuit of intellectual alternatives to the status quo short of identification with the communist movement. Meanwhile the success of nationalism in Israel's 1967 victory led to a resurgence of Zionist patriotism inclusive of orthodox religious observations. This major watershed in the attitude of the Jewish community toward Israel obliged a more relativistic appreciation of alternative cultural belief systems than before, when Jewish intellectuals had played a significant role in promoting transcultural ideals suggestive of a single overarching civilization. Because Jews now wanted to cultivate their unique identity, they could hardly discourage the effort of others in the same direction, and the convergence of opinion that isolated and valorized the customs of a particular society usually emphasized the need for belief, not disbelief. African-Americans were also beginning to find their own cultural identity at about the same time, and everybody suddenly became aware of the exploitive relationship between industrial and non-industrial nations. As a result, a variety of both orthodox and unorthodox cultural revivalist persuasions came to the fore, and intellectuals were less disposed than before to ridicule them, or to try to subordinate them to the historic ideals and accomplishments--science included--that had hitherto played a dominant role in western civilization as a whole. Anything was (or seemed) better than the American imperialism on display in Vietnam, and if Jews, blacks, and oppressed third-world nations could be primarily concerned with their religious and cultural identity, why couldn't others as well? Theoretical justification was needed, but this was no problem. Skeptical theory came to the rescue with a shift in perspective from the Academic skepticism's secular version of philosophy based on cumulative scientific discovery to a Pyrrhonian emphasis on verbal "indeterminacy" that would encourage the toleration of divergent social customs inclusive of these revivalist causes and persuasions. Just as sixteenth century Catholic apologists had resorted to the fideistic version of Pyrrhonian skepticism in order to reject both science and Protestantism, many of today's intellectuals have sought to reject the secular and probabilistic assumptions of science as the latest distillation of Academic skepticism, and have therefore once again shifted into the Pyrrhonian mode to insist upon the ultimately inescapable truth of uncertainty--aporia, or radical contingency--as justification for reverting to simpler and more comfortable versions of belief among those who wish to do so. Once again skepticism has been deployed against itself as an emergency measure in defense of belief.

As America's arguably preeminent contemporary skeptical philosopher, Stanley Cavell began his first and most ambitious book, The Claim of Reason, by exploring the epistemological assumptions of Wittgenstein's theory of language from a more or less semiotic perspective. Cavell focussed his inquiry on Wittgenstein's use of the word criterion, but he also deviated from this focus by introducing a large variety of topics relevant to the skeptical aspect of epistemology as an issue he wanted to link with the fashionable topic of discourse, as he explained at the very beginning of his book: "I have wished to understand philosophy not as a set of problems but as a set of texts."[cliv] By rejecting problems in favor of texts, Cavell implied a more basic shift from the pursuit of empirical knowledge to a peripheral investigation of language--the communication of one's grasp of these problems rather than the problems themselves--once again suggesting the Pyrrhonian emphasis upon social consent, orthodox or not, as a more basic desideratum. Moreover, Cavell's tone and the space he allotted to particular issues clearly put him in the Pyrrhonian camp. This seems obvious, for example, when he declares:

The presumably begin humanistic emphasis upon social acceptability shared by all thus necessarily supercedes the niggling emphasis upon empirical accuracy. Later Cavell explains, "that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for community," that "establishing criteria [as recommended by Wittgenstein] allows us to settle judgments publicly," and that "dissent is not the undoing of consent but a dispute about its content, a dispute within it over whether a present arrangement is faithful to it."[clvi] Again, in all of these remarks Cavell obviously emphasizes the Pyrrhonian goal of social accountability at the expense of empirical exactitude sought by the Academic skeptics. Otherwise, Cavell almost entirely ignores empirical methodology while devoting ample space to the discussion of the social contract as a post-Hobbesian theoretical issue of crucial importance to the topic of skepticism. He mentions Russell only twice in his five-hundred page text despite Russell's close relationship with Wittgenstein, to say nothing of his status as a major skeptical philosopher in the empirical tradition. Cavell also perversely criticizes Dewey's empirical logic as a product of the idealistic tradition, rejects what he describes as "Hume's attack upon the idea of a social contract," and takes pleasure in Wittgenstein's expression of views that would necessarily offend logical positivists of the empirical (i.e., Academic) tradition: . . . although Wittgenstein's immediate audience was the empiricist tradition of philosophy, his views are going, or ought, to offend an empiricist sensibility at every point--which is only to say that this conflict is an intimate one.[clvii] [italics in the original]

As for the dread topic of belief, Cavell resorts to an essentially Wittgensteinian argument:

However one qualifies the effort, "to confront beliefs . . . is not a practice of common sense"--indeed! And what of religious belief? Cavell leaves us with the cryptic remark that "some people are not even able to start a quarrel with God."[clix] Himself presumably included, good boy Stanley! By praising Wittgenstein's effort to use skepticism in order to refute it--essentially the same effort as both Descartes and Kant had already made--Cavell puts himself in the same post-fideistic camp derivative of Pyrrhonian skeptical theory, though he unfortunately neglects to mention Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, or any of the other ancient skeptics. All in all, Cavell's book is maddeningly discursive, but where it comes to a focus there should be no doubt of his anti-empirical bias that puts him squarely in the Pyrrhonian camp. The difference is stark between his version of skepticism and Russell's less than fifty years earlier.

With a similar perspective, a small group of philosophers has emerged over the last decade or so who have been identified by Michael Williams in his recent book, Unnatural Doubts, as belonging to a school of New (or Neo-Humean) Scepticism.[clx] All of the principal figures in this group--Barry Stroud, Thomas Nagel, and P.F. Strawson, as well as Williams himself--emphasize epistemological issues without obviously drawing conclusions supportive of either empiricism or orthodox belief. Nevertheless, their tenacious adherence to the elaboration of epistemological issues at a level of sophistication that exceeds anything attempted by Hume himself suggests the explanation facetiously mentioned by Williams in his first book, Groundless Belief, "that epistemological theories are best seen as offering different ways of reacting to the threat of scepticism."[clxi] In this case, I would suggest, the threat would be specifically of scientific methodology, and the reaction encouraged by New Scepticism is significantly left open to Pyrrhonian alternatives. Barry Stroud, probably the most important of the group, and certainly the most lucid, devotes a considerable portion of The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism to the effort to refute the "verificationism" emphasized by Carnap and Quine, both of whom sought to contextualize science on a philosophical basis. Stroud freely draws upon Kant, Moore, and Descartes in taking this position, as for example when he declares,

We would already see that the Cartesian sceptical conclusion is unreachable [untestable, unprovable, unsurpassable?], and perhaps we would even understand why. But as long as that sceptical conclusion continues to look reachable, perhaps even reasonable, we will have precisely that same reason for rejecting the verifiability principle of meaning.[clxii]

On the other hand, Stroud resorts to tortuous logic to challenge Quine's plain and important insight, "I am only making the point that sceptical doubts are scientific doubts."[clxiii] Stroud concludes his book by circuitously advocating a non-scientific agnosticism:

Religion seems rejected as an alternative answer, but not in any phrase, sentence, or distended verbal combination that might provoke the ire of Christian apologists. Thomas Nagel, on the other hand, is more forthright in his book, The View from Nowhere--if no less circuitous--in declaring his Pyrrhonian religious commitment:

Decartes tried to provide one, together with grounds for certainty that it was true, by proving the existence of the right sort of God. While he was not successful, the problem remains. To go on unambivalently holding our beliefs once this has been recognized requires that we believe that something--we know not what--is true that plays the role in our relation to the world that Descartes thought was played by God. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Descartes' God is a personification of the fit between ourselves and the world for which we have no explanation but which is necessary for thought to yield knowledge.)

I quote the passage in its entirety to let it speak for itself as a "view from somewhere"--specifically, from the effort of religious apologists to draw upon skeptical theory to emphasize the "facts we do not know," the "world for which we have no explanation," and the "something global" that might help to justify our religious belief in the "right sort of God."

The neopragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty is probably more closely aligned than New Skepticism with the original goals of Pyrrhonian skeptical theory in promoting an accommodation of the "custom and convention [that] govern human action." Typical of Pyrrhonism, Rorty has identified himself as an uncompromising antifoundationalist and has challenged the validity of all presumed truths, including the truths of science and religion. Truth, he claims, "is just the name of a property which all true statements share," and any effort to isolate particular truths as the Truth with a capital T is entirely a waste of time. "True sentences are not true because they correspond to reality," he declares, but primarily, as argued by William James, because they enable us to cope, because they happen to be useful. Summarizing James's theory, Rorty argues, "Most of the world is as it is whatever we think about it," but without entailing anything "out there" beyond our perception whose accurate description might be accepted as "the truth about the world."[clxvi] Indeterminacy therefore prevails, Rorty argues, so no absolute system (or "ground") may be confirmed to possess any truth superior to other truths. However, Rorty refrains from specifically attacking religion. Instead, he argues that his version of secularism is "not saying that God does not exist, exactly," but that it "just doubt[s] that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using."[clxvii] It's all a matter of semantics, he implies, beyond which one's beliefs are presumably just as good (or bad) as another's. How different this seems from Russell's earlier categorical insistence, pure and simple: "God and immortality, the central dogma of the Christian religion, find no support in science."[clxviii] As a skeptic, Russell might have added the word yet after support, but yet was implied, and the science Russell described had already persisted four centuries without unearthing any hard scientific data supportive of God and immortality. Hence his seemingly dogmatic commitment to the tenets of Academic skepticism. As a Pyrrhonian skeptic, Rorty leaves room for compromise with religious belief; as an Academic skeptic, Russell left none.

Stanley Fish, who also identifies himself as a neo-pragmatist, explains in his recent article, "Rhetoric," that truth is a "contingent affair," a matter of many truths rather than a single truth, thus embracing "a carnivalesque world of exuberance and possibility" that is primarily justified by its rhetorical persuasiveness rather than the scientific procedures of verification.[clxix] Indeed, this emphasis upon the rhetorical aspect of "truth" seems valid--no less valid than when skepticism was first advanced by the pre-Socratic philosophers and when Carneades and Cicero cultivated rhetoric in order to refine and enhance the quest for truth through competitive argumentation in utramque partem. But here the Pyrrhonian approach predominates through the alternative formulation that if nothing is exactly true, anything goes, and that to win the argument in rhetorical engagement, whatever it takes to do so, is to lay claim to one's portion of the truth. Anything one wants to believe is pretty much in the same ballpark as everything else, and diversity prevails. If no theory is entirely true, and, as a corollary, if no morality is entirely moral, it becomes almost too easy to promote any and all belief systems by ignoring or distorting the logic and factual information that might discourage their acceptance. Facts become useless, and qualitative distinctions no longer apply.

This Pyrrhonian emphasis on indeterminacy--that no truth is more verifiable than another--has, as intended, nullified science, and it has characterized the entire poststructuralist movement over the past thirty years. The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, for example, wrote of the endless displacement of signifiers from one context to another without stopping, as if there is no available closure, no stopping place that might be identified as a basic truth. Jacques Derrida has similarly emphasized contextual "ruptures" and the "freeplay" of meaning devoid of a center, an axiomatic core of meaning that might explain the rest. Roland Barthes devoted his entire career to this level of freeplay, repeatedly venting his outrage at Doxa, by which he described the conventional orthodoxy that might deprive him of his pursuit of semiotic freedom.[clxx] Likewise, Barbara Johnson has emphasized the "instability of the space between sign and referent," and, perhaps most inclusively, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith has emphasized the "radical contingency" of truths relative to their particular contexts of meaning. Since the intentional context of meaning hitherto sought by authors and their readers eludes determinacy, no truly objective standards exist to differentiate one text from another. Qualitative comparisons are thus unavoidably arbitrary, and there is no significant difference in achievement among authors--philosophers and intellectuals as well as the poets--except for their appeal to their respective audiences.

As Tobin Siebers has argued, our current version of skepticism--Pyrrhonian to the core--also bears a negative dimension by pitting thought against itself: "For skepticism now describes more than anything else the project of opposing thought to itself."[clxxi] Well enough, but more ominously, it uses thought to proscribe thought. As Siebers explains: "There are now limits to thinking otherwise if one wishes to remain a skeptic."[clxxii] Limits? How and why does freeplay rooted in indeterminacy oblige limits? But indeed such limits have been imposed. Just as ancient Pyrrhonism discouraged empirical inquiry by emphasizing the acceptance of orthodox belief, postmodernism discourages the use of concepts drawn upon empirical philosophy by emphasizing making one's adjustment to the rituals and conventions of postmodernist discourse. To guarantee maximum freeplay in their neo-skeptical discursiveness, postmodernists have established a large variety of taboos--taboos against topics and modes of argument so unacceptable that it even seems prohibited to acknowledge their status as being unacceptable. Not only are they to be avoided, but the topic of their avoidance--this, too, should be avoided. A tacit postmodernist codex of intellectual proscriptions thus becomes of essential importance, and postmodernist critics and philosophers are judged on how effectively they observe these proscriptions:

What's left? Not much. One is limited to mystification, rhetorical audacity, and one's eclectic skill in drawing everything that seems relevant in a safely precarious fashion into one's skein of lively and extravagant metonymic associations that demonstrate once again the ineffable truth that all is indeterminate. But at another level, presumably in discourse irrelevant to skeptical theory, belief once again creeps in, and with their rhetorical skills under the guidance of the codex of avoidances listed above our neo-Pyrrhonians very effectively obstruct its rejection.

Exactly as Pyrrho argued twenty-four hundred years ago, our final truths have become socially determined based on our collective pursuit of quietude, not on any abstract principle of veracity whose foundationalist pretentions are necessarily arbitrary and potentially disturbing. Social accountability becomes the primary issue rather than intellectual adequacy, and our appropriate goals presumably entail the valorization of experience and ideals previously marginalized by western societies. Since alternative cultures deprived of their full status under Eurocentric hegemony also deserve to be heard, the task of postmodernists is presumably to educate the public to appreciate their counterhegemonic cultural expressiveness. All well and good, except that a very basic paradox is involved: this latter-day Pyrrhonian strategy must be recognized to favor many authors and texts outside our skeptical tradition except in having been granted their privilege to be heard. As presumably non-Eurocentric voices, or advocates, they themselves feature belief, not skepticism, while the authors they displace have in many instances played central roles in the skeptical tradition that has made this displacement possible. To make room for these non-Eurocentric authors and texts, others must be neglected that have played a significant role in this tradition. As a campus administrator with obvious minority credentials once argued at lunch in the author's presence, "Who was Locke anyway? Has he really got to be taught in our classes?"

Latter-day Pyrrhonists also put themselves in the awkward position of encouraging the true believers who adhere to one holy cause or another with proto-fascistic intensity. For it seems that if taken too far the encouragement of cultural relativism bears a negative impact even more harmful than the oppressive influence of our presumably elitist Eurocentric tradition. Thousands of harmless fads and ad hoc issues may be granted their modest role in the current phase of Eurocentric tradition, but too many cultural movements have emerged which pursue their ends with unusual ferocity. These include, for example, the angry zealots of Israel and their fundamentalist Muslem enemies, the Irish Republican Army, the Serb and Croat patriotic groups, the genocidal Hutu hatchet killers of Rwanda, the Hindu and Muslem mobs in India, the crackpot fundamentalist communes that thrive today across the sunbelt, indeed across the entire world, the ideologically righteous criminal element in our cities, the right-to-lifers who assault our abortion centers, and the patriotic hard-liners who have persistently advocated a jingoistic foreign policy as if it were God's will. For these benighted warrior chauvinists, the culturally distinctive prejudices and superstititions they believe in make sense, so how can today's enlightened Pyrrhonian skeptics of the postmodernist variety disagree? Roughly two dozen civil wars seem to be raging on our planet in any particular year, and their combatants almost inevitably consist of fervent believers who combine religious, cultural, and national identity in their ideological dedication to victory. Our modern skeptics might be repelled by their fanaticism, but how can they demonstrate that in the final analysis their beliefs are worse than any others? The anti-probabilistic disinterest encouraged by Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Fish's versions of skepticism thus affords sufficient grounds for the pursuit of whatever goals one pleases, as long as these seem right and appropriate to those who pursue them regardless of their ignorance and mindless hostilities, and regardless of the damage they inflict on themselves and others. Nothing is certain--ergo anything goes. As an often pretentious intellectual defense of the anti-intellectual, this Pyrrhonian version of skepticism now predominates at the expense of Academic skepticism, and for how much longer one can only guess. The sooner Carneades and Cicero's emphasis upon careful inquiry can be resurrected as a more productive alternative by our intellectual community at large, the better.

As a fundamental human drive, belief should not be underestimated for either its thrust or its durability. Since it relaxes the mind with pleasant and supportive "truths" that ease our sense of vulnerability, it possesses extraordinary resilience in human affairs and cannot easily be eliminated.[clxxiv] It can be exploded as theory and exposed to be nothing more than patent superstition, but like mercury it sooner or later draws itself up again into another flattened globule able to wobble forward in a new direction. The rejection of a particular belief (e.g., that the earth is flat, or that Satan tempts sinners) simply displaces the capacity for belief to new dogmas that no less compel the expenditure of minimal effort in thinking to produce maximum gain in emotional gratification. That one is a Republican or Democrat, or a Baptist or atheist, or an American or Ukranian confers both status and a sense of destiny without particularly stirring impressive levels of cognitive behavior. Alpha waves predominate, not the beta. As C.S. Peirce maintained, belief ultimately takes on the quality of a habit: "The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions." As explained by Peirce, doubt (or skepticism) can only threaten this dependency: "Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief." As a result, "We cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe." If doubt intervenes, it becomes an unpleasant interlude, a temporary interregnum of experiential disturbation: "With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion."[clxxv]

This homeostatic principle applies to both individuals and social groups, and it normally entails a transition from belief to doubt and back again to a new and presumably superior level of belief. It even extends to history, with the ontogenetic dynamics of doubt replicated in the historic transition from ages of belief to ages of doubt and back again, or, vice versa, from ages of doubt to ages of belief and back again. Such might have been the case in the ancient world, when a seven-century tradition of skeptical rigor was supplanted by Christian faith, and then again it might have been the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when twelve centuries of Christian faith were supplanted by a Renaissance of skepticism that has persisted into the twentieth century. And such might be the case today, when the questions of Renaissance skeptics such as Montaigne, Descartes, Bacon and Gassendi have finally culminated in the twentieth century with the relatively sophisticated dialogue of Moore, Russell, James, Dewey, Carnap, and hundreds of others. As Jacques Barzun has suggested, perhaps we have reached the "last phase of the great emancipation promoted in the eighteenth century," or, more inclusively, extending to include the Renaissance, perhaps we have come to "the close of a brilliant half-millenium."[clxxvi] My only argument with Barzun here would be in my effort to treat such an unpleasant eventuality not as the product of undifferentiated skepticism, but specifically as the product of a Pyrrhonian skepticism that threatens to initiate another dark ages by dissolving the gains afforded by the academic version of skepticism that have provided the primary impetus of the last four centuries of achievement. As illustrated by the roles of Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, if not of Kant and Hegel (their failure was their tragic accomplishment), our latest version of Pyrrhonian skepticism--broadly identified as postmodernism, or poststructuralism--jeopardizes the achievements of the academic perspective rooted in empiricism by encouraging the return to full-fledged belief, the emotional dedication to faith that inevitably terminates serious and useful intellectual pursuits. This seems to be what is happening today.

Only skepticism makes a virtue of doubt, and only the Academic version of skepticism encourages the systematic pursuit of information (or data) in order to resolve doubts as well as possible without any sacrifice of the truth. Otherwise, misinformation predominates. Elsewhere I have described the alternative of minimizing the experience of doubt as the Affirmative Fallacy, the pursuit of quick and easy positive answers to deny unpleasant alternative truths.[clxxvii] For indeed the one truth we may grant with certainty--and here it is entirely possible to agree with Pyrrhonist assumptions--is the emotional pursuit of affirmative truths--friendly, pleasant, uplifting truths that confirm one's sense of personal worth as an individual and as the member of a group (or groups) one can take pride in. That these affirmative truths almost inevitably fall short of explaining things with sufficient adequacy does not really matter.

What conclusions may be drawn from this brief history of skepticism in western civilization? That Eurocentric tradition is at another major juncture in its history, and that the best way to cope with this challenge is to fully understand both its matrix and circumstances. Arnold Toynbee's theory of challenge and response as the key to a civilization's survival seems appropriate, since once again, as what might be described as a leading trend indicator, skepticism is hoisting itself on its own petard. Paradoxically, our Academic tradition of skepticism that gave us a definable common Eurocentric tradition linked with science and the Renaissance has once again fallen prey to its Pyrrhonian alternative, which seems to be encouraging cultural and religious Balkanization as well as a polarization between an ignorant populace which is presumably encouraged to believe what it pleases and a relatively small elite able to fabricate "desirable" beliefs in defense of the status quo. In other words, ideology seems to be in decline, and skepticism seems as much a cause of this trend as its effect. What can be done about it? How can we reduce present intellectual trends to a transitory phenomenon, a brief interlude in the history of civilization, rather than the preliminary step into another prolonged dark ages populated by monks, aristocrats, and an impoverished peasantry?

Our first obligation in meeting this challenge is to comprehend what is at stake, and exactly why. An adequate sense of perspective is of crucial importance, and right now this seems elusive--if not altogether unattainable. Toward this end, I want to suggest eight propositions:

Educated non-westerners readily acknowledge--and thereby to a certain extent share--the benefits of our skeptical tradition. It takes a myopic, self-flagellating commitment to the latest version of Pyrrhonian skepticism based on the concept of indeterminacy to be able to insist upon the primacy of cultural relativism as illustrated by the supposed intellectual parity of non-western/anti-skeptical cultures. Typical of the Pyrrhonian approach, multiculturalists join our skeptical tradition by assailing it, but their effort seems dangerously misguided. For the advantage of western civilization seem everywhere self-evident, not least in its treatment of women and cultural minorities compared to elsewhere in the world. Moreover, it is no accident that whenever possible non-westerners vote with their feet by migrating in droves to western societies, and with good reason, since a better life thereby becomes possible thanks to technology as the product of science beholden to skepticism. However, without the restraints imposed by skepticism, the non-western version of belief too easily degenerates into its nightmarish caricature, as might be indicated by the excesses of Serbian, Shi'ite, and Hutu cultural expressiveness. Not that reactionary ideological movements in western societies readily escape these excesses, as exemplified by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's regimes, all of which banished skepticism and made a virtue--indeed, an orthodoxy--of their respective cultural identities.

It therefore seems necessary to regain a sense of perspective as soon as possible in judging the merits of our unique (and pan-ethnic) Eurocentric tradition of intellectual freedom, and the very first step in doing so will be to overhaul the theory of skepticism and try to return once again to the notions of common sense and probability (or "warranted assertability") that were first proposed by Carneades of the Athenian New Academy and that has been part and parcel of scientific methodology since the sixteenth century. Toward this end, it also seems necessary to resort to hard-core iconoclasm as a militant use of skepticism to dispense with the most invidious and potentially harmful retrogressive belief systems now in vogue. Iconoclastic debate was effectively employed for this purpose by such figures as Protagoras, Carneades, d'Holbach, Paine, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and, yes, Ingersoll and Besant, and it seems especially needed today. Only by confronting the latest Pyrrhonian extravagance can we hope to restore skepticism to its proper role in the advancement of western civilization.

In summary, I reject what might be described as the counter-hegemonic fallacy by arguing that the Eurocentric tradition (and here I use the word Eurocentric devoid of its pejorative implications) has been more than a canon of texts arbitrarily selected by one reading public or another. Instead, I maintain, this very remarkable tradition has perpetuated itself as the residue of a cumulative dialectic between belief and skepticism, and that the quality of "greatness" once praised in particular authors and texts depends mostly--if not entirely--on the extent to which they have declared themselves at or near the cutting edge of this dialectic, wherever this might have been at the time. I have also tried to argue that any effort to criticize the residue of books and poems linked with this dialectic as an arbitrary canon imposed by Eurocentric hegemonic authority both parodies and vulgarizes this dialectic by willfully disregarding its unique contribution to western civilization as the world's singular depository of genuine intellectual freedom. Indeed, the tautological use of skepticism to renounce the single cultural tradition it has influenced with such extraordinarily success accords with the original Pyrrhonian goals of skepticism to promote unsubstantiated belief, but not with the Academic goals rooted in an empirical quest for probability as first proposed by Arcesilaus and Carneades. It therefore seems imperative that our present century's rather abrupt dysgenic transition from the Academic (or empirical) version of skepticism argued by Russell and his positivist contemporaries to the Pyrrhonian version argued by Wittgenstein, Rorty, Derrida, and others, be reversed. For there is more to skepticism than the mystification of ignorance, and our current social, political, and intellectual crisis obliges its reexamination in a more inclusive light.

[i] Paul Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986); and The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), pp. 14, 235-39, etc.

[vii] I do not want to suggest with my use of the word academic any of the traits typical of contemporary university research, such as one perhaps expects of so-called New Skeptics including Strawson, Stroud, Nagel, Williams, and, more or less, Cavell. As I shall later try to demonstrate, these New Skeptics tend to be Pyrrhonian in their emphasis, and so they may be described as having a small ;a academic identity (they walk, talk and look like professors), but emphatically without a capital-A Academic perspective, which I apply exclusively to the skeptics with an empirical emphasis who can be traced from Arcelisaus to Russell and Ayer.

[xvi] I add Critias to Socrates and Protagoras to concede his role as a sophist whose skepticism led to an atypical commitment to political tyranny. A cousin of Plato, Critias participated in his dialogues in a positive role, but then led the thirty tyrants who subjugated Athens and executed 1,500 of its citizens. Critias was admired for both his plays and his prose style, and fragments of his poem rejecting religion as an opiate of the ignorant may be found in Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists, I.54--in Sextus Empiricus III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classics, 1936), pp. 31-33.

[xx] The peculiar contrast here between Christian doctrine and the sequence of events in Gilgamesh may be noted: that in Gilgamesh the killing of a nature god (Humbaba) both precedes and by implication causes the denial of eternal life to both Enkidu and Gilgamesh, whereas in the Bible the denial of eternal life as God's punishment of Adam and Eve necessarily precedes Christ's crucifixion that restores the possibility of eternal life in heaven at least to Christians. Appropriately, a snake initiates events in the Bible by tempting Eve, while it terminates events in Gilgamesh by stealing from Gilgamesh the plant of eternal life. The Christian sequence is obviously more optimistic than its reverse in Gilgamesh.

[xxii] The word dogmatist was intended by Greek philosophers to apply to anybody who seeks an objective basis, or foundation, for the truth that can be accepted a priori independent of skeptical inquiry. In this sense, dogmatism is not necessarily a pejorative term, and dogmatists may be construed to include Christians, Platonists, Marxists, and even hard-core modern scientists who are unwilling to scrutinize the scientific method with the same suspension of judgment (epoche) as they do the empirical data they themselves gather.

[xxvii] Other ancient and early Christian authors whose writings also mention skepticism include Augustine, Aulus Gellius, Eusebius, Galen, Jerome, Lactantius, Plutarch, and Ptolemy, but the primary texts I will be discussing were those of Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius. These were the three authors primarily responsible for having preserved the basic tenets of a philosophical school that played a dominant role in the Hellenistic world for seven centuries. The loss of everything else may be primarily attributed to the religious zeal of scholars and philosophers during the twelve centuries that followed.

[xxix] Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, VII, 159-89, esp. 166-169, 176, 181-182, and 184. See Sextus Empiricus, II (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1935), pp. 87-103. Here book vii of Adversus Mathematicos is included as book i of Against the Logicians. Also useful in explaining Carneades's three criteria are the Introduction of R.G. Bury to Sextus Empiricus, I, pp. xxxiii-xxxvi, and Charlotte Stough's Greek Skepticism, pp. 50-64.

[xlv] Aenesidemus was a resident of Alexandria, and his dates of birth and death are not exactly known--according to Stough (p. 9) somewhere between 80 B.C. and 130 A.D. If by chance Aenesidemus followed Cicero, the same conclusion may be drawn, since there is no evidence that he drew upon, or even shared a common perspective with, Cicero's reconstruction of Carneades's arguments.

[xlvii] In "Religion: a Dialogue," Schopenhauer similarly let his persona Demopheles, the proponent of belief, argue that for an effective religion people require a system of metaphysics that "must be easily understood, and at the same time possess, on the proper points, a certain amount of obscurity, even of impenetrability." Also, Demopheles argued, "a correct and satisfactory system of morality must be bound up with its dogmas; above all, it must afford inexhaustible consolation in suffering and death." The consequence, Demopheles explained, is "that it [religion] can only be true in an allegorical and not a real sense . . . [and] it must have the support of an authority which is impressive by its great age, by being universally recognized." All this is essential, Demopheles explained, because of the limitations of the average mind: "If you want to form an opinion on religion, you should always bear in mind the character of the great multitude for which it is destined, and form a picture to yourself of its complete inferiority, moral and intellectual. It is incredible how far this inferiority goes . . ." See Essays of Schopenhauer, trans. by T. Bailey Saunders ((Boston, MA: Willey Book Company), Part 2, p. 20.

[liii] Popkin, pp. 5-6. Apropos of the fideists's response to academic sceptical arguments, Popkin declares on p. 25, "The concern with Academic scepticism, as presented in Cicero's Academica, appears to have developed among those interested in fideistic theology." Indeed, the influence of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus was often mixed during the renaissance, but it seems obvious that any choice of the academic approach of Cicero over the Pyrrhonian approach of Sextus Empiricus by Catholic fideists at that time was seriously misguided. In similar fashion Popkin also argues:

The sceptic, in either the Pyrrhonian or Academic tradition, developed arguments to show or suggest that the evidence, reasons, or proofs employed as grounds for our various beliefs were not completely satisfactory. Then the sceptics recommended suspense of judgment on the question of whether these beliefs were true. One might, however, still maintain the beliefs" (p. xix).

Here Popkin overlooks the basic distinction between the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism. The academic approach very decidedly obliged a continuing suspension of judgment that precluded unsubstantiated belief, as explained by Cicero: "I am still more certain that the wise man never holds an opinion, that is, never assents to a thing that is either false or unknown" (Academica, II.59). Popkin's confusion in this matter, a relatively minor flaw in his otherwise excellent book, may be linked to his fideistic bias which he concedes on p. xxi: I am more in sympathy with those who used the sceptical and fideistic views of the 'nouveaux Pyrrhoniens' for religious rather than secular purposes" (p. xxi). Even today it seems difficult for Christian scholars to acknowledge the depth of skepticism implicit in Cicero's text--an uncompromisingly secular testament that probably expresses more directly than any other ancient work of philosophy extant today the total rejection of unwarranted belief by Carneades and his followers.

[lxxvi] The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 134. In the Preface to the First Edition of 1781, Kant compared skeptics to nomadic tribes, "who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities." But, Kant assured his readers, "their number was, very happily, small; and thus they could not entirely put a stop to the exertions of those who persisted in raising new edifices" (p. 1).

[xcvii] See A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1906), The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, ed. by Gordon Stein (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), and the anthologies, Critiques of God, ed. by Peter Angeles (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1976); An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, ed. by Gordon Stein (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980); and A Second Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, ed. by Gordon Stein (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987). Also useful is Ingersoll's Greatest Lectures (Hackensack, N.J.: Wehman Bros. Publishers, 1964).

[cxi] John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 103. It should be mentioned here that Reinhold Loeffler reports having heard Iranian farmers make essentially the same argument in private conversations: e.g., "Tell me, is there a God? If there was one, He could not permit this misery and injustice to happen." See Reinhold Loeffler, Islam in Practice: Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 276. Aside from stylistic facility, the crucial difference between Mill's argument and that of the peasants quoted by Loeffler is that Mill articulated his indignation in a more inclusive theoretical context and then published and widely circulated his ideas among the reading public, whereas the farmers did not. It simply would not have been permitted. One must also take into account the extent to which today's Iranians might be influenced by cultural diffusion by having been exposed both directly and indirectly to agnostic and atheistic attitudes in western society. These attitudes must be emphasized, for example, by the Islamic clergy to demonstrate the superior purity of the Moslem faith to the religious practices in western society.

[cxxxix] For Montaigne's influence on Shakespeare, see Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, Methuen, 1982), pp. 109-110, 489; and Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 249-53. In his provocative essay, "The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare," in Essays in Literary Criticism, ed. by Irving Singer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956), p. 140, Santayana proposes an essentially nihilist Pyrrhonian interpretation beyond the intentions of Montaigne: "But for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing . . ." On the other hand, in personal correspondence with me Mark Richardson has proposed a fideistic interpretation, "that once an attitude of skepticism becomes an attitude of 'humility' in [Shakespeare's] plays, it also becomes specifically Christian." Both insights seem useful, for it is only with Shakespeare's grand hubristic characters such as Hamlet and Lear that the choice of nothing becomes even temporarily possible. Christianity's ameliorative alternative important to Montaigne is thereby granted its possibility for inferior (i.e., humble) characters without testing the limits of skepticism that obviously fascinated Shakespeare in his best tragedies.

[cxliii] Two of the most useful histories of fascism supportive of my thesis include The Birth of Fascist Ideology, by Zeev Sternhell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), and chap. 3 of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl Schorske (New York: Random House, 1980). Sternhell omits Schoenerer, Luebke, and Herzl, but Schorske features them, and there would be no difficulty in explaining their fascist tendencies based on Sternhell's assumptions.