c ha p t e r 3

We Know Nothing
Pyrrho

No one knows anything – and even that’s not certain. You

shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be
mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted.
The best option, then, is to keep an open mind. Don’t commit,
and you won’t be disappointed. That was the main teaching of
Scepticism, a philosophy that was popular for several hundred
years in Ancient Greece and later in Rome. Unlike Plato and
Aristotle, the most extreme sceptics avoided holding firm opin-
ions on anything whatsoever. The Ancient Greek Pyrrho (c.
365–c. 270 bc) was the most famous and probably the most
extreme sceptic of all time. His life was decidedly odd.
You may believe that you know all kinds of things. You know
that you are reading this now, for example. But sceptics would
challenge this. Think about why you believe that you are actu-
ally reading this and not just imagining that you are. Can you be
sure that you are right? You appear to be reading – that’s the way
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it seems to you. But perhaps you are hallucinating or dreaming

(this is an idea that René Descartes would develop some
eighteen hundred years later: see Chapter 11). Socrates’ insist-
ence that all that he knew was how little he knew was a sceptical
position too. But Pyrrho took it much much further. He prob-
ably took it a little too far.
If reports of his life are to be believed (and perhaps we should
be sceptical about them too), Pyrrho made a career from not
taking anything for granted. Like Socrates, he never wrote
anything down. So what we know about him comes from what
other people recorded, mostly several centuries after his death.
One of those, Diogenes Laertius, tells us that Pyrrho became a
celebrity and was made a high priest of Elis where he lived and
that in his honour philosophers didn’t have to pay any taxes. We
have no way of checking the truth of this, though it does sound
like a good idea.
As far as we can tell, though, Pyrrho lived out his scepticism
in some quite extraordinary ways. His time on earth would have
been very short if he hadn’t had friends to protect him. Any
extreme sceptic needs the support of less sceptical people, or
very good luck, to survive for long.
Here’s how he approached life. We can’t completely trust the
senses. Sometimes they mislead us. It’s easy to make a mistake
about what you can see in the dark, for example. What looks
like a fox may only be a cat. Or you might think you heard
someone calling you when it was only the wind in the trees.
Because our senses quite often mislead us, Pyrrho decided never
to trust them. He didn’t rule out the possibility that they might
be giving him accurate information, but he kept an open mind
on the issue.
So, whereas most people would take the sight of a cliff edge
with a sheer drop as strong evidence that it would be very
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foolish to keep walking forward, Pyrrho didn’t. His senses

might be deceiving him, so he didn’t trust them. Even the
feeling of his toes curling over the cliff edge, or the sensation of
tipping forward, wouldn’t have convinced him he was about to
fall to the rocks below. It wasn’t even obvious to him that falling
on to rocks would be so bad for his health. How could he be
absolutely sure of that? His friends, who presumably weren’t all
Sceptics themselves, stopped him having accidents, but if they
hadn’t, he would have been in trouble every few minutes.
Why be afraid of savage dogs if you can’t be sure they want to
hurt you? Just because they’re barking and baring their teeth
and running towards you doesn’t mean they’ll definitely bite.
And even if they do, it won’t necessarily hurt. Why care about
oncoming traffic when you cross the road? Those carts might
not hit you. Who really knows? And what difference does it
make if you are alive or dead anyway? Somehow Pyrrho
managed to live out this philosophy of total indifference and
conquer all the usual and natural human emotions and patterns
of behaviour.
That’s the legend anyway. Some of these stories about him
were probably invented to make fun of his philosophy. But it’s
unlikely that they’re all fictional. For example, he famously kept
completely calm while sailing through one of the worst storms
anyone had ever witnessed. The wind was tearing the sails to
pieces and huge waves were breaking over the ship. Everyone
around him was terrified. But it didn’t bother Pyrrho in the
least. Since appearances are so often deceptive, he couldn’t be
absolutely sure that any harm would come from it. He managed
to remain peaceful while even the most experienced sailors
were panicking. He demonstrated that it’s possible to stay indif-
ferent even under these conditions. That story has a ring of
truth about it.
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As a young man, Pyrrho visited India. Perhaps that was what

inspired him in his unusual lifestyle. India has a great tradition
of spiritual teachers or gurus putting themselves through
extreme and almost unbelievable physical deprivation: being
buried alive, hanging weights from sensitive parts of their
bodies, or living for weeks without food, to achieve inner still-
ness. Pyrrho’s approach to philosophy was certainly close to that
of a mystic. Whatever techniques he used to achieve this, he
certainly practised what he preached. His calm state of mind
made a deep impression on those around him. The reason he
didn’t get worked up about anything was that, in his opinion,
absolutely everything was simply a matter of opinion. If there’s
no chance of discovering the truth, then there’s no need to fret.
We can then distance ourselves from all firm beliefs, because
firm beliefs always involve delusion.
If you’d met Pyrrho, you’d probably have thought he was mad.
And perhaps he was in a way. But his views and his behaviour
were consistent. He would think that your various certainties
were simply unreasonable and stood in the way of your peace of
mind. You are taking too much for granted. It’s as if you have
built a house on sand. The foundations of your thought aren’t
anything like as firm as you’d like to believe and are unlikely to
make you happy.
Pyrrho neatly summarized his philosophy in the form of
three questions anyone who wants to be happy should ask:

What are things really like?

What attitude should we adopt to them?
What will happen to someone who does adopt that attitude?

His answers were simple and to the point. First, we can’t ever
know what the world is really like – that’s beyond us. No one will
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ever know about the ultimate nature of reality. Such knowledge

simply isn’t possible for human beings. So forget about that.
This view is completely at odds with Plato’s Theory of Forms
and the possibility that philosophers could gain knowledge of
them through abstract thought (see Chapter 1). Secondly, and as
a result of this, we shouldn’t commit to any view. Because we
can’t know anything for sure, we should suspend all judgement
and live our lives in an uncommitted way. Every desire that you
have suggests that you believe that one thing is better than
another. Unhappiness arises from not getting what you want.
But you can’t know that anything is better than anything else. So,
he thought, to be happy you should free yourself from desires
and not care about how things turn out. That is the right way to
live. Recognize that nothing matters. That way nothing will
affect your state of mind, which will be one of inner tranquillity.
Thirdly, if you follow this teaching this is what will happen to
you. You will start off by being speechless, presumably because
you won’t know what to say about anything. Eventually, you will
be free from all worry. That’s the best you or anyone can hope
for in life. It’s almost like a religious experience.
That’s the theory. It seemed to work for Pyrrho, though it is
hard to see it giving the same results for most of humanity. Few
of us will ever achieve the kind of indifference that he recom-
mended. And not everyone will be lucky enough to have a team
of friends to save them from their worst mistakes. In fact, if
everyone followed his advice, there wouldn’t be anyone left to
protect the Pyrrhonic Sceptics from themselves and the whole
school of philosophy would very quickly die out as they toppled
over cliff edges, stepped in front of moving vehicles, or were
savaged by vicious dogs.
The basic weakness of Pyrrho’s approach is that he moved
from ‘You can’t know anything’ to the conclusion ‘Therefore
20 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f p h i l o s o p h y

you should ignore your instincts and feelings about what is

dangerous’. But our instincts do save us from many possible
dangers. They may not be totally reliable, but that doesn’t mean
we should just ignore them. Even Pyrrho is supposed to have
moved away when a dog snapped at him: he couldn’t completely
overcome his automatic reactions however much he wanted to.
So to try and live out Pyrrhonic Scepticism seems perverse. Nor
is it obvious that living this way produces the peace of mind that
Pyrrho thought it would. It is possible to be sceptical about
Pyrrho’s Scepticism. You might want to question whether tran-
quillity really will come from taking the sorts of risks that
he took. It might have worked for Pyrrho, but what is the
evidence that it will work for you? You might not be 100 per
cent sure that a ferocious dog will bite you, but it makes sense
not to take the chance if it is 99 per cent certain.
Not all sceptics in the history of philosophy have been as
extreme as Pyrrho. There is a great tradition of moderate scepti-
cism, of questioning assumptions and looking closely at the
evidence for what we believe, without attempting to live as
if everything was in doubt all of the time. Sceptical questioning
of this sort is at the heart of philosophy. All the great philoso-
phers have been sceptics in this sense. It is the opposite of
dogmatism. Someone who is dogmatic is very confident that
they know the truth. Philosophers challenge dogma. They
ask why people believe what they do, what sorts of evidence
they have to support their conclusions. That was what Socrates
and Aristotle did and it is what present-day philosophers do
too. But they don’t do this just for the sake of being difficult.
The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get closer
to the truth, or at least to reveal how little we know or can know.
You don’t need to risk falling off a cliff edge to be this kind
of sceptic. But you do need to be prepared to ask awkward
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questions and to think critically about the answers that people

give you.
Although Pyrrho preached freedom from all cares, most of us
don’t achieve that. One common worry is the fact that each of
us will die. Another Greek philosopher, Epicurus, had some
clever suggestions about how we can come to terms with this.