Transcript for Interview with Tad Brennan on Sextus Empiricus

Read the Full Interview Transcript.

0. Introduction

Many of us got into philosophy because we hoped it would improve our lives. We think that getting at some kind of foundational truth about the world will finally make us happy. But Sextus Empiricus, one of the great ancient skeptics, thinks that this drive does more harm than good, because so often belief that one has found this capital T Truth leads to alienation from society, disruption of convention and living ridiculous lifestyles. In Sextus' time, some ancient philosophers would kill themselves because they couldn't solve a logical puzzle. And a modern equivalent would be religious terrorism. This unjustified fanaticism because you think you have the capital T Truth.

My guest today is Cornell's Tad Brennan, a legendary scholar of ancient skepticism. And in this interview you're going to learn how to cure yourself of philosophy. The alternative path to obtaining happiness and tranquility. And the various methods and master arguments Sextus employed to destroy the other philosophical schools he encountered.

---

Johnathan Bi: Who is Sextus Empiricus and what are the core tenets of his philosophy?

Tad Brennan: Sextus was a Greek author of probably around 200 to 250 AD working under the Roman Empire. He describes himself as a Pyrrhonian philosopher, and in his view, a Pyrrhonian is someone who is engaged in an ongoing search for the truth. On his telling, all philosophers start out searching for the truth, but then some of them think that they have found it. They've got the complete, final and unrevisable answer. And those he calls just straightforward dogmatists. And they would include people like Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics and so on. Others, he says, have concluded from their search that the truth cannot be discovered, that it's impossible to discover the truth. And those he thinks are just as dogmatic as the first group. He calls them academic skeptics and dogmatists of a secondary sort. And about himself he says, well, look, we haven't found the truth. We've not concluded that the truth is unfindable. We're simply still in the process of searching. So that's his self characterization. He's somebody who's searching for the truth.

But the method that he employs in searching for the truth is to examine the books and theories of his predecessors. So he's got what must have been a considerable and extensive library of ancient Greek philosophy. And he pores over the writings of earlier philosophers and attempts to challenge the tenets of their schools. And in particular, he will challenge the tenets of their schools either by pointing to internal incoherencies within the school or by pitting one school against another by saying that the one school has counterarguments against the first school. He also has some general modes that he uses in order to cause you to doubt whether the dogmatic schools have really accomplished what they claim to have accomplished. Things like familiar skeptical arguments against the reliability of the senses, familiar relativistic arguments against the prejudices of one culture as opposed to another. All these things he thinks, ought to give us doubt about whether the truth has been discovered.

Johnathan Bi: And one thing perhaps to add from your book is that he started pursuing truth because he wanted, among other things, tranquility. And yet, even though he has not discovered the capital-T Truth, he has received this kind of tranquility. And that's what I found so fascinating and applicable to not just my own life, but a lot of our lives, which is he's claiming in a very contrarian way. So first of all, he's attacking philosophical schools, dogmas, and letting ordinary opinions, those everyday opinions that you and I have, a lot of them, slip by.

Tad Brennan: Seems to.

Johnathan Bi: And also he's claiming that tranquility doesn't come from grasping at the truth, but he gets it without getting at the truth. Right? And so that's what I find extremely fascinating about your treatment of Sextus.

Tad Brennan: Well, he thinks that people who pursue philosophy, himself included, do so out of a dissatisfaction with the difficulty in understanding the world. The world's just puzzling. It's hard to make it all add up. It's hard to provide scientific explanations for phenomena. It's hard to get a good account of how ethics works. How should we treat other people? There are a million puzzles to be thought about. And on his account he began, as all other philosophers do, with the belief that he could only find tranquility. He could only find peace of mind by resolving all these unanswered questions. Had to get the answers, and if he didn't get the answers, then tranquility would never appear. So it was much to his surprise. He says, that in fact, instead of finding the answers, what he found was that for every answer that was put forward by some school, there was an equally good counter argument, which in his view, leaves him and ought to leave you in a state of what he calls equipoise or equipollence. Equality of considerations for and against. Just as much to be said on one side of the matter as the other. Are there Platonic forms? Are there Epicurean atoms? Well, there's a lot to be said in favor of it, but there's an equal amount to be said against it. The problem is not yet resolved. But he says that in his experience, somehow tranquility has flowed from the very experience of equipollence, from the very fact that his mind is in a perfect balance between the options.

Johnathan Bi: Right, and that is the mystery I wanna investigate in this entire... In this interview. Yeah, go ahead, you wanted to say something.

Tad Brennan: Feel free to investigate, but there's not a lot to be said about it. He himself, I think, eschews any analysis of how it comes out. I mean, he says that it happens rather accidentally. He has this...

Johnathan Bi: It's just a report, it's a self report. Hey, this happened to me.

Tad Brennan: There's that. Right? There's also... He offers us this little parable about the Greek painter Apelles, actually a well known painter who was laboriously trying to get the foam, the representation of foam on a horse's mouth, just right. And after many efforts of getting how it should look, he gave up in despair and threw his sponge at the painting. And then, to his amazement, the print of the sponge produced exactly the effect of foam that he'd been striving to accomplish. So that's at least a parable, but it doesn't really give us a roadmap.

Johnathan Bi: Right. A causal explanation.

Tad Brennan: Doesn't give us a causal explanation, doesn't really give us an algorithm for how to do it. I mean, after all, if you were to say to Apelles, so wait, is that how I should make foam when I next wanna make foam? He probably would not say, oh, it's guaranteed. He'd say, well...

Johnathan Bi: It worked for me.

Tad Brennan: It worked for me. Yeah, that's all I can report. And as you said, this is Sextus' own report of his own experience. So far as the closest we get to a causal account or causal explanation is just the claim that this follows from equipollence. This follows from equality of reasons, pro and con, but no more than that.

1. WHY Sextus attacks Dogma

Johnathan Bi: I see. Before we investigate what he's trying to attack, dogmas, how he tries to attack them, equipollence.

Tad Brennan: Good.

Johnathan Bi: And what results, right? This tranquility. I wanna start with the why question. Why bother attacking these things in the first place? And I want to begin with a fascinating quote from your book.

The self-induced disturbances of the Dogmatists [are found] throughout the pages of antiquity. For instance, there was the Pythagorean who bit out her own tongue, rather than vio­late the school’s prohibition against eating legumes. There was Philetas of Kos, who drove himself to death because he could not solve the liar paradox. There was the dialectician who killed him­self because he could not resolve a sophistical puzzle. There were the Cyrenaics, persuaded to kill themselves by Hegesias, until the local authorities closed his school as a health hazard … [On the other side of irrational elation] one need only consider the state of the proper Stoic who watches his children being tor­tured with a feeling of tranquil joy at the progress of the cosmos, or the state of the Epicurean who instead of feeling pained at the death of a close friend, delights in the reflection that he can always find other friends just as hedonically useful.

(Tad Brannen, Ethics and Epistemology in Sextus Empircus)

Tell us about the crazy people that Sextus was writing against. I think this part of the context is very important of why Sextus developed this seemingly offensive theory. Right?