Can Humans Ever Understand How Animals Think?

 

A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species

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Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected.

In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot had been picked. Monkeys have passed similar tests, and human babies can do it at 12 months old. But giraffes’ brains are much smaller than primates’ relative to body size, so it was notable to see how well they grasped the concept.

Such discoveries are becoming less surprising every year, however, as a flood of new research overturns longstanding assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of. A recent wave of popular books on animal cognition argue that skills long assumed to be humanity’s prerogative, from planning for the future to a sense of fairness, actually exist throughout the animal kingdom – and not just in primates or other mammals, but in birds, octopuses and beyond. In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.

In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul. We know our species as Homo sapiens, “wise man”.

Yet at a time when humanity’s self-image is largely shaped by fears of environmental devastation and nuclear war, combined with memories of historical atrocity, it is no longer so easy to say, with Hamlet, that man is “the paragon of animals” – the ideal that other creatures would imitate, if only they could. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.

In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

If human minds are incapable of solving the problems they create, then perhaps our salvation lies in encountering very different types of minds. The global popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher, released by Netflix in 2020, is just one example of the growing hunger for such encounters. In the film, the South African diver Craig Foster spends months filming a female octopus in an underwater kelp forest, observing most of her lifecycle. Foster presents himself as the anti-Jacques Cousteau; he doesn’t go underwater to study the non-human, but to learn from it.

Humility is a traditional religious discipline, and there is a spiritual dimension to Foster’s quest and to the film’s success. On YouTube, where the trailer has been viewed 3.7m times, thousands of people testify that My Octopus Teacher made them weep, changed their understanding of the world and made them resolve to lead better lives. It’s clear that, for modern people who seldom encounter animals except for pet cats and dogs, entering into a close relationship with a non-human mind can be a sacred experience.

The idea of the octopus as the nonhuman mind par excellence was popularised by the 2016 bestseller Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. A philosopher rather than a marine biologist, Godfrey-Smith got an opportunity to see the creatures in action at a site off eastern Australia known to researchers as Octopolis. There he discovered that octopuses are “smart in the sense of being curious and flexible; they are adventurous, opportunistic”, prone to making off with items such as tape measures and measuring stakes.

The fascination of the octopus is that while its behaviour seems recognisable in human terms as mischief or curiosity, its neural architecture is immensely different from ours. Since Darwin, humans have grown used to recognising ourselves in our fellow primates, whose brains and body plans are similar to our own. After all, humans and chimpanzees share a common ape ancestor that lived in Africa as recently as 6m years ago. Our most recent common ancestor with the octopus, by contrast, is a worm-like creature thought to have lived 500-600m years ago.

Because the mind of the octopus evolved in a completely different fashion from ours, it makes sense of the world in ways we can barely imagine. An octopus has 500m neurons, about as many as a dog, but most of these neurons are located not in the brain but in its eight arms, each of which can move, smell and perhaps even remember on its own. In Godfrey-Smith’s words, an octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”. When such a being encounters a human at the bottom of the ocean, what could it possibly make of us?

For most of the 20th century, animal researchers wouldn’t even have asked such a question, much less attempted to answer it. Under the influence of the American psychologist BF Skinner, scientific orthodoxy held that it was neither legitimate nor necessary to talk about what was going on in an animal’s mind. Science, he argued, only deals with things that can be observed and measured, and we can’t directly observe mental faculties even in ourselves, much less in animals. What we can observe is action and behaviour, and Skinner was able to modify the behaviour of rats using positive reinforcement, such as rewards of food, and negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks.

 When Jane Goodall first went to study chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s, the very notion of animal subjectivity was taboo. Her practice of giving names to the individual chimps she observed – such as David Greybeard, who her studies made famous – was frowned on as unscientific, since it suggested that they might be humanlike in other ways. The standard practice was to number them. “You cannot share your life with a dog or a cat,” Goodall later observed, “and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings. You know it and I think every single one of those scientists knew it, too, but because they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t talk about it.”

Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Scientists speak without embarrassment about animal minds and consciousness. In popular writing on the subject, Skinner appears only as a villain. In his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, primatologist Frans de Waal discusses a mid-20th-century experiment in which researchers at a primate centre in Florida, educated in Skinner’s methods, tried to train chimps the way he had trained rats, by withholding food. “Expressing no interest in cognition – the existence of which they didn’t even acknowledge,” De Waal writes, the researchers “investigated reinforcement schedules and the punitive effect of time-outs.” The staff of the primate centre rebelled and started feeding the chimps in secret, causing Skinner to lament that “tender-hearted colleagues frustrated efforts to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation”. You could hardly ask for a better example of how the arrogance of reason leads to cruelty.

Meanwhile, animals without “rational souls” are capable of demonstrating admirable qualities such as patience and self-restraint. Among humans, the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasure for future gain is called resisting temptation, and is taken as a sign of maturity. But De Waal shows that even birds are capable of it. In one experiment, an African grey parrot named Griffin was taught that if he resisted the urge to eat a serving of cereal, he would be rewarded after an unpredictable interval with food he liked better, such as cashew nuts. The bird was able to hold out 90% of the time, devising ways to distract himself by talking, preening his feathers, or simply throwing the cup of cereal across the room. Such behaviours, De Waal notes, are quite similar to what human children do in the face of temptation.

More intriguing than the convergences between human and animal behaviour, however, are the profound differences in the way we perceive and experience the world. The reason why an encounter with an octopus can be awe-inspiring is that two species endowed with different senses and brains inhabit the same planet but very different realities.

Take the sense of smell. As humans, we learn about our surroundings primarily by seeing and hearing, while our ability to detect odours is fairly undeveloped. For many animals, the reverse is true. In his 2022 book An Immense World, the science journalist Ed Yong writes about an experiment by researcher Lucy Bates involving African elephants. Bates found that if she took urine from an elephant in the rear of a herd and spread it on the ground in front of the herd, the elephants reacted with bewilderment and curiosity, knowing that the individual’s distinctive odour was coming from the wrong place. For them, a smell out of place was as fundamental a violation of reality as a ghostly apparition would be for us.

  Animals that perceive the world through scent, such as dogs, even have a different sense of time. We often talk about the importance of “living in the moment”, but in fact we have no other choice; since visual information reaches us at the speed of light, what we see around us are things as they existed an infinitesimal fraction of a second ago. When a dog smells, however, “he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future”, Yong writes. Odour molecules from a person or another dog can linger in a room long after the source is gone, or waft ahead before it appears. When a dog perks up long before its owner walks through the front door, smell can seem like a psychic power.

If giraffes can do statistical reasoning and parrots understand the concept of the future, then where does the distinctiveness of the human mind really lie? One favourite candidate is what psychologists call “theory of mind” – the ability to infer that each person is their own “I”, with independent experiences and private mental states. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball describes the classic experiment that tests the development of this ability in children. A child and an adult watch as an object is hidden under one of three cups. Then the adult leaves the room and the child sees a second adult come in and move the object so it’s under a different cup.

When the first adult returns, where does the child expect she will look for the object? Very young children assume that she will know its new location, just as they do. Starting around age four, however, children start to understand that the adult only knows what she has seen herself, so they expect her to look under the original, now empty cup. “Indeed,” Ball writes, “they will often delight in the deception: in their knowing what others don’t.”

Developing a theory of mind is necessary because we can never know what is going on inside other people in the same immediate way we know ourselves. Most adults take for granted that other people have the same kind of inner life they do, but this remains a kind of assumption. René Descartes was one of the first philosophers to wrestle with this problem, in the 17th century. “What do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines?” he asked. “Yet I judge these to be men.” But Descartes didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to animals. Even more than Skinner, he saw them as automata without any inner experience, “bêtes-machines”. Ball notes that Descartes dissected live animals to study the circulation of the blood, “and dismissed any cries of pain that procedure elicited as a mere mechanical response, not unlike the screech of a poorly oiled axle”.

Four centuries later, De Waal complains that science still hasn’t overcome the tendency to draw a dividing line between the inner lives of humans and those of other creatures. The reason that scientists have focused on theory of mind, De Waal believes, is because no animal has been shown to possess it. Such “interspecific bragging contests”, he writes, are designed to flatter our sense of superiority. In fact, it seems that even here we’re not clear winners. According to Ball, recent attempts to replicate the theory-of-mind experiment with chimps and bonobos suggest that the majority of them pass the test, though the evidence is ambiguous: since the subjects can’t talk, researchers gauge their expectations by tracking their eye movements.

 Even if other species were conclusively found to possess a theory of mind, of course, it would not challenge our monopoly on the kind of “rational soul” that produced the pyramids and monotheism, the theory of evolution and the intercontinental ballistic missile. As long as these quintessentially human accomplishments remain our standard for intellectual capacity, our place at the top of the mental ladder is assured.

But are we right to think of intelligence as a ladder in the first place? Maybe we should think, instead, in terms of what Ball calls “the space of possible minds” – the countless potential ways of understanding the world, some of which we may not even be able to imagine. In mapping this space, which could theoretically include computer and extraterrestrial minds as well as animal ones, “we are currently no better placed than the pre-Copernican astronomers who installed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos and arranged everything else in relation to it”, Ball observes. Until we know more about what kinds of minds are possible, it is sheer hubris to set up our own as the standard of excellence.

Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, observed that if horses and oxen could draw pictures, they would make the gods look like horses and oxen. Similarly, if non-human beings could devise a test of intelligence, they might rank species according to, say, their ability to find their way home from a distance unaided. Bees do this by detecting magnetic fields, and dogs by following odours, while most modern humans would be helpless without a map or a GPS. “Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame,” Gregg says.

But if human and animal minds are so essentially different that we can never truly understand one another, then a troubling thought arises: we would be less like neighbours than inmates who occupy separate cells in the same prison. The kind of understanding Foster achieved with his octopus, or Goodall with her chimpanzees, would have to be written off as an anthropomorphising illusion, just as Skinner warned.

The possibility of true interspecies understanding is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s landmark 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, to which every writer on animal cognition pays their respects, sometimes wearily. Nagel, an American philosopher, concluded that humans can never really understand a bat’s inner experience. Even if I try to picture what it’s like to fly on webbed wings and spend most of my time hanging upside down, all I can imagine is what it would be like for me to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

For Nagel, this conclusion has implications beyond animal psychology. It proves that mental life can never be reduced to things we can observe from the outside, whether that means the way we behave or the pattern of electrical impulses in our neurons. Subjectivity, what it feels like to exist, is so profoundly different from what we can observe scientifically that the two realms can’t even be described in the same language.

Few people have ever taken the challenge of Nagel’s essay as literally as Charles Foster in his 2016 book Being a Beast. A barrister and academic by profession, Foster set himself the challenge of entering the mental worlds of five animal species by living as much like them as possible. To be a fox, he writes: “I lay in a back yard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around.” To be a badger, he dug a trench in the side of a hill and lived inside it with his young son Tom, eating earthworms and inhaling dust. “Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week,” Foster notes.

Foster welcomes all this damage and discomfort, but not in the spirit of a scientist doing fieldwork. Rather, he evokes the medieval flagellants who covered their backs with welts to purge themselves of sin. That Foster defines sin as a transgression against nature rather than God doesn’t make the concept any less religious. “Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things,” he writes, and his preaching translates easily into Christian terms: “Say, with Saint Francis, ‘Hello, Brother Ox,’ and mean it,” he demands.

Foster’s way of seeking communion with the animals may be extreme, at times comically so, but his basic impulse is shared by many of today’s students of animal cognition, and an increasing number of laypeople as well. Encountering an animal mind can perform the same function as a great work of art or a religious experience: it makes the familiar strange, reminding us that reality encompasses far more than we ordinarily think.

The great difference is that while a traditional religious experience can awaken human beings to God, an animal epiphany can awakens us to the fullness of this world. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor,” Foster says in the closing lines of My Octopus Teacher, and by “this place” he doesn’t just mean a particular kelp forest, but the Earth itself. At first this might sound like an odd realisation: where else would human beings belong if not on our one and only planet?

But in the 21st century, it is clearly becoming harder for us to think of ourselves as genuinely belonging to the Earth. Whether we look back on our long history of driving other species to extinction, or forward to a future in which we extinguish ourselves through climate breakdown, many humans now see humanity as the greatest danger facing the Earth – a cancer that grows without limit, killing its host.

It is no coincidence that, at the same moment, tech visionaries have begun to think about our future in extraterrestrial terms. Earth may be where humanity happened to evolve, they say, but our destiny calls us to other worlds. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the explicit goal of hastening humanity’s colonisation of Mars. Other “transhumanist” thinkers look forward to a fully virtual future, in which our minds leave our bodies behind and achieve immortality in the form of electromagnetic pulses.

These projects sound futuristic, but they are best understood as new expressions of a very old human anxiety. We have always suffered from metaphysical claustrophobia – the sense that a cosmos containing no minds but our own was intolerably narrow. That is why, since prehistoric times, humans have populated Earth with other kinds of intelligences – from gods and angels to fairies, forest-spirits and demons. All premodern cultures took the existence of such non-human minds for granted. In medieval Europe, Christian and Greek philosophical ideas gave rise to the doctrine of the “great chain of being”, which held that the universe is populated by an unbroken series of creatures, all the way from plants at the bottom to God at the apex. Humanity stood in the middle, more intelligent than the animals but less than the angels, who came in many species, with different powers and purviews.

 Filling the universe with hypothetical minds, superior to our own in wisdom and goodness, helps relieve our species’ loneliness, giving us beings we could talk to, think about, and strive to emulate. Our need for that kind of company in the universe hasn’t gone away, though today we prefer to fill the region “above” us in the space of possible minds with advanced extraterrestrials and superpowered AIs – beings that are just as hypothetical as seraphim and cherubim, at least so far.

Our rising interest in animal minds can be seen as a way of filling in the regions “below” us as well. If an octopus is like an intelligent alien, as Godfrey-Smith writes, then we don’t need to scan the skies so anxiously for an actual extraterrestrial. Yong quotes Elizabeth Jakob, an American spider expert, to the same effect: “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets … We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.” Perhaps simply knowing that these other minds exist can help us make peace with the limitations of our own.

 

Can humans ever understand how animals think? By Adam Kirsch. The Guardian, May 30, 2023.

Naturalist Charles Foster wanted to reconnect with his inner beast – so he tried living as a badger, a deer and a fox

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Charles Foster lifts a wriggling worm to his lips. “Cheers,” he says.
 
We clink worms.
 
He warns that it might try to escape, and that there will be a strange, stereo-squirmy sensation when the worm splits in two.
 
He grimaces and chews pedantically to make sure every last bit has gone. Foster’s right: there is a grittiness to them. Earthworms wouldn’t be my first choice on the à la carte.
 
Foster has been on all fours for much of the morning, reminiscing about the periods he spent living as a badger, an otter, an urban fox. He also spent time, less successfully, as a red deer and a swift. In one way or another, he says, he has spent most of his 53 years being an animal, or at least trying to.
 
As a toddler in Manchester, he would look out of his bedroom window, fascinated by the tawny owl perched on a lamp outside. The family moved to Sheffield, where it was the blackbird in the garden he couldn’t stop thinking about. The bird stared at him with its yellow eye-rings and black pupils, taunting him. It knew something, and Foster wanted to know what.
 
“I was tantalised and infuriated,” he says. “I went down to the local library and read everything I could about blackbirds. I got a blackbird brain and pickled it in formalin, and would sleep holding it, wondering whether its wisdom would diffuse into me. I stuffed a blackbird and it circled on a piece of thread above my head when I went to sleep at night. I mapped every blackbird nest in our area and put them down in charts. I made maps of their flight path, and took ladders and looked into their nests. And I failed utterly to work out what made a blackbird tick.”
 
Foster was an unusual boy who grew into an unusual man. He was born to high-achieving, working-class parents who both became head teachers of primary schools. He had even greater ambitions for himself. His parents sent him to the local comprehensive, but he went to the library and read up about public school scholarships. Without telling his parents, he applied for one and won it. He left the comp to go to public schools far away in Bristol and Shrewsbury, where he entered a new world of privilege and expectation. Part of him hated it, but he thrived.

 
He promised himself he would re-engage with the natural world after his O-levels. “As soon as the last paper was finished, I went home and spent a day and a night lying in the Mayfield Valley just above our home in Sheffield, at a hare’s eye level. This was a sort of redemptive process that would undo all the life-denying process of the exams. That was my first conscious attempt to live like an animal.”
 
Did he enjoy it? “Enjoy isn’t the word. But I could feel a lot of toxins were being washed out. That seeded in me something – that in living the life we normally live, we are living a life that isn’t natural. And in order to be properly human, we’ve got to be properly animal.” Foster pauses and looks at me. “Do you think I’m insane?”
 
Convention got the better of him again. Foster sacrificed his inner hare and went to Cambridge University, where he studied veterinary science and law. After he left, he worked as a vet and a barrister, as an academic teaching medical law and ethics, as a philosopher and as a magazine columnist. (He still dabbles in all of these, and currently teaches at Oxford University.) He couldn’t have moved further away from the little boy who worshipped the spontaneity of nature. Instead of empathising with wild animals, Foster started shooting them for pleasure. He ran ultramarathons, 150 miles in a week, over the deserts of Africa. He made good money as a barrister, hunted in tweeds and lived the good life.
 
He soon felt a fraud. “The secret of a good barrister is that they are an empty vessel into which the soul of the latest murderer or rapist can be poured. It’s a very spiritually debilitating job to do. The damage that did called me to consider: what on earth is this creature called Charles Foster who occasionally voices opinions, who says he is a moral agent, who says he has ethical positions?”
 
Who did he think the real Charles Foster was? “The real Charles Foster grew up in a little semi in Sheffield and had his mates up and down the road, whereas I had remade myself as something else.” He saw himself as the kind of swashbuckling hero that Rider Haggard might have created. “I was a very arrogant, presumptuous, fantastically self-confident barrister. Even by barristers’ standards.”
 
One day he had an epiphany – well, an anti-epiphany. He was on an expedition across the Sinai, sitting in the midday sun, and he started to weigh up his achievements. “I thought: I will spend my time looking at the enormously fascinating, kaleidoscopically colourful soul of the fantastic Charles Foster. And I couldn’t see anything at all. It was like looking into a well. There was a rising sense of panic, from which it took years to recover.”
 
How did the fallout express itself? “A lot of the pinstriped swaggering vanished overnight,” he says. “The pride haemorrhaged away. I was a pretty broken person. I mean, I continued at the bar, I carried on working. But I became increasingly introspective.”

 
In his mid-30s, Foster’s first marriage fell apart and he started spending more time trying to understand what made animals tick: what is it like to be an otter guided by the smell of shit? Was he as competent a city dweller as an urban fox?
 
We stop at a spot in the woods. See, this could make a nice little sett, he says. He points to a small hollow covered with branches. Foster is a big man – 6ft 3in and a good 15 stone – but he eases himself into the hollow with surprising dexterity. When he lived as a badger in Wales with his son, Tom, they would sleep by day and prowl by night. In Being A Beast, the book he has written about his experiences, Foster wonderfully conveys the sensuality of life where smell is everything, and sight virtually irrelevant. But the book is very funny about his many bestial failings. Yes, he and Tom can cope in the summer, when badger life is a form of extreme camping, but returning in midwinter is a different matter. As an otter, he had less success. Part of the problem was he didn’t like otters: nasty killers with little to recommend them. He enjoyed the sprainting (shit-sniffing, which he did with his children; before long, they could distinguish each other’s poo) and spent hours swimming the lakes on Exmoor. But no, otter life didn’t do much to enrich the soul.
 
As for being a red deer, he really struggled. Yes, he grew his toenails and hair long, but these felt like superficial gestures. He asked a friend to set his bloodhound on him, so he could know what it was like to be hunted. There was an initial surge of adrenaline as he ran, but ultimately the experience was humiliating: when the dog tracked him down, it just gave him a contemptuous glance and walked off. Foster admits he was a rubbish deer. “I found it impossible to come down the pyramid and become a victim.”
 
By contrast, there is something ecstatic in his hopeless attempts to be a swift. He adores these most ethereal of birds, and is in awe of their ability to find their way from the eaves of his study in Oxford to their ancestral home in Congo and back again, to fly 30,000 miles a year without perching (swifts sleep and mate in the air). Foster goes paragliding, follows their path to Africa, eats similar foods; but it serves only to remind him how lumpen he is.
 
It is freezing but gloriously sunny in the woods. Foster slips out of his sett, takes off the mask the Guardian has lent him for the photoshoot, lights his tiny Hexamine cooker and knocks up a few barbecued worms, which he serves with nettles and garlic. They taste better cooked: less slippery.
 
You know, I say, I think you were most at home as a badger. “Why do you say that?” he asks. He looks disappointed. “I think I got closer to foxes than anyone else.”
 
I feel bad. Of course he made a much better fox: he got to scavenge through rubbish bins, mooch around London, share their emotional intelligence. “I wasn’t able to be olfactory enough as a badger,” Foster explains. “Another reason I didn’t get so close to badgers is that they are much more naturally relational animals than I am. I’m actually quite a lonely, wretched animal – and badgers aren’t.”
 
Tom made a great badger, I say. He puffs up with pride. “Yes, Tom’s a fantastic badger.”
 
We head off home where Mary, Foster’s second wife, has made pumpkin soup for lunch. She is a lovely, grounded woman who runs the house and looks after their four young children (Foster has two more from his first marriage); Mary also works as a GP one day a week. You can’t move in the house without bumping into stuffed birds, badgers, foxes and otters. A zebra skin dominates one wall in the lounge. I thought Foster despised his shooting days? “But it’s so beautiful.” Isn’t there something masochistic in having it there? “Yes,” he says, “it’s a bit like Christian ascetics constantly reminding themselves of the sins of the past.”
 
We sit down to lunch. I ask Mary if it took him long to adapt whenever he came back to domestic life. “He re-engaged with the family quite quickly,” she says. “The hardest thing for him was probably using knives and forks. Sitting at a table. Basic social mores. He likes standing up to eat anyway, walking around and doing things.”
 
Could she tell the difference when he returned after being a badger from, say, when he returned from being an otter? “I don’t think I could, no,” Mary answers gently. “I’m usually preoccupied with children’s bottoms and putting food on the table.” She looks at Foster affectionately. “You don’t get the attention you deserve!”
 
Was Mary surprised when he announced he’d be living as a beast? “Oh, no,” she says. “None of it was alien to what he’s ever been. I mean, you were living as an urban fox in London before I met you. Skulking around in the park at night.”
 
“I wasn’t sleeping in parks back then,” Foster clarifies. “I was trying to get into the head of an urban fox, eating out of dustbins and sometimes sleeping under bushes. I was doing that on and off most of the time I lived in London.”

 
Mary smiles. “I domesticated you, didn’t I?”
 
She says he has always been an extremist. “You suck the marrow out of it and agonise over it, to feel you’ve got to grips with it.” What form does his agonising take? “Verbal and physical. Always obsessing over the meaning of life, and what it means to be fully human. Whereas I just think, well, we’ve got to feed the kids.”
 
In the end, Foster’s book is a beautiful and bonkers metaphysical quest, with a number of questions at the heart of it – some universal (what does it meant to be human?), but most tied up with his own identity (what does it mean to be Charles Foster?). “All of us, I guess, wonder how real our relationships are,” he explains. “We wonder whether we are talking at cross-purposes, whether we can know anything about our nearest and dearest – this was just another lens through which to view that question. I thought, if I can have a relationship with something that is as different from me as a fox or a badger, then there’s a possibility that I might be able to know my wife or my children or my best friend.”
 
The revelation occurred when he was living as a fox, and came face to face with another fox that had stolen his chicken leg. “I felt not just that I was looking and observing, but that I was being looked at and being observed. That was the reciprocity I had longed for. I don’t feel I got that anywhere else.” And he came off second best to the real fox? “Oh yes! It was a better Londoner, a better liver. It could run faster, it needed less sleep, its teeth were sharper, it nose and ears were better. It was just superior.”
 
It made the whole exercise worthwhile, he says. “I’m reassured that relationships aren’t impossible. I’m reassured that I know something about Mary. I’m reassured that there is some core identity called Charles Foster, who’s capable of making real choices.” The angst-ridden uberman relaxes into a smile. “It’s made me slightly less insecure.”
 
Going Underground : meet the man who lived like an animal.  By Simon Hattenstone. The Guardian, January  23, 2016

Scepticism As A Way of Life

 

Think about a time when you changed your mind. Maybe you heard about a crime, and rushed to judgment about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Perhaps you wanted your country to go to war, and realise now that maybe that was a bad idea. Or possibly you grew up in a religious or partisan household, and switched allegiances when you got older. Part of maturing is developing intellectual humility. You’ve been wrong before; you could be wrong now.
 
We all are familiar, I take it, with people who refuse to admit mistakes. What do you think about such people? Do you admire their tenacity? Or do you wish that they would acknowledge that they jumped to conclusions, misread the evidence, or saw what they wanted to see? Stubborn people are not just wrong about facts. They can also be mean. Living in society means making compromises and tolerating people with whom you disagree.
 
Fortunately, we have a work of philosophy from antiquity filled with strategies to counter dogmatic tendencies, whether in ourselves or in other people. The book makes one laugh out loud with questions about whether we know that grass is green, that scorpion stings are deadly, or if it is wrong for parents to tattoo their babies. The French writer Michel de Montaigne read the book in the 16th century and used the strategies in his essay ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’. Through Montaigne, many European Enlightenment philosophers came to see a link between scepticism and toleration. Plato’s Republic is more renowned, but the book from antiquity that people ought to read right now is Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism.
 
Sextus was a physician who wrote in Greek and lived in the 2nd or 3rd century CE. He worked in a tradition that originated with the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, a contemporary of Aristotle. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is ‘the best and fullest account we have of Pyrrhonian scepticism’. In The History of Scepticism (1960), Richard Popkin identifies the beginning of modern scepticism with the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s decision to have Sextus translated from Greek to Latin. Sceptics could dethrone pagan philosophers who extolled the powers of reason; sceptics could also, it became clear, raise doubts about religious claims.
 
The sceptical way of life, on Sextus’ presentation, follows a certain rhythm. You feel puzzlement about something. You search for knowledge about it. You arrive at two equally weighty considerations about what is happening. You let go trying to find an answer. And once you recognise that you might not find a solution, it brings some mental tranquility.
 

An early biographer said that Pyrrho needed his friends to help him avoid wagons, dogs and cliffs because he would not commit to the knowledge of his senses. Diogenes Laertius also said Pyrrho would not help a friend who had fallen into a pond, suggesting that sceptics doubt our moral commitments. A perennial objection to scepticism is that one cannot live a recognisably human life and doubt the existence of physical objects or moral criteria. In his book Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers (2021), the philosopher Brian C Ribeiro reveals how sceptics throughout history have responded to this charge. Sceptics acknowledge that human beings perceive things with their senses, feel bodily impulses, learn useful skills, and follow laws and customs. Sceptical philosophers make different ‘sceptical cartographies’ – that is, maps of the boundary between sceptical doubts and the bedrock of human life that repels doubt. Sceptics work for a living, participate in family and community life, and can be as kind and generous as anyone else. What sceptics strive to avoid is making claims about the nature of reality beyond how things appear to them.
 
Here are a few of Sextus’ modes to undermine certainty in yourself and others.
 
Say that you identify yourself in the school of thought associated with a preeminent person, for example Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. If you were alive before they were born, then you would not have known that your thinking would have changed upon reading, say, Newton’s Principia (1687) or Einstein’s articles of 1905. ‘In like manner,’ Sextus writes, ‘it is possible, as far as nature is concerned, that an argument antithetical to the one now set forth by you is in existence, though as yet unknown to us.’ Another scientific revolution may be around the corner. Somebody in the past or alive right now might have an argument that would weaken a belief that you take for granted.
 
Are you smarter than a dog? It seems obvious that humans have capabilities that dogs lack. However, Sextus notes, dogs can reason which path to pursue their prey by eliminating the paths that do not have a scent. Dogs can be brave and loyal friends, have the power to choose whether and what to eat, and can convey subtle emotions and messages through sounds. Not only do dogs resemble humans in intelligence, virtue, freedom and communication, they perceive things that humans cannot. After all, it was Odysseus’ dog, Argus, who recognised his disguised master when he returned to the household. Upon reflection, we appreciate that octopi, whales, bats, spiders and so forth sense all sorts of things in the world that we apparently cannot.
 
Honey tastes sweet but appears unpleasant to the eyes. Perfume smells nice but tastes disgusting. Olive oil soothes the skin but irritates the windpipe. Paintings can be of mountains, but to the touch they are flat. What is the true quality of honey, perfume, olive oil, paintings? One cannot say for sure; the senses conflict with one another. We see an apple using our five senses. But, says Sextus, ‘it is possible that there exist other qualities that fall within the province of other organs of sense.’ The intellect works with material provided by the senses, and the senses conflict and may be incomplete. Our intellect might not be able to know the true story.
 
 
When we sleep, we have dreams that give us a distorted portrait of reality. But maybe dreams can give us a heightened sense of reality? Perhaps we have access to truths that are accessible only when we are sleeping, drunk or sick. René Descartes used a similar thought experiment but identified an escape route in our knowledge that we are, at the minimum, a thinking subject. Descartes brought in God to assure us that most of our perceptions correspond to something out there in the world. Sextus does not resort to theology. He does not want us to look for a foundation for certain knowledge or, at least, to claim that we possess it before we do. Rather, Sextus invites us to exercise humility that human beings can transcend their circumstances and discover reality.
 
Sceptics hesitate to make categorical pronouncements about whether, say, a medical procedure is safe. Its safety depends on such things as the age, gender, body mass index and circumstances of each individual. It is also possible that the side-effects of a procedure will take years, or generations, to manifest. In short, writes Sextus: ‘We shall not be able to say what each object is in its own nature and absolutely, but what it appears to be under the aspect of relativity.’
 
Some people around the world think it is appropriate to copulate in public, for men to wear one-piece tunics, for parents to tattoo their babies, and for men to marry their sisters. We, Sextus explains, do not think that these things are appropriate, but we cannot say that other people are wrong. We are a party to the dispute.
 
Outlines of Pyrrhonism provides readers with a list of argumentative strategies to use whenever anybody claims to know how things really are. Maybe you, the subject, are influencing your judgment, like when you comment on a meal at the end of a frustrating day. Maybe the object changes appearance depending on whether it is isolated or compounded, like when a grain of sand feels sharp, but a sand dune feels soft. Maybe both subjective and objective factors are at work, as when you notice a small comet because it is rare but do not notice the Sun because it rises every day.
 
After reading Outlines of Pyrrhonism, you might fold modesty into your speech and say things such as ‘This is how things appear to me’ and ‘Nothing more’ (ouden mallon).
 
But scepticism is not simply about knowledge or language. It is a way of life. Sextus invites you to become an open-minded, calm person who seeks out knowledge but does not become angry when certainty eludes your grasp or when others don’t see things the same way.
 
In a blog on ‘Epistemic Relativism’ (2021), Francis Fukuyama writes: ‘We who live in modern liberal societies have necessarily accepted a certain degree of moral relativism.’ Fukuyama does not comment on whether this is a good or bad thing but chastises postmodernist writers who espouse relativism regarding ‘assertions of fact concerning the outside world’. Fukuyama identifies the rise of epistemic relativism with writers who followed Friedrich Nietzsche, but these themes are present in Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Bracketing from the question of chronology, is Fukuyama right that relativism is a problem?
 
A quick reply is that sceptics eschew the term relativism. Sceptics do not maintain that truth changes depending on time or place. In 1933, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed in the inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist cause. Heidegger is a relativist but not a sceptic.
 
To the larger point that epistemic relativism is a problem, sceptics maintain that they do have criteria to make decisions about facts in the world or how to treat other people. These are, according to Sextus, ‘the guidance of nature, the compulsion of the feelings, the tradition of laws and customs, and the instruction of the arts’. For Sextus, nature and culture are the soil from which our ethical dispositions grow. Sceptics may be kind to children, help their neighbours, and build institutions that reflect the values of their culture. And there are many examples of cruel dogmatists.
 
 
In one of Sextus’ surviving manuscripts titled Against the Ethicists, he addresses the question of what a sceptic will do if a tyrant commands a forbidden act. The sceptic ‘will choose one thing, perhaps, and avoid the other by the preconception which accords with his ancestral laws and customs’ and will ‘bear the harsh situation more easily compared with the dogmatist’. Aha! For critics of scepticism such as Martha Nussbaum, this seems like evidence that sceptics are passive in the face of injustice. They don’t even know whether they will fight tyrants!
 
Rising to Sextus’ defence, the political scientist John Christian Laursen argues that sceptics can grow up in cultures that believe in watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, and sceptics can have a burning hatred for tyrants. Sceptics can possess energy, commitments and concern about the political order. ‘One can be committed without a chain of truths to support one’s actions.’ And, of course, dogmatists can also support tyrants who murder people who disagree with them.

 
Fukuyama wants people to agree on facts about the outside world. But intelligent people can look at those supposed facts in a variety of ways. Grass is green. Except at night, when it appears black. Sceptics can make arguments like that for a long time. Sceptics encourage us to live our lives in less frustrating ways than demanding something that humans do not and may not ever possess: truth.
 
One reason that it is important to read Sextus now is because people are considering proposals to tamper free speech in the name of combating post-truth politics. One such proposal is made by Sophia Rosenfeld in her book Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2018).
 
According to Rosenfeld, contemporary democracies have inherited a regime of truth from the European and American Enlightenment. Figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson envisioned a mutually supportive relationship between democracy, or republicanism, and truth. From one side, the entire reading public, and not just monarchs and bureaucrats, would have access to knowledge and would be able to debate issues of common concern. From the other side, educating the public through schools, universities and newspapers would accelerate the creation and dissemination of knowledge. ‘A moral and epistemic commitment to truth would undergird the establishment of the new political order,’ writes Rosenfeld.
 
This new social order committed to truth would depend, historically and conceptually, on a balance of power between experts and ordinary people. Experts would be responsible for using their training and institutional power to make discoveries that amateurs could not. You need specialists to design railroad systems and to measure climate change. Ordinary people play a part in this system by engaging in a running dialogue with experts about whether their plans are helping or hurting the common good. People can march and complain on social media when they think that experts have forgotten about them.
 
 
Democracy, Rosenfeld explains, requires a fine-tuned relationship between expertise and scepticism. Experts use methods, jargon, journals, conferences and so forth to acquire knowledge. But researchers express scepticism about each other’s work in peer review, and the public raises doubts about what experts are up to. ‘Pluralism,’ she argues, ‘along with a dose of scepticism inherited from the ancients, has, in theory, been a key characteristic of modern experiments with popular rule from the start.’
 
The problem today, according to Rosenfeld, is that expertise and scepticism are out of balance. Postmodernists writing arcane books do not help matters, though they are not the main culprit. Populist leaders share stories that they and just about everybody else know are false. People live in social media bubbles, and outlets cater to this development by publishing sensationalist stories. Like Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge (2021), Rosenfeld does not want experts to impose their dogmas on the public. Rauch and Rosenfeld envision a contentious public sphere in which experts and laypeople debate ideas and proposals. That said, they worry about the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics dominated by tribalism rather than a commitment to seek the truth. They both share a Platonic sense that the wise should have the final say about what stories may circulate in society.
 
If democrats are to combat post-truth politics, Rosenfeld suggests, we may need to rethink free-speech absolutism. The First Amendment may have meant one thing in the 18th century, but the American Founders could not have imagined how people would use electronic social media to coordinate neo-Nazi rallies or claims that mass shootings are fake news. ‘It may well be time,’ according to Rosenfeld, ‘to consider modifying free speech laws to limit the damage that free speech can do.’
 
Rosenfeld is a historian and does not give specifics about how to limit the damage of free speech. But she does say that democracy requires ‘shared convictions’ and ‘useful facts’ to craft government policy and bind us ‘all together in some minimal way’. As I write, politicians and academics are pressuring social media companies to censor posts about fake news and conspiracy theories and to revise, in the United States context, the First Amendment to make individuals subject to responsibility for the abuses of free speech. What is the problem with requiring social media companies to permit posts only based on facts or to reign in the abuses of free speech?
 
Here is where Sextus helps us pose objections to anybody who wants to censor fake news. What if the fake news is right? There are plenty of instances when people scoffed at an idea that was later widely adopted. Perhaps the piece of evidence to support the conspiracy theory has not yet come to light. Maybe people have seen things but have not yet been able to find their voice, or an outlet, to provide the missing piece of the puzzle. If you visit a seminar at a research university, you will find highly credentialed people raising their voices with one another over theories, methods, relevant evidence and so forth. Anybody who claims to shut down somebody by appealing to facts will be likely ignored. You will also find philosophers entertaining ideas that many people would think are simply wrong, such as that one can ‘discern a life in metal’, as Jane Bennett puts it in Vibrant Matter (2010). Anybody who speaks about facts should add qualifiers such as ‘these look like the germane facts to me’, or ‘this is how the situation appears to me, and no more’.
 
Pyrrhonian sceptics might have no problem with social media companies censoring, say, images of violence. They tend to go along with the laws and customs of the community, and they likely feel, as most of us do, revulsion at images of people hurting one another. But the sceptical tradition poses a recurrent challenge to anybody who claims to censor in the name of the reality-based community or objective truth. The sceptical tradition gives us reason to have doubts about anybody who speaks for the truth.
 
But what about Rosenfeld’s point that democracy and truth support one another? Won’t questioning the drive to truth make democracy vulnerable to populist leaders who share fake news? Sextus’ sceptical predecessor Carneades responded to this kind of objection by developing a doctrine of the pithanon, or the probable. Sextus said that this notion was too much of a compromise with dogmatism. You use the word probable if you have a sense of what is closer to the truth, which assumes that we know what the truth is. Sextus wants to get away from truth talk.
 
Sceptics still want to learn about things. The word ‘sceptic’ comes from the Greek word skepsis, meaning ‘enquiry’. Sceptics run experiments, test hypotheses, submit and do peer review, and the like. Sceptics follow the rules and methods of science and scholarship, and they laugh with their scholarly friends at the unfounded pronouncements of populists. But sceptics think that part of being intellectually honest is admitting the limits and flaws of one’s knowledge.
 
Looking back in time, we see that people should have been more sceptical about, say, the risks and rewards of using certain chemicals. In the 1960s, doctors prescribed thalidomide to treat morning sickness, and subsequently discovered that the drug caused birth defects. Americans sprayed more than a billion tons of the insecticide DDT on crops and lawns before the US government banned it in 1972; a recent study has shown that DDT’s health effects can persist for generations. In 2009, the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer had to pay a $2.3 billion fine for illegally promoting drugs such as Geodon, an anti-psychotic, and Zyvox, an antibiotic. Scientific consensus and common sense have been mistaken in the past. Sceptics press us to consider the possibility that experts and the majority of the public might be wrong today.
 
We cannot say that sceptics always favour democracy over other political regimes, yet scepticism has an egalitarian impulse insofar as it withholds from anybody the status of sage or philosopher-king. Democratic societies cultivate a healthy scepticism of political, scientific or cultural verities. Reading Sextus Empiricus today gives us argumentative strategies, and confidence, to resist anybody who claims to speak on behalf of truth or reality.
 
 
Scepticism as a way of life. By  Nicholas Tampio. Aeon, March 25, 2022. 

One day, historians might call our present era the age of opinions. While in the past only the pronouncements of a small number of opinion leaders resonated within the public, today, we are accompanied by a constant noise of opinions from all sides. The development of the internet and the rise of various social media has made the act of expressing an opinion a societal phenomenon.

 
The postmodern individual inherently holds opinions. Starting in early education, one learns to develop instant opinions on various topics. This is regarded as even more important than merely learning facts, which Google has seemingly rendered unnecessary as it is. In the age of social media, opinions have become currency. From ratings of restaurants, concerts and products to whatever items on the news agenda, the opinion of the anonymous crowd matters. Especially pointed opinions tend to reach many more followers, whether among the avant-garde, the mainstream or the many proponents or detractors on any issue.
 
Political debates on television work in a similar way. Just like with social media, it’s all about calculatedly stating opinions on various complex topics in the hopes of convincing the right part of the audience to agree. Even print media aren’t exempt from these forced opinions. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between commentary and news. For instance, the influential German magazine Der Spiegel simultaneously uses labels like “analytical” and “opinionated” for its newsletter “Die Lage.”
 
It is then perhaps hardly surprising when journalists make use of their creative freedom to embellish facts, aligning them to their — or their readers’ — opinions. The case of Claas Relotius — an award-winning journalist with Der Spiegel fired for fabricating material in his articles “on a grand scale” — is the paradigmatic example for this distressing state of being.
 
Tyranny of Opinion
 
Opinions help us understand reality. They become the ground upon which individuals build their perceptions and experiences of life. Thus, opinions become a part of our psyche. The existence of differing opinions becomes an impertinence, causing psychological suffering by implicitly violating our sense of self. For all the power it holds, the formation of opinions is not a rational process. Sometimes, it can be rather arcane. The history of ideas deals with these questions; however, more often than not, the best we can do is proffer educated guesses about the internal processes of the black box that is the human mind.
 
Nevertheless, one thing is safe to say: When an opinion is formed and has become a part of our psyche, our mind will work in overdrive to defend this opinion against contrary notions, arguments and, if need be, the whole of reality itself.
 
Herein lies one of the grave societal problems of our time. The constant demand to have opinions on an ever increasing number of topics makes us vulnerable. Differing opinions or, worse, explicit criticism have a negative effect on individuals. In a polarized and hysterical society, this results in a heuristic of hurt feelings: statements, messages, films, books and behavior are instinctively scanned for potential attacks on one’s own opinions and evaluated accordingly.
 
This doesn’t only apply to individuals but also groups that constitute themselves through shared opinions. Such groups might bring relief to those who are now able to adopt opinions without much effort and thus become immune to potential and exhausting feelings of self-doubt. When certain correlations between shared opinions occur, the group might evolve into a community of faith. Now, individuals can only change opinions if they are willing to risk not only psychological unrest but the loss of their community altogether. On a societal level, this creates an immensely strong polarizing effect. At this point, having opinions is no longer just a privilege — it has become a civic duty.
 
Within this framework lies a serious risk for both the psychological and physical well-being of the postmodern persona and social coexistence altogether. Is the increasing need for mental health counseling or trigger warnings in classrooms somehow related to this tyranny of having an opinion?
 
Peace of Mind
 
What’s to be done? According to the majority of ancient philosophers, personal happiness is first and foremost a result of one’s own psychological state of mind. Terms such as “ataraxy” (Epicureanism, skepticism) and “apathy” (stoicism) can be roughly translated as “peace of mind.” This equanimity is supposed to enable the individual to endure life with all its ups and downs. While we can’t change the world, we can change how we feel about it.
 
The skeptics were already aware of the potential downsides of forming and upholding opinions. They thought that there could be no peace of mind when one is constantly torn between differing opinions without being able to make a decision. Philosophers like Pyrrhon and Sextus Empiricus thought that the world is such a complex entity that true knowledge is impossible in the first place. Thus, there could be no true opinion, no matter how rationally one would try to form it.
 
Knowing this, the most prudent stance for any philosopher would be the total abstention from opinions whatsoever — epoche. Ancient sources tell us that Pyrrhon was so unmovable that he calmly approached ox wagons head-on and refused to change his way because of vicious dogs.
 
Obviously, this particular form of skepticism cannot be a model for us today — even in antiquity, only a select group of charismatic individuals lived by its teachings. In fact, Pyrrhon’s students got him out of harm’s way on the streets. Another important difference from ancient times is modern science. Back in the day, many of the questions could not be definitively answered due to a lack of appropriate technology and experimentation. This is certainly not the case today, meaning that some modification of skeptic thought seems necessary.
 
For instance, the existence of cells is no longer a mere opinion but an empirical fact. If we refuse to follow the path of solipsism that impugns objective reality altogether, overwhelming empirical evidence need not be classified as abstention from opinion. This mainly pertains to the natural sciences, although here too definitive empirical evidence doesn’t apply to all complex theories, which, therefore, should be treated as opinions.
 
Fundamental Undecidability
 
When it comes to human behavior, empirical evidence often only applies to the existence of specific individuals and self-perceived actions. The causes of these actions are not definitively identified due to the complex nature of reality. That is why all declarative systems concerning cultural matters, as opposed to natural matters, are empirically infeasible. Therefore, nearly all political, economic or social positions are merely well-argued opinions. Without empirical verifiability, there cannot be a clear decision on whether such an opinion is wrong or right.
 
This fundamental undecidability is complemented by the fact that humans tend to be insufficiently well-informed in most areas, making it impossible to form a well-grounded opinion altogether. Indeed, it seems strange to constantly demand opinions of people on topics they often don’t know the basics of. Examples of this are easy to find: Many climate skeptics are as poorly informed about the physics of weather events as opponents of genetically modified foods are about genetics and the functions of DNA.
 
In economic matters, the breadth of the spectrum of normative opinions seems to correlate negatively with the basic knowledge of the discipline. Even experts often get it wrong due to the mindboggling complexity of even the most basic systems. In his book, “Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?,” Philip Tetlock showed that experts usually gave worse predictions than random respondents.

 
In this regard, abstention from opinion seems to be an appropriate means to keep one’s peace of mind and gain a clear view of the world and the impacts of opinions on interpersonal relationships. Abstention from opinion might present a valuable antidote against the polarization of postmodern society. Postmodern skeptics should be able to prioritize building inclusive communities by focusing on empirical evidence without dogmatically accepting opinion as the ultimate truth and waging war on everyone who thinks differently.
 
That an individual suffers is an empirical fact. To help, no opinion is necessary. History, however, has shown us just how many people have had to suffer because of (a difference of) opinions.
 
The Age of Opinion: Can Ancient Skepticism Solve Our Modern Problems? By Julian Coeck.  Fair Observer, July 2, 2021. 

There’s always someone, somewhere, who will disagree with you. There will always be a second opinion, a different perspective, or the sliver of a doubt. Sam thinks the war’s right, Joe thinks it’s wrong. Ella thinks it’s warm in here, Toby thinks it’s cold. Bob thinks all humans are equal, AJ thinks some are better than others.
 
There’s two sides to everything, and life has no easy answers.
 
This is the central belief of Skepticism, and two of its greatest thinkers — the Greek, Pyrrho of Elis, and the Roman, Sextus Empiricus — believed that recognizing this is one of the best things that philosophy can give us.
 
Radical Skepticism
 
As we’ve seen with Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, Greek philosophy can all too often be misrepresented. Words like “cynical” and “skeptic” have mutated over the years to become entirely new beasts. To be skeptical, today, means to be doubtful. It’s to question, challenge, and be somewhat disbelieving of an idea or person. Yet in the ancient world, Skepticism was much more extreme.
 
Pyrrho is considered to be the first Skeptic philosopher. He began with the simple observation that there are two sides to everything and that we are all invariably bound to our own opinions and thoughts. Thus, we will always see the world differently than others.
 
It’s highly likely that Pyrrho witnessed first hand, or at least had heard of, the Eastern religions that repeatedly made the claim that the world is illusory, knowledge is limited, and human intellect is an infantile, narrow thing. Pyrrho agreed. For him, there’s no possible way to determine what’s true or “actual.”
 
And yet, we all stubbornly, angrily, and even violently insist that others are wrong and that we are right. According to Pyrrhonism, we waste so much time and effort seeking and demanding answers or resolution where there’s only doubt and ambiguity, that we’re destined to be unhappy. The key to living a fulfilled, happy, and flourishing life (which is called eudaimonia in Greek and was the end goal, too, of Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism) is simply to stop the pointless pursuit of resolution. Instead, we ought to adopt a position called epoché, which means “suspended judgment.”
 
For Pyrrho, if someone asks you for your views on some controversial ethical issue, on the latest government spending bill, or what’s the greatest movie of all time, you ought to simply demonstrate epoché and say, “I have only my opinion on the matter, as have you, so I shall say there is no answer.” Of course, you can debate and happily chat until the cows come home, but Pyrrho’s wisdom is just to recognize there will be no hope of a final, absolute, and neat end point to the discussion. Someone, somewhere will always think Dude, Where’s My Car is fantastic.
 
Is everything ultimately an opinion?
 
Pyrrho himself took things a bit far. His students reportedly had to stop him from walking off deadly precipices or into busy streets because he said he couldn’t entirely trust his senses. So, it took a few centuries for Skepticism to develop, and it found its voice again in the Roman, Sextus Empiricus.
 
Like Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus didn’t place much stock in human knowledge because he thought everything we might claim to know was always open to doubt or challenged. But, Sextus further added the idea that there could be no possible way to resolve such a challenge. For example, let’s suppose there are two people who disagree about something. What justification is there for one view being better than the other? For Sextus, both are equally valid.
 
We might say, “But we can give reasons for our beliefs!” However, this only begs the question: why does a particular reason make a belief stronger? If I think stealing is wrong because it harms someone, I still need to explain why “causing harm” is important.
 
For Sextus Empiricus, we’ll always reach the point of saying, “This is just what I think.” At no point is there an ultimate answer. Why, indeed, is causing harm bad?
 
Into this world of murky ambiguity, Sextus’ Skepticism argued that we should live only according to how things seem. This isn’t the same as trusting our senses, since even these are open to disagreement. (However, there are no stories of him nearly falling from cliffs.) Some animals can see ultraviolet light, some people hear Laurel and others hear Yanny, and there are psychedelic drugs that can make us see anything at all.
 
We only have how things appear.
 
The consolation of Skepticism
 
For Sextus and Pyhrro, recognizing the very clear limits to our understanding brings great benefit. With the revelation that there are some things — well, maybe a lot of things — that we can never know is deeply comforting. We can give up trying to dogmatically defend views that we have no way to know for sure are correct. We can stop getting so heated in debates where neither party can possibly come to a resolution.
 
But, this is not to give up trying. “Skeptic” literally translates as “enquirer,” and we can still aim for something, while also accepting we may never succeed. To be a Skeptic is to say, “I’ll probably never know the answer to this, but I’ll try to find out anyway.” It’s to give up the false hope for easy answers and to find peace in our own experiences, alone.
 
So, why not try Skepticism? All you’ve got to do is let out a deep breath, give your best Gallic shrug, and be at peace with how little you really know.
 
Pyrrho and the Skeptical way of life: ignorance is bliss. By Jonny Thomson. Big Think, June 8, 2021. 

 

“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”
 
So said a British government minister on the eve of Brexit. The minister in question was an architect of the so-far-so-bad act of self-harm that the British public brought on itself, despite warnings from experts.
 
The break with Europe was the long-fought-for victory for the so-called “Euroskeptics”. This formerly fringe coalition of nationalists and libertarians gained mainstream traction as Britain became mired in economic and political crises from 2008 onwards.
 
We’re now at peak skepticism it seems. It leaves society pallid with the sickness of wilful ignorance. A new breed of skepticism has been steeped in cynicism and given a hubris shot. You’ll find it on Twitter, talk radio, or in murky corners of Reddit and Facebook.
 
Questioning orthodoxy and authority is undoubtedly healthy, but rather than being more open-minded, the modern armchair skeptic grasps instead at fringe theories and comforting myths.
 
Our internet-fuelled skepticism is a generalised mistrust of expertise combined with a levelling-out of the value of information. One theory is seen as good as any other in our information-saturated world, and you can believe anything if you spurn expert opinion.
 
It is similar behaviour to what anthropologists label as the “narcissism of small differences” — it’s an ersatz feeling of specialness by rejecting a commonly (or authoritatively) accepted idea like “burning fossil fuels warms the planet”. Skeptics often mock people as “sheep”, yet they reject robustly validated beliefs in exchange for folk advice or outright fantasy.
 
Skepticism has become a system of belief — a belief in anything but the majority-accepted. Anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, climate change denialists, birthers, 9–11 conspiracy theorists, and Q-Anon whackos fill vacuums of doubt with spurious ideas justified only by how emphatically they are expressed.
 
Experts by nature doubt even their own advice to some extent — doubt being the engine of scientific enquiry and innovation. But armchair skeptics ironically have no room for doubt, armchair skeptics trump evidence with accusations of conspiracy.
 
In this age of information overload, beliefs are contested or clung onto like never before. It is now well-known that politicians and corporations exploit skepticism. “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” (“FUD”) is a negative dissuasion tactic used by marketers and campaigners. Lobbyists, PR agencies, think tanks and political parties pour money into making people doubt facts that may be important to them, and believe spurious ideas that may harm them.
 
Human beings seem to be driven by an impulse to believe. Man, Nietzsche wrote, would believe in the void itself, than be void of belief. We cling on to supposed truths of the way things really are, even if these ideas are contradictory, even if they sometimes harm us. Some beliefs console us, some make us feel superior, but all beliefs are a refuge of some kind.
 
There’s been no time like today when people are seeking refuge in almost any fantasy, like stricken swimmers clinging onto junk that they hope will transport them upstream.
 
Skepticism: Uncertainty is its Own Cure
 
Against this wildfire of pseudo-skepticism we must do all the more to propagate authentic skepticism. Along with curiosity, skepticism is a pillar of wisdom. The root of the word, “Skeptikos” in Greek, means “an inquirer”. Doubts are the fuel of thoughtful living.
 
When we use reason, we conceive of different viewpoints on a matter and take the view that is most plausible in the face of available evidence. The origins of skepticism as a way of thinking can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where the most robust and systematic form of this thinking emerged.
 
Much of what we know about the ancient school of Skepticism (capital “S”) comes from a Roman doctor living in the late second century known as Sextus Empiricus.
 
We barely know anything about Sextus himself — nobody knows for sure when or where he lived — but the doctor wrote a number of books giving us a window into the by-then centuries-old tradition of Skepticism.
 
A new translation of Sextus’s writings by Richard Bett gives a modern audience an accessible introduction to the school of thought, and shows us a better way to think about skepticism in a radically polarized world.
 
This species of philosophical Skepticism is a whole level up from our common idea of what a skeptic is. The Skeptic philosopher is not somebody who rejects one opinion for another, but rather aims to hold no opinion at all.
 
So there’s no true or false to the ancient Skeptic, there’s not even right or wrong. It’s crucial to think of the Skeptic as being continually open-minded. The goal is to suspend judgement entirely. This is not just considering an idea or belief as false — our commonly-held idea of “skepticism”, but considering it as neither true nor false.
 
This is not easy, and in fact takes a lot of effort. But the reward for the effort is worthwhile, as we will see.
 
The Skeptic school is one of the three major Hellenistic (Ancient Greek) schools of philosophy along with Stoics and Epicureans. These philosophies had one thing in common — they all claimed to be the best way to live your life. They were instructive philosophies, with advice on how to achieve peace of mind.
 
Skepticism was a mighty school, counting among its adherents the great Roman statesman and orator Cicero (who is often mistakenly thought of as a Stoic), and Carneades, the famous head of the Academy (the school founded by Plato).

But despite the increased popularity of Epicureanism and Stoicism in modern times, Skepticism remains an obscure philosophy. This is partly because it lacks the allure of Stoicism and Epicureanism in that it outright refuses to offer any “enlightening” theory.
 
While other philosophies promise to unlock hidden truths and deeper meanings to our lives, there’s no universal story of “the way things really are” to tell in Skepticism. In fact, it’s entirely against such a notion. In this sense, it’s a “meta-philosophical” position. And so it’s not as easy to unpack or summarise for beginners.
 
Skepticism is defined not as a body of theories like, say, Stoicism, but as a method of thinking. Its members came together as a “school” by virtue of what they did not believe, and their methods of avoiding belief itself at all costs. It could be thought of as therapy, since beliefs about things being good or bad, right or wrong, are what ultimately disturb us.
 
 
Shadowy Origins
 
 
Philosophical Skepticism was founded by Pyrrho of Elis, a shadowy figure from the 4th century. Like Socrates and Pythagoras, not much is really known about Pyrrho except fragments of information in rumours and stories about his life.
 
Pyrrho took an interest in philosophy while travelling on an expedition with Alexander the Great into Asia. While in India Pyrrho met “naked philosophers” or “Gymnosophists”. These were wise men who had chosen an extreme ascetic lifestyle of poverty and contemplation. Their ideas seemed to have made a deep impression on him.
 
Pyrrho returned to Elis as a philosopher, rejecting the Greek doctrines he had learned and instead sought peace of mind in a new and radical way of thinking.
 
Pyrrho believed that the “truth” was inaccessible. Our senses are unreliable, and all the more so are the opinions of other people. Holding beliefs about anything can do more harm than good, it is better to suspend judgement about whether things are true or false or even good or bad.
 
The goal of this approach was a state of mind the Greeks called “ataraxia”, which roughly translates to “unperturbed” or “undisturbed” (literally: “without (mental) trouble”). The word was often used in a military context as the ideal state of mind for a soldier about to enter battle.
 
This state of mind is different from “happy” or “excited”, it is not an actively positive state of mind, but rather one that is free of any disturbance at all. Ataraxia is only positive insomuch that it implies “serenity”, the word to which it is often translated.
 

The often retold example of ataraxia is Pyrrho’s calm during a storm while undertaking a voyage by sea. The philosopher’s fellow passengers were understandably terrified but Pyrrho calmly pointed out a pig on board the ship that had no idea that it was in danger.
 
“The wise man ought to repose in just such a state of freedom from disturbance,” the philosopher said, according to the historian Diogenes Laertius. Like the happy pig, Pyrrho thought it wise to not make any judgement about the situation the passengers were in. It was neither dangerous nor safe.
 
Pyrrho’s attitude couldn’t be further from the high-minded pursuits of virtue in the likes of Platonism and Stoicism — the wise man ought to be like the ignorant pig. The Pyrrhonist attempts to reproduce the bliss of ignorance about a situation by suspending judgement about its facts.

 

Discipline
 
But as Sextus makes clear, this is not a philosophy of the ignoramus, it is an inquiring philosophy that looks to balance arguments against each other to reach that desired state of ataraxia. Think of the state of ataraxia as like perfectly level scales, or a house of cards — an exact balance of opposing forces.
 
For every argument, there is an equally forceful counter-argument, the equilibrium between them is where wisdom, according to the Skeptic, is found.
 
Sextus wrote:
 
“The skeptical approach, then, is called investigative, from its activity involving investigation and inquiry […] The skeptical ability is one that produces oppositions among things that appear and things that are thought in any way whatsoever, from which, because of the equal strength in the opposing objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement, and after that to tranquility.”
 
In other words, the Skeptic uses their intelligence to open their mind and keep it open. Moreover, an open mind is a serene mind.
 
Seeing issues from many sides takes a lot of reasoning. Sextus’s writings detail just how extensive this reasoning is. The Outlines of Pyrrhonism layout ten “modes of Pyrrhonism” — these are ways of thinking about an issue to allow you to suspend your judgement. This highly practiced and honed uncertainty is the cure for the unintentional uncertainty that disturbs us so much in our daily lives.
 
This all begs the question: if we suspend judgement on everything, how do we survive? If we suspend judgement on whether or not water could quench our thirst, why would we bother drinking it? Sextus’s answer to this was that Skeptics would follow instincts and customs without believing in the ultimate reasons for those impressions, instincts and customs.
 
To spare themselves punishment, Skeptics would worship the state gods without believing in them, for example. Skeptics knew that water quenches thirst, that fire burns skin, and that honey tastes sweet, but refuse to ultimately believe in the reason why they do so.
 
By thinking in this way, they could go about their lives in a serene state of mind — they would think and feel the immediate facts of existence, but would not hold any beliefs that might form any opinions.
 
Some more academic Skeptics, like Carneades, looked to probability and plausibility to provisionally validate beliefs. Pyrrhonists like Sextus perhaps thought that was too close to judgement.
 
As Richard Bett points out, Skepticism freed its practitioners not only of the trauma of being convinced of certain definite views (and seeing those views confounded or contradicted), but also the trauma of not being able to settle on a definite view about something.
 
A Better Society

In the modern world, we are expected to hold definite views on events and affairs happening all over the world. 24-hour news bombards us with stories about wars and elections in countries we could barely point to on a map, tabloids scream sensationalist headlines at us, shrill social media posts demand that we take sides in increasingly polarised “culture wars”.
 
Being informed about the world is encouraged in Skepticism, since being so is required to oppose views to reach a suspension of judgement. But the Skeptic would warn that making hasty and impassioned judgements based on partial information does us no good at all.
 
The benefit of skepticism may be tranquillity for the individual, but more authentic skepticism would also have wider benefits for society. Bett writes, “taking other sides of a question seriously, and keeping the conversation permanently open, are important to a flourishing democratic culture.”
 
This fresh translation of Sextus makes a compelling appeal to skepticism as the ancient school intended it — to actually work at maintaining an open mind to secure not only our own peace of mind, but also to keep the peace in a divided society.
 
The events since 2016 in both the UK and the United States have shown how much we need sensitive and cool-headed deliberation to protect fragile democratic institutions.
 
Skeptics like Sextus may seem like extreme cases in their pursuit of calm in a chaotic world, but they set an important example and a high benchmark for people in all ages to aspire to.
 
Sextus’s writings inspired philosophical greats like St Augustine, David Hume and Michel de Montaigne. Skepticism has peculated through western thought, teaching us that a deliberate and cultivated doubt can guard against the blind alleys of dogma.
 
It is often said that chorus masters of Greek theatre sang at a higher pitch to motivate the chorus to sing better. Philosophers of Ancient Greece used this fact to illustrate the public utility of philosophers in providing a high benchmark for our conduct as human beings. The Skeptics show that radical doubt and a constantly inquiring mind can improve our lives immensely.
 
Sextus Empiricus: Open-Mind Therapy.  How uncertainty may be its own cure. By Steven Gambardella. The Sophist, April 8, 2021.