Lemur866: Alas, an excellent summary of the thread.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with sitting in the shower and meditating, for fifteen minutes, a couple times a week, on how “Nothing can be known.” It’s vaguely entertaining, and can heighten our appreciation of this life of illusion and mana which we must, perforce, reside in.
To base one’s entire life on this kind of thinking is really stupid.
(At a tender age, I read Robert Heinlein’s story “They” and it screwed me up pretty badly. Sensitive minds can, alas, be hurt by these kinds of ideas. I also got really screwed up by the movie “The Blob.” If you’re sensitive, the world can hurt you.)
Quite right. And also “this might be true” is not a conclusion you can draw.
When it was unknown whether we could square a circle, you could not say “it cannot be true” - and concluding “it might be true” because of that would be invalid.
The problem is that they seem to have logically proven that giving everything I have ever built my life upon up is the way to leading a fulfilled life and that anything else is not it.
It’s not “you can’t know for sure so suspend judgment and get on with your life”. That is not at all what they are saying. This is also about giving up likes and dislikes, and preferences. It’s a life without judgment and belief, because they believe that beliefs and opinions are the source of the world’s ills or at least cause most suffering. You guys are really only focusing on light skepticism, not their version of it.
And isolating yourself from the real world is not a fast path to schizophrenia?
Why should you “give up likes and dislikes, and preferences?” Isn’t being fed better than being hungry? Isn’t being healthy better than being sick? Even if these are only illusions, they are illusions no one can escape.
Why not allocate your energy rationally, to improve the quality of your illusory existence? Likes and dislikes make our lives better, not worse.
If you’ve got a toothache, do you say, “This isn’t real” over and over…or go see a dentist?
You are wrong on all counts. This isn’t solipsism syndrome, but dealing with a philosophy that has solid reasons behind it.
Their idea of reaching eudiamonia is to just suspend judgment on all non-evident matters. This is not opposition to it, this is their claim (with solid reasons) for why their’s is the only path to it.
Philosophy is not mental yoga for a healthy mind. That would be the naive view that they would suggest most think. It can lead to troubling stances (like the problems skepticism poses to epistemology). Pyrrhonism would seem to suggest it is pointless due to their stance on the criterion of truth (which they say is not demonstrated), the Munchausen Trilema which attacks any sort of justification for knowledge, and their account the reason is motivated by desire. In short, it is a path that leads nowhere but to unsatisfactory ends.
According to them, likes and dislikes are the source of suffering and pain. To be healthy is a preference and a judgment. There is no better or worse, for those are judgments.
Stop listening to them. Get a different philosophy. There are thousands.
Or drop philosophy entirely. Philosophies are like religions. Not a single one is proven or perfectly rational. They have uses but are not necessary. Atheists can lead long, fulfilling lives without any referent to religion. Many more people are aphilosophical than are atheistic. Become one.
It won’t solve your real problems, to be sure. But it will solve this false one in an instant.
Because they say that opinions and beliefs are the way to suffering. And to a degree they are right, chasing what is good and avoiding what we label as bad causes suffering.
Even labeling something bad can bring more anxiety than needed.
So they . . . believe . . . that, do they? And here you are: explicitly figuring that, to a degree, they’re right about the belief that beliefs are the way to suffering?
Dude, in your case I absolutely would agree that giving up philosophy and getting yourself a decent job that gets you outside with plenty of exercise is the way to happiness.
It turns out that thinking about philosophy makes you miserable. So give that up, practice some radical suspension of judgement, and be happy with the simple pleasures of life. Illusory pleasures? Who cares? Your suffering is just as illusionary, right?
Even if your life has no more foundational reality than a video game, there’s no way to break the illusion., if it is an illusion, short of death.
But of course this will do not good for me to tell you this, because your existential dread is not something you reasoned yourself into, so you won’t ever be able to reason yourself out of it. You need some behavioral therapy that deals with your body, not your mind. But this will never happen because your kind are only happy when they’re miserable.
It’s not really a belief so much as it is fact from what the claims are. By having no judgments on non evident matters people can reach peace. anything else is flawed and will not lead to fulfillment. Is anyone reading what it’s about?
On the other hand, we may seek to avoid these difficulties by interpreting Pyrrho’s first answer as epistemological. After all, the predicates he uses suggest an epistemological claim is being made. And further, Aristocles introduces this passage by noting that we must investigate our capacity for knowledge and he claims that Pyrrho was a spokesman for the view that we know nothing. Bett [2000] argues against the epistemological reading on the grounds that it doesn’t make good sense of the passage as it stands. For if we assume the epistemological reading of [1], that we are unable to determine the natures of things, then it would be pointless to infer from that that [2] our senses lie. It would make much more sense to reverse the inference: one might reasonably argue that our senses lie and thus we are unable to determine the natures of things. Some have proposed emending the text from “for this reason (dia touto)” to “on account of the fact that (dia to)” to capture this reversal of the inference. But if we read the text as it stands, we may still explain Aristocles’ epistemological focus by pointing out that if [1] things are indeterminate, then the epistemological skepticism will be a consequence: things are indeterminable.
Second, in what way ought we to be disposed towards things? Since things are indeterminate (assuming the metaphysical reading) then no assertion will be true, but neither will any assertion be false. So we should not have any opinion about the truth or falsity of any statement (with the exception perhaps of these meta-level skeptical assertions). Instead, we should only say and think that something no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not, because in fact that’s the way things are. So for example, having accepted [1] (and assuming the predicative reading of “is” in [2]), I will no longer believe that this book is red, but neither will I believe that it is not red. The book is no more red than not-red, or similarly, it is as much red as not-red.