Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 413 - Don’t Be So Sure - French Skepticism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the ILLAMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Be So Sure, French Skepticism. As we've been seeing, the Reformation led to results that were unexpected at the time, and ironic to boot. Luther was neither a tolerant nor a secular man, but in the long run, what he started led to the emergence of more secular and religiously tolerant societies. In the shorter run, the Reformation led to a reawakening of philosophical skepticism. Which may seem, if anything, even more astounding. 16th century intellectuals seemed to have been mighty sure of themselves. Luther was convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist, while Catholics felt equally certain of the authority of the Church. It was indeed an age when people were quite literally ready to kill anyone who disagreed with them about their most deeply held convictions. Here we may recall Montaigne's remark, It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. In a well-known book on the history of early modern skepticism, Richard Popkin tried to understand the skeptical leanings of Montaigne and other figures who wrote in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. For Popkin, one major factor was the impact of the greatest ancient skeptic, Sextus Empiricus. His writings had been known to some extent even in the medieval era, but in the 1560s, Latin translations of his writings appeared. Since humanists also knew about the earlier academic form of skepticism through Cicero, this Hellenistic tradition of thought could now take its place alongside Stoicism as a powerful influence. But Popkin also pointed to the Reformation as an important part of the story. His idea was that the conflict between Protestants and Catholics brought attention to what he calls the problem of the criterion. This is a problem about how to resolve disagreement. If you claim to be taller than me and I deny this, though to be honest it's not unlikely, then there is a criterion we can use to settle the matter, a literal yardstick. But there was no yardstick available when it came to the religious disputes that erupted in the wake of Luther. Catholics pointed to the authoritative standing of church tradition and the papacy, whereas Lutherans rejected this out of hand. With no shared standard by which the argument could be settled, the rival parties instead deployed abusive rhetoric and violent force. Popkin was right to point out that this problem was anticipated in the works of Sextus and other ancient skeptics. A standard technique of this school was to point to disagreements on philosophical issues, and then to suggest that there was no way to decide these issues without assuming some further equally controversial premises. Cultural variation was also invoked to motivate skepticism. Sextus accumulated examples of unfamiliar beliefs and practices in other societies, so as to suggest that the beliefs and practices of our own society are parochial and arbitrary. And we find Montaigne doing exactly the same thing. Still, there's a problem with Popkin's account. It doesn't really explain why Montaigne or anyone else would have found skepticism attractive. To the contrary, Popkin himself quotes numerous authors for whom skepticism was a potentially disastrous consequence of the quandary introduced by the Reformation. Scholars like Jacopo Sadoletto and Guy de Brès wrote treatises in refutation of skepticism, and the humanist Guillaume Boudet warned that everyone who follows the method of the academy would take nothing for certain, not even what revelation teaches us concerning the inhabitants of heaven and hell. As Popkin also notes, it was common for both Protestants and Catholics to claim that the rival camp's theological stance would lead to uncertainty in matters of religious belief. To understand Montaigne's fondness for skeptical argumentation, we need to delve more deeply into this aspect of his thought. Popkin remarks that Montaigne manages to introduce most of the major epistemological arguments of the ancient Pyrenists, albeit in rather unsystematic fashion. His favorite was probably the aforementioned technique of setting up opposing apparently irresolvable views. This is a technique he would have learned in his youth in an educational system designed to impart the skill of arguing on both sides of any question. In his maturity, he would duly quote in his essays the following line from Homer, There is every possibility of speaking for and against anything. The essays also make evident Montaigne's delight in recounting the strange customs of nations removed from the fronts of his own day in both space and time. Elsewhere, people might greet each other by turning their backs, or go without clothing. From ancient times, Montaigne cites reports of the quaint and bizarre habits of the Romans. Would you believe that they used to eat between meals and bathe every day? Having presented all this information, he concludes, As we'll discuss in a later episode, he was also fascinated by reports of the people in the recently-contacted Americas. He was remarkably open to the thought that those people might have an admirable, yet very different, way of life. Furthermore, in his deceptively unsystematic way, Montaigne applied this strategy at the level of the individual, claiming that, For Montaigne, the upshot of all this disagreement was that we should be less sure of our own convictions. He admired people who took a vow of ignorance rather than chastity or poverty. Alluding to the supposed religious certainties being thrown around by his contemporaries, he modestly allowed, Indeed, he professed to be bewildered by the fact that other people seemed so sure of themselves, These expressions of modesty are typical of him, and at first glance could be read in the same spirit as his self-effacing remarks about having a bad memory or poor powers of concentration. But it's clear from the lengthy essay entitled Apology for Raymond Sébon, which we talked about last time, that his uncertainty was a principled one. Here he called it a And he explicitly invoked these skeptical arguments of the Pyrenist school on the way to excusing Sébon for failing to provide ironclad demonstrative arguments. It was unreasonable to expect anything more, since such arguments simply cannot be given. But this same essay shows that Montaigne was no convinced Pyrenist, and not just because this would be a contradiction in terms. It's not so clear whether he appreciated the difference between academic and Pyronian skeptics. To make a long story short, the academics argued against the Stoics that knowledge is impossible. You might be able to find some beliefs that are more plausible than others, but you can never get absolute certainty. By contrast, Sextus's Pyronian skepticism suspends judgment on all matters, even about whether knowledge is possible after all. This allowed Sextus to avoid the paradox of claiming to know that knowledge is unattainable. Montaigne, though, seems to have thought that all skeptics are subject to this paradox. Thus he said of Pyronism that What he apparently valued most in Pyronism was the idea of following appearances. You might be aware that other peoples behave very differently, but that's no reason to start walking around naked, or god forbid, washed daily. Confronted with the diversity and uncertainty of human belief, and the fact that, as Montaigne puts it, there is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do, one should simply adopt the customs of one's own society. But in the same essay, where he makes that last remark, Montaigne says that a wise person is one who withdraws from the crowd, and makes judgments of their own. He often framed the essays, or rather, the lifetime of reflection that led to the essays, as a sustained effort to improve and refine his own judgments. Taking all this into account, we might conclude that Montaigne was what is nowadays called a fallibilist. In other words, he did not suspend judgment, like a Pyronist would do, but instead came to conclusions, even firm ones, while remaining open to correction. This fits well with his frequent emphasis on his own changing opinions, and it also fits with his commitment to moderation. Just as one should be neither an unrestrained hedonist nor a self-punishing ascetic, one should not abstain from all belief, but neither should one take oneself to be absolutely certain. We may be able to shed still more light on Montaigne's skepticism by turning to the way it was taken up by his friend Pierre Charron. According to legend, he was considered as an adoptive son by Montaigne, who bequeathed him the right to use Montaigne's family arms. This has been put in doubt by modern scholarship, since our main source for the story may exaggerate the extent of Charron's relationship to Montaigne. It's telling that it was not this adoptive son, Charron, but Montaigne's adoptive daughter, Marie Desgarnais, who was entrusted with the task of producing a posthumous edition of the essays, but more on that next time. What matters for now is that Charron most definitely drew on Montaigne extensively in his own writings, especially a work called On Wisdom. In this treatise, he takes recourse to Montaigne's various skeptical arguments, while also drawing on other authors, like Bodin, Lipsius, and Duver. As a result, Charron has a reputation for being a rather unoriginal author, but he does modify his sources rather than quoting them directly. Moreover, he puts skeptical ideas within a larger body of work that one can only describe as thoroughly non-skeptical. Charron was a preacher and theologian, whose 1593 work, Three Truths, polemicized against the Protestant Reformers, especially Duplessis Monnet, whom we met as the probable author of the political treatise, Vindicii contra tyrannos. The first true truths of Charron's title, which would have been acceptable to Protestants, were that God exists, and that he has sent Christ as a savior. But the third truth states that the church founded by Christ is to be identified with the Catholic one. As soon as one doubts, the authority of this church, argues Charron, disorder and heresy are bound to ensue. European history in the later 16th century was proof enough of this, and the dissension among the various Protestant groups was a further indication that the Reformation was deeply misguided. Now, this doesn't sound particularly skeptical. The puzzle deepens when we note that Charron published another work of passionately convinced Catholic theology in 1601, the very year that saw the appearance of his book on wisdom, which is packed with skeptical argumentation. What is going on here? Well, that's a matter of some scholarly controversy. One suggestion has been that the skeptical arguments drawn from Montaigne and Charron's On Wisdom are simply designed to clear away false beliefs. This procedure would make it possible for the innate seeds of knowledge and virtue in our souls to blossom fully. That sounds more stoic than skeptic, and indeed the same treatise On Wisdom contains ethical material indebted to stoicism, which is where the influence of Lipsius and Duver comes in. Yet there are also grounds for thinking that Charron was quite serious about his skepticism. He went further than Montaigne, who inscribed the saying, What do I know? in his tower. Charron put the words, I do not know, on the front of his house. It also appears on the frontispiece of On Wisdom. And in the preface of On Wisdom, he says that all his proposals are presented only problematically and academically. Whatever I propose, I obligate no one to accept. I simply present things and set them out. I will not be annoyed if anyone does not believe me, as pedants do. So we do need to ask how his uncompromising theological commitments could be made compatible with a skeptical, or fallibilist, epistemology. The key is already supplied by something we saw Montaigne saying, that his views were only human thoughts, as opposed to God's ordinance. This point becomes central in Charron, who systematically contrasts merely human wisdom with the wisdom divulged in God's revelation and the providentially guided teachings of the church. When Charron insists upon the variation between beliefs and the lack of any decisive criterion to decide the resulting disagreements, he is only impugning the certainty of human wisdom. Drawing on our own natural resources, we would never be able to go beyond uncertain opinion. This clears the way for an embrace of the supernatural resources supplied by God. Thus, Charron has been labeled a Phidias, in other words, someone who thinks that true knowledge is attained through faith rather than natural reasoning. We can now return to the question we started from. Why would men like Montaigne and Charron be positively disposed toward skepticism, where it had appeared more as a threat or accusation in earlier authors? The answer, I think, is twofold. First, skepticism was useful for Catholic authors because it allowed them to create space for faith in authority. Since we don't know anything for sure, we'd better let God tell us the right answers, and he does that through the church. This motivation is particularly clear in Charron, who was a Catholic theologian and polemicist, but Montaigne too, who was neither of these things, used skepticism as a rationale for conservatism in religion. Second, these authors saw skepticism as a route to end violent conflict. By undermining people's feelings of self-righteous certainty, they hoped to persuade them to stop rioting and fighting wars on the basis of those feelings. I've already quoted Montaigne's line about roasting people twice, so here's another quotation to the same effect. A third figure is often grouped together with Montaigne and Charron as belonging to a skeptical moment around the turn of the 17th century. But this philosopher, Francisco Sanchez, seems to me to have arrived at his skeptical stance via a rather different path. This despite the fact that he studied at the Collège de Bourguignes in Bordeaux, the same institution where Montaigne studied. Sanchez's life began in Braga, near the border between Spain and Portugal, but he moved to Bordeaux with his family as a child and his education and career unfolded in France and Italy. Trained in philosophy and medicine, he held professorial chairs in both fields at the University of Toulouse. So what caused him to lose his confidence in the possibility of attaining knowledge? For an answer, we must turn to his remarkable treatise, Quod nihile scitur, meaning That Nothing is Known. As its title suggests, the treatise is almost entirely destructive in intent and presents a searching critique of scholastic theories of knowledge. In wave after wave of argument, Sanchez charges the schoolmen with being doubly ignorant, because in stark contrast to Socrates, they do not even understand that they lack understanding. Unlike Montaigne, whose skeptical arguments have a sweeping generality borrowed from Pyranism, Sanchez, who doesn't seem to have made use of sexist at all, focuses on demolishing the specifically Aristotelian conceptions of knowledge that he knew so well thanks to his own education. Definitions are the foundation of Aristotelian science, so Sanchez tries to undermine the whole project by denying that any term can be defined, with full adequacy. This is because any definition will itself consist of terms that stand in need of further definition, a regress that will never end. As a result, language itself lies beyond our certain grasp, meaning that the readers of Sanchez's very book cannot be sure that they understand what they are reading. In a nice move, he adds that the term knowledge itself cannot be satisfactorily defined, which by itself will undermine any claim to know anything. How can you be sure you have knowledge if you aren't even sure what knowledge is? The same style of refutation is also applied to Aristotelian theories of proof. Any syllogism will consist of premises that would need to be justified by further premises, and again, we will never reach a starting point that is just obvious. And again, Aristotelians think we understand natural phenomena in light of their causes, but when we follow the chain of causes we will never get to anything that isn't itself caused, unless this is God, but it's agreed that God is unknowable, so we can't end the explanatory regress that way either. Not infrequently Sanchez adopts a sarcastic tone, as when he demands of the scholastics, who always appeal to indubitable first principles, well, send them to me. While Sanchez's treatise is remarkable for the power and cogency of its arguments, it is not unprecedented in the period we've been studying. Humanists like Valla and Vivas had unleashed similar torrents of invective and refutation against the scholastics, but Sanchez seems to be working towards something other than a rhetoric based humanist methodology. This becomes clear at the end of the treatise, where Sanchez merely gestures at a more positive approach to epistemology. Earlier in the work, he has claimed that all understanding is derived from the senses, and beyond this kind of understanding, all is confusion, doubt, perplexity, guesswork, nothing is certain. This could be a step toward a general skeptical conclusion, given that as Sanchez also mentions, sense experience is subject to illusions and misperceptions like the famous straight stick that looks bent in water, and it seems that he does not think sensation could be used to attain perfectly certain knowledge, the ambitions so fondly pursued by the scholastics. But, as he concludes his book, Sanchez alludes to an ambition of his own. He would like to, "...establish a kind of scientific knowledge that is both sound and as easy as possible to attain. It would be based not on the chimeras and fictions of Aristotelian science, but on things as they really are. Unfortunately, having gone on for more than a hundred pages about the kind of epistemology that will not work, Sanchez does not see fit to say anything more about this epistemology that he thinks would work. He simply says that he will devote a further treatise to it, and there's no sign that he ever made good on that promise. But, given his earlier words about sense experience, we can assume his new science would be grounded in empirical inquiry. If so, he may well have taken this idea from his medical training, even from the antique empiricist school of medicine that he would have known through descriptions found in Galen. Sanchez's science would surely be modest in its pretensions. It would not pretend to be an irrefutable body of conclusions, traceable to indubitable first principles, but present a cautious account of things as they seem to be, always open to improvement. So, it turns out that none of our three skeptics was really a skeptic, in the sense of suspending judgment about everything. They were willing to make judgments in the ethical and scientific realms, while bearing in mind that they might need to revise these judgments later. Indeed, Antenya seems to have downright expected to revise his judgments and feel conflicted about them. Hence one of the quotable remarks I mentioned in the opening of the episode on him, there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. But for Charon, at least, an embrace of one's own fallibility could be compatible with accepting the infallibility of the pope. In the time of reformation and counter-reformation, even skepticism was weaponized to fight for dogmatism. So now you probably think we've done enough to cover this sudden appearance of skeptical philosophy in Renaissance France. But don't be so sure. Everything I've said will be subject to correction next time, when I'll be talking to someone who really knows what he's talking about when it comes to skepticism in the history of philosophy. To hear more about the background and nature of skepticism in Antenya, Charon, and Sanchez, and also the way these ideas echoed in the thought of Descartes, you should make certain to catch my interview with Henrik Lagoland, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gas.