A Skeptic’s Faith [Sextus Empiricus]

     I have pursued art rather than religion or philosophy because it seems to me to offer greater access to reality. Indeed, when the practitioners of those other realms appeal to me, in the person of the Buddha, say, or St. Francis, Plato, or Nietzsche, I assimilate them to art. After all, each of these sought symbolic manipulation that would in part make life seem livable. For me, understanding religion is largely a matter of interpreting metaphors, and philosophy’s most important role is that defined by the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese alike: to enable one to live a good life.

     Much of religion and art as well employs ample metaphorical mediation in rendering the world, often glorious and grand as in the Mahabharata or Dante. While I agree that the subtleties of human insight are more precisely expressed in the indirection of figuration, I also appreciate the early Daoists, and some among the practitioners of Zen and Vedanta who look at reality directly, without illusion or protective rhetoric and yet find illumination in that rigorously spare vision. I find elements of the same sort of consolation of philosophy digestible even to a faithless twenty-first century reader in certain of those philosophers of late antiquity, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics for whom the Olympian gods had become unsatisfying, but who were not attracted to the salvationist mystery cults of the era. I turn to the pre-Socratics for poetry, to Plato and Aristotle for magisterial system, but to Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, stories of Diogenes, and to the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus for strategies aimed at a well-lived life.

     Though Pyrrho of Elis, whose ideas we know primarily from Sextus Empiricus, is often named the originator of Greek skepticism, his ideas were by no means altogether novel. The Greek σκέπτομαι means to look about carefully, to view or consider, and thus a skeptic would originally have been simply an inquirer. Indeed the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus encourages continuous questioning and declines to be dogmatic even in its doubts, insisting that one must withhold judgment in the present state of knowledge while allowing for the possibility of knowledge through some future improvement in reasoning and perhaps through non-ratiocinative processes as well. Long before Sextus’ time, late in the fifth century B. C.E. the sophist Gorgias was the author of a lost book titled On Nature or the Non-Existent (an epitome is in Sextus’ Against the Professors) in which he maintained that nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. A more thorough nihilism is difficult to imagine.

     In some dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as a doubter, saying in the Apology “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” [2] Similarly the conclusion of the Theaetetus seems to leave the question of what constitutes valid knowledge entirely unresolved.

     Academic skepticism descended through later thinkers associated with Plato’s school, constituting an alternative Skeptical tradition to Pyrrhonianism, embodied in the work of what was also called the New Academy of which Carneades was the most prominent exponent. As a kind of skeptic fundamentalist in this long-established tradition, Sextus aims at providing a systematic formulation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and thus mounting a persuasive and thorough polemic against the Dogmatists , meaning chiefly the Stoics, but including all believers of every sort. He rejected the Stoic faith in reasoning as well as their monistic pantheism and qualified acceptance of sense data as an accurate register of reality.

     Aiming at providing a thoroughly reasoned case even at the risk of trying his readers’ patience, Sextus repeats the same series of arguments a good many times. His most telling points called tropes or modes, were for the most part inherited from Aenesidemus. [3] His most often repeated argument is that of infinite regress. Since the reason justifying a conclusion itself requires justification, no proposition can be certainly established. [5] For Pyrrho and Sextus every criterion for truth must itself be proven and the criterion used for that proof in turn requires always another proof. The Skeptics insist, in opposition to the implications of everyone’s daily behavior, that we never can be certain we are in fact perceiving reality nor can we know that our own perception is the same as another’s. Since different thinkers come to different conclusions, not only about ideas but even about sense impressions, since all humans are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatus, since consensus is inadequate as proof, [4] it is difficult or impossible to find truly “self-evident” propositions from which to rebuild, like Descartes, a structure of thought ascending all the way to the heavens.

     Perhaps the most surprising result of Pyrrhonian skepticism as described by Sextus is the state of mind that can occur after one admits one’s ignorance. According to Sextus the goal (or τέλος) of skepticism is ἀταραξία , a quietude in mind. According to Eusebius’ account of Pyrrho’s follower Timon the skeptic experiences “first speechlessness, and then imperturbability, but Aenesidemus says pleasure.” [6] Sextus readily recognizes that this calm may be imperfect and he allows for “moderate feeling” when “unavoidable.” [7] For Sextus as for Buddha, desire is the source of pain. When one suffers what seem to be “natural evils,” one “deems himself to be pursued by Furies, and when he becomes possessed of what seems to him good things he falls into no ordinary sense of disquiet both through arrogance and through fear of losing them.” [8] Pyrrho himself was said to have traveled eastward with Alexander and to have studied with Indian yogis (the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” whom the Macedonian king himself regarded most highly) as well as with Persian magi before returning to Greece. Many of the anecdotes recorded about him after he set up as a philosopher upon his return relate to his detachment and imperturbability, though tales of his needing to be protected from walking off cliffs or being run down by carts are doubtless hyperbolic. He so impressed his fellow-countrymen that he was made chief priest during his life (his agnosticism having been found no impediment), and statues were erected in his honor both in his native town of Elis and in Athens.

     Sextus emphatically insists that his skepticism in no way denies appearances which he recognizes “induce our assent involuntarily.” [9] To him the problem is in the account given of the appearances. We cannot deny, he says, that honey seems sweet, “but whether it is sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt.” He is not performing intellectual stunts (as one might suspect Gorgias of doing) but rather, as he says, “pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists.” [10] Like all people, he relies constantly on his sense impressions and his cognitive abilities. He differs only in thinking that these useful abilities may fall short of delivering Reality to the consciousness. This is far from being a cul de sac for him; it is rather a beginning. On the first page or so of his book, Sextus warns his readers that he does not “positively affirm” of any of his statements “that the fact is exactly as we state it, but we simply record each fact, like a chronicler, as it appears to us at the moment.” [11] He later restates the concept while commenting on the highly practical matter of his own medical professions’ remedies: “we are unable to say what is the true nature of each of these things, although it is possible to say what each thing at the moment appears to be.” [12]

     For Sextus the same tentative acceptance of the phenomena of everyday reality applies to dialectic, the art of logical argumentation. Thus Sextus concludes his book with a curious passage in which he says that the skeptic sage, being a “lover of his kind,” wishes, like a good physician, to “cure” the delusions of others. He will select the argument to use in a given situation, not on its rational superiority to other possible arguments, but on the basis of what is appropriate to use with a given opponent. [13] “Proof” is not a matter of positivistic conclusions, but rather of rhetorical victory, the verbal formulation that will accomplish the speaker’s task.

     Both this acceptance of admittedly imperfect vision and the elaboration of rhetorical goals sound to me very like poetry. While we cannot grasp at Truth and hold it firm in the hand, we can record a snapshot of the play of subjective mind, and, if we do so accurately enough, it will resonate in others. Every poem, every work of art, no less than the propositions of a skeptic, might begin with the words “it is as if . . .” If such a declaration is the closest we may approach to Truth, it is the part of wisdom to accept that reality and follow Pyrrho and Sextus and those Renaissance writers whom they influenced such as Montaigne in making the most of it.


1. See Sextus Empiricus I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21d. I use the Loeb Classical Library edition with a translation by R. G. Bury. Though quotations are in English, references are to sections of the original text. See also Diogenes Laertius II.32.

2. Apology 21, d.

3. Ancient skepticism described their basic arguments as tropes or modes. Sextus Empiricus’ attempt to set forth his position systematically leads to a great deal of repetition. Modern comments taking his arguments into account include those by Karl Popper and, later, Hans Albert who coined the term “Münchhausen trilemma” to describe the choice between dogmatism, infinite regress and “psychologism” (trusting sense impressions) in terms very similar to those used in antiquity.

4. See Sextus Empiricus I, II, 43 on consensus of the majority. The Academic Skeptic Carneades had attacked consensus as a basis for theism.

5. See, for instance Sextus I, I, 116.

6. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk.XIV, ch. 18, 1-5.

7. Sextus I, II, 25.

8. Sextus I, III, 237.

9. Sextus I, I, 19.

10. Sextus I, I, 20.

11. Sextus I, I, 3-5.

12. Sextus I, I, 93. As a physician, his name Empiricus would seem to suggest that he practiced in the Empiric tradition though he notes at one point that the Methodic school had much in common with Pyrrhonism, in that it “follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient.” [Sextus I, I, 237] Both schools were opposed to the Dogmatists.

13. Sextus I,III, 280-281.

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“