Abstract
The second-century Pyrrhonian sceptic, Sextus Empiricus, says that piety of a certain kind is compatible with the Pyrrhonian – i.e. radically skeptical – way of life. The contemporaneous founder of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, Nāgārjuna, also embodies a form of sceptical practice in pursuit of the spiritual goal of non-attachment, including non-attachment in intellectual matters. After some preliminary remarks on the relevance of this chapter to ethics and anatta (non-self), I give an overview of the issue of how skepticism can relate to religious practice in the texts of Sextus and Nāgārjuna. Then I show how Sextus and Nāgārjuna represent a kind of religiosity without belief that is in contrast both to conventional views about the relation between belief and religious practice as well as some contemporary views in philosophy of religion concerning belief and faith. After considering some objections to my claim that Sextus and Nāgārjuna represent a distinct category of religiosity, I end with reflections on what the study of Sextus and Nāgārjuna could add to contemporary philosophy of religion.
The author would like to thank Gordon Davis and Stephen Harris for reading earlier drafts of this chapter. The author also benefitted from comments by audiences who heard versions of this chapter at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (2014), the Chattanooga Institute for Noetic Sciences (2015), and the Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Congress (2013).
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Notes
- 1.
Among scholars proffering hypotheses of historical interaction, the main disagreement is whether the direction of influence was primarily from India to Greece or vice versa. Flintoff (1980) argues that Pyrrho was directly influenced by Buddhist philosophy, making the direction of influence from India to Greece. McEvilley (2002, Ch. 18) argues in favor of a complex interaction in which India influenced Greece several centuries before Pyrrho’s lifetime; according to McEvilley , when Pyrrho brought his ideas to India, he then influenced the subsequent development of Buddhism, particularly Madhyamaka . Kuzminski (2008, Ch. 2) agrees with Flintoff on the direction of influence and opposes McEvilley’s view. Beckwith (2015) argues that the primary influence was from India (or central Asia) to Greece such that Pyrrho’s system is based on an early, pre-canonical, form of Buddhism.
- 2.
See Diogenes Laertius 9.61 (in Inwood and Gerson 1997, 285) .
- 3.
According to Annas , “For us, this type of agent-centered morality is most familiar in religious versions , notions such as that to the pure in heart all things are permitted, or that if you love God you may do as you like” (Annas 1995, 193). Likewise, many Buddhists claim that an enlightened person will automatically act in the morally correct manner.
- 4.
I am drawing this account from Taylor 1989 , Chs. 2 and 3.
- 5.
Another helpful distinction is Thomas Nagel’s distinction between the principle of prudence and the principle of altruism (Nagel 1970, 19).
- 6.
One interpretive debate about Sextus is whether he is offering a normative argument in favor of Pyrrhonism or a descriptive account of what a Pyrrhonian does (Thorsrud 2009, Ch. 7) . I favor the descriptive interpretation, since this gives Sextus a better response to the objection that skepticism is inconsistent, which has been one of the most pervasive objections to Academic and Pyrrhonian skepticism. One version of the objection says that it is inconsistent to use arguments to conclude that arguments are not powerful enough to offer rational support for their conclusions. On the descriptive interpretation, Sextus avoids this problem because he is simply not interested in giving an argument to support the conclusion that one ought to be a Pyrrhonian; he is merely describing what Pyrrhonian skeptics do, which means the objection rests on a category mistake.
- 7.
Still, one might wonder if Sextus and Nāgārjuna are giving any normative account of the adaptation of means and ends. In other words, one might wonder if they have a sense of the normativity of instrumental reason in the sense Korsgaard (1997) describes. My inclination is to say that they do not have any such account. For Sextus, such an account would contradict his careful denial that Pyrrhonian skeptics have beliefs (at least about philosophical matters – see PH 1.7). Nāgārjuna may well agree with Korsgaard when she claims, “There is no position from which you can reject the government of instrumental reason: if you reject it, there is no you” (Korsgaard 1997, 254; a similar constitutive note is struck in Taylor 1989 , 27). The difference, of course, is that as a Buddhist, Nāgārjuna would take connection between this rejection of normativity and a loss of a sense of self to be a good thing!
- 8.
Support for this reading comes from MMK 18, especially verses five and nine. There Nāgārjuna makes connections between non-self , emptiness , imagination (vikalpa) and the destruction of conceptual proliferation (prapañca), all of which lead to liberation (mokṣa).
- 9.
For more on this point, see Hankinson 1995, 286.
- 10.
For a collection of fragments and excerpts on Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism , see Inwood and Gerson 1997 .
- 11.
It should be noted that at least one Academic, Carneades, might have had a more nuanced approach in simply claiming that he had a persuasive impression that knowledge is impossible rather than knowing that knowledge is impossible (Thorsrud 2009, Ch. 4) . See also Cicero’s discussion of Carneades in Academica, 2.99–111 (Cicero 2006, 58–65).
- 12.
Annas asks, “What has he [i.e., a Pyrrhonian] lost that he originally had before becoming interested in theology? He cannot now commit himself to any universal , cross-cultural claim about the existence and nature of God . But this is not something he did in the first place” (Annas 2011, 82).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
The end of chapter verses are 5.8, 13.8, 25.24, and 27.30. Other verses suggestive of phase two are 18.5, 21.17, and 24.7.
- 16.
sarvadṛṣṭiprahānāya yaḥ saddharmam adeśyat/
anukampām upādāya taṃ namasyāmi gautamaṃ// MMK 27.30.
- 17.
Proponents of the “false views” translation note that dṛṣṭi often has a negative connotation of “a wrong view” (Monier-Williams 1994, 492) . While it’s possible that Nāgārjuna meant “wrong views,” it is also possible he meant views in general. The same Sanskrit word is used for the element of the Eightfold Path known as “right view” (samyag-dṛṣṭi), which has a positive connotation. In any case, an appeal to the text cannot solve this debate. My point is that if we want to take “dṛṣṭi” as meaning all views, it is possible to do so in a way that makes sense of the text. In favor of my translation, though, I would point out that a major reason in favor of the “false views” translation – that the text cannot make sense otherwise – is simply not the case.
- 18.
In this I agree with Garfield in his agreement with Ngog and the Nying-ma school (Garfield 2002, 46–68). Patsab Nyimadrak and Khedrupjey’s opponent in the Great Digest are others who take MMK 27.30 at face value.
- 19.
For another example of Early Buddhist quietism , see the following line from the Sutta Nipāta: “(only) when a man renounces all opinions, does he make no quarrel with the world” (Collins 1982, 130) . Also, Richard Hayes has identified a kind of skepticism within the Buddhist tradition from the Nikāyas up until at least Dignāga; Hayes calls this “skeptical rationalism … according to which there is no knowledge aside from that which meets the test of logical consistency, and moreover very few of our beliefs meet this test” (Hayes 1988, 41). Hayes also claims that Nāgārjuna exemplified this type of skepticism (Hayes 1988, 52–62).
- 20.
Similarly, Paul Fuller suggests that there are two main ways of understanding the role of views (diṭṭhi) in early Buddhism: the opposition understanding, in which right views are opposed to wrong views, and the no-view understanding, in which the goal is to avoid all views whatsoever (Fuller 2005, 1). Fuller’s concern is more with modern interpretations that the early Buddhist tradition has a single attitude toward views rather than Collins’s and my understanding that the tradition contains both attitudes. Also, Fuller argues against both the opposition and no-view understandings: “the opposition understanding is challenged because there is not an opposition between wrong-view and right-view as incorrect and correct truth claims but an opposition between craving and the cessation of craving. … the rejection of all views is not being advised, but the abandoning of craving and attachment to views … The early texts do not reject knowledge, but attachment to knowledge” (Fuller 2005, 8). Fuller argues in favor of what he calls the “transcendence of views,” which is a “different order of seeing” in which right view “apprehends how things are and is a remedy for craving ” (Fuller 2005, 157).
- 21.
- 22.
For a detailed discussion and criticism of family-resemblance views, see Schellenberg 2005 , Ch. 1.
- 23.
None of this should be taken to imply that Audi’s and Schellenberg’s positions on nondoxastic faith are identical. For instance, Audi thinks that faith is incompatible with doubt, whereas Schellenberg thinks faith in some circumstances requires doubt in the form of religious skepticism (Audi 1992, 59; Schellenberg 2005, 132). See also Schellenberg 2007 and 2009. Draper 2011 gives a helpful overview of Schellenberg 2005, 2007, and 2009 while Smith 2010 is a critique of Schellenberg’s religious skepticism.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
Furthermore, while it’s hard to know what ancient philosophers would think about contemporary developments, I think Sextus and Nāgārjuna may well critique nonrealist and Wittgensteinian notions of belief (whether Wittgenstein himself can be more favorably compared is a different issue). According to Sextus, a Pyrrhonian is concerned to avoid mental disturbance, and it seems to me that nonrealist or Wittgensteinian beliefs could provoke mental disturbance just as easily as their realist counterparts. Nāgārjuna’s point is that beliefs of a philosophical or religious nature often involve harmful psychological attachments that can’t be eliminated simply by another definition of what it means to hold a belief – the tendency toward belief itself should be eliminated.
- 27.
The study of Sextus and Nāgārjuna could be useful in pursuing what Andrew Chignell , echoing a suggestion from Nicholas Wolterstorff, has called “liturgical philosophy.” This idea “involves de-emphasizing ideal cases of justified bare theistic belief in favour of the philosophically significant features of actual religious adherence as modelled in various liturgical contexts. In other words, it would turn to real-world religious practice – especially the sort that goes on in ritual leitourgia – as a guide for philosophical reflection concerning the attitudes and doctrines involved in religion generally (Chignell 2013, 197.
- 28.
See Ribeiro 2009 for an argument that there is a great deal of continuity between ancient and modern skepticism ; interestingly, Ribeiro argues that Sextus and Montaigne are similarly committed to religious practice as a part of local tradition.
- 29.
Annas (2011) suggests that, at least with Sextus, the answer to this question is “no,” given the gulf between the ancient pagan context and the context of monotheism today, although she does admit that she isn’t considering polytheistic religions such as Hinduism (Annas 2011, 83). It may be promising to consider these issues in light of the pluralism and syncretism of many contemporary forms of Hinduism, especially those influenced by Neo-Vedānta.
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Mills, E. (2018). Skepticism and Religious Practice in Sextus and Nāgārjuna. In: Davis, G. (eds) Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67407-0_4
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