Skeptics today

Like Socrates, Pyrrho of Elis left us no text. 

We know that he lived between the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BC, and that he joined Alexander the Great’s expedition to India. Diogenes Laertius tells that he was a painter at first, that he then heard the lessons of Bryson and had contacts with the Gymnosophists in India.  What we know of his teachings comes from Timon and makes Pyrrho the precursor of Sextus Empiricus, Saturninus and others who between 150 and 250 BC defined themselves as skeptics in the Hellenistic period. 

In the original Pyrrhonian version, skepticism is the philosophical effect of an exposure to the thinking of otherness. The effect of the discovery of the relative nature of Greek knowledge that follows the encounter with Indian thought and the practices of those who Greek language would thereafter designate as Gymnosophists, wise men who based their knowledge on corporeity. 

With Pyrrho, the Greek gnoseological and ethical spheres open up to the otherness of knowledge, which makes it possible for skepsis to emerge. Skepsis is the suspension of judgement (epoké) at the level of epistemology and impassibility at the level of morality, apazeia (a term that should be translated as impeccability rather than apathy).

The experience of seeing the difference in myths, forms of life and worldviews and images suggests to Pyrrho a suspension of belief. Pyrrho initiates the skepsis that we now want to reactivate, in the apocalyptic crisis of the second decade of the 21^st century.

This skeptic gesture we propose as an antidote to the murderous dogma of the economy, of growth, money and the equivalent, wage and labour.

This dogma is destroying the very foundations of modern civilisation and scrapping collective intelligence, formatting the human according to models of enslavement to the mechanism. This dogma is turning wealth into misery, intelligence into the organised production of ignorance, and civility into barbarism. 

Let us liberate ourselves from it, skeptically.