Seeking calm in the chaos—how far would you go?
In this holiday blur, let's take a look at Pyrrho of Elis, who thought that suspending judgment would make us calmer and happier. Plus, we can't really know anything for sure anyway...
An Instagram post struck a chord with me this week: “The true measure of success is a calm nervous system.” (From @Wordsarevibrations)
Maintaining a calm nervous system is not always easy this time of year. This is the time of final exams and term papers for my teens, and year-end reports and reviews for me, my husband, and our colleagues at work. It’s literally a dark time in my hemisphere, and while we love celebrating winter holidays with family and friends, it’s also a lot of juggling and stress-inducing consumerism. Not to mention the chaos and violence of the world all around us, and the painful “year in review” global news stories that highlight how difficult things are for many people in many places.
None of this lends to a calm nervous system or the ability to find peace in the inner citadel. For those of us who adhere to ancient philosophy, we have go to back to our philosophical principles to seek that out… And recently, I needed a refresh. The goal of finding calm reminded me of an ancient philosopher I’ve recently studied: Pyrrho. Maybe we could learn a few lessons from him, as we seek tranquility?
This Pyrrho is not the same person referred to in the term “Pyrrhic victory,” meaning a win that costs so much to the winners that it’s just as bad as losing. That expression was named for King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who did battle against the Romans (280 – 279 BCE).
Instead, I am talking about Pyrrho of Elis, a town in the western Peloponnese. He was born about 360 BCE. The traditional origin story of this Greek philosopher is that he started as a painter and made murals of athletes in the gymnasium, after which he decided to follow the philosopher Anaxarchus, who accompanied the Macedonian King Alexander the Great and his court on his military campaign in India. The Greeks and Macedonians who joined Alexander traveled into Asia and spent two years at Gandhara, in northwest India. There, the young Pyrrho met religious practitioners and “wise men” sometimes called gymnosophists (Greek for “naked sages”) and the Persian Magi.
According to contemporaries, the gymnosophists were able to sit completely still for long periods, and steeled themselves against feeling pain and experiencing cold in harsh weather. And they had a strong independent streak. They were bold in questioning Anaxarchus, asking why he would serve a king. But above all, these wisdom teachers were liberated by their suspension of judgment.
After studying the ways of the sages, it occurred to Pyrrho that most people act out of habit, and judge out of custom. They don’t really know that one thing is absolutely correct and another incorrect, or that one is beautiful and another ugly. People rather tend to adhere to ideas that they learned from folks all around them.
For Pyrrho, by contrast, things simply “are.” There’s nothing to judge because we don’t really understand things at a deeper, more truthful level. Accepting that, he thought, could make you as imperturbable as the sages.
Pyrrho began to practice a lack of attachment and an absence of judgment, which led to a sense of tranquility. He didn’t trust his own senses—after all, who knew if they could be fooled by circumstances? Even something as simple as saying “it’s night outside” when things got very dark might be wrong. Maybe it’s a solar eclipse! Or the midst of a terrible storm blocking the sun. To assume we know is to be far too presumptive for Pyrrho.
After Pyrrho returned to Greece, people recognized that he was transformed, and he gained followers. He took his lack of judgment in his senses so seriously that he had a number of near-misses that would be funny if they weren’t so treacherous: while ignoring sense data, he almost fell off the sides of cliffs, and he came close to being hit by wagons. Luckily his friends helped him avoid being hurt. A famous story showed him praising a pig who kept peacefully eating while the ship he was on was flayed by a storm. That’s the way to live, Pyrrho thought.
He was also unmoved when it came to physical pain. One test for Pyrrho’s calm—known as ataraxia—took place when he needed surgery, and a physician cauterized his wound. According to legend, his facial expression remained unchanged. (Some commentators have said that this immovability was an early form of yoga practiced in India.)
Pyrrho was celebrated by his neighbors in Elis, who made him a lifelong high priest up until his death in around 270 BCE, and the Athenians, who gave him honorary citizenship. In his home life, Pyrrho lived with his sister, a midwife named Philista, and a rare occasion of his breaking his ataraxia happened when he vigorously defended her against critics. (So he did have a heart!)
If some aspects of this way of thinking remind you of Buddhism, it should come as no surprise. Some scholars believe that Pyrrho actually learned from early Buddhists during his travels (including the author of Greek Buddha, Christopher I. Beckwith). The resonance seems strong.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into what we know about this little-known philosopher’s ideas. It’s hard because we don’t have any books or writings by him. But he did have followers and students who shared some of his thoughts, which have been passed down. Pyrrho—later known as a founder of Skeptic philosophy—apparently focused on three fundamental questions, which were reported by his student Timon (via the later writer Eusebius of Caesarea):
“(i) How are things by nature? (ii) What attitude should we adopt towards them? (iii) What will be the outcome for those who have this attitude?”
“In response, he said (i) things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and inarbitrable… for this reason (ii) neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore, we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted, and unwavering, saying each individual thing that it no more is than is not…. (iii) The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance.”
We can’t really know the true nature of things, this philosophy argues, so why focus on trying to know the unknowable? By acknowledging that we may be wrong about what we observe and believe, we won’t get caught up in constantly taking and defending an idea or opinion. By taking care not to form opinions at all, in fact, we can reach tranquility or inner peace, according to Pyrrho.
(I won’t go further into the philosophical implications of Pyrrho and Timon’s work here. For a deeper, enlightening look at these questions, check out Massimo Pigliucci’s discussion in his Substack.)
All of this made me wonder. How far would we—or should we—go to find calm? Would we be willing to give up classifying things as good/bad or awesome/terrible? In other words: Could we, like Pyrrho, let go of the chains of customary beliefs and of needing to be right? And even go further, would we ignore what our senses tell us—what seems clear from everything we observe around us—in order to find ataraxia?
From a practical standpoint, is it even possible to live this way, without having others do your practical or real-world work? It seems Pyrrho did benefit from other people taking care of at least some of his travel, shelter, and safety. That’s not a luxury most of us have!
Realizing it’s a long shot, I still wonder if this approach could yield some fruitful concepts for us as parents and caregivers. In fact, I believe that a sprinkling of this philosophy could actually help. Right now, I’m thinking about our attachment to what we view as “success” for our kids (especially teens!) on the one hand, and on the other, the influence of parenting experts who seek to define how we should all act. There’s a lot to be skeptical on both of these fronts.
Like with most things, I can see a balance to strive for. It’s important not to give up the very vital role we play in actively guiding our children and setting and enforcing appropriate boundaries and goals for them and their behavior… and yet, we can easily get too wedded to our “sensations and opinions” that might not be completely true. (This could be akin to questioning our impressions in a Stoic sense.)
Take a concrete example. Raising kids here in Silicon Valley would lead you to believe that every student should become a computer scientist or electrical engineer, and should prepare to work for a tech company. Not that there’s anything wrong with those fields at all: In fact, my husband trained in/works in those areas with enthusiasm, and so do many of my colleagues! But it’s not the only career out there. It’s a custom, a habit, even a sensation we get due to being surrounded by it day in, day out, among our friends, colleagues, neighbors. What would we think if we lived in rural Nebraska instead? Or Morocco, Indonesia, Brazil? We’d be immersed in different cultures with different customs. Just spending a couple weeks in France recently reminded me of how different that culture is from the one I live in.
This is not to say I personally believe in relativism—far from it. We can acknowledge that a lot of things are culturally or societally influenced, and that sense data can be misleading, while still holding to the notion of pursuing a life of virtue and improving our own character.
For a bit more context, let’s turn back to the Stoics, the ancient school I’ve studied most and am inspired by for my life philosophy. They advocated exercising choice over our own thoughts, opinions, and motivations, and refining our mind’s focus onto our inner strengths. They didn’t necessarily believe that most people (aside from the once-in-hundreds-of-years sages) could really know the pure truth of things; but we can use our nature-given sense of judgment to improve ourselves and our lives nevertheless. And if you’re looking for guidepost on how to judge and form opinions, we could refer back to the key Stoic virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, moderation. Virtues are always filtered through a cultural lens (ie, in ancient times it was “just” to not consider women as equals to men, for example, which I completely disagree with today) … but we can continuously seek to redefine them and to use them to build a character that is in harmony with the nature of the world as we’d like to see it, and in harmony with our humanity. Of course, like all things philosophical, this is easier said than done!
I know that I’ll never be able to follow Pyrrhonism “in real life” since I wouldn’t want to give up on seeking to understand what’s good/bad and what’s true/false, and I still put stock in my senses. But I would like to use Pyrrho’s ideas to temper how I react in the moment. Thinking this way could help regulate the anger I get tangled in about the world around me regarding things I cannot change. I could apply it to my own mis-steps or omissions, many of which are in the realm of stuff that doesn’t matter and isn’t really that bad. I could employ it when getting frustrated with my kids over pointless things that just happen to get under my skin. I could embrace and share the practice of letting go of having to be right about everything all the time, and the pressure that brings—as well as the impossibility of it, given how little we each understand of the entire planet out there, which we can only see from our own perspective. We could all try this.
That kind of liberation from constant judgment—that suspension of everything needing to be scored on the moral compass every second of the day—sounds as relaxing as a long soak in a lavender-scented bath. Perhaps it’s one piece in the puzzle of what we need to chase away the “I can’t believe all the crap I have to do” end-of-year blues… a way of thinking that can shift our mindset in subtle ways, and maybe, just maybe, take us one step closer to a calmer nervous system.
Interesting article.
Pyrrho has been described as the "Greek Buddha". Buddhism talks about emptiness of things (eg. Heart Sutra), which is interpreted by Buddhist scholars like Chogyam Trungpa to mean things are as they are when they are "empty" of our preconceptions. It is our superfluous judgment which creates the distinctions of like-dislike, good-bad, attraction-aversion.
Perception without judgment is considered to be the purest form of perception in many Eastern traditions. When we don't judge, the world is exactly as it is. Personally, I find this very intriguing. Sometimes, when I get annoyed with what someone did, I see that it is just what someone did. The judgement that it is annoying is purely mine. My annoyance is a quality of my judgment, not a quality of what someone did.
I hear the echoes of Stoicism here. "What injures you is not people who are rude or aggressive but your judgement they are injuring you." (Epictetus, Encheiridion 20) Acts and things don't create distinctions. Our judgments do.
I loved this piece, and I am a fan of the practical application of Pyrrhonism like you demonstrated here. As a former Buddhist monk whose studied the Pali canon for thirty years, I do want to say I think the resonance between Pyrrho and the Buddha is overstated and I'm somewhat bewildered by this scholarly trend lately. Pyrrho seems to me much more like another Indian teacher, a contemporary of the Buddha, Sanjaya Belatthiputta, who the Buddha, or his disciples, were (probably somewhat unfairly) very critical of, and who was, indeed, a Skeptic. The Buddha, though he criticized attachment to views in and of themselves, thought that accurate knowledge was available through meditative training and strongly advocated for which views he thought lead to freedom and harshly criticized those he said don't, and some of these views of the Buddha would have been rejected by Pyrrho as dogmatic and non-empirical. See here on Sanjaya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjaya_Belatthiputta