Epoché

First you defrost the refrigerator.

-          Ernest Hemingway on how to write a novel

When he published Essays in 1580, Michel de Montaigne pioneered the genre – essays – that now terrify schoolchildren.  Contrary to earlier authors, Montaigne was not concerned primarily with politics or religion or any other discipline. He unapologetically and unabashedly took himself as the focus of his efforts and his essays (“attempts” in French) were aimed at understanding himself.

This blog was inspired by Susan Bakewell’s unusual and intriguing biography of Montaigne, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer.  A Booklist review of How to Live cites the “charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays” of Montaigne.  Although I am not sure if my essays will be charming or tolerant, I believe that I may be able to write digressive and skeptical ones.  Charm, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.  Digression comes naturally to me and, as I get older, I know that I have digressed when I look up from my shoes and discover that my companions are fidgeting and looking at their watches.

The word skepticism may be used in formal or more colloquial senses.  By nature, I am skeptical, but am not as tolerant as Montaigne.  He adopted an attitude of amor fati, or “love of fate,” founded on his acceptance of a strain of skepticism that someone with my judgmental nature finds difficult to embrace.  However, skepticism or “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object” seems to me to be an appropriate way to respond to the confusing, ambiguous, mysterious, frustrating world that we inhabit. On a day when the “underwear bomber” pleads guilty after acting as his own attorney who can justify anything other than a skeptical attitude?

According to Bakewell, Montaigne subscribed to a school of skepticism named after an ancient philosopher named Pyrrho.  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

Pyrrho of Elis . . . left nothing in writing, but his pupil Timon says that whoever wants to be happy must consider these three questions: first, how are things by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have this attitude? According to Timon, Pyrrho declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable. For this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore, for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon, will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance

The speechlessness and freedom from disturbance that results from following Pyrrho’s analysis is known as epoché, which means “to suspend judgment or withhold assent.”  Pyrrho maintains that epoché is the appropriate attitude in the face of our lack of knowledge.  Since there is no end of our search for knowledge (“skepsis” means to “always search or investigate”), then we cannot even maintain that we do not know anything because that constitutes an unwarranted claim to knowledge – of our ignorance!

Since setting up this blog, I have been taking epoché to an extreme and following Hemingway’s advice to “defrost the refrigerator” (or “clean up my hard drive” or “run to Costco”) instead of preparing and posting essays. However, that is not the same as epoché.

Skeptics do not believe that we cannot discover reasons to act one way or another. For instance, Montaigne deferred to the laws, customs, and traditions of his time and deferred to the Church in all spiritual matters.  Skepticism only maintains that we cannot discover the “correct or right” way.  That approach resonates with me.