Pyrrho of Elis

Pyrrho's first move is to withdraw his assent from every opinion: while things remain indeterminate, to grant belief to one rather than another would be to rush. This restraint meets the evidentialist spirit, to believe only in proportion to what shows itself, but in an extreme form, since nothing shows itself enough to deserve belief. The Pyrrhonian nuance is that he makes of this restraint no moral duty: it is the lived effect of the indeterminacy of things, the impossibility of assenting where nothing tips the scale, rather than a rule one would impose on oneself.

Aristocles (after Timon), cited by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, XIV, 18 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61-62

If nothing is good or bad by nature, then no object deserves to be pursued or feared: Pyrrho draws from this an indifference (adiaphoria) toward things, the lived spring of his detachment. Where Epicurus sorts desires into the necessary and the empty, Pyrrho does not sort: it is the value judgment itself that he withdraws, which defuses desire at its root rather than ordering it. Tradition credits the sage with such evenness of soul that nothing moves him, yet without advocating an ascetic extinction: he lives by what appears, hunger, thirst, customs, without attaching to them as goods.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61-66 · Cicero, On Moral Ends, II, 35 and IV, 43

Pyrrho grants suffering neither a fruitfulness that would forge the soul, nor the status of an absolute evil to be abolished: either would be to judge it by nature twice over. The greater part of the torment, he holds, comes from the added opinion that what happens to us is an evil; to withdraw that judgment lightens it accordingly, and only the forced pain of the body remains. The position is thus close to the median indifference, a suffering defused by the suspension of the value judgment rather than magnified or fought on principle.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 66-68 · Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V (on the imperturbability of the sage)

To hope, like to fear, is to judge that a non-evident future will be good or bad: yet it is precisely this judgment on the indeterminate that Pyrrho suspends. With no opinion about what tomorrow must bring, he does not hang his peace on an expectation, and welcomes what presents itself. The tone is one of lucid tranquillity rather than a principle of hope, yet without the tragic despair foreign to one who has given up judging the future.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 107-108

Pyrrho's skepticism is first an attitude turned toward the testing of appearances rather than the world-transforming deed, which leans it toward the examined life. But unlike the Socratic examination of the self, it carries no doctrine of the soul to be deepened: no inner self to decipher, only the discipline of a gaze that frees itself from opinions. Hence an interiority that is real but thin, and held back from the extreme.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61-70

The verdict of indeterminacy applies to values as well: nothing is just or unjust, beautiful or ugly "by nature", but only by convention and custom. Timon reports that for Pyrrho "nothing is beautiful or ugly, just or unjust" in itself. Lacking a criterion to decide, the sage suspends judgment on the existence of universal norms and regulates himself, by default, on received usage, without holding it true. Hence a null universalism and a thin constructivist strand, since following custom is not grounding it: it is conforming to it in the absence of any established moral truth.

Aristocles (after Timon), cited by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, XIV, 18 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61 and 101

Disturbance, for Pyrrho, arises from the opinion that a thing is good or bad: remove the judgment, and the emotion that depended on it falls away. This is an intellectualism of the passions, shared with the Stoics, but he pushes it further than they do, since he withdraws not only false judgments but the very act of judging things. One nuance holds him back from the extreme: tradition grants that the sage still suffers in the body, from cold or pain, affections no suspension abolishes. Diogenes Laertius indeed reports that Pyrrho, caught one day fleeing a dog, admitted it is hard to strip the human being away entirely.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 66-68

The indeterminacy of all things extends to the divine: since neither the existence nor the non-existence of the gods can be established, the sage does not decide. This suspension is more radical than agnosticism, which asserts undecidability as a thesis, since Pyrrho does not even posit that the divine is unknowable. In practice, following the custom of his city, he honors the gods like everyone else, without attaching dogmatic belief to it. It is this lived suspension, and not a position of balance between faith and atheism, that the median value marks here.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 64 and 108 · Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 2 (on the gods)