The Skeptic’s Bible.
He stood apart from his body. His body, that mangled mess, his body. He had succeeded at last; he had killed all that was still recognizable. The idealist had morphed completely into a cynic. The contradiction had fully synthesized.
He stood apart from it all, numb, this tyrant who once extolled liberty. It was time to release all the violence he had repressed. It was time to repay the pain, the anger.
He had feared this day would come. It had kept him up at night, this slow descent into nothingness, but he had embraced the inevitable only half-heartedly. He had seen the darkness in the hearts of men; he had stared into the abyss that was his own soul. He had made peace with the evil that all men hide behind their smiles.
He died, as all men must; on his grave: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The descent into cynicism is often the result of the brutal elimination of optimism. Rarely is this devolution in stages. Often, it is sudden, a reaction to some cataclysmic event in the optimist’s life, one that, finally, forces him to face the limits imposed by nature. Feeling defeated under the inimical weight of reality, the optimist withdraws into himself and finds a new rule of life. He might frame this course of action as an act of courage, but, usually, it is impelled by a desire for survival. The erstwhile optimist’s cynicism is a bulwark against ego death; it is the final act of rebellion against the indifference of the universe.
The optimist, browbeaten by what he sees as the inevitability of evil in the world, becomes weary of his certainty. He still believes that human action can affect the course of history, but he has come to accept that, in the final analysis, nature has the last laugh, and it is a mirthfully hateful or indifferent laughter. To the cynic, history is still inexorable, but its movement is not towards the creation of heaven on earth but its opposite. And historical facts would seem to confirm this notion too. The logic of history seems to be one of dashed hopes and wasted dreams. The history of mankind would seem to be one of endless strife and injustice.
There is a middle ground that exists between optimism and cynicism, of course. If the optimist is lucky, it is this middle ground that he finds when he loses his optimism. Even the cynic, after a period of wandering in the barren lands of hopelessness, may yet find his way back to the solid grounds of skepticism.
The skeptic, by definition, has no use for hope. His ethic is a simple one — refusal; that is, dignity and courage in the face of the deafening silence and cold indifference of nature. He jettisons utopia for pragmatism, historical inexorability for simple joys in the present, faith for the simplicity of imperfect human action. The skeptic is an uncertain individualist, a cautious social engineer.
The skeptic’s epistemology, of course, entails a relativism that dangerously borders the cynic’s nihilism. Although the skeptic refuses to accept the destruction of meaning and acts purposefully still, he is acutely aware of his and others fallibility, a notion that can push him, if he is not careful, into defeatism or a perspectival conception of reality. But, although he is distrustful of received truths, the skeptic must not reject truths. Even as he accepts that morality can be a moving target, he must insist upon a line, a limit — within the parameters imposed by nature. He must come to understand that nature is not the enemy, history is.
History is a function of human action, while nature exists outside its influence. In acting man can determine the course of history, but nature imposes limits on his actions. The skeptic’s refusal to succumb under the weight of history is courageous. His calm acceptance of the limits imposed by nature is the height of wisdom. And in all of this, he has no use for hope, simply intelligent action, today, in the present, with no use for the utopia of some future emerald city.
The skeptic must always be wary of fatalism. He must not shy away from the psychological conflict that his skepticism demands; in fact, only this conflict can sustain his skepticism. The skeptic is not a pessimist. The pessimist’s fatalism is clear in his passivity and his avoidance of psychological conflict. On the other hand, psychological conflict sustains the skeptic.
The pessimist, like the cynic, redefines evil to ease his dissonance, or he justifies his complicity in the world’s evilness by pointing to its inevitability. The cynic is not passive, of course; his project goes a step further than the pessimist’s. The cynic, once an optimist, grew wary of the evil in the world. A realist, he looked into the mirror and saw evil in himself too and surrendered to its inexorability. But the cynic’s project is not passive; like the optimist, he dares to subjugate history and nature to his will. He wishes to dominate, to destroy and recreate; he is a true iconoclast, a colossus of history. In him the will to meaning and the will to power morph into one — his project is one of domination.
The skeptic is only so-called if he consistently embraces the psychological conflict that results from the annihilation of optimism. He must also stare into the mirror and see the dark abyss within himself. The skeptic must, as Peter Bien once said, not ignore or bury the evil within him. Instead, he must channel it into the service of good. He must understand that the “psychologically sound knows that every person, divinity included, is evil by nature as well as good; violent and hateful as well as loving.”
The skeptic must be psychologically sound. To survive, he, too, must be a realist; he must not avoid the evil in the world, and he must never forget that he also is capable of all the atrociousness that shattered his optimism. The skeptic can give purpose to the evil within him; in fact, he must, or else it will consume him, even as he continues to, hypocritically, see himself as a good person. For the skeptic the first principle of action is one of limits, one mediated by Socrates’ dictum: “gnothi sauton.” Know thyself.