Robert Pirsig, Pyrrho, and the Buddha versus Socrates

Zen and the Art of the Least Understood Pyrrhonist Spiritual Exercise

The problem of Socrates is far worse than how he looked. The problem is how he thought.

The spiritual exercises of the ancient Pyrrhonists can be classified into three categories. The category we know least about from ancient sources is the zetetic exercises. These exercises are the focus of this article. The term “zetetic” is derived from the Greek term for “searching” or “inquiring.” The zetetic exercises direct the mind towards continued searching and away from arriving at conclusions.

Our surviving sources largely just imply their existence. Perhaps this is because the sources didn’t think there was much to say about the instruction to keep investigating and eschew drawing conclusions about non-evident matters. However, there are many interesting things to unpack here.

A good place to start with this unpacking is with Pyrrho’s summary of his philosophy. In that summary, Pyrrho says that pragmata are adiaphora and unstable. First, we need to understand what the two untranslated terms mean, as they don’t translate well into English.

Pragmata is typically translated into English as “things,” but it means something narrower than that. It’s something closer to “issues.” For example, a well-known quote from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus uses this term in the same way that Pyrrho uses it, not to refer to “things” in the sense of physical objects, but to instead refer to a concept that includes events, issues, and disputes:

Men are disturbed, not by pragmata, but by the dogma which they form concerning pragmata.[1]

Those familiar with this famous quote from Epictetus may be surprised to see dogma in it. It’s exactly the word Epictetus used, but almost no translation of Epictetus uses the term. This is a major source of confusion for people familiar with translations of Stoic texts when they encounter Pyrrhonist texts. (Here’s an example.) The meanings of words in one language commonly do not match well with words in other languages, even in cases where one language has directly borrowed the word from the other language, as is the case with dogma. That’s why we’re having a digression here about pragmata and adiaphora. Meanings are also colored by context and the intents of the speaker. Understandings are also colored by context…