Of Vain Subtleties

There is a kind of intellectual refinement that has gone so far past its object that it can no longer see it. The philosophers who have applied their considerable ingenuity to questions like the precise nature of motion, the exact constitution of matter, the final reason why fire burns upward rather than downward — these men have produced systems of impressive internal consistency that have, in the end, told us nothing useful about fire or motion or matter. Each system contradicts the last. Each new philosopher who appears demolishes what his predecessor built and erects something of equal fragility in its place. The spectacle has a certain grandeur, but it is the grandeur of elaborate machinery that runs very smoothly but produces nothing.

I am not against subtlety in itself. There are domains where fine distinctions matter enormously — in law, in medicine, in the reading of texts — and where the man who cannot make them does harm by his coarseness. But there is a kind of subtlety that becomes, by excess, its own negation. When a philosopher has refined his position to the point where no example from ordinary experience can touch it, where every objection can be met by a further distinction that places the point just out of reach — this philosopher has not arrived at a higher truth. He has constructed an elaborate method for avoiding any truth at all.

“The subtlest reason, pushed beyond a certain point, becomes indistinguishable from the refusal to reason. For what is reasoning except the attempt to arrive somewhere? A method that can go anywhere leads nowhere.”

I have read the Sceptics, and I have found much in them that is valuable — particularly their insistence that we examine what we claim to know and ask ourselves how we came to know it. But the Sceptic who makes a complete system of his doubt, who subjects even his doubt to doubt and then doubts the doubting of the doubt, has traded one dogmatism for another. He is as certain of his uncertainty as the Stoic was certain of his virtue. The truly honest position is simpler and less impressive: I know some things, imperfectly; I do not know others; I cannot always tell which is which. This is a humble statement, and it does not make a striking philosophical position. But it is, I believe, what careful examination of one’s own mind actually reveals.