On Skepticism

by Chōkōdō Shujin

Chōkōdō Shujin argues that you must moderate your doubts, lest you fall into the trap of decadence and dilettantism.

It appears that it is not easy to accurately determine the meaning of skepticism. In some cases, suspicion itself is deified, and a sort of religion arises from this. In a word, everything must be questioned; there is no custom or tradition that is above questioning. In other cases, it is the work of the skeptic to rid himself of all doubts, and any suspicion is ruthlessly denigrated as immoral precisely because it is seen as a form of doubt. Here, nothing is allowed to be questioned. This is a sort of fundamentalist mentality, and the height of naivety. Skepticism could be seen as a virtue of the intellect. In the former case, the suspicion itself becomes a disqualification. In the latter case, it is also indecisive to try to put all doubt out of one’s mind.