By: Wes Alwan
There's a new bio of Montaigne out, How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, reviewed here:
Because Montaigne’s great question was Socrates’s question—“how to live?”—she arranges her portrait of him around the answers he offered.
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Familiarly, the key to Montaigne is his scepticism. It is the scepticism of Pyrrho, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus, which teaches that because the arguments for and against any proposition are equally good or bad, one must suspend judgement (a state known as acatalepsia). This open-minded, non-committal, often ambiguous stance suited Montaigne.
Which reminds me: Sextus Empiricus was rediscovered in the 16th century after a long period in which he was ignored (from the fourth century onwards). As Luciano Floridi puts it (pdf), the "... Middle Ages show no driving interest in sceptical arguments within the restricted philosophical and theological debates that may address issues concerning the nature and reliability of knowledge, when discussing ethical, religious and epistemological questions ...."
The Renaissance saw a revival of interest in Sextus, leading to a popular Latin translation of his Outlines in 1562. Subsequently, Sextus Empiricus was widely read and hugely influential. Montaigne's used Pyrrhonism (Sextus' brand of non-academic skepticism) in service of his ethical concerns, but as the renaissance became the enlightenment the epistemological concerns dovetailed with those of the ongoing scientific revolution. Both were a challenge to Aristotelianism an Scholasticism.
Descartes Meditations was published in 1641, just 20 years after the publication of the first Greek editions of Sextus' works. According to Floridi it is unknown whether Descartes read Sextus, but the breadth of his influence at this point makes this irrelevant. Descartes takes the early modern revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism and significantly radicalizes it. Hume was also deeply influenced by Sextus, who articulates a version of the skeptical argument concerning causation.
The hallmark of Pyrrhonian skepticism is its rejection of the academic skeptic's claim that nothing can be known, not even that nothing can be known; "nothing is knowable" is itself a belief that ought to be given up rather than paradoxically affirmed. (Apparently Hegel -- who asks us to doubt our doubt -- was also deeply influenced by Sextus Empiricus). Ultimately, the Pyrrhonian obtains peace of mind by suspending all judgment at a theoretical level but living by habit (which perhaps involves some sort of non-theoretical belief). Further, we can legitimately make claims about our experience as long as we acknowledge that it is our experience to which the claims apply rather than to things in themselves (to use a Kantian formulation). Hence Descartes' related claim that the I -- as an experience -- cannot be a deception, because in this case the deception would just constitute the I. (I can doubt that my experiences are veridical, but not that I have them). Further, Sextus' concern about the differences between the sensory organs in animals and the fact that perception must be a relationship between such organs and objects is a precursor to the early philosophical impact of the science of optics, as in Locke's primary and secondary qualities (and ultimately, in Kant's distinction between phenomena and things and themselves).
We can see in all of this the debt of not just Montaigne, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel owe to this brand of skepticism, but also pragmatism. In fact, Sextus formulates the regress argument at the core of modern pragmatist's talk of "conceptual schemes."
There are several important upshots of the Pyrrhonian brand of skepticism, according to which we withhold judgment about the epistemological status of our beliefs rather than despairingly conclude that we can't know anything.
First, agnosticism rules the day. Atheism is just another claim that goes beyond experience. Negative claims that go beyond experience are just as inadmissible as positive ones. (Compare Kant's limitation of scientific claims to empirical phenomena while making room for faith in the domain of the unknown -- although the Pyrrhonian would probably not, without some pragmatic emendations, take the suspension of judgment about what's outside our experiences as a lead-in to faith about it).
Second, inquiry continues (and business generally goes on as usual). This is the pragmatic side of the coin. Pyrrhonianism is not an excuse for despairing of knowledge, putting on a beret, becoming a relativist, and declaring there is nothing outside the text and that we have carte blanche to do what we want with what's inside the text. We suspend judgment about what's outside the text, and we remain curious inquirers within it (and, I would say to give philosophy a place, at its periphery). Which is to say, this brand of skepticism is not a challenge to the value and methodology of scientific inquiry. (Compare all of this to pragmatic defeasibility).
Third, (ironic/aesthetic) detachment abides: the mental tranquility I mentioned above -- "ataraxia" -- is meant to be the consequence of suspending belief. In a point reminiscent of Buddhism (another school with a poorly-placed "h"), suspending judgment helps us avoid desire and hence pain. Again, this is not meant to lead to inaction and paralysis but to serve as a foundation for continued practical activity (including inquiry). And in day to day life, we follow "custom." So when it comes to particular investments of emotion, it's not that we don't make them but that we make them at a less metaphysical level ... perhaps with tongue in cheek ... in such a way as they are easily withdrawn. Think of a football game in which, as fans of a team, we're deeply engaged in an outcome even when we know that ultimately our choice of team is arbitrary. And in the end, unless we're soccer hooligans, we can walk away from that investment relatively unscathed -- we don't bring it with us when we leave the arena. Within a certain prescribed realm (the phenomenal arena) we move, act, and carry on business as usual, even while we launder it of other-worldly, life-and-death, metaphysical implications.
Which brings us to Nietzsche. Naturally! Actually, there's a been quite a bit of work on Nietzsche and skepticism recently, including by our former colleague Jessica Berry, who makes Nietzsche out (pdf) to be a Pyrrhonian skeptic about morality rather than a mere anti-realist. In a similar vein, Maudmarie Clark makes Nietzsche out to be a Kantian skeptic about knowledge -- chicken soupnema to my fan-boy soul -- in her superb Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (which also includes an excellent discussion of pragmatism).
But what I want to get at here is the sense in which the detachment -- or rather, phenomenal attachment and noumenal detachment -- I described above is the kind of ironic or aesthetic detachment that Nietzsche might endorse. So to move beyond the football game analogy, the arena becomes a stage, and we become our own work of art. The artist's detachment is a sort of political and moral detachment for the sake of aesthetic attachment: producing a convincing villain requires that Shakespeare remove himself from the temptation to moral condemnation and appreciate the villain aesthetically (and help us do the same). That's why preachy art sucks -- it disfigures rather than represents dispassionately what it rejects or endorses. And when we turn to self-production, the same principle holds. Which is to say, we move beyond utilitarianism and deontology to questions of character.
Fine writeup; the last para puts me in mind of “negative capability” as Keats said about Shakespeare.
Allow me to briefly riff:
I think you say in the last sentence that self-production (character) sucks when preachy and shines when ironically detachment and aesthetically enhanced. John Galt and I would say that much of the world (much of the time) disagrees with that idea. The collective is always trying to reduce the outstanding—by morals, religion, codes of law and behavior. Garrison Keillor riffs on the self-abnegation of middle America every week. Even our mirroring neurons are trying to get us to assimilate and blend, for utility’s sake. We must cooperate; we are the most social creatures in creation.
Even our arenas and allotted times for ironic or aesthetic detachment—say, Mardi Gras, spring break, football games—are group activities. The only time ironic or aesthetic detachment would truly be detachment is when there was no audience. But even then you would have the internalized audience, right?
Thanks — I had to look up Keats’ negative capability — very cool. I like the phrase”irritable reaching after fact & reason.”*
For Nietzsche, the task is to produce a “pathos of distance” from the collective, right? I don’t quite understand the John Galt reference — I thought Rand was depicting her (silly) version of the ubermensch?
Why must we escape group activities or an audience to achieve aesthetic detachment? They seem to go together: one forsakes the omnipotent fantasies of union with the mirroring object (proto-audience) or vengeance upon it in order to construct the reparative story — akin to giving up one’s political or personal attachments when depicting characters. The irritable reaching after control is then replaced with a control of the manipulated symbol/work of art. The phenomenon becomes more important than the noumenon. But the audience is still critical here — and moving beyond art to onself-as-art, you’re offering yourself as a character to others (rather than merely coming at them either as ascetic/self-sacrificing moral actor or as someone who wants to use them). Something like that, thinking out loud — you’ve seen my paper on this.
* Footnote: Keats as quoted in Wikipedia:
“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates every other consideration.”
From Wikipedia: “In the 1930s, the American philosopher John Dewey cited Keatsian negative capability as having influenced his own philosophical pragmatism, and said of Keats’ letter that it ‘contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises.’ Nathan Scott, in his book ‘Negative capability; studies in the new literature and the religious situation,’ notes that negative capability has been compared to Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit, ‘the spirit of disponibilité before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.'”
Who needs god to “underwrite” mystery when you have negative capability?
The John Galt reference: If undocumented descriptions of Atlas Shrugged are to be believed (I haven’t read it—good ammo for any defender of Rand), the Galt character belongs to a natural creative elite; the rest of us are ungrateful parasites and bumpkins. In response to a punitive capital gains tax (metaphorically speaking) Galt and the “creative class” go on strike, and thus depriving us of the wellsprings of creativity and genius. The vast collective of un-creatives are worse off.
I made a connection between your ironically detached, aesthetically enhanced philosopher/artist and the Galtian creative class. Both are elites against the collective, I suggest.
I see from your response, however, that you had something else in mind: the reparative story, the artist as a character (not a person) in that story. That reminds me of TS Eliot’s distinction between the man that suffers and the mind that creates. He didn’t want us thinking about The Wasteland as “sick thought,” that is, as a rant brought on by the discovery that his wife was sleeping with Bertrand Russell.
I’ll have to come back after work.