A Philosophy of the Essay

Scepticism, Experience and Style

Erin Plunkett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350170483
• eBook ISBN: 9781350050006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Erin Plunkett draws from both analytic and continental sources to argue for the philosophical relevance of style, making the case that the essay form is uniquely suited to address the sceptical problem. The authors examined here-Montaigne, Hume, the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell-bring into relief the relationship between scepticism and ordinary life and situate the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. The formal features of the essay call attention to time, subjectivity, and language as the existential conditions of knowledge. In contrast to foundationalist approaches, which expect philosophy to reach empirical or rational certainty, Plunkett demonstrates through these writings the philosophical advantages of a fragmentary, non-dogmatic style of writing. A Philosophy of the Essay shows how this medium can help us come to terms with the contingency and uncertainty of life.

1

Introduction: Knowing and essaying

Habe nun, ach! Phil osophie,

Juristerei und Medizin,

Und leider auch Theologie

Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.

Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!

Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar

Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr

Herauf, herab und quer und krumm

Meine Schüler an der Nase herum-

Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!

…

Dafür ist mir auch alle Freud entrissen,

Bilde mir nicht ein, was Rechts zu wissen . . .

Ah! Now I’ve done Philosophy,

I’ve finished Law and Medicine,

And sadly even Theology:

Taken fierce pains, from end to end.

Now here I am, a fool for sure!

No wiser than I was before:

Master, Doctor’s what they call me,

And I’ve been ten years, already,

Crosswise, arcing, to and fro,

Leading my students by the nose,

And see that we can know – nothing!

…

Instead all Joy is snatched away,

What’s worth knowing, I can’t say . . .

—Goethe, Faust, Part I: Scene i¹

A few years ago I had the pleasure of discovering Francesco Queirolo’s Il Disinganno (1753-54) at the chapel of Sansevero in Naples. The sculpture depicts a man tangled in a huge, heavy net, wrought exquisitely in marble, which drapes in folds over his head and down the length of his body. He strains under the immense weight, yet his posture is not one of resignation. His right hand reaches over his head, gripping the net and lifting it from his face. With an expression of curiosity, or hope, he looks down onto the face of a winged figure – a radiant child who returns his gaze and whose position, foot not quite touching the ground, suggests the opposite of everything signified by the heavy net. The child’s small hand lifts the net from the man’s face and torso, inviting him to step out into his freedom, as if escape were as simple as the act of seeing his way out. The man’s age suggests that he carries the experience of many years and has seen much. Yet the inscription, ‘qui non vident videant’, a reference to Christ’s healing of the blind man, offers the possibility both of failing to see and of seeing anew. The title of the work, Disinganno, suggests the removal of illusion, a lifting of the veil that conceals.

Can there be an escape from the tangled net of scepticism, and might it resemble this scene? Not the opening up of a higher or more privileged view, but a seeing anew of what there is to be seen in the same? What would a philosophy look like that cultivated this kind of movement?

In a sense scepticism always holds out the promise of a more perfect way of seeing – this lies at the root of its rejection of everyday vision. The senses are unreliable, and reason has its monsters – so the sceptic must locate this more perfect vision elsewhere. It may be the wisdom of God, unencumbered by the errors of a body and the flow of time. Or it may lie in a rigorous method, something like Descartes’s search for clear and distinct ideas, or the foundationalist attempt to ground knowledge claims absolutely, or the pragmatist attempt to circumscribe merely adequate criteria of justification. This study is motivated by the idea that all such accounts leave us tangled within the net and ultimately fail to recognize the significance of the sceptical moment. As Stanley Cavell argues, recovering from scepticism, which is not the same as refuting it, requires a turn away from philosophy as epistemology and a philosophical reckoning with the everyday, as the site of both illusion and concealment; in other words, we discover the everyday, our common ground, not as something that we already know or know ‘well enough’, but as something that demands our care, despite our ignorance. For philosophy, this entails an examination of the existential ground of speculation, the enabling conditions of human knowledge and action. Such an examination makes special demands on the practice of philosophical writing, for to avoid imposing the structure of thought on the structure of being, it must reflect the shape or the tempo of existence itself. Escaping from scepticism’s net thus becomes a poetic concern.

One of the overarching questions in this study is: what does style have to do with thinking? For such an unassuming question, it is deeply divisive. To many contemporary philosophers in the Anglophone tradition, the neutrality of texts – and the separability of essential content from contingent form – is taken for granted. As a reading strategy, this has its advantages, allowing a great number of texts to be compared with one another as if they were speaking about the same things: a relatively fixed set of philosophical problems. And given the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry, it is perhaps not surprising that the insights of literary criticism should be largely ignored by philosophy. Despite the broad application of the term ‘text’ in literary and cultural studies and despite Richard Rorty’s (1978) still-timely reminder that, whatever else it may be, philosophy is a kind of writing, there remain few philosophical studies within the Anglophone tradition dedicated to questions of genre or form in modern philosophical texts. The formal qualities of philosophical works are rarely included in philosophical pedagogy. This resistance to the literary dimension of philosophical texts has been thoroughly diagnosed, both by Rorty and by the subject of his 1978 essay, Jacques Derrida, as a misunderstanding of the nature of language and a misguided attempt by philosophy to borrow its legitimacy from the objectivity of the sciences, holding to an ideal of the transparent, authorless text, while distancing itself from ‘rhetoric’. In recent years, Beryl Lang (2010) has tried to popularize the study of rhetorical strategies as expressions of philosophical commitments, pointing to a blind spot in contemporary analytic philosophy. Jonathan Lavery (2007, 2010) has argued that genre in particular is a useful lens through which to read philosophical texts, one that can supplement logical or semantic analysis and bring to light features of a text that would otherwise remain hidden.

This study links the philosophical problem of scepticism to a way of writing, an essayistic mode. That the essay is fundamentally sceptical in orientation is widely accepted in literary studies, though such studies have yet to feed back into the treatment of scepticism within philosophy. My own reading of the essay identifies an essentially Pyrrhonian ‘therapeutic’ position – one that is aporetic with regard to certain knowledge while situating the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. Following the two primary philosophical theorists of the essay – Lukács and Adorno – I see essayistic texts as a rejection of the idea of a neutral form of discourse, and so in addition to considering the specific features of the essay, this work will, I hope, serve as an argument for linking ways of writing philosophy to epistemological and ethical commitments. The authors under consideration – Montaigne, Hume, the early German romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell – represent an exemplary rather than exhaustive sampling of philosophical essayists, each of whom redefines the stakes of the problem of knowledge by pushing the question back to the conditions of existence – specifically time, subjectivity and language – that shape the horizon of thought. This phenomenological approach is reflected in texts that are heterogeneous, circular, reflexive and open, resisting systematization or reductionism. The selected authors, in addition to representing the features and possibilities of the essay form, offer a way of thinking about scepticism that moves from a largely pragmatic attention to the conditions of experience – understood as the limits of human understanding – to an interrogation of how we come to feel that these conditions are not our own.

What do we know?

‘Scepticism’ and ‘essay’ are each in their own way contentious terms that require some explanation and context. In its most basic form, scepticism is a term that indicates a doubt about the ability of subjects to know the world, or other minds – a doubt that can extend to the existence of the phenomena in question, as in Cartesian metaphysical scepticism, or, at the very least, to their nature, what the world is like in itself. As it has been conceived in the history of philosophy, scepticism is an epistemological problem of never being able to sufficiently justify one’s beliefs about the world. The task of distinguishing between opinion and truth, appearance and reality, is foundational to how the philosophical tradition understands itself, and in this sense scepticism can be seen as the philosophical problem, since it threatens the ability to make such distinctions.

One of the central preoccupations of scepticism and attempts to refute it is the search for reliable criteria on which to base one’s knowledge claims. Greek scepticism, which flourished from the fourth century BCE, is notable for its rejection of any such grounding criteria, leading to the philosophically troubling conclusion that uncertainty is an ineradicable feature of human existence. The debates of ancient scepticism are helpful for understanding the concern for adequate ground that stands behind sceptical doubt and the problem of infinite regress that plagues foundationalist efforts, both issues that will arise in this study. Greek scepticism also raises the crucial ethical–political question of the relationship of philosophical doubt to common life. An overview of ancient Pyrrhonism in particular offers some context for the concerns that motivate the tradition of philosophical essayism, since the essay is essentially an anti-foundationalist form, rejecting the notion of an ultimate theoretical ground while emphasizing the existential or experiential ground out of which speculative enquiries proceed.

The model for the kind of sceptical approach that I identify in the essay is found in ancient Pyrrhonism. Where other ancient sceptical schools make positive or dogmatic knowledge claims about the impossibility of knowing, Pyrrhonian sceptics, as presented by Sextus Empiricus in his second-century text Outlines of Pyrrhonism, adopt a radically agnostic epistemological stance, characterized by the systematic dismantling of any positive position, either for or against the possibility of certain knowledge. Taking a cue from Socrates, they describe themselves as ‘aporetic’, their method issuing not in a new theory of knowledge but in a state of aporia, finding oneself ‘at a loss whether to assent or to deny’ (2000, p. 4: 7).

After a period of obscurity, Sextus’s Outlines resurfaced in the sixteenth century with the publication of Stephanus’s Latin translation (1562) in France and became a decisive text for the French humanists of the Renaissance, including Montaigne. As outlined by Popkin and Schmitt’s comprehensive studies, the rediscovery of ancient scepticism in early modernity had a massive impact on European thought – recognizable in developments in both philosophy and literature.² Sextus identifies the sceptical goal as suspension of belief or epoché, and his manual offers ten ‘modes’ to achieve this end, ten ways to demonstrate the unreliability of any ground that an opponent may attempt to claim as justification of their position. The scope of the Pyrrhonian critical method is admirable, in that it applies equally well to the two extremities of the philosophical continuum – what can broadly (if anachronistically) be called empiricism and rationalism. The possible criteria of knowledge are on the one hand empirical – information conveyed through sense impressions – and on the other hand rational or logical, claims that are thought to be true because they are self-evident or internally consistent. Sextus argues against the reliability of sense data by appealing to common errors of perception, such as optical illusions; to the relativity of sense perception among different bodies (animals, insects, people suffering from illness, those with a high tolerance for heat or cold or pain); and to the limitations of the five sense organs (‘other qualities can exist, impressing other sense organs in which we have no share’) (2000, pp. 26–7: 97). Those tempted to turn away from sensory evidence and instead to seek a rational criterion for knowledge claims are likewise led into aporia, as Sextus lays out the first recorded version of the infinite regress or Agrippan argument wherein any criterion used to justify a claim itself requires further justification and so on ad infinitum (Empiricus 2000, pp. 30–1: 114–8). Wittgenstein, two millennia on, offers a pithy summary of the consequences of the infinite regress problem: ‘My reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act without reasons’ (Wittgenstein 2009, pp. 90–1: 211). This predicament, the ‘because I said so’ moment in the process of justification, clearly presents a problem for the examined life. Giving reasons and examining presuppositions is fundamental to philosophical reasoning, yet philosophy offers no way of saying what counts as sufficient justification if the process is in principle endless. Rather, what counts is in the end decided by conventions or by beliefs that themselves are not subject to further reasoning.

The Pyrrhonian critique of foundationalism is presented not as a set of propositions but as a dialectic, bringing different points of view into relation with one another in order to demonstrate the limited or provisional nature of each. This rhetorical choice is significant in that it demonstrates an awareness of the problem of conveying a sense of aporia through positive, that is, dogmatic propositions. The concern with finding a style of argument that avoids dogmatism is likewise a preoccupation for later essayists, who favour the essay for its resistance to closure or systematization. Sextus defines the sceptical method as

an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence (isostheneia) in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement (epoché) and afterwards to tranquillity (ataraxia). (2000, p. 4: 8)

The dialectical approach of the sceptics covers both ‘things which appear’, and ideas or internal representations (‘things which are thought of in any way’). In seeking to demonstrate that all criteria are of equal, which is to say indeterminate, value, Pyrrhonians undermine the ability to make knowledge claims and thus seem to undermine the very possibility of philosophical discussion, in which criteria are evaluated with a view towards affirming or denying whatever claims about the world are being made. With their rigorous agnosticism, reinforced by the open-ended form of the dialectic, Pyrrhonian sceptics were an exasperating adversary, and their contemporaries, along with many philosophers from the sixteenth century onwards, viewed their agenda as essentially hostile to philosophy. Yet one can also see Pyrrhonism as a meta-philosophy that promotes a nondogmatic way of understanding philosophical activity and pits the goal of human flourishing against the goal of certain knowledge. Neil Gascoigne nicely summarizes this ‘therapeutic’ approach, following Sextus’s comparison of scepticism to medicine and Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as therapy: ‘Principally, the Sceptic’s view was that rather than guide us in the search for the knowledge that would enable us to live happy lives, philosophy should cure us of the disposition to believe that there is any such knowledge’ (Gascoigne 2002, p. 31). Insofar as there was a positive, and not merely critical, agenda in this approach, the outcome was meant to be a kind of ‘tranquillity’ (ataraxia) afforded by the giving up of unjustifiable views. Sextus suggests that it is possible to do away with beliefs about how the world really is and instead to live in accordance with custom and habit, after which tranquillity follows ‘fortuitously, as a shadow follows a body’ (2000, p. 11: 29). The therapeutic scepticism of the Pyrrhonians is developed by later philosophers into sophisticat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Knowing and essaying
• 2 Nostres Conditions in Montaigne’s essays
• 3 Concepts in conversation in the Humean essay
• 4 Infinite approximation in the German romantic fragment
• 5 Possibility in Kierkegaard’s imaginative discourses
• 6 Scepticism and acknowledgement in Cavell’s essays
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright