Talk - 13/05/05
So the research I want to introduce today is centered around “peritrope,” of which you can see a very breif definition on the first-page of the handout, which I will just quickley read out:
Peritrope was known for many centuries primarily as a tool for refuting ancient skepticism (in Sextus Empiricus, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, for example). If I make the assertion, “There is no truth,” then you can respond using peritrope by posing the rhetorical question “Well, then, isn’t that true?” It is often known as the accusation of ‘self-refutation.’ The word itself is Greek for "turning around".
First formally identified by Sextus Empiricus in a discussion of Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras, Peritrope has a long and surprisingly contiguous history in philosophy. Since peritrope is, put simply, the accusation that a philosopher has retained what he has disavowed in and by the disavowal itself, peritrope has an immediate bearing on all questions concerning the possibility of any totalized overcoming or transcendence in general. Despite this, peritrope has only received limited academic attention in recent years (mostly in the work of Barbara H. Smith, Carl Page, and Myles Burnyeat).
“a mess of an article on an idiocyncratic non-topic”
Idiosyncratic non-topic, although meant to mortally wound my article, actually goes a long a way toward developing a description of something which, though it remains itself, is at work in so many essentially different ways throughout the history of philosophy, that it can hardly be said to be a topic at all.
So you can see that immediatly the issue of the clarity or lucidity of the concept of peritrope is already at issue. But, at very least, it seems at first, peritrope must be a concept. But from the start in Sextus Empiricus, peritrope was never part of the kind of philosophy that dealt with concepts. So is it a rhetorical device, is it an idiosyncratic non-topic? This raises the question of whether the vocabulary of philosophical ‘concpets’ Ãis appropriate to a subject such as peritrope with such an enormous variety of historical incarnations and appearances. But, to complicate matters, there are moments in the history of philosophy where peritrope is treated as a kind of plain old analytic concept, as in the work of Myles Burnyeat, but there are other moments when it is literally a bodily experience,w where it is the only thing that can exorcise the malignant deceiver God from the dream of rationality, as in the Cartesian Cogito.
But just the same, as I said, it is there with unmistakeable lucidity in the earliest sceptical writings, not as a dead concept but as a living trope or a mode of being, and, most importantly for this phase of my reasearch, as the point of departure of a therapeutic method for eliminating anxiety that accompanied melancholia. (for Deleuze/ Derrida) My reasearch seeks to trace the appeareances and behaviors of peritrope from a cathartic departure point for scepticism, through its rol Êe as a defence of christian faith, to its appearance as the gauranteur of modern subjecthood in the Cartesian Cogito. Today I just want to talk a bit more about the semi-originary therapeutic role it played in ancient scepticism, to talk about some of the issues I’ve been working on recently.
For Sextus Empiricus, a Greek Alexandrian physician and the only sceptic who left a comprehensive account of his system, pyrrohnian scepticism only really gets off the ground when it turns from an interrogation of our admitidly dim sence-perceptions to a self-interrogation wherein doubt and scepticism themselves are overturned in an act of peritrope. From Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “Even in professing sceptical sayings regarding the doubtful, such as “Each thing is no more this than that” or “I determine nothing,” the sceptic still does not dogmatize. For, whereas the dogmatist lives as if his dogmas were absolutley real, the sceptic does not deliver his sayings in any absolute sence; for he knows that the saying “All is false” speaks of itself just as it s peaks of everything else, as does the saying “Nothing is true,” so the “No more” saying is itself “No more” this than that.”
The ou mallon formula is the central trope of skepticism at the time of Sextus Empiricus. Its translation and precise meaning are already at this stage at issue. Ou Mallon is the sceptical slang by which one brushes away not only all dogmatism, but the scepticism as well which calls dogmatism into question. At this point, not only sence perception and objective reality are called into doubt, but the fainomonon of skepticism itself as it flourishes in thought. The skeptic herself is immediatly and deliberatley displaced, and becomes an “object” of skepticism. No longer a beleiver in skepticism, she becomes a skeptic, in practice and in person. At this moment of thought where epistemology seems to decisivley fail, the goal of the philosophical logos itself switches from the uncovering of dogmatic truths through critical doubt (associated with the peripatetics) to an unending ther apeutic practice wherein doubt and thinking are not seen as tools for the extraction of essences (diabebaioumenos). In peritrope, when skepticism casts itself aside, i.e. when it becomes skepticism, when the doubter’s doubt is doubted by the doubter, what emerges from this reflexivity is not as we might expect the self-certainty of the Cartesian Cogito, but a hollowed out subject who no longer posesses the capacity for the kind of dogmatic critical doubt which does not also doubt itself.
Now, the larger project of skepticism is to deliver us from anxiety of human existence, through this suspencion of judgement (epoche) to a non-state of the soul known to the greeks as ataraxia, which has been translated over the centuries as quietude or freedom from worry. But the process described above is likened by Timon among other sceptics to the purgative cures associated with the treatment of melancholia. Fear and anxiety in Hypocrates and Galen are treated primarily as symptoms of melancholia, and cannot be directly treated apart from it. Scepticism, then, in its peritropic moment, tries its purgative method directly against the symptom, which at once reframes it as an ailment or cosmic imbalance. THis description of the process is from Diogenes Laertius:
Also the expression, "Every reason has a corresponding reason," &c., does in the same manner indicate the suspension of the judgment; for if, while the facts are different, the expressions are equipollent, it follows that a man must be quite ignorant of the real truth.
Besides this, to this assertion there is a contrary assertion opposed, which, after having destroyed all others, turns itself against itself, and destroys itself, resembling, as it were, those cathartic medicines which, after they have cleansed the stomach, then discharge themselves and are got rid of.
Diogenes Laertius
But this description of scepticism is directly challenged by the peripatetic philosopher Aristocles:
'It is altogether a silly thi ng, when they say, that just as cathartic drugs purge out themselves together with the excrements, in like manner the argument which maintains that all things are uncertain together with everything else destroys itself also. For supposing it to refute itself, they who use it must talk nonsense. It were better therefore for them to hold their peace, and not open their mouth at all,
'But in truth there is no similarity between the cathartic drug and their argument. For the drug is secreted and does not remain ˇ in the body: the argument, however, must be there in men's souls, as being always the same and gaining their belief, for it can be only this that makes them incapable of assent.
Aristocles quoted in Eusebius
The very nature of the healthy soul is here at issue with regard to anxiety, doubt, and knowledge. Does scepticism leave its dangerous residue in its unwitting victims when it administers itself as a purgaitve? Or does it really and truly evacuate itself, leaving the soul in state of natural health, free from the anxiety caused by insipid dogmas? Or, in other words, is the healthy soul capeable of dogmas and absolute assertions about the world and about itself? This, of course, is not a question for which skepticism can provide an answer. Or, if it does, it cannot know its answer absolutley, remaining undecided even in regard to whether it has answered. As the Democritean Metrodorus of
Chios (fourth century B.C.) said, anticipating the most important anti-dictums of both skepticism and socratic philosophy:
“We know nothing, not
even whether we know or do not know, or what it
is to know or not to know, or in general whether
anything exists or not.”
Peritrope was known for many centuries primarily as a tool for refuting ancient skepticism (in Sextus Empiricus, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, for example). If I make the assertion, “There is no truth,” then you can respond using peritrope by posing the rhetorical question “Well, then, isn’t that true?” It is often known as the accusation of ‘self-refutation.’ The word itself is Greek for "turning around".
First formally identified by Sextus Empiricus in a discussion of Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras, Peritrope has a long and surprisingly contiguous history in philosophy. Since peritrope is, put simply, the accusation that a philosopher has retained what he has disavowed in and by the disavowal itself, peritrope has an immediate bearing on all questions concerning the possibility of any totalized overcoming or transcendence in general. Despite this, peritrope has only received limited academic attention in recent years (mostly in the work of Barbara H. Smith, Carl Page, and Myles Burnyeat).
“a mess of an article on an idiocyncratic non-topic”
Idiosyncratic non-topic, although meant to mortally wound my article, actually goes a long a way toward developing a description of something which, though it remains itself, is at work in so many essentially different ways throughout the history of philosophy, that it can hardly be said to be a topic at all.
So you can see that immediatly the issue of the clarity or lucidity of the concept of peritrope is already at issue. But, at very least, it seems at first, peritrope must be a concept. But from the start in Sextus Empiricus, peritrope was never part of the kind of philosophy that dealt with concepts. So is it a rhetorical device, is it an idiosyncratic non-topic? This raises the question of whether the vocabulary of philosophical ‘concpets’ Ãis appropriate to a subject such as peritrope with such an enormous variety of historical incarnations and appearances. But, to complicate matters, there are moments in the history of philosophy where peritrope is treated as a kind of plain old analytic concept, as in the work of Myles Burnyeat, but there are other moments when it is literally a bodily experience,w where it is the only thing that can exorcise the malignant deceiver God from the dream of rationality, as in the Cartesian Cogito.
But just the same, as I said, it is there with unmistakeable lucidity in the earliest sceptical writings, not as a dead concept but as a living trope or a mode of being, and, most importantly for this phase of my reasearch, as the point of departure of a therapeutic method for eliminating anxiety that accompanied melancholia. (for Deleuze/ Derrida) My reasearch seeks to trace the appeareances and behaviors of peritrope from a cathartic departure point for scepticism, through its rol Êe as a defence of christian faith, to its appearance as the gauranteur of modern subjecthood in the Cartesian Cogito. Today I just want to talk a bit more about the semi-originary therapeutic role it played in ancient scepticism, to talk about some of the issues I’ve been working on recently.
For Sextus Empiricus, a Greek Alexandrian physician and the only sceptic who left a comprehensive account of his system, pyrrohnian scepticism only really gets off the ground when it turns from an interrogation of our admitidly dim sence-perceptions to a self-interrogation wherein doubt and scepticism themselves are overturned in an act of peritrope. From Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “Even in professing sceptical sayings regarding the doubtful, such as “Each thing is no more this than that” or “I determine nothing,” the sceptic still does not dogmatize. For, whereas the dogmatist lives as if his dogmas were absolutley real, the sceptic does not deliver his sayings in any absolute sence; for he knows that the saying “All is false” speaks of itself just as it s peaks of everything else, as does the saying “Nothing is true,” so the “No more” saying is itself “No more” this than that.”
The ou mallon formula is the central trope of skepticism at the time of Sextus Empiricus. Its translation and precise meaning are already at this stage at issue. Ou Mallon is the sceptical slang by which one brushes away not only all dogmatism, but the scepticism as well which calls dogmatism into question. At this point, not only sence perception and objective reality are called into doubt, but the fainomonon of skepticism itself as it flourishes in thought. The skeptic herself is immediatly and deliberatley displaced, and becomes an “object” of skepticism. No longer a beleiver in skepticism, she becomes a skeptic, in practice and in person. At this moment of thought where epistemology seems to decisivley fail, the goal of the philosophical logos itself switches from the uncovering of dogmatic truths through critical doubt (associated with the peripatetics) to an unending ther apeutic practice wherein doubt and thinking are not seen as tools for the extraction of essences (diabebaioumenos). In peritrope, when skepticism casts itself aside, i.e. when it becomes skepticism, when the doubter’s doubt is doubted by the doubter, what emerges from this reflexivity is not as we might expect the self-certainty of the Cartesian Cogito, but a hollowed out subject who no longer posesses the capacity for the kind of dogmatic critical doubt which does not also doubt itself.
Now, the larger project of skepticism is to deliver us from anxiety of human existence, through this suspencion of judgement (epoche) to a non-state of the soul known to the greeks as ataraxia, which has been translated over the centuries as quietude or freedom from worry. But the process described above is likened by Timon among other sceptics to the purgative cures associated with the treatment of melancholia. Fear and anxiety in Hypocrates and Galen are treated primarily as symptoms of melancholia, and cannot be directly treated apart from it. Scepticism, then, in its peritropic moment, tries its purgative method directly against the symptom, which at once reframes it as an ailment or cosmic imbalance. THis description of the process is from Diogenes Laertius:
Also the expression, "Every reason has a corresponding reason," &c., does in the same manner indicate the suspension of the judgment; for if, while the facts are different, the expressions are equipollent, it follows that a man must be quite ignorant of the real truth.
Besides this, to this assertion there is a contrary assertion opposed, which, after having destroyed all others, turns itself against itself, and destroys itself, resembling, as it were, those cathartic medicines which, after they have cleansed the stomach, then discharge themselves and are got rid of.
Diogenes Laertius
But this description of scepticism is directly challenged by the peripatetic philosopher Aristocles:
'It is altogether a silly thi ng, when they say, that just as cathartic drugs purge out themselves together with the excrements, in like manner the argument which maintains that all things are uncertain together with everything else destroys itself also. For supposing it to refute itself, they who use it must talk nonsense. It were better therefore for them to hold their peace, and not open their mouth at all,
'But in truth there is no similarity between the cathartic drug and their argument. For the drug is secreted and does not remain ˇ in the body: the argument, however, must be there in men's souls, as being always the same and gaining their belief, for it can be only this that makes them incapable of assent.
Aristocles quoted in Eusebius
The very nature of the healthy soul is here at issue with regard to anxiety, doubt, and knowledge. Does scepticism leave its dangerous residue in its unwitting victims when it administers itself as a purgaitve? Or does it really and truly evacuate itself, leaving the soul in state of natural health, free from the anxiety caused by insipid dogmas? Or, in other words, is the healthy soul capeable of dogmas and absolute assertions about the world and about itself? This, of course, is not a question for which skepticism can provide an answer. Or, if it does, it cannot know its answer absolutley, remaining undecided even in regard to whether it has answered. As the Democritean Metrodorus of
Chios (fourth century B.C.) said, anticipating the most important anti-dictums of both skepticism and socratic philosophy:
“We know nothing, not
even whether we know or do not know, or what it
is to know or not to know, or in general whether
anything exists or not.”
posted by peritropist at 5:07 PM
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