ANCIENT VERSUS MODERN SCEPTICISM

This volume focuses on scepticism as it was understood and practised in the ancient Greek and subsequently the ancient Greco-Roman world. The title of the volume is therefore less than ideal. “Ancient” should not in general be used as a shorthand for “ancient Greek” or “ancient Roman,” as if the rest of the world did not exist. And there is a particular reason for unease in this case, seeing that a plausible case can be made for regarding some figures and movements in ancient Indian philosophy as sceptical. For this reason I originally proposed “Ancient Greek Scepticism” as the title. But it was correctly pointed out that some important figures to be discussed - most obviously Cicero - were definitely not Greek, and that it is by no means certain even that Sextus Empiricus, the one Pyrrhonist sceptic of whom we have substantial surviving writings, was Greek. My second proposal, “Greco-Roman Scepticism,” was in turn subject to quite reasonable criticism on grounds of its unfamiliarity. So with some reluctance I had to agree that “Ancient Scepticism” was the best title available.

The sceptical philosophers and traditions to be discussed are, then, firmly located in the history of Western philosophy. And it is of course also true that scepticism has been a topic of central importance in modern Western philosophy at least since Descartes, and continues to excite widespread interest today. But “scepticism” means rather different things in the two periods.

Arcesilaus initiated a sceptical phase in the Academy after taking over in c. 268 BCE. He was motivated in part by an innovative reading of Plato’s dialogues. Where his predecessors found positive doctrines to be systematically developed, he found a dialectical method of arguing and the sceptical view that nothing can be known (akatalêpsia, De Or. 3.67, see DL 4.28, 4.32). He also advanced this conclusion in opposition to the ambitious system of the Stoics, claiming further that the appropriate response to the pervasive uncertainty generated by his method is the suspension of judgement (epochê).

Arcesilaus' dialectical method was practiced without significant modification in the Academy until Carneades, who became head sometime before 155 BCE. Carneades both continued and strengthened Arcesilaus' method (ND 1.11, Acad. 2.16, see also Acad. 1.46, and Eusebius, Praep. evang. 14.7.15). Sextus marks the change by referring to Plato’s Academy as Old, Arcesilaus' as Middle, and Carneades' as New (PH 1.220).

Since the main interpretative issues regarding both Arcesilaus and Carneades depend on the concepts of akatalêpsia and epochê, we must try to determine what they mean, how they are related, and what attitude the Academics take towards them – i.e. in what sense, if any, are these their sceptical doctrines?

In 1887, on the occasion of the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, T. H. Huxley declared proudly of the many changes that had occurred during the monarch’s long reign:

Huxley was a pioneering biologist, but he was more familiar to the Victorian public as an outspoken proponent of an empirical and naturalistic world-view, gaining notoriety as Charles Darwin’s self-styled 'bulldog' during the evolutionary controversies of the 1860s. In his view, it was the application of various scientific procedures to the practices of industry and transportation that had facilitated the economic dynamism by which nineteenth-century society had been transformed. The 'rapid and vast multiplication of … commodities and conveniences of existence' and removal of the 'natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse' were the direct results of employing scientific methods, which had also entailed a 'strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy'. The very success of the Victorian polity, Huxley proclaimed, could be traced back to the empirical and inductive principles adumbrated in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon and now brought to fruition two centuries later.

A third of the way through Elizabeth Gaskell’s story 'A Dark Night’s Work', the heroine Ellinor Wilkins is suddenly roused from a pleasurable reverie by 'a mysterious noise - heavy, sudden' coming from her father’s study, giving rise to 'a mysterious instinct [which] made her feel sick and faint. No sound - no noise. Only by-and-by she heard, what we have all heard at such times of intense listening, the beating of the pulses of her heart, and then the whirling rush of blood through her head.' Creeping down the staircase, she sees, 'with a strange sick horror', the body of Dunster, her father’s unpleasant junior partner, 'his head propped on chair-cushions, his eyes open, staring, distended'. 'Ellinor could not have told whether it was reason or instinct that made her act as she did that fatal night', the narrator continues, describing how, almost in a state of trance, she first attempts to revive the dead man, then helps her father and their servant Dixon to bury Dunster’s body in the garden. This is the 'dark night’s work' that forms the climax of the tale - a 'haunting memory' that 'would come and overshadow her during many, many years of her life' (ch. 6).

'A Dark Night’s Work' was published in All the Year Round in 1863. Like Wilkie Collins, her fellow contributor to the journal, Gaskell often used short fiction as a means of generic experimentation, and her story shares many of the features of sensation fiction. It explores the effects of secrecy; it sets an extreme event in a familiar middle-class setting and exploits immediate physiological response to generate emotional intensity; and it traces the physical, emotional and social consequences of Dunster’s death on Wilkins, on Dixon and above all on Ellinor, as the mental shock of the murder itself becomes ‘the incubus of a dreadful remembrance’ (ch. 11).

The ‘reading revolution’

The period 1830-1914 saw some of the greatest changes in readerships and the types and availability of reading material ever experienced in the Western world. These changes had already begun by the late eighteenth century, but the majority of them only came to fruition during the Victorian era; it was only after progressive nineteenth-century legislation had finally over-ruled the preceding generation’s fears of a print-fuelled social revolution that real and lasting changes in reading patterns became possible.

The shift from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century reading habits has often been characterized as a shift from 'intensive' to 'extensive' reading: a change, that is, from the regular, repeated reading of a few expensive texts by a few privileged readers to the rapid consumption of a wider range of cheaper ones by a broader audience. It is certainly irrefutable that reading matter gradually became far cheaper and more plentiful between 1830 and 1914, and that there were more readers to enjoy it. The numbers of books and newspapers produced more than quadrupled across the century. The population of England, Scotland and Wales more than trebled from 10.5 million in 1801 to around 37 million by 1901. Literacy rates in England and Wales increased from about 60 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women in 1800, to 94 and 93 per cent respectively by 1891. This was due both to industrialization and to a concomitant demand for a more literate workforce, and to parliamentary reform which speeded up the increase with successive compulsory education acts after 1870. Overall, the effect was more readers at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning, and more printed matter to satisfy their demands.

INTRODUCTION

Scepticism was first formulated and endorsed by two different schools or groups, the Academics in the third century BC and the Pyrrhonist sceptics in the first century BC. It is, properly speaking, a product of the Hellenistic period. However, it is sometimes assumed that earlier philosophy was marked by a naïve complacency about whether knowledge is really possible. According to this view, philosophers in the classical period may have asked what knowledge is, but not whether knowledge is even possible at all.

This is mistaken for two reasons. First, earlier thinkers anticipated many of the arguments employed by Hellenistic sceptics. “Sceptical” arguments were in the air from the period of the Presocratics on, although not in the form of a well-defined position, but in the form of certain loosely related ideas and arguments. And they did not go unnoticed; the potentially destructive force of these “sceptical” arguments was appreciated by philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. Their formulation of the problems confronting the possibility of knowledge, together with their responses and attempts at defusing those problems, would inspire and anticipate many of the debates between sceptics and their opponents in the Hellenistic period.

E. S. Dallas’s review of George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1866) exemplifies the way nineteenth-century literature, and realism in particular, often defined its practice through visual tropes. The period had an almost compulsive fascination with visuality because it was the crucible for working through broader tensions between the material and the ideal, imagination and reality, the seen and the unseen. Dallas’s praise is typically double-edged in that seeing is simultaneously knowing and feeling, an epistemology and a phenomenology. His praise equates the truth-value of Eliot’s work with the vividness of her pictorial style, defined as the capability of imagining a scene as if it was a painting. Nonetheless, for all Eliot’s corresponding realism, Dallas’s invocation of the proverb actually emphasizes that seeing is a perceptual, subjective process. The concrete 'seeing' of Eliot and her readers is lauded precisely because it is an ideal and imaginative, yet embodied, act. Seeing might be believing, but the Victorians' fascination with processes of perception and illusion, often explored through optical devices, meant they were all too aware of how such belief could be misplaced.

The multivalent discourses of nineteenth-century visuality are evident in the conflicting function of the large number of pictorial and optical tropes in literary texts. Taken as a whole, their prevalence reflects the intimate relationship between literature and the burgeoning variety of visual media. Many studies have demonstrated their creative interaction, whether through tracing the influence of different visual arts and technologies upon individual writers or through more general explorations, such as the impact of photography and painting upon conceptions of realism. One notable study by Martin Meisel has gone so far as to argue that a common aesthetic style, combining narrative with pictorialism, runs through much nineteenth-century literature, painting and drama.

It is always difficult to determine when an institution begins a process of decline, and philosophical institutions are no exception to this rule. What one can say, in the case of the Academy, is that the exceptionally long and brilliant scholarchate of Carneades - he was head of the school for several decades before leaving voluntarily in 137 BCE - marked the high point of the sceptical Academy, while at the same time revealing the fault-lines that would lead to its division, and then to its disappearance. There are several reasons for this two-sided legacy.

(a) Like his predecessor Arcesilaus, Carneades had not himself written any philosophical work. Oral teaching lends itself more than any other to contradictory interpretations. Carneades had a disciple, Zeno of Alexandria, who took notes during his courses, notes in which the master could at no time recognize his own thinking. One may imagine that what was true for Zeno (in some sense Carneades' secretary) was all the more so for his other students, whose divergent notes must have given rise to disputes. It is not impossible that Carneades himself had incited a certain rivalry among his followers, like that which Cicero reports in Orator 51: he used to say that Clitomachus said the same things as him, but that Charmadas said them in the same way as he did.

The past as we know it was largely created by the Victorians. Historical terms and concepts such as the Renaissance, the Augustan, Modernity, the Zeitgeist - indeed, the very coinage 'Victorian', and even the idea of periodicity itself, were nineteenth-century inventions. Moreover, we have inherited from the nineteenth century a modern historical consciousness, and historiographical methods, for it was during this period that the modern discipline was defined and professionalized, that the counterclaims of empiricists and idealists were first articulated. This was when the German empiricist Leopold von Ranke introduced the methods of 'objective' history, the French republican Jules Michelet those of 'total' history, and the Swiss historian of art and culture Jakob Burckhardt those of Kulturgeschichte, and when Hegel and Marx shifted the focus of historical study away from the rise and fall of rulers and nations to the analysis of social change, together revolutionizing the historical sciences across Europe; while, in Britain, Carlyle and Macaulay presided over an efflorescence of narrative history and in 1886 the professional journal the English Historical Review was founded.

Nineteenth-century historiography is sometimes represented as somewhat monolithic, comprising predominantly grand narratives of great men, and celebrating nationalist and imperialist ideologies within either the progressivist paradigm of Whig history or the cyclic model of history favoured by conservatives. However, it is on the contrary precisely because history writing in an age described by Nietzsche in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873) as suffering from a consumptive ‘historical disease’ was so rich and various, and took so many literary forms beyond that of the formal academic treatise, that modern cultural historians, critics and theorists so often turn to it, as a source or model, or as offering exemplification and elaboration of modern methods.

A PRELIMINARY AGENDA

“Having said this much against the principles of music as well, basing ourselves effectively on factual data (pragmatikôs), at this point we bring to an end our disquisition against the objects of instruction in the liberal arts (mathêmata).” These are the closing lines of the compact set of treatises Sextus Empiricus devotes to the demolition of the so-called liberal arts (M 1-6, or more precisely: M 1, Against the Grammarians; M 2, Against the Rhetoricians; M 3, Against the Geometers; M 4, Against the Arithmeticians; M 5, Against the Astrologers; M 6, Against the Musicians ). Before confronting problems of some importance concerning the placing of this work and its type of scepticism, it is worth at least touching on two questions.

The first has to do with whether or not it is possible to attribute to Sextus an already systematized version of the “canon” of liberal arts, divided into a trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and a quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music).

INTRODUCTION

The history of the transmission, recovery and posthumous influence of ancient scepticism is a fascinating chapter in the history of ideas. An extraordinary collection of philosophical texts and some of the most challenging arguments ever devised were first lost, then only partly recovered philologically, and finally rediscovered conceptually, leaving Cicero and Sextus Empiricus as the main champions of Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism respectively. This chapter outlines what we know about this shipwreck and what was later salvaged from it. It cannot provide many details, given its length. And, being a review, it does not try to solve the many puzzles and mysteries still unsolved. But, as an introduction, it does seek to give a general idea of what happened to ancient scepticism in the long span of time occurring between Augustine and Descartes. It covers a dozen centuries of Western philosophy, so a few generalizations, some schematism and a good degree of abstraction from specific information will be inevitable.

LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES

Our story begins with a dramatic loss of memory, roughly in the fourth century. By the time Augustine was writing Contra Academicos, Academic scepticism, transmitted in Latin, had become the brand of scepticism known to philosophers and theologians, at the expense of Pyrrhonism in general and Sextus Empiricus’ Greek texts in particular. There may still be some sporadic references to the Pyrrhonians at the beginning of the fifth century, but it is significant that the word academicus had become synonymous with sceptic, a linguistic use that will remain unchanged until the seventeenth century.

This passage from George Saintsbury’s 1896 History of Nineteenth-Century Literature highlights one of the most remarkable publishing phenomena of the period 1830-1914, the proliferation and predominance of the periodical press. As he notes, many novels were first published in magazines and then issued in volume format. Individual poems first appeared in reviews and magazines. Many influential prose works were published serially, along with scholarly work in emerging academic disciplines.

Saintsbury was well qualified to comment. Until his recent appointment to the Regius Chair of English at the University of Edinburgh in 1895 he had spent nearly a quarter of a century as a journalist, writing and reviewing with frenetic energy for Macmillan’s Magazine, and the Fortnightly, the Academy and the Saturday reviews among others, covering contemporary English and French literature as well as current politics. He once claimed he could earn on average £3 10s for an evening’s reading and a morning’s writing.

Written around 1851, Matthew Arnold’s 'Dover Beach' describes the 'tremulous cadence slow' (line 13) of pebbles on the shore. The melancholy lyrical impression produced by this 'eternal note of sadness' (line 14) underlines the over-determined border with the European continent, figuring contemporary anxieties about political insecurity. There was reason to fear for what Tennyson terms in 1852 England’s 'sacred coasts': in December 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d'état raised invasion fears in Britain. A civilian rifle club movement was established to protect the vulnerable south coast, which Tennyson himself joined. Meanwhile, Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt was working on a painting on the south coast of England originally entitled Strayed Sheep, Our English Coasts (1852), depicting sheep perilously close to the cliff edge, suggesting an acute sense of national defencelessness. For Arnold, the monumental 'Glimmering and vast' (line 5) cliffs of Dover morph into 'a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night' (lines 35-7). Arnold’s poem (like Thomas Hardy’s pre-World War 1 poem 'Channel Firing') offers an acute epistemological anxiety about invasion and the disintegration of identity. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine Britishness without reference to a fraught relationship with Europe. Although British collective national identity was often seen in the nineteenth century to be challenged by the continent, the collective invention of Britishness was contingent upon the nation’s relationship with other countries.

What difference does it make to understandings of the English literature of the period 1830-1914 to consider literary texts in transatlantic terms? What in any case might constitute a transatlantic approach or a transatlantic methodology when critically reading English literature of this period? This chapter addresses these questions first by giving a brief account of the current critical paradigms governing the ways in which transatlantic relations have been theorized and debated. Next it will move on to a series of exemplary readings that will demonstrate the ways in which so-called 'transatlantic' approaches to literary texts can provide ways of challenging more nation-based definitions of writers and texts, allowing for a shift in focus and of emphasis and, ultimately, new readings.

Defining transatlantic literary relations

Transatlantic literary relations have not yet been as fully theorized as other models of transatlantic relations, though this is certainly changing. Earlier interpretations of these literary relations were frequently comparativist and Anglophone. They often stressed an anxiety of influence model, showing the ways in which American authors modelled themselves on British authors while also, gradually, trying to produce a literature that reflected the particular conditions of life in the United States. This posited a somewhat one-way version of influence, elevating British writers and English literature (narrowly defined) over the work of American writers, who were shown as always trying to escape from English literature’s dominating presence. Furthermore, this became a way of reading American literature as a form (or extension) of English literature. In this reading American literature was interpreted as somehow changed by being produced from a new national experience, rather than in its own right.