“It Is Required You Do Awake Your Faith”: Learning to Trust the Body through Performing The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

Skepticism is part and parcel of “a bargain none of us struck.” There is no denying that human knowledge is limited, that there seem to be multiple, co-existing truths, and that these truths are also often in conflict.2 However, we are not necessarily, therefore, forced to resign ourselves to radical relativism. Richard Rorty, for instance, claims that binary oppositions are misleading and that, accordingly, the values of true and false are only a “supposed antithesis” (Rorty 1984: 5). Paradoxically, he explains, the two sides depend on one another, define one another, and are in fact inextricably linked by a gradient that progresses from one to the other and does not allow for a clear-cut distinction.3 But while Rorty sees in this predicament a basis for philosophic pragmatism that suspects all meanings and truths, the same concept of gradience has also been used to defuse the supposed threat of skepticism. Stanley Cavell and Ellen Spolsky both suggest that, despite lacking guarantees for absolute truth, humans still possess means of determining a gradient of truths that ranges from less probable, plausible, apt, or useful to those that are more so. Cavell claims, “it is possible to live an intelligent, satisfying, and even moral life with the mental equipment which is our inheritance” and “recover … from the tragically debilitating skepticism that rejects ‘good enough’ knowledge in a vain struggle for an impossible ideal” (Spolsky 2001b: 44–45).4KeywordsMixed ModeBinary OppositionPhilosophic PragmatismRadical SkepticismConventional RomanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.