The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment Graeme Garrard (bio) Christian Thorne . The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii+377pp. US$49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-03522-5. This lengthy book is a reconstruction and analysis of selected "anti-foundational" texts and ideas from antiquity and early modernity. Its basic aim is to demonstrate that a long tradition of Pyrrhonian scepticism, which began in ancient Greece and was revived in sixteenth-century Europe, is actually politically reactionary in both its intentions and its effects, despite sharing many formal similarities and argumentative strategies with contemporary "Left anti-foundationalism." Thorne's general conclusion is that the critique of knowledge that lies at the heart of such scepticism can be stylistically innovative and radical without necessarily being socially or politically subversive. The moral of his story is that, although recent anti-foundational intellectual movements [End Page 539] such as critical theory, poststructuralism, and neopragmatism are almost uniformly radical or "progressive" in their politics, their sceptical antecedents in the early modern period were anything but. Hence Thorne's conclusion that scepticism "simply is a form-the form of antimony or argument/counterargument. Scepticism aims to be nothing but that form, without any philosophical insides" (314). Pyrrhonian scepticism, named after the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho and closely associated with his follower Sextus Empiricus, is the view that we ought to suspend judgment about what to believe because we cannot know what is true and what is false. This cognitive "suspension" (Greek epokhē, ἐποχή does not deny the possibility of knowledge, since such a denial would itself be a claim to knowledge. Rather, it favours the wholesale abandonment of the quest for understanding itself, which is held to be intellectually honest and mentally liberating. An influential Latin translation of Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism was published in 1569, and played an important part in the revival of Pyrrhonist scepticism in early modern Europe. A typical example of this can be seen in Michel de Montaigne's influential and endearing Essais (1580), to which Thorne devotes two long, critical chapters of his book. According to Thorne, a generalized scepticism about knowledge pulls the epistemological rug out from under all beliefs, including those that would serve as a basis for criticizing the status quo, leaving would-be reformers and radicals with no rational answer to the question "why change?" In the context of sixteenth-century France, Montaigne's Pyrrhonian doubt about knowledge became "an ideological weapon of the absolutist state" (85-86). By subverting the French Catholic State's subverters, Pyrrhonism amounted to a "skeptical absolutism" (101) and "authoritarian pragmatism" (61) that in practice propped up the conservative status quo, which was the substantive political purpose of Montaigne's formally innovative Essais. Also, if, as anti-foundationalists claim, all beliefs are contingent and contextual, with no universal or objective basis, then our adherence to the particular beliefs that we happen to hold is purely a matter of socialization and habituation, in which case you should not "waste your time hammering out sophistical arguments or passing ungainly legislation. Control memory. Condition loyalties. Police the imagination. Train the children" (84). For sceptics, epistemological disagreement is rationally irresolvable, forever threatening to spill over into the political and religious spheres with catastrophic results, as it did in sixteenth-century France and seventeenth-century England. This threat led Montaigne to seek unity, "not philosophical unity, but rather some site of local homogeneity from which variety can be expelled. This is a scepticism of the loyalty oath and the witch-hunt" (107). [End Page 540] The superficially moderate and sceptical Montaigne emerges here as a close ideological relative of the political absolutist Thomas Hobbes, who also viewed philosophy as inimical to political order and sought to isolate the state from knowledge and argument "so that sovereignty can operate unimpeded" (208). Early eighteenth-century Tory satirists such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe continued this sceptical assault on philosophy and knowl edge (the Counter-Enlightenment of the book's title), and for much the same reason: "it necessarily leads to social and political disorder" (250). They entered the new public sphere of print culture in order to subvert it...