what kind – or kinds – of thinker was Byron? what were his philosophical sources and how did these shape the peculiar structures of thought exhibited in his poems, letters and more formal prose? Those who have discussed such questions have usually identified philosophical scepticism, something about which the poet was demonstrably informed, as an important point of reference. m. g. Cooke somewhat reluctantly concluded that Byron ‘is so strongly disposed to mistrust strictly clean categories that the primary bent of his philosophy must be termed skeptical’. For Cooke, scepticism is something to be admitted rather than celebrated: it ‘becomes a question’, Cooke worries, ‘and indeed a vexed question, whether we can find in Byron’s verse some affirmative philosophic position, befitting a poet of his rank and of his years’.1 donald h. reiman was less concerned about the fittingness of Byron’s scepticism, finding in it a philosophical correlate for the situation of Byronic exile: ‘as a universal outsider, Byron self-consciously employed academic or pyrrhonist skepticism to distance himself from the creeds that competed for his allegiance’.2 hoagwood goes further to claim this universal distancing as an intellectually coherent and sophisticated response to the world:
Byron’s rehearsal of the traditional skeptical principles and tendencies is more than a reproduction of a source or of sources. it is rather the articulation (often a disorderly articulation) of a critical method of greater intellectual sophistication than has been normally allowed to the poet.3
Byron does more than toy with the ideas of philosophical scepticism;
he articulates, rather, a distinct critical practice or ‘method’, one that allows us to place him in intellectual history with more confidence than has traditionally been the case. Contrary to Cooke’s sense of Byron’s scepticism as problematic, moreover, hoagwood associates it, via the
pyrrhonist’s ataraxia, with ‘delight’ and the ‘enrichment of human experience’.4
while there can be no doubt about Byron’s interest in philosophical scepticism or its importance for his writing, no clear consensus has emerged about how best to describe this aspect of the poet’s thought.
not helpful here is the fact that ‘scepticism’ is a rather nebulous term, both in its popular (ranging through various senses of wariness, cynicism and pessimism) and technical uses;5 it is not always clear, in this respect, that critics have used it to mean the same thing. There are historical considerations also. in the eighteenth century, the word, mainly due to its anti-religious ramifications, was often associated not with a successful mode of life (as for hoagwood) or even reasoned caution (although it can be for hume), but with optimistic intellectual programmes, ‘enthusiasm’, or even fanaticism. The outlandish schemes of walter shandy, for instance, are described as ‘sceptical, and [...] far out of the high-way of thinking’.6 For pope, the ‘sceptic’, mired in his doubt, lacks vigour and presence; he is no more than a footnote to the life of the mind:
Know then thyself, presume not god to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great:
with too much knowledge for the sceptic’s side, with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, he hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, in doubt to deem himself a god, or Beast;
in doubt his mind and body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;7
This kind of ‘sceptic’ is an intellectually atrophied extremist, one who programmatically doubts everything. he is too certain, too closed down in his thinking, to grasp the non-categorical truths of man’s ‘middle state’, the energized but wearing inbetweeness that pope captures in the rhythms of his punctuation.
Byron, who at no point identifies himself as a sceptic, takes a similar if less theologically certain line: ‘i have formed no decided opinion – but i should regret any sceptical bigotry as equally pernicious with the most credulous intolerance’ (BLJ, iv, 60). ‘sceptics’ for Byron tend to be either militant bigots or risible reactionaries, such as the ‘sceptics who would not believe Columbus’ (Don Juan, xvi, 4).8 when Byron does become interested in scepticism it tends to be at those moments where it collapses into its own definitions. This is famously and deliberately the
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case with the socratic ‘i know nothing except the fact of my ignorance’.
at the same moment socrates claims to ‘know nothing’ and also to know a ‘fact’ (that socrates is ‘ignorant’). By loading his words beyond their capacity the philosopher turns a static epistemological claim into a shifting experiment in thought.
Byron knew this famous crux from diogenes laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and quoted a version of it in Don Juan (vii, 5). he was fascinated by its implications and placed them at the intellectual centre of his poem, notably in this stanza which he spins out of montaigne:
‘Que sçais-je?’ was the motto of montaigne, as also of the first academicians:
That all is dubious which man may attain, was one of their most favourite positions.
There’s no such thing as certainty, that’s plain as any of mortality’s Conditions:
so little do we know what we’re about in This world, i doubt if doubt itself be doubting.
(Don Juan, ix, 17) rather than reproducing conventional sceptical arguments (‘all is dubious which man may attain’), Byron writes them only in order to cross them out again.9 his interest lies in those moments where argument breaks down – or flourishes – into paradox and form. Thus it is ‘plain’ (or certain) that ‘There’s no such thing as certainty’, a reflection intensified and escalated in the gleeful alliteration of ‘i doubt if doubt itself be doubting’. This wriggling out of normative argument into absolute possibility is also a nod to tradition in so far as it partic-ipates in the ironic, dialogic status of montaigne’s physically inscribed but uncertain motto. Byron’s printed and vocally dense utterance becomes a perfectly timed claim on behalf of literary presence. at precisely the moment in which philosophy – as locke understood it at least – seems to lose its grip, the evasions of poetic form assume a quasi-tactile immediacy that offers to mitigate what might seem a dismal epistemological predicament.
This connection between scepticism and poetics, a major concern of what follows, will be easier to understand if we first assemble some context.10
* * *
philosophical scepticism can be dated back at least as far as arcesilaus of pitane (c.315–242 BC), founder of the middle academy, and later Carneades (c.213–129 BC). pyrrhonism, a development of this ‘academic’
scepticism that takes its name from the peripatetic philosopher pyrrho of elis (born c.365–270 BC) – who travelled to india with alexander the great, and whose teachings were based upon a sceptical sense of cultural difference – is concerned more with ethics than epistemological procedure.
it was later codified (c.ad 200) by sextus empiricus. Byron knew about classical scepticism from a range of sources, including montaigne, Bayle and hume; he also (as has been noted) read diogenes laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers,11 which includes an account of pyrrho’s life and thought, and which refers to the apocryphal stories about the philosopher’s refusal to avoid, on extreme sceptical grounds, onrushing chariots and steep precipices, and his constantly having to be saved by a contingent of dedicated followers.
Classical scepticism can be subdivided into a number of stages or procedures. The first is isostheneia, a sceptical balancing that involves juxtaposing conflicting views with the aim of undermining belief in any single opinion or system. traditionally, this was carried out through a series of standard arguments or ‘tropes’, which balance, as diogenes laertius has it, ‘the equal value of contradictory sayings’.12 The sceptic may argue, for instance, that the fact that there are many different forms of religious belief itself undermines the likelihood of any particular form being true. This process justifies for the sceptic a situation of suspended judgement or epoche, a complete indecision with respect to any definitive claims about the nature of reality. he does not argue that a particular system is necessarily false, only that it appears to be impossibly difficult, given our unreliable and limited resources, to say with certainty that it is true. academic scepticism, which sought to undermine (primarily stoic) dogma, found in epoche an end in itself: since certainty can be challenged on any question, the sceptic refuses to assent to his opponent’s claims and also withholds any dogmatic alternative. gibbon read Bayle as a determined sceptic of this kind, as a universal critic of religious and philosophical systems:
his critical dictionary is a vast repository of facts and opinions; and he balances the false religions in his sceptical scales, till the opposite quantities, (if i may use the language of algebra) annihilate each other […]. ‘i am most truly (said Bayle) a protestant; for i protest indifferently against all systems, and all sects’.13
The very constitution of Bayle’s magnum opus, its being a ‘vast repository of facts and opinions’, entails a huge act of isosthenia; sceptical activity, as
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with montaigne, seems an inevitable consequence of amassed learning.
The sceptic’s wisdom, moreover, is expressed not through a direct argument but through an act of form: it is the dictionary’s textual fabric, its manner of compilation, that determines the direction of its meaning.
another version of the argument from variety – again an important one for Byron – is hume’s case against miracles.14 hume’s probabalistic relativism appealed to Byron as a strongly reasoned response to the world, but also as a rich store of comically pliant imagery. This is hume:
in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and that it is impossible the religions of ancient rome, of turKey, of siam, and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation. every miracle, therefore, pretended to have been wrought in any of these religions (and all of them abound in miracles), as its direct scope is to establish the particular system to which it is attributed; so has it the same force, though more indirectly, to overthrow every other system.15
with Byron, here in Beppo, the stamped presence of argument – which is so clear in hume’s prose – is modulated and energized by the mind of the poet and ironist:
and there are dresses splendid, but fantastical, masks of all times and nations, turks and Jews, and harlequins and clowns, with feats gymnastical, greeks, romans, yankee-doodles, and hindoos;
all kinds of dress, except the ecclesiastical, all people, as their fancies hit, may choose, But no one in these parts may quiz the clergy, Therefore take heed, ye Freethinkers! i charge ye.
(Beppo, 3) Byron borrows hume’s romans and turks and swells their ranks to create a vibrant pluralism that stands in contrast to an authoritarian establishment determined to assert its exemption from the threatening energies of variety. The question of what Byron is arguing, however, seems a difficult one to answer. we could take the stanza as a critique of organized religion from the perspective of the ‘Freethinker’, as an assertion of the individual’s right to ‘choose’ without the coercion of a morally unreliable and philosophically unjustified Church. This, however, as well as being too straightforward for Byron’s complex take on religion, would be to crowbar deft and tonally evasive poetry into a position of over-easy liberalism. The first problem is that Byron is not thinking straightforwardly in philosophical terms in the way hume is.
what for hume is the space of argument is for Byron crammed full of
life and the questionable, participated truths of carnival as an ethically particular form of human activity. The idea of choice, moreover, is not given a clear philosophical outcome: if we wish to construe our ability to ‘choose’ as our ‘fancies hit’ as a straightforwardly good thing then we do so because of what we have already decided rather than because of anything that has happened in the process of reading Byron’s poetry.
The question of how desirable such freedom might be is left unanswered behind the poet’s irony. second, Byron is interested in his language as its own form of comic life; the rhymes that carry through ‘fantastical’
and ‘gymnastical’ and that link up ‘doodles’ and ‘hindoos’ don’t argue anything, but they contribute to a reading experience that projects beyond the assumptive framework of the argued.
one of the most provocative questions thrown up by classical scepticism is where we go (if anywhere) from the suspended state of epoche. hume argued that in the absence of certainty we should weigh the merits of each case and decide which is most likely. The classical pyrrhonist takes a rather different line. pyrrhonism is conceived of by its followers as a way of life outside the academy; it is more concerned with the broken surfaces of life than the procedures of theory. academic scepticism, it has been said, ‘leads nowhere’, whereas ‘pyrrhonism is a universal attitude’.16 The pyrrhonist withholds belief about the nature of reality as it is presented to him through the senses, but he does (contra the amusing but misleading stories about pyrrho and onrushing chariots) ‘assent to appearances, over which he has no control’,17 as well as accepting the social and cultural configurations within which he finds himself (in this sense it is a conservative philosophy). he is not, as the stories suggest, a lunatic who refuses instinct, will and nature at the behest of philosophical principles, but one who seeks a life untroubled by what are seen as fruitless conflicts over questions that cannot in any case be settled in a philosophically satisfactory manner.
pyrrhonists ‘follow’, as sextus empiricus writes, ‘a line of reasoning which, in accordance with appearances, points us to a life comfortable to the customs of our country and its laws and institutions, and to our instinctive feelings’.18 The end of pyrrhonism is not to win an argument but to achieve a state of ataraxia;19 it encourages, that is, a way of life grounded in a ‘suspension of judgment [that] brings with it tranquillity like its shadow’.20
For Byron, pyrrhonism was just another crazy pre-Christian sect he had read about in Bayle (and others), as we see in this pointedly double suspension:
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i am no platonist, i am nothing at all; but i would sooner be a paulician, manichean, spinozist, gentile, pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the lord and hatred of each other. (BLJ, ii, 89)21
influenced by hume’s sense of pyrrhonism as irrelevant, as something that will ‘vanish like smoke’ when exposed to the realities of life,22 Byron would have thought of the pyrrhonist as a version of the philosopher in Johnson’s Rasselas.
on the other hand hume (arguably) misrepresents pyrrhonism by conflating it with academic scepticism, the latter, seemingly, being more susceptible to his accusations of excessive abstractness and irrelevance to real life.23 The pyrrhonist has in fact thought about his inability to deny the ‘principles of our nature’ and his ataraxia, especially where developed (as hoagwood does in Byron’s case) away from simple conformism, is perhaps not quite as hopeless as hume suggests. if hume does misunderstand pyrrhonism then he also bequeaths his misunderstanding to Byron who, as hoagwood and others note, makes a number of claims that seem (at least partly) consistent with the tripartite pyrrhonian structure described above. his insistence upon being ‘nothing at all’, for instance, sounds just like the kind of non-dogmatic disengagement typical of classical scepticism. Byron frequently self-diagnoses such states of mental disengagement, thus falling more or less into line with the procedures recommended in diogenes laertius and by sextus empiricus:
‘i will neither read pro nor con. god would have made his will known without books, considering how very few could read them when Jesus of nazareth lived, had it been his pleasure to ratify any peculiar mode of worship’ (BLJ, ii, 98). such refusals to ‘read’ either way (especially if we ignore the complications entered by Byron’s devout tones) might certainly be extrapolated into a state of epoche. whether we want to go as far as to commit Byron, with hoagwood, to a neo-pyrrhonist
‘conceptual and preconceptual frame’ is another question.24
hoagwood, it seems to me, overcommits his subject through a selective use of evidence. he cites this extract from a pre-wedding letter to annabella milbanke:
The only part [of mathematics] i remember which gave me much delight were those theorems (is that the word?) in which after ringing the changes upon – a–B & C–d. &c. i at last came to “which is absurd – which is impossible” and at this point i have always arrived (BLJ, iii, 159)
of this it is claimed that ‘Byron intensifies the pleasure of mental
suspension, putting “delight” where the ancients put “tranquillity”, but the total suspension of mind is welcomed by Byron no less than the early philosophical sceptics’.25 in another letter to annabella, Byron writes: ‘in the midst of myriads of the living & the dead worlds – stars – systems – infinity – why should i be anxious about an atom?’ (BLJ, iv, 78). of this hoagwood claims that the ‘deficit of a conclusion, comforting or otherwise, can generate a sceptical ataraxia and a freedom from angst.
[Byron] expresses in his own voice – not in the fictionality of a poetic projection – this skeptical quietude and its basis’.26 The first problem here is the assumption that in these letters we encounter a more authentic, stable or reliable voicing of Byron’s philosophical views than we do in the poetry. Byron’s pre-wedding letters to annabella emerge from a very specific and complex set of social and psychological factors, and project a different personality to the one encountered, for instance, in the letters to hodgson. They are certainly a performance, and not necessarily less of one than the often movingly honest narrator of Don Juan, who also represents a more intellectually developed Byron. it is true that a form of rational suspension is welcomed in the case of mathematics (part of a larger joke about Byron’s future wife) and in the second example Byron plays the world-weary philosopher who has apparently given up in the face of his own insignificance; but, taken as a whole, his articulations are too richly contradictory and evasive to justify any conceptual privileging of ‘skeptical quietude’ or ‘freedom from angst’ (intended or otherwise).
Byron often suggests the opposite, as when he (allegedly) remarked to the composer isaac nathan, in 1814, that ‘they accuse me of atheism – an atheist i could never be – no man of reflection, can feel otherwise than doubtful and anxious, when reflecting on futurity’ (HVSV, 83).
hoagwood is right to draw attention Byron’s ‘vitality’ and
‘life-enhancing power’,27 but while these energies certainly draw from the imagery and structures of the sceptical tradition they also exceed that tradition’s frames. Byron’s philosophical significance will not be found by invoking (or adapting) established philosophical descriptors, but in following the ways his poetry transforms linear thought amidst the energizing possibilities of language:
For ever and anon comes indigestion,
(not that most ‘dainty ariel’) and perplexes our soarings with another sort of question:
and that which after all my spirit vexes,
is, that i find no spot where man can rest his eye on, without confusion of the sorts and sexes,
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23 scepticism, system and poetry