“The Skeptic Way- Outlines of Pyrrhonism” by Sextus Empiricus (translated by Benson Mates)

Sextus Empiricus was a Greek physician who lived in the second century A.D. He was a follower of Pyrrhonean Skepticism and wrote this treatise as a summary of Pyrrhonean thought. As for its influence, Mates claims, “The rediscovery and publication of these works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led directly to the skepticism of Montaigne, Gassendi, Descartes, Bayle, and other major figures.”

Empiricus begins on the fundamentals of truth. “Some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching…. The Skeptics continue to search…. As regards none of the things that we are about to say do we firmly maintain that matters are absolutely as stated, but in each instance we are simply reporting, like a chronicler, what now appears to be the case.” With that major caveat, which applies to his entire treatise, he goes on. “The Skeptic Way is called Zetetic [“questioning”] from its activity in questioning and inquiring, Ephectic [“suspensive”] from the pathos that arises concerning the subject of inquiry, Aporetic [“inclined to aporiai [the characteristic of being stumped]”] either as some say, from its being puzzled and questioning about everything or from its being at a loss as to whether to assent or dissent, and Pyrrohnean because it appears to us that Pyrrho applied himself to Skepticism more vigorously and conspicuously than his predecessors…. The Skeptic Way is a disposition to oppose phenomena and noumena to one another in any way whatever.”

The Skeptics had an ambivalent view on the concepts of the Good and the Bad. “The person who believes that something is by nature good or bad is constantly upset; when he does not possess the things that seem to be good, he thinks he is being tormented by things that are by nature bad, and he chases after the things he supposes to be good; then, when he gets these, he falls into still more torments because of irrational and immoderate exultation, and, fearing any change, he does absolutely everything in order not to lose the things that seem to him good. But the person who takes no position as to what is by nature good or bad neither avoids nor pursues intensely. As a result he achieves ataraxia [peace of mind]…. The [first] Skeptics were hoping to achieve ataraxia by resolving the anomaly of phenomena and noumena, and, being unable to do this, they suspended judgment. But then, by chance as it were, when they were suspending judgment the ataraxia followed, as a shadow follows the body. We do not suppose, of course, that the Skeptic is wholly untroubled, but we do say that he is troubled only by things that are unavoidable.” Later, Empiricus continues, “Thus the Skeptic, seeing so much anomaly in the matters at hand, suspends judgment as to whether by nature something is good or bad or, generally, ought or ought not be done…. He follows, without any belief, the ordinary course of life; for this reason he has no pathos one way or the other as regards matters of belief, while his pathe [feelings] in regard to things forced upon him are moderate. As a human being he has sensory pathe, but since he does not add to these the belief that what he experiences is by nature bad, his pathe are moderate…. He who supposes that something is by nature good or bad or, in general, ought or ought not be done, is upset in all sorts of ways…. From what has been said it is evident that there can be no such thing as an art of living.”

As regards to everyday wants, the Skeptics discovered the concept of marginal utility. “Things that are rare seem precious, but things that are familiar and easy to get do not. Indeed, if we thought of water as rare, how much more precious it would appear than all the things that do seem precious! And if we imagine gold simply scattered on the ground like stones, to whom do we think it would then be precious and worth hoarding away?”

The Skeptics spend a lot of time dealing with subjective appearances as opposed to the things in and of themselves, which they realize are impossible to comprehend independently. “For, as the Dogmatists say, the intellect does not of itself get in contact with external objects and receive phantasiai [sensory impressions] from them, but it does so by means of the senses; and the senses do not apprehend the external objects but only their own pathe, if anything. And so the phantasia will be of a sensory pathos, which is not the same thing as the external object…. And since this pathos differs from the external object, the phantasia will not be of the external object but of something different…. Nor again can one say that the soul apprehends the external objects by means of the sensory pathe because the pathe of the senses are similar to the external objects. For from whence will the intellect know whether the pathe of the senses are similar to the objects of sense…. The intellect, looking at the pathe of the senses but not having observed the external objects, will not know whether the pathe of the senses resemble the external objects.”

Empiricus does not put any weight in the mental gymnastics displayed by the Sophists and by apparent paradoxes. There is a simplicity to the Skeptic refutation. “If, therefore, when an argument is propounded in which the conclusion is false we know at once that because of having the false conclusion it is not true and sound, we shall not give our assent to it even though we may not know where the fallacy lies…. If the argument leads us to something unacceptable, it is not we who should give precipitate assent to the paradoxical result because of the plausibility of the argument, but it is the Dogmatists who should desist from an argument that forces them to assent to paradoxes, if indeed they have chosen, as they profess, to seek the truth and not indulge in silly talk like children…. If an argument is leading us to something generally considered paradoxical we shall not assent to the paradox because of the argument, but we shall avoid the argument because of the paradox.”

Finally, Empiricus concludes by returning to the art of living, the supposedly wise, and the restraints of reason on the pathe. “If one cannot come to possess the so-called “art of living” either by learning and teaching or by nature, that art so much vaunted by the philosophers cannot be discovered…. And just as one would not say that a eunuch has self-control with respect to sexual pleasures, nor that a person with a bad stomach has self-control with respect to the enjoyment of food (since for such things they have no craving that they can combat by means of self-control), in the same way one ought not say that the wise man has self-control if he has no natural pathos to restrain by his self-control…. For if he has an impulse toward something, he is certainly perturbed, and if he controls it with reason, he still has the bad in himself…. Thus, insofar as it is up to his prudence, the wise man does not acquire self-control, or if he does, he is the most unfortunate of all, so that the art of living has brought him no benefit but the greatest perturbation.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Isaiah” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter makes the case that this book should be divided into three sections. “Isaiah son of Amoz, a Jerusalemite, began his career as a prophet in the 730s B.C.E…. Chapters 1-39 in the book that comes down to us incorporate the prophecies of Isaiah but also include much disparate material that is clearly later, some of it reflecting the imminent or actual fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. Nothing from chapter 40 to the end of the book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz. The strong scholarly consensus is that chapters 40-55 were composed by a prophet of the Babylonian exile, whose name is beyond recovery, prophesying a triumphant return of the exiles to Zion through the agency of the Persian emperor Cyrus…. The so-called Second Isaiah is followed by a Third Isaiah in what is now the last eleven chapters of the book. The situation presupposed in these chapters is the predicament of the community in the Persian province of Yehud, or Judah, after the rebuilding of the Temple, so the historical setting would have to be the fifth century B.C.E., although probably before the decisive mission of Ezra and Nehemiah in the middle of that century…. The claim that Third Isaiah is a disciple of Second Isaiah may be questioned because they are far too removed from each other in time—perhaps by as much as three generations.”

The bulk of the Book of Isaiah is written in verse. “It is above all the vehicle of poetry in all these prophets that demands close attention…. There are two reasons for the use of poetry, one theological and the other pragmatic. In most of these texts, the prophet represents himself as the mouthpiece of God’s words… and it is perfectly fitting that God should address Israel not in prose, which is closer to the language of everyday human intercourse, but in the elevated and impressive diction of poetry. The more pragmatic reason for the use of verse is that, as in all poetic systems, poetry is memorable in the technical sense…. All three of the principal poets in the Isaian corpus exhibit a good deal of technical virtuosity, and, of course, this will often not be visible in translation. Isaiah son of Amoz is particularly adept in thematically pointed wordplay…. Plays on words resist even approximation in English. More pervasively, in all of the Isaian poets, the expressive power of the line of biblical poetry, in which the second verset concretizes, intensifies, or focuses what is expressed in the first, is exploited with great resourcefulness.”

In Isaiah 1:3, Alter notes the book’s first use of the complementary versets, “the donkey its master’s stall. This line is a neat illustration of the pattern of focusing or concretization in the movement from the first verset to the second in biblical poetry. The first verset puts forth the general relation of beast to owner; the second verset (with metrical room for an additional word in the parallelism because the verb “knows” does double duty for both halves of the line and need not be repeated) then focuses on the place of nurture connecting beast and master.”

Alter stresses, in Isaiah 6:8, that God speaks through the prophet’s mouth, allowing him the authority to also speak in verse, “Here I am, send me. The obvious implication is that, the prophet’s lips having been cleansed, he is now ready to take up his mission. There is a linguistic note as well as a spiritual one in all of this: poetry, purportedly representing divine speech, is the prophet’s vehicle; now, with his lips purified, he is in a condition to utter this elevated and powerful form of speech.”

Throughout his footnotes, Alter also focuses on the aesthetics of the language. He calls out especially beautiful and powerful images in particular lines of verse. In Isaiah 9:1, he notes, “The people walking in darkness/ have seen a great light. This is one of the most arresting instances of antithetical parallelism in biblical poetry. The line is starkly simple yet haunting.”

In his commentary to Isaiah 24:1, Alter begins by making a historical conjecture and then continues to justify one of his translation choices, “The Lord is about to sap the earth and strip it…. These words mark the beginning of a new large unit that runs to the end of chapter 27. In the judgment of most scholars it is at the very least a century and a half later than Isaiah son of Amoz, but this prophet is also a strong poet…. In keeping with this prophet’s cosmic outlook, ‘erets here means “earth” rather than “land.” This is a poet who exhibits a vigorous inventiveness in emphatic sound-play. Thus, “sap” and “strip” in this translation are only a pale approximation of boqeq and bolqah in the Hebrew.”

Often, Alter explains the origins and history of particular words. In Isaiah 29:1, he gives a bit more background, “Ariel. Although the second verset makes it clear that this is an epithet for Jerusalem, wildly disparate proposals have been made for the etymology of the name. Perhaps the least strained is that it means “lion of God,” which is to say, not an ordinary lion but some sort of heraldic lion; and a good candidate for that would be the cherubs carved over the Ark of the Covenant, which are more or less winged lions. By synecdoche, then, this carved beast in the Temple might have become an epithet for the city in which the Temple stood.”

In Isaiah 37:24, Alter again combines his historical and poetic knowledge to give insight, “I will go up to the heights of the mountains/ the far reaches of Lebanon. Although Sennacherib’s campaign did include Phoenicia, here he is besieging Jerusalem. The mountains of Lebanon, however, are the proverbial loftiest heights in biblical poetry, and yarketey levanon, “the far reaches of Lebanon,” contains an echo of yarketey tsafon, “the far reaches of Tsafon,” the dwelling place of the gods. Sennacherib’s declaration at this point sounds rather like that of the overweening king of Babylonia brought down to Sheol in chapter 14, which may allude to the text here. The cutting down of lofty cedars also figures in chapter 14.”

Alter relates the suddenness with which Second Isaiah begins his prophecy in Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort, O comfort My people. The prophecies of Second Isaiah begin abruptly, with no introductory formula as “The word of the Lord came to me, saying.” If such introductory matter once existed, it would have been editorially deleted in order to encourage the perception that these prophecies are a direct continuation of what had preceded. Scholars have long puzzled over who is being addressed in the first verse…. Perhaps it is simplest to assume that those addressed are people in general, or even nations, enjoined to comfort Israel. In any event, the key word “comfort” at the very beginning of Second Isaiah sounds the great theme of Second Isaiah’s prophecies.”

One of Alter’s repeated themes in his commentaries is the gradual stress away from paganism and towards a devout monotheistic worldview in the biblical text. In Isaiah 40:12, he points out, “Who with his hand’s hollow has measured the waters. With this prophecy, soaring poetry becomes the vehicle to convey God’s magisterial role over all creation. It is perhaps at this point, most likely in the later sixth century B.C.E., that the universalist potential of biblical monotheism is fully realized.”

Much of the Book of Isaiah deals with the impact of the Babylonian exile and the quest to return. In Isaiah 42:14, Alter expands on the conundrums that must have been on the minds of many, “I have been silent a very long time,/ kept my peace, held Myself in check. These words answer a theological quandary that would have plagued the exiles: where is the God of Israel, why does He allow us to be reduced to this lowly state? What God says is that He has chosen to be silent and hold back, but that moment is now past. like a woman in labor now I shriek. This simile marks the startling transition from God’s silence and self-occultation to the moment when a new era is born, with birth pangs like a human birth.”

In Isaiah 43:19, Alter points out another cyclical theme in the Bible, “I will make a way in the desert. The great highway in the desert that God will lay down for the return from exile is a symmetrical antithesis to the “way in the sea” (v. 16) He made for Israel in its first liberation from servitude. History is thus seen in a pattern of cyclical recurrences, with differences.”

Again, in Isaiah 48:1, Alter combines his knowledge of history and poetic structure to make a comment as to the prophetic word choices, “house of Jacob/ who are called by the name of Israel. Although it is a regular procedure in poetic parallelism to use “Jacob” (the primary term) in the first verset and “Israel” (the name to which “Jacob” was changed) in the second verset, the wording here looks as if it may be a gloss on the two names. Formerly “Israel” designated the northern kingdom, but since that kingdom was destroyed, the name has been attached to the Judahites as well, who now constitute the entire people. This adoption of the national name is further explained by the third verset, “who came out from Judah’s womb.””

In Isaiah 56:1, Alter makes the case that the section of Third Isaiah has begun, “Keep justice and do righteousness. This moral exhortation, coupled with the urging to observe the sabbath in the next verse, strikes a new note in the Isaiah collection, one that some commentators have characterized as “sermonic.” It is the strong consensus of biblical scholarship, with only a few dissenters, that Isaiah 56-66 is a later composition than Isaiah 40-55, and almost certainly the work of more than one prophet…. The probable period for these prophecies is the early decades of the fifth century B.C.E., before the arrival from Babylonia of Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Alter explains the significance of a repetition in Isaiah 60:7, which a casual reader might easily miss, “the house of My splendor I will make splendid. This is not a redundancy. The Temple by rights is the house of God’s splendor, but only when it is completely rebuilt and grandly refurbished will it achieve its status as the house of God’s splendor.”

In Isaiah 63:1, Alter describes the monotheistic God, once again still personified with semi-pagan attributes, “Who is this coming from Edom,/ in ensanguined garments from Bosra? The first six verses of this chapter are the most vivid—and grisly—representation in biblical poetry of YHWH as a warrior-god. The image of God trampling the vineyard would be picked up in the Book of Revelation.”

Finally, Alter reminds us of the envelope form so often used in the Bible, this time in Isaiah 66:13, “As a man whose mother comforts him,/ so I Myself will comfort you,/ and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. The triple insistence on this verb, following “her comforting breast” is an excellent allusion to the comforting, “Comfort. O comfort My people,” at the beginning of chapter 40, bringing all of 40-66 to closure in an envelope structure.”

“Critias” by Plato (translated by Diskin Clay)

This dialogue is mainly a single speech by Critias. The speech is on the ancient mythical war between Athens and Atlantis. He first references the wealth and power of Athens’ ancient past, “For it is in the train of Leisure that Mythology and Inquiry into the Past arrive in cities, once they have observed that in the case of some peoples the necessities of life have been secured, but not before.” He claims that, back then, Athens was governed more like Plato’s proposed Republic, “Now, at that time, the other classes of citizens who dwelt in our city were engaged in manufacture and producing food from the earth, but the warrior class that had originally been separated from them by god-like men lived apart. They had all that was appropriate to their training and education. None of them had any private possession, but they thought of all their possessions as the common property of all, and they asked to receive nothing from the other citizens beyond what they needed to live.”

The dialogue ends abruptly, mid-sentence, and without conclusion. Towards its end, Critias describes the manner and morals of Atlantis in its own heyday, “For many generations and as long as enough of their divine nature survived, they were obedient unto their laws and they were well disposed to the divinity they were kin to. They possessed conceptions that were true and entirely lofty. And in their attitude to disasters and chance events that constantly befall men and in their relations with one another they exhibited a combination of mildness and prudence, because, except for virtue, they held all else in disdain and thought of their present good fortune of no consequence. They bore their vast wealth of gold and other possessions without difficulty, treating them as if they were a burden. They did not become intoxicated with luxury of the life their wealth made possible; they did not lose their self-control and slip into decline, but in their sober judgment they could see distinctly that even their very wealth increased with their amity and its companion, virtue. But they saw that both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honored. And virtue perishes with them as well…. But when the divine portion in them began to grow faint as it was often blended with great quantities of mortality and as their human nature gradually gained ascendancy, at that moment, in their inability to bear their great good fortune, they became disordered…. Inwardly they were filled with an unjust lust for possessions and power.”

“The Agony of Eros” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”

Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”

Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death…. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.”

Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. Love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”

“Menexenus” by Plato (translated by Paul Ryan)

This dialogue was known in antiquity as the “Funeral Oration” and is mainly comprised of a speech that Socrates claims was handed down to him by Aspasia, Pericles’ renown mistress. Socrates tells Menexenus that he takes no responsibility for its contents, themes, and veracity. Still, Menexenus has his doubts about who is the speech’s real author. The oration concerns Athens’ war dead and the themes of courage, virtue, glory, and heroism. Socrates begins, “Indeed, dying in war looks like a splendid fate in many ways…. They became brave by being sons of brave fathers. Let us, therefore, extoll first their noble birth, second their rearing and education. After that, let us put on view the deeds they performed, showing that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.”

Socrates proceeds to recount not only Athens’ recent war heroes, but first goes back, past the Peloponnesian War even, to the ancient wars with Persia. He begins with Athens’ most illustrious ancestors. “Those men were fathers not only of our bodies but of our freedom, ours and that of everyone on this continent.” He then continues to boast about Athens, “The opinion gained currency that our city could never be defeated in war, not even by all mankind. And that belief was true. We were overcome by our own quarrels, not by other men; by them we remain undefeated to this day, but we conquered ourselves and suffered defeat at our won hands.” After all, the more recent loss to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War of the Thirty Tyrants have to be explained away.

Finally, Socrates returns to the valor of the war dead and what the present generation of Athenians owe to their ancestors, “We must remember the fallen, and every man, just as in war, must encourage their descendants not to desert the ranks of their ancestors and not to yield to cowardice and fall back…. Free to live on ignobly, we prefer to die nobly rather than subject you and your descendants to reproach and bring disgrace on our fathers and all our ancestors. We consider the life of one who has brought disgrace on his own family no life…. Do whatever you do to the accompaniment of valor, knowing that without it all possessions and all ways of life are shameful and base. For neither does wealth confer distinction on one who possesses it with cowardice (the riches of a man like that belong to another, not himself) nor do bodily beauty and strength, when they reside in a worthless and cowardly man, seem to suit him…. All knowledge cut off from rectitude and the rest of virtue has the look of low cunning, not wisdom…. For a man with self-respect nothing is more disgraceful than to make himself honored not through himself, but through his ancestors’ glory…. For that man’s life is best arranged for whom all, or nearly all, the things that promote happiness depend on himself.”