“How would I know?”

 

“How would I know?”

This is the question at the crossroads of method and scepticism. To treat it as a question with the stress on the word “how” generates one story; but stressing the whole phrase – putting in doubt its ordinary function as a question – generates another story.

If we actually take that latter choice as the choice of scepticism, the philosophical thing to do is to ignore its tone and attend simply to its substance – the challenge to certainty. And all respect to that!

Yet to ignore its tone is to abandon too much that is philosophically pertinent to simple “literature”, as though this were all a naturally different field than philosophy, poetry and not proposition. Poetry, too, is proposition. Obliquely, by hide and seek.  Because this is a challenge that takes the guise of a jeer. And that jeering tone is, I’d say, the glory and the downfall of scepticism. 

In the Oxford English dictionary, the etymology of the word jeer is called uncertain, although there is a notion that it might come from gieren, to bray, to shout. That is slender evidence to connect the jeer to the donkey, but I am nothing if not a bold jumper.

The ass has long had a place in the philosopher’s gallery of figures. Apuleius’s ass – the man transformed into a donkey; Bruno’s ass; Nietzsche’s ass. An honorable dishonorable procession. The donkey’s bray is an emblematic characteristic, and on the down low, the male donkey’s penis is supposed to be an extraordinary instrument. The jeering tone of “how would I know” leads us to an interesting down-low form of scepticism, in which the assertion of knowledge is seen through as an assertion – that is, a performance of privilege and authority. When Descartes saves the world by building on one certainty, the sceptical donkey laughs at the idea of “saving” the world, and the self-amplifying presupposition that the world is a thing that one can save. And yet, there is a scepticism that goes farther and says: why not?

2.

The buffoon and the ass keep turning up together, as though the deck of achetypes that lies, face down, under our electric prestidigitator’s fingers were a crooked pack.

According to Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Apuleius, the author of the Golden Ass (that book of transmutations through which the transcendentally ludicrous is finally given shape and form by Psyche’s quest for Cupid) was, by the fourth century A.D., credited with the translation of the corpus of Hermes Trismegistus. These were the books that were supposedly written before Moses was a pup, and they were wildly popular in the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici hired Ficino to translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum in 1462, as the manuscript containing it had turned up by way of a traveling monk, Leonardo da Pistoia - instructing him to interrupt the Plato translation project, as the Corpus Hermeticum was urgent. Cosimo wanted to read the thing before he died. Such was its prestige, such is the greed for ‘secret’ knowledge. By the time of Bruno, a century later, the C.H. had lost something of its allure, vis a vis the regular scholarly world, but had continued to be central to the system of Renaissance magic, which operated in the hidey holes, intersecting, as secret knowledge always seems to, with intelligence agencies and diplomacy.

Bruno, of course, was interested in magic, as were members of Raleigh’s School of Night that he made the acquaintance of in his London sojourn. In the group picture of the founding fathers of the modern era, all lined up like Dutch masters, we usually have Bacon, Galileo and Descartes – Bruno is left out. And the reason that he is left out is that he was just too damned interested in that f-fuckin magic. Yet in reality – that promiscuous bitch, my darling - Bruno can’t be left out. In that grave company, Bruno was a buffoon – a necessary joker, the philosopher-buffoon who keeps returning, in some dark orbit according to some dark cycle of its own, to put into disarray the white magic of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. To play Rameau’s nephew to Diderot, to play the neurotic bachelor Kierkegaard to Hegel’s monument to the state to come.  To throw a few boomerangs around, liven the joint up, and raise, if possible, everybody’s level of anxiety and hope, the two intricately counter-weighted against each other.

In Dorothy Waley Singer’s life of Bruno there’s an anecdote about Bruno’s childhood that reads as though some bit of Pyrrho’s life in Diogenes Laertes had waited until the era of Rebirth to show itself again:

Bruno gives in his greatest Latin work, the De immenso, [4] a description of an episode in childhood, which made a deep impression on him. His home was in a hamlet just outside Nola, on the lower slopes of Cicada, a foot-hill of the Appenines some twenty miles east of Naples. [5] He tells with affectionate detail of the beauty and fertility of the land around, overlooked from afar by the seemingly stern bare steeps of Vesuvius. One day a suspicion of the deceptiveness of appearances dawned on the boy. Mount Cicada, he tells us, assured him that "brother Vesuvius" was no less beautiful and fertile. So, girding his loins, he climbed the opposite mountain. "Look now," said Brother Vesuvius, "look at Brother Cicada, dark and drear against the sky." The boy assured Vesuvius that such also was his appearance viewed from Cicada. "Thus did his parents [the two mountains] first teach the lad to doubt, and revealed to him how distance changes the face of things." So in after-life he interprets the experience and continues: "In whatever region of the globe I may be, I shall realize that both time and place are similarly distant from me."

From how would I know to how would I know, we’ve rounded the stresses, here, in this devotion without a real beginning or end.