(no subject)

[proximoception]

The five skepticisms: of being, knowing, saying, willing and sensing (these last AKA determinism and solipsism respectively). I don't believe in any of these not-believings (a sixth skepticism, skepticism-skepticism?); yes, people have died to keep believing they didn't believe in these basics, but they never stopped believing in them.

Can thinking/reasoning be one more? I think it's subsumed under knowing. Or saying.

Those not peer-pressured into adopting these come to them on their own, always for defense. Adopting one but unhappily--does this entail craving one aspect (certainty, say; getting to give up) but balking at others? Notice no one would move on to these if they could accept the apathies of the liar or nonsense-spouter. The most irritating of phenomena is when a skeptic senses a leak in her skepticism and tosses in some "you can't/won't stop me" responses to fill the breach; unless that would be the mad palace of misconnections and spreadings of language she produces afterward to assimilate that burst of infantine chaos.

Distraction is a more primal defense than skepticism, which is essentially an argument. Though arguments themselves may be just distractions that proved durable. Well, not just.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Do you read Cavell? "Knowing and Acknowledging"? And the King Lear essay, "The Avoidance of Love"?

Also MOntaigne may be a skeptic-skeptic, at least in the Apology for R.S.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Read around in his Shakespeare book when you recommended him, mostly about (I think) Othello but who knows what soaked in. Yeah, skepticism in Montaigne always seemed more rhetorical, a way to say what he liked in Xtian territory.