Without a City Wall

Review Articles Without a City Wall CHARLES LOCK Modris Eksteins. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys 1989. 396. $26.95 David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989. 378. us $39.95; $15.95 paper 'Stirb und werde' (die and become): Goethe's words preside over Modris Eksteins's thesis of origins and destructions, emancipations and conclusions. By telling the reader that Stravinsky had intended to name his ballet not 'Rites of Spring' but 'The Victim,' Eksteins proffers a shadowy alternative title for his book. The enticing jacket collage shows Nijinsky at his most hermaphroditic and otherworldly, cut out against a bomb-levelled cityscape. Genius as victim, modernity as ruin, destruction as regeneration: this collage, like each ofthe book's few but carefully chosen illustrations, brings together what we like to keep separate, threatens to do away with the saving distinctions. These distinctions - among them civilizatiorllbarbarism, reason/unreason, progress/reaction, democratic/totalitarian, tolerance (the one)/intolerances (the many) - subserve a schematic view of modernity. The twentieth century can be accorded value, can be almost justified, when presented as a struggle between good and evil, angels and demons, in which the forces of darkness are always about to be negated. If, however, we think of other historical periods - the Victorian age, the Middle ages, the Reformation - we think of a complex whole in which all is potentially explicable, from which nothing needs to be excluded. This may have much to do with the arbitrary survival of records, the unacknowledged procedures of selection, and with the sheer freedom of not living then, of not being answerable to all that then was. But the difference ofour modernity is not so easily written off. We cannot comprehend within a single field the extremes and the enormities of the age. Such a proposition is not easily demonstrated. Such a demonstration must rely excessively on negatives. We think that we think about modernity in terms of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER J, SPRING 1990 434 CHARLES LOCK disparity and of the incommensurate, the absurd, the surreal. It has, however, been taboo not to think about modernity in those terms. And each of those terms denotesa degree ofdifference which is transcendent. We cannotachieve an image of our civilization in which Hitler and Picasso, Stalin and Stravinsky, are merely opposed, within the grasp of coherence. Such an image would threaten any concept of 'civilization' and the myths by which we survive. A text of negative proof might be Pound's Canto CXVI, 'I cannot make it cohere,' to which any sane and civilized reader must give relieved assent. We do not want such light and splendour to be reconciled with Mussolini. We celebrate in Pound and others the aesthetic fragmentation that endorses the scheme of modernity as disparate, scattered, beyond singleness of grasp and responsibility. Modernity can be comprehended, made endurable, only by distinctions and separations of a transcendent order: in the phrase of Czeslaw Milosz, the modern is 'a neoManichaean age.' Postmodernism resists most definitions but this one: that period from which one can obtain a single perspective on modernity. This can be arranged only by denying or playing down the horror, as Terry Eagleton makes clear in his attack on Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard: Modernity for Lyotard would seem nothing but a tale of terroristic reason and Nazism little more than the lethal terminus of totalizing thought. This reckless travesty ignores the fact that the death camps were among other things the upshot ofa barbarous irrationalism which ... junked history, refused argumentation , aestheticized politics. Who is junking history? The one who dares to think of Nazism as whole cloth and of a piece with the rest of Western history and culture, or the one who attributes it to an 'upshot of a barbarous irrationalism'? For Eagleton, Nazism is of such a quality as to be unavailable to our modes of explanation. To admit the phenomenon of Nazism within the realm of explanation is to turn it into 'nothing but' - which is to say, homogeneous with the rest of history. And not to be 'nothing but' is to be transcendently other to our modes of explanation. The transcendence of evil- its otherness from reason, history, etc - has in its keeping the order of our sanity. That is what is at risk in the debates about Heidegger and de Man, and this is why we have witnessed such an extraordinary and not always welcome recuperation of ethical discourse. (This recovery of the ethical has, incidentally, reopened the debates on Pound, Eliot, and others about whom there have been no recent revelations.) The scheme of modernity is established by a dividing wall that keeps angels from demons, the apostles of culture from the instruments of barbarism, and this wall admits of no crossings. Current debates about Heidegger and others concern the value and legitimacy of texts that issue from authors possibly, or indubitably, on the wrong side of the wall. The recently published 'responses' to the de Man affair were largely and somewhat repetitively of this order. The critical point that has been unspoken is WITHOUT A CITY WALL 435 that these debates have been generated precisely for the purpose of preserving the scheme, propping up the wall. At a deeper level, what is not being contested is the validity ofthe scheme itself. As long as one has two separate realms - the good of Culture, the bad of Nazism the discourse has no requirement for an internal ethical critique. On the side of the good, ethical discourse has been limited to 'nothing but' the self-embarrassed naIvete of judgment. For those who never had time to waste on Existentialism or Deconstruction, these debates have replenished self-righteousness. But even a sympathetic adherent who has acquired a scepticism of Heidegger's philosophy or de Man's theory is complicit in evasion. Central to that evasion is the certainty that Nazism is an 'upshot' from some Teutonic sub-basement or Saxon hoard. Even to evoke Nietzsche or Wagner is to create a scapegoat and thus to avoid the answerability of true familiarity. What if Nazism had its origins in Reason itself, in all that we consider of greatest value in the struggle against unreason? Kant, for example, or Hume, or Voltaire. That is the argument of Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic ofEnlightenment, and it is an argument that seldom gets a hearing today. (Consider the obloquy aroused by the mention ofLeo Strauss.) The claims of Reason are conditional on its disclaimer of Nazism; Reason can understand, explain, and appropriate that in whose origin or being it has a part; Reason has nothing to say about Nazism, whose origin must be utterly other. The evidence of history has turned Reason from a universalist ideal into one side of a Manichaean divide. Modris Eksteins has taken the evidence of history, and transgressed. Culture and history are not juxtaposed for 'mutual illumination ' but the better to trace the coherence of signs and themes that bind them together, that render them hard to tell apart. Eksteins structures Rites ofSpring as a play in three acts, admitting and even inviting an aesthetic reading. Resisting causality, development, and other forms of explanation, Eksteins follows modernist principles - aesthetic principles - of collage, juxtaposition, simultaneity , and contiguity. Dance and ritual provide an order of metaphor: 'Rites of War,' 'Battle Ballet,' 'War as Art,' among others. The inference that we may draw from the evidence thus arranged is that the creativity ofmodernist culture is bound up with a destructiveness which is hard to separate from modern history. Modern history also partakes ofthe creative, and is marked by the aestheticizing of public and political life. In much of the politics of modernity aesthetics has played an instrumental part. Always the available alibi is Nietzsche's aphorism that life can be justified only as an aesthetic spectacle. Common to the horrors of modernity - the Somme, Auschwitz, Hiroshima has been a destructiveness which is inseparable from creativity. In considering the means of destruction, the emphasis should not be only (as it is in Heidegger) on its technological scale and efficacy, but also on its ingenuity, on the whimsical originality and ingenious parody, which could be more easily discerned in the instruments of destruction were they cleansed of their demonic instrumentality. 436 CHARLES LOCK Aesthetics is every bit as culpable as technology, artists and scientists as answerable as technicians. Characteristic of modernism was a stated need for destruction, rupture, or iconoclasm, in order to clear or to create a space in which to make it new. We ought to acknowledge the pleasure in pure destruction taken not only by Tzara or Marinetti but by many other and more central artists. Usually, however, scholarship and aesthetic theorizing contrive to tum destruction into a function of creation: the omelette's excuse. Gertrude Stein knew better when she praised Picasso for having shown us 'things destroyed as they have never been destroyed.' David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity observes that Stein wrote this appreciation in 19.38, and thus anticipated further novelties of destruction. Modernism's destructiveness was directed at aesthetic conventions and traditions. In order that human beings should be destroyed it may be necessary first to aestheticize them. A person can be aestheticized either as an object, or as a character in a narrative. Of the former, most often expected of and endured by women, we have become extremely conscious. The objectification of a woman, however, is not strictly aesthetic - and certainly not in Kant's definition - because the intended response involves appropriation and desire. For Kant the properly aesthetic is untrammelled by desire or instrumentality. In so far as the objectified person functions in the viewer's narrative ofdesire, that person is the objectofthe viewer's concern. The disinterestedness proper to the aesthetic response is close to indifference, and dangerously so: one is more likely to be responsible for that which can be appropriated. The possibility ofappropriation is thus what keeps an objectified person 'kept,' enslaved but alive: The Portrait of a Lady is the most searchinganalysis of this theme. Aesthetic objectification has caused much abuse and exploitation, but not much destruction. The modern age has become wise to the dangers ofaesthetic objectification. The besetting evil, however, has been aestheticization by narrative. Here beauty belongs not to the person but to the story in which that person is accorded a role. The person is turned into a character, a function of the plot. Freud is an obvious and influential practitioner; there are still those who celebrate Freud's achievementunder the aspect of the literary, as ifit were to his greater credit. ErnestJones could, with no sense ofanomaly, treat Hamlet as a real person because Freud had long been treating real persons as characters in texts. Freud should not be singled out emphatically, for he belonged to the generation that brought about the extraordinary turn, most vigorous among anthropologists, towards mythology and ritual. The relationship between those anthropologists and the neo-Kantians of the first decade of the twentieth century would bear investigation. The phrase 'rites de passage' achieved immediate and wide'spread currencyafterthe publication ofa book ofthat title byArnold Van Gennep in 1909. That phrase was to be a gift to those who shortly afterwards had to justify making soldiers of young men. Ritual, being dramatic in form, timeless in recurrence, overlooks the specificity WITHOUT A CITY WALL 437 of its victims; the particularity of the human person is of no account. The obviousness of this probably explains the astonishinglack ofheat and indignation generated by the recent disclosures of Mircea Eliade's Fascist sympathies. As for those currently engaged in controversy over Joseph Campbell, one can only wonder whether they have read The Masks of God. The danger of thus aestheticizing the individual life by mythology is not hard to demonstrate. Rupert Brooke belonged to the'set' at Cambridge closelyassociatedwiththat university's famous school of anthropology. In 1905 Frances Comford wrote of Brooke: A young Apollo, golden-haired, Stands dreaming on the verge of strife Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life. Brooke was not thereby objectified aesthetically; he was put into an aesthetically pleasing narrative which was directed towards an appropriate and early termination. The disinterest ofthe aesthetic apprehension is under suspicion: one would hardly write as Frances Cornford wrote ofa person in whom, and in whose future, one had an interest. Trivial in itself, Comford's ditty helped to make barbarism actual; the personal life becomes an aesthetic narrative; the ethical is negated by mythological relativism; slaughter finds justification by archetype. These instances are not in Eksteins's book, but are evoked by a reading thereof. His emphasis is on the aesthetics of dance as metaphor for war, rather than on the relationship, consolidated by Stravinsky, between dance, ritual, and anthropology . Eksteins does call once on Huizinga, to provide an epigraph: 'All play means something.' A much more damaging quotation could easily have been found in Homo Ludens, buteven this one mightplayfalse to Huizinga's concluding protestation against the obvious abuse of his thesis. The notion of play suggests that the ethical can be suspended, that nothing need be taken seriously: it's only a game, only a myth. The role of aesthetics in Huizinga's thesis is problematic, but he had at least the courage to argue in 1938, when Homo Ludens was first published, that 'only a mythology without direct hold on our aesthetic sensibilities can reveal to us the full measure of its savageness.' The convergence of aesthetics and anthropology at the beginning of the modern period can explain some of the subsequent disasters. When 'life,' personal and political, is aestheticized, the ethical is subordinated. The primacy of the aesthetic over the ethical that marks modernity's most flagrant reversal of Victorian ordering makes possible the high valuation of modernist culture and the utter absolution of its responsibility for modern history. In marshalling evidence of the aestheticizing of war, and of the years entre deux guerres, Eksteins writes with a fascination which is likely to implicate the reader in the aesthetics of incongruity. A German historian in 1910 writes: 'War is the price one must pay for culture'; Nijinsky, mad by 1919, tells his audience in St Moritz: 'Now I will dance you the war'; when explaining war to the ranks, officers spoke 438 CHARLES LOCK in the language of school sports and the Church of England: duty, fair play, team spirit. (Mention could have been made of 'Tubby' Clayton and Toc H.) Rilke hailed the new creature emerging from the War, 'das er todlich belebt' - 'invigorated by death.' Albert Speer, the choreographer of Nazism, 'was very interested in the dance theories of Mary Wigman.' A hostile reviewer wrote of Stravinsky and Diaghilev's Rite of Spring: 'Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry.' Of a form of this cult.Eksteins is himself an adept. The concept of 'the wrong note,' however, supposes the principles of selection, division, and exclusion. It also presumes an aesthetic detachment. Eksteins does not then depend on the wrong note but on the jarring of juxtaposition, the incommensurates of collage. He presumes neither the viewpoint of aesthetic judgment nor the objectivity of ethical judgment; he is able to avoid some of the errors of the age he represents. In an important discussion of kitsch, Eksteins suggests that aesthetics can supplant ethics only with the help of deception, make-believe, masquerade - even, one might add, propaganda on behalf of culture. But he resists the easy path of making a clear distinction between art and kitsch, for that would be, once more, to exonerate the aesthetic. On Hitler Eksteins is pithy and shocking: against the conventional explanation (in fact an apology on behalf of art) that Hitler was not a real painter, just a house painter, Eksteins insists: 'An artist was what he was and ... what he always remained.' The viewpoint of aesthetic detachment, and of ethical judgment, has been symbolized in the twentieth century by flight. From Nijinsky's leap in 'L'Apresmidi d'un faune' to the naming ofStephen Dedalus and the closing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through Lindbergh's exploits to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and on to the unanswerable, ungainsayable image of 'planet Earth' as seen from outer space, flight provides a status that is godlike and a viewpoint that is exemplary. As defiance of gravity and of the laws of matter, flight may be taken to symbolize also the revival of dualism; the achievement of flight, as distinct from the aspiration, has given new validity to the Gnostic valuations of matter and spirit, earth and air. On the insufferable Lindbergh, Eksteins writes with a curdling restraint, and it is disappointing that the myth of that most gnostic of modern writers, Saint-Exupery, was not also scrutinized. Such a regret, however, is doubly impertinent: the book contains much, and it carries convictionbecause it appears to lack methodological principles of selection and inclusion. What we are presented with seems to be based rather on the general memory of those years than on the research of a professional historian. When other figures; analogous topics, suggest themselves to readers, as they inevitably will, their non-appearance confirms the absence oftendentiousness, of the need to explain and prove. Eksteins denies himself the vantage that would be afforded by the panoptic view, as he recognizes himself and his readers to be conditioned by the modern age, and party to its problems. It is an age of which there can hardly be, even now, a legitimate bird's-eye or Dedalian view. What we know of history is not determined by the texts that are written WITHOUT A CITY WALL 439 afterwards. Texts anticipate events, controlling not only perception and interpretation but the very experience of events, and the way in which their happening is brought about. Andre Gide was frustrated in his quesffor authentic, spontaneous reactions to trench warfare: He was stunned to hear survivors spouting the same old cliches contained in newspaper reports of the battle. 'None of them could provide the slightest original reaction,' [Gide] complained. It was as if the soldiers had read the articles that were to be printed about the battle before they went into it. If the infantrymen lacked originality, the creative writers were little better. It has often been observed that there is a peculiar ten-year delay between the end of the First World War and the publication of the prose works about it. All the famous English memoirs, of Graves, Blunden, Sassoon, and others, were published in 1929 and later. The only important exception - and that partial- does not concern the Western Front: T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars ofWisdom: A Triumph was written by 1921, privately printed in 1926, but not actually published until 1935. The catalyst for the publication of the war memoirs is generally acknowledged to have been Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which was first published in German in January 1929. On this topic Eksteins has assumed the prerogative of an academic to examine the German military archives: he has discovered that Remarque probably saw no more than six weeks of active service at the Front. All Quiet was written in a few weeks in 1928, shortly after Remarque had reviewed a clutch of German war memoirs by Ernst Junger and others less famous. After his enormous success Remarque was clearly embarrassed, and was extremely uncomfortable when questioned about the details of his war experience. What is insistently striking about this minor deception is that there is in English one book which initiates the modem literature of war, and that book, The Red Badge of Courage, was also mistaken for the raw, authentic thing. Stephen Crane had seen no action whatever. Both The Red Badgeand All Quiet contribute to A Farewell to Arms, whose publication and success in 1929 caused Hemingway to invent his own military past. We should not be troubled by this. Rather than assume that war literature is peculiarly dependent on convention and independent of experience, we should take the phenomenon ofwar prose (war poetry seems to be different) as typical of all prose. Whereas archives can prove the absence of military service, nothing can prove an author's absence from the service of, say, love or social betterment. We know that war conforms to the texts of war; we may always be free to deny that that is true of everything else. Aestheticization works in both directions, informing events as well as conforming them. One of Eksteins's most hauntingly vivid passages describes the rats in the trenches. These, 'queer sardonic' and 'droll' to Isaac Rosenberg, were so offensive that the soldiers were almost glad ofa gas attack for the damage it would inflict on the rats. Eksteins surmises that some years later when Hitler, who had 440 CHARLES LOCK fought in the trenches, referred to Jews as 'vermin' he would have recalled that most effective remedy - almost a solution. What is shocking about the surmise is that it credits Hitler with metaphorical thinking of the kind that we would applaud in another context. The most dangerous response would be that of irony. Eksteins appreciates that juxtaposition in itself is not irony, and the latter is markedly absent from his text. Juxtaposition and collage offer a plenitude of possible responses; irony compels a narrow response, a cool, knowing acceptance of things as they are that forgoes the ethical entitlement to hope that things might be otherwise. Rites of Spring joins the attempt to dismantle the separation by which the modem world is divided transcendentally into good and evil, by which barbarism is walled offfrom civilization. Itis with provocative relish and a certain daring that Eksteins insists on and traces out the continuities of aesthetics through the fabric of modernity, encompassing the artists we revere and the one from whom we prefer to withhold the designation 'artist': 'our Hitler.' Eksteins refers just once to 'our postmodernist age,' and it is not his task to define its relation of continuityand rupture with modernism and modernity. That is the project of David Harvey, whose Condition of Postmodernity is subtitled 'An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.' So we pass from the origins of modernity to the origins of postmodernity, which Harvey ascribes to the years 1968-72. From a 'high cultural' perspective, that seems much too late: literature, painting, and music had long since recognized their disinheritance from modernism. But Harvey's concern is with culture in the broadest sense; his approach tends to the sociological and the economic. Postmodernism and postmodernity are perplexing terms. In the vaguest sense, which is also one frequently used, the postmodern indicates merely a development (even if entropic) of the modern, and in this sense the term is unnecessary, even spurious. However, if the term signifies a rupture we need to know whether that rupture is one of passive discontinuity or active antagonism. Discontinuity could be indicated by the merely chronologic prefix 'post'; antagonism would be better labelled 'antimodernism.' Oddly, it is in architecture that we see antimodernism at its most blatant, yet it is in that sphere that the term 'postmodernism ' first found wide acceptance. This has led to much confusion. Postmodern architecture rebels against functionalism and the severe good taste ofmodernism. Its devotion to what Baudrillard calls the 'simulacrum' - epitomized by a developer's sloganin an Ontario subdivision: 'Historic Homes ofthe Future' - has little to do with what in the arts acknowledges the achievements of modernism and struggles with the fact of coming after. Disapproval of postmodern architecture need not entail disapproval of anything else labelled postmodern, and for clarification of this it would be useful to make the distinction between the postmodern and the antimodern. No more than a distinction, however. The only useful definition of the postmodern is that it is that in which and from which it is possible to look back on modernity and see it undivided. This is the distinctive contrast with the WITHOUT A CITY WALL 441 contemporaneous understanding of modernity in neo-Manichaean terms. We are, according to such proponents of postmodernism as Lyotard, in a position to contemplate what Jurgen Habermas calls 'the project of modernity' in its completion, or state of exhaustion. For Habermas the project of modernity, which began with the Enlightenment, still possesses the potential of extension. For others, the project is over and we find ourselves, as it were, unemployed by history. The transcendence of Evil in the twentieth century gave modernity a worthy adversary: call it barbarism and set it against all the heirs of Enlightenment. Looking back on modernity, as postmodernists have begun to do, one historicizes Evil and is forced to recognize its full implication in the texture of the twentieth century. For Habermas Reason still has its enemies; for the postmodernists the enemies are just part of the aesthetic divertissement. 'Culture' has assumed, or resumed, its anthropological denotation: all that is of human origin or agency, all that characterizes the human society. An especially fascinating culture over here: tricky texts, efficient gas chambers, ingenious bombs, great emphasis on education, varieties of political order and experimentation, and an economic system so cerebral that it has nothing to do with things. Ethics has been replaced by ethos. Against the aestheticization of ethos there is little resistance. The politics of postmodernity are exemplified by multiculturalism, which makes anthropological specimens of us all (or rather, of course, them all), and by the maintaining of the political legitimacy of Pol Pot for lending a certain tone - sombre but, from a distance, pleasing - to the political landscape. Ideologies have been aestheticized; we are no longer interested in their efficacy because there is nothing for which they can work - in Lyotard's term, there is no 'metanarrative.' Nor, when ethos has replaced ethics, can one justify a concern with rights and values. Ideologies, like everything else, provide diversion. The glue of this society, in which all that is is acceptable - in which an architect (Venturi) can seriously suggest that Disneyland, being so popular, should be taken as a model- ought to be money. Harvey is particularly good on 'Fordisffi,' 'flexible accumulation' and the changing devices and wiles of capitalism. 1972 is an important year for postmodernism because it marked the end of the Bretton-Woods agreement; since then money has been a pure signifier, free of moorings in matter. As financial strength is now (for individuals if not for states) more than ever before dependent on credit, the premium is on appearances. And because of its absence, money is elevated to a transcendent plane. One is tempted to suggest that there has not been such an age of faith for six hundred years: what is credit but the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? Carlyle spoke of cash payment as 'the universal sole nexus of man to man.' What we live with now is a credit nexus, and the worrying question concerns the stability of a nexus established by credit. The loss of faith that would lead to a collapse of the economy would also precipitate, much more severely than ever before, a collapse of social order. It may be a sign that we have already accepted 442 GREIG HENDERSON the fictiveness of society that we seek out and content ourselves with its aestheticization. Harvey's way out (and any study of postmodernism that does not admit to claustrophobia is likely to be narcissistic) is to call on Marxist theory to 'dissolve the categories of both modernism and postmodernism into a complex of oppositions expressive of the cultural contradictions of capitalism.' With the global distribution of postmodernism and the folding up of the Iron Curtain, it might be necessary now to include Communism within the contradictions of Capitalism. What has made the latter proposition hitherto unthinkable is the Manichaean splitting that made modernity endurable. Harvey is persuasive in his argument that we should read Marx as an early modernist'writer. As it is written in Das Kapital: 'We erect our structure in imagination before we erect it in reality.' Many years after the scheme of modernity was in place, the Berlin Wall was erected. Postmodernism may have brought about its demolition. In his concern with the dependence ofidentity on s~hemes of division, Harvey discusses the film Wings of Desire (Himmel uber Berlin), in which a character says: 'It is impossible to get lost in Berlin because you can always find the Wall.' If it is true also that we destroy our structures in imagination before we destroy them in reality, then the events of the autumn of 1989 suggest not just that we are but that we have been living in a/mazing times. Dedalus, old artificer, cunning in deed. In Search of the Ordinary: Leading Words Home GREIG HENDERSON Michael Fischer. Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1989. 165. us $27.50; $10.95 paper Stanley Cavell. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein Albuquerque: Living Batch Press 1989. 128. us $9.95 paper The philosophical work of Stanley Cavell is based on the assumption, enunciated by Wittgenstein, that the task of philosophy is 'to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.' As Cavell reflects in his latest book: 'Philosophers before Wittgenstein had found that our lives are distorted or waylaid by illusion. But what other philosopher has found the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the uses of humble words, looking philosophically as it were beneath our feet rather than over our heads?' Like Wittgenstein, Cavell confronts the temptation of scepticism and finds whatever victory there is to be found in 'never claiming a philosophical victory over (the temptation to) skepticism,' for such a victory could only mean 'a ...