Byron’s printed and vocally dense utterance becomes a perfectly timed claim on behalf of literary presence. This wriggling out of normative argument into absolute possibility is also a nod to tradition in so far as it participates in the ironic, dialogic status of Montaigne’s physically inscribed but uncertain motto. 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’. 9 His interest lies in those moments where argument breaks down – or flourishes – into paradox and form. Rather than reproducing conventional sceptical arguments (‘all is dubious which Man may attain’), Byron writes them only in order to cross them out again. 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: The outlandish schemes of Walter Shandy, for instance, are described as ‘sceptical, and far out of the high-way of thinking’. 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. There are historical considerations also. 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. 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. 2 Hoagwood goes further to claim this universal distancing as an intellectually coherent and sophisticated response to the world: 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’. 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’. 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’. 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.
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