PRISONERS OF THE VOID: The existential misgivings of a legal aid lawyer

By Otto Loser and Anton Matins

I’ll suppose that the automaton adapted and restructured itself instinctively, and by behavioural permutations as it trundled along. My thoughts urge me to demonstrate how this creature that I am might have deviated significantly from a period early in the seventeenth century, only to loom larger as it sought to reform its relations with m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Migration Books
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999940010

Otto Loser

Otto Loser is a character in a book called A Stranger Danger, by Anton Matins. He was born in Vienna on 18th September, 1979. At the time of writing Prisoners of the Void he was an Austrian national, practicing as a duty solicitor in southern England. During the preparations for Brexit he lived and worked in Plymouth, Devon.

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WHAT IS INSPIRATION?

If the answer is crime what is the question? Answers flood like water down a slope I think of as judgment. If the answer is judgment what’s the question? The gush of answers drown the shape any question makes. When I think about what it might mean to question things by looking at the inspiration for asking, something unexpected happens.

[1] The best questions are buried in the graveyards of philosophy. If I wonder what crime is it’s because I can remember something about Socrates. His life ended in a trial by jury. His jury convicted him. Plato loved him and wrote about him. It was the way he spoke. Socrates was the master of a peculiarity of language called examination. He examined his life. He examined everyone’s life. I think about him often because his memory sets the limit for all that is reachable by the operation of reason. Socrates had no need to write down what he thought because he had no answers. He was put on trial because he asked too many questions. He was coarse and ugly. He inspired Plato to devote his life to the perfection of such qualities as virtue and justice. It was the shadow cast by that condemned man that gave Plato’s writing its equivocal complexion. As soon as Socrates was dead Plato longed to hold what could never be held. The result was the suspension of answers by their own contradictions. This was called aporia. It was the kind of prevarication that troubled almost every response suggested by the denizens of Athens, drawn towards the Socratic experience, where each answer coaxed out would evaporate in another maddening question.

[2] The dilemma facing reason is the absence of a capacity to render lasting definitions. This absence found one of its most poignant expressions when Socrates defended himself against of a jury of Athenians. He’d been accused of disrespecting the gods, introducing gods of his own, and with all his meddling, corrupting the young. To be accused of any crime is to be judged. The judgment is instant. It’s held up as the sword of reason. Even though he was about to be struck down by that sword Socrates was unflinching in his accusations: I’m wiser than this man, he jibed, pointing at one of his jurors. It’s likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he doesn’t, whereas when I don’t know, neither do I think I know; so I’m likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I don’t think I know what I don’t know.¹ It’s in the wake of this subversive petitioning that I feel able to pose any question at all. This might have been liberating for me. But it seems I must be ensnared by a form that isn’t one: The form of a question. If Socrates was a criminal deserving of his punishment the question might have been what is a crime? But what I’ve been longing to know is what is a question?

[3] Questions don’t answer themselves. They suggest departures from an established order. Their origins must distantly precede the aporias of Socrates. They’ve always been thought of as troublesome. They exist because they must. For as long as languages have been spoken it seems that questions have been needed. To render them less harmful they were confined within special compounds. Any notion of escape by means of a question was met with an answer. The answers have come to be a form of imprisonment. They accumulate as knowledge. I can feel trapped by the rigid structures of knowledge, from the simplest of answers to whole a way of life. All I have left when that feeling becomes oppressive is another question. Whatever the answer is, it seems to me that the rules it designates are bound to be broken by even more questions. Whole civilizations will come tumbling down. There are poems about this. Look on my works ye mighty and despair! the King of Kings once barked, allowing a hot-headed Shelley to pen, in his sudden and revealing verse: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.² My favourite question might be put like this: What lies beyond the mirage of the greatest answers ever told? Many have tried to formulate an answer. They are all the metaphysical theories of life gathered in the oasis of judgment. I don’t try to be a philosopher. I haven’t the learning. I try to be a speculator, or a conjecturalist. Because I think mostly in questions I can admire those who lived such harshly natural lives as to appear to exclude judgment altogether.

[4] The most natural responses to anything that can be known were gifted to those early scandalisers known as kynicós. The best of them was Diogenes of Sinope. Still in swaddling when the people of Athens discovered Socrates was a criminal, the antics of this eastern wanderer would eventually drive Plato to describe him as Socrates gone mad.³ Diogenes loved to shock the Athenians. He pleasured himself in public. He joked about it with passers-by, even as they stared on in disgust. He complained that if only he could rub his stomach and get so much satisfaction he would never go hungry. To modern Europeans he would have been the perfect candidate for punishment. To medieval Europeans he might have been seen as a kind of Canute, trying to command the tides. In one anecdote, it was at the end of an especially wild show on the hilltop stages during a Dionysian festival, as thousands tumbled down the slopes of the Acropolis, transported and tipsy, Diogenes forced his way up through the crowd, back towards the amphitheatre, calling out as he went: This is what I’ve been doing all my life.⁴ The antics of the cynic were grown in that life of contrarian gestures. It was about how reason could be turned in on itself so that judgement was caught by itself. All that remained after Diogenes had closed judgment off once and for all, was something he liked to think of as the most natural way to be. Apart from his soiled cloak all he had was his naked life in public. I picture him abandoning the cloak as well. His self-sufficiency was nearly complete when one day he came across a boy drinking from a stream out of the hollow of his hand. Rolling his eyes, shaking his head in disbelief, this greatest of cynics looked at the wooden cup he’d been lugging around and threw it in a bush. All this time, he will have muttered, the cup was in my hands.⁵ But Diogenes would never be free. No matter how natural his life became he was as much a prisoner of his thoughts as I am of mine.

[5] Questions are not of the senses. They are posed in the intellect. But what is the intellect? The difference between Diogenes and Socrates was that Diogenes ignored questions because they weren’t made of anything that could be handled physically. They were devious forms that enticed the intellect with the prospect of escape. They maddened the soul. Perhaps it was mad to want to escape from a madness that was already known. But to ask questions was a method of loosening any madness, whether or not it was known. This essence of inquiry is what led to the formalities of thought that arose from the lives of the early skeptics. The skeptikoi were inquirers so determined to continually test each aspect of what was known, they found they could refuse to be tempted into the constraints of any convention. Plato had long been dead. But his Academy, which flourished in an olive grove known as Hekademia, would go onto cultivate this practice of questioning all things, always in the name of Plato’s constant love for Socrates.

[6] One leading academician, dedicated to the uncomfortable displacements of knowledge, was Aenesidemus of Crete. Some three-hundred years after Socrates was compelled to end his life for daring to ask too many questions, Aenesidemus grew disillusioned with the conflicts of competing answers. In refuting each dispute with his own barrage of questions he claimed to have been inspired by a painter from Elis, called Pyrrho. This Pyrrho was reputed to be the first skeptic ever. Not much else is known about him. He died in the first century before Christ. Attached to Alexander’s campaign of Macedonian aggrandisement, he may have travelled to northern India. A journey of this kind should have been enough to dislodge what any observant and well educated Greek thought he knew. It was said that Pyrrho liked to talk to himself. If people asked him why, he told them he was studying how to be good.⁶ It seems that I’ve always been writing this book. I feel I’m writing it for the same unknowable reason: To discover how to be good. To me it’s significant that Pyrrho compared wasps, flies and birds to humans.⁷ Like Socrates and Diogenes he wrote nothing down. There was no need. As long Pyrrho could say what he had to say to himself, what followed for him was the study of how to be good. He taught directly of the incomprehensibility of experience. He considered that nothing [is] honourable, or disgraceful, or just or unjust…[T]here [is] no such thing as downright truth [and] men [do] everything in consequence of custom or law.⁸

[7] This is the earliest reference to the rule of law that I know of. It’s steeped in the problem of having to judge what was bad from existing explanations of what was good. I use the word problem to indicate any question that might occur in contemplation of a judgment. Before I can ask what a crime is, I am drawn to the question of what justice is. An event might be thought of as unjust. But such an event doesn’t define what is just. It seems to be a matter of judgment. Judgements are written in laws. There can be no law without some prior judgment. Yet laws bind themselves to future judgments. Without laws future judgments would seem incoherent. But that would suggest that answers come before questions. Only when this coupling becomes unravelled by the act of questioning, is something called reason revealed; and only when reason is exposed in this way do more questions come tumbling out. This kind of conjectural surge might cause reason to lock itself back into itself, only to wonder if it can ever escape. Like all of those who have declined to write about the problem of asking questions, I must grope in the dark, dimly aware that there may be nothing worthwhile or lasting that is known. As I take each step it seems that I must stagger ignorantly towards those questions that make their own demands of reason.

[8] It occurred to me to ask what a question is. But to begin with I wanted to know what a crime is. Without knowing why I asked I found myself thinking of a crime as a formal means of proscribing ways of behaving. If I don’t learn how to behave the rule is that I can expect to be punished. But behaviour seems as culturally determined as I am. It’s whatever it is defined to be. I would guess that crime didn’t begin as a word. By the same token I would have thought the word just didn’t begin in speech. As words they’re too difficult to pin down, as if they indicate something that can’t be defined. Maybe it isn’t the definition that matters. Crime sounds like scream. Screaming is the most natural response to the harm that can be caused by a crime. It repels the criminal. It raises the alarm. It might occur during the commission of a crime. But the scream can last long after the crime has been committed. Some screams from the past are still being heard today. Having to ask these kinds of questions, without yet knowing how to define the words I use, I can see that I’ll continue to stumble. This is a predisposition. It’s how I’ve come to be after nearly six decades of trying. When I question things I can no longer be convinced by the answers that occur to me. A kind of malaise settles over each answer I come across. To avoid these disaffections I search for more questions. For example, I could ask now: What is it that attracts the accusation that a crime has been committed? It seems that the accusation must precede the crime. Before the alarm can be raised a person must already know that what is happening is something called a crime. But all that is really known is that something has been lost, or is about to be lost. It’s always about the knowledge that something can be possessed. It’s a threat to that sense of propriety, like a physical attack on the person or the person’s property. Some possession will have been carried off. Or someone’s life life will have been taken. Or some aspect of that life, irretrievably crushed. In conjunction with the development of common law principles these kinds of events go on to be defined by laws. The model is that legal prohibitions and punishments are the answer to the harmful events called crimes, which are always about a person’s unacceptable loss.

[9] Questions change. The answers change as well. It’s uncontroversial to argue that laws defining harmful events don’t remain consistent. It had once been thought that people who attempted to kill themselves, just as Socrates had been made to do, should be prosecuted in the event that they survived their ordeal. The offence of suicide was repealed when I was a child.⁹ By the beginning of the 1960’s suicide no longer offended against the principle of the sanctity of life. Not all common law jurisdictions had the urge to abandon this principle. Suicide remained a crime in India until 2014.¹⁰ It might be that some harmful events cause people to react in terror, while other harmful events used to, but don’t anymore. There are harmful events today that weren’t thought of as harmful events in the past. Slavery is an example. The scream against slavery was only belatedly heard in Parliament. It had been thought by the Greeks and others to be a mainstay of civilization. Laws have since been passed to prevent that scream from ever being heard again. They were enacted to bind future judgments. But according to the fickle motions of opinion, the judgments required to make those laws are always capable of taking radically different forms at short notice. Against the motions of opinion laws are an ungainly power attempting to operate as the most reasonable response to a scream.

[10] When examining his life Pyrrho realized there could be no behaviour that isn’t formed in customs or laws. If behaviour is formed in this way crimes could be thought of customary, and the law as a formal response. Crimes are defined by the laws that are passed. For many it will be habit-forming to offend against those laws. Any propensity of this kind is logically formed over generations of cultural development. I would guess that the behaviour of all living creatures is formed in this way. Pyrrho compared people to all living creatures. Frogs will congregate on roads at night. It’s not in their interest to do this, but the roads didn’t exist when frogs first started meeting there. People seem equally bound by their instincts, especially when they commit crimes. It may be sensible not to judge what they do. Pyrrho lived by the practice of epoché, a skeptical term which referred to the suspension of judgement. The notion of suspending judgment might seem absurd. It may be asked whether judgment is even capable of being suspended. The skeptic of today is fiendishly judgmental. Judgment is the essential skill. It’s all about renouncing what others do in the light of some difficult and superior knowledge.

[11] But when the Hellenistic doctrines of incomprehensibility were beginning to crystallize renunciations of this kind were not the answer. In those early days the skeptic danced with every shape wisdom took on. Wisdom was the answer to every question. She was called Sophia. Philosophy meant: To love Sophia. It was only later that her existence was denied. They may have loved her but the skeptics went on to castigate her. Was it because she was unfaithful? It seems so; and a word was formed to describe the reaction. It was this unhappy coupling between the question and the answer that made the word epoché possible. But epoché is a word that is virtually unusable now. It seems to be a riddle. Although it means never siding with any one answer, it extols the practice of asking questions. It even needs the question to be asked. For the skeptikoi suspending judgment became the dominant in the face of every question. For them epoché was the best answer ever. They devised special modes of challenge to help them contrive their suspensions. Carefully adumbrated in the second century, the skeptical modes read like a key that unlocks the gate to everything that is known. They were simple arguments, refined and standardized out of a series of scrolls called Pyrrhonian Outlines, written by the Greek physician, Sextus Empiricus.¹¹

[12] Sextus noted that humans…have nothing through which they can judge except the senses and the intellect.¹² Knowledge was anything that made itself apparent to the senses, through the intellect. But if each appearance was necessarily transformative, whether it was impressed upon the caprices of the senses or the interpretations of the intellect, so was the fate of knowledge necessarily transformative. Down the centuries much of the vigour for this radical inspiration went on to be smothered. I can see why. Had it remained so potent reason might by now have been swept away in a deluge of doubt. I wonder how Sextus delivered himself of any argument while such a torrent raged around him. What he wrote down bristles with contradictions. The pinnacle of it was that anything perceived had to be subject to the vagaries of perception.¹³ It followed that if what was perceived could only then be apprehended as a thought, the intellect must somehow have interceded. But this was difficult to confirm because the intellect was not an object that could be measured. I say that it cannot judge objects, Sextus wrote, it does not even perceive itself accurately.¹⁴ In Book II of the Outlines he began to construct a dam that he hoped would contain the flooding precipitated by the deluge of knowledge. Part of the dam’s construction took the form of a list of five skeptical defences. What was achieved by the operation of those arguments was the promise of resolutions by the hot evaporation of propositions, resulting in many blissful suspensions of judgment.

[13] The five defences against all knowledge are integral to the skeptical method. They were known as the Agrippan tropes or modes:

[i] The first problem was the dispute itself. Whatever anything is, there was always a dispute as to what it might actually be. These disputes produced irreconcilable accounts of the same thing, whatever it was. They were the loggerheads that occurred out of opposing judgments. Not only did they produce the harshness of every dogma, they could fester indefinitely. For that reason it was prudent to avoid making any kind of judgment in the face of a dispute.

[ii] Within the endless disputes about things there was always at least one unstoppable cascade. The skeptics referred to this as an infinite regression. It opened suddenly, like a chasm, and went on forever. This was so because that was so, because that was so, because that was so… In the account given by Sextus: [W]hat is brought forward as a source of conviction for the matter proposed, itself needs another such source, which itself needs another…so that we have no point from which to establish anything, and suspension of judgment follows.

[iii] There were the more straightforward regressions, which often happen in disputes. Someone will say it is what it is, as a means of concluding an argument. Every assertion made drains perilously towards this kind of circularity. It is a giddy reciprocal form that continually feeds on itself. Why does the universe exist? Because the universe exists. Providing his own edifying instruction Sextus wrote: [Circularity] occurs when what ought to be confirmatory of the object under investigation needs to be made convincing by the object under investigation; then, being unable to take either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgment about both.

[iv] Then there was relativism. The slippages that happen in every kind of dispute were hopelessly diverted by accounts that had to oppose one another because of the relative positions of the disputants.15 What is described as relativism today has become a much misunderstood form. It has long been maligned by those who are convinced they are right, as something devilish given only to skeptics. But it was nothing of the sort. The skeptic simply observed the polarities of relativism and taught that the suspension of judgment was the best position to take.

[v] Finally, it was realized that theories are meaningless. There could be a theory for anything. To come up with a theory was to hypothesize.¹⁶ It may have been pleasant to guess. But the skeptics saw that a guess was too easily refuted by a second guess. I may guess that everything I know is conjecture. But as the best guess was never going to resolve any dispute the only sensible option for the skeptic was to preclude the power of judgment altogether.

[14] These modes would come to tantalize and worry any thinker who bumped into them. The consensus was that they were too hard to penetrate. Best avoided, they were said to have been the refining work of a brilliant skeptic called Agrippa. Fused together and applied to all knowledge as five easy ways of demonstrating the illusory appearance of anything perceived by the intellect through the senses, they have proved for a few choice stragglers to be a great pool for the waters of dogma to be damed in. Sextus didn’t know anything about Agrippa. Apart from a later mention by the chronicler Laertius there is no record of a skeptic called Agrippa. As far as Sextus was concerned the greatest Pyrrhonian synthesis ever came about through the endeavours of the then more recent skeptics, from the first and second centuries. This was fitting. No individual perfects what is, after all, a pattern of subjectless thought brought about by the recollections of many thinkers, over long periods of time. The wisdom Sextus passed on has always had the form of a ghost. I derive satisfaction from the unknowability of Agrippa. It is the provision out of history of something anonymous through the now arbitrary use of a name.

[15] By Agrippa’s five routes out of any assertion the skeptic learned that if something appeared to be known, the difficulty was to know that it couldn’t be known. It was also to apply this heady uncertainty to the assertion that nothing is certain. Almost everyone who tries will become dizzy and waver. It feels like walking on quicksand. The impulse is to scramble back towards some position of certainty, which can no longer be attained. The fear of ruin is such a strong impediment that only a few could be induced to attempt it seriously. It’s likely that the effort will only have been made by those to whom it came naturally. No person is comfortable with the notion that reason won’t keep still, but is always rushing on. Some were forced into the skeptical sorrows, because nothing else made sense to them. Oscar Wilde was said to have committed a serious crime. Where was reason when he needed it? Reason does not help me, he scribbled from a despair in prison that would destroy him not long after his release. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust, and the system under which I have suffered, a wrong and unjust system.¹⁷ Wilde’s scream is a well documented example of the malleable and ongoing misapprehensions that can occur over short periods when it comes to the kind of conduct that may be described at any one time as criminal. Seen over longer periods I could argue, out of my own dismay, that any crime at all might suffer the indignities of this critique.

[16] Joining the ranks of the skeptikoi was never going to be a free lunch. The thinking is misunderstood. The skeptic is hated as a relativist. But those who say this have confused skepticism with just one of its critical methods. There are many who reject a position skeptically,