An Aporetic Logos

This chapter expands on the two-fold aporetic logic (logos) that Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ thought appears to put forward. To make sense of it, it is necessary to return to Heraclitus’ fragments, not in order to reassert a supposedly contradictory flux, but in order to highlight how logos stammers in a forked tongue: on one side, as it were, the logos of humans with their infinite differentiae and on the other, the logos of nature with its undifferentiated expression. This is not a nature/culture divide, which would already indicate an all-too-human differentia. This is, on the contrary, a bio-linguistic expression that includes a multitude of accounts, some of which happen to be human in nature. With the tetralemma and time as air, Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ thought appears to emphasize the aporetic manner nature expresses itself in all its undifferentiated, unstable, and undecidable way. They were both indeed called “Aporetics,” those who live “in perplexity,” not in the sense of an inability to deal with or understand something, but most simply, in the sense of a convergence with what knows no poros, or way out: logos.