In
philosophy, an aporia ( grc,
ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ, aporíā, literally: "lacking passage", also: "impasse", "difficulty in passage", "puzzlement") is a conundrum or state of puzzlement. In
rhetoric, it is a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often feigned.
Definitions
Definitions of the term ''aporia'' have varied throughout history. ''The Oxford English Dictionary'' includes two forms of the word: the adjective "aporetic", which it defines as "impassable", and "inclined to doubt, or to raise objections"; and the noun form "aporia", which it defines as the "state of the aporetic" and "a perplexity or difficulty". The dictionary entry also includes two early textual uses, which both refer to the term's rhetorical (rather than philosophical) usage.
In
George Puttenham's ''The Arte of English Poesie'' (1589), aporia is "the Doubtful,
ocalled...because often we will seem to caste perils, and make doubts of things when by a plaine manner of speech we might affirm or deny
hem
A hem in sewing is a garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric and to adjust the length of the piece in garments, such as at the end of the sleeve or the bottom of the g ...
. In a reference from 1657, J. Smith's ''Mystical Rhetoric,'' the term becomes "a figure whereby the speaker sheweth that he doubteth, either where to begin for the multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing" (OED).
Herbert Weir Smyth's ''Greek Grammar'' (1956) also focuses on the rhetorical usage by defining aporia as "an artifice by which a speaker feigns doubts as to where he shall begin or end or what he shall do or say" (674).
More modern sources, perhaps because they come after the advent of
post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...
, have chosen to omit the rhetorical usage of the term. In
William Harmon
William Harmon (born 1938) is James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of five books of poetry and editor of ''A Handbook to Literature''. His most recent poetry has appear ...
's ''A Handbook to Literature,'' for example, aporia is identified as "a difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision", while also noting that critics such as
Jacques Derrida have employed the term to "indicate a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself" (39). Julian Wolfreys, in his essay "Trauma, Testimony, and Criticism", characterizes trauma as aporia, a wound with unending trail. Valiur Rahaman, in his book ''Interpretations: Essays in Literary Theory '' (2011), explained aporia as a creative force in both the artist and their art; it is, for the artist, an edgeless edge of the text or a work of art.
Etymology
The separation of aporia into its two morphemes ''a''- and ''poros'' ('without' and 'passage') reveals the word's rich
etymological
Etymology () The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words a ...
background as well as its connection to Platonic
mythology
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narra ...
.
Sarah Kofman
Sarah Kofman (; September 14, 1934 – October 15, 1994) was a French philosopher .
Biography
Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960 at the Lycée Saint-Sernin, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze. Her aban ...
asserts that these two components are crucial to a fuller understanding of the word, which has been historically translated and understood somewhat reductively: "translators, who usually escape their perplexity by translating ''poros'' as 'expediency' and ''aporia'' as 'difficulty'
..leave the reader in the dark as to all the semantic richness of ''poros'' and ''aporia'' and give no hint as to their links with other words belonging to the same 'family (9). Such links inevitably demonstrate that the terms are part of a "tradition" that
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
borrows from, a tradition which "breaks with a philosophical conception of translation, and with the logic of identity that it implies" (10). To demonstrate such a break, Kofman reviews multiple instances of the term throughout Plato's work. Her discussion of the myth of
Poros
Poros ( el, Πόρος) is a small Greek island-pair in the southern part of the Saronic Gulf, about south from the port of Piraeus and separated from the Peloponnese by a wide sea channel, with the town of Galatas on the mainland across the ...
,
Penia
In Plato's ''Symposium'', Penae ("deficiency" or "poverty" in Latin) or Penia (; "deficiency" or "poverty" in Greek) was the personification of poverty and need. She married Porus at Aphrodite's birthday and was sometimes considered the mother ...
, and
Eros
In Greek mythology, Eros (, ; grc, Ἔρως, Érōs, Love, Desire) is the Greek god of love and sex. His Roman counterpart was Cupid ("desire").''Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia'', The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. In the ear ...
in Plato's
''Symposium'' especially reveals the concept's untranslatability. Penia, the "child of poverty", decides to forcefully
impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, the personification of plenty, who is always in opposition with aporia and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros, who inherits the disparate characteristics of his parents (25). The perplexing aspect of the myth is revealed as one realizes that Penia is acting out of resourcefulness, a quality normally attributed to Poros, and Poros' inaction reveals his own passivity, a poverty of agency or ''poros''. Such a relationship intensely affects not only the context of aporia but its meaning as well:
Ultimately, aporia cannot be separated from this etymological and cultural history. Such history provides insight into aporia's perplexing semantic qualities as well as into the
historical context in which the word functions as an indicator of the limits of language in constructing knowledge.
Philosophy
In philosophy, an aporia is a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises (i.e. a
paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
). It can also denote the state of being perplexed, or at a loss, at such a puzzle or impasse. The notion of an aporia is principally found in
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC, marking the end of the Greek Dark Ages. Greek philosophy continued throughout the Hellenistic period and the period in which Greece and most Greek-inhabited lands were part of the Roman Empi ...
, but it also plays a role in post-structuralist philosophy, as in the writings of Jacques Derrida and
Luce Irigaray, and it has also served as an instrument of investigation in
analytic philosophy.
Plato's early dialogues are often called his 'aporetic' (Greek: ἀπορητικός) dialogues because they typically end in aporia. In such a dialogue,
Socrates
Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
questions his
interlocutor about the nature or definition of a concept, for example virtue or courage. Socrates then, through
elenctic
The Socratic method (also known as method of Elenchus, elenctic method, or Socratic debate) is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw ...
testing, shows his interlocutor that his answer is unsatisfactory. After a number of such failed attempts, the interlocutor admits he is in aporia about the examined concept, concluding that he does not know what it is. In Plato's ''
Meno
''Meno'' (; grc-gre, Μένων, ''Ménōn'') is a Socratic dialogue by Plato. Meno begins the dialogue by asking Socrates whether virtue is taught, acquired by practice, or comes by nature. In order to determine whether virtue is teachabl ...
'' (84a-c), Socrates describes the purgative effect of reducing someone to aporia: it shows someone who merely thought he knew something that he does not in fact know it and instills in him a desire to investigate it.
In
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
's ''
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
'', aporia plays a role in his method of inquiry. In contrast to a
rationalist inquiry that begins from ''
a priori
("from the earlier") and ("from the later") are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on empirical evidence or experience. knowledge is independent from current ...
'' principles, or an
empiricist
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...
inquiry that begins from a ''
tabula rasa
''Tabula rasa'' (; "blank slate") is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. Epistemological proponents of ''tabula rasa'' disagree with the doctri ...
'', he begins the ''Metaphysics'' by surveying the various ''aporiai'' that exist, drawing in particular on what puzzled his predecessors: "with a view to the science we are seeking
.e.,_metaphysics.html" ;"title="metaphysics.html" ;"title=".e., metaphysics">.e., metaphysics">metaphysics.html" ;"title=".e., metaphysics">.e., metaphysics it is necessary that we should first review the things about which we need, from the outset, to be puzzled" (995a24). Book Beta of the ''Metaphysics'' is a list of the ''aporiai'' that preoccupy the rest of the work.
In Pyrrhonism aporia is intentionally induced as a means of producing ataraxia.
Contemporary academic studies of the term further characterize its usage in philosophical discourses. In "Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency" (2009),
Nicholas Rescher
Nicholas Rescher (; ; born 15 July 1928) is a German-American philosopher, polymath, and author, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961. He is chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and was fo ...
is concerned with the methods in which an aporia, or "apory", is intellectually processed and resolved. In the Preface, Rescher identifies the work as an attempt to "synthesize and systematize an aporetic procedure for dealing with information overload (of 'cognitive dissonance', as it is sometimes called)" (ix). The text is also useful in that it provides a more precise (although specialized) definition of the concept: "any cognitive situation in which the threat of inconsistency confronts us" (1). Rescher further introduces his specific study of the apory by qualifying the term as "a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses", a designation he illustrates with the following syllogism or "cluster of contentions":
The aporia, or "apory" of this syllogism lies in the fact that, while each of these assertions is individually conceivable, together they are inconsistent or impossible (i.e. they constitute a
paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
). Rescher's study is indicative of the continuing presence of scholarly examinations of the concept of aporia and, furthermore, of the continuing attempts of scholars to translate the word, to describe its modern meaning.
Rhetoric
Aporia is also a
rhetorical device whereby the speaker expresses a
doubt
Doubt is a mental state in which the mind remains suspended between two or more contradictory propositions, unable to be certain of any of them.
Doubt on an emotional level is indecision between belief and disbelief. It may involve uncertainty ...
—often feigned—about his position or
asks the audience rhetorically how he or she should proceed. One aim of aporia may be to
discredit
A smear campaign, also referred to as a smear tactic or simply a smear, is an effort to damage or call into question someone's reputation, by propounding negative propaganda. It makes use of discrediting tactics.
It can be applied to individual ...
the speaker's opponent. Aporia is also called ''dubitatio''. For example:
See also
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Antinomy
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Cognition
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Dubitative mood
Dubitative mood (abbreviated ) is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, that indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain. It may subsist as a separate morphological category, as in Bulgarian, or else as a cat ...
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Figure of speech
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Intuition
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...
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Rhetorical question
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Thought experiment
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
History
The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most anc ...
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Zeno's paradoxes
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (c. 490–430 BC) to support Parmenides' doctrine that contrary to the evidence of one's senses, the belief in plural ...
References
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Vasilis Politis (2006). "Aporia and Searching in the Early Plato" in L. Judson and V. Karasmanis eds. ''Remembering Socrates''. Oxford University Press.
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{{Ancient Greek philosophical concepts
Concepts in ancient Greek epistemology
Concepts in ancient Greek philosophy of mind
Figures of speech
Mental states
Pyrrhonism
Rhetoric
Theories in ancient Greek philosophy