Rhetorical Humanism vs. Object-Oriented Ontology: The Ethics of Archimedean Points and Levers

Abstract

Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge.Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes' life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role."Knowledge," at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience.If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about knowing, we are left with the question of how different modes of making knowledge approach their "Archimedean" points.The question is especially important today as a renewed ontological enthusiasm sweeps through humanities disciplines that have grown wary, perhaps rightly, of epistemological skepticism.I distinguish here between epistemic approaches that focus on the firm ground of the Archimedean point, offering certitude à la Descartes, and approaches more oriented, like Archimedes himself, toward assemblages where "knower," point, and lever are mutually implied.These approaches, elaborated in more detail below, comprise two opposing epistemic styles: a lever-oriented approach tends to foster an uncertainty with positive ethico-political implications and a point-oriented approach tends to foreclose it.Starting from the (contingent) assumption that our figuring is rhetorical all the way down, I describe these contrasting approaches as epistemic styles in order to highlight that who we are is at stake in how we think we know-even when we claim to sidestep epistemology altogether-and that in the entanglement of who we are and how we know, we owe much to all our others. Toward a New Rhetorical HumanismIt is, at any rate, not the case that all styles of knowledge-making involve searches for an outside view of things or for firmness and certainty, to take two common ways of thinking about Archimedean points.Since antiquity, rhetorical theorists have regarded knowledge-making as the collection and examination of contingent points and effective levers,

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