Aporia
from 400 BCE Central to the early dialogues; theorised by Aristotle
Reaching a genuine impasse by good reasoning, and treating that as an achievement rather than a failure to be papered over.
- Active
- from 400 BCE
- Where
- Athens
- Also
- aporia
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Classical procedures
What it is
An aporia is a place where the arguments on both sides are strong and the question will not resolve. As a method it is the deliberate production and honest occupation of such places.
The methodological claim is that arriving at a well-constructed impasse is worth more than leaving with a bad answer. Aristotle goes further: he holds that setting out the aporiai properly is the necessary first stage of any inquiry, because you cannot solve a problem you have not felt the force of.
How it works
Take a question that seems to have an obvious answer. Construct the strongest case for it. Construct the strongest case against. Establish that both cases rest on things you are not prepared to give up. Stop there, and say so.
The last step is the hard one, because every instinct is to resolve. An aporia that is quietly settled by dropping one of the two cases was never an aporia.
The moves, in order
- Pose the question
- Build the strongest case for one answer
- Build the strongest case against it
- Show that both rest on commitments that cannot be given up
- Remain there, and record the impasse as the finding
The procedure
Proposition There is no fair way to allocate the last bursary.
- Two candidates remain and one bursary. The panel agrees the award should go to the greater need.
- On one reckoning, need means present circumstances, and candidate A's are worse.
- On the other, need means the difference the money makes, and it makes more difference to candidate B, whose circumstances are better but whose alternative funding is nil.
- The panel finds it cannot give up either reading: abandoning the first makes need indifferent to actual hardship, abandoning the second makes it indifferent to what the award achieves.
- No third reading has been found that both readings are versions of.
Therefore The panel is at an impasse that is real rather than a failure of deliberation, and its finding is that the criterion of need is not determinate enough to decide between these two.
What the panel does next — draw lots, split the award, go back to the trustees — is a decision, not a resolution. The value of the aporia is that it stops anyone claiming the decision was the fair answer.
What it is good for
Honest committee work, and the opening stage of any serious inquiry. It is the antidote to the false resolution, which is by far the more common outcome when a hard question meets a deadline.
Where it fails
It can become a destination. A method that legitimises stopping is easily used to avoid the work of going on, and there is a strain of philosophy that treats reaching an impasse as sophistication rather than as the beginning of the problem.
It is also poorly suited to anywhere a decision must actually be made, which is most places. Recording that the question is undecidable does not tell the panel who gets the bursary.
Common misconceptions
That it means confusion. It means the opposite — a confused person has not reached an aporia, because they have not yet built either case properly.
Where it came from
The early Platonic dialogues end in it as a matter of course. Aristotle then makes it methodical in the Metaphysics and the Topics, treating the survey of aporiai as the first stage of inquiry.
What became of it
Preserved as a stage of method by Aristotle, revived as an end in itself by scepticism, and taken up again in the twentieth century by Derrida in a rather different sense.
Lasting influence
The convention that philosophical papers may end without a conclusion descends from it, as does the practice of setting out the problem before proposing anything.
Why it still matters
Undervalued. Most institutional decision-making would be improved by the ability to record an honest impasse.
Put another way
A survey that reports the ground will not carry the road.
Texts
Aristotle, Metaphysics
Book III is nothing but a catalogue of aporiai, set out before any of them is addressed. The clearest statement anywhere that this is a stage of method.
Where to start
Read any early Platonic dialogue to the end and resist looking for the answer. There is not one, and noticing how badly you want one is the lesson.
The surprising bit
Aristotle, the most systematic philosopher of antiquity, held that you must be at a loss before you can inquire, and built the collection of impasses into his method as a formal first stage.
In their own words
Those who inquire without first stating the difficulties are like people who do not know where they are going
Who held it
the Pyrrhonists
Connections
- Relies on
- Socratic elenchus
- Influenced
- Reflective equilibrium
- Parallel to
- Catuṣkoṭi
The verdict
An honest stopping place that becomes a vice the moment it stops being uncomfortable.