The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

by Zachary Sng

Overview

Eighteenth-century Europe, preoccupied with both the origins and the defense of reason, was naturally concerned with what might be the root of all error. A topic any systematic account of knowledge must grapple with, error became a frequent point of debate in new scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical investigations. Taking John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as his point of departure, Sng examines a number of such debates, focusing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, he takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, Sng elucidates how people wrote about error and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge. The range of authors addressed—Leibniz, Adam Smith, Coleridge, Kant, and Goethe—demonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity underlying the textual production of the age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804770170
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/20/2010
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Zachary Sng is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Brown University.

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The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

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By Zachary Sng

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7017-0

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Chapter One

Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge

Narratives about founding texts, epochal breaks, and clear-cut beginnings tend to be taken with a grain of salt these days, but from time to time, one comes across a statement of such compelling lucidity that it seems to warrant a suspension of readerly skepticism. Hans Aarsleff's characterization of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Leibniz's response to it seems to be one such case: "The Essay was literally epochmaking, and such works never fail to efface their own past; in fact, one can almost say that the Essay has no other history than that which was its own future, as if Locke merely wrote to give Berkeley and Hume something to write about. Unlike Locke, Leibniz named his sources and gave citations, which may help to identify the Essay's elusive background, and Leibniz's vast correspondence offers a further wealth of information." Aarsleff sees the "epoch-making" character of the Essay as something written into the work itself: by effacing its own historicity and remaining silent about its sources and influences, the Essay essentially produces the effect of being the first of its kind. The only history in which the Essay is embedded, in other words, is the one that it inaugurates and inscribes, and according to which it is a site of origination. Aarsleff's statement was made in 1964, and it has since been challenged by suggestions from numerous intellectual historians about Locke's sources and influences, and by readings that show how the Essay acknowledges these debts. The more important provocation of Aarsleff's claim, however, has remained largely unaddressed: how does the Essay efface its own historicity, and how does one read or interpret such an attempted erasure? These questions guide the reading proposed here, which examines the Essay's complex reworking of historicity and origination and considers its relationship to the potential for corruption that is inextricably linked to unreliable words.

In order to secure the coherent production and distribution of knowledge, and to limit the damaging effects of error-prone language, Locke has to provide a persuasive account not only of the origins of ideas and words but also of the mechanisms by which they should be allowed to enter into circulation and exchange. The Essay fails, however, to completely secure this model of origination and distribution against the threat of corruption, because something repeatedly obtrudes to undo the distinctions on which it depends. Uncovering the greatest challenges to the integrity of Locke's epistemological claims will necessitate a closer examination of language, not just as it is explicitly discussed in book 3 of the Essay, but in relation to Locke's own rhetoric. The Essay's own linguistic performance has only lately begun to receive scholarly attention, and one could argue, in tandem with Aarsleff, that the text itself is responsible for this long neglect. After all, Locke argues forcefully that the best thing language can do is to submit to regulation and clarification so as not to obscure the understanding. Words, he writes,

interpose themselves so much between our Understandings, and the Truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose upon our Understandings. If we consider, in the Fallacies, Men put upon themselves, as well as others, and the Mistakes in Men's Disputes and Notions, how great a part is owing to Words, and their uncertain or mistaken Significations, we shall have reason to think this no small obstacle in the way to Knowledge.

The business of the Essay, the Essay itself seems to tell us, is with things far more important than style and composition, and its investigation of language is aimed at rendering it nothing more or less than a medium of impeccable clarity for the conveyance of ideas. Reinforcing this compelling effect of transparency is the disarming candor with which Locke constantly interrupts his own text to reflect upon its composition and structure, thus seeming to lay bare its origin and logic. Locke's eagerness to stage the process of the Essay's composition before the reader's eyes is often seen as a commitment to transparency, but such gestures are also part of a coherent textual strategy that has not been adequately examined. What is the relationship, then, between Locke's emphasis on narratives of origination (with respect both to ideas in the mind and to the text of the Essay itself) and the call for a clarified medium with which to convey ideas?

PLEASURE, SEEING, AND THE UNDERSTANDING

The importance of clearing away all impediments to vision and of letting light into hitherto obscured sites of origin is repeatedly stated in the Essay. Take, for example, the opening premise of Locke's argument:

The Understanding, like the Eye, whilst it makes us see, and perceive all other Things, takes no notice of itself: And it requires Art and Pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object. But whatever be the Difficulties, that lie in the way of this Enquiry; whatever it be, that keeps us so much in the Dark to our selves; sure I am, that all the Light we can let in upon our own Minds; all the Acquaintance we can make with our own Understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great Advantage, in directing our Thoughts in the search of other Things. (43; 1.1.1)

Behind this pragmatic appeal to the reader lies a daring claim: before we can begin to understand anything at all, we have to first understand the faculty of understanding itself. This is achieved by retraining the mind's eye onto itself, first setting it "at a distance" to itself and then allowing it to make it "its own object." The understanding is therefore always two things simultaneously in the Essay: the object of investigation as well as the condition of possibility of that same investigation. The understanding, like an eye, is a sealed chamber that enables seeing, but until it is itself penetrated by sight, it cannot observe, describe, and account for itself. Before the understanding can act as a ground for a rigorous system of knowledge, light must be cast into this dark space of the eye so that it is longer its own blind spot. The point from which seeing and understanding originate must also become the destination of the gaze, a secret chamber into which light is shed so that understanding can begin. The darkroom of the mind is thus something like a "clean room" in which the assembly of the Essay can begin, undisturbed by the possibility of contamination and illuminated by the pure unflickering light of understanding.

One element in the scene, however, seems incongruous: the necessity of turning understanding inward upon itself has such obvious practical benefits for Locke's professed aim (in his words, it will "bring us great Advantage") that it seems odd to assert that it will, in addition, "be very pleasant." Does pleasure's presence here, in the careful space of origination that Locke has constructed for the project of understanding, signal a breach in the integrity of this primal scene? To assume that pleasure has the status of a supplement-that it arrives later and as an interloper in a scene scripted for the solipsistic self-embrace of the understanding understanding itself-would, however, be a mistake. In the "Epistle to the Reader" that precedes the Essay itself, Locke already argues for an intrinsic connection between pleasure and the understanding:

He that hawks at Larks and Sparrows has no less Sport, though a much less considerable Quarry, than he that flies at nobler Game: and he is little acquainted with the Subject of this Treatise-the understanding-who does not know that, as it is the most elevated Faculty of the Soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant Delight than any of the other. Its searches after Truth are a sort of Hawking and Hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the Pleasure. (6)

Pleasure, found in the pursuit rather than in the attainment of truth, is a vital component of the way the understanding operates. On this basis, Locke constructs a crucial analogy: the process of writing the Essay is like the process by which understanding takes place, in that both are concerned first and foremost with the pleasure of the hunt.

The epistle culminates in a famous vignette that reveals the voyeuristic pleasure of understanding to be part of an elaborate narrative strategy to give the reader a fleeting and unexpected glimpse into a scene of textual conception. The Essay, in other words, turns upon itself exactly in the way that the understanding is later called upon to do:

Were it fit to trouble thee with the History of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six Friends meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a Subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled our selves, without coming any nearer a Resolution of those Doubts which perplexed us, it came into my Thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set our selves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the Company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed, that this should be our first Enquiry. (7)

Book 1's description of the understanding turning inward to cast light into its own dark recesses and grasp itself as object was therefore not a primal scene at all but rather the repetition of an earlier scene, a duplicate camera obscura that repeats the interplay of pleasure and understanding set up in the first. Locke's epistemology is thus grounded in twin acts of self- reflection: the understanding's ability to shed light on the conditions of its own possibility and the Essay's capacity for telling its own history.

Locke's claims about his text and about the understanding establish a relationship of complete correspondence, setting the Essay up as an instance of language that reproduces with precision the operations of its subject. The principles of clarity, transparency, and unimpeded sight bind form to content, language to thought, in the mode of a perfect mirroring. This doubling, in fact, goes even further:

For the Understanding, like the Eye, judging of Objects only by its own Sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers, having less regret for what has escaped it, because it is unknown. Thus he who ... sets his own Thoughts on work, to find and follow Truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the Hunter's Satisfaction; every moment of his Pursuit will reward his Pains with some Delight; and he will have Reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot much boast of any great Acquisition. This, Reader, is the Entertainment of those who let loose their own Thoughts, and follow them in writing; which thou oughtest not to envy them, since they afford thee an Opportunity of the like Diversion, if thou wilt make use of thy own Thoughts in reading. (6-7)

If Locke's text can make itself perfectly transparent, it can yield to its reader with absolute clarity and immediacy the processes by which it has come to be (that is to say, the record of its pursuit of truth), and the reader will be able to reproduce this set of processes and experience the same pleasure that its writer did. Clarity and pleasure are therefore not at all opposed for Locke, as is commonly presumed; in fact, the former guarantees the maximization of the latter. Conversely, his objection to obscurity and ambiguity in language does not stem from some deep-seated prejudice against affective categories such as delight, playfulness, and pleasure. Aarsleff's observation that the Essay "has no other history than that which was its own future" (43) could be seen, in fact, as confirming the success of this almost coercive combination of pleasure, candor, and transparency, which allows the text to stage not only its composition but also its own reception with remarkable efficacy.

LANGUAGE, THE GREAT CONDUIT

Indeed, one could say that the complex admixture of delight, instruction, and persuasion that Locke claims for his text is absolutely consistent with the three tasks of the orator commonly outlined by classical rhetoricians-movere, delectare, docere (to move, to delight, to instruct). Rather than excluding rhetoric at the opening of his Essay, Locke seems instead to give the art of persuasion a privileged position vis-à-vis the understanding. This would be consistent with the way the medial is privileged in his observation that "pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure" when it comes to the understanding. Such passages from the epistle could also, however, be read as the first signs of a deep-set ambivalence or suspicion about the means and the media through which understanding is conveyed. By positing an immediate response of pleasure in the reader, reciprocal to the writer's own pleasure, and emphasizing pleasure as the seamless correspondence of form and content, the epistle expresses a preference for a medium that is not one at all, a mediating instance of such complete clarity and transparency that it effectively effaces itself. Pleasure is, in short, the medium through which Locke installs the precise opposite of mediation. A similar approach is also deployed in the Essay with respect to language, the most compulsively thematized instance of mediation in the text. There, however, we find a troubling aspect of language that resists the work of clarification.

Language is a medium in that it interposes itself between two things, thus enabling a certain passage or exchange. At the same time, however, it puts this intercourse in peril. This can be seen in Locke's compressed account of the origin of language, that "great Instrument, and common Tye of society" (402; 3.1.1):

The Comfort, and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of Thoughts, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external sensible Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose, nothing was so fit, either for Plenty or Quickness, as those articulate Sounds, which with so much Ease and Variety, he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how Words, which were by Nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas; not by any natural connection that there is between particular articulate Sounds and certain Ideas, for then there would be but one Language amongst all Men; but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea. The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification. (405; 3.2.1)

Words are "external sensible signs" that make an internal, invisible idea (accessible at first only to the thinking subject) available to other people with whom one converses. To fulfill this function, they have to operate much like pleasure does: there has to be a mirroring principle which guarantees that the word excites within the listener the same idea that was originally within the speaker. This would not be a problem if Locke admitted a motivated relationship between ideas and words, but the situation is delicate because of his assertion that the original connection between an idea and the word that acts as its sign is arbitrary. The "perfectly arbitrary Imposition" (408; 3.2.8) that creates for each individual a connection between a word and an idea therefore has to enter into negotiation with the connections made by other individual speakers of his language, and ideally, a "common use, by a tacit Consent" (408; 3.2.8) will come to prevail for a given word.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist by Zachary Sng Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................ix
Introduction....................1
1. Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge....................14
2. Linguistic Turns: Leibniz, Tooke, and Coleridge....................45
3. Kant and the Error of Subreption....................76
4. The Madness of the Middle....................106
5. "Inaccurate, as lady linguists often are": Herodotus and Kleist on the Language of the Amazons....................136
Conclusion: A Dirty Word....................161
Notes....................173
Bibliography....................189
Index....................199

Editorial Reviews

"This elegant, lucid book addresses itself to one of the most imposingly significant topics imaginable. Sng manages the remarkable feat of writing with knife-like precision about error—the very figure of figurative drift. His study not only contributes richly to our understanding of classic eighteenth-century literary and philosophical texts, but offers the rare spectacle of a work fearlessly committed to the task of thinking about reading."

Claremont Graduate University - Marc Redfield

"The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist is highly ambitious and shows a remarkable erudition in a broad spectrum of fields: philosophy, literature, and above all literary theory. This is theoretical thinking and literary criticism at its best."

Yale University - Carol Jacobs

"With clarity, precision, and deftness, Zachary Sng analyzes in The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist the topic of error as it is thematized and figured in an array of philosophical and literary texts from Britain to Germany in the eighteenth century . . . The topic is a demanding and potentially unwieldy one that Sng handles with athleticism and elegance."

Studies in Romanticism - Emily Sun

"With clarity, precision, and deftness, Zachary Sng analyzes in The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist the topic of error as it is thematized and figured in an array of philosophical and literary texts from Britain to Germany in the eighteenth century . . . The topic is a demanding and potentially unwieldy one that Sng handles with athleticism and elegance."—Emily Sun, Studies in Romanticism


"The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist is highly ambitious and shows a remarkable erudition in a broad spectrum of fields: philosophy, literature, and above all literary theory. This is theoretical thinking and literary criticism at its best."—Carol Jacobs, Yale University


"This elegant, lucid book addresses itself to one of the most imposingly significant topics imaginable. Sng manages the remarkable feat of writing with knife-like precision about error—the very figure of figurative drift. His study not only contributes richly to our understanding of classic eighteenth-century literary and philosophical texts, but offers the rare spectacle of a work fearlessly committed to the task of thinking about reading."—Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University

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