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2

THE CLAIM TO EXPERIENCE

Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience: In that, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self.

—An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.2

With these opening words to book 2 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke makes his well-known claim that all knowledge comes from experience. This claim has situated Locke as a founding figure in the British empiricist tradition, inaugurating a lineage continued by Berkeley and Hume. While early modern empiricism finds few champions today, it is not uncommon to see interpreters reiterate depictions of the Essay as entangled in the intractable problems posed by belief in a certain foundation in sense perception and an accompanying hostility to language, especially in its imaginative, rhetorical forms. Locke’s Essay has long been the target of criticisms directed against empiricism as positing an untenable faith in the mind as tabula rasa, a blank slate as passive receptor for sensory impressions, independent of and prior to both normative frameworks and language. Identified with what Wilfred Sellars calls the “myth of the given,” Locke’s claim to experience is seen as providing a secure foundation for human knowledge and reason in a precognitive, prelinguistic conception of sensory perception.¹ Such a faith in unmediated sense perception depends on a dualist split between mind and world, self and others. It draws, in Richard Rorty’s words, a “veil of ideas” that insulates the rational and self-certain subject from a shared world that is constituted through social practices, particularly language.² While contemporary readers may be skeptical of empiricism’s naive foundationalism and unyielding dualism, Locke’s supposed antipathy to language, especially rhetoric, remains an article of faith.³

Scholarship examining the historical context leading up to and surrounding Locke’s Essay offers a number reasons to loosen the hold of Locke’s image as founding figure of British empiricism. The labeling of Locke as an empiricist, Hans Aarsleff suggests, owes more to nineteenth-century histories of philosophies than to the Essay itself.⁴ Such latter-day labels give way to more focused attention on Locke’s involvement with seventeenth-century science, under the influence of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, and on his moral concerns that are framed by a Christian cosmology. In James Farr’s words, “The alleged empiricist philosopher of common sense has had restored to him an epistemology devoted to vindicating its theocentric framework and an understanding of the scope and methods of science.”⁵ To contextualize Locke’s Essay in this way, however, does not necessarily eliminate the association between Locke and those criticisms launched against empiricism. Charles Taylor, for example, draws from Tully’s study to emphasize the theological commitments of Locke’s thought. For Taylor, Locke’s subject achieves this very dualist stance, namely, its radical detachment from the shared social world, through a firm foundation in Christian theology. Locke’s “punctual self” needs more than experience to achieve self-certainty, yet such recognition does not necessarily trouble his reputed hostility to social and linguistic practices.⁶

Locke’s claim to experience is indeed the launching pad for the theory of knowledge and language offered up by the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Dislodging this claim from its latter-day legacy in empiricism’s privileging of unmediated sense perception, untouched by language and concepts, opens up an alternative understanding of Locke’s claim to experience as a critical project, emerging against a backdrop of significant developments in early modern philosophy, science, and rhetoric together. In this chapter, we will resituate the claim to experience and its relationship to rhetoric in two ways. First, Locke’s claim to experience emerged in a historical moment marked by a productive breakdown, rather than enmity, between philosophical-scientific practice and the rhetorical tradition. Second, that breakdown was integral to a culture of Epicurean materialism, in which Locke participated and that marks the style and substance of his writing. As we will see, readers of Locke who emphasize both his theological and scientific commitments cite the influence of the early modern Epicureanism of Gassendi, which helps to disentangle Locke from a latter-day empiricism and its philosophical dilemmas. In its place, Locke emerges as a theorist of judgment rather than certainty, negotiating a world conceived in terms of ineliminable contingency and uncertainty. Most important, this modern Epicureanism takes up the project of cultivating judgment in a manner that preserves a key role for rhetoric. We will then be able to recognize Locke’s appeal to experience as one that engages contingency, affective attachment, and imaginative language to critique existing authority and reconceive the subject.

Experience: Between Philosophy and Rhetoric

The familiar opposition between philosophy and rhetoric and between language and the material world structures a classic tale about Locke and the seventeenth century as a moment of rupture that starts to fray upon closer examination of a growing interest in experience and probable judgment. Locke’s relationship with the Royal Society and his lifelong passion for natural philosophical inquiries testify to the importance of scientific pursuits in his life and work.⁷ This association might seem to reinforce the view of a scientifically oriented Locke as hostile or indifferent to rhetoric. Histories of science and rhetoric, however, paint a more nuanced picture.

Claims to experience made by Locke and his scientific cohort emerge, not from an opposition between rhetoric and philosophy, but from a weakening of this divide. The notion of experience underwent a significant transformation in Locke’s lifetime. Experience, construed as part of the contingent world of appearances, was traditionally located on the side of the rhetorical tradition against Aristotelian philosophy’s search for demonstrative certainty and the forms of nature. Logic and rhetoric were sorted by a division of labor, with each assigned to different arenas of knowledge and action. Knowledge claims proceeded by deduction from certain principles, limiting credibility for the contingent observations of natural philosophy or other claims based in experience. On the other side of this divide, rhetoric related to questions of opinion and belief proper to the realms of politics, law, literature, and religion.⁸ In England, rhetoric, especially Ciceronian, had been taught since the Middle Ages as part of the curriculum, alongside grammar and logic, at Oxford and Cambridge.⁹

By the sixteenth century, Renaissance humanism had recovered and accorded new value to the category of experience while working to discredit scholastic philosophy.¹⁰ Reformers such as Rodolphus Agricola, Philipp Melanchthon, and Petrus Ramus offered various ways of reworking the categories of rhetoric and dialectic, such that logical arguments made from plausible, uncertain premises became appropriate for all areas of study.¹¹ Different versions of a new dialectic emerged, taking over probable reasoning from rhetoric. Agricola, influential for both Melanchthon and Ramus, helped bring about “a semantic revolution” by redefining dialectic in manner that, somewhat paradoxically, reclaimed the Ciceronian view of invention as a rhetorical activity.¹² In other words, Agricola’s new dialectic took over from rhetoric the inventive capacity to generate topics and probable arguments on both sides of a question, in utramque partem. English rhetorics from 1530s onward by Henry Peacham, Thomas Wilson, and others show the marks of Agricola’s and Melanchthon’s influence, in particular. Influential on the Continent and for Calvinist Protestants in England, Ramus offered a subsequent reform of dialectic that promised certainty rather than plausible arguments on both sides, breaking with the controversialist tradition. Invention, nonetheless, remains on the side of dialectic for Ramus, while rhetoric is reduced to style and delivery. Rather than there being a decline of rhetoric, the modes of inquiry associated with dialectic come increasingly to draw upon those previously assigned to rhetoric in order to more deeply engage the realm of experience.¹³ These humanists lowered the divide between philosophy and rhetoric over the course of the sixteenth century. They expanded their modes of inquiry and respect for experience-based knowledge into the natural sciences. As Barbara Shapiro explains, “The wall that for centuries had separated philosophy from rhetoric, reason from experience, and certainty from probability crumbled still further as a number of humanists attempted to develop unified arts of discourse that rearranged and combined elements of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric.”¹⁴

With these reforms and a growing disenchantment with the earlier distinction between science and rhetoric, there was no longer a particular mode of discourse appropriate to scientific inquiry. The seventeenth century witnessed an increasing dissatisfaction with this breakdown of boundaries , alongside the continued erosion of the credibility of the older order. In response, efforts arose to articulate modes of truth claiming that aspired to a higher standard than humanist claims to plausibility while responding to the skepticism that worked to discredit Scholastic claims to certainty.¹⁵ At the same time, the contentious politics of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sparked a more intense interest in rhetoric as an affective and motivational force.¹⁶ Responding to these manifold pressures and frustrations, New Scientists of the seventeenth century yet again reconceived relations between philosophy, rhetoric, and experience. Some, like Descartes, recommitted themselves to demonstrative certainty in the wake of radical skepticism, while Hobbes offered up his new science of politics focused on the passions, using mathematical reasoning and definition. In contrast to both, English empirical science, under the influence of Bacon, Boyle, and Gassendi, among others, championed experience as a source of knowledge, albeit with a more limited understanding of truth than that sought by Aristotelians or Cartesians. Locke, with his claim to experience, cut a defining figure in “the development of a family of ideas that breached the epistemological barrier between a logic and rhetoric, or knowledge and opinion.”¹⁷

This is not to say that either rhetorical or philosophical notions and practices remained unchanged by this breach. On the contrary, these new empirical scientists reworked established modes of authorizing claims to assert and legitimate their innovations in philosophy and science.¹⁸ The new emphasis on experimental natural philosophy challenged Aristotelian and Cartesian philosophy, on the one hand, and the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Montaigne, on the other. These challenges did not necessitate a radical break with these traditions, however. Instead, early empirical scientists drew from a range of traditions that they reworked for their distinctive purposes. The influence of Montaigne and other skeptics is registered in the prominent role of contingency and the persistent threat of fallible senses. Their mitigated skepticism, however, focused on modes of judgments based on experience that were registered as more or less probable. Such evidence from experience, judged by a matter of degrees rather than certain truth or falsity, challenged traditions of appealing to authoritative texts favored by both Aristotelians and humanists.¹⁹ With the new notion of probable judgment reworked from the rhetorical tradition, these experimental scientists sought authority for their new claims to knowledge, based not in tradition but in contingent experience.

This project required new methods of evaluation to distinguish matters of fact from the products of unquestioned opinion and fallible senses. In turning to experience as a source of knowledge, the English empirical scientists did not consider all experience to be equal. They developed experimental methods, but not all sources of knowledge could come from direct observation. Testimony and reports of others were also necessary, if not always as reliable. The Royal Society developed new standards and gradations of probability in order to evaluate testimony and determine what could be considered a “matter of fact” under conditions of incomplete or contested information.²⁰ While truth through demonstration was often out of reach, a range of terms indicating degrees of uncertainty could be applied, among them highly probable, probable, mere opinion, and conjecture.²¹

It is important to note that probability in this era did not entail the highly formalized mathematical methods used by social scientists today, though it could involve quantification. These early empirical philosophers considered carefully, both qualitatively and quantitatively, when assent to philosophical claims was warranted. They based assent, for example, on the number and reliability of firsthand testimony and secondhand reports whose reliability might be determined by personal characteristics of observers, for example, their skill, education, and personal stakes in the outcome. These emerging scientific methods borrowed heavily from practices for evaluating the reliability of witnesses and their testimony, as established in legal practice and with roots in the rhetorical tradition.²² Where opinion had previously been excluded from the purview of science, a central question for this new natural philosophy was which opinions could be trusted as evidence of knowledge or were close enough to be useful.²³

The Royal Society and its adherents were not simply taking up a new mode of scientific inquiry for a narrow group of experts. They sought new modes of reporting probabilistic claims based on experience to audiences for whom such claims were unfamiliar.²⁴ Reporting of experimental findings was indispensable for this new scientific method and it was also essential for winning approval and support. They needed, in other words, to persuade new audiences of their experimental claims without a claim to philosophical certainty. Consequently, the new articulation of probable knowledge drawn from experience generates more than a new epistemology. To substantiate the conclusions drawn from an experiment and enable others to build upon that knowledge required that witnesses be present and their presence recorded. Experimental reports, Boyle argued, must be written so as to allow others to replicate the experiment without having been present, scrupulously recounting their methods, materials, and circumstances. Such careful performance of experiment and the recording of direct observation, however, were insufficient for the aspirations of the Royal Society, which hoped to convey their findings to a much larger public than those who might ever serve as direct observers. They sought to expand their claims of experience through vivid narratives of their experiments so they could create, in Steven Shapin’s words, “virtual witnesses.”²⁵ Modes of writing aimed at eliciting the experience of observation, at bringing knowledge back to the senses, came to be essential for the launching of novel scientific claims through a vocabulary of probability, opinion, and experience drawn and reworked from the rhetorical tradition.

Recognizing the intersection of philosophical and rhetorical traditions and the ongoing place of rhetoric in this emerging scientific culture makes a difference for how we understand Locke’s claim to experience in the Essay. Resituating Locke within the context of early English empirical philosophy troubles the long-standing association of Locke with philosophy against rhetoric and perceptual experience against language. Douglas Casson shows how extensively this new wave of probable judgment informs An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Locke’s body of work as a whole, including his writings on religion and politics. The Essay, in fact, comes to enact the very shift from demonstrative certainty to probability that Shapiro and others have highlighted historically. In book 4 of the Essay, Locke asserts what seems like a hard and fast distinction between knowledge and opinion, reiterating the traditional opposition between scientia and opinio. He defines knowledge as “nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas” (4.1.1). Such knowledge, described as an immediate perception, is certain and treated as a kind of passive reception in which the understanding has no choice but to accept the proposition in question. Belief or opinion, by contrast, is qualitatively distinguished from knowledge. Belief or opinion requires an active practice of judgment of whether assent should be given to a relation of ideas “when their certain Agreement or Disagreement is not perceived but presumed to be so.” At this point in the text, Locke describes knowledge and judgment as two different faculties (4.14.4). Most propositions arise as a matter of judgment rather than certainty, and as such they are weighed in terms of probability, or likeliness of truth by degrees (4.15.2–3). This distinction recalls both Aristotelian and Cartesian categories and in part accounts for why so many readers have seen Locke as a confident defender of rational certainty or at least a defender of demonstrative knowledge against uncertain belief.²⁶

As several of Locke’s interpreters have noted, however, his distinction does not hold.²⁷ Locke immediately undermines his own clear contrast, ultimately shifting to a quantitative distinction between forms of belief and opinion that he treats as knowledge. He cites other forms of knowledge, including habitual knowledge based on the memory of perception; sensitive knowledge of the existence of external objects; and demonstrative knowledge, which is mediated by other propositions. Locke assigns the term knowledge to all these, but none of them uphold the same immediate and passive reception initially required for knowledge. Consequently, as Casson summarizes these moves, “Locke pushes the greater part of our knowledge in the direction of voluntary belief” and probability effectively takes over the realm of knowledge.²⁸

Locke never fully abandons his claims to certain knowledge, notably asserting that “Morality is capable of Demonstration, as well as Mathematicks” (3.11.16; see also 4.3.18). Indeed, there are for Locke cases in which such assent will be forced by demonstrably true claims, but they turn out to be infrequent and highly limited in practical use. These truths, such as “Where there is no Property, there is no Injustice” remain meaningful only at the level of abstract definition. Locke holds out the promise of demonstrative certainty in moral philosophy but never develops it, and it is unclear whether it could ever be developed.²⁹ In other words, Locke reserves a category of knowledge that is certain and immediate. Over the course of book 4 of the Essay, however, that category comes to occupy an increasingly circumscribed and irrelevant place in the work’ s central concern with the conduct of human understanding and action. Belief or opinion based on active judgment of when to give assent takes over most matters before the understanding. The narrow scope of demonstrative knowledge and the vast, expansive terrain of judgment are brought together under the chapter heading “Reason.” In this comprehensive form, reason emerges, in William Walker’s words as “the faculty that bridges the supposedly distinct faculties of Knowledge and Judgment and that assesses and is affected by all ideas, whether they make up knowledge or probability.”³⁰ Locke resituates reason such that it no longer sits on the side of either philosophy or opinion. Rather, reason is expanded to encompass judgment in situations both certain and uncertain, but mostly uncertain. Despite the lack of certainty, Locke speaks of judgment as sufficient for the purposes that humans face as moral and instrumental agents in this life and the next. Judgment in practical matters is both necessary and sufficient for even the weightiest matters of human action and responsibility. As Kirstie McClure explains, for Locke, “the dilemma confronting every human agent was one not of metaphysical speculation but of existential risk and practical judgment.”³¹

Recognizing Locke as a theorist of judgment may seem discordant with his appeals throughout his writings to foundationalist terms and tropes, for example, the grounds of knowledge, philosophical and political origins, and nature as representing both a human condition (the state of nature) and functioning as an object of scientific inquiry. It certainly challenges the construction of his work as fundamentally divided. However, it also challenges those who see a more unified body of work in which practical judgments find their validity by recourse to epistemological or moral foundations, whether empirical, rational, religious or some combination of these.³² Instead, Locke’s appeal to such foundationalist terms sets up a problematic of judgment that does not guarantee verifiable conclusions, at least not in this life. It is this problematic of judgment that, as we will see in the forthcoming chapters, bridges his philosophical, moral, and political concerns.

As we now see, Locke’s claim to experience and his overriding concern with judgment emerge from a period of cross-pollination between traditions of rhetoric and of philosophy. While new natural philosophers adopted the older rhetorical language of experience, opinion, and probability, they also reinvented that language for their novel scientific projects. Such reinvention, however, does not necessarily mark the severing of rhetoric’s influence on the notion of experience.³³ Rather, the reworking of an old language for new purposes and the desire to disseminate sensible experience and practices of observation to an emerging public made vivid language, analogies from nature, and the capacity to persuade an audience of probable truths all the more important. In other words, the reinvention of a language of experience and a mode of judgment out of fraying philosophical and humanistic traditions relied on rhetoric in new, distinctive ways.

The Culture of Epicurean Materialism

I have so far placed greater emphasis on how the notion of probable judgment drawn from experience borrowed from the rhetorical tradition and was reinvented for the scientific purposes of emerging claims to experience in natural philosophy. This preoccupation with probabilistic judgment was by no means limited to what we would recognize today as an emerging scientific realm. On the contrary, it came to span many types of inquiry that included not only philosophy and science but also history, religion, language, and politics.³⁴ It became, in Richard Kroll’s words, “an entire symbolic cultural mode.”³⁵ This cultural mode was one of Epicurean materialism, inaugurated by Gassendi’s revival of Epicurus, via the poetry of Lucretius (translated into English for the first time in 1656), and the reconciliation of the ancient philosophy with Christianity.³⁶ It cohered around the epistemological commitments we have been examining—probable knowledge based in experience, an ineliminable condition of contingency, a mitigated form of skepticism—as well as a revival of Epicurus’s commitments to atomism and hedonism. Emerging in the aftermath of the English civil wars, these widespread commitments and themes contributed to an anti-Cartesian perspective held by Gassendi, as well as Boyle, an important intellectual influence for Locke, and Hobbes, in differing ways.³⁷ Notably, in contrast to Descartes and Spinoza, Gassendi insisted on the necessity of rhetoric for this new method and epistemology.³⁸

Language was a matter of significant interest and concern from the beginning for the New Scientists. Just as Aristotelian and humanist approaches to empirical inquiry fell short, so too did they fail to offer an appropriate language with which conduct the methods and convey the findings of the New Science. Bacon first suggested aphorism and analogy as particularly useful styles, but his model was not adopted by later generations of the Royal Society. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the distrust of Aristotelian and humanist practices were combined with a particularly intense hostility to the unstructured, emotive, and mystical rhetoric of nonconformist sects (enthusiasts) who also rejected their predecessors. A new style for the New Science sought to reject the highly ornate, disputational, and impassioned speech of these various opponents, for purposes of knowledge as well as politics. Nevertheless, rhetoric remained essential for their philosophical and practical purposes.³⁹

Language and a renewed interest in the workings of the material world were not necessarily opposed but were brought into close relation in this new materialism, as exemplified in an oft-cited analogy by Lucretius comparing letters with atoms.⁴⁰ Where materialism today often connotes mechanism, contingency was instead a central commitment for this seventeenth-century materialist culture along with a rhetoric that promoted that sense of contingency. Objects of inquiry, natural, historical, or textual, were approached as fragments or atoms from which to draw hypothetical inferences. Such atoms—whether scriptural fragments or natural evidence—were resistant, but not immune, to interpretation. Their stubbornly fragmented nature served to highlight the artificial and contingent work of drawing meaning from the particulars of experience.⁴¹

The atomistic nature of the material world pressed the need for the intervention and artifice of the interpreter or judge. Self-conscious activities of interpretation and judgment were seen as essential to moral, historical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge, whether in reading scripture, ancient texts, or the Book of Nature.⁴² Accordingly, Epicurean writers engaged in a self-narration of their own reading to “allude to and dramatize the reader’s necessarily contingent activity when faced with the text,” revealing to readers the conditions of the texts own production, particularly its figural devices.⁴³ Performing its own creation, especially its rhetorical creation, proceeded, at least in part, through certain conventions that we find in Locke’s Essay. These include the soliciting of the reader’s assent and the implication that such assent will be shared by other readers. In this way, the reader is invited into the activity of interpreting the text by the text itself, emphasizing how meaning is produced in contingent encounters between reader and text. In this way, both the skepticism of Montaigne and the need to move on with cautious judgment are registered in a new method and style.⁴⁴ This mitigated skepticism required careful attention to the appropriate conduct with which one might negotiate that contingency when approaching a text or an experiment. It did not aspire, however, to the elimination of that contingency.

Turning back once more to the epistle to the Essay, we can draw still richer meaning from these passages by recognizing the way that it participates in the textual practices of Epicurean materialist culture. To recall, Locke presents to his readers a scene, in which “five or six Friends meeting at my Chamber . . . found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every side.” The Essay thus begins with a narrative of the conditions of its own production. Those conditions are contingent (“by Chance”), social (“five or six Friends”), and materially situated (“at my Chamber”) (7). As a precursor to inquiry, Locke recounts an epistemological crisis in which this friendly group must navigate what first appears to be irresolvable doubt. Rather than giving in to radical skepticism, however, they stop and redirect their efforts, turning first inward: “before we set our selves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see, what Objects of our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with.” The mode of inquiry for this group, as well as for the author of the Essay, is self-conscious. Ultimately, the epistle draws readers as well into this self-conscious activity, as Locke asks them to observe in themselves analogous phenomena of the understanding.⁴⁵

The scene evokes both crisis and possibility, clearing the way for a chastened and arduous reconstruction of the fragments of knowledge. The way forward, both cautious and civil, is not the project of a lone philosopher but is a shared venture hinging on mutual assent: “This I proposed to the Company who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed, that this should be our first Enquiry.” The epistle links this contingent occasion and mode of inquiry to the rhetorical style of the Essay. Locke apologetically describes his work as “[s]ome hasty and undigested Thoughts, on a Subject I had never before considered . . . which having been thus begun by Chance, was continued by Intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resum’d again, as my Humour or occasions permitted.” What appears as a claim to no style we now recognize as participating in the plain style of the New Science, as Locke challenges the “[v]ague and insignificant Forms of Speech and Abuse of Language” that “have so long passed for Mysteries of Science.”

Even more, however, the epistle shows us how the style itself expresses the social and material conditions of the experience of the author and his friends. The writing must stop and start again, like this circle of friends, cognizant of their limitations. Both participants and style proceed in a fragmented and discontinuous manner, subjected to the contingent forces of humor, chance, and entreaty. The epistle draws the reader into the contingent experience of its birth and its voice, apologizing for it but at the same time widening the circle of cooperative inquiry conducted by underlaborers seeking only to “remove some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge.” In expanding his circle to an untold number of readers, Locke lends the Essay a quality of never being fully realized.

The narrative of the epistle enacts the reconstructive turn to origins that the Essay will advance as its primary mode of inquiry and that echoes through the Two Treatises of Government. The rhetorical form of the Essay is appropriate to the mode of inquiry and the mode of inquiry is enacted in the rhetorical style of the Essay. Rhetoric and method drive each other in the shared pursuit of limited claims drawn from contingent, material conditions. Specifically, Locke adopts the genre of the essay, following in the footsteps of both Montaigne and Bacon. In a similar spirit in which Bacon advocated aphorism so that philosophers could convey “‘knowledge broken’ to invite further inquiry,” Locke as essayist advances the informal and winding form of the essay to fit the fragmented and contingent nature of his findings.⁴⁶ As Theodor Adorno would observe centuries later: “Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its subject matter is always a conflict brought to a standstill.”⁴⁷