The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

Zachary Sng

• Editore: Stanford University Press
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804775090
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire européenne

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.

Notes

Introduction

1

Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5:910. Translations are mine, based on the English translation of the identical passages appearing in Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 196–99. All translations in this book are mine unless indicated otherwise.

2

See, for example, Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v. “errō,” and Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “err.”

3

This example is discussed in Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations, 21. For information about the history of the French erreur, Bates cites the Grand Larousse de la langue française and the Trésor de la langue française. The German word history can be found in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bates’s examples of the knight-errant and the Wandering Jew serve as useful reminders of the rich material on error offered by medieval and Renaissance writers. The wealth of scholarship available on such earlier explorations of error underscores the difficulty of extracting them from Christian narratives about sin and expiation, and I therefore bracket them out in order to focus my attention on the epistemological stakes of error in the eighteenth century. For some examples of how earlier treatments of error could be integrated into a more general discussion, see Brown, “‘Errours Endlesse Traine,” in Turning Points, 3–30; and Teskey, “From Allegory to Dialectic.”

4

This would be, one could say, the approach of an intellectual historian like Bates: after a survey of the different metaphorical models that make up the Enlightenment’s “topography of knowledge” in his second chapter, he is able to then declare his intention to “leave the metaphorical depiction of this epistemological problem” (40) in order to study error more closely.

5

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.3.3. Quintilian does not provide a name for this common genus to which both tropes and figures belong. Since the discussion about figure cited here deals with the general issue of “departure from the simple and straightforward” (9.1.3), I employ the term figure for expediency when discussing Quintilian.

6

A parallel case could be made for Greek rhetoric (which Quintilian occasionally cites using the Greek terms). There, the operative terms would be schēma instead of figura, and either soloikismos or barbarismos in the place of Quintilian’s “vices.” For an excellent overview of the various classical systems of rhetoric, see Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. Solecism will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 5.

7

De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 7. This essay opens the volume entitled Allegories of Reading, and it could be argued that in the course of his chapters, the suspending potential of what he calls “rhetoric” is eventually assumed by the metatrope of “allegory.” De Man’s concept of allegory is based on “narratives to the second (or the third) degree” (205) that are engendered by an undecidability between truth and error in a primary narrative, and it could certainly also have been adopted here as a key critical term. My only reason for preferring rhetoric over allegory is historical: while both terms are used by de Man to indicate roughly the same vertiginous undecidability between truth and error, the former experienced a general circulation and co-implication with the discourse of knowledge in the eighteenth century that the latter did not. For more on the relationship between de Man’s treatment of allegory and error, see J. Hillis Miller, “‘Reading’ Part of a Paragraph.” See also Corngold, “Error in Paul de Man,” for a general discussion of error’s importance in the writings of de Man.

8

Another suspension that is entailed by this approach to error is the one between reader and writer. The undecidabilities surrounding error apply, in other words, also to reading, criticism, and interpretation as acts of mastery through interpretation, but so too does the possibility of being in error about error. This will be an important consideration here, especially in my discussions of modern critics who read eighteenth-century texts, as well as Enlightenment authors reading classical texts. For a more explicit discussion of error and practices of reading or commentary, see Lerer, Error and the Academic Self.

Chapter One: Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge

1

Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 43.

2

There has, for example, been a series of discussions about Locke’s indebtedness to Pierre Gassendi and Nicolas Malebranche, whose ideas circulated under the banner of a revived Epicureanism in seventeenth-century England. See Norton, “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism’”; Kroll, “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi”; and Michael and Michael, “The Theory of Ideas in Gassendi and Locke.”

3

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 488–89; 3.9.21. All quotations are based on the text of the fifth edition, published posthumously in 1706. References are to page, followed by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers. Emphases are from original unless otherwise noted.

4

The “Epistle to the Reader” can be found in all four editions of the Essay printed during Locke’s lifetime. I cite from the version found in Nidditch’s edition, which is taken from the fourth edition.

5

The two most famous classical descriptions of these officia oratoris from antiquity are to be found in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, 4.482, and Cicero’s De oratore, 69.

6

Jonathan Gil Harris has pointed out that the word conduit seemed to oscillate between meaning both source and distribution in early modern England. See J. G. Harris, “This Is Not a Pipe.”

7

This pair of quotations (with the Cicero quote in Latin) appears on the title page of the third edition in 1695. In the first two editions, the title pages only contain the first quote.

8

Locke was almost certainly familiar with Cicero’s text, for he quotes another passage from its first book as the motto for the unfinished “Of the Conduct of the Understanding.” The listing of books in Harrison and Laslett, eds., Library of John Locke, shows that Locke owned two seventeenth-century editions of the complete works of Cicero that contained De natura deorum (entries 711 and 721).

9

Nidditch and Rogers, eds., Drafts for the “Essay,” 1.2. I have modified Locke’s irregular orthography and punctuation in the passages cited from Draft A in order to facilitate reading.

10

For a discussion of the use of the child as example in early modern philosophy, see Krupp, Reason’s Children.

11

The concept of Adamic naming was a crucial one for seventeenth-century theories of language. For a general discussion, see Coudert, Language of Adam. A discussion of Locke’s use of Adam in the Essay can be fou...