Authority Figures. Torrey Shanks

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