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