Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (review)

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 204-207 FRED PARKER. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. χ + 290. ISBN 0-19-925318-8, cloth, $65/£50. To carry on reasoning in the face of the implications of skepticism is what Fred Parker calls "sceptical thinking." Not to be confused with the engineered vacillation leading to a tranquillizing suspense of judgement, it involves the double perspective of someone conducting a life, believing and reasoning as we do, while acutely aware that the whole endeavor is, in a sense, untenable. If, as Sir Philip Sidney famously said, an imaginative writer "nothing affirms, and therefore never Iieth," then the dilemma posed by skepticism might be less embarrassing for that kind of writer than for philosophers. The latter purport to offer tenets valued according to their truth, however variously defined; the former, on the other hand, create "speaking pictures," or verbal imitations (cf. Arist. Poetics 1). Skeptically thinking imaginative writers can create speaking pictures of a life in which knowledge is unavailable though people must reason, believe, and act. In a famous letter Keats went so far as to deem a kind of ataraxy to be a condition of the highest art, adducing Shakespeare's "Negative Capability... of being in uncertainties , Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (21, 27 December 1817). Parker does not discuss the possibility that negative capability might conduce to the highest flights of literature. He is concerned with the unresolved tensions of skeptical thinking that he sees as complicating key works of literature in the Hanoverian reigns. For their authors and readers, the negativity of skepticism was "disillusioning and destabilizing" (14) if not ameliorated by a humor like Sterne's or an irony like Hume's. Humor or irony arises from the oddity that skepticism is put in its place only when we give up and allow nature to reassert itself. Not heroic measures, but backgammon and making merry with friends prevail over doubt. Sometimes, when the confrontation with skepticism gives rise to the precept of following nature, skepticism can result in "a surprising confidence of assertion" (53). Imaginative writers might be more readily able than philosophers to relish the situation, but nothing prevents a philosopher from taking an intermission to create a speaking picture of skeptical thinking, as Hume did at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise. Thus, Parker puts Hume in the company of Pope, Sterne, and even Samuel Johnson as reflecting an efflorescence of skeptical thinking in the eighteenth century. After two chapters of conceptual and historical introduction, each of these four authors gets a chapter in what amounts to an assemblage of independent but linked essays somewhat in the fashion of Hume's Philosophical Hume Studies Book Reviews 205 Essays. In this review I will concentrate more on the chapters of most concern to those interested in Hume. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to hear that Montaigne's assaying ruminations, Locke's "destabilizing epistemology" (33), and Bayle's oscillations in argument set the stage for this efflorescence of skeptical thinking. Chapter 2 is devoted to the collateral damage of Locke's endeavor to clear the ground a little of the rubbish obstructing the way to knowledge. Locke's critics, early and late, correctly found skeptical implications in the way of ideas, and though the Essay was intended as a vaccination against scepticism, "it was a vaccine which carried some risk of transmitting the condition in active and perhaps virulent form" (61). Locke's empiricist program depended alarmingly on suppositions that, normally if not reliably, our words stand for ideas in an intersubjectively uniform way and that ideas represent external reality. Also alarming was Locke's suspicious attempt to exempt moral and religious language from the contingent relation between words and reality that he had elsewhere insisted was a plentiful source of error. In chapter 3, Parker juxtaposes Pope's Essay on Man (1733-34) with (a) the First Epistle ofthe First Book of Horace Imitated (1738) and (b) the philosophical essays of Pope's supposed mentor, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. In the Epistle, Pope...