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1 The Face of Experience
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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1 THE FACE OF EXPERIENCE Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding stands in a peculiar relation to the tradition that it founded. On the one hand, the school known as associationism, represented most prominently by David Hartley, depended on Locke's assertion that ideas are derived from experience. The principle by which these ideas were said to be governed, moreover , was designated by a phrase lifted out of the fourth edition of Locke's Essay, "the association of ideas." On the other hand, the use of association to name a central principle of rational thought altered the meaning it had in Locke's work, in which it referred to a thought process subversive of normal reasoning and described as a "madness." While Locke assumed, like the later associationists, that reason normally operates by combining simple ideas according to their "natural connections," he reserved the name "association" for the formation of "accidental " connections that unconsciously influence the reasoning process. In transferring the name to "rational" thought processes , the eighteenth-century empiricists effectively eliminated the phenomenon that, in Locke, had raised serious questions about the principles established in the rest of the Essay. The very term that introduced a counterpoint in Locke's analysisof reason came to stand for a type of empiricism known for its simple, "mechanistic" form of explanation. EMPIRICAL TRUTHS AND CRITICAL FICTIONS / 2 Despite the sporadic recognition of this anomaly in the history of British philosophy, it has received little sustained attention .1 "Association of ideas" is itself associated, most frequently, with the eighteenth-century empiricists, for whom Locke is generally understood to be the starting point.2 The implications of such an approach are perhaps most apparent in studies of English Romanticism, which have often attempted to define the period in relation to the empirical tradition. Whether this relation is seen as essentially negative, or positive, or as a working -through and transcendence of empiricism by Romantic texts, the pattern remains fundamentally the same: whatever the individual doctrinal differences, empiricism is characterized as a general philosophical approach exemplified variously by Locke, Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, and others, to which Romanticism is a more or less complex response.3 A number of interpretations of English Romantic texts depend on an approach to empiricism which neglects the complexities of individual arguments as well as the peculiaritiesof the tradition asa whole. The consequences of this view of empirical philosophy are most apparent in works that interpret Romantic texts in terms of avocabularyof experience. The concept of experience,which is as varied as it is central to empirical philosophies, tends to be lifted uncriticallyfrom the context of these arguments and used as a framework in which to understand the complex issues of Romantic poetry. The problems of literary convention, diction , and figuration are then neglected for the poem's reference to a world of passion, thought, and other aspects of experience .4 This occurs particularlyaround the terminology of sensation . Empirical arguments concerning sensation are usually read literally, presumably because the texts are "philosophical," and insist on the literal status of their own language, and because they claim with this authority that sensation is a basic unit of experience. The referential status of the language of sensation thus tends to overcome the often peculiar way these terms are actually used in various arguments, which employ [3.235.42.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:45 GMT) THE FACE OF EXPERIENCE / 3 their own conventional and figurative devices. The empiricist's claim to refer to an empirical world is taken, that is, at face value, and the power of this referenceaffects the reading of certain terms even in the more explicitly figurative contexts of Romantic poetry. In the "nature poetry" of Wordsworth, for example , the ultimate reference of words such as perception and eye is usually read in terms of a model of physiological experience —even when the claims made about such experience are said to differ radically from the claims of the empiricists. Thus when Wordsworth is said to make creative thought the basis of perception, in opposition to certain empirical doctrines, the termperception is still read in both cases on the basis of its reference to a physiological experience.5 Regardless of the differences said to exist between what the texts say about experience, the general notion of "experience" as an interpretive framework remains within the context of a literal and generalized reading of empirical philosophy. A more careful consideration of the actual complexities of these philosophical texts raisesserious questions about...