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Conclusion: Mourning Experience
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CONCLUSION Mourning Experience How covetous the Mind is to befurnished with all such Ideas . . . may be a little guess'd, by what is observable in Children new-born, who always turn their eyes to that part, from whence the Light comes, lay them how you please. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II.9.7) Thus the Ideas, as well as Children, of our Youth, often die before us: And our Minds represent to us those Tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the Brass and Marble remain, yet the Inscriptions are effaced by time, and the Imagery moulders away. Locke, Essay (II.10.5) Surely one has no choice but to be an empiricist so far as one's theory of linguistic meaning is concerned. W. V. O. Quinc, "Epistemology Naturalized"' The latent project of the present volume has been to open up the possibility of a rethinking of empiricism in order to at- MOURNING EXPERIENCE / I}? tempt to understand anew the critical traditions that are defined in terms of it. In the prevailing understanding of these traditions, which is based on the explicit claims of the texts that constitute their corpus, English empiricism (of which Locke is one of the main writers) is often represented as the less sophisticated origin of self-reflection, which Romantic poetry, on the one hand, and critical philosophy, on the other, reject or overcome . What both of the later traditions respond to, in this view, is a particular notion of origin which determines the Lockean—or the classicalempiricist—understanding of understanding : the idea that we can know our knowledge by tracing it to its origins in the sensory world. This notion of selfunderstanding not only seems to derive thought from the empirical world but makes self-understanding a matter of mere observation, like the chronicling of a natural phenomenon, bound entirely to the laws of physical perception. For later writers such as Kant and Wordsworth, this apparently simple notion of empirical origin will not account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself, to detach itself from the laws of the empirical world. English Romantic poetry and German critical philosophy claim, in different ways, to overcome empirical shortcomings by replacing the observed empirical origin with a kind of lack or absence, a fundamental break with, or detachment from, sensory reality, which is what makes possible the turn of the mind upon itself. Following the individual forms of this claim to transcend empiricism, the present book has first shown how they all involve , explicitly or implicitly, a certain theory of language. Wordsworth can, in this perspective, be viewed as replacing a literalized language of empiricism, in particular the vocabulary of sensation, with a figurative language of "imagination," substituting a "Romantic," figurative narrative for the literal empiricist 's tracing of origins. The power of imaginative selfconsciousness which springs from a lack rests precisely on the power of figurative language to free itself from the constraints of literal, referential meaning, or a meaning grounded in a direct , perceivable link between language and the empirical world. [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:16 GMT) EMPIRICAL TRUTHS AND CRITICAL FICTIONS / 134 In Kant, the philosophical critique of empiricism also, ultimately , rests on the implicit recognition that empirical reference cannot be the basis of conceptual self-understanding. The replacement of a philosophy aimed at knowing—by referring directly to—things in the world, with a philosophy aimed at knowing the limits of knowledge, is made possible by the selfreflecting capacity of "symbolic" language. In this case, reference to the world is subordinated to a kind of self-reference, and the power of thought to turn upon itself isgrounded in the self-representing power of the symbol. The symbol becomes the basis of Kant's entire philosophical system, an elaborate, self-reflecting structure called the "architectonic." In this view of the relation between Locke and the later authors, then, Wordsworth's narrative and Kant's system are indeed linked in the common priority they attribute to self-reference, or tofigure over reference. Read in this context, the scene of mourning , the facing of the dead parent or child at the very origin, could point to a possible dramatization of a referential absence which grounds meaning, something like a nothingness speaking at the heart of language. The process of interpretation opened up by these texts does not end, however, with the texts' conceptual or thematic wish to move beyond empiricism. A closer reading of...