The Determination of Locke, Hume, and Fielding

A common practice of critics of the eighteenth-century English novel from Watt to McKeon is to describe the new literary form in relation to British empiricism. ¹ In this essay, I, too, will engage in this practice, but in a way which challenges: 1) the methods by which these critics usually arrive at an understanding of British empiricism; 2) their general interpretation of this epistemology; and 3) their understanding of how a particular eighteenth-century novel is related to it. The methodological challenge is constituted by the kind of attention I give to a single but crucial word in the empiricists’ vocabulary: “determination.” This is a methodological challenge because, although some scholars trained in literary criticism have begun to confront specific problems of reading the major texts of empiricism, most critics who discuss the novel in relation to them do not. ² And rather than making grand claims about empiricism on the basis of scant considerations of the major texts and of authoritative historians of epistemology such as Heidegger, Rorty, and Foucault, I propose to discredit one particular grand claim about empiricism which is forwarded by these authorities and which is prominent in novel criticism. The claim is that British empiricism defines knowing as the having and judging of representations (that British empiricism is a representational epistemology), and I will discredit it by arguing that besides defining knowing as an act of judgment, the word “determination” in the text of empiricism defines knowing as an act of will such as legislation or stipulation. Finally, on the basis of these challenges to the general methodology and interpretations that underwrite much eighteenth-century novel criticism, I will proceed to discuss Tom Jones in relation to empiricism more properly understood. Observing that “determination” in this novel poses the same problems as it does in the text of British empiricism, I will argue that we must revise our understanding of this novel’s plot, aesthetics, and hermeneutics.

Let us begin with horos, a Greek ancestor of “determination” that sets the conceptual limits within which we will proceed. Horos ( ) in classical Greek is used to mean “limit” or “boundary” and is the stem of the verb horizein ( ), the root of our word “horizon.” This verb is used to mean to “divide or separate from,” as a boundary or border separates two areas of land, or as a line bounds a circle. But the term is also used to mean types of human stipulation: to deify, to banish, to lay down, to ordain, to appoint, to appropriate, to mark out by boundaries. The verb could thus be used in locutions meaning to be a boundary, or ones meaning to lay down, posit, and stipulate a boundary. This verb occurs in Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism as part of one of the standard expressions of the skeptics. The first Latin translators and printers of Sextus translated it as definire, so that the skeptic’s expression, ouden horizo, was rendered nihil definio. This Latin translation would seem to have set up an English translation of horizein as “to define,” but in the first surviving complete English translation of the Outlines, part twelve of Thomas Stanley’s The History of Philosophy (London, 1656–59), this is not the case: horizein is translated as “to determine.” Ouden horizo hence becomes “I determine nothing,” a translation that R. G. Bury kept in his modern Loeb translation of the Outlines. ³

Sextus explains the act which he calls horizein and which we have named “to determine” in the short chapter devoted to the expression “I determine nothing.” “‘To determine,’” Sextus tells us in Bury’s translation,

is not simply to state a thing but to put forward something non-evident combined with assent. For in this sense, no doubt, it will be found that the Sceptic determines nothing, not even the very proposition ‘I determine nothing’; for this is not a dogmatic assumption, that is to say assent to something non-evident, but an expression indicative of our own mental condition. So whenever the Sceptic says ‘I determine nothing,’ what he means is ‘I am now in such a...