The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards.

Martin, Edwin

This book is "an attempt to trace the consequences for literary theory of taking a classical empiricist stance." It moves from Locke and Berkeley, through Burke and Hazlitt, to Ruskin, "gradually away from 'philosophy' and toward 'literary' and 'art' criticism" (p. ix). The book contains an introductory chapter, chapters on each of these five figures, an epilogue on Richards, and an appendix which attempts to distinguish empiricism from other doctrines and movements.

The author takes empiricism to be "accused of privileging the visual over the discursive, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal, and totalizing explanations over dialectical processes." It is, he says, his "goal to unsettle these binary oppositions and to argue that at the heart of empiricism lies a sophisticated, dynamic, and dialectical account of the relationship between language and visual perceptions that [is] fruitful for literary study" (p. x).

Historical British empiricism is sometimes taken to be characterized by central tenets denying (1) the existence of innate human knowledge and (2) the existence of a human faculty of pure intellection (a capacity to contemplate nonsensory ideas). Law, on the other hand, is more concerned with empiricism as a thesis or attitude about connections between perception and language - between the pictorial and the literary - for therein lies a possible connection between epistemology and criticism. What links Locke and Berkeley to Burke, Hazlitt, and Ruskin is, first, "the tendency to describe both the world of appearances and the mechanisms of the mind in terms of a common set of figures: reflection, surface, and depth"; and, second, "the constant analogizing of optical sensations and verbal language in terms of one another" (p. 22).

This concern fairly naturally leads Law to begin in the introductory chapter with consideration of empiricist discussion of "Molyneux's question" - what a newly-sighted adult would see and would report to be seeing. This question neatly brings into relief the "inextricable relationship" between seeing and talking. Following the claimed relationships from the seventeenth to the twentieth century occupies most of the book. Along the way emphasis is given to the discursive, rhetorical, temporal, and dialectical aspects of the story.

The book is thus intended as a history of empiricist, epistemologically influenced criticism. It is not a wholly continuous history, though. On the philosophical side, one might wonder about the omission of Reid, Hume, and Mill, all of whom count as important British empiricists of the period who had views about perception and language. Presumably Mill is excluded because, although he "is by many accounts the last true empiricist in the mainstream philosophical tradition," his interests lie outside of those that "link" the thinkers here treated (p. 246). Still, since Mill was contemporaneous with Ruskin, one might have expected there to be some interesting relationship here. Especially curious is the slight attention given to Hume. Hume is generally counted as a giant among empiricists, with well-developed views on perception and language in the tradition of Locke and Berkeley. And, much more than either Locke or Berkeley, Hume is concerned with esthetics, criticism, and questions of taste.

Edwin Martin, North Carolina State University.