Gotta get back in time... (I couldn't NOT make the reference.)
There was a big connection going on among Vico, Locke, and Hume, that of the knowledge that comes from experience.
Vico: "Knowledge of oneself is for everyone the highest encouragement to bring rapidly to a conclusion the study of the entire cycle of learning" (4). Knowing yourself and your capabilities is directly tied to your ability to know more or apply your existing knowledge.
Locke: "For though he that contemplates the operations of his mind cannot but have plain and clear ideas of them, yet unless he turn his thoughts that way and considers them attentively, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations of his mind..." (427). You must know your own mind to know your thoughts and what you think about your own thoughts. Pretty meta.
Hume: This is the shift in my observation, where Hume claims that those who read primary historical texts "wou'd attain but a very confus'd idea of the transactions of that period" (285). Hume's contemporaries needed him because no matter how much they knew themselves and their thoughts, they just weren't enough like Hume that they could contextualize and simply understand the purpose of a past text. Knowing yourself may have been all well and good for Hume, but you need to know more than yourself and your immediate surroundings; you must know what came before you and how to interpret it.
It seems that Hume is bridging the gaps left by Vico and Locke. A person can not be so self-involved, there needs to be a thread from the ether that binds our experience with knowledge. In other words, things have led us to be where we are. Things have occured that make us believe what we believe. Hume felt there is a need for people, like himself, to analyze and interpret history to provide the needle and thread that may sew our experience together. Hume, as Marilyn pointed out, expanded Locke's idea of empiricism: all original knowledge comes from experience.
The more contemporary comp./rhetoric folks take that a step further: we gather knowledge from our experience of trying to gather knowledge (as convoluted as that sounds). Faigley and Flower both explore the process of transcribing thoughts. Fish looks to the self as the subject of study, not the text that the self "experiences."
The connection between experience and knowledge seems to have survived scrutiny but the analysis of that connection has not successfully proven empiricism.
Johanna's discussion with Faigley that revealed that Faigley knew little of Vico was interesting, considering that both are wrestling with the same essential question: Does knowing oneself (be it the mind, the self's experience, or the mind's process) equate to simply knowing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That final thought is a good question. I think however that Hume set a good standard for looking not just to self-understanding but also to the realization that the self has been influenced by outside forces and that understanding those influences may lead to a better understanding of the self and history.
ReplyDelete