Locke's 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,' literary history, literary theory

This dissertation is mainly a consideration of figurative language in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The introduction establishes three contexts for this consideration: literary history, studies in the distinction between literature and philosophy, and literary theory. The second chapter is an account of the complexity of Locke's figurative description of mind: descriptions of an impressed, struck, engraved, or imprinted tabula rasa are persistently rejected in favor of terms of containment, ownership, labor, vision, and socio-erotic acquaintance. Because Locke explicates vision in terms of the impact of particles against the eye, however, his ocular language recuperates the scene of impact and impression as a representation of the mind and its activity. This account contests the general principles and several specific claims of major versions of post-Renaissance literary history. The third chapter documents Locke's use of the term "force" to describe language and the mind. It presents the specific conceptual difficulties posed by this usage, and confirms the traditional view that figurative language may pose difficulties for the establishment of coherent epistemological doctrine. The principal observation of the final chapter concerns Locke's description of the substitutions of ideas which are involved in various mental processes and in the formation of various concepts: these substitutions are structured the same as the substitutions of specific words which, in rhetorical tradition, are designated as tropes. This observation is the grounds for a critique of Paul de Man's writing on Locke and Nietzsche. It is also the basis for the conclusions that empiricism is a major precedent for Nietzsche's rhetorical critique of conceptuality, that empiricism is continuous in crucial respects with the rhetorical tradition which it ostensibly rejects, and that a rhetorical critique of conceptuality relies on basic concepts within western philosophical tradition.