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Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent

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Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent By Adam Sneed A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Marjorie Levinson, Chair Professor Gregg Crane Associate Professor Sean Silver Professor Silke Maria-Weineck Adam Sneed [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9205-1715 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks must be to the University of Michigan for the opportunity and privilege to pursue the life of the mind. I am deeply grateful for the tremendous and constant support provided by faculty and staff of the UM English Department. I am indebted to the Rackham School of Graduate Studies for two timely dissertation fellowships and to the U-M LSA International Institute for the opportunity to pursue archival research in Scotland. I thank the members of my dissertation committee: Sean Silver for providing a constant model of passionate, creative scholarship; Gregg Crane for first dislodging me from a neo-Kantian, Skeptical perspective; Silke Maria-Weineck for cheering on the polemic; and my wonderful chair, Marjorie Levinson, for supporting and encouraging me at every stage of the dissertation process and for bearing with me as the project evolved over time. I would like to thank my dear friends Samuel Heidepriem, Emily Waples, Logan Scherer, Kristin Fraser Geisler, Ryan Hampstead, Joe Chapman, Anthony Losapio, Sarah Mass, Alice Tsay, Lizzy Mathie, and Amrita Dhar for their love and support through the years in Ann Arbor. Special thanks to my dear friends Kathryne Bevilacqua, John Paul Hampstead, and Julia Hansen, who read and commented on drafts in the final stages. I thank Tilottama Rajan and Orrin Wang for assisting with my reading of Godwin’s Caleb Williams and for guiding me through the publication process at Romantic Circles Praxis (thanks also to Jeffrey Moro for his editorial work). Chapter Five benefited greatly from an early workshop with the Eighteenth-Century Studies Group (ECSG), and I am especially indebted to David Porter for the artful, penetrating questions he raised during that meeting about the lasting appeal of neo-Kantian Romanticism. Many thanks to Walter Cohen and my fellow travelers at Marjorie and Walter’s dinner seminar for feedback on my Hume chapter and for injecting fresh critical energy and joy into my final year as a graduate student. I am grateful for more casual conversation and advice along the way with Marc Mazur, Michael Nicholson, Danny Hack, Adela Pinch, Lucy Hartley, Clem Hawkes, Tim Fulford, Julia Carson, Theresa Kelley, Maureen McLane, Noah Heringman, Tim Campbell, Stefan Uhlig, Yasmin Solomonescu, Marshall Brown, Zoe Beenstock, Sean Barry, Taylor Schey, and Devin Griffiths, and many others. I thank ii my mother Debbie, my father Macky, my brother Will and his wife Natalie, my sister Sarah, and all my extended family for their love and support during the dissertation process and, indeed, well before. Above all, I thank my brilliant and loving wife, Anna, who carried me over the finish line. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi Introduction: Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century 1 Johnson’s Kick 1 Carlyle Reading Johnson 4 Carlyle’s Reading of Johnson is Neo-Kantian 6 Introducing Neo-Kantian Romanticism 9 Neo-Kantian Intellectual History as a Hermeneutic Circle 20 Neo-Kantian Intellectual History Misreads Enlightenment Skepticism 27 Summary of the Chapters 34 Chapter One: Thinking Through Neo-Kantian Intellectual History 41 1.1 Neo-Kantian Intellectual History as a Religion 41 1.2 The Great Endeavor: Mid-Twentieth Century Neo-Kantian Romanticism 51 1.3 “Hume is the Special Prophet:” Stephen’s Neo-Kantian Intellectual History 80 1.4 Collapsing Kant’s Triptych: Kant, Reid, and the Epistemologist’s Dilemma 88 Chapter Two: Neo-Kantian Critique Loves a Crisis 98 2.1 Whose Crisis is This? 98 2.2 Johnson’s Kick, Revisited 99 2.3 Two Senses of Irreligious, Revisited 108 2.4 The Real Crisis: Practical Rationality, Constructive Skepticism, and the Problem of Assent 112 2.5 Moral Evidence as the “Province of Rhetoric” 123 2.6 Johnson’s Science 127 Chapter Three: There Was No Radical Hume 138 3.1 Neo-Kantian Romanticism Misreads Hume 138 iv 3.2 Hume Misreading Locke 154 3.3 What Crisis of Analogy? 165 3.4 Commonsense and Critical Analogy in Hume's Dialogues 173 Chapter Four: Making (Common) Sense of Analogy 185 4.1 Bad Analogies: Two Perspectives on Formal Analogy 185 4.2 Weak Analogies in Tristram Shandy 189 4.3 Commonsense and Critical Orientations 193 4.4 Disciplining Playfair’s Analogies: The Persistence of Scientia 199 4.5 Analogy as Presumption: The Lawrence-Abernethy Debate 202 4.6 Rhetoric and Psychology 211 4.7 Common Sense, For and Against Analogy 217 4.8 Analogy as Assent: Associationist Aesthetics 226 Chapter Five: Romantic Analogy Reconsidered 231 5.1 Coleridge’s Dim Analogies 232 5.2 Wordsworth’s Visual Analogies 239 Chapter Six: Disciplines of Doubt: Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams 254 6.1 Staging Risk in Wordsworth’s The Borderers 258 6.2. Victor’s Reasonable Doubt 266 6.3 Caleb’s Unreasonable Doubt 277 6.3.1 Constructive Skepticism and “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” 279 6.3.2 Before Skepticism: Caleb Williams and Unreasonable Doubt 283 Coda: Romantic Doubt 293 Conclusion: Thinking Beyond Neo-Kantian Romanticism 296 Bibliography 300 v ABSTRACT “Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent” revisits the intellectual historical conditions that contributed to the widespread internalization of skepticism as an error-reduction strategy during the Enlightenment. To do so, it abandons a longstanding emphasis the special philosophical tradition of epistemological skepticism associated with the Scottish philosopher David Hume and pursues an alternative intellectual history of Enlightenment skepticism centered on the Anglophone tradition of “constructive skepticism” that informed not only Hume’s skeptical habits but those of other influential Anglophone Enlightenment thinkers more often set in opposition to Hume. “Misreading Skepticism” draws on this tradition of constructive skepticism to generate a much different picture of the character of Enlightenment skepticism than the one extrapolated from radical Humean skepticism: one that is not anxious but assured, not theoretical but pragmatic, not preoccupied with the threat of “radical uncertainty” but resolved to attaining “moral certainty” sufficient to justify belief and action despite irreducible uncertainty. Readings of the philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Dugald Stewart recover the broader Enlightenment project of practical rationality that encouraged the widespread internalization and instrumentalization of constructive skepticism. Readings of eighteenth- century rhetorical and legal treatises trace how this constructive skeptical ethos was disseminated beyond epistemology and embraced within a generalized theory of assent. “Misreading Skepticism” approaches this broader “misreading” in the modern intellectual history of skepticism through the special lens of Romantic literary studies, where scholars have traditionally framed the rise of British Romanticism as a response to a supposed epistemological “crisis” posed by Humean skepticism. “Misreading Skepticism” argues that, to understand the Romantic literary reaction to Enlightenment skepticism, we need to approach the intellectual history of British Romanticism not through Humean skepticism but through constructive skepticism. Readings of Romantic works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and other authors demonstrate how these Romantic writers use literary form to vi interrogate the confident embrace of constructive skepticism within the Enlightenment as a means for managing uncertainty, often by dramatizing or thematizing elements of subjectivity and error that skepticism fails to detect or discipline. Drawing insight from the constructive skeptical tradition as well as Romantic literary critiques of that tradition, “Misreading Skepticism” develops a revisionary account of skepticism that attends to the rhetorical and social dimensions that complicate any epistemological account of skepticism. vii INTRODUCTION Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century Johnson’s Kick After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — "I refute it thus.” -John Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)1 Let me begin with a question about this famous anecdote from Boswell: Is Johnson’s argument skeptical? The answer depends on a more general, perennial question about how to define skepticism, and the anecdote itself recommends the two most common approaches to defining skepticism, though these approaches have conflicting implications for interpreting the kick. From one perspective, if we focus on Berkeley’s idealism, we might define skepticism more narrowly as a special kind of content: either a special set of arguments organized around
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