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

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 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.