Enlightening the Enlightenment: Extending Three Texts through E-Exploration

The larger portion of our project, trying to transcribe the data we collected into meaningful results, had us going through some pretty odd leaps in logic—especially when it concerned mapping longterm results of the texts and authors. Amanda keyed on some pretty sharp ideas about how Ngrams showed the texts moving through the actual Enlightenment, noting the shifts of each after their original publication and how most, especially Hume’s Human Understanding, took dramatic falls very shortly after publication. These shifts showed how long it took for the texts to exert any kind of influence.

My early assumptions about the potency of these works were rooted in how theologists were approaching them—this came from Campbell more so than the others, obviously—and based on our class conversations, I feel I was right in viewing them through this lens, especially when charting the popularity of Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric through the Second Great Awakening. I would be curious to see, if there were some way we could focus the results more through Ngrams, how these mentions were tied to Christian texts and how they were used in connection to rhetoric.

Seeing “language” move through these tools was especially relevant in connecting the texts to the task and made the goals of the assignment a lot more obvious; we’re exploring the language of the texts in systems that only focus on specific words with little reliance on the context of their appearance. As Campbell notes, “use is the sole mistress of language” (900). I wonder, then, what opinion would he have of this kind of quantifiable exploration of his work? The logical appeal would fit in with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but I think Campbell, with his focus on the oratory uses of language and developing connections between speaker and audience, would not approve of this study. Locke, in advancing the concept of words as man-made signals—“words having naturally no signification, the idea which each stands for must be learned and retained” (818)—would be more likely to approve (Locke use of “perception” is at 203 and “language” is at 167!). He would agree that our results aid his argument about the nature of language and might even be inclined to point to the discrepancies of the Ngram terms as even more evidence in his section about the abuse of words and their shifting meanings.

As we read excerpts of Locke and Campbell for the week, the exploration of Hume forced us to interpret ungrounded results more so than the other two texts. Dr. Graban mentioned in class that Hume served as a bridge between the other two, but, at least in how I would attempt to frame the usage of the word, he was also the most focused on philosophy. His Human Understanding, the shortest of the three explored texts, used that word more than the other two combined. Both Campbell and Locke are establishing their own approaches to philosophy, but neither are as inclined to discuss this as much as Hume (Campbell in his title but not his text). How must Hume see himself, then? Is he freer with this term because of Locke’s lack of use of it, or does he want to put more emphasis on the study of thought than either of the other two (it is a treatise on Human Understanding, after all, but then so is Locke’s)?