Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine major canonical works written by eighteenth-century writers and philosophers in order to analyze how the epistemology necessary for a revolutionary rethinking of social relations and political structures gives rise to skepticism. I argue that Rene Descartes's epistemology and hence his skepticism, is in a much closer relation to British empiricism than is usually assumed, and that both ground in a new model of mind the justice of the revolutionary overthrow of kings. I try to show that British empirical philosophy, by which I mean any philosophy that posits sense-experience as the basis of knowledge, gives rise to and sustains this revolutionary skepticism. ;Relying on the work of ordinary language philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, I argue that, while epistemological skepticism and melancholia are not the same thing, skepticism as to the possibility of knowing other minds can inspire a melancholic turn away from and insistence upon the impossibility of all social interaction, including speech. With the melancholic turn, skepticism takes on a pathological cast and becomes melancholia proper. I use Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva's analyses of melancholia to show how the philosophical premises of British empirical philosophy give rise to a melancholic picture of how language operates and knowledge is acquired. I then examine various literary efforts to critique empiricism for constructing such a picture and to come to terms with this new mode of heroic action and community service. ;Melancholia is always expressed via a spectacle, because the dis-ease itself depends upon refusing conventional modes of self-expression. I argue that the melancholic refusal of communal modes of expression and subsequent reduction of convention to pure theatricality, in the pejorative sense, informs empirical practice and philosophy, revolutionary politics, and the moral and political programs of eighteenth-century and romantic literature