Chris Townsend. George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language

Abstract

Occasionally a monograph comes along that so adroitly fills a gap in our knowledge of Romanticism that one’s first reaction is surprise that the gap was not noticed earlier. Chris Townsend’s fine study, George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language, is such a book. Given that Berkeley was widely read by many Romantic writers, it is curious that he does not feature more prominently in scholarship on philosophical Romanticism. Townsend’s thorough and detailed analysis remedies this oversight; furthermore, he suggests that, like Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking ‘refutation’ of immaterialism (which was so wide of its target that it gave birth to a class of logical fallacy, the argumentum ad lapidem), modern criticism has tended to miss the fundamental point of Berkeley’s theories. The book makes a convincing case that in doing so, it has underestimated his importance to a generation of writers. The main contention of this book is that Berkeley’s writings provided the philosophical grounds for many of the experiences we now tend to think of as ‘Romantic’, such as intuited knowledge of the spirit, the self, and God. The peculiar appeal of Berkeley to the Romantics lays in the way he provided a means of critiquing Enlightenment ideas using the very tools of the Enlightenment. It was Berkeley’s empirical commitment to the primacy of sense experience that led him to question Locke’s representational theory of knowledge, and with it the claim that, in order to have meaning, a word had to signify a clear and distinct idea. This part of the book’s thesis leans heavily into its (mostly persuasive) ‘literary’ reading of Berkeley, presenting him as a thinker for whom ideation is linguistic and style integral to experience. Berkeley’s writings are self-consciously ‘poetic’, as Townsend maintains in the first chapter, not merely because of the way in which they reflect upon the role played by language in thinking but also because of the way in which they perform that role. Furthermore, Berkeley’s postulation of a category of inferred knowledge based upon ‘notions’ made possible what Townsend calls ‘empiricism spiritualized’, a world in which the senses intuit divine meaning through the ‘ghostly language’ (8) of nature.