ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will compare the gendered epistemology of John Locke and Margaret Fell as representatives of a choice between life and death in early modernity. Locke’s epistemology, based on ideals of putative neutrality and objectivity and disturbed by ‘enthusiasts’, became the model of knowledge in modernity. I show, however, that it is premised on death. Not only does it take objects (rendered lifeless by the removal of God from the world) as a paradigm for knowledge, but it also renders the process of knowledge itself as based on calculation rather than sympathy. I also show that in the writings of ‘enthusiasts’, in particular the Quaker Margaret Fell, a life-giving and lifeaffirming knowledge was affirmed. Unfortunately, this was heavily repressed by Locke and his fellows both in terms of gender and in terms of its (related) understanding of the divine, so that modernity was structured upon a gesture of death. My primary aim in this chapter, however, is not just diagnostic. Rather,
I wish to help effect a shift in western consciousness and practice, disrupting the symbolic of death and beginning to open out a new imaginary in which knowledge and reality are otherwise constituted. I propose to start the process by reconsidering the deathly configuration of Lockean epistemology, in particular by asking deconstructive questions: who does it leave out? What does it repress? It is noteworthy that Locke, usually urbane and unruffled, was, as I described earlier, completely discomposed by those he called ‘enthusiasts’, against whom he launched the sort of poorly reasoned diatribe that he would not have countenanced for one minute in any other context. ‘Enthusiasts’ were the only group capable of generating for Locke even more anxiety than ‘superstitious nurses’ or ‘the authority of old women’ (whom he also greatly disliked) (Locke 1693 [1989]: I.3.22), and when the two groups were conjoined, as they were in the authoritative old Quaker woman Margaret Fell, he became, by his own standards, quite irrational. Now, I suggest that anyone who could so unsettle Locke’s well-oiled ‘punctual self’, as Charles Taylor has aptly described him (Taylor 1989: 159), deserves our respectful attention! Locke won, of course: he was in a position of power, such that he and those like him could define what should count as a
respectable rhetorical space (Code 1995: 7) and banish ‘enthusiasts’ as Others. I suggest, however, that these Others, silenced in western philosophy’s account of its own knowing, not only destabilize its structures but also open the way for a different approach to epistemology in which gender, particularity and flourishing can be taken seriously. Moreover, since the Lockean programme effectively established the secular-
ism of epistemology, a reconsideration of that programme also reintroduces the question of religion. It is my belief that the secularism of the Lockean project is as patriarchal and necrophilic1 as the religion it replaced; moreover that in this construction of secularism religion itself was also fundamentally altered so that in modernity the forms of secularism and religion are reciprocally constituted. They deserve each other as surely as an ill-assorted couple in a relationship of co-dependence. Now, I have no wish to reinstate western Christendom in a business-as-usual approach, even if that were possible: it is far too deeply mired in death-dealing over many centuries. However I do want to argue that in this respect secularism is no better. Feminists who have been quick to reject the former have too often assumed the latter as the taken-forgranted alternative. I suggest that this is too easy; that in fact secularism (here in terms of Locke’s epistemology) re-inscribes many of the worst aspects of traditional Christendom. By probing it, therefore, in the light of its repressed Other(s) we find that we are also probing issues of the construction of religion in modernity; and by imagining an alternative epistemology centred on life rather than death we are engaging in a radical shift of the symbolic which moves us beyond secularism and religion. Or so I shall try to show.
