system that makes sense of this task; Locke’s “empty cabinet” makes it possible to think of mental activity as a pattern for natural philosophical practice. The link between practice and concept is in this regard quite explicit; stocking the mind is like stocking the cabinet, mental processes leaning on a distinct set of habits, which will turn out to be elaborated in haptic engagements with the world.
A strange habit has sprung up in our reading of Locke. We have learned to read him as an entry in a history of ideas, when his prose, especially when he touches nearest on the nature of the mind’s ideas themselves, embeds itself continually in a history of practice. Locke’s own remarks lead back toward embodiment, especially in spaces like his library; the pressure even of this passage is not toward abstraction, though this is the process it describes, but rather toward a set of learned movements. Locke insists that the acquisition of ideas, and even the development of reason, recalls and is formally equivalent to the material processes of sorting books in a library. Jules Law, elaborating Richard Rorty’s claims about the rhetoricality of metaphor (metaphor as one world-making choice among others) argues that the brilliance of Locke’s achievement is precisely the ambiguity of his figures; Locke, Law argues, deliberately leaves his metaphors unpacked.7 But Locke only appears to leave his metaphors unpacked while we confine ourselves to conceptual source domains; that is, his metaphors are only unpacked if we think that they refer us to an imagined set of relations. Locke’s own prose all along points us toward practical, embodied engagement with objects in space. This particular image works because the cabinet provides the working space where a relationship between the curator and a stable system of storage may become duplicated as a model for an internal relationship between the mind and its objects. Even while ideas rise from objects, Locke’s prose returns us to particulars. If you want to unpack his metaphors, you will have to unpack his library.
So, does Locke represent the genesis of the empiricist dualism, as it is commonly argued, or a more profound embeddedness in the materials of thinking, as his own language insists? The paradox, felt even here, is that Locke’s figure of the mind as collection develops a distinction between the mind and its materials, even while itself resting on a complex set of entanglements with the environment through which that mind moves.8 It is one thing to claim that the objects of the world are ontologically unlike but systemically identical to the objects of the mind. This is how Locke is read, as advancing a theory of mind distinct from, rather than “abstracted” from, or even “much the same” as, the daily practices upon which Locke’s thinking continually leans. Locke advances, in this sense, philosophy as the mirror of nature, reproducing nature while nevertheless fundamentally unlike it. It is something else altogether to create this systematic difference by tinkering with physical models. This would be to install an internal division in the mind that bottoms out upon an intimately experienced and always evolving relationship between a curator and his things.9 These often-remarked internal distinctions, differently articulated through abstract slashes like res cogitans/res extensa, soul/body, mind/brain, are established through shifting alliances between psychological theories and habits of work. Indeed, in his case, Locke builds this strange division with constant reference to curating a cabinet. And this is the beginning of a kind of entanglement.
Locke bases his model of an autonomous mind on a dialectical interchange between models and theories, cabinets and minds, collections and concepts.10 “Man’s power,” as Locke sums up, and his “ways of operation, [are] much the same in the material and intellectual world.”11 Locke’s name therefore has come to stand for a concept of mind that would emerge as one of the chief legacies of Enlightenment empiricism, despite the fact that a return to his own habits tends to paint a much more complicated picture.12 Undoubtedly, Locke’s argument and its legacy helped introduce a warpage into mainstream ways of viewing the world. This is the system of the understanding as an observer among its objects, the mind consisting of, on the one hand, a set of faculties like reason and judgment, and, on the other, the ideal objects with which it works. And it establishes this through a complex web of metaphors, each of which leans on the memory of haptic practice. But our readings of Locke in general expect us to perform a more complicated transformative trick: at once to remember what it feels like to stock a cabinet with its objects, and to accept an etiology of reason which, in the end, will insist that it has no place for feeling. Take, for instance, Paul de Man’s influential reading of the Essay. “When Locke,” de Man convincingly argues, “develops his own theory of words and language, what he constructs turns out to be in fact a theory of tropes.”13 This seems exactly right. Locke’s curatorial mind is not only modeled on the labors of a collector in his cabinet; it also works, fundamentally, by modeling ideas on patterns observed in the stuff of experience, de Man’s “theory of tropes.”14 “Of course,” de Man continues, “he would be the last man in the world to realize and to acknowledge this. One has to read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statements.” We are asked, therefore, to accept Locke as a foundational figure in the modern mobilization of metaphor, while we are encouraged to overlook the (metaphorical) rudiments on which his most conceptual metaphors are built. We are encouraged to treat him as a theorist of pure reason, when all his remarks remind us of thinking as a practice. Even while Locke reminds us of the embeddedness of thought in the stuff of the senses, we are asked to forget.
The usual treatment of the history of the empiricist project, de Man’s remarks notwithstanding, is to note its general hostility to metaphor, especially when metaphor is imagined as a mere rhetorical choice among others.15 In this sense, metaphor is the stuff of poetry and stagecraft, what, in the conventional formulation offered by Thomas Tyers, “takes the hearer and reader by storm,” convincing “our passions … before our reason, which is too often made a dupe of.”16 But increasingly, recent work has drawn our attention to the ways in which thinkers were sensitive to metaphor as an important tool for organizing systems of ideas.17 This insight is in fact developed by Locke, though he avoids the word “metaphor” itself. “It may,” he remarks,
lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made us of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquility, &c. are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking.18
The double consciousness of Locke’s treatment of metaphor is on full display here. On the one hand, Locke goes out of his way in this passage to avoid even the hint of a rhetorical flourish—while, on the other hand, he expects us continually to hear the origins of words as figures for sensible simples. It is not merely that sensible ideas are made twice “to stand,” or that ideas “rise” from the senses; these are of course things less proper to ideas than to the person having them, but this is merely the beginning of the ways in which ideas are, Locke insists, traceable to haptic or somatic dimensions of experience. Rather, he suspects that his whole vocabulary, and the conceptual field in which he thinks, might “depend” upon, that is, “hang from,” ideas first produced by the senses. “Apprehend” means “grasp,” “adhere” means “stick to”; “instill” means “put in by drops”; “disgust” means “averse taste”; and so on. And precisely here is the moment I mentioned before—where language more appropriate to Paradise Lost turns up in the Essay: “Spirit,” Locke continues, means “breath”; “angel” means “messenger.” Words penned in Locke’s cabinet would not be out of place in Milton’s bed.
Philosophical analysis in this account therefore begins to look like metaphor analysis, as metaphor emerges as the basic generative condition of intellectual life in the first place.19 While Locke has gone out of his way to avoid the word, what he is describing is the work of metaphor embedded in the intellect. Indeed, he offers us a definition without the proper name,
