Abstract

Critics generally concur that the Enlightenment's goal was a demythologized, "scientific" world-view, expressed in a transparent, nonfigural prose. In the pages that follow, I argue that the Enlightenment was animated by myths of its own: the demythologizing of language and the world, if desired, was never achieved. Even in the writings of David Hume, always taken to be the essence of an enlightened rationalism, transparency is obstructed by a fundamentally figural style and a patently fabulous science of human nature. Hume shares with his contemporaries a mythic vision of the polis or classical republic as a cohesive masculine community of shared assumptions and beliefs. The polis myth was often evoked metonymically, in a scene of ancient "eloquence": the term refers both to the ancient orator's ability to move the just passions of a civic assembly, and to the sublime style of his speech, marked by such vivid figures of thought as a apostrophe and prosopopoeia. Hume's philosophy of mind, which gives a central role to the force of perception, is styled as an allegory of eloquence. Perceptions that "strike" the mind in the Treatise do so with the same "force" and "vivacity" that classical and neoclassical rhetoricians attribute to Demosthenes. Accordingly, the Treatise establishes a myth of community in which our common perceptions perform the ancient orator's task of uniting us. This myth is similarly inscribed in Hume's Natural History of Religion. ;Yet nostalgia for ancient eloquence, however far-reaching it may have been, did not engross Hume, or anyone else of his era. Indeed, while lamenting the absence of eloquence from Hanoverian Britain, Hume's essay "Of Eloquence" paradoxically advances arguments against its revival. The essay effectively displays the "modern" or progressive discourses that vied with a retrospective myth of eloquence. Macpherson's Ossianic forgeries, in turn, reconcile the contradictory discourses--and acute perplexities--exemplified in "Of Eloquence": they satisfy both the age's nostalgia for sublime eloquence and for the ideal polis, and its modern taste for polite manners and private life