JOHN LOCKE VS SWIFT
One way of looking at these crises of interpretation in Gulliver's Travels is to
consider them alongside the empirical philosophy of John Locke, of which Swift
was critical. In his 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' (1690), Locke
attempted to investigate the formulation and workings of systems of knowledge. In
broad terms, Locke's essay attacks the idea of imagination as the key to knowledge,
in favour of recognising that the mind acquires knowledge through direct
experience, empirically:
'…Men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge
they have, without the help of any innate impressions, and may arrive at certainty
without any such original notions or principles'.
At the core of Locke's philosophy is the argument in which Locke describes the
mind at birth as a tabula rasa – a wax tablet as yet unmarked by the impressions that
experience will write on it. Experience is something that the mind cannot refuse,
and at a basic level, the mind is marked by the initial sensation of the object
perceived. From those markings, we use sense and reason to build up a system of
knowledge. What we know then, is derived from connections made between
perceived experiences – not from any innate wisdom or understanding.
Locke's theory provoked a debate about what was real. His idea of the materialism
of objects external to the body seemed opposed to any sense of inner reality. In
Locke's philosophy of knowledge, reason is elevated above spiritual revelation. For
a staunch Anglican like Swift, it seemed to offer a defence or intellectual basis for
deism, or atheism. Although Locke's Essay was initially intended to provide an
investigation of the nature of religious belief, many Anglicans thought Locke was
creating an epistemology that cut God out of the equation.
We could read Gulliver's troubles in understanding what he sees as a parody of
Locke’s philosophy of human understanding. Gulliver looks to the material world
around him to gain a sense of knowledge. There is a great deal of emphasis on what
he sees, and a real striving to attain some kind of objectivity, to record his
impressions accurately. However, his impressions and his sensory apprehension of
those worlds do not help him to gain knowledge. He looks at the trees around him
to get a sense of scale, but they do not help. One of the central parts of Lockeian
philosophy was that knowledge was not purely derived from sense data, but that
man used reason to work out the connections between the ideas received through
experience.
However, although Gulliver tries to measure one object against another to establish
a correct perspective, he remains unable to establish a secure view of the world. In
a broader sense, Gulliver should be able to calibrate moral behaviour by using his
external experiences of the people that he meets on his travels as a body of
knowledge from which he can derive a sense of an ideal society. In terms of
Lockean empiricism, it is significant that Gulliver has no inbuilt, preformed sense
of spiritual or inner revelation. All he has is what he sees, and he uses that to define
his own moral philosophy.
But the philosophy he arrives at by the end of the book is one which is profoundly
misanthropic and patently ridiculous: when he returns home after his voyage to the
