Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger

by Karen S. Feldman

Overview

In a provactive work that brings new tools to the history of philosophy, Karen S. Feldman offers an elegant account of how philosophical language appears to produce the very thing it claims to describe. She demonstrates that conscience can only be described and understood through tropes and figures of langugae. If description in literal terms is impossible, as Binding Words convincingly argues, perhaps there is no such thing. But if the word "conscience" has no tangible referent, then how can conscience be constructed as binding? Does our conscience move us to do things, or is this yet another figure of speech?

Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and Heidegger's Being and Time dramatize conscience's relation to language and knowledge, morality and duty, and ontology. Feldman investigates how, within these works, conscience is described as binding upon us while at the same time asking how texts themselves may be read as binding. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810122819
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	07/21/2006
Series:	Topics In Historical Philosophy
Edition description:	1
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Karen S. Feldman is a lecturer in the departments of rhetoric and German at the University of California, Berkeley.

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BINDING WORDS
Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger

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By Karen S. Feldman
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2006
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-2281-9

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Chapter One Hobbes's Leviathan: Conscience and the Concealments of Metaphor

In the course of condemning metaphor and figurative language in Leviathan, Hobbes offers the example of the word "conscience" to illustrate the dangers of metaphor. According to Hobbes, "conscience" was originally the name for public, shared knowledge, but Hobbes narrates a history in which a metaphoric characterization of conscience as private, individual knowledge came to supplant the earlier meaning. Hobbes suggests that this metaphoric shift in effect instituted a new sphere of private knowledge, a sphere threatening to the security of the commonwealth and the binding principle of public authority upon which it is based. Insofar as the production of private conscience is said to have been accomplished by a metaphor, trope and rhetoric are implicated by Hobbes in the performative production of private, individualized knowledge and its political implications. Of course, the vocabulary of performative production is anachronistic to seventeenth-century England. Nonetheless the explanations in Leviathan of how private conscience came into being and of how metaphor corrupts the order of names indicate that metaphor's danger derives from what we might characterize as a range of performative effects, effects not only upon the representation of the public/private distinction but also upon the actual existence of the public and private realms. Error and deception first became possible in the public sphere, according to Hobbes, when knowledge was disengaged from the guarantee of witnesses. Hence Hobbes's arguments in Leviathan in favor of the preservation of proper meaning and against metaphor and figurative language correspond to an anxiety regarding both the absence of the binding power of witnesses on the validity of knowledge and the incipient power of privacy in a commonwealth based on obedience to sovereign authority.

Performativity and what I have called "bindingness" are at issue in Hobbes's Leviathan in several respects apart from the question of conscience. They are, most famously, involved in his treatment of the binding character of promises, of declarations, and of words in general-in particular with respect to the pledge of loyalty to the sovereign upon which the commonwealth is based and also with respect to the declarations of law by the sovereign. In addition Hobbes's own text has been characterized in terms of performativity. Samuel Mintz, for instance, argues that in his construction of the Leviathan metaphor Hobbes imitates God's performative. Tracy Strong suggests that Leviathan can be read not only as a text about politics but also as a political act, namely, as the grounding or inauguration of a scripture that serves for politics in the same way that holy scripture serves for religion. In this reading, sovereignty is said to be established by the text, by means of the representation that the text carries out or performs. Hobbes's description in Leviathan of the metaphoric positing of private conscience is thus one among many points where the text demonstrates a concern for the binding force of language and texts upon politics.

While in comparison with religion and sovereignty conscience is not a topic of terribly heated debate in Hobbes research, nevertheless conscience in Leviathan, which Hobbes uses to illustrate the dangers of metaphor, is no incidental example with regard to Hobbes's concerns. I will show in this chapter that although Hobbes's discussion of conscience and metaphor is not a lengthy one, conscience may be seen to be the most dangerous metaphor for both Hobbes's nominalism and his political philosophy as a whole, for it is precisely the metaphoric shift in our understanding of conscience that, in Hobbes's account, corrupts knowledge into opinion, making error and deception possible. The metaphoric redefinition of conscience instantiates both the danger that metaphor poses to Hobbes's nominalist model of truth as the order of names and the danger that privacy poses to the stability of the commonwealth. The details of Hobbes's story of the corruption of knowledge and truth by metaphor, however, indicate that they are constitutively vulnerable to the corruption that Hobbes attributes to punctual instances of metaphor.

Hobbes's Condemnations of Metaphor

The seductive ornamentality of rhetorical language, its inconstancy and ambiguity, its capacity to incite the passions and to deceive-these elements are central to Hobbes's well-known concerns regarding what he calls "abuses" of speech, the safeguarding of truth and the security of the commonwealth. In Leviathan Hobbes repeatedly censures metaphor as deceptive; he considers tropes and figurative language to be abuses of speech, and he excludes metaphors from the proper language of "demonstration, counsel and all rigorous search of truth.... [Metaphors] openly profess deceit; to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifest folly" (59). Metaphor poses a threat to the stability of the commonwealth in part because it is a device of eloquence, which by Hobbes's definition appeals to the passions:

Neither endeavour [speakers in an assembly] so much to fit their speech to the nature of the things they speak of, as to the passions of their minds to whom they speak; whence it happens, that opinions are delivered not by right reason, but by a certain violence of mind. Nor is this fault in the man, but in the nature itself of eloquence, whose end, as all the masters of rhetoric teach us, is not truth (except by chance), but victory; and whose property is not to inform, but to allure.

In this passage, eloquence is the instrument of passion, violence of mind, and victory rather than of appropriateness, reason, and truth. Eloquence seduces and allures, it does not inform. Thus Hobbes argues that a counselor should avoid "all metaphorical speeches, tending to the stirring up of passion" (246). Likewise Hobbes writes with respect to the effects of eloquence in governmental assemblies:

In an assembly of many, there cannot choose but be some whose interests are contrary to that of the public; and these their interests make passionate, and passion eloquent, and eloquence draws others into the same advice. For the passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand; in an assembly are like many brands, that inflame one another, especially when they blow one another with orations, to the setting of the Commonwealth on fire, under pretense of counselling it. (248)

With respect to assemblies and thus to political matters, the contagion of passion-itself described eloquently in this passage-is the danger of eloquence, for metaphor and eloquence are both inspired by passion and inspiring of passion. As containing the potential to inflame people's passions against the good of the commonwealth, the rule of the passions and eloquence-and hence metaphor, their vehicle-clearly threatens the commonwealth and the pledge to the sovereign, which should instead be safeguarded by reason, truth, and appropriate language.

Hobbes's condemnation of metaphor and other devices of eloquence may appear to be incongruous with his own eloquent and rhetorical style in Leviathan. Victoria Kahn argues, however, for the performance-like character of Leviathan, demonstrating that Leviathan rhetorically and strategically inscenates the rejection of figures and rhetoric:

The Leviathan acts out a rhetoric of logical invention in two ways. First of all, it presents us with a logical argument that, Hobbes tells us, is in itself persuasive, and thus aims to be a substitute for and to foreclose all further rhetorical debate. But once rhetorical debate has been logically foreclosed, the structure and techniques of rhetorical debate are reintroduced in what Hobbes hopes to have mapped out as the realm of logic.

Kahn's reading is a subtle elaboration of the rhetorical and logical sophistication of Hobbes's rejection of rhetoric. It offers an answer to accusations of simple performative contradiction on the part of Hobbes when he condemns metaphor and eloquence within a highly rhetorical text. In a similar vein James Martel argues that Hobbes's highly rhetorical style in Leviathan belongs to the strategy of the text, insofar as the text's rhetorical flourishes highlight the problematic nature of the authority behind the very text that appears explicitly to condemn such flourish.

Hobbes does not, however, univocally condemn eloquence-quite the contrary. For instance, he writes that "reason, and eloquence, though not perhaps in the natural sciences, yet, in the moral, may stand very well together. For wheresoever there is place for adorning and preferring of error, there is much more place for adorning and preferring of truth, if they have it to adorn" (702). What is more, Hobbes's condemnations in Leviathan are inconsistent with his less negative assessment of metaphor in other texts. For instance, whereas in Leviathan Hobbes's explication of the importance of using words in their proper sense is combined with an invective against metaphor, in De Corpore the discussion of metaphor is less vehement:

Names are usually distinguished into univocal and equivocal.... [E]quivocal [are] those which mean sometimes one thing and sometimes another.... Also every metaphor is by profession equivocal. But this distinction belongs not so much to names, as to those that use names, for some use them properly and accurately for the finding out of truth; others draw them from their proper sense, for ornament or deceit.

In this context, the use of metaphors for purposes other than the finding out of truth is condemned, but the equivocality of metaphor itself is not. Hobbes offers a positive evaluation of the capacity to make the comparisons essential to metaphor and of the freshness and novelty of new expressions in his "Answer to Sir William Davenant." Here what seems to worry Hobbes more than the use of metaphor and eloquence to inflame the passions is the possibility that those passions may attach to errors of thought and provoke insurgency. Hobbes divides eloquence into two parts, one part of which is devoted to clarity and elegance and thus to logic, the presentation of truth. The other part of eloquence serves the passions:

Now eloquence is twofold. The one is an elegant and clear expression of the conceptions of the mind; and riseth partly from the contemplation of the things themselves, partly from an understanding of words taken in their own proper and definite signification. The other is a commotion of the passions of the mind, such as are hope, fear, anger, pity; and derives from a metaphorical use of words fitted to the passions.

Metaphor is here associated with the part of eloquence that persuades by means of stirring the passions and thus with the part of eloquence that is dangerous to the commonwealth. But the passage also shows that Hobbes is not simply an enemy of eloquence, for eloquence also includes the clear and explicative character of speech that derives from proper use. Thus despite Hobbes's specific invectives against eloquence, his condemnation of eloquence is by no means equivocal. Rather, it pertains only to the commotion of passions.

In contrast to what I have shown thus far, even Hobbes's condemnation of eloquence is not univocal. As Ross Rudolph notes, emotions are for Hobbes not primary obstacles to the proper use of reason. In this vein Hobbes writes, "The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them" (114). The problem with metaphor's appeal to the passions is not the passions in themselves. It is rather the ease with which the passions can be manipulated by eloquence: "But that [eloquent speakers] can turn their auditors out of fools into madmen; that they can make things to them who are ill-affected, seem worse, to them who are well-affected, seem evil; that they can enlarge their hopes, lessen their dangers beyond reason." The passions cannot be condemned in themselves, according to Hobbes, because it is the passions that lead to the establishment of the commonwealth and the rise of human beings above the state of nature-specifically "fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them" (116). To this extent, the passions are the condition of the formation of the commonwealth. The passions are also what people have in common, although the objects of passion differ in different people. The sameness of the passions in human beings is also what allows people to read each others' hearts and to have their own hearts read. Thus passion is the condition of the readability and legibility that form the condition of fulfilling Hobbes's exhortation in the introduction to Leviathan to read oneself. Insofar as they are the key to the heart and thus to a metaphorically instituted interior space of legibility, the passions are also connected to the constellation of trope and conscience.

The Abuses of Speech

We have seen that metaphors are dangerous to the commonwealth insofar as they are able to stir people's passions in such a way as to distort their judgment and provoke them to actions contrary to the good of the commonwealth and hence contrary to their own good. Hobbes also implicates metaphor directly and indirectly in a variety of "abuses" of speech. Such corruption of language is not trivial but instead represents a thoroughly political danger, for language is, according to Hobbes, the condition of the existence of society, of the commonwealth, and hence of peace:

The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion, whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace. (18)

Without speech, here defined as names and what connects them, Hobbes claims that there would be no possibility of remembering thoughts nor of communicating them to other people. Without speech, there exists therefore no possibility for the establishment of and subordination to a sovereign authority, and hence no possibility to leave the state of nature. Speech and language are central to the goal of securing a stable commonwealth, in part because the commonwealth and its sovereignty are based on a declaration of a transfer of rights to a sovereign. Hobbes's concern with proper signification and his condemnation of the devices that threaten to corrupt it reflect a concern for the binding power of that declaration.

Within Hobbes's nominalist model of language, metaphors exacerbate the dangers of inconstancy and insignificance in the signification of words, and these corruptions of proper signification endanger the stability of the commonwealth-all this fully apart from the problem of metaphor's influence upon the passions. What Hobbes calls "insignificance" refers to a name that signifies no thing, an "empty name"; Hobbes associates it with the use of metaphor in the context of abstraction. In particular Hobbes worries about "the vain philosophy of Aristotle" that turns ways of speaking into ontological categories which are not sheerly intellectual. He links the danger of abstraction directly to the possibility of disobedience and thereby to potential political upheaval:

But to what purpose, may some man say, is such subtlety in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick. (674)

(Continues...)

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Copyright © 2006 by Northwestern University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On Metaphor, Conscience, and Bindingness

1. Hobbes's Leviathan: Conscience and the Concealments of Metaphor 

2. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: The Performative Successes and Rhetorical Failures of Conscience 

3. Hegel's Being and Time: Not "About" Being

Conclusion: The Frailties of Guarantee

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"A brilliant consideration of the relationship between performativity and conscience, Binding Words is a tour de force, written with admirable lucidity, vitality, imagination, and originality. It is at once rhetorical and philosophical, full of vibrant and unexpected readings." 

—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

From the Publisher