Authority Figures. Torrey Shanks

but not limited to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He speaks of rhetoric at times in a pejorative manner, casting it in feminine form, “the fair Sex” (3.10.34), and emphasizing its ornamental role of language: “Nor do I deny, that those Words, and the like, are to have their place in the common use of Languages, that have made them currant. It looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by: and Philosophy, it self, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it appears in publick, must have so much Complacency, as to be cloathed in the ordinary Fashion and Language of the Country, so far as it can consist with Truth and Perspicuity” (2.21.20). He positions judgment as “a way of proceeding quite contrary to Metaphor and Allusion, wherein for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of Wit, which strikes so lively on the Fancy, and therefor so acceptable to all People” (2.11.2). The beauty of such figural language requires “no labour of thought, to examine what Truth or Reason there is in it,” Locke complains, thereby building his reputation as hostile not only to rhetoric but also to aesthetics more generally. In Of the Conduct of the Understanding, written for possible inclusion in the Essay, he recognizes the need for figural language but seems to reserve only a secondary place for it: “Figured and metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more abstruse and unfamiliar ideas which the mind is not yet thoroughly accustomed to; but then they must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have, not to paint to us those which we yet have not. Such borrowed and allusive ideas may follow real and solid truth, to set it off when found, but must by no means be set in its place and taken for it.”¹⁹ In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which sets out a plan for cultivating reason in young gentlemen, he argues that right reasoning “does not consist in talking in mode and figure itself” and seeks to excise from the curriculum the “art and formality of disputing” as well as formal rules of rhetoric.²⁰ In the educational writings, as in philosophy, the call for clarity in speech rings throughout, as does the concern that the persuasive power of language carries the potential to undermine proper modes of conduct of the understanding (STCE, §189). For “[t]he Mind without looking any farther, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the Picture, and the gayety of the Fancy: And it is a kind of an affront to go about to examine it, by the severe Rules of Truth, and good Reason” (2.11.2).

      Representing an extreme case of rhetoric as a challenge to reason is the case of enthusiasts, where the effects are felt in moral and political matters. Enthusiasm, Locke argues, entails the replacement of reason with fancy, or imagination, when authority is granted on the basis of passion rather than evidence. For those moved by such inwardly felt religious passions, according to Locke, “Reason is lost upon them, they are above it: they see the Light infused into their Understandings, and cannot be mistaken; ’tis clear and visible there, like the Light of bright Sunshine, shews it self, and needs no other Proof, but its own Evidence: they feel the Hand of GOD moving them within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel” (4.19.8). What they see and feel, however, is not sensory experience, but metaphor and simile, Locke argues: “[T]hey are sure, because they are sure: and their Perswasions are right, only because they are strong in them. For, when what they say is strip’d of the Metaphor of seeing and feeling, this is all it amounts to: and yet these Similes so impose on them, that they serve them for certainty in themselves, and demonstration to others” (4.19.9). In enthusiasm, rhetorical figure and imagination undermine cautious judgment based on evidence.

      What reason is there to suspect that anything more is needed to explain this apparent break between Locke’s philosophy and rhetoric, in keeping with the tenor of his times? There are clues even in these few passages that something more complicated is going on. First, in rejecting disputation and the formal rules of rhetoric in education, Locke rejects only certain institutionalized practices and objects of the rhetorical tradition while reinforcing the importance of writing and speaking well. Where handbooks of rhetoric fall short, examples of eloquent and effective speech are much more powerful. A favored example for speech and letters is none other than Cicero (STCE, §189). Second, figures such as metaphor and simile maintain at least some useful, if conscribed, role in communicating ideas, even, or rather especially, the ineffable concepts of philosophy. This suggests the possibility that reason alone may not be sufficient in all cases. Finally, when Locke turns a critical eye on rhetoric, his concerns are often rooted in questions of authority and practices of judgment. Establishing authority and making judgments are hardly removed from the traditional terrain of rhetoric. Locke’s concerns about rhetoric are motivated by the very issues that the rhetorical tradition put at the center: questions of authority and judgment.

      There are deeper reasons to question the epic tale of rupture between philosophy, science, and rhetoric in the seventeenth century in general, and in Locke’s work in particular. Large-scale transformations such as these are rarely so sudden or discrete. Rather, rhetoric, philosophy, and science come together in unexpected ways in this creative period of transformation, challenging us to conceive of these relationships in fuller and more nuanced ways. While the phrase “the rhetoric against rhetoric” acknowledges that the castigation of rhetoric does not necessarily signal its exile, the phrase resists the richer and more nuanced meanings afforded by the rhetorical tradition. Interpreters of Hobbes, for example, have closely examined his shifting and complex engagements with rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition to find resources well beyond the negative and instrumental uses highlighted by Garsten and others. As Victoria Kahn shows, Hobbes’s claims against rhetoric must be understood as unfolding within a sophisticated rhetorical engagement between author and reader, in which the reader’s assent is solicited from the outset to an analogy between the self and the text’s presentation of a new political subjectivity. Leviathan’s social contract, in which interpretive as well as political power are granted to the sovereign, is premised on a prior linguistic agreement: a metaphoric contract concerning the mode of reading both self and text. Moreover, it is precisely Hobbes’s concerns with humans in a materialist world, as embodied and imaginative creatures driven by passions, that makes rhetoric dangerous but also indispensable.²¹ This is not to ignore Hobbes’s challenge to authoritative ideas and texts of the rhetorical tradition or his wariness of the individual capacity for judgment. Rather it is a signal that rhetoric was not so easily dispensed with by early modern thinkers, despite their criticisms. This is especially the case for those theorists, like Hobbes as well as Locke, who sought to legitimate and challenge claims to authority in new ways.

      Closer examination of Sprat and the New Scientists also reveals that rhetoric both sustained the claims of the New Science as well as serving as object of attack. As they challenged traditional modes of epistemic credibility, natural scientists needed to garner authority for their new modes of philosophical and scientific claim-making. Early empirical scientists rejected the principle of authority of Aristotelianism and humanism in exchange for their own claims to knowledge based in experience. Brian Vickers shows how the attacks on rhetoric represented by Sprat’s History do not mark such a profound break between a victorious antirhetoric camp against a losing rhetorical tradition or sect.²² Rather, a seemingly generalized hostility to rhetoric can indicate not so much an epistemological commitment as a commonplace of contentious political arguments. The New Scientists “were not against language, or rhetoric, or the imagination. They were against their opponents’ misuse of them—or, perhaps more simply, they were against their opponents.”²³ Making accusations of the abuse of rhetoric in these highly charged political and philosophical debates is not the same as rejecting rhetoric, certainly not in practice, but not even necessarily in principle.

      Language was a deep concern for the New Science and drove linguistic innovation in a number of disparate directions, including in Bacon’s advocacy of analogy and aphorism as well as John Wilkins’s universal language.²⁴ Sprat’s insistence on a plain style, like Locke’s call for order and clarity is not a rejection of rhetoric as such, but a call for one rhetorical style over another.²⁵ The innovations in natural science also led New Scientists to turn to nature as an abundant source for new analogies, spurring on “a free use of rhetoric, both of figures . . . and tropes (especially metaphor).”²⁶ While Sprat cautions against “Rhetorical Flourishes” in Royal Society reports, he writes that the language of the New Science must “represent Truth, cloth’d with Bodies; and to bring Knowledg back again to our very Senses,