Authority Figures. Torrey Shanks

from rhetoric, experience from reason, and matter from language.³⁷ On the contrary, Locke’s repetitions and discontinuities signal a question of style—that is to say, of rhetoric—that too often goes unasked, most of all with regard to his political writings. To engage rather than partition out, or make exception of, these repetitions and discontinuities requires that we inquire anew into the relationship of philosophy to rhetoric in Locke’s thought. Locke’s reputation as a theorist of a masterful rationality and abstract individualism stands uneasily alongside the style of his texts. It is this uneasiness that invites my inquiry.

      To consider the role of rhetoric in Locke’s work is to challenge some of our most familiar images of the thinker, not least in his capacity as political theorist. Where a rhetorical stance suggests a writer engaged with particular audiences, Locke is traditionally praised as well as castigated for looking beyond the particular polity to abstract states of nature and social compacts. Contextualist readers of Locke have shown the way in which his writings can be understood as interventions in specific political controversies, such as the Exclusion Crisis. They have shown the way in which Locke, even in his most abstract utterances, engages in and contends with particular debates and vocabularies of his time and place, whether acknowledged by the author or not.³⁸ While they are enriching, particularly for their challenge to all-too-familiar depictions of Locke as a precociously secular, liberal, individualist thinker, such accounts deemphasize the plural and disruptive uses of language that rhetoric enables. It is worth noting, however, that historically inflected interpretations of Locke reveal him to have been deeply engaged with matters of the pulpit and the political stage. From his early education and academic appointment as a lecturer in rhetoric to his later political and religious concerns, Locke was immersed in contexts in which rhetoric was of supreme importance.³⁹ Why then do we not consider more seriously and more often the role of rhetoric in Locke’s political theory?

      Situating Political Critique

      Locke’s famous claim in the Essay that all knowledge comes from experience places him as a founding figure in the empiricist tradition, in which experience operates as a firm foundation for rational thought that is external to human cognition, concepts, and normative frameworks. Caught up with such a “myth of the given,” Locke’s thought has long been criticized for its naive faith in unmediated sense perception and the way it obscures the need for normative concepts and language to make experience meaningful. This is not the only way to understand Lockean experience, however. Theorists and historians of literature and rhetoric as well as of science have greatly expanded our understanding of the relation of rhetoric to experience in the early modern period. In ways that both challenge and extend de Man’s insights, they show that despite well-known attacks on rhetoric, proponents of the New Science developed a new relation to rhetoric rather than fully abandoning it. The valuing of experience itself is shared by both the rhetorical tradition and the natural philosophy that interested Locke, troubling their opposition. To be sure, the concept of experience underwent significant transformation in this period, but it can also be seen as common, if contested, ground for these two supposedly antithetical traditions. Moreover, Locke’s Essay plays an important role in this period of transformation.

      I approach Locke’s claim to experience through the early modern revival of Epicurean materialism, which emphasizes a chastened practice of probable judgment based on persuasive evidence and testimony rather than on certain foundations. While a number of scholars have noted in Locke’s thought the influence of Pierre Gassendi, the philosopher of early modern Epicureanism, rarely have they considered how this might require us to reconsider the traditional assumption of Locke’s hostility to rhetoric.⁴⁰ More than just an epistemology, Epicurean materialism involved “an entire symbolic cultural mode,” requiring rhetoric no less than epistemology.⁴¹ Rhetoric, in other words, is not unequivocally excluded by the major scientific and philosophical shifts of the seventeenth century. In more subtle forms, it was essential for challenging and asserting authority, both epistemic and social, in new ways. Read through the empiricist tradition and its critics, Lockean experience remains captured within a stark opposition between mind and world, self and others. With Epicurean materialism, it becomes possible to see how the claim to experience acquires meaning and critical force only when it is combined with the inventive capacities of rhetoric. Recognizing the importance of this Epicurean materialist background rightly trains our attention on the importance of experience for Lockean judgment, but without losing sight of the indispensable role of rhetorical invention as a capacity for gaining critical purchase on existing norms and practices.

      It is not my intention to place Locke formally within the rhetorical tradition as a primary intellectual influence. Rather, with this expanded understanding of the importance of rhetoric to philosophy and to critique, we will be well positioned to consider in new ways Locke’s nuanced and conflicted relationship to rhetoric and its significance for his theory and practice of critique. To be sure, Locke criticizes eloquent speech. Looking beyond these charges of “mere” persuasion, however, opens up a variety of modes in which rhetoric can sustain theoretical and political argument: as figure and trope, satire and parody, exemplar and fable, and most of all, ingenious, inventive activity. Being attuned to the creative and theoretical contributions of these rhetorical gestures will generate new possibilities concerning the rhetorical and critical significance of particular figures of femininity and foreignness, recurring in Locke’s writings, that Locke’s admirers too often ignore and critics view solely as an impediment. At the center of those critical engagements with authority, we find Locke’s figures and tropes—his exemplary mothers, fathers, cannibals, and Indians—productive of new political meaning and possibilities out of particular images. The place of such imaginative language and unexpected stylizing within Locke’s theoretical writing will open up onto the role of inventive activity in giving meaning and force to his critique of philosophical and political authority.

      In drawing attention to the importance of invention in Locke’s philosophical and political writings, I invoke the word, invention, for its capacity to bridge the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political realms in a manner appropriate to his wide-ranging modes of inquiry. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this word in rhetorical terms as indicating the finding or discovering of arguments and topics. In scientific terms, it refers, as is common today, to the creation of a new instrument or idea. In literature, music, and poetry, and even with regard to political institutions, invention can be used to speak of a fabrication or contrivance, that is, of the creative work of humans. The wide scope of invention bridges the realms of fiction and fact, aesthetic and rational, creation and discovery. It includes creation ex nihilo as well as the language of finding, which may refer to that lodged in the memory or hidden within nature. To speak of inventive activity is not necessarily to depart from reality, either into fantasy or to the Archimedean point. Nor is it necessarily to work reproductively with materials already given, whether natural, social, or human. Invention encompasses the distinctive human capacity to work creatively from a position situated in natural, social, historical, linguistic, and political contexts. That may involve radical creativity as well as simple recollection, or some combination of the two. It is precisely this resistance to the dichotomies of rationalist philosophy that enables us to envision our social and political practices in new ways, that is, to launch and sustain situated political critique.

      As Grassi reminds us, for Cicero, such inventive activity was the means by which humans transformed the given world into a meaningful realm, a distinctive mode of work always situated within social and political relations.⁴² The rhetorical tradition thus recalls us to the originary role of inventive labor in making and transforming the world from within its particular shared practices and traditions, without necessarily reproducing them. Broadly speaking, Locke shares this Ciceronian interest in human labor enacted upon nature as an originary source for politics.⁴³ As we will see, for Locke, human workmanship extends also to the generation of words and ideas from experience. It is in Locke’s emphasis on human activity and judgment that we will discover the fundamental role of rhetoric. To identify such human activity with labor is not to exclude the role of invention. Rather, it is to recognize the productive and creative role of invention in the indispensable work of rhetoric.

      Using Epicurean materialism as a vantage point on Locke’s thought, I offer a close examination of