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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 .1 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 19 1 which the commonwealth is based and also with respect to the declarations of law by the sovereign.2 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.3 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.4 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,5 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...

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