Actor, Orator, Person: The Representation of Passion and the Passion of Representation in Hobbes’ Leviathan

Abstract

The essay discusses personhood from the point of view of a critical history of representation and advocacy, focusing on Hobbes’s Leviathan, ch. I, XVI. Before introducing the constitutive concept of agency as based on the possession of one’s own words and deeds, Hobbes refers in the pre-conceptual genealogy of personhood to representation in theatrical and legal contexts. By discussing Hobbes’s chapter as well as representation in poetry (Horace) and rhetoric (Quintilian), the essay suggests reconceptualizing agency by taking such pre-conceptual practices into account.

Keywords:

• person
• agency
• rhetoric
• theatre
• Hobbes

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Deborah A. DeMott, “The Contours and Composition of Agency Doctrine: Perspectives on History and Theory of Inherent Agency Power,” University of Illinois Law Revue, (2014): 1813–34. “… agency relationships … are best understood to enable one person (the “principal”) through an independent actor (the “agent”) to take legally salient actions in relationship to third parties and facts in the world.” (p. 1816).

2 George Mousourakis, “Chap. 1, The Law of Persons,”in Fundamentals of Roman Private Law (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012), 85–118. For Gaius’s Institutes and the division into persons, things, and actions see Will Deming, “Paul, Gaius and the ‘Law of Persons’: The Conceptualization of Roman Law in the Early Classical Period,” The Classical Quarterely 51 (2001): 2018–230; for a critical, Foucauldian, perspective see Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things. From the Body’s Point of View, trans. Zakija Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

3 See Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publ. Co, 1993), Sect. 2, pp. 19-48 (4:406-445).

4 Samuel Pufendorf, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, trans. William A. Oldfather, ed. with revisions by Thomas Behne (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009); Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo. Vol. 2. Transl. of the ed. of 1688, trans. Charles H. Oldfather and William A. Oldfather (Oxford and London: Clarendon Press, Humphrey Milford, 1934); and Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, trans. Michael Silverthorne, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

5 Pufendorf, De jure naturae and gentium, book I. ch. 1, sections 3 and 4, 38-65; cf. Duty of Man and Citizen, Book I. ch. 2, pp. 27–32. For Pufendorf’s concept of autonomy and liberty see Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 118–40; for the concept of imposition and its intrinsic problems Stephen Darwall, “Pufendorf on Morality, Sociability, and Moral Powers,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2012): 213–38.

6 On the construction of the person as individual substance in Leviathan see Marco Simendic, “Thomas Hobbes’s Person as Persona and ‘Intelligent Substance’,” Intellectual History Review 22 (2012): 147–62; on the political context Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–80.

7 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: Norton & Co., 1997), 88.

8 Ibid.

9 The quotations here and in the following paragraphs ibid., p. 88f.

10 Christoph Strosetzki, Konversation und Literatur. Zu Regeln der Rhetorik und Rezeption in Spanien und Frankreich (Frankfurt: Lang, 1988).

11 Secondary naturalness – doing what comes naturally as practice in given frames – resembles the anti-foundational notion of rhetoric as developed in Stanley Fish, “Chap. 20, Rhetoric,” in Doing What Comes Naturally. Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 471–502.

12 “A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man …” (Hobbes, Leviathan., p. 88).

13 “… Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other … (Hobbes, ibid., p. 88).

14 Cf. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–29.

15 Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, book I, ch. 14, Of the first and second NATURALL LAWES, and of CONTRACTS, pp. 72–9. With the first law of nature being a pure commandment (“That every man, ought to endeavour Peace,” p. 72), the second law, beginning again as a commandment, first introduces the idea of a right (“That a man willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things,” p .72f.). The right that enters the law in the moment of laying it down, if necessary, then further introduces transference and, with it, the social contract (“Right is layd aside, either by simply Renouncing it; or by Transferring it to another,” p. 73).

16 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

17 Horace, “The Art of Poetry, or Epistle to the Pisos,” in: Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairlough (London: Heinemann, reprint 1936). Page numbers in the following paragraphs refer to this edition and translation.

18 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), trans. Donald A. Russell (London: Harvard University Press, 2001). Page numbers in the following paragraphs refer to this edition and translation.

19 In her reading of Horace’s Art of Poetics Jennifer Ferris-Hill highlights the social context of this poetics in terms of family and friendship (according to the character of the Art of Poetry as a letter to the Pisos). Even if the approach here emphasizes, in contrast, affect and affection on anthropological rather than social levels it follows Ferris-Hill in stressing the intersubjective underpinnings of The Art of Poetics. See Jennifer Ferris-Hill, Horace’s Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), in particular ch. 3, Risum, pp. 153–99.

20 Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying. A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour, trans. James S. Churchill, Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

21 Manfred Fuhrmann, Dichtungstheorie der Antike: Aristoteles, Horaz, „Longin.“Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992).

22 The argument as summarized here is developed in Rüdiger Campe, An Outline for a Critical History of Fürsprache: Synegoria und Advocacy, Deutsche Vierteljahreschaft (DVjS) 82 (2008): 355–81; cf. also Campe, Affizieren und Selbstaffizieren. Rhetorisch-anthropologische Näherung ausgehend von Quintilian, Institutio oratoria VI, 1-2, in Rhetorische Anthropologie. Studien zum Homo rhetoricus, ed. Josef Kopperschmidt (München: Fink, 2000), 135–52.

23 See Francesca Romana Nocchi, Techniche teatrali e formazione dell’oratore in Quintiliano (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2013).

24 Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, trans. John H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, reprint 1994), on accusation and motives see I. 10.5, 1868b; for the emotions see II. 1.3, 1377b.

25 Davidson opens his essay, Agency, from 1971, with an everyday story of awakening (Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 43–62. The awakening first person feels himself to have been awakened because someone is playing violin nearby; he stands up, washes himself and shaves, gets dressed, and goes downstairs. He turns on the light in passing, trips on the edge of the rug, and spills coffee as he reaches for his mug while reading the newspaper. The reader is often uncertain whether these are events that happen to someone, or actions that have their cause in a self. Waking up is probably not an action, but shaving certainly is. Is snoozing after waking up an action? Is turning a switch one action and the bending of fingers another? Is waking up an action? The story from everyday life consistently avoids giving any decisive answers. If we want an answer – and we want it, because we need orientation for actions in everyday life – we make up a re-description: Can one conceive of a particular process as the effect of an intention (understood as cause)? Simple cases of doubt are those which we can see one way or another. I can have stepped on the edge of the dining room rug intentionally or not. More intricate are the cases in which the intention is clear, but related to something other than that of which it has ultimately become the effect. I wanted to reach for the newspaper, but I didn’t want to spill the coffee; but my intention to do the one thing has brought about the other. And so on.

Such considerations allow the above insights to be understood in a new way. If in Horace the spectator adds to his comprehension of the pain taking place on the stage that it concerns Telephus in a drama, which has such and such events as its theme, then that has the manner of a deferred re-description. And in his presupposed engagement to speak for the one who cannot speak, Quintilian’s orator assumes an understanding of the action to which he, out of this engagement, brings forth the appropriate stories, which then always already are the actions and sufferings of the one for whom he speaks. Doubtlessly, Hobbes’ efforts go towards theoretically resolving such complications in the figure of authority as the possession of agency. But as the preface to Leviathan shows, the sovereign or leviathan is a person and the owner of agency precisely because he finds the passions of all citizens within himself.

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Rüdiger Campe

Rüdiger Campe is Alfred C. and Martha F. Mohr Professor of German and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His research focuses on literature and knowledge, German, English and French, 17^th century to the present, and on reception studies in rhetoric and aesthetics. He is author of The Game of Probability. Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist, Stanford 2012, and he has published in particular on baroque theatre and the modern novel. Most recent publications: “Schutz und Schirm.” Screening in early modern German, in Screen Genealogies, Amsterdam 2019, ed. Buckley, Campe, Casetti; Die Institution im Roman. Von Musils Törless zum Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Würzburg 2019.