Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity 9780226777504

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Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity

Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity

nancy s. struever the university of chicago press  chicago and london

nancy s. struever is professor emerita in the Department of History and in the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09    1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-77748-1 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-77748-0 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Struever, Nancy S. Rhetoric, modality, modernity / Nancy S. Struever. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-77748-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-77748-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Modern. 2. Enlightenment. 3. Rhetoric. 4. Modality (Theory of Knowledge) I. Title. B791.S86 2009 190—dc22 2009011107 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents Acknowledgments  vii List of Abbreviations  ix chapter 1.  Introduction: The Classical Background  1 chapter 2.  The Modernity of Early Modernity  9 Hobbes and Rhetorised Psychology  13 Possibilities in Motion  14 Hobbes and Rhetorised Argument  25 Possible Agency and Possible Plot  36 Vico: An Alternate Scenario  42 Possible Agency  42 Rhetoric and Legal Possibility  45 Possible Plots  53 Hobbes and Vico  58 chapter 3.  From Early to Late Modernity  66 Modality Sorts  71 An Exemplary Modernism  80 chapter 4.  Modernizing Rhetoric: Recuperation and Response  89 New Rhetorics  98 A Modernist Contest of Faculties  102 chapter 5.  Inquiry Possibilities  107 Conclusion: Using Possibilities  117 Notes  131 Index  153

Acknowledgments

I

wish to thank the publishers of Il corpo e le sue facoltà: G. B. Vico. ed. G. Cacciatore et al. ISPF-LAB, Numero 1-2005: Saggi: Atti del convegno Internazionale, for permission to publish parts of my article “The Impersonal in Vichian Classicism.” Also, I wish to acknowledge the venues that offered opportunities for speculation on modality. The June 2006 Sorbonne Conference, La Rhétorique et les autres, provided the occasion for developing a connection between my earlier work on Hobbes and Vico and Walter Benjamin, at the suggestion of P. A. Meyers. However, my text draws only from my original paper, not at all from P. A. Meyers’ heavily revised version, published as “Esquisse sur la modernization de la rhétorique comme enquête politique,” in Littérature 149 (1/2008), 4–23. The first version of my modality thesis appears in the paper “Rhetorical Modalities and Secessionist Inquiry in Hobbes and Vico,” for the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Colloquium, Ann Arbor, September 25, 2006. I summarized my thesis at the President’s roundtable, “The Future of Rhetoric,” International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Strasbourg, July 2007. Also I wish to thank my former students, David Marshall and Danielle Follett, for their perspicacious comments on early drafts. Finally, I am indebted to the University of Chicago penumbra: that is, the recollections of former McKeon students, Eugene Garver, Marc Cogan, and the extensive acquaintance of Douglas Mitchell, including, of course, William Swenson and Richard Buchanan.

Abbreviations B

Behemoth (Hobbes)

C

“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (Peirce)

DCP

De corpore politico (Hobbes)

DNE

“Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (Peirce)

FB

“Fixation of Beliefs” (Peirce)

HI

Hegel’s Idealism (Pippin)

HMIC

“How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce)

HN

Human Nature (Hobbes)

IM

Idealism as Modernity (Pippin)

IO

Institutio oratoria (Quintilian)

KK

Knowledge and the Known (Hintikka)

L

Leviathan (Hobbes)

LM

“The Law of Mind” (Peirce)

MPP

Modernism as Philosophical Problem (Pippin)

NPF

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Porter)

NS

New Science (Vico)

PhG

Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hegel)

PW

Plausible Worlds (Hintikka)



abbreviations

R

Rhetoric (Aristotle)

RN

“Reply to the Necessitarians” (Peirce)

chapter one

Introduction: The Classical Background

T

his essay considers rhetoric as, simply, a kind of inquiry, and argues the importance of a specific investigative interest, simultaneously basic, pervasive, and elusive—modality. “Modal rhetorics” need to be juxtaposed to modal logics. Rhetorical interests, tasks, performances—all are informed by the press of possibility, the discrimination of the actual, the response to necessity and contingency. And rhetoric as hermeneutic, as a specific, traditional contribution to understanding civil interests, tasks, performances, carried in texts, signs, deeply engages modality as primary quality of civil experience. Modal logics may define structures of validity, inferential sequences; modal rhetorics deal in patterns of use. My interest is in mode as color or valence, regarded as of the utmost importance to issues of political capacity and action. Briefly, I am assuming that in civil inquiry the opposition philosophical /rhetorical inquiry is of intrinsic interest; that an inquiry’s allegiance to a particular modality defines its most basic strategies; and that the mechanics of representing a modal allegiance generate a refined, perspicuous account of investigative goals. The Classical, and archetypical “contest of faculties,” rhetoric vs. philosophy, originated, and persisted, not simply as a rivalry of pedagogic practices and academic interests, but as a conflict of claims and counter-claims concerning morality, truth, and utility in inquiry, an opposition that resurfaces in attenuated or exaggerated form throughout pre-modernity, and, I shall argue, informs, still, the issues of morality, truth, and utility in Modernist political investigations.



chapter one

Yet, the history of rhetoric describes its interests as carried in a most dishevelled rhetorical tradition, a very large body of practical manuals and theoretical expositions, containing “a very loose, indeed, ramshackle collection of discursive problems and solutions, all stained— dyed, to use Montaigne’s metaphor —by a discursive pessimism: by the heavy constraints of negative definitions of the nature of human discursive capacity, and of the relation of discursive to cognitive capacity; by the embodiment of discursive practice in a matrix of communicative needs; and by the close relationship of communicative need to political possibility.”1 And, rhetoric’s consuming interest in possibility, thus modality, is key, not simply to the Classical opposition of rhetoric and philosophy as an originary defining moment in inquiry, distinguishing oppositional beliefs and procedures, but key as well to the issue of “modernizing.” In discriminating rhetoric’s engrossment with possibility, it specifies rhetoric’s peculiar civil capacities, and makes a case as well for rhetoric’s remarkable capacity for renewal, for “modernizing,” the reinvention of its civil strategies in response to novel civil affairs. As corollary, the history of philosophy describes the positives and negatives of philosophy’s allegiance to systemic necessity, and its capacity for systemic renewal, with its modal commitment to necessitarian truth. Still, the opposition should work, not as an exhaustive binary opposition, not as an insoluble antinomy, but as a vivifying argument about values and procedures, giving rise to novelty and careful correction. “Modernizing” rhetoric is mapping the current possibilities of investigative innovation and critique in the civil operations rhetoric properly regards as its domain. And, as we shall see, “the massive presence of contingency” Robert Pippin attributes to the high culture of Modernity requires the modern investigators’ zealous canvassing of possibilities, a devotion to range of response. The description of rhetoric as inquiry should employ, in my view, the Peircian pragmatic approach, advocated in his “Fixation of Beliefs” and his “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”; where he claims the investigative core is the set of beliefs that generate the habits of action in inquiry.2 Inquiry is simply “the struggle to attain a state of belief” (FB, 247); the sole motive of thought is to produce beliefs . . .”; “the essence of belief is the establishment of habit [rule of action]” (HMIC, 213). Peirce’s linkage of beliefs and habits gives us a formula marked by modesty and, happily, “rhetoricalness.” The modesty, or radical inclusiveness, is of use to the consideration of inquiry in general, while the rhetorical values resonate with rhetoric’s topical concerns: its engagement with a community’s be-

introduction: the classical background



liefs, shared opinions (endoxa), and with rhetoric’s inveterate habits of activity, persuasion as practice and goal. He offers a narrative of investigative process as continuous, “possibly” open-ended, with the goal of truth, or the desired definition of reality, as something the community “settles down to” (RN, 555), “in the long run” (C, 239). It is essentially in motion, moving from doubt, not as original position, as the skeptic’s hyperbolic doubt, but as “irritant,” to fixation, (temporary) stabilizing of belief. The process is “only that of valid inference,” but, “every sort of modification of consciousness—Attention, Sensation, Understanding—is an inference” (C, 233); the entire range of consciousness is “a sign resulting from inference” (C, 240). It is a process autochthonous, simple, practical, possible. The identity of a habit is how it may lead us to act, “not only under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur”; “there is no meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice” (HMIC, 263); “the meaning of a thought” indeed, as always to be represented, as representable in future thoughts, is “virtual” (C, 227, my emphasis). But, as well, it is a process engaging an astonishingly dishevelled array of elements. Consider the tedious inclusiveness of his list of pertinent factors: not simply beliefs, ideas, signs, but “habits” as a complex rubric of rules and dispositions; feelings, emotions, sensations; also, thoughts as feelings, ideas as “living feelings” (LM, 549); feeling as “mental quality of a material sign” (C, 240); consciousness as material quality, or reduced to material sign (C, 240); belief as “stadium of mental action” (HMIC, 263)— all must be located, assigned value in process, an activity turgid, stained by uncertainty, a process cluttered by demands for (investigative) action. “Impure” inquiry, in short.3 Peircian modesty, impurity, also single out rhetorical competences, and, in effect, make a case for the perspicacity of rhetorical inquiry. Rhetorical competence is vested, primarily, in the Quintilianesque appeal to the strong affect of passions, pathos, and the softer emotions, ethos. Peirce’s messy inclusiveness includes affect as element: but note the double structure of affect—affect as feeling, emotion, disposition is a vital constituent of the inquiry process; but also, in “The Law of Mind” he stipulates affect as “affectability,” simple interference, with affected, affecting calling to mind the rhetorical concern with communicative production/reception. Affects as motions, versions of feeling, invest habit as an “affective bond” (LM, 551); the Peircian notion of Idea, notes its intrinsic quality as living feeling, notes the energy with which it affects other Ideas, and its tendency



chapter one

to bring along other Ideas (LM, 549). Then, inquiry for Peirce is, basically, rhetorically motivated: “the soul and meaning of thought . . . can never be made to direct itself to anything but the production of belief” (HMIC, 263), to deeply committed persuasion (the rhetorical facit fidem), in short. For, inquiry is, only, shared; “the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual only, but in the community” (FB, 250), for the community as the locus of investigative action is crucial as “beyond the vagaries of you and me” (C, 239). The description employs as well the compact narrative of Martin Heidegger’s SS1924 lectures on Aristotle’s rhetoric: Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. This is a revisionary account of Hellenic thought, designed, perhaps, to make a place for Heidegger in the history of philosophy. Here Heidegger proposes rhetoric as the “originary” discipline of the original argument, the rich political discussion that transpired in the discourse of the assemblies, the courts, and the oratory of the games: the Greeks “lived in oratory.”4 Where Klaus Dockhorn stipulates rhetoric as the second, the alternate Bildungsweg of antiquity, Heidegger asserts that rhetoric was the first chronologically, and that logic, which structures the monologic discourse ascertaining scientific truths, and dialectic, the discipline of the dialogue on the principles of inquiry, are late and derived.5 Then, Heidegger also claims that rhetoric is not an autonomous linguistic techne, but transpires solely inside politics. Thus in Aristotle: being is essentially “being-with-others” (Miteinandersein), and language, the distinctive human capacity, as address to others, is basic to life as political, the zoe¯ praktike¯ meta logou (127, 105). Or, to adapt the perspective of Michel Meyer: rhetoric as negotiating distances between language-users, organizes politics as the discursive negotiation of differences of civil import.6 The concern of rhetoric with discursive alterations, with effects on others, with persuasion, deemed a weakness by philosophers, must be redefined as a strength. This informs, I suggest, Josiah Ober’s claim that we must not look to Greek philosophy for insight into Greek politics, but rather to the evidence provided by oratorical practice, primarily of the 4th century. Greek philosophical work of critique and retrospective justification does not transpire within the authentic political experience, and carries a-­political or anti-political motives.7 Aristotle, as the great theorist of rhetoric, as well as of philosophy, helps us a great deal. But the rhetorical as political is the central issue. Rhetoric suffers from, must respond to its initial definition by philosophy—primarily in the Platonic dialogues (Gorgias, Sophist)—as a Sophistic practice

introduction: the classical background



(professionally political?): defined pejoratively, it is true, by a “Sophist.” The contentious definition was as a discipline which opposed philosophy: rhetoric as relativist, an argumentative competence in finding possible arguments on either side, in utramque partem, confronting philosophy’s search for necessary truths. Here rhetoric most certainly had to function as inquiry; there is no way one can develop techniques of persuasion without theorizing basic processes of appeal and reception. The Classical history of educational formations narrates the enduring contests, defeats, and successes of the two hegemonous disciplinary matrices: the contesting of claims of necessity, the accusations of relativism, the attributions of truth and of use. The rhetorical tradition certainly carries the weight of Sophistic speculation on communicative needs and limits as posing the elemental political problems. Even the simple lists of figures, or most basic accounts of argumentative tactics are informed by heavy, fraught assumptions. Thus the Classical, pre-modern manuals and pedagogic practices transmit, even in attenuated form, the pessimism and excitement of Sophistic contentions; indeed, technical excellence can modify schoolroom simplicity, expand insight.8 But if pessimism, then possibility. Sophistic/rhetorical speculation is a continuous engagement with the reciprocal definition of impossibility/possibility in civil affairs. The shifting boundaries of the impossible provide the opportunities for political ingenuity in response, for a constant exercise in arbitration of possible capacity and act. There is, then, a very thick history of rhetoric as an alternate formation and oppositional investigative initiative. It seems perverse to argue that there is a larger, encompassing, and archetypically philosophical concern which invests rhetoric with much of its interest and power as inquiry. Negotiating practical life deals in the larger issues of political motive, circumstance, consequence, of, in short, what is, what has to be, what could be. The most inclusive inquiry rubrics are those of modality: necessity, contingency, actuality, possibility. But there is more. Modality is, of course, a defining element of Aristotle’s logic; thus, the true is predicated as necessary. In J. Hintikka’s account the primitive, basic nature of modality interests is authenticated by the connections with the foundational model of physical structure in the structure of motion; motion is defined as moving from potential to actualization. The key terms are dunamis (potential, power), kinesis (movement, partial realization), and energeia (complete actualization). It is the link between potential (dunamis) and possibility (endechomenon) that is significant for us. Hintikka argued that Aristotle explores modalities



chapter one

in order to disentangle himself from the determinism, self-inflicted, of some of the major necessitarian initiatives of his rationalist system. In his distinction between partial and complete actualization, Aristotle has an opening to “unrealized possibilities” as modifying systemic necessity. Modality, in short, operates in the complete Aristotelian program, not simply the logical/ontological one. Hintikka also claims that Aristotle did not succeed in disentangling himself; the failure, I would suggest, stems in part from an unresolved tension between philosophy’s necessitarian theses, and rhetoric’s anti-necessitarian practices. This is, perhaps, another justification of Ober’s claim for the political insights of a rhetorical proclivity.9 For, the proper, practical home of modal inquiry is rhetoric. Heidegger’s urtext, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, states, first, that the task of rhetoric is to “theorize” the “possible means of persuasion,” tó endechómenon pithanón, then, that the domain of rhetoric (and dialectic) is the probable, and that it considers, in light of its negotiating task, only that “which could be otherwise.”10 And, political deliberation is about policy; it concerns the future, and thus a primary topos, line of argument, is the Possible, tò dunatòn, and Impossible (R, 1392a 6–8; cf.1391b 27–29). Thus rhetoric’s modal proclivity: a supremely tentative project, it seeks possible arguments for possible effect in possible situations. In the Rhetoric we find the first, and perhaps most powerful case for the primitive nature of rhetorical modal interests. Rhetoric II represents a strong appropriation of the psychology of the De anima; the De anima in turn, if we regard it as a “general introductory course on the science of biology,” explicates the basic structure of Aristotelian life sciences as the structure of motion; P. Aubenque speaks of Rhetoric II as Aristotle’s “fully rhetorised psychology.”11 The excitement here, and it does seem like excitement, is the fit between Aristotle’s most basic structure of process and the pertinence of modality issues to defining investigative and performative priorities; the linkage between potential and possibility becomes the engine for exploration of a range of life capacities and actions. Rhetoric performs in a strange domain of motivated possibilities, all needed in some civil scheme, all imbued with value colorations: attributions of purpose, cause, destiny, praise, blame, all embedded in scenarios of realization. Geoffrey Hawthorn, as a historian/social scientist of, primarily, international politics, argues in his Plausible Worlds the heuristic value of Hintikka’s “possible worlds” (alternate states of affairs or courses of events) for mapping, locating the actual world. In brief, counterfactuals illumine in explanation; the job of the inquirer is to place actuality in a range of possibilities.12 Beyond this, rhetoric connects the

introduction: the classical background



explanatory and the programmatic, the understanding of the actual political past and the suggestion of political possibilities of the future. Rhetoric both defines and poses possibilities, both finds and creates, energises possibilities. But this task raises more issues; the modal notions must be considered in their relation to each other, but also to the elements of chance, coincidence, and to the hypothesis of determinism, a determinism that would undermine rhetoric’s obligations to use and to response, and also to the obtrusive presence of categories of time, truth, change.13 Politicalrhetorical inquiry uses modality to assert, modify, deny, contest activity as political, as negotiating community, to place events in a narrative of governance, to gloss, to give conceptual clarity to potency and act as compatible, or not, with the political. There is a deep compatibility between the very specific analytic techniques rhetoric must develop to fulfill the demands of persuasion, the core political functions, and the very general commitment to the modality of possibility as the domain of rhetorical duty. There is a beneficial interactivity of modal proclivity and analytic habits that energises; it is profoundly non-dismissive. Rhetoric has both the theoretical insouciance and the technical analytic instruments to describe the possibilities that map actuality; (the “actual,” of course, is “possible”). For actuality, as any historian will admit, is counter-intuitively difficult of access, often remote from the inquirer’s vocabulary, not responsive to flat-footed philosophical defining initiatives. Thus, consider the reductions of exotic insights to a lingua franca of moralisms: “common sense” as shared commitment reduced to personal accomplishment. Philosophical programs of developing political wisdom, political prudence, can seem bookish, their normative ambition as only commentary. It is a contrarian approach, utilizing the intricated Aristotelian modal interest and “rhetorised” psychology that distinguishes, I shall argue, Thomas Hobbes’ innovations. Once again, to return to the Peircian initiative that focuses on beliefs generating habits of action in inquiry: the archetypical contest of faculties produce archetypical intrications of premises and practices; modal beliefs complicate practices. We notice the proclivity for possibility as domain of operation for rhetoric sponsoring habitual rhetorical practices, and the rhetorical practices in turn reacting against any dogged pursuit of necessity. There is, of course, a parallel, yet distinct, Roman rhetorical development. By addressing the modality issue, it is possible to reconstruct the relation between Greek and Roman rhetoric, and modify our appreciation of the effective contributions of the entire Classical rhetorical tradition to civil



chapter one

research habits. It is worth considering that the Latin rhetorical tradition is, in the long run, not only thicker, and more accessible than the Greek, but as more diverse, uneven, is more influential in shaping the Classical heritage of political-rhetorical modal proclivity.14 And, in particular, the extraordinary usefulness of the rich tradition of Latin manuals and pedagogy for political inquiry lies in the vital connection they describe between rhetorical and legal practice.15 The rich specificity of the practices embedded in legal as well as rhetorical texts pushes back against abstract political formulations to deal with the quotidian possibilities, the texture of forensic argumentative life: habits shape beliefs. Rhetorical capacity here is responsive, engaged, strengthened by formula and formulaic court proceedings. The manuals dispense rhetorical techniques for finding the right kind of argument and evidence for legal contest. The means, the expedients for civil action are both discovered and used inside the practice. And, rhetorical-legal invention, the determining of the status, causa of a specific case functions in a domain of alternate, possible scenarios in the practical world of claim and counter claim, in the formulaic processes of private-public law. The process of inventing and developing arguments for specific formulaic practices requires ingenuity in formulating possible cause and possible effect. Thus in the Ciceronian texts—the manuals, the oratorical treatises, the epistolary memoirs—the accounts of the relations between jurisconsult, master of legal texts, and orator, performer in the public arena, illumine actual Roman institutional changes in office and process, and thus creation of civil possibility. For Quintilian, the loss in imperial times of political practice motivates his rich exploration of the possibilities of legal practice as surrogate. And in Early Modernity Giambattista Vico’s brilliance lies in his remarkable investment in Roman legal process as revelatory of the vagaries and strategies of Roman political reality. The Peircian formula clarifies the relation between Hellenic and Roman rhetoric, not as polemical, reduced to the invidious contrast of original /derivation, but as comparative investigative moments, versions that develop the belief in, proclivity for possibility by different strategic choices, habits. And thus the ingenious parallel versions of Greek and Roman initiatives of Hobbes and Vico: in Hobbes’ use of an Aristotelian rhetorised psychology, and Vico’s employment of Roman rhetorical-legal hermeneutic. And, as we shall see, the distressing absence of this Hobbesian and Vichian presence in Modernist rhetorical political inquiry is balanced by the possibility, perhaps not unwitting, of reiterations of modal beliefs and rhetorical habits in the political criticism of Walter Benjamin.

chapter two

The Modernity of Early Modernity

I

ndeed, the resort to Vico, and to Hobbes, is essential to my account of modernizing civil inquiry. I am making a case for the modernity of Early Modernity. Hobbes and Vico are secessionist thinkers, seceding from the normative, moralistic, prescriptive program of Classical political philosophy, repudiating the terms and arguments that dominated medi­ eval and Renaissance as well as ancient thought, jettisoning the dubious transcendental assumptions underpinning its moralistic speculation. My case for the modernity of Early Modernity has its own rather baroque— appropriately baroque—modal implications. Hobbes and Vico most cer­ tainly retrieve Classical rhetorical assumptions and operations that contest philosophical assumptions and operations. But while their work can be read as an actualization of the Aristotelian rhetorical possibilities, their work remains, on the whole, simply possibility in modernist inquiry. It is a modernism inadequately represented, still, in the 19th- and 20thcentury retrievals of rhetoric; the inadequate representation, of course, justifies what will be my very heavy investment in describing Hobbesian and Vichian work. It is important to recognize that Hobbes and Vico do not function within the dominant academic domains—philosophical or rhetorical— of the period, domains structured by Christianised Classical philosophical motives, zeal; domains with a great deal less fluidity than the confused dy­ namics of the formula “Republic of Letters” would suggest. It is piquant:

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chapter two

Vico’s career as university professor of rhetoric in Naples most certainly accounts for his familiarity with rhetorical beliefs and habits of action, but his career as rhetorician is occluded by his dominating, and failed, ambi­ tion to become professor of law.1 And, academic rhetoric is itself gradually occluded in the period. A prominent theme of the history of rhetoric is the displacement of rhetoric by literature and criticism in 19th- and 20thcentury academic organization. But this displacement is rooted in an earlier displacement; rhetoric was rendered unfashionable by the double initiative of Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment science; their identity as “modern” may be in question, but their ambition for systematic­ ity, and at least crypto-necessitarianism, not. For the dominant Enlighten­ ment investigations, rhetoric lacked explanatory power. And, certainly, no simple Classical source and influence model works. Rather, what is recaptured by Hobbes’ and Vico’s investigational habits is not so much Sophistic doctrine as a strong Sophistic antagonism to philos­ ophy’s habit of generating moralisms that please and help no one except the promulgator. Hobbesian psychology, as we shall see, has strong affini­ ties of beliefs and habits with those of Aristotle’s Rhetoric; and, perhaps more so than Aristotle’s inquiry, it is permeated by a “sophisticated” pes­ simism. It expresses a simple opposition to philosophical moral optimism as trivializing the civil imperatives of the more important issues confront­ ing communities. Yes, it would be nice for politics to be moral. No, it is not a real possibility in most of real time. The most we can hope for, according to Hobbes, is a range of community functions that achieve the peace as justice that allows inventions, arts, cultural innovations, surprises. And Vico’s pessimism is expressed in his investment in irony as explanatory thesis of great power: civility as unintended consequence. All of this, I am arguing, is rhetorical in tone: and all easily effaced, elided. But what tone of voice do they use? I suppose one could ask—what logical tone of voice? What is the “reality,” existence, they attribute to their key elements? Their ambitions are modal to the core: an accomplish­ ment of Hobbes and Vico is to renegotiate modalities. The Hobbesian and Vichian secession can, perhaps, be redescribed as having a simple, basic, and specifically modal dimension: they proffer more civil possibili­ ties. In the collection Reforging the Chain of Being, J. Hintikka gives his fullest account of what he regards as the pertinent intellectual historical context for modality inquiry. Here he argues that what Arthur Lovejoy claims as the central metaphysical notion for pre-Modern intellectual his­ tory, the Principle of Plenitude—that all genuine possibilities will be real­

the modernity of early modernity

11

ized at some point in time—informs most, or the most important Western speculative initiatives. He then claims that “the widening of the realm of possibilities is one of the most interesting overall features in the history of Western thought,” and was a development initiated in the late Middle Ages, and certainly, a prominent feature of intellectual history in the Re­ naissance and Early Modernity, a feature both parallel to and intricated with the moments studied under the rubrics of “Scientific Revolution” and “17th-century Rational Philosophy,” the work, in short, of figures such as Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz, figures fascinated by “the relative richness or poverty of the universe,” by “what more or less hidden possibilities there perhaps lurk waiting to be realized.”2 Hintikka of course argues the importance of Leibniz’s work on possible worlds and his theory of compossibility; Leibniz’s theorization of our actual world as the richest, most plentiful, best possible world is simply a façon de parler of this quantitative shift. Or, “widening of possibilities” is one way of defining a quantitative surge in critical, revisionary investigative interests in Early Modernity, and another way of characterizing Hobbesian and Vichian “se­ cessionary” developments in civil inquiry. And, I seem to be contending, Hobbes and Vico’s rhetorical (or anti-philosophical) habits of action in inquiry nourish the investigational shift as an increase in political specula­ tive fervor, inventiveness. To be sure, the extreme generality of Hintikka’s claim for an epoch of widening of possibilities daunts, but this, too, can be redescribed with useful specificity. And, of course, the quantitative shift is at once a qualitative one: Hintikka’s “possible worlds” semantic theory argues that the considering of possibility is itself an initiative engaged in confronting the nature of necessity, contingency, chance. Hobbes’ Leviathan is not going to happen. Vichian myth is both history and fiction, speaking of actuality and possibility as meshed. And where do we locate in history the three Vichian stages—the ages of gods, he­ roes, and men? Both Hobbes and Vico—and here one must look again at Hobbes’ texts—repudiate a straightforward, single voice, normative in ambition, prescriptive in motive, claiming moral necessity. It is a subtle secession: asserting contingency, modifying political agency and virtue, suggesting ranges of possible political scenarios, both past and present. Hintikka, of course, argues for a gradual widening of what was thought possible in science, philosophy, pseudo-science, theology, perhaps; a wid­ ening that offers a range of, perhaps at times only of, possibilities. But the high cultural context of Hobbes and Vico is saturated with Classical dilem­ mas; there are major confrontations phrased in modalities informing, even

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chapter two

dominating, many of the texts of late Renaissance and Early Modern cul­ ture. Think, for example, of the string of ethical fables in Valla’s De libero arbitrio, in Leibniz’s Théodicée III, and Kant’s Nova dilucidatio. All the fables (with an inner, formal connection, indeed), all the plots offer por­ trayals of free will embedded in matrices of systemic necessity: theologi­ cal; theological and moral; metaphysical and moral—all making almost amusing, almost despairing claims for moral potential. It is this endless, unfruitful modal debate Hobbes and Vico, mostly, evade. In the secession we note the affiliations of modal interests with rhe­ torical investigative skills. It is useful, I argue, to place almost equal em­ phasis on specific rhetorical inquiry capacities and on rhetoric’s affinity for the modality of possibility as productive of political insight. Indeed, I am claiming that modal interests are so primitive, so pervasive, so en­ during that they organize, arrange specific investigative techniques; the primitiveness guarantees strenuous revision or invention, either one. At the same time, rhetoric is a formation that responds to a large array of (primarily political) issues and actions and deploys a large array of tactics to meet, decorously, these issues and actions. Here the affinity to pos­ sibility colors every inquiry and response. Hobbes and Vico, as seces­ sionists, replicate rhetorical critiques of political philosophical thinking. Rhetoric functions inside politics, yet rhetorical inquiry does not func­ tion well inside some political philosophical programs. Ober’s warnings against using Classical political philosophical justifications to define Hel­ lenic political practices warn as well against Renaissance recuperations of Classical political philosophy. Both Hobbes and Vico avail themselves of rhetorical critical moments in their new, compendious assessments of political possibilities, assessments that both undermine Classical political formulas and query narratives of civic virtue. Their “modernizing” dam­ ages irretrievably Classical political philosophy’s beliefs and habits of ac­ tion, with its affinity for the mode of necessity, dominated by reductive systemic notions, philosophical habits producing, somewhat exasperat­ ingly, two very dense thematisations: first, a conventional, that is uncon­ vincing, moralism claiming free will; and second, necessitarianism, the conventional lady and the necessitarian tiger. In sum, in so far as Hobbes and Vico investigate the basic material activities of politics— deliberation in Hobbes, the texture of legal claim and counter claim in Vico—they employ rhetorical analysis. In so far as they use rhetoric, they nourish an affinity for possibility. And thus, their inventiveness in the modality of the possible.

the modernity of early modernity

13

Hobbes and Rhetorised Psychology I have heard him say that Aristotle was the worst teacher that ever was, the worst Politian and ethick—a country fellow that could live in the world [would be] as good; but his rhetorique and discourse of animals was rare.3

Thus John Aubrey citing Hobbes on Aristotle. Aubrey, by observing Hobbes’ invidious comparison of Aristotle’s political and ethical philoso­ phy with Aristotle’s rhetoric and his research on animals, focuses our at­ tention on Hobbes’ secession, his revisionary capacity. My starting point is the statement, “his rhetoric and discourse of animals was rare.” The Hobbesian edge in political inquiry is a natural philosophical one, but not the hard edge of the contemporaneous physical sciences. The dominant interests of the Leviathan, the De homine, and Human Nature are nec­ essarily those of the life sciences, and, in particular, of psychology; here Hobbes’ speculation reflects the peculiar state of the issues in the 17th century. André Pichot maintains that there are only two major concep­ tions of life before the 19th century: Aristotelian continuum and Carte­ sian dualism; throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, there is no clearly dominant paradigm, but a profusion of theories, existing in contest and cooperation.4 Just so, Hobbes’ psychology represents an imposition of a matrix of mechanical terms and motives on an Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions; it is a mechanical continuum. For, Hobbes’ predilec­ tion is for continuum, a unified theory, and the Aristotelian model proffers an exhaustive, systematic definition of life which asserts the soul as the principle of life in all creatures; R. Sorabji speaks of Aristotle’s biological concept of the soul; G. E. R. Lloyd claims that Aristotle’s psychology is the frame for his zoological program.5 Every argument for interspecies continuity between vegetative capacities of plants, animals, and men and between sensitive capacities of animals and men is an argument for intra­ species continuity of vegetative, sensitive, and intellective capacity. The investigations of nutritive, generative phenomena, the distinction of vol­ untary and involuntary motions in the body, the varied emphases on the importance and functions of sensitive capacities shared with animals re­ quires a consideration of the elements, not rational, that interact with our specific rational capacity. Hobbes absorbs these 17th-century interests, I would argue, when he transposes Aristotle’s definition of the soul as prin­ ciple (arch�) of life into his simple assertion that the soul is life (L, II, 674). Certainly it is the case that both the Aristotelian soul and Hobbes’ human

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nature are defined as the sum of natural faculties, a series of contiguous, interactive faculties and powers (HN, 2). Leo Strauss, long ago, remarked Hobbes’ employment of Aristotle’s Rhetoric II with its necessarily complex, thus necessarily pessimistic ac­ count of a continuum of interactive faculties — sensation, perception, imagination, the passions, memory, and reason—this is the “fully rheto­ rised psychology” of Pierre Aubenque, already organized under topoi for use in argument: the definitions are to be slotted into oratory, speeches; they are descriptions that appeal, argue.6 It is a rhetorical accommodation of biology to politics, integrating fundamental animal capacities for mo­ tion and self-movement with political tasks of “speaking-out,” the affir­ mation, rejection, and alteration of shared beliefs, endoxa. When Hobbes appropriates Aristotle’s design of rhetoric as a “life-science,” he associ­ ates it with Aristotle’s minute observations of animal behavior, rather than with the abstract tidiness of his ethical treatises. The various powers or capacities are so intertwined, so temporally integrated that piece-meal analysis is impossible; it is difficult to sort out emotion, or imagination, or reason. In Hobbes’ early Human Nature, in the De homine, as well as in chapter 6 of the Leviathan, Hobbes gives versions of the Aristotelian definitions of passions in Rhetoric II, 1–11; he accepts Aristotle’s text as wellmotivated natural philosophy, in so far as it assumes the coherence of accounts of animal sensitive capacity with human sensitive capacity. The account of basic life faculties, functions and actions is essential to the account of political capacity and action: the more basic, the more essen­ tial. When Hobbes deplores Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics as confused, less useful, he may be reacting to the obscuring of the constraints of his psychological theory by their optimistic rationalist scenarios. The strong pessimism of the psychological account embedded in the Rhetoric demands inventive response in political as well as rhetorical theorizing. Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in short, plays an important part in the preliminary stage of Hobbes’ initiative, a role much more important than simply as a manual of instruction in Hobbes own political eloquence.7

Possibilities in Motion . . . Aristotle judged rightly that to be ignorant of motion is to be ignorant of nature . . . (Dialogus physicus)8

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Once again, central to the Early Modern investigations of both modal­ ity and rhetoric is the Aristotelian structure of motion. The elaboration of possibility requires the elaboration of change. Possibility as framing individuals’ capacities—passions, reasons, choices—frames them in pos­ sible worlds, makes them credible in plots, describes them in the corrobo­ ration of practices, taking part in narratives. What makes an individual potential pertinent is change; possibility forces change, changes the topic, persistently, inevitably. The very strict Aristotelian connection between power and potential, dunamis, possibility, the proposition that change is simply the actualization of possibility, founds Hobbes’ notion of civil ca­ pacity. The whole bent of the Hobbesian triple program, the De corpore, De homine, De cive is to reconsider, within the bounds of biological life, political life; here Hobbes uses the mechanistic language of 17th-century natural philosophy as simply a gloss on this biological model. We have been deceived by Hobbes’ flat-footed prose style, invoking mechanism; his style disguises the experimental nature of his project. Aristotelian rhetoric is a life science. And the most basic premise of the Aristotelian model is the stipulation of life as motion, and further, motion as continual interac­ tion, a continuity of functions and operations. Here, there is little tension between the Aristotelian model and Hobbes’ mechanical embellishments; Hobbes cites Harvey’s mechanical /Aristotelian model to support the postulate that vital motion is motion of the blood, perpetually circulating (De corpore, 407).9 Hobbes appropriates the identification of life with mo­ tion and describes life as, in the first place, movement of sensitive capaci­ ties and functions shared, of course, with animals. “Life is itself but motion and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense” (L, 51). Aristotle’s Rhetoric—for that matter, classical rhetorical texts in general—accommodates biology simply by recognizing that the hegemonous life motions are political actions. For, rhetorical theory must give an account of the capacity to produce and receive political discourse. Every argument of the biological theory for the continuity of life and vital capacities is an argument that supports rhetoric’s broad appeal to the fac­ ulties across this range: the interactions of sensation, imagination, fancy, memory, reminiscence, reason. In his chapter on manners, Hobbes insists on motion as continuum of motive; the introduction of a specifically human goal, felicity, simply mod­ ifies the physiological model. Temporal continuity structures a person’s manners (a translation of mores and thus of ethos): “. . . the felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied . . . Felicity is a

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continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter” (85). When he assumes a general inclination of all mankind as political—having to deal, negoti­ ate with others—as “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death,” he stipulates the desire not only in terms of pleasure, “intensive delight,” but also simply as self-­preservation, conser­ vation of life: “he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he hath present without the acquisition of more” (85–86). The distinc­ tion between men and social beasts is, indeed, invidious; we have more difficulty in being sociable because of our continuous competition for honor, and thus our continuous production of envy, hatred, and war; their agreements are “natural,” ours by covenant, only artificial, requiring force (156–57). Politics is strained sociability. On the other hand, in contrast to classical rhetorical texts, the political and ethical texts insist on false distinctions between specifically human, rational activities and general life activities.10 The relevance of the classical psychology which defines life as motion for classical rhetoric is clear. Of the three Ciceronian tasks of rhetoric: docere, instructing, delectare, delighting, and movere, moving, Quintilian asserts that the quintessential rhetorical competence is moving the affects; for the passions are motions of the soul (motus animi) which cause motions of the soul.11 Rhetoric, in short, must master words that work upon, cause motion. A heavy commitment to life as motion sustains a heavy commit­ ment to rhetoric as moving, and thus invests Hobbes’ interests in defining the transactive powers of the subject. In Hobbes’ formulation, passions are the beginnings of voluntary motions, and the beginning of speech (HN, 25, 31–32, 67). Aristotle’s Rhetoric insists on the centrality of the passions— elegantly defined by Hobbes in grammatical terms of voice, as what the living creature undergoes, suffers—in an account of continuum, of continual interactivity. The passions (path�, adfectus) are vital junctures in a classical map of soul (psyche) and body (soma) relations which struc­ ture action. At the outset of the De anima, Aristotle insists on defining the soul by defining passion both physiologically (anger is a boiling of the blood) and dialectically (anger is a desire for revenge for injury); here dia­ lectic (and rhetoric as its antistrophe), deals with life motions as discursive capacities (De anima, 403a27–b13). In the Aristotelian map sensations, or motions responsive to a vital environment, are inseparable from pleasure or pain, and thus of appetites of desire and avoidance (De anima, 413b23– 25).12 Similarly, Hobbes insists that these appetites are simply corrobora­

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tions of vital motions (L, 54). The “corroborations” of the appetities are described, then, as physiological motions. Aristotle’s passion, a subset of appetite, is a disposition which assumes a continuum of sensitive elements (of pleasure and pain) with cognitive elements— considerations of condi­ tions, objects, grounds.13 For Hobbes, the continuum thesis always holds: passions proceed from the alteration made in the brain by the action of external objects “and continued to the heart” (HN, 54); Hobbes also folds in the Aristotelian descriptions of the cognitive elements, the particular objects and grounds of passions which define them. Aubenque tells us that what is “political” in the Rhetoric is the nec­ essary consideration of use in discursive intervention of each defined passion. Hobbes’ short definitions of the passions are, in fact, topics as principles or maxims, proverbs drawn from conventional uses, then pre­ sented as ready for use in political name-calling: they are definitions or sentences for politicians to employ. Aubenque is asking us to look again at the implications of Aristotle’s Topica where he insists on the duality of topics as both the form and content of argument. “Common sense” as conventional wisdom is divided into specific bits of sense, commonplaces, koinoi topoi, loci communes. In effect, Aristotle asks us to consider the es­ sential pragmatic function of topics and topical argument; commonplaces in Aristotle are both the “principles of argument”—such as the basic tac­ tic of comparison of scale, “the more and the less,” and the maxims, results developed from the principles: “make haste slowly” as aphorism suggests that more speed can be less effective. An abstract form is rendered practi­ cal, becomes part of a repertoire of statements instantly recognized, abso­ lutely accessible to the listener. The topoi are, in some broad sense, in the listener and the listener’s competence: possibilities. Hobbes’ definitions of the passions have assimilated, not simply the characterizations, but the topical naturalness of Aristotle. Hobbes follows Aristotle, then, in the total politicisation of rhetoric. Seventy-odd years ago, Leo Strauss cited parallel passages from the Art of Rhetoric, the Human Nature, the De homine, and the Leviathan which provide us with Hobbes’ obvious extractions from Aristotle’s definitions of the passions, and which suggest Hobbes’ ingenuity in exploring the transactive powers and limits of the political subject. Thus, Hobbes may jettison the Aristotelian vocabulary of sensitive and rational soul, form and matter, yet his account of discursive capacity actually sharpens and accentuates, rather than attenuates, the force of some Aristotelian initia­ tives in the Rhetoric (L, IV, c. 46). The test of the seriousness of his natural

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philosophical interest is the stretch of nature, the commitment to include as many civil phenomena as possible in a natural account, an account that selects the most basic life structures and most primitive life functions as powerful in political activity. His predilection is to push the employment of the account of animal structure and function as far as it will go. This physicalist, processual account, I would claim, redesigns political agency, and, in effect, Hobbes’ pessimism effaces the Classical “Human­ ist” notions of an individual, participatory role of the orator-citizen, and of his possibilities for political effect.14 He shows himself in the Behemoth as perfectly attuned to the failure of discursive negotiations, attuned as well to failures as almost inevitable, necessary; he destroys through rhe­ torical analysis the possibilities of oratorical citizen participation. It is as if the animal account reveals another, possible world of great explanatory value; its force trumps, its plots encompass the narratives of Humanistic capacity. Consider Hobbes’ definition of the activity of our internal deliberation as continual alternation of appetites and passions: “the whole sum of de­ sires, aversions, hopes, and fears continued until the thing be either done or thought impossible is that we call deliberation” (L, 48; DCP, 408–9).15 And, again, he forces notice of that other, possible world upon us: “this alternate succession of appetite, aversions, hopes and fears is no less in other living creatures than in man, and therefore beasts also deliberate” (48; cf. De corpore, 409; HN, 68). Obviously, Hobbes regards it as neither useful nor desirable to claim that “rational” interests or peculiarly hu­ man ends change radically the operations of deliberation. It is impossible for our deliberation to completely transcend, move outside of the domain of sensitive capacity. At best, in human deliberation we can note what P. Pellegrin characterises as an interposition of a rational “filter” on the ac­ tions of sensation, imagination, desire.16 The interposition of screens of education or formation, moreover, can be, and are, described by Hobbes as veils of ignorance (L, 279). Indeed, passionate thoughts normally guide and direct mental discourse; a wandering, unguided train lacks, precisely, passionate direction (L, 12). Deliberation is simply oscillation of dispositions, with no easily specifi­ able terminus, with “will” described as simply the last (sensitive) appetite, the last stage in a process that is redescribed as rational only with dif­ ficulty, and “impossible” is a modality of closure. This redefinition of will as simply an act, not a faculty assigned to the rational domain, is in effect the dereification of will as “moral force” in that Classical possible world,

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where “free” is empowered as “rational” (L, 48).17 We note Hobbes’ etymological derivation, de-liberare; deliberation is about what is in our power and is free as long as we don’t stop deliberating; yet, deliberation also takes away our liberty, in that it stalls action (HN, 68). Consider the implications of this definition of individual deliberation, when Hobbes shifts his focus to deliberation of the group (HN, c. 13, 70f). Political practices transpire in a domain saturated with emotional force and response. In the account of group deliberation in the Human Nature he does not oppose voluntary/necessary, since the act of willing may be necessitated by fair means, allurements, as well as foul, violence.18 Again, he insists that the freedom of willing is no greater in man than in other liv­ ing creatures (De corpore, 409). Thus, unlike Hobbes’ activity of writing treatises on politics, deliberating is not a discourse of science, amenable to a geometric method, with a definite place in the progress of political knowledge. Deliberation can be described as a reciprocity of pre-reflective strategies. In such a process, how could sequences of syllogisms impinge? While political action can be explained by science, it cannot be controlled by an internalized scientific code of mental behavior. Hobbes is not sim­ ply asking us to consider different possible worlds; he is redrawing their boundaries. It is the complexity of Aristotle’s model, the complicated relations be­ tween faculties, that is the source of political insight. Rhetorical pessimism rereads political process from the perspective of psychological process and the exchange of signs that articulate the processes for us. Rhetorical pes­ simism informs, for example, the accounts of the emotions and the will. Rhetorical habits stipulate emotions, not as private states of mind, but as social acts of attribution; the passions are reactions to the representations of ourselves by others: “in the pleasure men have, or displeasure from the signs of honor or dishonor done unto them” (HN, 40). Dumouchel insists that Hobbes vocabulary of emotions is not constituted of terms of which the first referents are intimate mental states of the subject, rather, they indicate relations of force between the agents; they are essentially social phenomena. The emotions are “not the means, but the being of the social.”19 Emotions as unshared, unattributed have only a ghostly ex­ istence. Or, consider the peculiar movement between Aristotle’s positive claim that “fear leads us to deliberation” (R, 1383a6–7), and Hobbes’ edgy formula, “fear inclines men least to break the law” (L, 285). The web of political life is an emotional, but also a problematic, uncertain texture. The range of possibilities is by necessity large.

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Most certainly rhetorical psychology redesigns the political vocabulary. But, counter-intuitively, the pessimism of his account of capacity, by med­ dling with the terms, expands possibilities, counters determinism. I have argued in an earlier paper that we have not taken advantage of the truly useful account of Hobbes by Wilhelm Dilthey in his Weltanschauung und Analyse; here Dilthey insists, first, on Hobbes’ misanthropy, second, on his “impetuous subjectivity,” and, finally, on the difficulty of drawing a politics from this profoundly pessimistic account of the political subject.20 The misanthropy and the impetuous subjectivity both use and are ener­ gised by Hobbes’ appropriation of rhetoric, but not as a naïvely conceived manual of eloquence. Hobbesian psychology, firmly grounded in physical necessity, produces not so much a list of solutions, as an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunction, with a much shorter list of functions. What also seems counter-intuitive, however, is Hobbes’ sense of the re­ sistance of political deliberation to rhetoric as fluent control; rhetoric may analyse, but may not master politics. To be sure, by taking into account Hobbes’ gloomy postulates, the fair allurements of rhetoric represent not righteous strategies in deliberative democracy, but tactics of compulsion, fair as trope of foul. This foul play, of course, is described by Quintilian in his acceptance of the task of perturbation of the violent passions (pathos) along with that of conciliation of the mild (ethos) (IO, VI, 2, 8–9). Con­ sider the hostile accounts of “counsel” in Hobbes’ theory, where counsel is the political discursive alternation which follows the oscillation of internal deliberation (HN, 74). In his “Review and Conclusion” to the Leviathan, Hobbes makes an appeal to the “universities” as the proper place for the dissemination of his tract. But this admits a strong distinction between the “scientific” rhetoric he addresses to this erudite elite and the use of rhetoric in actual political situations (L, 713). In no sense does he view the university elite as counselors, say nothing of potentially competent counselors. But note that Hobbes accuses as well the self-delusion of the “subtle and wise” political protagonists, who, since they “love to consult,” are often undone by the rapid strategic actions of the powerful (88); the tendency to consult is an attribute of political weakness (274). And, the obtrusion of unwanted counsel tends to the breach of the peace (DCP, 107). Then, the context of assemblies, the actual situations of deliberation, can be antipathetic to good advice, in encouraging those whose “interests made passionate, and passions eloquent,” an eloquence that inflames the audience (L, 248; cf. 173–75). The practice of rhetorical accommodation is

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needful complicity with the pre-political or apolitical, with natural, base­ line deliberation. Common policy is not advanced by common consulta­ tion; Hobbes distrusts the influence of the “popular man” as well as that of the assembly in which he shines (L, 327). The proper way to seek counsel is to consult many, but apart (L, 247–48); the process of open consultation with the end of consensus is counter-productive, thwarts political continu­ ity. It seems that the task of the sovereign is to leave as little space and time, as few issues as possible to open deliberation by individuals, another of Hobbes’ gloomy rhetorical diagnoses.21 Hobbes, then, is as conscious of the dysfunctions of political rhetori­ cal practice as he is of the usefulness of rhetorical/natural initiatives in his theorizing. It is not simply the case that the Rhetoric accommodates the biology in its political account; rather, it is the very perspicuous homology of the biological/natural with the rhetorical/natural that energises his ac­ count; this homology tends to shape his decisions about specific means and ends. Thus, what is quite striking in the Hobbesian account is his lack of in­ terest in consensus as goal and in strategies for creating consensus. What is equally striking is his use of Aristotle’s connection of passions, differences, politics—and physiology. At the beginning of his account of passions and character in book II of the Rhetoric, Aristotle asserts that “the passions are all those elements that so change men as to make their judgements dif­ ferent and [this is important] that are also attended by pain or pleasure” (1378a19–21; cf. Hobbes’ De homine, 103; HN, 32, 54). In the chapter on “Manners” in the Leviathan, Hobbes reformulates this in his claim that all men, in their perpetual pursuit of life goals, “differ only in the way, which arises partly from the diversity of passions in divers men, and partly from the difference of knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the affect desired” (85, cf. 61). In the succeeding passage, as we have noted, Hobbes qualifies the pursuit as political: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death” (85–86). Political power is temporally situated, as motion; his physiological interest achieves historical definition. Hobbes thus specifies the differential in the desire and apprehension of power as the mechanism that fuels political behavior, drives political ac­ tion; “passions proceed from our imagination or conception of our own power above that of those who contendeth” (HN, 40; cf. 37; my empha­ sis); passions proceed from differential and produce differential. Passion as source and response to difference constitutes politics. Nature as motion, as alteration, change supports a political focus on change, alteration. The

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biological assumptions support the chain: if life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics. And thus difference, not consensus centers his political problematic. Politics is a response to endemic, irreducible trouble. Political life is relatively impervi­ ous to simplistic, normative initiatives; the negotiation of difference cannot be reduced to maneuvers of consensus. Hobbes’ constantly reiterated goal for the state is peace, but difference supplies the political task.22 Once again we see the coherence of the rhetorical and the biological; the rhetorical affinity for possibility is for possibility as variable, for the task of variation; Hobbes’ emphasis on biological considerations predicates life operations as inherently unstable; time is the subverter of stability, the fomentor of difference: “And because the constitution of a man’s body is in continual mutation, it is impossible that all the same things should al­ ways cause in him the same appetites and aversions; much less can all own consent, in the desire of almost any one and the same object” (L, 40–41). Biological necessity in the individual necessitates, counter-intuitively, the immediate, fragmented, ad hoc responses of the community; that is to say, biology supports the primary rhetorical canon of appropriate response, kairos, quod decet. But Hobbes, if anything, undervalues our capacity for timely, appropriate response. Hobbes, and Aristotle, and Cicero, establish a linkage between individual and social incapacity; indeed, singular pas­ sions constitute sedition (L, 63). Consent to others’ desires is unnatural, or naturally difficult. At the same time, instability fosters a bitter persistence; passion are “infirmities so annexed to the nature both of man and all other living creatures” as to be hindered only by “extraordinary use of reason or constant severity” (L, 284). And again, the insistence on the shared in­ capacities of men and animals is a strategy of authentication; it is a sharp insistence on the “state of nature,” not historicized as a primal situation, but recognized as a persevering, distressing qualification of all political life; it is our perpetual limiting condition, the condition of possibility for political act. Amos Funkenstein has argued for the purity of this construct of nature in Hobbes in its function as a “limiting case”; as limiting case it constrains the constructors of the state to difficulty; Hobbes’ Leviathan then becomes a possible solution to gross difficulty.23 Here, arguably, Hobbes is post-skeptical; or, perhaps, it is a kind of Ciceronian, methodological skepticism. One could compare the skepti­ cal function of the first trope in Sextus Empiricus’ Hypotyposes; the rich definition of natural animal capacity limits the claim for purely human capacity. What we share is employed to distinguish what is proper, since

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definitions are powerful in so far as they are exclusive. Skeptical theory places human capacity as shared with, or limited in comparison with, ani­ mal sensitive capacity.24 Just so, Hobbes uses the innate, natural sociability of bees and ants to address the contests, the failures of artificial expedients of covenants in dealing with our passionate pursuits of honor and power (L, 125, 15–17). Thus Aristotle’s discourse of animals, and Hobbes is aware that it is embedded in the Rhetoric, justifies rhetoric as the encompassing, though inadequate, verbal art, authenticates political problematic as bio­ logically grounded, and sets parameters of natural difficulty for political possibilities of artifice. Rhetorical possibilities are poised within animal necessity; the Hobbes­ ian tendency is to stretch the account of natural conditions of possibil­ ity as far as it can go. For Hobbes’ political situation is even more labile than Aristotle’s; Hobbes offers not snapshots of contests of different stable opinions, but continued mutation, continued obduracy of the emotional states of both individuals and individuals-acting-together. Those engaged in the act of deliberation contend in an ever-changing context of stubborn emotional states; the protagonists are intricated in a constant dance with occasions of nature—kairotic, temporary obligations. We have remarked the continuum of sensitive and cognitive elements in the Aristotelian defi­ nition of the passions as elements which cause differences in judgement accompanied by pain or pleasure (1378a19–21). Hobbesian politics is a continual negotiation of passionate alterations. Consider the pervasive­ ness of references to the destabilizations of fear in Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes’ definition, “fear is aversion with opinion of hurt from the object” (L, 43), is very close to Aristotle’s “pain of disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future” (1382a21–22). Or, fear can be stabilizing response to alteration; indeed, if anything, Hobbes raises the stakes of Aristotle’s dictum: “Fear causes men to deliberate” (1383a6–7), by intricating fear with seeking sociability (L, 88), and with law and liberty. Consider, again, the odd, rough Hobbesian formula: “Fear is that which inclines man least to break the laws” (L, 284), and his claim that fear is consistent with liberty when men act voluntarily “out of fear” (L, 97). In all of this, of course, “voice” counts: here passions are possibili­ ties we undergo, suffer, as well as seize. Funkenstein has remarked the inventiveness of Hobbes in mediating nature (faculties and functions) and culture (the conventional imposition of names).25 Yet, a rhetorical focus tends to exaggerate rather than palli­ ate, mediate confrontations. The insistence on continuum of sensitive and

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cognitive elements is at the same time an insistence on complication and complicity. Hobbesian passions, as the source of difference, are in the first place temporal differentials, mutations transpiring in time in the living creature. Passions in the second place are mutations named, functioning as ideologies, that is to say, affixed by our language habits to our natures in ways which are, on the one hand, resistant to further mutations, and, on the other, always in reaction to others’ naming practices, and both causing and responding to primitive motions of the soul. Thus Hobbes’ formula­ tions: in persuasion, passions raise opinions; in instigation, opinions raise passions (HN, 75). Passions are a response to the difference of opinions provoked in turn by passions expressed in the assembly (L, 340). For Hobbes, passionate bodies furnish the source of difference, but the con­ ventional names solidify as they channel differences. At the same time, the arbitrary descriptions of their interpersonal range and intensity may so­ lidify, but not stabilize differences. Again, Hobbesian reciprocity foments difficulty: Hobbes insists on passions, virtues, vices, justice as named (L, 115–16), and insists as well that passions diversify, destabilize names (HN, 26). “Social construction” of virtues and vices is not simple, direct, but a product of reciprocal, sometimes edgy, transactions. Thus Dumouchel notes the “performative” nature of Hobbes’ initiative: the attribution of an emotion to someone is itself an action, not simply the description of an internal state.26 This action encloses, dominates moral-political defini­ tions, for Hobbes claims that passions in themselves are no sin, they are named sin; neither justice nor injustice have any existence outside a social naming; neither anger nor fear have any valence but a social valence (L, 114–16). Thus Hobbes shifts the discussion of emotions to a discussion of politically intrusive transactions— calling people names and responding to name-calling, that is, being represented as emotional. Do we, then, have any natural possibilities of virtue? What I am contending is that pessimism is competence; Hobbes’ se­ vere account of transactive incapacities of the political actor not only con­ tributes to what Dilthey called Hobbes “impetuous subjectivity,” but also enables an extraordinarily innovative revision of political possibilities. Human Nature presents a unified field of difficulty, where there is a strong connection between aesthesis (sensation), rhetorical strategy, and political expedient. The value of the rhetorical organization for Hobbes is that it addresses contiguous, but very different capacities and states that interact in complicated textures of choice and necessity. Hobbes, more so than Ar­ istotle, perhaps, integrates physiological and dialectical definitions of the

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passions to shape a hermeneutic extraordinarily sensitive to dysfunction, and in such a way as to exclude rigorously a range of concepts of political possibility. Hobbes goes well beyond the Machiavellian initiative, which has been described as the consideration of politics given the condition “du caractère radical et irrelevable du mal général,” to specify the benefits for political thought of an inclusive psychology, one that presumes the intrica­ tion of passion and perception, passion and principle, passion and law.27 The taste for impurity, the rejection of simplistic moralism, is all to the good.

Hobbes and Rhetorised Argument . . . this place is not for the whole art of logic, which if I enter further into, I ought to pursue; beside, it is not needful, for there be few men which have not so much natural logic, as thereby to discern well enough, whether any conclusion I shall make in the discourse hereafter, be well or ill collected . . . (HN, IV, 21)

In practice, this “natural logic” amounts to topical argument that rheto­ ric shares, to be sure, with dialectic.28 What I am arguing now is the pecu­ liar suitability of topical argument to develop the mode of possibility; or, conversely, that a proclivity for possibility focuses the Hobbesian topical strategies for use. Rhetoric’s theoretical insouciance (untouched by a de­ sire for system) and technical analytic ingenuity operate in the domain of variables that generate possibility, possibilities that the topics attempt to control. The earliness, or quaintness of Hobbes’ modernity lies in his dependence on available, Classical rhetorical forms of reasoning, and, in particular, on the topics. Rhetorical invention is topical inquiry; topical inquiry discovers uses of general terms, usages of principles of argument for the theoretical political account. But, still, the political theory is not put forward as immediately usable, practical in politics. Topical organiza­ tion is simply the best account of political experience, describing, most im­ portantly, the basic symmetry of motion and emotion in political beliefs: describing an obdurate, resistant entanglement that must be mastered. Thus where Thouard claims an opposition or contest between “ge­ ometry” as natural philosophic procedure and “rhetoric” in Hobbes, the remarkable unity of Hobbesian tone would suggest that there is coopera­ tion, not tension, between rhetorical topics as discovery procedure and geometry as sufficient syntax of unequivocal definitions.29 Rather than

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geometry vs. rhetoric as the contest of skills corresponding to the work of the mathematici, who pursue certainty, and do not produce contest, with that of the dogmatici, who deal in a contested domain of opinion (HN, 73–74), it is the case that geometry is a topic. It functions as a very large topic, rubric, storage bin as source of maxim and argumentative form, en­ thymeme. Geometric relations simply present its principles as topical rela­ tions— of antecedents, consequents, contradictories—in a simple, clear, orderly manner (L, 45).30 Hobbes most certainly is engaged in his work in stabilizing terms for use in his propositions (HN, 28–29), terms to be linked in arguments, but his terms are topics, and their source is “common wisdom.” The many quite technical accounts of topics and topical inven­ tion in the dialectical/rhetorical tradition—for this is an issue where the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, becomes somewhat clarified (1354a1)—show, in general, that topics as technique is coordinate with the “natural logic” Hobbes attri­ butes to his readers in justifying his decision not to give a refined account of syllogistic; their natural logic, he is asserting, allows them to judge the inferences of civil discourse; topical argument as public, accessible tech­ nique proffers both the terms, the primary definitions, and the simple strategies of the deliberations of the polity.31 As context of Hobbes’ natural logic, the contemporary use of topical argument, a competence very widely diffused, even entrenched in the in­ vestigative habits of Early Modernity, reflects the perverse richness of the topical tradition.32 Topics as inventive faculty is most certainly a major source of argument in its linkages of maxim, sententiae, enthymeme, ex­ ample. Cicero claims that topics are both logically and chronologically prior, that is, “natural”; the topics “. . . ad usum potior erat et ordine naturae arte prior.”33 Cicero contrasts the places used by the dialecticians with those used by the rhetoricians (Topica, XIII, 53–XIV, 57), but topics may ally rheto­ ric and dialectic; when B. Cassin points out that philosophers have rivals who falsify their work—those in the practice of eristic, orators, sophists, demagogues, and dialecticians—she links rhetoric and dialectic as oppo­ nents of philosophical aims and methods, and in so doing, pointing to a very wide domain of argumentative practice that surrounds philosophical systematizing.34 Certainly the tactics and definitions are very common and very intricate. Topics as the lines of argument drawn from the predica­ bles— e.g., whole, part, differentiae—are the source of many enthymemes (incomplete syllogisms); Stump claims that the point of Aristotle’s Topica

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is simply to familiarize us with the predicables. But topics are the rubrics of arguments which gather maxims, as well as the maxims neatly derived from the predicables: thus the topos “the more and the less,” which func­ tions not as “commonplace,”—stereotype in our contemporary notion— but as a line, principle of argument. Special topoi are based on premises (1358a1117–20) as well as the source of premise-parts of enthymemes (1358a10–35). Cicero collapses enthymeme and sententia: “omnis sententia proprio nomine enthymeme” (Topica, XIII, 55); the enthymeme is maxim as well as argument. And topics are called “inference warrants” by Otto Bird, “something under which many enthymemes fall” (Rhetoric, 1403a17–18).35 And Jaeger describes a Hellenic rhetoric where the logic of proof is but the servant of a new conscious act of psychologically influenc­ ing the listener; thus it would follow that the topics that encompass many enthymemes attend not simply to the logical aspect of the enthymemes but the emotional and moral resonance.36 All this complication of terms and argumentative syntax is perversely liberating; it illumines the textual strategies of Hobbes, and enlarges our sense of his capacity for variation, the easy availability of possibilities. The central interest, and competence, of the topics, however, is in the task of connecting general to particular: and, again, the topics specify a very com­ plex web of relations, a complexity, however, of an easy redundancy. The commonplaces are arguments of relationship (of definition, of genus and species, of substance and accident, etc); topics are both the names of the bins storing, classifying lines of argument and maxims, and the contents of the bins—maxims condensing principles of almost indefinite argumenta­ tive reach. There is a double relation of general to particular, first in the relation of the loci as lines of argument to the maxims, and second, in the relation of maxims to specific use in arguments; topics derive some of their strength from formal argumentative tactics, but also engage the speaker/ listener in a heavy social network of habits and beliefs. The use of topics requires recognizing their force and selecting the application; it is a politi­ cal act of discriminating possibilities of definition and intervention. Above all, topics are most specifically public, accessible; topics serve dialectical-rhetorical argument which functions within the realm of the community’s shared wisdom, not in the domain of the subtle mysteries of refined inquiry.37 The topics arrange the endoxa, the shared opinions, of civic negotiations; there is no such thing as esoteric political wisdom. “Common sense” is both source, the shared values of great generality of the community, and it is an expedient, a competence in enunciating a

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specific relation which will connect perspicaciously political values for effect in public discourse. A rhetorical topic appreciates judgements produced by an inclusive, not specialized community, by the everyday discursive interactions of the community at large. Topics provide, then, a guide in the hunt for the useful generalization in the particular case. They, above all, deliver suppleness. There is a strong connection between top­ ics as rhetorical discovery procedures and decorum as rhetorical rule or canon, asserting the primary value of “appropriateness” to person, time, place. The topics present the technical support for decorous strategies, strategies that shift for the occasion, suggest possibilities, while drawing on common sense. What is of particular interest for considering modality is the perspica­ cious emphasis in Theophrastus’ definition of the topos where he stipu­ lates topical range as indeterminate: “the topos is a principle (arch�) or element, from which we grasp the particular principles, of determinate form, but indeterminate (aoristos) with respect to the individual matter.”38 We could use this distinction to contrast dialectical and rhetorical interests in the topoi; the dialectician’s emphasis is on the determinate principle and the rigor it offers, the rhetorician’s responsibility is for the indetermi­ nacy as ineluctable context for his task. Certainly for political theory the need to respond to an indeterminate range of particulars is vital. Politics demands novelty, new possibilities; occasions stretch into an indetermi­ nate future. Thus the political theoretician, as Hobbes knew well, was con­ stantly forced to search for innovation and articulation of novel response to depressingly enduring factors. Or, Hobbes’ use is both dialectical and rhetorical; he is using dialectical topical invention to stabilize the general terms of determinate form he is using in his account of politics, but only in order to take account of the indefinite reach of rhetorical topics in po­ litical uses, and its obdurate problems.39 Still, common topics as at once the forms, principles of argument, and the maxims, content of argument, offer a closed circuit of activity, a simple, graspable competence of inclu­ sion. Common topics are not special topics of special sciences; they do not offer special subject matter, science (1358a10–35), but simply tactics of including, subsuming special subject matter. The peculiar gift of Hobbes­ ian inquiry is subsumption of the particular without erasure, and equally without falling into a naïve empiricism. One is less convinced that Hobbes possesses the practical political tal­ ent for deliberation, the talent for relating the determinate endoxa, the shared opinions of the community, to the fluid, indeterminate particular­

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ity of events and then persuasively affirming, denying, changing opinion. The historical reception of Hobbes, in its variety, raises the question: what possible response did he seek? The strong topical inquirer is supposed to seek a specific, idiosyncratic relation of general to particular, a reciprocity of mutual modification, enrichment, of general topics by specific use, or, he may attempt a revisory rereading of specific occasions by invocation of an “edgy” generalization—(this edginess Hobbes does seem to have a tal­ ent for)—a kind of clever oscillation encouraged by rhetorical habits. The coherence of the political rhetorician is not a coherence of system, but of constant, ever-recurring, unremitting effort. Consider the Hobbesian investigative practice. The Human Nature con­ tains a tissue of topical arguments, some taken from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, about the capacities, and incapacities, for interaction, for speaking and hearing; these are recognizably topoi, in the sense of sounding like max­ ims, somewhat distorted sententiae. The topical elements both explain our usages, and are claimed to dominate practices. But Hobbes’ distortions hint that, disguise them as we may as moralistic aphorisms, judgements, we must recognize their (his) asperity as qualifying our moralistic use. Note, for example, the distance between the Aristotelian topos, “rheto­ ric is the appearance of politics” (1356a27–30), and Hobbes’ definition of “eloquence” as “seeming prudence” (L, 79); the shift in focus is from the status of a discipline to the operative presentations of a virtue; this is a change of register that limits the reach of ethics while it questions (ora­ torical) performance. It is crucial, however, to see engagement with modality as often a strik­ ing conflation of the issues and difficulties of politics as practice with the issues of political inquiry. The brilliance of the Hobbesian initiative is that it puts at risk traditional accounts of practice by, simply, replacing them with the topics of his own investigative practice; the primary topic of the Hobbesian text is Hobbes; it is a reflexive concern with the strategies of definition of possibility. Consider the passionate topics. If Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a compendium of Hellenic political wisdom, Rhetoric II antholo­ gises political passions. Hobbes has derived from Aristotle a sense of the importance, explicit or implicit, of the habits of naming passions and of the effectiveness of named passions either in the implicit belief-context or ex­ plicitly in the self-presentations of the speaker and his appeals to audience beliefs. Since the passions, as topics, are already organised for use, the top­ ical diagnosis is immediately integrated into his account of discursive ac­ tion, there is no intermediate stage of analysis, no speculative mediation.

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Anger is defined as “the appetite for overcoming present opposition,” and therefore when anger is named, assigned to discursive exchange as this ap­ petite, it functions to change a political situation; a topic covers both the constraints of historical context and the rules of investigative competence, reach. The passion terms are grounded in a psychological realism, that is, in a description of the structure of transactions, a social realism. Thus Aristotle on the requirements for naming “anger” in argument: the orator must understand the specific social parameters: anger against whom, why, in what frame of mind (1379a10–11). The stabilized term, anger, must al­ ways refer to specific employments in a transaction. There is no such thing as a “free” passion, that is to say, a private possession, state of mind.40 In the topoi, the passions’ names are at stake; they furnish a political matrix of contestatory language. In this, political-topic passions are basic motions causing changes in judgement; attributing passions is a discur­ sive tactic of change; they are not outside politics in a natural philosophy, but inside political action. Thus the topics preserve the passions in their deliberative space. Hobbes makes us confront, not passions transform­ able into rational self-interests, but passions unreconstructed, preserved as polemical counters to be used in naming, and thus provoking, modify­ ing response. They are not neutral concepts, but contentious, contending statements, and this is a part of their usefulness for our possible responses to the intractable indeterminacy of politics. They have an edge, but the edge merely emphasizes, underscores Hobbes’ ambition for stipulating “common” force in negotiations. A topical practice such as Hobbes’ makes some intriguing assumptions about the receptivity of the 17th-century audience. In rhetorical theory, the vital linkage is between loci communes and sensus communis, between the maxims as articulated principles and the source of principle, common sense, shared opinion, endoxa (or Vico’s unreflective judgements!), of the community. Hobbes’ insistence on the conventional source of meanings is less an initiative of philosophical Nominalism than an insistence on the power and responsibility of community sense; moreover, the theory of topics, indeed, of rhetorical argument in general, places considerable emphasis on the competence and responsibility of the common audience to take account of the topoi. And thus again, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and not his Politics or Ethics, is a compendium of Greek political wisdom. Indeed, the linkage of topoi and common sense blocks intrusions, abstract, system­ atizing interferences by academic sodalities, interferences deleterious to political theorizing as replacing natural motives with their irrelevant, scho­

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lastic rationalizations. To be sure, the sodalities produce their own, very bland, topoi; but here we must juxtapose Hobbes’ claim to philosophise with the absence of, or, often, the critique of, recognizable philosophi­ cal rubrics in his work. In a sense, Hobbes insists scholarship is not civil. Thus his comparison of civil hindrance of covenant—injustice—with its analogue in scholastic disputation—absurdity (L,119). In civil society an injustice is sine jure, a self-contradictory hindrance; in scholastic practice, self-contradiction is unimportant, merely an absurdity. And thus we can read Hobbes’ critique of the absurdity of the philoso­ phers’ attempt to distinguish perception from passion in their parsing of “to see and fear a lion”; the phrase most certainly describes a single event, and thus the distinguishing reading contravenes common sense’s support of the interpenetration of sensitive and affective, mechanical and emotional.41 A topic as both principle (content) and principle of argument (form) places a peculiar reliance on sensitivity to type of usage. Unless it is “common sense,” shared use, it has no value. The invention of possibility has sharp limitations; innovation lies only in the stretch and fit of the argument, as de­ terminate and whole, to the specific situation of the indeterminate range of civil affairs. And, Hobbes is not distressed by the gap between the asperity of his topics and our moralistic disguises of topics, because he is convinced that our transactions are based on, while they may obscure, common sense, or, at least his own lucid version of common sense. For, there is a difficulty. Loci communes, topics, are certainly rooted in sensus communis, common sense. But Hobbes has a quite low opin­ ion of our grip on common sense. His attribution of a “natural logic” to his audience seems to leave us with a vexing question. Hobbes wants to convey to us a clear notion of the status of the terms he uses in sentences about politics; his aim is accessibility. But, he seems to want his argument accessible to an audience he addresses in an almost dismissive tone. In a rather subterfuging way, Hobbes seems to regard his audience as not up to his argument. This dismissiveness is rooted in his pessimism. In this respect Hobbes’ sense of the grasp and use of commonplaces seems to run counter to an important tenet of the rhetorical tradition: the competence to make various specific calls on listener participation is a major source of the strength of rhetorical argument. Indeed, the Classical texts state that it is the listener, not the speaker, who is responsible for the effect of the argument; this suggests a political phenomenology of great interest.42 It is difficult to resolve what Hobbes would judge to be rhetorical suc­ cess with an audience he distrusts. And, it seems dubious to attribute to

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Hobbes primary, serious interest in his own rhetorical techniques since his definitions of receptive capacity undermine any communicative op­ timism. How much participation do the Hobbesian arguments allow the reader? Do the topoi, when they depict incapacity, question, rather than elicit listener capacity? And, certainly, Hobbes’ dismissiveness nourishes our suspicion of Hobbes as interlocutor; how do we attribute the character of geometer to so cranky a speaker? Yet, it is certainly the case that topics may define to a degree Hobbes’ 17th-century audience for him. Topics were, once, a pervasive, entirely internalized, in the sense of taken-for-granted, technique. The topics are so “ordinary” as to be almost invisible, so useful that they were irreplace­ able, not to be ignored or displaced. Ann Moss describes in The Printed Commonplace Book the Renaissance practice of compiling commonplace books for the public or in private as a highly stylized mode of rhetorical inquiry, and excerpting topoi as a widely diffused habit of action; she notes the practice was fading in the late 17th century, but it was by no means ef­ faced, even in the 19th century. The commonplace book represents a most peculiar intersection of the topic as dialectical line of argument— defini­ tion, genus, property, etc—and the topic as maxim, rhetorical exemplar. The topics as, simply, headings, rubrics of the pages of the book join the lines of argument with compiled lists of authoritative usages, classical tags; it juxtaposes strategies, i.e., comparison, with masses of classical pithy saws; the books could be guides for either schoolboy shortcuts or erudite pretension.43 They also raise an issue; do commonplacing habits represent a disdain for context—anything is grist for any of your mills— or does it evoke a fascination with the energizing effect of decorum, the act of appropriat­ ing to give meaning in a new context of use? Certainly this preconstituted audience is reconstituted by Hobbes. The use of the topic can be tropic; Hobbes can create new relations between common (as traditional) sense and occasional employment; he can change—and he does with his asper­ ity—the fields of force.44 Hobbes’ sense of the fragility of his audience appears in his career choices; except perhaps in the Behemoth, he does not intervene rhetori­ cally in specific, recalcitrant political discourses; he finds the recent history of political rhetoric fairly appalling. Yet, in his theoretical work, Hobbes’ own rhetorical strategies of address suggest the kind of audience and the kind of effect he attempts to secure. Where do we locate this audience? Hobbes has harsh words in the Behemoth for the political idiocy of the

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university elite, and, in the Dialogus physicus, for the coercive practices of the clerical elite that banished him from England, the political-clerical elite that banished him from France, and the Greshamite and Royal Soci­ ety sodalities that excluded him from their discussions.45 Hobbes’ strate­ gies indicate he wants an uncoerced, general, but perhaps unaccomplished audience. And Hobbes’ “natural logic” as a topical logic, addresses noncoercively. Topical reception is as well uncoerced because in the topics, in the relating of determinate generalisation to indeterminate occasions, the reception itself is necessarily indeterminate, a broad band of witnesses, participants, in an open-ended continuum of incident, occasions. One can call rhetoric either relativist or open-ended, of course; but the attribute of fluidity suggests not only inquiry in motion but reception of inquiry in motion; surely this flux stipulates the domination of the modality of pos­ sibility. The difficult obligations of relating determinate generalization to indeterminate range of use is all to be done over, and over again, by the uncoerced audience. The Hobbesian strength is that he can make a gen­ eral, accessible tactic, available even to the minimally educated, even to a modern, clueless audience, into a strong aid to subtle argument. Topics are simply listings of recurring arguments, and premises and modifica­ tions used in arguments. It immediately embeds the listener in a network of present, at-hand constructs. The topics are assumed to be so basic that they shape the refined arguments of the metaphysicians; yet they are so diffused in the rhetorical formation of a 17th-century audience that they help Hobbes exploit a wide range of pervasive attitudes and, at the same time, embroil them in a strenuously innovative program. Commonplaces represent common sense, but Hobbes’ common sense is wildly provoca­ tive, and his provocation serves to counter coercion. “Provocativeness” is precisely what is “rhetorical” about his topoi. This explains, I think, why the tags and rubrics of the history of philoso­ phy, employing the terms of the philosophical schools of the 17th century, are of very little use in giving an account of his work. Richard Tuck has claimed that Hobbes’ political interest is “late”;46 this certainly fits with the priority of his natural philosophical concerns, but it fits as well with Hobbes’ supercession of the traditional philosophical schools’ rubrics; his central interests develop after he has discarded the rules. Hobbes lacks the credentials for a true-blue Nominalist: his work is permeated by the psychologism which is strongly opposed to Nominalism in the standard account. To be sure, an excessive Nominalism has been attributed to him: power is power only in the exchange of signs of power; power is relative—a

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signifying excess over your opponents’ signs of power. But surely Hobbes is realist at some level; physical force is not simply a sign, it curtails the ef­ fect of words (L, 128); victory is more than a sign, it is blood. There exists not simply a semiology of power, a map of structural relations; words work in a network of passions, motions, and yet words can manipulate, intrude in this domain only in a limited way. Another philosophical rubric can be used gingerly: Hobbes’ work is certainly post-skeptical, but his skepticism is a Ciceronian, rhetorical one, a use of eliminative debate, in utramque partem, rather than Cartesian hyperbolic doubt.47 And, his “geometry” as “the only certain science” does not at all function within the traditional, available philosophical discourse; his avowedly geometric definition of writers of politics as those who “add together pactions to find men’s duties” is about as unphilosophic a phrasing as one could contemplate (L, 30). Hobbes’ provocations, the anti-scholastic outrages, however, help us understand Zarka’s claim that the actuality of Hobbes 17th-century re­ ception is bad reception.48 But is not this “bad” reception precisely the reception Hobbes wants, or needs, for his political theory to succeed in its severely revisionary task? His definitions, especially the redefinition of the political subject, Zarka insists, are strenuous efforts of inflection, warpage; above all, the texts must be seen as “porteurs d’interrogation”; and, Zarka seems to admonish us not to lose their questions. Of course, the definition of terms “with geometric certainty” for Hobbes was the foundation of science (L, 23–24), but we have noted two important qualifications, critical of philosophic activity: first, he associates the creation of bad terms, the insignificant sounds that have no referents, and self-contradictory definitions, such as “incorporeal substance,” with scholastic dysfunction, philosophical professionalism (L, 27; he cites Cic­ ero, 33). Second, the terms must be fixed, stabilized, but stabilization is only possible in the context of an argument, in relation to the persons using the terms; yet philosophers make exasperatingly durable mistakes in their ambitious attempts to transcend the limits of their arguments, transcend, indeed, the disgusting political actuality. In contrast, topical argument, in its concern with common beliefs and the shared body of his­ torical interventions has both the commitment to actuality—the mass of accumulated acts of the community—and the flexibility of its simple, in­ genious organization of topics to respond: to pose possibilities, then, as an analytic system of variables as a valid, adequate account of actuality.49 Hobbes’ rhetorical map, or topology of the passions, reorients, rather than stabilizes, or perhaps reorients before it stabilizes, the argument. It is a

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basic map of cause, motive—“indignation” is “anger for great hurt done to another” (an altruistic passion, perhaps) and of initiative effect: “anger” is “sudden courage,” an access of force; of course to qualify “courage” with “sudden,” thus temporary, thus evanescent, is a highly rhetorical provoca­ tion (L, 43). The rhetorical map raises possibilities of combinations, al­ terations, contestation of the components of policy that sharply define the civil body. The strategies of the deliberations, interactions are, in effect, putting into play affective possibilities, valences. The aphoristic “anger as sudden courage” is a possible explanation, that is, a variable offered to measure the force and direction of an actual intervention. The topology, indeed, maps an “impetuous subjectivity.” Thus, Hobbes’ connections of the terms of passion with the stock terms of political philosophy—liberty, justice, reason, nature—reorder these basic elements of the Classical account. Fear advances in value; liberty retreats; liberty and fear are consistent, they can reinforce each other. Yet fear, counter-intuitively as a state of undecidability, stabilizes: of all the passions, that which inclines men least to break the law is fear; and fear, as Aristotle said, as a disposition to anticipate troubling signs, can initiate deliberation, where the freedom of indecision can be the source of fruit­ ful discussion. Exceptionally fruitful, liberating when eliminative: Hobbes’ definition of deliberare in the De homine invokes the Ciceronian debate “in utramque partem.”50 The agents in philosophical scenarios, “will” and “judgement,” are relegated to the status of initiatory disposition and rhe­ torical, decorous competence. Cause, effect, values are rearranged; liberty applies to bodies only (L, 197); liberty is condition of possibility, not spiritual savor; politics serves biology; peace, conservation of life, not freedom or justice is goal; in the first section of De cive, “libertas” deals with process, not end. Carefully, dereification, as essentially a rhetorical habit of relating value to use, less­ ens the drag of philosophical non-reference; Hobbes has a penchant for using grammar to query reifications as, for example, in the various shifts from verb to noun, from gerund and participle to thing, entity (L, 25). En­ tities become adjectival, mere qualifications; manners are thus “the quali­ ties for peace and unity” (L, 85); natural law, like fear, is a “quality that disposes to peace and obedience” (L, 253, 285). With the rhetorical focus on speech, usage, not language, political qualities are “social,” aspects of exchange; justice is a social quality, not a faculty of mind or body (L, 115); injustice is self-contradiction in exchange; the self-hindering in political negotiations of contract is very like a philosophical absurdity. In Hobbes’

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usage “conscience,” one of the most confused usages in the contemporary politics and theology, becomes, simply, etymologically, co-science, shared knowledge (L, 53), demystified, useful. Then, reason, as not a natural vir­ tue, but an accomplishment, the result of industry, can also be a dangerous facility: in the Dialogue on Common Laws he sees the individual’s appeal to his own reason in a case of law anarchic; also, he defines the condition of war as the domain where “everyone is governed by his own reason.”51

Possible Agency and Possible Plot All this is in aid of just two basic rhetorical investigative impulses: the redesign of agency and thus of the agent’s potential, possibilities, and the complication, the rendering fluid, of plot, the projection of alternate scenarios. Certainly, Hobbesian political rhetoric problematizes the ad­ dress to the “rational will” of the person of the Classical citizen-hero. But Hobbes’ consuming interest in the definition of sovereignty, the sovereign redescribed as “collective personhood,” represents another remarkable attenuation of Classical theoretical interests. The account of politics that specifies that true political capacity operates only within a collectivity de­ nies capacity as mine or yours. We shall see similar resolutions of collectiv­ ity, of the personal into the impersonal, in Vico. Further, sovereignty is not a priori, not a given, but a product as well as bearer of process; it does not precede, but arises out of process. Sovereignty is essentially “authorised will,” “a new jural, not moral situation,” endowed with a special kind of open-ended authority as the power “to legislate, potentially on any aspect of life, for the whole community.”52 And further, “authorizing” is very like a persuasive, rhetorical function; the founding act is a persuasive as well as forceful opportunity. The mutation of all the key terms follows: “social contract” is a sub-species of authoritarian, that is, initiative, founding acts. And “natural law” becomes simply a proclivity, a disposition, a collection of “qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience” (L, 212). Then, a great deal of Hobbes’ speculation concerns not politics as de­ liberative activity of the Classical account, but sovereignty as rubric of political force. Rhetoric’s sharp focus on process reveals, paradoxically, that much of “political” life is apolitical, not the freely functioning delib­ eration and negotiation of Classical republicanism; the apolitical initiates, interrupts, and dismisses the political; it specifies deliberative impos­ sibilities. Rhetoric also analyses “mere” rhetoric, gives a full account of

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dysfunction as well as function, and, describes the discursive exercises of sovereignty. The reductions—the sovereign is soul, is life, is motion of the commonwealth is again a dereification; sovereignty is not so much en­ tity as carapace, vessel, person as in persona, officium, to be filled with historical usages; it is defined by a constellation of functions of the being of a state, with depressing timely qualifications as a mortal body, with an artificial eternity (HN, 159). Its monopoly of power, which is at issue, is hedged about by the qualifications of life, thus death. Sovereignty is not described as an ideal government but as a necessary organic function; it is not tricked out in the traditional language of regality, not described in parental metaphors of love and obedience, legal values of moderation, equity.53 When Hobbes speaks of sovereignty, he discusses authority. The con­ text of the writing of the Leviathan is, according to J. G. A. Pocock, a tissue of structures of authority; the English Revolution is about the dissolution, then reconstitution of authority; Hobbes’ authority is the product or pos­ sibility of political process, but is not itself “political” as process, activity.54 In describing Hobbes’ work, I would argue, we can use “authoritarian” as a simple, neutral adjectival derivative of authority; apolitical is simply privative: it refers to a domain where political activity does not take place. Hobbes’ focus on sovereignty as unique, solid, homogeneous or as dys­ functional, untrue is a proper focus on the massive presence of the apoliti­ cal in the mortal state since simple authoritarian functions are apolitical; the discussion of sovereignty describes how much is not explained by the use of the optimistic republican scenarios. The reach of “authority” limits the reach of the political as the open practice of discursive negotiation described by Cicero; Cicero most certainly describes an ideology of politi­ cal practice; he also describes meticulously the mechanisms of its decline and failure. In Hobbes’ account the dominance of authority structures and authoritarian process assumes a corresponding absence of politics, and a corresponding, skeptical sense of the capacities, possibilities, and acts of failure. Rhetoric exhausts politics, but there is not much politics to exhaust. Rhetoric is essential to the analysis of politics, but a great deal of Hobbes’ specific descriptions of actions is the diagnosis of political inadequacy, negative potential. Again, rhetoric accounts for politics by virtue of its biological assumptions; rhetoric postulates the pressure of physiology on psychology, and psychology on the psychology of address. Hobbes’ psychophysiological description we have cited above of deliberation as the

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oscillation between aversion and desire becomes the basic template for political practice, a template that sorts and underlines the natural mechan­ ics; it encases the acts of counsel and advice, and of political deliberation in general, the negotiations of public utility, for conservation of life (HN, 74). The template stringently limits useful possibility. Note the qualifications in Hobbes’ account: first, deliberation puts an end to the liberty of doing or omitting; liberty is simply the by-product or condition of inconclusive action; second, the alternate succession of desire and aversion is, indeed, only biological, beasts also deliberate; third, the model exposits the concept of will as merely the last appetite or aversion, an act, not a faculty: thus beasts also have will. Fourth, and finally, delib­ eration is an oscillation of passions as endeavors, initiatory, the beginnings of voluntary motions (L, 49). Voluntary, as passionate, lacks the penum­ bra of rationality of the philosophical account of will as rational appetite, without passion; the deliberative model evacuates the will as, only, a basic disposition; voluntary is, simply, not involuntary, i.e., not digestion. Most importantly, the biological model of deliberation explains con­ tract, and, of course, scholarly accounts of Hobbes tend to start with contract as the most basic, primordial action of Hobbesian theory. But contract is simply a version of a more basic activity: “the matter of a covenant” is always something that falls under deliberation: “for to cov­ enant . . . is an act of will, that is to say . . . , the last act of deliberation; and is therefore always understood to be something to come; and which is judged possible . . .” (L, 126). Contracting is not so much a rational consent as an initiatory closure, the expressed final passion of an oscillation, the annulling of liberty not to close: a done deal.55 Once again, we see negative capacity: passion as socially defined endeavor of the living being supplants intention as interior mental state as initiatory act; and, of course, passion­ ate activity falls under the competence of rhetorical description, rather than moralistic namings. The oscillation model is obviously time-laden, and thus the political process is quintessentially timeful. Politics, political practice, can be ad­ dressed as a string of connected, or disjointed, deliberations, of course “mutual” deliberations and their closures, responding to the needs of the state as creatio continua.56 Society is a continuing effort; fear and its reac­ tive responses may generate deliberation, but do not constitute a steady state. Hobbes’ “dire straits” makes the case for the artificiality of politics stronger; politics is defined as the necessary, direct contention with both artificial and natural differences, alterations; this, recall, is Meyer’s basic

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definition of rhetoric as capacity. Hobbes does not propose a thick positive description of natural group actions; the time frame of covenants, con­ tracts is determined by the needs of the state, in its continuous creation. Again, the “state of nature” is not a specific, historical, originary event, but a fiction of a continuous parameter that constrains and limits all politi­ cal activity, a condition of possibility. Thus, in Hobbes’ biological/rhetorical effort the value of the rhetori­ cal organization is that it addresses adjacent contexts and contiguous capacities and states, both those oscillating in a biological definition of an individual’s deliberations, and those of mutual deliberation, where rhetoric delineates a complex web of relations of dependence, interactiv­ ity, continuity, persistence, and negativity. Mutual deliberation requires reciprocal acts; mutual acceptation is essential. Consider Hobbes’ mode of impossibility: “[to] make contracts with brute beasts, is impossible; be­ cause not understanding our speech, they understand not . . .” And, “To make covenant with God, is impossible . . .” because, without mediators or lieutenants “we know not whether our covenants be accepted” (L, 125). For Hobbes, the object is to fix terms within an argumentative practice, fix the relation to a user exchange. Again, the emphasis is on the mutuality of political negotiation; a contract that is not an exchange, not mutual, is a “gift, free-gift, grace” with a strained, unreliable significance for politics (L, 121). Hobbes can start from the psychological givens of the individual human life, without slipping into the error of constructing an individualist politics. Then, while Hobbesian definition strategies imply the positive value of rhetoric as an accommodating discipline, rhetoric affirms negativity. The deliberation model undercuts naïve eloquential claims; rhetoric prejudices eloquence. His inquiry intimates that we may not have a natural propen­ sity for deliberative democracy; our discursive capacity for deception and absurdity place these activities at risk. Chapter 25 of the Leviathan is a tour de force of rhetorical analysis of group/individual relations; it de­ scribes assemblies as amplifying speaker’s particular passions, and the in­ trusion of counselors as laminations of particular passions on oscillations of group desires and aversions. His rhetorical psychology, the basis for his sensitivity to rhetorical impossibilities, is a source of his acute political pessimism. Consider the hair-raising qualification when he describes the motive of the one who gives a gift as “to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion” (L, 121). Hobbes, like Aristotle, is “sophisticated” in the sense they both take up the Sophistic fascination with civil dysfunction,

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rigorously excluding a range of political ideals, contradictions of biologi­ cal givens, impossibilities. The dissolution of the role of citizen-participant and of the confronta­ tions of the vital temporal dimension, evanescence, of sovereignty affects plot. Because of the insecurities, rhetorical insecurities of deliberation, Hobbes’ possible solutions are more or less a list of necessary inadequa­ cies of political process; the enclosure of necessity by possibility is telling. Of course the tactic of social definition of agency is crucial for his specula­ tion. The socialization complicates exceedingly the traditional, moralist justification of political acts. The flexibility of his argument is manifest in Hobbes’ strategy of multiplication of plot. Hobbesian psychology, be­ cause pessimist, does not support moralistic simplicity of plot, motive, but stimulates multiple considerations, expands opportunities for failure, and remarks the necessity of inventive plots to deal with negative capacity. Hobbes deploys a range of counterfactuals to design the factual. Con­ sider Leviathan II, c. 17, his preliminary account of the bases of political activity. His explanation is a series of lists of explanatory conjectures. Thus, first, everyone has kept the laws of nature: 1) when he has the will; or, 2) when he can do it safely; or, 3) if there is no power erected; or 3b) no power great enough for security. Then, consider his statistical model of a “multi­ tude”; (recall that agency is collective). It is composed 1) not by small num­ bers, but small additions; or, 2) it is sufficient when odds are not so visible or conspicuous. Also, 3) a multitude with particular judgements is vulner­ able; or, 4) a multitude can be mutual opposition; or, 5) a multitude can be internal war. The rest of the section continues to pose possibilities: for “if we could suppose” consent in a multitude, “then consent in all,” “then . . . no need for civil government.” A remarkable use of counterfactuals. Or if bees form a natural polity, why not men? Well, because of 1) competition; 2) eminence; 3) pride; 4), language; 5) injury/damage; 6) the opposition natural/artificial. A range of variables describes a range of incompetence. Aristotle’s basic concepts of motion and fulfillment, kinesis and energeia, here inform rhetorical plenitude as well as philosophical simplicity. And just so, in Hobbes’ speculation, modality liberates: multiple scenar­ ios, alternate plots stipulate no simple explanatory narrative. The plots are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but, when coexistent, certainly incon­ sistent, indeed jarring, in a perspicacious manner. Hobbes looks towards Hawthorn’s tentativeness: social science’s modest method is to situate ac­ tuality in a range of possibilities; or, perhaps, he is projecting multiple determinisms in multiple plots of possibility. This in turn qualifies political

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speculation as open-ended, and not a simple-minded task of constructing coherence; the major qualification is uncertainty; that is to say, counterintuitively it projects “freedom,” not determinism. The expansiveness of the Hobbesian account lies, in great measure, in its amplification of negative capability, potential, possibility. Hobbes’ asperity tends to stretch the diagnosis to include more possibilities, and, in particu­ lar, dysfunctional ones. Further, the Hobbesian command of negative ca­ pacities becomes a skill in mapping impossibilities and necessity. Still, the curious effect of Hobbes’ appropriation of the Aristotelian life-­metaphors is to describe a negative potential defined as in motion; and this tends not, at the same time, to expand the realm of determinism. We seem to find Sorabji’s notion of the disjunction between necessitarian premises and de­ terminism. The figures of motion, e.g., deliberative oscillation, inform the scenarios. The invocations of expansion, contraction, reduction are in play, and work interactively to complicate the political account. The effect is to break apart the coherence, stability, and order of the physical model, especially where it serves as the model for political agency. Breaking re­ veals divergent motions, the sources of political problems, but, as well, the sources of good as well as bad possibilities of civic activity. Expansion, in short, leads to sophistication in assessment of chance for peace, away from indulgence in moralisms, towards austerity of formulation. All this illu­ mines what is at stake in rhetorical inquiry with its proclivity for possibil­ ity; it raises the issue of the status of “posing” possibilities as a speech act; “posing” has the illocutionary force of intrusion, querying, in a discussion. And Hobbesian expansion, the inventive dysfunction of the construct of “Leviathan,” for example, is certainly irritating. For Hobbes’ investigation, the “bad” reception is desirable reaction; the intrusiveness suggests a pos­ sible political act within the Peircian community of inquirers. But this returns us to Buchanan’s focus on the use of possibility as pri­ marily an investigative strategy. Hobbes’ modal concerns invest his most basic premises: thus the peculiar qualifier of Hobbes; he mentions that speech is distinctive of the human: “for aught I know it is” (L, 28). Speech is so necessary, so central to political process—(recall the “impossible” contracts with animals and with God)—that Hobbes chooses to claim its specificity; but, then, places the distinction in parentheses: it is a possibility. The issue for Buchanan is the adequacy, validity of the possible as “vari­ able whole” as the analytic equivalent, the measure of the actual as indi­ vidual whole (97–98). Buchanan illumines Hobbes when he claims that our great scientific systems are not genuine knowledge, but mere possibility

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(100). His strong point is the paradoxical inaccessibility, opaqueness of the actual; it will always contain more than can be exhausted by any given kind of analysis; this implies that “chance is in this sense a radical feature of ex­ perience . . . [and that] [t]his indeterminate is often called contingency and confused with possibility” (104). Chance is irradicable; possibility focuses attention on political work.

Vico: An Alternate Scenario “[Hobbes tries] to enrich Greek philosophy by adding a great part which it cer­ tainly lacked . . . the study of man in the whole society of the human race.”57

Vico, of course, did not “use” Hobbes, but he extends the severe Hobbesian critique of the traditional Classical account of political values and activities to develop a new science of startling novelty; it is Vico, more than Hobbes, who elaborates a rich account of the “whole society”; and it is Vico, rather than Hobbes, who treats “wholeness” as both essential, and, in the large, passed over in Classical political philosophy. The truly signifi­ cant, and truly rhetorical shift in Vico we find in the opening paragraphs of the New Science that announce Vico’s secession: here he claims his topic is “civil things,” cose civili, not moral, morali. The proper topic is the whole of society, and thus the history of nations cannot be a simple extrapolation from an account of individual values and actions, an account which can de­ liver merely “private illumination” (NS, 5). The claim inverts the Classical strategy that assumes a moral philosophical foundation for politics, the ab­ solute priority of moral inquiry. But this stipulates Vico, like Hobbes, must redesign political agency and thus political possibility. There is no Vichian interest in large choices, heroic acts of the individual protagonists. We note the lack of proper names, the eschewal of narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions in the New Science.58 There is no Julius Caesar, no Augustus, no Pericles. The prominence in the text of mythic, not historical heroes simply engages the issues of the origins of civility. Achilles is not a proper name, but a possibility of role which explains a pre-civil situation.

Possible Agency This is not a minor stylistic choice, but a consequence of one of his deep­ est commitments, a commitment, I will argue, to the “impersonal.” When

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Vico begins the “Introduzione dell’opera” with the statement that his in­ terest is in the civil, not the moral, he replaces the moral with the civil; the emphasis is on the civil as not moral (NS, 5). Impersonal glosses civil, but impersonality functions on so primitive a level of mode and issue in Vichian inquiry that it recalls R. G. Collingwood’s “absolute presupposi­ tion”; in the Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood attempts to specify the “metaphysical” property of absolute presuppositions as so fundamental, so controlling of inquiry program that the assumptions are rarely either articulated or recognized: never questioned, never verified, never even stated.59 Vichian impersonality is an orientation to the discovery of com­ mon capacities, communal actions, so basic that it needs no articulation. Or, impersonality can be characterized as a Peircian “belief” that gen­ erates “habits of action in inquiry”; this is a belief-practice homologous with other Vichian practices, the habit of selection of foundational ritu­ als, or the focus on the natural progress of metaphors, or the resort to “common sense” as explanatory. The priority of the civil stipulates direc­ tion, valence of the investigative exercise; the civil may illumine moral possibilities, or, rather, their limits; to reverse the direction of the exercise produces only tautology, stasis, necessity. Or, impersonality is a critical, contestatory gesture: the habit of the impersonal is anti-personal, reject­ ing moral/individualist issues and evidence as distraction, generating only private illumination. Impersonality tempers, corrects individualism as doctrine while refining our sense of human potential. Certainly Vico’s discovery of poetic origins as master key of his disci­ pline depends, according to Max Fisch, on an anti-essentialist position: individual men do not possess humanity as essence, rather, we observe men in groups become humane, or civil: the developmental sources can only be primitive: “robust ignorance,” “corporeal imagination” (NS, 34, 338).60 Thus Vico insists that civil motives cannot be read as moral ra­ tionalizations, as a tissue of personal intentions and decisions. Indeed the peculiar un-didactic tone of the New Science is rooted in part in his rejection of the Classical moralist offer of wisdom, the personal delivery of personal skills of prudence of the Classical texts of the “solitary phi­ losophers” (NS, 130). We find behind this, again, an antagonism to the philosophical habit of refining the epistemological model as personal, solitary, seeking a pure, isolate cognition, the base of the rational—and the source of the “other minds” dilemma of Vico’s opponents, Cartesians. Rather, the new science requires the rhetorical complexity of re-cognition, a concept that will, as we shall see, have a rich Modernist development. Of course, there is still another Early Modern parallel, with Hobbes’ denial of

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emotions as private states of mind, his insistence that emotions constitute social being. There is no possible profit, for Vico, to attempt to ascertain Achilles’ personal intentions; this would contribute to moralism, not new science. On the other hand, the civil requires at every juncture, alteration of human affairs, attention to shared beliefs, “common sense,” to basic, that is, embodied, capacities; to actions as concerted, perhaps opaquely so. “Impersonal” thus redesigns political potential, possibility. Impersonality is not simply an assumption or value but invests and defines a pervasive practice; it is the “tone” of the civil discussion, and the absence of that tone would render the New Science an entirely different project. What I now argue is that the impersonal invests, energises the pervasive, yet diffuse, presence of some specific rhetorical capacities and habits of action in in­ quiry in the New Science, that is, those particular habits that validate civil interests. Recall that the originary Classical rhetoric as a mode of inquiry was civil inquiry: Heidegger restates this when he claims Hellenic rhetoric transpired entirely inside politics. Vico has no difficulty, then, in modifying his university-pedagogical commitment to rhetoric; what he achieves is a re-invention of an archaic rhetorical method for his genetic study, his exploration of the archaic. Of course, the material as well as the method of Vichian inquiry is “Classi­ cal”: it is ancient Italy, Rome, more particularly the texts of Homer (as more serviceable than Virgil?) and of Roman law, more particularly still, the anticipations and Nachleben of Roman law and customs. Classical rhetoric contains a series of premises, argumentative strategies, and for­ mal investigational interests that both define and refine the notions of civil behavior. Rhetoric as a “life-science” is perfectly suited to the analysis of the impersonal as the devotion to “life,” to basic and shared biological capacities and acts, as well as to civil facta, shared inventions—Vico’s cus­ toms, institutions, traditions, “fragments of antiquity” (NS, 525, 354–57). For, first, rhetorical premises specify the impersonal as embodied; rhetori­ cal dispositions, for Vico as well as Hobbes, bridge the biological and the civil. Vico’s interests in civil history are genetic, seeking the birth, origin (NS, 18). Rhetorical interests in producing and analyzing civil discourse employ a Classical psychology of generation: an interactive continuum of interactive faculties: sensation, perception, imagination, intellection, memory. Rhetorical psychology asserts the corporeal as bedrock of civil process; or, succinctly, not counsel—consiglio—but nature served provi­ dence in civil origins (NS, 532). In Vichian early stages the impersonal is

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coterminous with the corporeal— early stages, of course, which will be encapsulated in later ones. Further, rhetorical capacities and habits of action in inquiry specify the impersonal in another dimension: rhetorical strategies of argument, topical argument, validate the impersonal; they deal with the common­ places — the principles of argument and the maxims they generate—as the rubrics of common sense, the shared opinions, Vico’s belief systems of unreflective judgements of civil communities. We note, for example, his use of the topos, in the sense of principle of argument, “the One and the Many,” in his congettura ragionevole that the many place names of diverse “genti” articulate one originary meaning: civil as impersonal substantiates one, single investigation producing a unified body of civil results (NS, 527). Vico has, so to speak, a rhetorical sensitivity to the use of common, shared sense in social processing, of the habits of action generated, and of, in par­ ticular, the fault lines, inconsistencies, ironies in the employment of topoi. Topical processing can be a source of anti-political habits: Vico describes the slide from assertions of shared maxims to the delivery of cruel judge­ ments of non-sharers, exclusionary motives. Topoi are common, and, of course, corporeal: Fisch’s introduction to his translation argues “a wholly corporeal imagination” as the Vichian source of primitive poiesis; this is surely a rhetorical proclivity for continuity of capacities; thus Vico’s stipu­ lation of an originary sensory topics, topica sensibile (NS, 495): as Fisch points out, of topoi “with the immediacy of feeling rather than the discur­ siveness of deliberate inference” (NS, K5n).

Rhetoric and Legal Possibility The texture of the New Science is a web of common beliefs, customs, dis­ positions, rules that inform the range of civil actions. Vico’s invocation of cose civili is etymologically significant: it points to his research com­ mitment to the Roman civitas, rather than the Hellenic polis. One may hypothesize that this counters the Classicist political philosophical senti­ ment that “Romanness” is less worthy, moral than “Greekness.” And here it is perhaps useful to consider Vichian modernity in the light of the work of another, Modern student of Rome, Ronald Syme; his work offers mas­ sive erudition, but erudition organized by a reflexive perspicacity, a refine­ ment in assessing possible strategies in Roman inquiry. At one point in The Roman Revolution, his account of that profound shift to Imperium in

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Roman politics, he discounts the worth of the study in changes in political theory, or of the perennial appearances (or non-appearances) of politi­ cal maxims. Rather, what he claims to be of real “historical” worth is the establishing of the identity of agents in the political process. Establish­ ing of identity becomes, in part, the description of group identities; the creation of Augustus’ role is as head of a revolutionary party, and the political (a-political?) process is a result of complex, persevering factional interests; in short, a preoccupation with entities—nobiles, novi homines, equites, plebs, the colleges and sodalities of religion and law, the gentes— very like Vico’s.61 The connection of moral capacity and political activity is problematized; Syme may call a protagonist detestable, but the detest­ ability is not described as a controlling factor, it leaves only traces of con­ sequences. Vico glosses Syme by intimating that “personal intention” is of lesser civil interest: simply derived, a reflection of event; perhaps a pure fiction as afterthought. Vico’s strenuous questioning of the possible iden­ tity of Roman agents develops a notion of “impersonal” as categorically shared. The obvious, and important point is that the depiction of group identities multiplies, complicates possible motives, strategies. Most certainly Vico exploits the huge depository of evidence con­ stituted by Roman law, a law resistant, according to the Romanist Alan Watson, to the colonisations of Greek moral philosophy.62 Neither Hobbes nor Vico consult Cicero as Greco-Roman republican theorist. And while Vico pays less attention than Hobbes to the “rhetorised psychology” that delivers pessimism, Vichian method is, basically, the rhetorical-legal her­ meneutic to be found in Cicero’s rhetorical texts. In the New Science Vico does not mention, but uses rhetoric; his work shows mastery of the very wide range of specific terminology and argument available. In the Ro­ man rhetorical manuals, by far the most attention is devoted to the legalhermeneutic strategies of forming argument; in the New Science a very large proportion of the evidence is the product of the historical use of this rhetorical-legal hermeneutic in legal practices.63 The felicity of his pro­ nouncements on the legal contributions to the history of civil institutions and practices derives in large part from his brilliance in integrating legal thinking with political thinking. Vico takes advantage of the fact that the Roman rhetorical manuals and the Roman legal texts offer us two different, but very specific, very precise, perspectives on civil capacity, potential. Roman law presents a very large data-base of Roman legal activity, and the rhetorical manuals offer generous instruction in invention of argument as the explorations of

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the topics of status and causa; the manuals describe the legal-oratorical exploitation of a range of possible narratives for possible arguments for possible civil solutions in the confrontations, claims and counter-claims in private/public cases. How useful to have Cicero’s manuals for exegesis of Cicero’s practices! It is this domain of formulaic legal processes that reveals for Vico the origins and development of Roman civility, of the Roman state. It is, indeed, an incredibly rich domain of possibilities, realized or unre­ alized, but critical, suggestive, contesting. Rhetorical and legal hermeneu­ tics both assume the constant, pervasive, aporetic linkages of formulaic rules, shared beliefs, with particular instantiations. When Crifò argues the correspondences between legal and rhetorical hermeneutics, he points to the tactics of legal work where the common, shared, generic meaning of the law dominates the interpretation of the particular case; the individual, particular is always overridden by the supra-personal concern for the law.64 Rhetorical and legal hermeneutics assume the constant, pervasive linkages of formulaic rules, shared beliefs, with particular instantiations; the goal of the practice is to preserve the continuity of the law, and the sense of corporate (does Vico etymologically meld corporeal and corporate in his theory?) identity of the polity.65 And, of course, for Vico “impersonality” as constraint, as selective of shared opinions and dispositions, is not in the same semantic field as “objectivity” and “abstraction”; these pertain only to the terms and syntax of argumentative operations. The “impersonal” is active in the domain of life, not logic. We have already observed in Hobbes’ case that the Latin Classical rhetorical texts, Vico’s professional interest, dwell on rhetoric as deeply obligated to the psychology of continuum, on rhetoric as addressing the motus animi, the motions of the soul as embodied, intricated with our life-­motions, thus impersonal. Political rhetoric addresses the issues of as­ sertion, alteration, change of beliefs; the stimulation or repression of dis­ positions, habits of mind. The motus animi, or “modifications of the mind” (NS, 331), constitute the essential material of the science as motions, as genetic development, as “natural progress,” as reiterations. But this in turn suggests that the very large scale corsi and ricorsi of the Vichian civil ac­ count as collective actions, biologically figured, are not at all submissive to teleologies as ideologies, certainly not to the impositions of telos by author’s narrative. Rhetorical choice is not simply Vico’s professional allegiance; a strong rhetorical concern for topic and issues precedes, underwrites civilhistorical choice; the corsi and ricorsi represent long-range impersonal

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forms of action by impersonal potential. There is a fascination for that which can be related to the most basic, most primitive life functions and events. The earliest, simplest, most “bestial” stages of the Vichian corsi are the most powerful explanatory paradigms. The Vichian correlative formal­ ism is an acutely refined, reduced notion of political experience as motion; but there is no attempt to define motion or emotion as subjective, private states of mind, internal scenes; Vichian formality, like Hobbes,’ is public; and he recounts public exchanges of motion. Perhaps it is Hobbes’ physi­ calist emphasis on formal motion that motivates Vico’s sense of Hobbes’ civil philosophy as the only precedent for his own New Science. Consider as well M. Papini’s gloss, his suggestive qualification of 17th-century interests in motion in his insistence on the Baroque as defined by the assumption of conatività, on motion, bodily initiative as self-sufficient, autochthonous; conativity, strenuously impersonal, singles out, for Papini, another aspect of the theoretical purity of formal motion as Vichian context, and glosses Vico’s civil narrative of the corsi as elementary life-cycles and their reitera­ tion as reflective of a general vitalist strategy (NS, 340).66 The consideration of the Baroque context, then, suggests the elegance and selective power of the impersonal as Early Modern orientation. The impersonal as commitment, however, is not simply reinforcing of Vichian goals and methods; the impersonal as presupposition has a con­ testatory function as well. The impersonal proves to be a factor in the rhetorical-modal program of critique, in the use of possibility as adequate, critically adequate, account of the actual. It corrodes the traditional affili­ ations of the Early Modern recipients of a Classical formation with the Classical moral texts, considered as esteemed purveyors of personal moral choices, for Vico, the texts of the “solitary philosophers,” the Stoics and the Epicureans. Very large credit must be given to the Vichian program for its abstentions from the tiresome repetitions of thread-bare moralism which tend to intervene at most junctures in Renaissance and Early Mod­ ern political or historical texts. And in Vico’s narrative of his “twenty years labor” of the discovery of the originary force of poetry as the masterkey of his science (NS, 34, 338), impersonality functions as corrosive of authoritative prose, critical of the current scholarly treatise-delivery of sustained argument as capable of adequate replication of early develop­ mental modes. The New Science is a web of specific choices, defining and rejecting the inadequacies in argument, the untrustworthiness of treatise accounts of development. For Vico, development requires representation as a “natural progress” of metaphor, the figurative historicized.

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To be sure, the New Science, in its difficulty, seems to possess either too much organisation—we note the over-use of the “Three Ages” to classify a huge amount of diverse information— or too little organization—the text presents a clutter of narratives, linkage obscured, of wildly varying length and specificity. Yet by the initial distinction, the choice of “civil” consistently contests the “moral.” If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercriti­ cal of the moralistic initiative. Vico’s program is a rejection of postures, tactics that foreclose possibility. The difficulty of the individualist moral program is that it is reductive, falsifying of complexity, variation in pos­ sible explanation. In asserting that the account must give the one, unique plot of the unique agent’s cause and effect, motive and action, it reduces the possibility of action to that one unique plot; or, asserts that any other plot must be essentially the same plot, not even, perhaps, a version. Or, wrong. On the other hand, the impersonal obligation corrects the personal reduction which reduces agency to that of a self, a self-consciousness, con­ sciousness, reason, spirit, soul, person, persona. Assuming the unity of the unique apperception as capacity of the unique self, persisting through its lifetime, badly muddles civil agency. At the same time, Vichian initiatives foster possibilities, attending to diversity rather than theoretical tidiness. Possibility is a domain, as a “vari­ able whole” where variation is essential to the analysis of the actual as opaque, and historically difficult of access. Here Vichian impersonality, subversive of the personal as homogeneous goal and practice, fosters an array of possible versions of civil practices. Individual actions constitute all of history only in the most trivial sense. Capacity and action are not only biological, embedded in a continuum of animal/human faculties, but they are embedded as well in a continuum of irreducibly social, shared, poten­ tials and social activities. Like Hobbes, Vico can employ the “biological” elements to extend civil insight; a psycho-physiological account of capacity does not constrain him to a pious moralism of capacity and action. The text presents not simply a clutter of narratives of legal practices that illumine the shifts in civil strategies for preservation of identity of the nation or state, but employs a range of (primarily rhetorical) techniques for articulating a range of possibility. We find the use of lists of topics as suggestive in function, inviting comparison; the use of counterfactuals in legal argument—a practice Vico taught—becomes the template for the use of competing narratives of legal practices to illumine the range of Ro­ man strategies for securing legal order, political perseverance. The use of fictions, versions in law in the Roman past illustrates for Vico the Romans’

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taste for possibility, for posing alternative scenarios for the maintenance of Roman integrity of identity. To be sure, the use of fictional dialogue, or antilogy, in the Thucydidean vein to express what the protagonists “should have said,” a use that admits gaps in actual, retrieved discourse, is quite sparing in Vico and Hobbes; yet the narratives of speculation take their place; we recapture the deliberations Hobbes claimed transpired in the subjunctive voice. And finally, the peculiar, and peculiarly intelligent use of irony by Vico serves to give another, possible version of affairs, a version that contradicts, even, the protagonists’ versions, reasons offered in a com­ pletely different tone of voice. The fetching of the civil out of the pre-civil is often not only unwitting, but undeserved. Vichian judgements are pre­ sented with reticence, but the flawed, the ill-motivated are recognized. Still, the technical variation in Vichian narratives should enlighten: the inquirer at home in the realm of possibility is, probably, at ease with the possibility of conflict, and able to find the possibility of conflict as clarifying, useful. The Vichian project represents a very large effort in redesign of in­ quiry as a whole, and we must consider the function of impersonality in Vico’s reconfiguration of research values, an activity concentrated, in my view, in the redesign of the relation myth/history. Vico, in insisting that the proper materials of the Homeric texts are “sensi volgari” and “volgari costume” (NS, 781)—“raw, villainous, ferocious, fierce, mobile, irrational” (NS, 787)— dismisses abstraction, philosophic glosses on personal moral­ ity, dismisses not only the moralism of Homer’s readers, but the moral­ ist persona of the author “Homer” (NS, 837). Vico predates the acute methodological skepticism of F. A. Wolf, and asserts the text’s value in recuperating a lost, strayed, but formative heroic society.67 The novelty and strength of this redesign is described by default by Bernard Williams in his intriguing chapter, “What was wrong with Minos?” in the collection, Truth and Truthfulness.68 Williams’ project is to give a thick account of the values of truth and truthfulness as issues in, among, other things, politi­ cal philosophy. Williams in this chapter, starting from a querying of using Minos as evidence by Herodotus — a peculiar statement of Herodotus, questioning the use of a “mythic” figure, as not, he says, “of the human race”—argues that the vital transition from mythic to historical explana­ tion is defined by Thucydides’ contribution; the movement to history also represents a crucial investigatory progress in Hellenic, that is, Western, inquiry. There is nothing surprising in Williams’ omission of Vichian no­ tions of myth as history in the Whiggish account of progress from fiction to fact; we should point out, however, that Vichian mythic inquiry is not

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a naïve re-capitulation of pre-Thucydidean modes of explication, but is, rather, post-historical, it corrects the narrowness of historical “rational” accounts. It is distressing, perhaps, to contemplate how much Vichian strategies could have helped Williams in his program of defining a useful history of politics; truth to the rescue of civility, so to speak. Vico’s mythic inquiry is an inclusive variant of historical inquiry, certainly not fitting in, rather, prejudicing a Whiggish model of Modern progress. Myth-ashistory employs myth as evidence; myth vs. history must disdain the use of fiction as fact. Vichian impersonality, however, enables a new competence in seeing the possibilities of myth as evidence. Myth is critical, corrective of the standard historical narrative by means of its details, the small, decisive markers in the mythic fables of types of capacity and action, details that yield perceptions of general, impersonal processes; thus the fable of Ata­ lanta revisits the patricians’ strategies against the plebs: concessions can found victory (NS, 653). Vichian fables express historical attitudes, char­ acterize both motives and ironies of specific social tactics; they also con­ tinue the work of L. Valla in the destruction of the standard, personal, Christian/Classical ethical fable opposing free will to determinism; I am arguing that, in part, the dedication to the modality of possibility energises this “impersonal” attack. Vichian myth, then, delivers a thick narrative of impersonality; his his­ torical program is an inventive Classical formalism of corporate (corporeal and community) entities, expressed in corporate motions, changes, transi­ tions. Exemplary of its diagnostic power is the revision of the definition of the “heroic”; the exposition of tactics of violence as anxiety, of strategies of subjugation as expressing verbal scrupulosity, problematizes the entire heroic corpus as it was often used in the Renaissance and Early Modernity as historical source for early Greece. Another, contrary, gloss: the visual culture of the late Renaissance and Baroque, in its multitudinous retrievals of the Classical images of gods and heroes, presents us with constant tech­ nical negotiations of the representation of the typical with the individual, the impersonal archetype with “personal” telling idiosyncrasy, of Hellenic archetype with the aspirations of a contemporary historical personage. Myth presents a god or hero as “impersonal” agent, but dressed, perhaps, in the trappings of an eccentric personality; divine revenge played by the all-too-human. The art, and Vico, present the heroes as aporiai. But Vichian strategies offer as well a critique of critique; these strate­ gies are impersonal in their stipulations of very large groups in motion, the

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gentes, as revealing the important structures and processes of civilizing. By the simple (phenomenological?) strategy of bracketing-off the history of the experience of the Hebraic gens, Vico saves the vital transitions in the history of the Gentiles, the other nations of the world, from Christian hermeneutics. In Vico providence functions primarily as remote guarantee of the perspicacity of a narrative of motion. There are certain Vichian ac­ commodations—the Gentiles are post-diluvian strains—but there is not much “pious” about Vico’s divine providence. More than this, the Vichian invocation of providence can be seen as situating skepticism as simply one of many current strategies in an armamorium of techniques: Vico, per­ haps, liberates us from liberty, from the untoward effects of Early Modern libertas philosophandi, and thus from some of the reductionist theories of the Enlightenment rationalist program, frightened by religion. There is another critical effect of Vichian formalism: his impersonal political premises work to de-aestheticise form and rhetorical form, re­ ducing form to “style,” and thus diminishing its capacity to define the civil. Certainly Vico’s rhetorical assumptions are closer to Heidegger’s descrip­ tion of Aristotelian rhetoric as political, than to the reduction of rheto­ ric to eloquence and eloquential concerns of Early Modern, and, indeed, Modern rhetoric. Williams, in another chapter of his Truth and Truthfulness, attacks H. V. White’s rhetoric as too narrowly defined as, merely, elo­ quence. It is intriguing that Williams, in his discussion of White’s claim for rhetoric’s control of historical narrative, makes a more interesting case for rhetoric than White: rhetoric rescues thought (242). There is a rather deli­ cious symmetry: Williams makes a strong case against White’s rhetorical theory of history-writing by singling out White’s reduction of rhetoric to poetic in his explanatory paradigm: White’s historian as primarily literary, a poet, master of figure. Vico, on the contrary, uses rhetorical premises and procedures to describe poesis, poetic process as generic “making” in historical development, thus specifying an inclusive task of defining ranges of civil possibilities. But there are strong positive effects of the Vichian redesign: “imper­ sonal” allows Vico to distinguish a contrarian strand of political theory and practice. The impersonal glosses not only “civil” but “possibility.” The impersonal is oriented towards a descriptive formalism of raw, pow­ erful agencies, dispositions, habits, motions: all capacities as shared, or interpersonal. It simply negates the paradigmatic possibilities of certain scenarios: thus his stigmatization of solitude as not ethically viable. As a personal possession of a pure, simple space that constitutes non-civil

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space, it invents a prison of psychic deprivation, disabling the social, that is, the humane. Vico thus places and relegates the philosophical literature of wisdom and personal prudence to the solitude of spirit and will; teach­ ing private prudence loses any relevance to his science.

Possible Plots Still, impersonality as canon is inclusive, usefully designating a range of kinds of potential agencies and plots. Thus myth is employed by Vico as the archetypal genre of archetypes of impersonal agency in an exagger­ ated sense. The capacity to extract structure and process from the mythic material is a formalist capacity to describe the “impersonal” motions of society-in-movement; employing rhetorical techniques of representing motus animi in effect rejects articulate justifications and expressed ratio­ nalizations in order to focus on the oscillations, contests of raw potential, of failed capacities — on unintended consequences, in short. It delivers archetypes of impersonal agency of intrinsic interest to political analysis, as expansions of the reach of the civil. It validates as well radically differ­ ent narratives of civil process. Thus the impersonal is essential to, permits irony as theory of, cause and effect (NS, 38, 342). For irony as Vichian historical paradigm describes collective actions and collective results, and it has little resort to, it undervalues, personal intention, will, reason, decision.69 To be sure, irony has its place in Vico’s methodology as the fourth trope; but this is the trope of commentary, reflection, and is un­ like metaphor as a mode of unreflective judgements of the gentes; it is an investigator’s reflection on the unreflective, in short. As a singling out of unintended consequences, it obviously becomes a way of accounting for the hair-raisingly unpredictable generation of the civil from the uncivil, of bringing something from nothing, taming contingency. Irony is a sophis­ ticated tactic for dealing with possibilities, as a double commentary on contingency as double possibility, that which could have been otherwise, that which, indeed, was thought to have been otherwise. There is, to be sure, a melancholic tone: formal motions illumine prim­ itive, raw motions, capacities, incapacities, producing irony; and the af­ firmation of the civil often involves a moral pessimism, underlining the inadequacy of personal capacity and action. Yet, probably the most posi­ tive effect of impersonality as orientation is the undermining of the cult of personality in politics. As an account of collectivities, it subverts a range of

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overly optimistic definitions of agency, falsifying naïve notions of politi­ cal effectiveness, possibility. Would it be possible to make a claim for Vich­ ian inquiry as usefully criticizing our contemporary political inquiry? Or is Richard Sennett a Vichian? For Sennett, the “cult of personality” is the fatal flaw of both liberal and anti-liberal models of modern political theory and practice. He speaks of two tyrannies of intimacy, two denials of the reality and worth of the impersonal life: “the extent to which people can learn to pursue aggressively their interests in society is the extent to which they learn to act impersonally.”70 In modern politics, the cult of personal­ ity in state leaders is simply the obverse side of the coin, the recession of public interventions on the part of the populace, where turning off the television becomes the “only” political act. It is, on their part, a deep re­ gression into the personal and private. Sennett questions as well, however, the Habermasian formulations of the impersonal as “public”; the growth of the “public” domain is the growth of a domain of publicity of expression on the part of a society which is opposed to, critical of, the public power of the civil body—a flawed sense of civil action. Certainly, one gets the impression that, while the cult of personality may be of immense benefit to a politician’s career, it can have only contingent, accidental benefits for policy. The cult fosters accounts of intentions, using personal narratives which are more or less equivalent to the narratives of intentional fallacy in art criticism which attribute intentions to animals and landscape. The focus on intentions leads to a very natural assumption that all political candidates are fatally flawed. In contrast, the inquiry of the New Science disputes the extraordinary preoccupation of the Classical formation with personality, and the political analysis that substantiates the cult of person­ ality; indeed, personality is a negative potential, possibility. Certainly “impersonal” is a primitive allegiance for Vico; but Vichian method is inclusive, expansive in its use of rhetorical capacities. Vico ex­ ploits the fact that legal arguments have a peculiar modal status; it is the case that the legal claims and counter-claims assert their versions of the necessity of the past; yet, only one can possess this necessity of the past; both cannot deliver actuality; both, in argument, are possibilities facing the denial of the court. Only one will win. And, finally, Vico’s very heavy engagement with etymology is in itself an exploitation of the connections between “power,” “potential,” and “possibility” embedded from the be­ ginning in the Classical grammatical exploitation of the relation root /deri­ vation.71 Because the Roman jurisconsults controlled the arcane words, they possessed an arcane power that can be ascertained retrospectively. In

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his early legal text, the De Constantia, Vico offers a very large array of the practices that actualized the potency of words for civil intervention. Again, Vico, like Hobbes, is preoccupied with alternatives, with the modality of possibility, and not simply in the notions of agency, but in the narratives of actions. The legal texts and the rhetorical tactics prof­ fer multiple scenarios, an array of strategies: in effect, “political” strate­ gies of negotiation of differences. Thus legal fictions propose alternate protagonists as well as possible revised justifications. And, again, the Ho­ meric plots are coordinate with the legal scenarios, disturbing Classical philosophical solutions, diminishing their range. His combination of myth and law as source has greatly enriched and stabilized myth as evidence. His coordinate treatment of myth and law as evidence of common beliefs, dispositions, rules presents conflicting possibilities. There is no point in a political theorist describing republican virtue in a non-Classical, non­republican polity. Homeric heroism is not a Vichian option, but a strongly revised, alternate narrative, explaining early institutions and processes.72 Vichian heroes perform in an adjacent, a “possible world,” illumining a plausibility. At the same time, plots are simply proffered; the tentative plots are distant from, remote from Vico’s addressees’ judgements. Each offer of a possibility is a request for comparison, contrast; each posing requires a civil response, which may, however, not be linked to any civil practice: another possibility. Both Hobbes and Vico are deeply learned in Classical thought; but Vico’s Roman Classicism produces an idiosyncratic account of rhetorical modalities investing narratives of pre-civil activity. Similarly, he produces the ingenious account of his Homeric heroes’ ca­ pacity as tightly constrained by their verbal scrupulosity, a constraint that has the ironic consequence of generating civility. Hobbes has not an ironic bone in his body. There are two texts, chapter 11 of the Study methods of the Time (De nostri temporis studiorum ratione), and the Autobiography (Vita scritta de se medesimo), that offer Vichian glosses on his New Science. Chapter 11 gives us, in essence, a possible program in law, and reflects the aspirations of the professor of rhetoric to become a professor of law. Vico’s whole legal career transpired in an “adjacent world” of programmatic texts; the fissures and slippages of his own career perhaps motivate the strong em­ phasis on slippages, fissures, discontinuity in Roman and Neapolitan legal theory and practice. It is a narrative of historical cross-currents, conflicts, resistances to philosophical colonisations, ironies making homologies of the natural, the pragmatic, the moral impossible; the end Vico proposes

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is the oxymoronic “systematization of an art.”73 In chapter 11, rhetorical and legal interests in both academic and forensic engagements are both an opposition and an intrication, replicating the untidiness of the originary Sophistic-rhetorical relations. The Autobiography, his personal narration of the discovery of the “civil,” is a memoir expositing his impersonal sci­ ence of the genti as personal accomplishment. And memoir as genre is exceptionally inviting to rhetorical analysis: the antecedent models for the investigative form suggested by M. Fumaroli for Descartes’ Discourse on Method or by A. Battistini for the Vita are gratifyingly diverse, and pre­ sent a range of possibilities for (authentic) inquiry, a range exploited with brilliance. For Fumaroli’s Descartes the “nude” Commentaries of Caesar balance the introspective exploration of accountability of St. Augustine’s Confessions.74 Battistini balances as source the Cartesian Discourse— for Vico a false genre displaying a flawed inquiry—with the Life of St. Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit genre of “spiritual exercises”; both inform the Vita as exercise, as actualization in progress of inquiry possibilities. But unique. Battistini characterizes the Vita as “personalissima e inimitabile.”75 In the memoir form there are linked immunities; it assumes the incorrigibility of the narrative as non-representational (what could be our basis for question­ ing the personal acts of “showing”?) and posits the inimitability of the life nar­ rated. The presupposition of memoir rhetoric is purely Heraclitean: the life depicted cannot be done over again . . . The memoir-inquiry not only attempts to foreclose errors, unusable orthodoxies, but also redefines success as isola­ tion, and this defines the reader/interlocutor, in his isolation, as capable of dis­ covery—his own, “timeful,” decorous. The isolation topos holds not only for the speaker but also for his audience; the antipathy to authority invalidates the speaker as authority.76

Most “personal” is most anti-authoritarian, most subversive of academic discipline; every act is a juncture, a heartfelt, necessary choice that is antinecessitarian as program; here again Vico breaks the Classical linkage of individualist moralism with civil study. The proclivity for possibility informs yet another investigative connection, posing a different inquiry community, informing it with an incoherence, a sense of idiosyncratic au­ thority, an authority that qualifies a reader’s obligation to respond; for the memoir, of all genres, is needy of response. The necessity imposed on the reader/inquirer is to go it alone, generate his own possibilities.77 The

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Vita was every bit as problematizing of academic authority as the New Science. Vico was, then, extraordinarily sensitive to what we could call research possibilities. The New Science editions of 1725, 1730, and 1744 are at times distressingly disjointed, and show Vico’s devotion to the continuous pro­ posal, alteration, and replacement of his plots. What is missing in 1744 that was present in 1730 could be termed a range of possibilities, unrealized (Aristotle’s anti-necessitarian interest), or realised no longer. The absence of the 1730 Practica readdresses, or denies, the issue of the relevance of theory for practice, for this is the brief text where Vico connects his “con­ templative” New Science to “active” human prudence. Cristofolini, the editor of the 1730 edition, points out in his introduction that Vico gave in his “Correzioni” where the Practica appeared neither instructions to suppress it, nor to publish it.78 And, in the changes in the account of the supposed Greek origins of the Roman XII Tables in all three editions, we see changing versions of the famous three stages, or three ages of gods, heroes, and men and their transformed replications: to attribute Greek origins to Roman law would confuse a developmental model. Cristofolini characterises the Vichian investigational disposition as “cinematic”; Vico has a proclivity for shifts, and shifts at times abrupt, disruptive, as well as concatenated, sequential; all of the shifts are designed to elicit meaning; all of this remarks his sensitivity to developing research possibilities.79 The different treatments in the editions tell us Vico is attempting a novel kind of explanation. They illustrate the difficult sentence in New Science 446: the three ages, which define chronological periods, at the same time rep­ resent three kinds of human capacities, and arise “simultaneously.” This is not explanatory pluralism—an environment of equal opportunity—it gives no sense in which the possibilities are compatible or even compa­ rable: they are, simply, possibilities. Finally, we must note that Vico is not simply the investigator of the range and richness of possible policy, but the fierce opponent of models dominated by modalities of chance or necessity; that is, for the “foolish wanderings” of the chance of Epicurus (and of Hobbes, NS, 179), and the chains of necessitarian cause of the Stoics (NS, 5, 130, 335, 345, 1109).80 The intimacy for Vico of fortune, chance, necessity is striking: fortune is regarded less as useful bearer of possibility but rather as simply the bearer of necessity or impossibility—the inevitable confrontations with what is always so, and what is never so. The heavy-handed, perhaps glib, use of necessity and chance in the traditional grammar and syntax of moralistic

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argument is contrasted with proper inquiry limited to “the series of pos­ sibilities it is permitted to understand,” that is to say to the clarification provided by comparison, by, perhaps, situating the actual in “possible worlds”: Thus the proper and continual proof here adduced will consist in comparing and reflecting whether our human mind, in the series of possibilities it is per­ mitted to understand, and so far as it is permitted to do so, can conceive more or fewer or different causes than those from which issue the effects of this civil world.81

Hobbes and Vico In summary, my argument for the modernity of Hobbes and Vico seems to work toward the contention that an honest occasion for being usefully expansive is in consideration of Hobbes and Vico, for they not only of­ fer rich displays of the possibilities of rhetorical civil inquiry, but their displays may be arguably richer by far than a very wide range of contem­ porary inquiry; or, I shall claim, they remain as unrealized possibilities in Modernity. By considering Hobbes and Vico as practitioners of inquiry in the Peircian sense, by giving an account of the cluster of beliefs that generate habits of action in inquiry, we can take account of the parallel achievements of Hobbes’ project of a civilis scientia and Vico’s nuova scienza. Both as critiques of Classical political philosophy make use of ele­ ments of rhetoric as critique of philosophy,82 yet neither give attention to the Renaissance project of recuperation of Classical republican rhetorical program or exemplary eloquence. Both, however, are receptive to the po­ litical pessimism of Cicero’s memoirs, the account in the Ad familiares of the precipitous political decline of republican Rome. And both replicate the pessimism of Montaigne, who reinvents Cicero’s epistolary program; all three tried to liberate inquiry from premature normativity, the unwar­ ranted optimism that motivated naïve political and ethical didacticism. In his Essais, Montaigne is in effect telling us that there is no audience, no reception for prescriptive moralistic discourse; the Essais display a healthy skepticism towards the assumption of moralism that the precepts “change,” “do us good.” Montaigne’s strategies of address indicate, rather, that if there is an audience for moralisms, it is self-deceived, deluded that they in fact “get it.”83

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One could argue that anti-moralism in effect takes part in the mysteri­ ous “increase of possibilities” Hintikka claims marks late medieval, Re­ naissance, Early Modern intellectual activity; anti-moralism works against the single plot, and the single definition of independent character acting autonomously in a narrative of clear choices that defines didactic prose. But as well, one could speak of “positive negativity,” a pessimism that is expansive in posing possibilities and impossibilities. Vico is ambiguous about Hobbes’ Classicism; Vico both classifies, derogatively, Hobbes and Machiavelli with Epicurus as believers in chance, and praises Hobbes as retrieving the Classical interest in society and civility that Epicurus, as one of “solitary philosophers” shuns. The ambivalence responds to his perception that Hobbes simultaneously attempts a laudable, inclusive civil science and recognizes a coercive contingency. Hobbes’ materialism may substantiate the precarious, imperiled existence of individual bodies; there may be no concept of our natural sociability; indeed, the “biologi­ cal” defines the state’s goals in disconcerting ways. A sum of individual bodies both constitutes and is extraneous to the state as artificial body. Hobbes’ definition of sovereignty as “mortal artifice,” and as such a body mysterious, isolate, undemonstrated, yet man-made, artificial, reminds us of Vichian efforts to join the singleness, uniqueness of a political identity, say of Rome, with the fictional legal practices needed to support that per­ severance as mortal, susceptible. For Vico unintended consequences may construe continuity in political identity; certainly these are troublesome, oxymoronic qualifications of program. Hobbes and Vico share a major investigational premise, the verum/ factum principle: we can only know with certainty that which we have made.84 Yet the principle funds radically different investigative modes. In Hobbes’ use of the verum/factum principle, geometry and civil science, as entirely our confections, are demonstrable, natural history and physics, as observations of nature are not. They share, in fact, a strong interest in the man-made; and share, therefore a sense of possibilities as manufac­ tured, as proposed interventions we are responsible for. Yet, for Hobbes it is political theorizing that is demonstrable, not the practices of political interactions, for Hobbes believes that much of physical phenomena we cannot know, and political discursive practice is severely compromised by its hopeless entanglements with the biological. Political theory, however, with the aid of rhetoric’s negative capability, can describe perfectly the complicities of political artifices of negotiation, failures for the most part, and thus to be junked.

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But here, however, there is a very strong contrast between Hobbesian and Vichian inquiry practices. While Hobbes refuses to engage with the wealth of all-too-human detail of historical political practices, Vico found this wealth of intrinsic interest as revealing the sources of civility, if often only ironically so. Where Hobbes seems to prefer to elide the confusion and contradictions of historico-legal practices of the community, and thus reduce the amount of historical information for theorizing, in contrast the many Vichian invocations of etymology are central to his diagnosis because the traces of social-legal practices in the language archive are the sources of his political wisdom, in giving an account of the tactics of main­ taining national identity. The texture of the New Science is that of innu­ merable, disparate accounts of the terms in these traces, primarily found in legal texts. Hobbes, however, paints with a broad brush. His economies are economies large in scale, allowing no small, incremental positive steps. The problems are war and peace, the solutions do not find useful any mild institutional variants, new institutional arrangements, devices. We are left with the uniqueness and integrity of the sovereign life-force, person as the definition of success, as the macro-solution to macro-problems. Sovereign, however, as unique “person” shares few characteristics with the unique protagonists of Classical moral discourse. Indeed, it is the opacity, naïveté of Classical moralist accounts of politics that Hobbes and Vico contend. Indeed, Hobbes, as well as Vico, is a great fan of rhetorical diagnos­ tics. Vico wastes no time recounting or praising Roman oratory; Cicero is invoked as a legal semanticist, diagnostician, not as a public performer. Hobbes’ political thinkers, at least, so he claims, obey rules: not to en­ gage in controversy, not to seek rhetorical victory. The discourse of po­ litical theory becomes stronger as isolate, non-performing. It can depict precisely the discourse of political negotiations as fundamentally untidy, both resistant to theory, and too penetrated by passionate motives; here Hobbes and Vico, of course, share still another rhetorical assumption: the neutrality, naturalness, and originating power of passionate faculties. Poli­ ticians regress. Again, we note the compatibility with Syme’s work on Roman poli­ tics. Syme at one point speaks of politics as “abolished, or sterilized” in the Roman Revolution of Augustus’ party: that is, the organising concept is—“is politics possible?” His work suggests again that modality overlays political history with radical suggestions; in the Roman Revolution the obliterated or emasculated political capacity co-exists with, perhaps is the source of, the enormous bulk of governmental apparatus and activity.

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Syme and Vico distinguish precisely the same very large area of civil be­ havior: amenable to rhetorical analysis, inhospitable to oratory. Obviously Vico’s choice of this Roman domain of legal rule and legal behavior selects as well the remarkable array of evidence of Roman capacity to react to endemic change, to contingency. And Syme continues by claiming that, while the Roman Revolution was bad for politics and oratory, it was rich, rewarding, fascinating as “history.” What is the modality of Syme’s “historical”? Can rhetorical inquiry con­ template the demise of political oratory as not so much to be lamented, as to be recognized as offering a different, more dire range of civil potential and action? The untoward as illuminating the toward? The peculiar capac­ ity of rhetorical analysis is to diagnose the failure of oratory as not simply a moral failure but as a political event of great complexity. Or, do the thin, unhistorical, and not truly useful philosophical definitions of the political or civil urge our emendations of their thin notions as task? Certainly this helps account for the contentiousness of Hobbes as well as Vico. The bias of rhetorical analysis, as regressive, is quite negative; the con­ cern is not so much with eloquence supporting wisdom, but with a duty to probe dysfunction in discursive, i.e., political action. We have noted the symmetry between Zarka’s claim that Hobbes’ texts are “porteurs d’interrogation” and Meyer’s assertion that the key to rhetoric is “problématologie.” Hobbesian rhetoric resists thin philosophical strategies of solution, such as Funkenstein’s mediation of nature and culture, or Hirschman’s rationalizations of passions into interests. But this resistance not only disallows feebleness; the critique demands lucid retrogression, a taste for untoward naturalness. One of the prime rhetorical motives is to shut off philosophical options that have confined possible practice; it is, of course, a renewable motive, an unending task. The usefulness of rhetorical inquiry is in its refusals. It lacks precisely the directness and simplicity of the Classical philosophical description of the role of citizen, leader—in short, it lacks wishful thinking. Their Early Modern rhetorical operation, in describing the role of citizen narrates difficulty, conflicts, aspirations, conflicts as aspirations. Hobbes and Vico offer a vast expansion of possibilities for critique. Here it is important to remember that Peirce’s abstemious project—to define all of Western inquiry!—begins with the essays of 1868 on incapaci­ ties.85 Very obviously Hobbes and Vico react to Descartes; Peirce reacts to Cartesian optimism by listing four incapacities: we have no power of In­ trospection, we have no power of Intuition, we have no power of thinking

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without signs, we have no conception of the incognizable. And just so, I would argue, Hobbes and Vico’s positive programs depend on careful definitions of negative potential. Recall that Hobbes insists that an indi­ vidual’s appeal to his own reason is an anarchic, even autistic strategy; he defined the condition of war as the domain where “everyone is governed by his own reason.”86 Perhaps Hobbes reacts to Descartes as the rhetorical theorist I. A. Richards, in his Mencius persona, reacts to Western thought as an enterprise. To assimilate the Mencius text, he claims, is useful be­ cause “it lets us ask ourselves sharply whether the intellect has been on the whole a useful invention to man.”87 The Vichian fascination for plots of origin may echo the regressivity of Hobbes: the continual resort to the most humble life processes, the extended narrative of the contributions of the gross bestioni to the explanation of pre-civil stages pursues a similar deployment of lowly potentials. The vector is that of a rebellion against dry ambition for “pure inquiry” (attributed of course by Williams to Descartes). Hobbes’ pessimism reb­ els against self-deception; he protects his pessimism in a series of con­ tests which are a series of rejections; the positions he attacks, he attacks in part because of their refusal to admit possible incapacity. We have noted Hobbes’ rejection of all intellectual confederacies —universities, Royal Society, clerics—but, primarily, his anti-Cartesianism is a distrust of metaphysical presumption, with its premise of an autonomous spiritual capacity. In his rejections, Hobbes’ view of evidence is crucial. In a re­ markable passage in the Leviathan, he contrasts his proffered, but perhaps unconvincing “inference from the passions” with the possible consider­ ation of our own “experience”; (what may be unconvincing, of course, is his own use of Cartesian introspection). If the reader does not trust the inference—that nature disassociates and renders men apt to invade and destroy each other — the reader may consult his own experience. Thus “experience” is not the Cartesian introspection Peirce defined as incapac­ ity, and it is not natural-historical observation, but, rather, the collection of data on the active habits prevalent in social transactions, obviously in­ cluding the rhetorical analysis of practices. These actions, he claims, are as accusatory as his words (L, 113–14).88 It is this alliance with rhetoric against philosophic pretensions that proves expansive of civil possibility. Hobbes, like Vico, and like modern Romanists such as A. Watson, is aware that law, vital to the constitution of the civil, resists philosophic penetration; it is neither made by, or ex­ plained by philosophic categories.89 Then, philosophy, by presupposing

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rationality in some doggedly exclusionary way, resists rhetoric’s capacious definition of the troublesome range of life capacities which is needed to describe political competence. Hobbes’ political topics offer a range of general terms, presented with a maxim’s force, presented with a range of basic principles of arguments, highly suited to the demolition of familiar moralism, a morality parasitic on politics. The passion-topics are begin­ nings, not extraneous, not “outside” in natural philosophy, but articulat­ ing political acts. Hobbes’ strategy of defining political power is radical, provocative; absolute or pure power is rendered necessary by the strict cir­ cumscriptions imposed by the elemental dispositions, qualities. One can make a truly brief, pithy observation about Hobbesian possibilities: he has a taste for the wrong ones. It is the regressiveness of his practical interest, his continual resort to the most humble vital processes that supports his resistance to transcendental presumption. Rhetoric does not simply ac­ commodate, but directs political interest, as regressive; only the concern with discursive effect prompts the dismal psychology, only the psychology, or psychopathology, would prompt the politics. The Hobbesian and Vichian programs represent, then, an actualization of the possibility of rhetorical inquiry outlined in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, an actualization made possible, in turn, by the critical proclivity for possibility as mode and by, simply, a critical proclivity. For then, at least. The state­ ment by Hobbes that deliberations take place in the subjunctive voice dis­ tinguishes a specific Hobbesian/ Vichian separation of possible/actual as concern. For, how do we apply the Leviathan? The New Science? Our hesi­ tation as response reflects Hobbes’ and Vico’s odd tactics, their fancy for disconnection. These are not enterprises employing the indicative voice, claiming empirical mastery of the “real”; rather it is difficulty, opacity that distances reality. Hobbes’ “experience” brackets a realm of visible activi­ ties such as locking chests, etc., and interprets its significance in terms of a narrow investigative need. Vico’s reader/inquirer knows not the history, but the historical narrative he himself has constructed. Hobbes’ subjunctive claim also brackets, and strengthens by its modesty, the inquiry. In so far as he associates the principles of his civil science with the work of the mathematici, he is stipulating that it does not function in the world of politics, the domain of contest, of the dogmatici (HN, 74). In so far as he sees his “scientific” inquiry as “progressive,” cumulative, he is denying utility; the access he gives is to his argument about politics, not political negotiation itself. In stabilising the value terms for the duration of the argument, the inquirer removes himself from application: he is exploring, not advising.

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I am arguing that Hobbes’ sensitivity to the resources of rhetorical topical invention should not be dismissed as Hobbes’ “aphoristic style.” “Aphoristic” obscures the fact that the topoi he presents are not isolate, but functioning as premises and conclusions within the very complex ar­ gument he offers on the structure of politics. Aphorisms, baldly stated, tend to stop-watch, interrupt and “time” intrusion. Hobbes seems clearly able to support a supple, modifying, tropic use of topics as well as a mode which seems to promote, not suppleness, but useful ineptitude, a manner, authority which begs to be questioned. Vico uses his Three Ages as “vari­ able wholes”: one age is the condition of possibility for its understand­ ing; one age is also the condition of possibility for the understanding of another age. An age as a “variable whole,” a possible world adjacent to another age, has explanatory power. And just so, what is most “rhetorical” about the Hobbesian project is the disclaimer of naïve applicability, easy morals, easy rhetoric. And, here, of course, lies one of the stronger affinities of the Vichian program with that of Hobbes: neither acts as if he believes he is delivering prudence, or that neat transfers from theory to practice are possible; both resist large, naïve promises of transfer that would prejudice their new sciences. But they also strongly affirm the “scientific” value of their account of social and political practices; the sharp division between their rhetorical investi­ gational tactics and political rhetoric is a source of strength. Quite frankly, both Hobbes and Vico do not presume a receptive audience. They, proba­ bly, do not have one. The “bad reception” Zarka attributed to Hobbes may have been what Hobbes wanted; Vico—however truthfully— claimed he had no audience. There is a peculiar, almost distraught, quality to Hobbes’ pronouncements about political possibilities; he refuses to describe the ideal state; his research into the dysfunction that accompanies motion de­ velops a pessimism that is, in his project of impure inquiry, an enabling pessimism, both liberating him from the idle project of defining an ideal state, and specifying novelty: politics demands the inquirer’s continuous engagement, continuous posing of possibilities. Hobbes’ treatises present arguments explaining politics using topoi of great harshness, linking them in a dire account of basic capacities and prac­ tices. The political practices are, as linkages of these disturbing principles, quite grim; a critique of Hobbes is often a critique of grimness. Hobbes and Vico reconstitute their audiences by stabilizing only the roughest, rawest meanings of their terms; they counteract the academic tradition which employs soft, worn political coinages that obscure the tough as­

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sumptions Hobbes and Vico appreciate. There are, to be sure, problems of scale: initiatives that generate extreme possibilities—Leviathan, a new barbarism— certainly suggesting diagnoses of extreme dysfunction. But these are meant, perhaps, as disclaimers, confrontations — an intrusive gloss on the pedestrian moralistic accounts, a shock tactic. However, when their contemporary audience fails to register the rough deviations, the argument freely slides back into the false problems and solutions of Classical political definition. That is a bland domain, colo­ nized in Early Modernity by Classical Christian notions of sin and virtue; it offers effortless movement from one necessitarian scenario to another, a slide from Classicism to a species of enlightened Modernity, Enlighten­ ment as gloss. This Classicist political philosophy is not simply flawed in its naïve extrapolations of individual merit to political use, but completely and wrongly committed to the proposition that these particular merits and values are transcendental, preliminary, necessary. This Classical political philosophical coinage is easily reminted for Enlightenment orthodoxy or Liberal Modernity. The Hobbesian and Vichian initiative secedes from the slide.

chapter three

From Early to Late Modernity

H

ow do rhetorical modalities impinge on current political inquiry? My focus on modality involves first, a claim for synergy between pos­ sibility as inquiry commitment and rhetorical technical competence that is generative of inquiry strategies, expansive of issue; second, that Hobbes­ ian and Vichian programs are so generative, so expansive that they subsist, still, as possible critique and challenge. They could challenge, from within the Anglophone, or Western, discussion, the begged questions of the heg­ emonous terms and propositions: an exasperating hegemony that seems planetary. Yet just now I seem to have suggested that Hobbesian and Vichian modal work is not terribly influential. In early Modernity, I have claimed that rhe­ torically attuned initiatives of Hobbes and Vico represent a secession from Classical political philosophy: that is to say, thought indicative in voice, pre­ scriptive in tone, claiming necessity. Theirs was a subtle secession, but with a profound shift in modalities, both in the assignment of political potential or capacity and the designation of “possible [political] worlds.” I suggested a very restricted notion of Modernity. Their Modernity means devaluing Classical political philosophy by means of, but not exclusively by means of, Classical political rhetoric: their Modernity is simply the vector away from an inoperative Classicism. It is, perhaps, not Modernity as “new.” But how could the Hobbesian and Vichian inquiry join the current dis­ cussion? Certainly Hobbes and Vico cannot be placed within a paradigm

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of Modern progress; indeed, they suggest Modernism as hard-won initia­ tive, not inevitable, not won by chance, but as a collection of unrealized as well as realized possibilities, itself a modality to be inhabited, a potential that encloses, encapsulates. What is the nature of this contemporary dis­ cussion to be joined? What is missing, and what could be useful to the dis­ cussion is a plain expansiveness of premise and practice that deals with the intractable, indeed distressing, core of political action, and that counters theoretical elaboration as reduction, theory that reduces the civil to the moral, a reduction abetted by necessitarian, single plots. What could be perversely constructive is the Hobbesian rhetorised psychology that dis­ closes the range of factors that qualify autonomy of intention, agency, and that hedge the possibility of pure rationality of choice. Or, the Hobbesian topical argumentative style, that forces civil complicity on his audience. Or, the Vichian narratives that expose alternate and successive scenarios, the subsistent ranges of civil possibility. Or, the Vichian engagement with the thick legal, transactional tissue of historical practices and formulae that form the conditions of possibility of simple values as principles. All of this redesigns possible agency and possible plot. Or, to change tactics, how is late Modernism ready for some (anachronis­ tic) Hobbesian and Vichian intrusions? One could hypothesise— exploit­ ing, still, the metaphor of the contest of faculties—a mutual modification of rhetorical strategies and a revisionist philosophical moment, a program represented best, perhaps, by the late work of Bernard Williams in his collections, Truth and Truthfulness, and the posthumous In the Beginning Was the Deed, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, and The Sense of the Past.1 This is work that pursues his earlier attempts to define “the limits of philosophy”—surely a rhetorical ambition—in ethical or political inquiry. One could also make a case that the new inquiry he proposes would be, possibly, a very productive alliance, witting or not, of rhetoric and philoso­ phy, research that abandons moral pretension in order to achieve political pertinence.2 If Aristotle’s “philosophical” concern with modalities finds its proper home in his Rhetoric, it is also the case that the devotion to the consideration of modal issues in political thinking gives a seriousness to the rhetorical habits of action in inquiry. That is to say, what might seem to be minor, merely suggestive rhetorical tactics—the exaggeration of narra­ tion skills, the provocative use of figure to define agency—turn out to be of major significance in modifying, shaping political inquiry. Possibility sponsors tolerance, complexity; we note that Hawthorn, strongly influenced by Williams, insists that the strategy of illumination

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of the actual by situating it in a range of possibilities reconciles us to the deep-set incertitudes of social scientific research. The social sciences are “haunted by possibilities . . . understanding possibilities is at the heart of understanding itself” (PW, xi). The notion that actions, decisions could be “otherwise” not only furnishes the rationale of rhetorical practice, but gives a strong anti-necessitarian motive in political investigation. Thus the gathering of past possibilities illumines past actualizations of civil choices: consider all those Ciceronian rhetorical manuals recommending happily the dispensing of multiple counterfactual narratives to enable judgements of the past; the past is not alterable, but its necessity is not transparent. For Porter’s Wolf, the skeptical revisionist of the myth of Homer—a re­ visionism I would notice as also a Vichian initiative—“history is as con­ jectural as art”; Porter notices the peculiar modality of the new philology: “what makes philological reconstruction possible is the mere possibility of its possibility.”3 Notice John Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 deploys very sweeping counter­ factuals, a very large possible world, to illumine empire: what if English and Spanish colonial efforts were switched? The English colonizing south and central America, and Spain the “Anglophone” north?4 Elliot’s is a very harsh thought-experiment designed to force harsh questions; the counterfactual narratives are carefully composed unrealized possibilities, Aristotle’s anti-determinist resource; not “actuality” certainly, but mental exercises interjected into the discussion in order to enhance our sense of the specific dimensions of past choices; scenarios, narratives as displace­ ments, functioning to reorient goals and accomplishments. To be sure, the alternate scenarios must be established with the same historical tact, the same philological accuracy in regard to terms and propositions as the core narrative of the past. Further, political deliberation requires the accu­ racy to be projected to the future as well, with the generation of alternate consequences for the alternate scenarios.5 Also, the posing of possibilities makes demands on not simply community capacity, but the perceptions of capacity by political agents. In rhetoric’s use of modalities, speculation on past possibilities infiltrates future policy, connects past consequences and present choices; it is a talent for time, a political clarification: deliberation about deliberation.6 Hobbes and Vico seceded from the Classical program described by Wil­ liams as normative, moralistic, and “transcendental” in its assumptions; for Williams it is perhaps deadening, certainly question-begging in its effect in political research. If we miss the secession, are we obliged to rehabilitate,

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like Rawls perhaps, Classical political philosophy?7 Thus Williams appeals to Judith Shklar and her “liberalism of fear” not to rehabilitate, but to contest political foundationalism and its rock-bottom certitudes. Shklar, he points out, rejects the transcendental assumptions of the moralism that invests liberal theory and that purveys an unsustainable definition of moral autonomy as the normative basis of politics. This is a “faith-based” initiative, relying simply on the peculiar, perhaps exceptional, historical context of contemporary Anglophone politics for evidence of its beliefs’ sustainability. When Williams claims that liberal prescriptions have little historical resonance, he argues both for their parochialism and for their ephemerality.8 But, how does one speak of politics? The prescriptive tactic, speaking with a magisterial (academic) voice, tends to remove events and agents to an isolate, timeless, placeless location. Williams seems to argue that the difficulties of moralistic Classical political theorizing are still with us; one could rephrase this critique as a claim that the beliefs and habits of ac­ tion of this inquiry impose necessity and are insensitive to possibility: they impose obsolescence. But Williams appeals to a very broad-based discus­ sion—among philosophers, to be sure—that attempts to revivify politi­ cal inquiry. Williams invokes R. G. Collingwood, whom he calls “severely underestimated,” on the (perhaps false) confrontation of relativism/uni­ versalism.9 Here what is in question is the way one relates pastness to pres­ entness; this could be restated as querying our capacity to consider the past as a “possible world” in order to distinguish contemporary problems. Collingwood is right, Williams asserts, in his insistence on competence as concerning that which we can affect by action; “the question whether we might prefer to live in a past period because we think it better cannot arise.” It does not arise, Collingwood said, because “the choice cannot be offerred.” “We ought not to call [the past] either better than the pres­ ent or worse; for we are not called upon to choose it or reject it, to like it or dislike it, to approve it or condemn it, but simply to accept it.”10 But this does not mean we make no judgements, we just do not extend all our moral opinions to the past; and if they are unextended, that does not mean they are untrue. Collingwood is trying to create a very generous space for consideration of plausibilities, and is warning against relativ­ ism as well as universalism. Collingwood gives a taut, technical account of transpirings, realizations of possibilities dismissed by “relativism.” Obvi­ ously, the focus on modality is a focus not simply on civil potential but civil history; it is the insistence on temporality, on motions in time that makes

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possibility salient, useful.11 And it illumines Collingwood’s anti-relativism: relativism is a mistaken substitution of judgement for invention, finding; this substitution is precisely the flaw of the Early Modern “Classical” for­ mation—rushing students to moral judgement—for Vico.12 But civil re­ search assumes civil capacities are realized in different time-frames; the historian deals with timeful actualizations. Just so, the research modalities of Hobbes and Vico are considered for the virtue of their specific structure and their particular account of process; both deal, frugally, with deriving something—politics—from nothing, civility from barbarism; neither re­ quire civil intention for civility. Hobbes and Vico secede in part in order to find the right tone of voice to deal with the past’s connection to the present; with the civil or barbaric past’s connection with the barbaric or civil present. Modalities, in short, deal with temporality as issue. “Time and modality [are] tied together in the most dramatic way.”13 Historians of philosophy assure us that the initial Hellenic logical program demands modal desig­ nations, demands which are at the same time temporal assignments. For Hintikka, the infamous “sea-fight” of De interpretatione, 19, is central: A sea fight must either take place tomorrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take place tomorrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it is necessary that it either should or should not take place.

This is exemplary for Aristotle’s sense of both the constraints of neces­ sity and of the constraints that have to be placed on the attribution of ne­ cessity, from the mere sense of the fullness of time, full of possibility. Logic demands that the alternative—take place or not—is necessary; time is not empty. The early “statistical” (e.g., never, always, sometime) definition of possibility that Hintikka focuses on is temporal and privileges the mode of possibility as most engaging problems of modal interrelation.14 Thus, for Hintikka the Lovejovian Principle of Plenitude—all genuine possibili­ ties are realized at some point in our (actual) time—stipulates the domi­ nance of possibility as, possibly, the most interesting in its relation to the other modes: the “always” of necessity, the “never” of the impossible are comparatively non-productive of problem; contingency is simply double possibility—it can happen, or not, in time. The focus of the possible is on an indefinite “some time,” a space hedged by the apprehension of the “always” of necessity and the “never” of the impossible, and specifying a rather fraught concern. Any exploration of time requires investment in

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modality; any exploration of modality drags in time. Possibility as realized in time, fills time: gives it significance and pathos in the accounts of the direction and force of civil moments. Again, where do we locate Vichian stages? What is the existential sta­ tus of Homeric heroism? Of heroism, tout court? The Vichian three ages, divine, heroic, vulgar, are repetitious, endless transformations of limited civil capacities and circumscribed opportunities; they mark the major intervals of the long story of specific civil potential or powers and their historically diverse actualizations.15 They are, essentially, three Kantian “conditions of possibility” for the understanding of the collective agents’ collective actions, alternate ranges of engagement, manifolds of temporal development: narratives of exploits, institutional shifts are symptoms.

Modality Sorts I have argued that what is central and powerful is a simple modal pro­ clivity. Hobbes and Vico, then, secede from the Classical political philo­ sophical paradigm of Early Modernity in part by addressing modalities in an innovative way. I have been told that there is a paper, or lecture, of Richard McKeon that sorts, characterises investigations by the dominant modality.16 McKeon joins, or originates, a late Modern discussion of great pertinence, since it offers opportunities to sort political inquiry, indeed, sort Hobbes and Vico. What is noteworthy is that the general discussion of dominance addresses, almost exclusively, philosophical inquiry, where the modal choice can be baldly, perhaps too baldly, stated. Philosophy, with its duty of appealing to a universal audience by proclaiming the systemic coherence of its account, the universal as eternal, is predisposed to neces­ sity as mode, and thus has deterministic proclivities, proclivities Hintikka claims Aristotle struggles against. Sorabji contends against Hintikka that Aristotle is not determinist, but, still, that necessity is more attractive to him than chance; thus he points out Aristotle defines the free man as performing what is necessary, and thus makes himself immune to chance (Metaphysics 12.10; 1075a19–23.) At the same time, Sorabji calls determin­ ism falsity, a mistaken argument, not unequivocally subscribed to by Aris­ totle; Sorabji himself feels obliged to confront hard and soft determinists, both incompatibilists (necessity as incompatible with free will) and com­ patibilists (necessity as compatible with free will) who populate Classical as well as contemporary philosophy.17 The persuasion of the philosophical

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moralists is an oxymoron, persuading us of a necessity, not a possibility; to be sure, the orator seeking for ways to present a moral choice as necessary, will discover many possibilities, but the obligation is, rather, the persuasion of the actuality of the possible choice. “Unrealised possibilities,” Hintikka seems to claim, subvert claims of necessity; the mere activity of investigat­ ing the unrealized possibilities can be therapeutic. Still, proclivity for one modality does not permit dismissal of the others; according to the Kneales’ The Development of Logic, necessity is “cor­ relative to” contingency and possibility, that is to say, “inconceivable with­ out.”18 But the correlation has diverse effects, usages; the usages within the philosophical discussion make us aware of the different correlations possible, in not simply a continued philosophical, but in a rhetorical/po­ litical deliberation. The dominant philosophical perspective is that logical strictures, necessities, cannot be simply conventional. Or, Wittgenstein claimed, the only necessity is logical—a claim of logical tautology (632). If logic consists in restrictive laws about the possible combination of propo­ sitions, logical laws can’t be sheer convention, without knowledge of the restrictions; and Kneale adds, significantly, “just as moral laws can’t be introduced by conventions without knowledge of obligations” (635). It is impossible to pose either logical or moral restrictions, without conscious­ ness of the application; it is impossible to use restrictions while veiled in ignorance of their uses. This is, Kneale claims, in contrast to Hobbes’ con­ ventionalism; Hobbes, he says, saw all logical necessities as tautologies, that is to say, true by definition, simply by-products of rule-making (636). Yet, the Hobbesian formulations are profoundly pessimistic, carrying a heavy burden of psychological freight. The new Hobbesian civic possibili­ ties impose awareness of the compromised capacities and actions. Neces­ sity is the mother of invention or, the enemy of invention. Kneale wants to tell us, then, that necessity and contingency, necessity and possibility are defined correlatively. In political deliberation canvass of possibility invokes necessity, consideration of a range of possible states of affairs calls upon the constraints of necessity to fix the boundaries of capacity and action. For Vico, certainly, necessity has great resonance, untoward reso­ nance; it is over-utilised in the discussion. But can the Kneales’ account take account of Hobbes’ and Vico’s inventions? It is only fair, when trying to sort philosophy, to refer to the brilliant Necessity, Cause and Blame of Sorabji, and in particular his outline of his own position; he is indeed as sensitive to rhetorical patterns of use as to logical structures of necessity. One of the difficulties of attempting to place

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modality in the discussion is its basic, primitive force in argument: basic, in particular, to any discussion of ethics and politics. In putting forward his own position Sorabji argues that accepting, acting on the “truth” of de­ terminism would make impossible a range of attitudes—indignation, re­ morse, resentment— central to everyday experience (attitudes, of course, often addressed in rhetoric). He asks: if the action was all along necessary, how can we be responsible, deserving of praise or blame? What this sug­ gests to me is that “responsibility” as bare, naked philosophical concept is of less use, perhaps of little use, in the theory. Sorabji is, I think, ac­ knowledging that the statements using these terms are incomplete without recognition of the everyday discursive mechanism of social effect; he is colonizing rhetoric by giving in. Epideictic—praise and blame—is Perel­ man’s central rhetorical function; here Sorabji connects modality—neces­ sity—to rhetorical competence; the philosophical discussion of necessity and responsibility is vapid without a refined, specific mapping of the do­ main of effective, possible operation. The more encompassing, more use­ ful problematic, for Sorabji, whether he likes it or not, is “rhetorical”; any study of modality must attempt to deal with rhetorical operations; any rhetorician must refine his definitions of modality. And, certainly, in so far as philosophy deals in ethics and politics, it must contend with its own systemic ambitions; modality sorts. It is conflicted theory; it must avow ra­ tionalism and not disavow a thin, rationalist optimism; expand the account of reason’s necessities, and maintain, for responsibility, free will.19 But now compare rhetoric, quite neglected in this philosophical discus­ sion, but an inquiry originally and definitively inside politics, assuming a continuous engagement with possibility in order to cope with necessity. Assuredly possibility dominates rhetoric, which is forced to work in a strange domain of very complicated patterns and tasks. Modality sorts. I have also argued that rhetoric’s proclivity for possibility generates a peculiar rhetorical competence for working with possibility, a talent for working with the diffuse, the contrary, the confused. But the philosophical discussion is not agile enough to consider as important the technical tasks, and, in particular, the subtle intrication of modal proclivity and rhetorical habits. First, the mode of possibility demands invention as skill; invention is not simply the first function of rhetoric, but invention is stipulated as defining rhetorical-political competence, developing policy. Next, a pro­ clivity for possibility has the force of modifying necessity and tempering deterministic initiatives, thus “improving,” enlarging the political dialogue. But the proclivity also connects with the essential rhetorical task of praise

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and blame; where a hard determinism subverts the responsibility which stimulates praise and blame, the expansion of possibility expands oppor­ tunities for praise and blame, discriminates novel scenarios, complex recharacterisations: in short, the proclivity marks a capacity for politics. And thus the generation of the rhetorical habits of action in response to theory and in refinement of instruction; the rhetorical habits purvey agility, alertness; they constitute a remarkable array of inquiry strategies. For ex­ ample, we note the basic rhetorical canon of decorum, the duty of seeking for the argument that which is appropriate to time, person, place, which thus assumes adapting to change, predicaments as primary task. Defining the range of situations defines the range of possible appropriate adaptations. Decorum privileges possibility. For, rhetoric’s response to contingency must be decorous, but the response is, very often with a possibility as a response of use, use to the agenda. And possibility requires temporal sophistication, a refined sense of what time “fetches.” Here I find W. Blattner’s revision­ ary notion—which he attributes to Heidegger—that time is experienced not as a linear succession, a vapid, contentless flow of “Nows,” but as a simultaneity, a non-sequential “manifold” of past, present, future. It is a manifold of dimensions, intricated, experientially complex, as basic; here “present” subsists as an expandable, contractible ghost in future and past, read or grasped as appropriate or inappropriate for actions.20 The training exercises of rhetoric as well as oratorical performances assume just such a sophisticated sense of time. Rhetoric’s proclivity for possibility engages specific habits of suggesting, describing, inventing, contesting possibilities as coming to pass, or not, in time; it assumes working inside a domain filled with movement, with processing of potentiality into actuality. There is a list of rhetorical habitual activities that amount to a critical engagement with possibility as source and activity as mappable. The rheto­ ric manuals, oratorical practices, rhetorical hermeneutics deploy a truly remarkable array of habits of action for inquiry. These are habitual activi­ ties that can invent possibility, remap actuality. For example, the rhetorical exercise, debate in utramque partem: this is an Academic, i.e., Skepticist, exercise that engages skeptical energies in foreclosing premature dogma­ tism; it stipulates the preparation of both sides of an argument, and as­ sumes not one true, one false, but two possible arguments. The point of the Declamatio as school genre is training in oppositional usefulness, in the consideration of the multiple scenarios of multiple choices; it requires inge­ nuity in remapping conventional moralistic domains. Consider as well the tactical specification and polemical use of the possibilities invested in the

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false dilemma; or, the general engagement with deliberation about “things that could be otherwise”; or, the use of counterfactual narratives in mak­ ing legal judgements about the past; or, the posing of civil possibilities that assume flawed civil capacity; or, the public practice of praise and blame that require assumptions, or speculations of voluntarism, responsibility. All these may assume freedom, arbitrary action, but do not prove free will. Rhetoric’s assumptions are not axioms, but simply Peirce’s beliefs, whose function is only to generate habits of action. The proclivity for possibility is a disposition that animates political performance; and reciprocally, the du­ ties and functions of political-oratorical performance nourish the analysis, motivate the inquiry, push the inquiry into complexity. Further, this rhetorical complexity, marked by reciprocity, discrimi­ nates specific modal proclivities of genres. Consider Cicero. His treatises, transactions of his Greco-Roman philosophic enterprise, present repub­ lican theory as necessitarian, entail his prescriptions; necessity is a moral coloration. Cicero’s epistolary accounts, his memoirs, delineate necessity as itself trapped in contingency; in the familiar letters, Cicero’s Hellenic political philosophy is of little use, is little used, in his account of current politics. In Cicero’s manuals of legal-rhetorical hermeneutic the tactics blur the notion of pure intention by autonomous agents, question the point of the “real”; the legal wrangles about intentions are, after all, only to make a possible case, produce a shared decision affecting a historically situated collective public. The Topica, the De inventione are simply inves­ tigative programs as are certainly Books III–V, and perhaps Books VIII, IX on figures of the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian. Cicero’s legal-political orations must invent, as well as praise or blame, possible scenarios. They may narrate what once was, and is no longer possible, as well as exploit improbabilities, project the improbable instauration of a saving grace. The counterfactual (for how can it be proven?) narration of the past itself sets future options, forecloses possibilities. His skills depict an almost impos­ sibly complex relation between past, present, future. But further, all the Ciceronian genres, stigmatized as egoist, are steeped in the concerns of reflexivity: all considerations of strategic possibilities must also be carried in the discourse of the personal possibility, all strategies refer back to the responsibility of the speaker’s own capacity. The direction of the valence of defining tactics is from the civil back to the moral; it is a reflexiveness that queries rather than simply asserts. Beyond this, what is at stake is not simply a commitment of rhetorical inquiry to a dominant modality, but the specification of the relation of the

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dominant to other modes: possibility as primary concern qualifies the per­ ception of the constraints of necessity, the intrusions of contingency, and the received notions of actuality. These are, as well, relations in motion. The Aristotelian actualizations of potential (possibility) are not simply the basic, defining physical process, but processes that persevere in the history of, say, political thinking as processes that mark edges, project boundaries of power, canvassing the question of “Why not?”—why did the Roman senate not recognize fatal errors? The opposition necessity/contingency has a confused, changing relation to the opposition necessity/possibility. Necessity can effect a contingency; thus military necessity may call into ex­ istence contingency plans for contingent response. And, recall Hintikka’s claim that unrealized possibilities, asserted, can subvert the claims of ne­ cessitarian explanation, posing possibilities can change the argument. For, modal sorting most certainly sorts basic philosophical work. Thus, the issue of determinism and free will: it is not simply Aristotle the phi­ losopher who feels the need to be disentangled from determinism. There is a collaboration of philosophical and rhetorical work—if in Aristotle’s philosophical initiative rhetoric becomes a primary site for the exploration of modal phenomena, then modal interests raise the stakes for rhetorical inquiry. Hobbes’ chapter 17 of Leviathan II is exemplary of his useful ex­ pansion of investigative interests. The rhetorical engagement with framing possibilities, in arguing alternate scenarios lends depth as well as specific­ ity to the definition of free, or possible, decisions and engagements in civil affairs. But, free to do what? While counterfactuals expand rhetorical explana­ tion, the task of posing possibilities becomes a central skill in rhetoricalpolitical program. Thus Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a television debate with Lawrence Eagleburger: Brzezinski rather crisply pointed out, in reference to the Middle East, that there are possibilities for action, and possibili­ ties only for talk, only for conversations among the powerful. Rhetorical analysis, perhaps, is most useful in distinguishing what is mere talk. It is an archetypical rhetorical interest, trying to refine, narrow the notion of freedom. The rhetorical talent is for predicaments, for affective accounts of dysfunction, lamentable occasions, missed opportunities; it can discern deterministic bids, impasses; and it is more sophisticated in regard to ide­ ology than philosophy, easily detecting the deliquescence of ideas into ideology. Still, the investigatory contest can be internal: certainly Platonic dialogical rhetoric, richly textured, struggles against the Platonic defini­ tions of protagonists, most of them, most of the time, afflicted, it seems,

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by mild Asperger’s: certainly afflicted by an ambition for pure, isolate cognition. Modalities as a philosophical concern, then, may encompass but do not derange basic rhetorical work; rhetorical investigative habits seek out, proliferate modal issues for opportunities to invent policy; rhetorical prac­ tices query the many philosophical aporiai of freedom and necessity Sor­ abji enumerates. The more salient the political core of rhetoric, the more strenuous the efforts to distinguish the core; the stronger the rhetorical focus on political discourse, the more circumstantial the account of politi­ cal behavior. The practices, essentially political, slide into fruitful critique of the political philosophy—normative, preceptive, transcendental in as­ sumption—Williams finds unsatisfactory as account of actuality. Certainly Early Modern changes are illumined by modal sorting. It is clear Vico contests the Early Modern historiographical notion of history as Ciceronian magistra vitae, history as philosophy teaching by example. Rather, Vico engages the Ciceronian intimacy of law and politics, the strong connection between the explanation of the civil past by counter­ factuals and the civil need to pose possibilities, in order to avoid begged moralistic questions. Vichian sensitivity to a range of possibilities becomes sensitivity to a range of unintended consequences, to absence of intention. Yet, Vico’s strong insistence on the weight of unintended consequences in history is, at the same time, a critical recognition of the philosophical notion of intention as “intensional,” “directed,” “up to us,” or “conscious­ ness.” Political needs require, and rhetoric provides, an expansive range of possibility for intention, hedged, qualified, as still “up to us,” responsible.21 Further, in so far as modality frames the practices of rhetorical-legal her­ meneutic, it seems to require exploring all the possible action, intentions, the roads not taken, as revelatory. When the frame is useful, it clarifies, but it also expands, offers divergence. Or, to shift our focus to another Early Modern innovator, consider impure intention: thus Eugene Garver on Machiavelli’s contribution to Renaissance rhetorical politics. Garver takes up Williams’ distinction be­ tween real and notional possibilities—in Machiavelli these are for imita­ tion or for admiration—and connects this with the distinction between natural and artificial necessities: “artificial necessities mediate between the natural necessities that make deliberation impossible and the possi­ bilities already within the deliberative space.”22 In Garver’s ingenious for­ mula Machiavelli advises the prince to “imitate necessity.” This consigns necessity as optional effect, but also emphasizes possibility as rhetorical

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task: Machiavelli recommends the politician to imitate necessity in order to create possibility.23 And Williams remarks Machiavelli’s insistence on difference, on the distinction of government, politics from morality (surely recapitulated in Vico). The extraordinary engagement of Machiavelli with investigating the discourse of politics is an engagement with difference: politics offers an entirely different set of possibilities from morality.24 I have argued that “no one ever leaves the Prince with his moral sense dulled”; at the same time, Machiavelli does not pursue a program of dull­ ing the senses of the Prince. The Prince, as advisee, is advised to take into account a range of unrealized possibilities that is depressingly wide. What the reader (over the shoulder) and the Prince get is a set of sharp, precise discriminations of moral dilemmas posed not necessarily as “real, actual” choices but as constraints. In effect, Machiavelli peels off layers of Classical republican theory, of philosophical morality, from the Classical republican narrative. Or, look again at the rhetorical engagement with the passions in the Hobbesian appropriation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric II Strauss has noted. In classical rhetoric the rhetorical devotion to moving is defining; rheto­ ric works with the passions as motus animi, motions of the soul, causing motus animi. There is no sense that the passions are passive; “undergoing” is an aspect of “acting”; for Aristotle they are the elements that change, metabalontes (1378a19–21). Thus passions create the ripples, unevenesses, fault lines that provoke differences, and thus they demand possibilities, possibilities colored by, steeped in pleasure and pain, aesthesis. Or, recall Hobbes’ definition of deliberation as simple oscillation, basic motion. But this is not a simplistic “physicalist” account. The physicalist, necessary motion evokes indeterminate vibration, open to contingencies, receptive of hitherto unrealized possibilities. Rhetoric, functioning inside politics, seeks out the elements of change, alteration and privileges not stasis, uni­ versal accord, consensus, but kinesis; in politics diversity is engine, gen­ erating possibility. Once again, modality intervenes; passion is potential, the possibility of an actualization.25 Thus, the rhetorised psychology of Hobbes provides the mechanics of expressing his notions of civil engage­ ments and his modal allegiance. In short, basic strong investigative allegiances motivate the academic quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy; it is not a simple contest of faculties, but a confrontation that demands different arrangements and uses of key terms of action and capacity in the accounts of ethics and politics. The opposition rhetoric/philosophy is not so much the contest of perennial academic insti­

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tutions as the confrontation of two major investigative initiatives, defined, in large part, by their contentious beliefs and habits of action in inquiry; what is “perennial” is not the institutions but the quarrel. Rhetoric is, pe­ rennially, a second, alternate formation existing in a kind of symbiosis with perennial philosophy, a relation limiting autonomy of the first formation; it is a constraining interdependence. Again, modality inflects the opposition; it is a Peircian disciplinary experience, primitive (an inescapable possibil­ ity). Necessitarian formulae tempt the philosopher with ambitions for total coherence; the simple oratorical practices seek out possibility. Or, origi­ nally, rhetoric served as philosophy’s necessary evil, opposition: a concept and process responsive to philosophy’s self-definitions, providing critical, skeptical habits that chasten philosophy’s traditional incivility, ambitions for necessity. Ober returns to, and revivifies the quarrel; recall his insis­ tence that it is the Athenian oratorical practice, itself, that is the source of political understanding. To be sure, there are problems: there is a certain lack of reciprocity; philosophical refinement may inform rhetorical prac­ tice, but rhetorical inquiry does not often impinge on philosophical habits of action. Aristotle’s De anima may underpin Aristotle’s Rhetoric II, but Ober is in effect complaining of the disjunct between political oratory as source and political thematising by the philosophers as program. But there is more: B. Cassin illumines the relation of rhetoric to philos­ ophy when she glosses Quintilian’s aphorism: “Philosophia enim simulari potest, eloquentia non potest” (IO, XII, iii, 2).26 Cassin contrasts, in effect, philosophy’s distance as inquiry from the inquirer’s “real-life” experience with rhetorical closeness, complicity: oratory is not separate, self-standing text. Cassin illumines precisely that—somewhat distressing— Ciceronian concern with reflexivity; all oratorical posing of political possibility reflects back on orator’s capacity, speaker’s self-understanding. Quintilian insists that it is work where the rhetor is afflicted by the taedio laboris the phi­ losopher escapes, and it is either success or failure, win or lose: success, that is, as effect. Simulation as threat applies only to philosophy; this is the discussion where the skeptics’ formula—the simulation of inner states of mind by outer signs is evidence for the inaccessibility of “other minds”— accounts for a subversion of political theorizing, presents a primary philo­ sophical puzzle. While philosophy and its intentions can be dissimulated, oratory and its effects cannot. Only effect is index sui, not susceptible of pseudos; effects are not simply reactions, but eloquence itself.27 But, then, one must contrast philosophy, producing conflicted theory when it attempts ethics or politics, with rhetorical inquiry, vexed by practice;

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Cicero’s political understanding is informed by Cicero’s oratorical failures. Still, the force of rhetoric’s interventionist habits perhaps motivates the strenuousness of the articulation of possibilities of intervention. The quar­ rel can be seen as an enduring, if intermittent, investigative opportunity for reciprocal critique and revision of the major paradigms of inquiry.

An Exemplary Modernism To return to late Modern political investigations: notice at the conclu­ sion of Plausible Worlds how Hawthorn, most certainly philosophically inclined, connects rhetoric and modality when he summarises the state of the question in the social sciences. Like Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, he rejects philosophical foundationalism with its quest for rock-bottom certitudes, a priori givens; history and the social sciences should not claim knowledge, but must be content with understanding hu­ man affairs. And, understanding engages modalities: for understanding we must fit them in a space of possibilities . . . it is our practi­ cal judgement of the practical judgements of the relevant agents which defines [possibilities] . . . Understanding human affairs starts and ends with our experience of the ac­ tual: but because it turns on what is causally and practically possible, it cannot produce knowledge, will rarely be general, and cannot simply consist in deploy­ ing a theory.28

Here, Hawthorn, in order to define understanding, intrudes rhetoric: “for understanding we are returned to persuasion and debate.” In a lengthy footnote he marks understanding’s goal of use, its concern for practical judgements, the difficulty of giving a formal account of deliberation, and the implications for investigative performance: “persuading others re­ quires the skills of what used to be thought of as rhetoric.”29 Rhetoric is doubly implicated in the social science project, then. On the one hand, rhetoric offers an account of the raw material— deliberating practices— of politics. On the other hand, investigations, as civil practices, must them­ selves persuade the audience into political conceptual clarity, a receptivity to alternate scenarios, sensitivity to unrealized possibilities. Hawthorn, in this passage, seems to lament the effacement of rheto­ ric in modernity. What I would now argue, however, is achievement, not

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effacement: that Modernity possesses in Walter Benjamin a prime ex­ ample of rhetorical brilliance in investigation. Obviously, Benjamin had neither a past formation nor a present community that would encour­ age easy self-definition as a rhetorician. What he had as context was the post-Kantian engagement with defining conditions of possibility Robert Pippin describes (I will refer to this in the next chapter), and Porter’s postNietzchean “philology of the future”: exactly right for the reassembly of the beliefs generating rhetorical habits of action in his criticism.30 And on the simplest, most basic level: for Quintilian, gesture, gestus or actio, was the preeminent rhetorical skill. Benjamin regards gesture as Kafka’s preeminent skill: “the entire work constitutes a code of gestures.”31 Yet it is both primary—he notes that Kafka “does not grow tired of making the gestus present” (II.2, 435; II.2, 814)—and fraught, difficult: “what Kafka could fathom least of all was the gesture . . . each gesture was an event” (II.2, 419; II.2, 802). Difficult but germane to, and fostering, expanding the argument: Kafka “divests human gesture of its traditional supports, and then has subject for reflection without end” (II.2, 420; II.2, 802). Ben­ jamin’s description of Kafka’s talent is a quintessentially rhetorical one. The divesting of traditional supports, engages the reader in questioning agency, pushing back against the constraints of traditional inquiry prose. And thus the animal parables: “they are not parables, yet they do not want to be taken at their face value” (II.2, 420; II.2, 803). What do the animal gestures clarify? “Shame,” in the parables, as “his strongest gesture” is both “an intimate human reaction” and has “social claims”; it both acts “in the presence of others,” and “for others” (II.2, 428; II.2, 808). It illumines mutual recognition; a collectivity of animals as well as men possess collec­ tive memory, identify a contest of forgetting (II.2, 429; II.2, 809–10). But, above all, Benjamin’s gestures explore possibility; the code of gestures proceeds from openness: the gestures “surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset” (II.2, 417; II.2, 801). And, the gestures proceed toward, deliver open-endedness, the chance of the pos­ sible: “the greater [his] mastery became, the more frequently he avoided adapting these gestures to common situations or explaining them” (II.2, 418; II.2, 801). Gesture is essential to Classical rhetoric as both diagnostic and per­ formative, performing in posing, suggesting an “inarticulate” possibility, where suggesting is either a vivid or a subtle physical marking of a value or operation not programmable in a proposition. Gesture is essential to Benjamin as well as Kafka; both are interested above all in literature and

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criticism as “rhetorical” investigation: that is, intervention, interference, “acting up”: that is, as theatrical gesture.32 “Gesture” indeed seems to be Benjamin’s term that describes the most basic unit of rhetorical effect, of material force in communication, and, still, only loosely attached to semantic structures; and, he regards gesture, surely, as timeful practice, not pure, stop-time visuality. To define discursive force one must describe a complicity with the modality of contingency: the inquirer works in “ac­ cidental, external, and even strange aspects in bond with the historical process.” The task is to confront “the capacity to be at home in marginal domains” (III, 360; II.2, 670). The rhetorical description is of a gesture inside the discursive or semiotic framework, usages; here, as well as in Benjamin’s fascination with collecting citations-as-gesture, aphorisms, the materiality is that of communication. Indeed, Benjamin labored over his theory of collecting; he interrupted his late Arcades project, essentially his attempt at an Urgeschichte of the 19th century, to perfect his essay, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Histo­ rian,” essentially his attempt to redefine history. Benjamin, in his late postMarxist phase approves a general “dialectical” as opposed to “causal” inquiry (II.2, 479; III, 269). Historical materialism rescues us from the dysfunction of the “Humanism vs. Science” paradigm; the key question is: is an inquirer or is he not a “dialectical” thinker? (II.2, 482; III,270) In Fuchs he sees a contest of a rationalist fervor and a hunger for material, but the beneficial result is a correction of formalism; the collector’s work with reproductions addresses the crucial issue of reception (II.2, 480; III, 269); his critique of the concern with genius (inspiration, intentionality) is a concern with Faktur, materiality; and the investigation of iconography, a deeply obliged contextualist program, is, as anti-formalist, central to the interest in reception, materiality. The rhetorical linkage of gesture and collecting, of collecting material gestures, and stipulating thoughts as indices, gestures, is very strong in the late Passagen-Werk. First, I find illuminating the structural similari­ ties of the collecting work of Benjamin’s “convolutes,” the files, sheafs of notes of the Arcades project with the contemporaneous screens, the large black screens covered with diverse images and texts, image reactions, in Aby Warburg’s “Atlas” project. In both cases we have extraordinarily so­ phisticated attempts to organize “theoretical” and “practical” material elements simultaneously. Second, I will argue that both the convolutes and the screens suggest the traditional organization of the commonplace book, of classifying remarkable diversity under topoi, compendious argu­

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mentative headings. Here Benjamin’s habits of transferring, repetititously, material into his convolutes indicate his devotion to argumentative func­ tion. As opposed to systemic classificatory habits that relegate, deposit, these are topoi that rhetorically work in reverse: requesting links, threads of argument; they supply substance, ends, but not means; and, lacking means, they provoke our connection-making by the absence of explicit connections, soliciting, in short, possible arguments in response. And, for both Benjamin and for Warburg the convolutes, screens control theory bits as well as collection bits; indeed, the theory elements as citations have the hard-edge of “things.” Certainly the collecting habits emphasise the materiality, physicality of thinking-gesture as rubric.33 Material or “mechanical”; Benjamin revalues the notion of art as ex­ perience. At this point, it is useful to shift from an account of rhetorical interests, values as characterizing basic Benjaminian habits of investiga­ tive action, to considering possibility as presupposition, energizing belief. We may regard the two major essays, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” as well as the assemblage “Central Park” as a prolonged meditation on modality, and specifically on possibility as modality that changes the sub­ ject, questions the status of “things,” shifts gears of description, explana­ tion moments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “The Work of Art,” and there, most perspicuously in the adumbration of the tentative nature of the “original”; in order to understand our experience of the reproduc­ tion we must entertain a range of new aesthetic possibilities, both revalue the potential—Aristotle’s dunamis— of the original, and come to terms with its “aura,” either as an “actuality” we claim to experience or as an originating possibility, an event that puts experiences in train. His sense of aura is as that which is specific to time and place, and thus as that which is eliminable (verkümmert), unreproducable (I.2, 438).34 Aura is Dasein possessing an authenticity (Echtheit) (I.2, 437), yet as ephemeral, simply a Gespinst, spiderweb (I.2, 440); this indicates again his interest in modality, in specification of varieties of being as basic, prior in his aesthetic specula­ tion, and perhaps suggests echoes of Heideggerean formulae. Or, suggests timefulness: he may claim the aura as inseparable from embedment in the fabric of tradition which is itself alive, changeable (I.2, 441), that is, as a specificity not to be nailed down; since the context of reception—now, the masses—is itself in flux the work of art is an active, working existence; al­ ways reproducible, but irreplaceable as well. Or, Benjaminian criticism re­ calls a Collingwoodian effort to make us thicken our sensibility to time as

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dimension, experienced in multiplicity, simultaneousness. Both theorise a fluidity which we shall see as central to the Modernist program; the intro­ duction of “aura” into the argument saves speculation on past possibility, blocks the retreat of the ephemeral, or, simply enriches experience. But Benjamin’s most powerful statement about versions, semblances concerns translation; (“The Task of the Translator,” I, 253–63; IV.1, 9–21). Benjamin specifies alternate, unrealized possibilities in claiming the diffi­ cult, fraught relation between originals, as perhaps now unrealizable possi­ bilities, to translations, transformed actualities. As well, the appearance of an adequate translator is sheer contingency (I, 254; IV.1, 10). And, as if to underline this “impossibility” of translation, Benjamin counter-­intuitively denies a straightforward account of an audience of a work of art. “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience” (I, 253; IV.1, 9). Our simplest, most direct notions of versions are put at risk; there is no direct, archetypal relation. This de­ nial serves to emphasize the problematic status of versions, the peculiarity (but not the meaninglessness) of possible translations. Rather, the origi­ nal as translatable can transform, be transformed as another language’s possibility, an after-life, a potential requiring the fullest possible range of rhetorical sensitivities to the possibilities of a language; the actualization is not of the text, but of the “kinship of languages” (I, 255; IV.1, 12). The task is to represent “the innermost relation of languages to one another”; there is a profound shift of scale in the project of transfer. The translation transpires within the constant flux of languages, expressive possibilities in motion, expressed, here, as language-life, a biological figuration. What motivates his account of original/reproduction, original/translation is a very rich sense of possibility, of the rhetorical capacity for representing difference as truth. A fascination with possibilities develops a talent for difference: philological accomplishment combines grammatical and rhe­ torical sensitivities to structure and use. Benjamin sees no need to throw out the philological baby, accuracy and zeal, with the tedious positivist bath water. In “The Rigorous Study of Art” (III, 363–69; II.2, 266–70), he insists that philological craft must address the insignificant; the inquirer must make himself at home in marginal domains. The significance sought in their techniques is rhetorical, arguing against the traditional center as neglect.35 But the Benjaminian rhetorical continuity is not simply of a disciplinary frame of belief and habit, but a remarkable iteration of Vichian rhetorical initiatives, to the point, I would suggest, that the Benjaminian prose reads

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like a forgery: the taking over, intact, without citation, of Vichian motives. Thus the brilliant articles on “The Mimetic Faculty” (II.1, 210–13; II.2, 720–22); “The Doctrine of the Similar” (II.1, 204–10; II.2, 694–98); and “On Astrology” (VI, 192–93; II.2, 684–85).36 Benjamin insists on the origi­ nary force of mimesis, of similarity as essential to all kinds of occult Wissen in history; it recalls, perhaps, the importance of the historical-figurative presence of metaphor in the New Science. Benjamin’s emphasis, however, is on the historical occurences of strategies of mimesis, the specific cogni­ tive usages of resemblance in the past. He assumes an originary mimetic potential of objects, and its increasing fragility in historical development; a flood of “manifest configurations, mimetic resemblances, may once have existed where today we can’t even guess at them” (VI, 193; II.2, 685). For Benjamin, and Vico, present the alternative as not simply a different theory of cognition, but a different cognition; for both, situating actuality, the actual high culture, requires the consideration of radical, fundamental reorientations, a Collingwoodian “metaphysical” shift. Then, “imitation may be seen as the only authority that gave to astrology the character of experience”; this imitation is an inaccessible strategy of creating meaning. Benjamin, in short, engages and recommends a genealogy of “similarity” (read metaphor) as powerful originary knowledge (II.1, 210–13; II.2, 720– 22). And, like Vico, he assumes language as “an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences” (II.1, 208; II.2, 697). They indicate, not so much a Hobbesian “rhetorised psychology,” as a rheto­ rised epistemology. Vichian as well is Benjamin’s privileging of the rhetorical, or effec­ tive force of myth as text. Myth intrudes an experience of the heroic. For Benjamin myth was the Greek’s historical evidence: “No myth has been understood unless it has been accepted by reason, the Greek myths are fundamentally rational” (II.1, 392; II.2, 578). Yet, Vico rejects the stan­ dard account of the heroes as “historical” Greeks with “philosophical” moral virtue. Rather, he puts forward heroic society as acquiescent to force, punctilious in greed, verbally scrupulous; this is an alternate, pos­ sible world that explains without residue the actions and capacities nar­ rated in the epics. Vichian adjacency, the assumption of possible worlds of different cognitive capacity, not simply different theories of cognition, raises the issue of “scale” as significant again. Benjamin, perhaps, recog­ nized Vico’s strenuousness, his secessionist care to produce a radically novel possible world, to secede from the philosophical account as wrong, inappropriate to the Homeric material, and merely justificatory of an

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anachronistic program, not rhetorically sensitive to the heroic interactions related. For Vico, Homeric myth is the hardest possible evidence for a historical development of extraordinary political importance, of heroism as institution, an institution that strongly modified the course of successive institutions. For, again, we can find a Vichian reformation, the therapy of the “impersonal.” Benjamin reiterates Vico’s premise; it is not the pri­ vate, individual accomplishment but the structure and proceedings of an organization that signifies.37 Their topic is often the web of considerations that embed the simplest gestures of solidarity or denial in civil history. “In every case it is a question of how life and work are organized in society” (II.2, 420; II.2, 803). Yet in Benjamin, more than in Vico, or in Hobbes, there is an explicit, strong acknowledgment of the obligation to rhetorical performance; poli­ tics is not simply topic but engagement, discursive duty for the inquirer: “the gate to justice is study” (II.2, 247; II.2, 815). It is in the articles on Kafka, as well as in “The Author as Producer,” and “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer” that Benjamin deals with the presence (absence) of a politically functional intelligentsia. Here he notes the de­ cline of a “free Intelligentsia” (II.2, 783; II.2, 749) in Modernist authors’ disastrous, self-delusive attempts to come closer to “Wirklichkeit.” While the (lost) function of intellectuals is to defend our most human interests in the long term, the loss as well is of “Humanistic anarchism,” radical contestation of delusions of realism (II.2, 789; II.2, 753). Benjamin’s rhetorical habits thus extend not only to the definition of political initiatives in discursive activity, but, as well, to a critique of con­ temporary politicality, the absence of true political commitment. And here Benjamin revisits the rhetorical topic of audience dismissed in his account of translations. Thus he elaborates his account of European intellectuals’ lack of a sense of audience: intellectuals retreat to “an over-sized monkish cell . . . in order to weave the text of a sermon, undaunted by the thought it will be delivered to rows of empty seats, if indeed it is delivered at all” (II.2, 784; II.2, 749). No audience, no colleagues: Benjamin deplores as deeply disturbing the divide between novelists and intellectuals (II.2, 791; II.2, 755). Yet his critique of Proust claims Proust, as sensitive to the very social-historical issues Benjamin had stipulated as task for the intellectual, writes “from the standpoint of the pure consumer,” yet, is brilliant in his critique of society (II.2, 792; II.2, 755). Still, both artist and intellectual now err in their sense of persuasive task, political duty: Benjamin deplores the fact that the avant-garde has only the haute bourgeoisie as public; he

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cites Cendrars on authors becoming automata, disjoined shadows, Döppelganger (II.2, 799; II.2, 761). This focus on “the development of the problems in the advanced in­ telligentsia in France” is archetypical rhetorical inquiry: located in space and time, considering the issues of decorum, changes in space and time, considering appropriate response, and with the assumption that the first task is to define a collective subject /author, a political collectivity. Yet, the modern collectivities may lack responsibility: for example, “Surrealism would have been spared many enemies . . . had it originated unambigu­ ously in politics” (II.2, 798; II.2, 759). Benjamin contemptuously observes that not even Machiavelli tried to embellish the bitter political necessities with “the pathos of ethical precepts” (II.2, 787; II.2, 748); this of course fits with Machiavelli’s elimination of the veneer of Classical political philoso­ phy from political narrative. As well, one must note the intrication of the two Aristotelian rhetorical proofs ( pisteis): ethos and pathos. One could argue that Benjamin is the most Modernist of rhetoricians; Benjamin, by means of rhetorical analysis, makes the case that Modern­ ism lacks, fundamentally, mysteriously, rhetorical-political articulation.38 In contrast to the theoretical purity, the prestigious detachment of phi­ losophy, the “aura” of rhetoric is the presence of a continual cultivation of audience; as itself political, it properly instructs listeners in their political work, or chides them for its absence. Further, the Modernist rhetorical sense of modality shifts, displaces the sense of experience, presence; pos­ sibilities diminish, necessity recedes. My Peircian assumption was, recall, that belief in possibility as primary domain of operation generates partic­ ular habits of action in rhetorical inquiry. But this fits in with my sense of Benjamin’s rhetorical capacities, for his modal proclivities generate oppo­ sition to intellectual necessity, to necessitarian exposition, to, for example, exhaustive psychoanalytic or theological interpretations of Kafka.; (II.2, 424; II.2, 806); a taste for possibility works against hegemonous explana­ tory theories, excessive thematising. But, can the practical proclivity be inadequate for necessary practical demands? Does this tension sponsor further demands, insights, strategies? Benjamin recognizes the tension, but does not indulge the necessity. Thus, as we shall see, modality as consuming rhetorical practical interest will connect with chance/contingency as consuming Modernist preoccupation. Arendt notes in her “Introduction” (43) that Benjamin (like Kafka), like the flaneur of the Arcades project, is guided by chance in his explorations. That is to say on another level, Benjamin (as perhaps Kafka) is solely

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interested in literature and criticism as intervention, yet the modal status of the intervention is precisely what is at issue. Not only are the demarca­ tions impossible/possible insecure, but the actuality, the direction of the gesture is troublesome, descriptions are reactive, expositions too reflexive to place. But not just exposition: Benjamin follows Kafka in dealing not in simple fictions but provocative modal issues. Kafka’s theater is devastat­ ingly reductive of modal kinds: the theatrical can function as effacement: “it is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be”—“Dass sie im Ernstfall sein könnten, was sie angeben, schattet aus dem Bereich der Möglichkeit” (II.2, 422; II.2, 804). It is proper, then, to note Benjamin’s range of rhetorical talents: most certainly in his appreciation of the primacy of gesture, and, again, in the re­ markable parallels with Vichian interests in originary language elements, and again in his wild originality in generating possibility in response to contingency as context. Even the chronological table of Benjamin’s pro­ duction in VII.2 edifies in its display of his extraordinary list of smallscale, edgy responses to small-scale cultural facts, or trainwrecks. And, as we shall see, he edifies in his appropriations of “sociality” and “fluidity” as large-scale Modernist qualifications of inquiry. Benjamin’s work is the most subtly rhetorical of all; it takes seriously the task of interlocution; it performs in the domain of the marginal, fragile; it acts with the aim of continually stretching the competence of the reader to engage with oth­ ers— other texts, images, readers. Benjamin cultivates our possibilities.

chapter four

Modernizing Rhetoric: Recuperation and Response

I

have been claiming that the quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy offers a specific and useful perspective on inquiry as a contrast of modality concerns— of rhetoric with possibility, opposed to philosophy with necessity, and, that the contrast illumines rhetoric’s civil motives. Rhetorical habits discover, articulate, refine, and pose possibilities. Recall Hawthorn’s “possibilities haunt the social sciences.” Rhetoric uses conjecture to expand, transform a problematic, and uses counterfactuals to revalue our past as our necessity. Thus, Elliott wants us to review, strenuously, our sense of colonial enterprise in his “rhetorical” query—was Montezuma necessary? But consider as well Bernard Williams’ claim: Rhetoric is peculiarly disposed to set free the various suspects from the Platonic side of the divide, carrying with it ideas of manipulation and force, and the implications that there are almost in the nature of the case, rival speakers (or, if not, that is because one has got rid of the others).1

Williams, perhaps, sees the Platonic Republic as “truth”; it does not need to be actual. But he defines rhetoric as saving the phenomena, placing them in a web of conjectures about vulnerability to manipulation, scenarios of force. By the mention of force Williams reminds us of rhetoric’s fundamental physicality, its refusal to preclude the material, ignore bodies. “Setting free” is suggesting possible, alternate scenarios for possible

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alternate forces. Rhetorical intervention is not simply an inventive articulation but a rescue of suspect elements, possibilities fraught with connections to power. Rhetoric sponsors strenuous review, acting against thin moralism. But here I must make a strong disclaimer: Willliams’ work itself represents a really considerable initiative of rescue; his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) sets a program that meticulously makes a case against bad motives and thin arguments of political and ethical philosophy. I admit that the rescue I am attributing to rhetoric with its affinity for possibility has a different presence in Williams’ thought. Yet, certainly, for Williams much of contemporary political philosophy is still Classical. The point of intruding Hobbes and Vico in the Modern discussion is that their political thinking is not. Vico responds exactly to the loss of politics: the absence of Classical political activity is generative; Hobbes reorients the discussion by removing the Classical moral carapace from political speculation. But, how, specifically, did Hobbes and Vico modernize political inquiry? Hawthorn argued that the social sciences must be content with understanding since they do not possess an adequate psychology to “capture” practical deliberations.2 He sees this exchange of knowledge for understanding as not so much modesty as precision, staking out the territory of civil potential and process.Yet, Hobbesian rhetoricized psychology and Vichian rhetorical-legal hermeneutic transformed political capacities as collective, requiring a new decorum of collectivity, new definitions of civil possibility. They changed entirely the protocols of achievement. (Perhaps Hawthorn did not notice) Hobbesian basic psychological elements are shared: emotions are the being of the social; Vico offers narratives with no proper names, the impersonal as agency. And Vichian nar­ ratives of unintended consequences, of the deep ironies of history, are of equal importance with Hobbesian pessimism in the delineation of unto­ ward capacity, potentiality which subverts, secedes from the Classical political philosophical narratives of individual intention and act: these become impossibilities. That is: impossibilities as acts ineffective politically, or at least, the individual intentions have, often, unintended consequences. I am arguing, then, for the seriousness, coherence of a post-­Hobbesian, post-Vichian investigative moment. Here Williams makes a most suggestive distinction, between Modernity and contemporaneity, in order to assert the “Modern” as a specific and unique inquiry epoch, with “modernity” as “a genuinely historical category, which organises both explanations and phenomena to be explained.”3 In contrast, “contemporaneity” is vulnerable as unstable, ever-recurring, as always reclaiming unique-

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ness, as always au courant with the current. We may have then a range of contemporary rhetorics, of dubious investigational interest. No doubt Classical rhetorical disciplines have lost their academic place; no doubt rhetorical techniques of reading are in vogue. The notion that Modernity offers a certain completeness in inquiry must contend with a truly irreducible disarray of rhetorical motives and goals. The extraordinary diffusion in pre-Modernity of manuals, pedagogical works provided for the diffusion of rhetorical notions. But the one can undermine the other; the persistence, or reinstatement of rhetoric as an academic subject does not necessarily innovate in rhetorical inquiry. In fact, the opposite tendency may be observed. Rhetorical analyses of contemporary political oratory tend to smell of the Classical lamp, when renewal would mean competent response to contemporary context. In short, there is a reverse drift of argument, ventriloquizing, destructive of argument. But Williams tells us to define, with a hard edge, Modern rhetorical inquiry as both recuperation, rescue, and extension of specific explanatory paradigms and their explananda, that is, both novel and expansive. I am interested then, only in defining Modernist inquiry in Williams’ sense, with only a loose, intriguing relation to the task of defining Modernism as epoch, promise of higher civilization: more specifically, in the viability of Modernist rhetoric as political inquiry. First then, the key to, the trigger for the Modernist recovery of rhetoric is the recuperation of the political core of rhetoric. Without the serious political engagement, the originary Hellenic program, rhetorical analysis is easily colonized by parallel investigative fashions; without the engagement even the analysis of modern political oratory becomes primarily a tactical description, or a literary exercise. It is one thing to take a “linguistic turn” and proclaim language as the core of politics; it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities. Then, the recuperation of the political core is key to the revaluation of possibility as rhetorical modal interest. Modality, of course, is a primitive choice; early, influential, purposive; modal choices precede and modify other investigative choices. The rhetorical allegiance to possibility as mode is a specific commitment of rhetoric entailed by the time-specific need for practices of negotiation, for the addressing of dispositions, for asserting, contesting, denying beliefs: the cathection to possibility is required by the demands of time. Yet, Modernizing must necessarily be capable response as well as recuperation; besides recapitulating an originary program, as Modernist, it

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must be responsive to key elements in the Modern discussion. This requires a shift in my strategy from simply a consideration of the specific beliefs and habits of action of rhetoric as inquiry initiative, to a review of the general intellectual historical context, the encompassing discussion that requires response. Robert Pippin sees Modernism as most economically described as a philosophical problem; he privileges as Modern a bold Kantian initiative seeking autonomy, a “thorough critical or selfdetermining reflection,” a reflection concerned with establishing “the conditions of possibility for knowledge.”4 One can make a case for Modernist rhetoric, for rhetorical inquiry with a hard edge, with Williams’ coherence of explanation and explananda, that is, by insisting on its competent response to a Modernist context, to the general shift in philosophical work. In my view—it almost certainly is not Pippin’s—the philosophical shift produces concepts that accommodate rather than contest rhetorical ambitions; the rhetorical ambitions, however, require focusing not so much on “autonomy” as goal as on “conditions of possibility” as means. The recovery of rhetoric transpires within an atmosphere of post-­Hegelian epistemological excitement, and it should be possible to find within late 19th- and 20th-century rhetorical inquiry responses to, perhaps only to, a specific Hegelian strand; this particular reading of German Idealism selects modal beliefs and investigative habits and offers our best chance of understanding modern rhetoric’s best efforts. Following Pippin, I would suggest two Hegelian factors: a sense of fluidity encompassing both inquiry and its topics, and a commitment to critique of the isolate self, solipsistic in activity, a commitment which is, at the same time, devotion to sociality. The epistemological excitement, justificatory for Modern inquiry initiatives, consists, then, of a strong new role for temporality in inquiry, and a contentious strategy in social definition of subject, agent, and purpose, and, I would add, a modal interest: a search for conditions of possibility, and the qualification of possibility as shaping argument.5 There is as well a piquancy in the homology between the sociality and fluidity of the recuperated rhetorical program—already marked in Hobbesian and Vichian inquiry—and the new philosophical work. For a sense of the high epistemological stakes, I will turn to a carefully Modernist—in Williams’ sense of the word—reading of Hegel, an account that not only collects, clarifies the contextual factors I regard as relevant, but is itself an instantiation of modal interests that qualify these factors. I shall refer only, then, to Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, and, in particular to his chapter 7, “Satisfying

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Self-Consciousness,” which describes chapter 4 of the Phänomenologie des Geistes.6 Pippin considers here the “turning point,” which Hegel defines as the leaving behind both of the empirical, “the colorful sham of the sensuous here and now,” and the metaphysical, “of the empty night of the supersensible beyond,” in order to step into “the spiritual day of the present.” What is of interest to the rhetorical recuperation is only this account of the turning point, of only the critical work, the PhG as introduction, rather than Hegel’s mature social-political theory.7 True, the relegation of the late political theory allows Pippin to ignore some of the more hairraising of Hegelian political pronouncements. But true as well, it enables Pippin to focus on the critical brilliance of Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s work. Pippin’s narrative of the turning point is important in suggesting the deep background for Modernist revisions of inquiry; the account both asserts the strong new role for temporality and claims a bold initiative in collective, social definition of subject, agency, purpose. In Hegel’s chapter 4, I would argue, Hegel’s turning point is determined in what is essentially a rhetorical workplace, a domain of modalities, historical process, deeply social, not solipsist. For Pippin, of course, philosophy is the “decisive single institution,” with the mission of clarifying the form and ground of thought (HI, 170). Yet at a juncture where he announces “finally, we arrive at a philosophical claim” (HI, 148, cf. 143), he acknowledges a previous lack, and a style of argument unphilosophical, perhaps rhetorical, certainly stylish—“opaque, bizarre” (HI, 144): bizarre in the interjection of the Master-Slave discussion, in no logical order, as part of an “archetypical parable of modern social life,” a fable of source as a “Hobbesian social ontology” (HI, 154). Of peculiar interest are the intrusions of possibility in Pippin’s account, the persistent introduction of the term at practically every major juncture of the argument. Thus, he claims the turning point “opens to self­consciousness its possibility of knowledge” (HI, 143). Here Pippin argues the Kantian source for Hegelian work, and refers back to the Kantian interest in the issues of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, apperception, the autonomy and spontaneity of self-consciousness. The shift is to mindedness considered as spontaneity, not substance, then to like-mindedness considered as social achievement.8 Hegel’s method considers the “truth of possible shapes of the Spirit” (HI, 146). Chapter 4 considers not only the interdependency of the possibility of determinacy and the actuality of the undetermined subject, but suggests as well the inconclusiveness of his

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inherited cognitive language; for, you can make claims only within a practice to possibly objective judgement (HI, 147). Pippin claims that Hegel sees a realist skeptical notion of consciousness (as) only an ungrounded counter-possibility; and, he regards resort to psychology as dubious: desires, ends are not a possible independent ground (HI, 149). Pippin describes Hegel as claiming against a “metaphysical” notion of self-consciousness as substance, it is not as an external, another world that self-­consciousness is “the condition of possibility of the sensuous [empirical] world” (HI, 149). Also, “spirit,” Pippin tells us, is Hegel’s “term of art for social existence, for collectively achieved practices” (HI, 147). “The very possibility of ego-identity requires reciprocal recognition—it is only possible within a community” (HI, 154).9 “Subject” as condition of possibility becomes a placeholder; it loses its traditional grammatical-logical function. And “condition of possibility” is certainly impersonal, accessible; it is a sketch of capacity as at least divided, put in motion, and suggests, we shall see, “mutual recognition” as cognitive goal. This is, indeed, a strange vector for abstract thinking; to resist the grammatical isolation of the subject, and to insist on the social nature of the Spirit. (All the emphases are mine.) But, these intrusions of possibility are Pippin’s, not Hegel’s; he is using modal considerations to gloss Hegelian excitement. Pippin’s enthusiasm for the possibilities posed by the Hegelian text cannot obscure the fact that the word “möglich” appears but once in the chapter (PhG [1952], 144). And thus his description of inquiry: the central problem of the PhG is the problem of knowledge. The issue is: how to consider community and its establishment of the constitutive principles, especially of claims to knowledge, claims that can only be made “possible” within the community? Universality is at stake; the goal is developing like-mindedness, that is, reciprocal recognition; recognition is central for the problem of a possible knowledge of objects (HI, 155–56, 160). The need to develop a “like-mindedness,” as reciprocal recognition, is equated with Absolute Spirit (HI, 156); self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged (159); recognition is “collective subjectivity” (160); the subject is always a collective, socially self-realizing subject (HI, 170). Yet, to introduce another desiring [phenomenal] subject in the scenario is to introduce the possibility of conflict (HI,152), thus we must account for thought itself in the possibility of struggle for supremacy and resolution (HI, 159, 163); the link between the possibility of self-consciousness and thought requires two factors: an “other” self-consciousness, or selfconsciousness “in thought” (HI, 159). But this results in the introduction

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of the Master-Slave narrative of struggle, opposition, where the Master (recognizing) confronts the Slave (recognized) (HI, 160). Here, I would argue, the strategy suggests the invocation of a rhetorical account of possible mutuality, possible roles in mapping human work, as it achieves collective subjectivity (HI, 160), and as it asserts the absolute universality of thought. In Pippin’s summary section, he states the problem Hegel confronts is “the distinction of the logically possible from the really possible” (HI, 169–70), the key issue in the history of modal logic. Yet, the brilliant conclusion of Hegel’s chapter concerns the Unhappy Consciousness and its relation to reality, and it is devoted to the misapprehension of reality, “Wirklichkeit.” Indeed, Hegel’s use in this conclusion of Wirklichkeit is nearly as prominent as Pippin’s use of “possibility” (PhG, 160f). If Hegel asserts the priority of motion—and here Pippin notes the philosophical analogue to the Aristotelian premise of movement as defining the physical (HI, 150)—Hegel’s interest is in process of actualization, not potential, not Möglichkeit, but “Wirklichkeit.” His narrative is of a broken, sundered reality established in repetitious actuality by a broken, sundered consciousness, limited by contingency, not enlarged by possibility. Hegel describes, movingly, a mistake. So movingly, I would claim, that the PhG can be read as a rhetorical explication of some rhetorical oppositional strategies that underpin the rhetorical recuperation. True, the Hegelian theoretical promise, of course, will be of the possibility of potential, of the expansive politics of negotiation and recognition. However, it is Pippin’s Modernism that makes the Hegelian Modern philosophical context perspicacious for rhetoric. It is his intellectual-historical use of “possible” to replace the philosophical “actual” that, by shifting the register of Hegel’s ingenious proposals, shifts the effect of exactly those strands of Hegelian inquiry that inform the rhetorical recuperation; in the PhG both factors, fluidity (Hegelian Flüssigkeit) of inquiry and the social nature of the Spirit are presented, and both factors are presented and glossed by modal considerations by Pippin. The two strands—fluidity of inquiry and topic, with fluidity as the temporal atmosphere of possibility, and collectivity as defining a “subject”—underwrite inventive political, precisely civil, possibilities: ingenuity in stipulating change, process, and evasion of conventional structures in attributing intention, appreciation of collective action. Central is Pippin’s focus on Hegel’s devotion to mutual recognition: all fundamental activities are cognitive (227); mutual recognition is canon for the knowledge of politics as well as of philosophy and science. If, therefore,

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you cannot extrapolate to someone else’s recognition, you have no chance of defining the potential of yours; you would have to admit a debilitating solipsism. It is not simply that Pippin’s possibility glosses the Hegelian text: in some basic way, Pippin wants to sort out a proclivity for stating political, social issues in a particular mode: that is, as considering possibility as expansive, enriching. Fluidity, and the social nature of the Spirit establish the devotion to possibility in political discourse, the devotion, in short, to a liberating expansion of problematic. Pippin concludes his book, notably, with a recharacterization of Hegel’s recharacterization of logic; the effort is accommodating, I will claim, to rhetoric. Pippin works with the Hegelian investment in the Notion, an investment that observes . . . how the traditional understanding of thought’s most fundamental distinctions, the fixed classifications of logical kinds, Notion, judgement, and syllogism, and the internal distinctions within each classification (especially universality and particularity; predicate and subject) are inadequately understood within the standard term “logic.” Such Notions are far more inherently interrelated and interdefinable than had been recognized. (237)

And the result of such ignorance is that the metaphysical consequences drawn are undermined by the failure to note the dependence of the Notions on “the conceptual scheme as a whole.” Ignorance afflicts the modality of actuality itself. Thought must be construed as an “activity,” and the investigative results must be seen as functions, rules for activity: Peircian “habits of action” perhaps. Thought, also, in motion: philosophy may assert motion; rhetoric’s competence, its ongoing task is to respond to it. All this reinforces a Modernist recuperation of Classical rhetorical habits, originally committed to time, to fluidity, to processual notions of inquiry and topic. The recuperation is response as well to interdefinability of a certain type, to social, interpersonal definition; “mutual recognition” is the rhetorical gold standard of cognition, as we observe in the recuperation of the topics, the commonplaces as organization of mutual recognition. We recognize the promise of Hegel’s theory in the rhetorical engagement with fluidity, process, development as encompassing inquiry and its topics, and in the care to define the intrusion of collective definition tactics, of socially defined agency, of the processes of mutual recognition, in the parallels and intrications of cognitive and political practices in negotiating recognition. But we must notice another Modernist connection.

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While Pippin uses modality to gloss the factors of fluidity and social definition in Hegel’s critical inquiry, we notice an analogous pair of factors—an insistence on fluidity in inquiry as well as topic, and on pluralist, collective agency in the making of both practices and the theory of practices in J. Hintikka’s early text, Knowledge and the Known.10 But here the fluidity and agency are justificatory context for his program in modal logic. Possibility’s importance in this program stems from its use in expansive, i.e., adequate, definition— conceptual clarity. In a definition, a thorough account of compatibility of inquirer’s proposition with “what he knows” requires the inclusion of “unrealized possibilities”; it must encompass all those “realized and unrealized states of affairs and courses of events,” “possible worlds,” that are pertinent (KK, 214–15). Hintikka emphasizes the importance of the interrelations of possibility, necessity, contingency, impossibility to each other; in order to stabilize and refine the relations, he focuses on possibility. The Lovejovian metaphysical Principle of Plenitude—that all genuine possibilities will be realized at some point in our time—uses the notion of possibility to define, in turn, necessity, impossibility, contingency. But note as well Hintikka’s significant, and unexpected, admiration of R. G. Collingwood’s sense of fluidity, in Collingwood’s insistence that “a large part of the philosophical activity of the Socratic school consisted of attempts, and sometimes not entirely unsuccessful attempts to free themselves of the implications of their conceptual presuppositions,” from the diminishing returns of conceptual clarity as closure (KK, 43). Correction in philosophical program has its power and value in the contest against inevitability, necessity; the core, proper effort of the philosophical tradition should be reconsidered as an effort to free thought from inevitability. Or, Hintikka, will argue: “the reason why a thinker adopts the so-called Principle of Plenitude may be his belief in the richness of the world. But it may also be his narrow view of the hidden possibilities that lurk behind the ontological backdrop of our actual world, hoping to enter the limelight of our actuality.”11 Consider as well, later in the text, Hintikka’s appreciation of Vico and Hobbes’ arguments for the status of “maker’s knowledge,” and thus for the needful primacy of the topics of the civil world as a world of our collective manufacture, and therefore “knowable.” Yet, Hintikka’s is a refined appreciation: he observes “how little truly intentional action” there is in, say, Vico’s account of cose civili, his maker’s knowledge (KK, 83). Recall Hintikka’s proposition that “an action is intentional if and only if it

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involves the simultaneous consideration of several possible worlds.”12 In short, Hintikka, in directing us to fluidity in inquiry and to maker’s knowledge, is directing us as well to the nuances of civil making, to Vico’s irony, to unintended consequences. While conceptual clarity depends on reference to more than one possible world, the agents of civil history are not necessarily to be presumed to have conceptual clarity. To attribute possible choices to the past is not, necessarily, to attribute possible awarenesses of choice. “Possible” can be meant in the most refined, non-empirical way. But, as well, “possible” dwells only within community, the community with choices, within the domain covered by maker’s knowledge. Vico stipulated that only the inquirer-narrator’s “making” knowledge can track civil making. It may be the case that there is disparity between the clarification brought by Hintikka’s community of inquirers’ consideration of possible worlds, and the clarity of the political process; the inquirer, not the politician, benefits from unrealized possibilities, counterfactual narratives. Is there a possibility that clarifying political inquiry is not a recipe for clarifying political thinking? The inquirer seems to be constrained to canvass possibilities; Vico does not mention that his political agents are under similar constraint. Vico’s “indomitable forces of reasonable choice” are both powerful and, alas, rare. Is the clarity brought by consideration of possible worlds authenticating a lack of clarity in actuality?

New Rhetorics But, our focus must be on the possibility of Modern “modal rhetorics” rather than modal logic. I will appeal only to two more or less “nationally” defined initiatives, and I argue that the contemporary historiography of rhetoric, rather than the practice, is the location of speculative vigor for both the recuperation of an originary Classical rhetoric and response to the Modernist discussion. In the German development, initiated and summarized for me by Heidegger’s SS1924 lectures, it would seem from the singular occurrence in these lectures of Aristotle’s Rhetoric that rhetoric was the accidental beneficiary of Heidegger’s confrontation with his Modernist context. Instead, I would argue that the texts Heidegger found in the Rhetoric become essential to his strategy of correction of philosophical direction, just as the Rhetoric was essential to Heidegger’s narrative for the correction of our notion of the history of Hellenic thinking. Again, the crucial tactic of recuperation was to link the claim that rhetoric was

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not an autonomous linguistic techne but functioned inside politics, with his introduction of new goals and procedures in his revisionary account of Hellenic inquiry. It should come as no surprise to find, besides this novel recuperation, a Heideggerean response to the Hegelian factors of fluidity and social definition. Heidegger’s Modernist lineage is impeccable. At the same time that he mines Aristotle’s Rhetoric for insight, Heidegger takes a place in a very rich line of phenomenological inquiry. In the background of the SS1924 lectures are his lectures of 1920–1921 on St. Paul and the phenomenology of religion; here Heidegger explicitly claims he is attempting a phenomenology of early Christian religious experience in the Diltheyan mode.13 The continuity Dilthey-Husserl-Heidegger which is explored in the collection of Makkreel and Scanlon, Dilthey and Phenomenology, is of specific, intrinsic interest to the Heideggeran reformulations of agency, action, narrative. Recall its focus on the problematic of time, which could be considered as at least in part a maturation of the Hegelian concern with flu­ idity.14 A close reading of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, however, reveals not simply Modernist initiatives, but a revaluation of Classical habits of action in inquiry; it is a Peircian project as Modernist response. It is not so much a pressing through to a “pure” Aristotle, as a demolition of intervening mediations; it is more rigorous than Gadamer’s hermeneutic, according to Dockhorn; perhaps it can be seen as recasting Husserl’s reflexive phenomenology. The virtuosity of Heidegger’s use of the Rhetoric is manifest in his intrication of interests in time and mode in his account of Aristotle on “fear” (1382a20–1383a12). This is an elaborate, nuanced specification of fear not simply as “experience,” aesthesis, but as Befindlichkeit, disposition, where one “finds oneself” in reaction to a phantasia, a representation, as announcement, through signs, sem�ia, of a possibility that is “still not really there,” “noch nicht eigentlich da.” Phobos, that is, as a Befindlichkeit, die gestellt ist vor eine mich betreffende, auf mich zukommende und als solche sich anmeldende, und zwar gerade durch die Anmeldung näher kommende Möglichkeit.15

The insistence on futurity, on a future subjunctive voice, is a claim on mode. “Fear” as a possibility, then, is both “there, and not there,” “da und nicht da,” actually felt and not actual; it is “still” not really here, and

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it might not happen; yet it has an intimacy, or nearness, “ein Nicht-Dasein in Sichnähern zu sein” (253).Tense and mode conspire to define the status of a political factor that glosses political behavior. This functions, among other things, as a meticulous account of the reality of a mutual recognition, shared fantasy, as cognitive and political act. At the same time, I would argue for the usefulness of Aristotle’s Rhetoric as intervention in the 1924 work in the general development of early Heideggerean thought. For, there is a strong linkage of the notions of possibility and time made explicit in the lecture “The Concept of Time,” a lecture which was, in real time (July 1924), embedded in the work of the SS1924 lectures.16 Here there is a very strenuous reworking of basic ontological arguments; the primary motive, to insert temporal process into formulations results in a striking reformulation of possibility in the intrication of human existence, Dasein, with time, possibility. Dasein is as human life primarily possibility (12E); Dasein is mine in its authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) only as possible (mögliches) Dasein (19E); Dasein always is in a manner of its possible temporal being (20E); and, finally, time is Dasein (20E). Dasein as primarily possibility furnishes the everyday; this connection precedes the extremely complex accounts of authenticity in Being and Time; the connection, it seems to me, enables a simpler, more elegant notion of timely value, of timely possibilities of being-with-others, of political possibility than his later formulations. Certainly Heidegger’s use of Aristotle’s Rhetoric as gloss on Aristotle’s philosophy is part of the force behind the modal and temporal revision, and, to some extent, behind the resort to collective definition in his novel usage of Das Man as agent in this lecture.17 But here, of course, Heidegger’s project becomes a complete review of philosophical beliefs and habits of action in inquiry; he returns to relocate philosophical inquiry in his new history; yet, I am maintaining that it is inquiry corrected by rhetorical motives and values. The German recuperation of rhetoric is an extraordinarily full and diverse program, to be sure. The best brief historical survey of this program is still Dockhorn’s.18 Yet, while the work of Gadamer, treated with particular tact by Dockhorn, and that of H. Arendt, which T. Kisiel regards as “protopolitical,” are of particular interest, their work is at the same time less evanescent, and less radical, than Heidegger’s.19 For, Arendt does not evade the seductions of moralism, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic, while claiming Vichian inspiration, manifests a rather thin notion of Vichian rhetorical-legal hermeneutic. Also, of course there is a very strong German initiative in “rhetorical anthropology.”20 But rhetorical anthropology,

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it seems to me, regains both the strains of empiricism and metaphysics, if that is possible, that Hegel tried to oppose in the account of his “turning point”: it flirts with an empirical account of conventionalism as constructivist justification of moral and political values and seems to disguise a rejuvenated “metaphysics of the subject,” as in, for example, the essentialised “homo rhetoricus” of Oesterreich. Modernism in reverse, perhaps. In the French development there is an initiative of equal moment, again, transpiring primarily in the historiography of rhetoric; it represents as well a vigorous effort to integrate rhetorical inquiry into general intellectual history developments. I think it can be argued that Heidegger’s recuperation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric has its analogue in P. Aubenque’s reading in the seminal article, “Logos et pathos: pour une définition dialectique des passions,” a reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric that may serve as a kind of matrix for French inquiry into Hellenic rhetoric and Sophistic. Aubenque, of course, argues that Aristotle’s principal object was to respond to Sophistic; Aubenque, like Heidegger, emphasizes the priority of Hellenic rhetoric as pre-existing dialectic (cf. Aristotle, Soph. El., 34, 184a1,b1). The Sophists practiced, but did not theorize, dialectic; they had only an empirical, non-reflective grasp of it, according to Aubenque’s Aristotle. But, then, Aubenque is maintaining that Aristotle’s goal was to counter the Sophistic preoccupation with skills to argue both for and against any particular problem; that is to say, Aristotle engages his foes precisely in the domain of the probable, possible.21 Yet, Sophistic is crucial to a Modernist initiative of rhetorical recovery, an initiative that owes much to Nietzschean formulations, a Nietzschean element that is much more obvious in French recuperations than in the German.22 The Modernist lineage of rhetorical inquiry is in this case less explicitly post-Hegelian, but remarkably attuned to the French reading of Hellenic inquiry, particularly that of M. Detienne and J-P. Vernant, that emphasizes the “un”-philosophical, or “anti”-philosophical strands in the history of Greek inquiry, that is to say, an expansive account of very early, and influential, strategies of definition; again, this is a Peircian reading, a concern with the habits of action in inquiry.23 In the work of J. De Romilly and B. Cassin, we see once again, that it is the recuperation of the political core of rhetoric that is the basis for their extraordinarily refined, fine-grained accounts of Hellenic activity, and, again the recuperation sponsors a competent Modernist response to Modernist context in the revaluations of temporality and agency.24 Their focus on the connections of rhetoric to Sophistic is most certainly an effort

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to review political theory and practice in a most specific way: considering an elite’s behavior as evidence of good and bad faith, based on perspicuous or faulty accounts of cause. As well, they reconnect serious philosophicaltheoretical interests, in, say, affinities for modality, with technical rhetorical analytic accomplishment. Beyond this, I would argue an initiative equivalent to Heidegger’s reading of the passions in their modality inquiry. De Romilly’s dense reading of the function and use of the antilogy in Thucydides is an account of the use of possibility as clarification, the defining and use of modality as investigative competence.25 Thucydides’ assumption, after all, is that the protagonists should have said, but did not, possibly, assert the explanation offered; at any rate, the antilogies are ajar, not actual. The odd existential status of the paired, imaginary speeches, is the source of insight; it is because they represent an adjacent, possible world, or a putative actuality, that the “actual”—inaccessible as we know it to be—loses its seductive appeal. Then, the fact that the speeches are paired is of the greatest significance; the opposition could be read as moralist /immoralist; more likely, the goal was illumination of the occult, hidden structures of political significance; the imaginary places illumine, locate beliefs and habits of action. True, we should mention as “adjacent” to this sophisticated work other Francophone initiatives; we can find a less clearly defined response to the Modernist discussion in the work of Ch. Perelman and M. Meyer.26 This is in part owing to perspective; they are philosophers addressing rhetoric, rather than rhetoricians addressing associated disciplines. Perelman is astute in considering epideictic, the “creation of adhesion of spirits,” as the primary rhetorical genre, which certainly underlines the political motives of rhetorical activity; Meyer is valuable in his insistence on the “crankiness” of rhetoric, its problematizing nature, and in his strict connection of politics and rhetoric: politics as, simply, the discursive negotiation of differences of a public nature. Yet, in some sense, it is a less responsive reading of rhetorical interests than De Romilly’s; it is certainly the case that the “nouvelles rhétoriques” after Perelman were colonized by linguistics in its several manifestations.27

A Modernist Contest of Faculties Both the French and German work shed light on the contest of faculties as illuminating persistence and change in inquiry habits. And, to consider

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modality as primitive interest of both rhetoric and philosophy allows us to revisit the quarrel, and distinguish defining moments in their opposition, and to notice the effect on inquiry. It also promotes reconsideration of the contrast of the allegiances, connections between intellectual history and rhetoric, on the one hand, and the engagement of history of philosophy with philosophical problems on the other. The history of the disciplinary institutions is of some interest, but in the history of inquiry in general, it is, again, the opposition itself that is functional. Here philosophic ambitions and habits may revise problems and issues, change systematic orientations, but rhetorical habits of action, practices not only offer instantiations, they revise the revisions. Rhetoric, as Williams’ domain of “left-over” topics and tactics rescued from philosophy, becomes an opportune source of riposte, response to philosophical “thinness,” reductive and necessitarian, a necessity that blurs and confuses issues.28 But, as well, rhetoric is beneficiary of the regret for philosophical thinness. Rhetoric in opposition, rescuing elements discarded by philosophy, makes amends for, is compensatory for philosophical habits that lack their own political focus. It promotes a strand of investigative interests that promote a return to untidiness as virtue, to refinement, diversity, proliferation; the essential commitment to movement pushes back against an enthusiasm for the eternal, immortal. And this prompts reconsideration of historical inquiry in general, of the premises, procedures, and values of Modernist historical inquiry. The focus on modality suggests as well a reciprocity: modal interests strengthen rhetorical speculation; rhetorical interests may rescue possibility as proclivity. Yet, I would suggest, there is one strand of Modernist modality in the philosophical discussion that is not either contested or assimilated in rhetorical work; this is Peirce’s investigation of necessity, the correlative of possibility, an investigation that delivers a very strong anti-necessitarian, thus, perhaps, pro-possibility argument. Peirce’s anti­necessitarianism has the very great virtue for us as a modal initiative that, once again, invokes the life sciences, in Peirce’s case, evolutionary theory. In the Monist articles of 1892–1893, but particularly “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” and “Reply to the Necessitarians,” he argues the foundational role of chance in scientific speculation: “cause” is not a philosophical word; necessity is the enemy of invention; chance, defined as radical diversity, “makes room for” law; he qualifies this a bit when he claims, “I only use chance to give room for the development of law by means of the law of habits” (RN, 543, 552). It is an originating instability,

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attributing “pure spontaneity, life to the universe” (DNE, 333), and providing a modern evolutionary “life science” frame for any consideration of life possibility. His anti-necessitarianism employs the “tychism” of Darwin, “where the only positive agent of change is fortuitous variation, seconded by natural selection.”29 Peirce, of course, defines himself as a scientist and philosopher; he speaks respectfully, if glancingly, of rhetoric as “methodeutic.”30 But modesty is perhaps crucial to the enterprise—the case against necessitarianism depends, to some extent, on Peirce’s serious critique of the traditional epistemological givens: incapacity is key. We have already noted, as a gloss on Hobbes’ pessimism, Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism as epistemological modesty: thus the claims of the early essays that there is no power of introspection, of intuition, of thinking without signs, of cognizing the absolutely uncognizable explicate a modal proclivity. Peirce’s article “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” is most useful because most programmatic; it attempts to counter post-Cartesian and post-Kantian philosophical failures. Later, in the “Reply to the Necessitarians,” he claims that analytic, that is, deductive arguments deal with the “imaginary,” not with the “external world” (RN, 534). Peirce’s continual invocation of the external world offers, perhaps, a quasi-phenomenological practice, but one where validity is established by “possible experience,” “experience to come” (DNE, 324, 326). In “Consequences” Peirce makes an explicit linkage: “it follows from our own existence that everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves. This does not prevent its being a phenomena of something without us . . .” (C, 223). Not at all: for selfdenying Peirce, “we can admit no statements concerning what passes within us except as hypotheses necessary to explain what takes place in what we commonly call the external world” (C, 213). But more basic still is his claim in “Some Consequences” that the Cartesian location of investigational process in the individual consciousness is unsound: “to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is pernicious” (C, 212). “The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are [possibly] to be, is only a negation” (241–42; my addition). Rather, the investigatory locus is shared process: philosophy can be sought “only for the community of philosophers” (212, 239); it is a “civil” affair. But further, thought “has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community” (241; my emphasis). That is to say, it is potential only, possible, because communal: a

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striking justification of rhetorical allegiances and actions. Note that the Peircian notion of community possibility denies a naïve historicism: “ideas as past events are completely beyond the bounds of possible experience as the Kantian thing-in-itself” (LM, 535). This amounts to a rhetorical appreciation of inaccessibility, outside the discussion: compare Williams’ claim that ancient moral formulae are smarter than modern—but, unusable.31 Thus, Peirce’s claim that thought is potential glosses Hobbes’ insistence that deliberation takes place in the subjunctive; further, Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism casts light on the Vichian inquiry which dismisses the determinism implicit in cognitive individualism’s explanations. Peirce, like Vico, questions the hypostatization of “free” into “free will”: “man does, should not identify himself with his will” (214). Or, all three—Hobbes, Vico, Peirce—mark the dysfunction of the Classic/Christian antinomy of free will/determinism as the wrong orientation, begging questions, a misplaced ambition for exhaustiveness. Further, it is intriguing that Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism recapitulates the two Hegelian investigative interests of sociality and fluidity: for, in his “social theory of reality,” recalling Hegelian mutual recognition, inquiry transpires only in a community; and the inquiry is extremely fluid, indeed, has almost a skeptical cast—truth is that which may transpire “in the long run,” only a half-promise.32 Sociality and fluidity counter—but only to a degree — the pessimism. Yet the pessimism, in a most elemental sense, increases possibilities, replacing the single plots of singular virtues with the multiple articulations of conflicted perceptions, decorous responses, and communicative misfires. A Peircian modesty inhabits the rhetorical enterprise I have been describing; his anti-necessitarianism is the richest Modernist account that supports the rhetorical affinity with possibility. For, again, modal interests can give a, perhaps inappropriate, seriousness to minor, merely suggestive rhetorical tactics; it sponsors exaggeration of narrative skills, the multiplication of arguments in developing fine-grained accounts of intention and chance in civil affairs. Modal logic may be the “science” of modalities, but political-rhetorical inquiry uses modality to assert, modify, deny, contest activity as politically viable, as negotiating community; it can place events in a narrative of governance, give conceptual clarity to potential and action as compatible, or not, with civil claims. The assertions, placements must themselves be recognized as heavily politicized. They stipulate the fluidity, the dependence and separation of the alternate scenarios; the possibilities define obligations—felt, denied, obscured. And, on the other hand, the practices, the rhetorical

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habits of action in inquiry, give substance to modal definition and instantiate the contests of claims of capacity and incapacity; they discover and describe alternatives. The skills of narrative, figure, and argument build “thick” descriptions that are diagnostic of opportunity, missed opportunity, and employ the counterfactual as critique of policy. To return to McKeon’s claim that modality “sorts”: it sorts choices, remarks hierarchy, underlines divisions in inquiry. But the status and effect of the modalities is not uniform. Necessity as claiming perseverance counterintuitively problematizes the rhetorical-political narrative in some elementary way: “not this, that.” It can also function in the subjunctive voice; recall Garver’s Machiavellian program of “imitating necessity,” pointing to projects of redefining, enabling necessity, changing necessity. Radical contingency is, obviously, one of the dominant concerns of rhetorical inquiry as required to find decorous response. Actuality is “proper” domain; but, counter-intuitively, recall, is difficult of access, hard to map, remote, not self-explanatory, needing, indeed, possibility to triangulate positions. Possibility, I have argued, is the interest of rhetorical inquiry, clarifying alternative scenarios, clarifying choice /constraint, clarifying, of course, in order to pose choices. Possibility, often performing in the subjunctive voice, changes the subject; it shifts attention not to randomness (contingency) and determinism (necessity) but to perceptions of randomness and determinism. This modal focus deals in the traffic in human affects, and with reception, the quintessential rhetorical investigative concern, thus it both supports and exploits rhetorical habits of action in inquiry.

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ince we are engaged in defining not Modernity as epoch, but the nature of Modernist inquiry, modality is, above all, an intellectual historical issue of intrinsic interest, for the proclivities for modality not only sort genres of inquiry, but broad shifts in intensity and use of mode mark shifts in the relations between genres which accompany the shifts in inquiry in general. What I would now like to argue is the unique suitability of Pippin’s Modernist narrative for explaining rhetoric’s unique capacity for modernization; post-Kantian philosophy’s work with conditions of possibility for knowing supports renewal of rhetorical habits of posing civil possibility. The sociality and fluidity Pippin attributes to Hegelian inquiry justify precisely those rhetorical investigational capacities of expansiveness, suppleness; the rhetorical responsiveness that engages possibility, engages the “massive presence of contingency” of Modernity. I have tried to make the case that sociality and fluidity invest the “modern” efforts of Hobbes and Vico; the values accompany a general habit of their activity, articulating novel, or multiple possibilities. In contrast, when Pippin attributes to the Enlightenment a “new positivity” and claims it is “unable to articulate to itself its own possibility,” he is refining by contrast his definition of the subsequent Modernity, asserting its amplified devotion to articulating possibility (MPP, 64). Pippin is, in effect, making a case for Modernity’s readiness for rhetoric’s interventions. The philosophical initiatives he selects both recollect

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and revise elements of the Classical quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy. To be sure, Pippin does not bother to revive the contest of faculties; his revisionary account of Hegelian Idealism, by his expansion of Kantian interest in conditions of possibility has only an unintended consequence of expanding the justification of rhetorical inquiry. Modernist rhetoric both recuperates some fruitful Classical habits of action, and reacts to this new philosophical environment that both accommodates and stimulates; it is an argumentative rhetoric. The Enlightenment’s incapacity that Pippin describes, resistant even to translating one program as one possibility, contrasts with rhetoric’s modal proclivity, the capacity to, at least query, or even detach program: or, to act responsively, decorously. And if we return to the case for the exemplarity of Benjamin’s Modernism, Benjamin’s very detailed, very precise work on Modernist high (and low) culture is exemplary just in so far as he exhibits not simply a rhetorical proclivity for possibility, but a proclivity practiced, a talent for dealing with a modal emergency, apprehending the massive presence of contingency, seizing an opportunity for renewed brilliance. Consider Pippin’s progress in Modernism as Philosophical Problem as a history of modal proclivities; he treats in chapter 3 the Kantian transformation, the critical consideration of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, for the central issue of Modernism is the establishment of autonomy, the project of self-rule; in chapter 4 he discusses Nietzsche’s critique of the critique—an “ironic nihilism,” and in chapter 5 he moves to Heidegger’s strenuous revision of the entire history of philosophy, his invocation of “ultimate meaninglessness.” Nietzsche and Heidegger, I have argued, offer sustenance for the rhetorical revival. He moves then from Kant to Nietzsche, whose Classicism can support the motives of the French recuperation of the Sophists as masters of rhetoric, to Heidegger, whose SS1924 lectures recover in Aristotle’s Rhetoric a powerful and ingenious investigative moment in Hellenic thought. Pippin redescribes Kant’s critical transformation in the strategies of Germanic, or Hegelian, Idealism. The knowing is of a possible autonomous mindedness as spontaneity, but as well of the possibility of like-­mindedness as social achievement, of mutual recognition as basic to cognitive as well as political activity (MPP, xiv). What this now suggests is a layered notion of possibility: a primary, epistemological interest in the “bare” possibility of knowing, and a secondary linkage of possible knowledge to possible use of knowledge, and thus the defining, posing of possibilities in the social realm (MPP, xvii, xx; IM, 391). This is, of course, the function of rhetoric,

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with its basic concern for ascertaining political potential, possible action, and the potential context of action for negotiations. But also, Pippin folds back, uses reflexively, the notion of possibility to reconsider the entire 19th/20th-century movement, for the sensitivity to modal interest is reflective, reflecting back on modal capacity itself, on what can be put in play. At the end of the chapter on Nietzsche, Pippin resorts to a heavy use of possibility to configure the issues; just as in his reading of the PhG, he intrudes possibility as a kind of initiating, or final, consideration that maps his domain of inquiry. For Nietzsche, Pippin claims, the quest ends in asking “how is political life possible?” (MPP, 111) Pippin concludes his account of the modern philosophical idea of liberation and the achievement of rational autonomy by lamenting that it effectively, essentially questions “the ‘possibility’ of such reason itself” (MPP, 113); the inquiry questions as well the “possibility” of social institutions which claimed rationality (MPP, 112). Modernism can be disastrous. Pippin’s narrative assumes a “middle event” of the late 19th and early 20th century, exemplified in Nietzsche’s nihilism and Heidegger’s “ultimate meaninglessness,” both of which contest the enduring Modernist goal of autonomy.1 This critique is compatible with rhetorical pessimism, which can view even the simple philosophical project of prudence as a delusional effort. Rhetorical inquiry tends to critique, reject possibilities, question refined accounts of impossibility. Pippin’s Modernism had sought autonomy in order to contest empirical or metaphysical dogmatism. Yet, indeed, it would seem that rhetoric, reckoning only with the domain of the probable, simply treats as “topics,” all dogmatisms: possibility as an affliction of certitude, perhaps. For Pippin, an overarching (and pragmatic) concern of Modernism is “how best to understand just what was not ‘now’ possible and why, just what was possible” (MPP, xvii). But this concern with possibility encapsulates rhetoric in its task of articulating possibilities. Pippin’s notion of the rigidity, propriety of the Modernist anti-transcendental, internalist notion of wellmotivated inquiry as social practice suits rhetorical modesty; it authenticates rhetoric as itself having a proclivity for “radically internalist” goals and premises. Possibility places claims in questions: it encloses the natural or metaphysical elements in the consideration of special effects. For, rhetorical techniques must respond appropriately, flexibly. It is not that rhetoric will not try to supply abstract, metalevel justificatory arguments—it is the case, however, that rhetoric protocols must gauge carefully just how far the arguments can extend, or even if they can furnish a minimal basis

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for discussion. The perspective is skeptical, one of disbelief: very radical internalism. The key Modernist texts and art cited repeatedly in the metaModern discussion of Pippin, or T. J. Clark, or, of course, Benjamin, seem permeated through and through with rhetorical habits of entertaining possibilities, extensions, disbelief. And, reciprocally, possibility is sufficient and defining interest of rhetoric recovered: rhetoric as modern. In short, Pippin’s motives in his continuous resort to possibility expose the serious motives of modern rhetorical recuperation: they can justify the recovery, not as an antiquarian movement, but as a deeply felt commitment to well-motivated inquiry. All three of Pippin’s texts—Hegel’s Ideal-­ ism, Idealism as Modernity, Modernism as Philosophical Problem—are crammed with invocations of possibility, and this is essential both to his remapping of Modernist inquiry, and for our resituating modern rhetoric, with its strong engagement with possibility on the most basic level. Pippin uses possibility to mark difficult or expansive tasks of definition, and the use changes register to change the subject: to deny restrictive parameters, question narrow goals, reorient issues; the original Kantian operation, furnishing “the conditions of possibility of knowledge,” distinguishes the primitive task as tentative in nature, subjunctive in voice. Pippin also employs modality to extend the pertinent range of application to “any possible” agent or action, an extension which is, at the same time, a questioning of previous limits, previous certainties, necessities. Possibility as change of register promotes inquiry as not simply investigation of what might, or could happen, but as an engagement with the tone and temper of a fully explored life, intricating, indeed, aesthetic with social parameters (MPP, 105). Thus contemplating the possibility of “free agency” and “rationality” is meditation on, a consideration of fullness of range, fulfillment. One is required to consider not simply the “actual” in the sense of what transpired, or transpires, but alternates, extensions, extensions invoking fullness, freedom, in some puzzling way. To recapitulate: Pippin’s selection of the Hegelian inquiry values of sociality and fluidity at the same time selects rhetorical interests: the essential sociality of rhetorical agency and discursive process, and the imperative of fluidity expressed in the canon of decorum, the continuous obligation to the appropriate in time, place, person. The Hegelian values are easily seen as affirming rhetorical values. But what, precisely, the intellectual historian asks, are the tactics of sociality? What makes it move? The questions suggest a shift in disciplinary perspective; if we can assume that intellectual history is simply the history of inquiry: that, for ex-

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ample, it addresses not the history of 17th-century religion, but the history of 17th-century inquiries into religion—then we may turn to an exemplary Modern historical practice for strategic enlightenment. A remarkable example of an exposition of the sociality of inquiry is Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, his brilliant evocation of the lines of connection and contest in mid-19th-century Basel: between Bachofen the historical legist, Burckhardt the cultural historian, Overbeck the (non-believing) theo­ logian, and Nietzsche, the radically innovative philosopher.2 Gossman’s extraordinary sensitivity to the social texture of Basel’s intellectual life illumines the maneuvers of mutual recognition, the perspicuous shifts in like-mindedness that Pippin claims are central inquiry events. It is notable that Gossman’s career as intellectual historian tends, in the first place, to focus on inquiry modes and investigational habits; Gossman, also, is a meticulous observer of the literary, rhetorical quality of the inquiry texts as well as a master of the possibilities of stylistic, rhetorical analysis to reveal the structure and motives of the procedures employed. It is piquant, of course, that the Basel inquiry Gossman describes is antiModern to the core, although this antipathy is expressed diversely, and expressed in contest as well as civility. Contesting, indeed, in Nietzsche’s case, sociality itself. In Burckhardt Gossman finds “emphatic repudiation of the German academic world,” as a professional supplanting of the social (441). Burckhardt, of course, is anti-philosophical as well as anti-Modern; he is notorious for his refusals to engage Nietzsche on philosophical issues. His investigative stance is characterised by Gossman as “informality, insouciance, a Socratic affectation of ignorance” (440). Yet Burckhardtian modality as interest, as a kind of anti-necessitarian prejudice, embraces possibility, and thus Modernity. Burckhardt’s irony developed a “detached acceptance of the inevitable” (266); at the same time, civil competence was the capacity to sort out what “in any given circumstance was possible, honorable, and most likely to promote human well-being.”3 His pessimism acknowledged the ineradicability of evil (268), but also the pervasive investment of contingency. Necessity was a crucial political calculation of ambition, not “objective necessity” (270). Burckhardt is master of negative cultural potential. In another sense, Gossman does argue Basel’s Modernity in the engagement with possibility. What is of real interest is the status of some of the speculative initiatives, the status, for instance, of the “near miss,” the entertaining of possible explanations, doubtfully correct, but nonetheless energizing the debate. Just so, Edward Said, in his Beginnings, defended the wild

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Vichian etymologies as of tangible investigative value; compare Gossman’s account of Bachofen’s insistence on the intrinsic worth of the insights available in primitive narrative in constructing an account of originary, inaccessible, pre-civil situations.4 In the peculiar sodality of Basel inquiry, there is a kind of perversity: the near miss is constitutive for investigation of a variety of unrealized possibility, thus anti-determinist, expansive in force. Gossman works out the rhetoric of community in a most Peircian fashion, and with Peircian results: a description of the development (over decades) of initiatives as transpiring “in the long run.” Gossman’s short answer to the intellectual historical questions posed above is “sociality provokes fluidity.” But I will now argue that the most perspicuous engagement with fluidity as inquiry value, an engagement essentially rhetorical, is Benjamin’s. There is, of course, a strong contrast between Burckhardt’s devotion to the preservation of a traditional high culture and Benjamin’s sense that preservation is impossible, continuity is novelty or nothing. An array of Benjaminian critical interventions, his basic revisions of textual and figurative relations over time has the effect of a remarkable rethinking of temporality as quality: the consideration of the interventions of mechanical reproductions, of the stain, the irretrievable temporal effect of “aura”; the reorienting work of the translator—all these efforts make fluidity as dimension not simply a temporal, but an “ontological” issue. Benjamin’s mastery is mastery of the essential fluidity of forms, of the modes, procedures, traditions of practice and recognition in the creation of literature and art. And, as well, in assuming the inaccessibility of an original, he projects the unlikelihood, the impossibilities of imitation as aesthetic initiative in such a manner as to disallow interpretations too dependent on imitation as succession. The definition of “aura” is a refinement of the notions of possibility or impossibility of continuity. To return to Pippin’s useful narrative: it is his intrusions of possibility that illumine Modernism and thus Modernist rhetoric: he begins with the Kantian transformation, the shift of philosophical interest to establishing the conditions of possibility for knowledge, but he appeals to modality to color the entire narrative of Modernity; it “changes the register” to a domain of speculative energy and freedom; the autonomy which he assigned to Modernity as goal becomes the opportunity for anti-determinist experiment. Pippin’s account of the Nietzschian and Heideggerean critique of the modern aspiration to full autonomy, and of their full acceptance of finitude, limits, opens a space for rhetorical inquiry, a space clearly linked to, defined by his modal perspective: it is an instance of philosophy accom-

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modating rhetoric. He cites Vattimo’s claim for “weak thinking,” pensiero debole, as opening a space for the aesthetic and rhetorical experiences of truth—another philosophical accommodation (MPP, 138). Or, his pro­ clivity for possibility tips the balance of motive: the proclivity reflects a rhetorical-political kind of obligation to pose possibilities, and may mark a shift in the relation of genres, a resolution of the Classical quarrel. Rhetorical as well, of course, is his concern for reception, “possible” reception, of the alternate programs for autonomy, or for critique of autonomy. To address Pippin’s intellectual historical suitability recognizes his rhetori­cal potential. Or, put it another way, Pippin’s philosophical project is rhetorical. Pippin the philosopher describes, wittingly or not, an opening or a condition of possibility for serious rhetorical inquiry; his account of the am­ bitions, valences, vectors of current thinking co-opts a range of rhetorical­political investigations that, with their cathection to civil things, and their proclivity for possibility, have the potential to expand the political discussion, and reorient moral ambition. To be sure, for Pippin rhetoric as hermeneutic is an inferior mode of inquiry; just so, Pippin’s sense of the primacy of (Idealist) philosophy perhaps explains his elision of Peirce’s Modernism as an example of an inferior American pragmatic philosophy.5 Pippin respects Idealism’s quest for an epistemological autonomy that requires necessity; Peircian prag­ matism’s insistence on the epistemological merits of possibility dismays. For, Peirce furnishes another intellectual historical context of Modernism, not considered by Pippin. Peirce exhibits a steady engagement with modality, countering necessitarian premises and thematizations; indeed, I have already argued that Peirce’s interest in possibility is grounded in a fierce anti-necessitarianism: for there is no absoluteness, thus there is no absolutely first cognition of the Cartesian dream, all arises in continuous process (C, 214). There is no absolute universality, no absolute exactitude, no absolute necessity (RN, 546). Thus his list of four incapacities amounts to an affirmation of the importance of time in inquiry. So that, the Monist articles on late 19th-century inquiry constitute a Collingwoodian metaphysical project, that is, metaphysics as ambitious history of inquiry; it situates, gives coherence to, Modernist inquiry. His “biologism” his conviction that the principle of growth is the primordial element in the universe is both the justification of evolutionary theory, and invests the mathematical logic of Georg Cantor, De Morgan, and himself; “all regularities of nature and mind are the products of growth” (LM, 533), of lifelike irregularity, contingency. And the resort to contingency, with its

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fraught doubling in chance, which Peirce defines as, simply, “indefinitely varied specialness” (RN, 543) is, like Collingwood’s indefinitely varied logic of question and answer, a habit of investigative action that prefers radical possibilities, fundamental reorientations, time as of the essence.6 For both Peirce and Collingwood the facility for possibility is simulta­ neously a faculty for disassociation from the old terms and conundrums of philosophical discourse. The conceptual space of their inquiry, of good inquiry, is metaphysics in motion, and is virtual: recall Peirce—if in signs, then communal, if communal, then virtual, fluid. Like Collingwood Peirce revalues reorientations, noticing betraying narcissisms, self-delusive rationalizations. Both Pippin’s assertion of “the massive presence of contingency” and Peirce’s “metaphysic of modality” sustain the commitment to investigate possibility as an intermodal effort: the possible coping with the contingent. But Peirce’s very detailed, very polemical account of evolutionary contingency supports, although not directly, rhetorical modesty in an ingenious way. In the rhetorical program reason, qualified by, invested in interdependency already inhabits an uncertain space, functioning in an area of massive contingency, where possibility works as the primary modality, a “necessary” first consideration. Rhetoric as inquiry is already “liberated” from the necessitarian claims of reason to encapsulate all possible means within a single rational carapace of ends. Thus Peirce explains rhetoric’s peculiar tone: abstemious, modest, intransigent, when focused on possibility. To my mind, since rhetoric as inquiry is informal, unpretentious, pragmatic, the possibility of posing possibilities, the investigation of which to pose, carries with it a sense of warrants as simply persuasive, or persuasive to a degree. Rhetorical inquiry’s working language sounds like Peirce. Once again the centrality of possibility is of interest: possibility is so essential to politics that it orients political inquiry; posing a possibility can retroactively change the epistemological context. Both Peirce’s and Pippin’s accounts support rhetoric with its stipulation of the unthematizable nature of political and ethical life. And Pippin’s version of Hegel does not get us stuck with great reaches of Hegelian social and political doctrines. But I would argue that both accounts of intellectual context support rhetorical possibility as so powerful an interest, so important to politics, that it retroactively affects the ideological basis, the array of justifications. All slopes are slippery. But how much intellectual historical context is engaged? Pippin virtually ignores the Early Modern developments that I have argued are the

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locus of rhetorical investigative initiatives of great promise. Here I would like to clarify the promise by invoking a provocative statement of Pippin: Modernist autonomy required “not philosophy, but bravery,” in order to commend the courage of Hobbes and Vico (MPP, 118). Pippin attributes this aphorism to Heidegger, but perhaps we can attribute this courage to Heidegger’s revival of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as well as to Hobbes’ and Vico’s secession as a political investigational initiative of great promise— in the main not pursued—as well as brave, and, in the main, unacknowledged. Certainly the informality, pessimism of rhetorical beliefs and habits of action, in characterizing Hobbes’ and Vico’s work, characterize it as non-participant in philosophy’s history in either the standard academic account—in Williams’ view very wrongly divided between “analytic” and “continental,” like a division between front-wheel drive and Japanese cars— or in Pippin’s heavy revision of that account in his emphasis on German Idealism. There is indeed a kind of resistance to Hobbesian and Vichian bravery: Hobbesian psychology could be relegated in the standard account to merely a version of, or a reply to Classical Aristotelian motive. But the complexity of his model of interaction, interdependence of faculties, capacities, activities, a complexity that is in motion at all times, founds his psychological pessimism, completely compatible with Aristotelian biology, but a pessimism entirely at odds—as Hobbes noted—with Aristotelian ethical-political philosophy, and, as well, at odds with Modernist psychological pessimism. If Nietzsche claims that even having a “self” is in question (MPP, 108), he finds entirely different sources than the sources Hobbes finds for his notion of rank disorder in the agent. If Hegel contests the liberal-contractarian notion of “atomistic agents negotiating the political order” (MPP, 108), he is not contesting Hobbes, with his dour view of collective negotiations. The failure to take account of Hobbes’ and Vico’s Modernist bravery is in part a failure in description of Modernity. For what Pippin rather ignores is that Modernist autonomy could be redescribed as a very complicated network of dependencies; without even appealing to neuro-­science, we have competent accounts of confrontations, contests, failures of connection in basic competence: Freud’s model is exemplary of a mythic account of disconnection. Similarly, while Pippin distrusts Hobbes’ “naturalist” account of agency, he does not attend to the fact that Hobbes’ nature is embedded in a tediously complex, often dysfunctional brain/body process. So much embedded, perhaps, that Vico even claims that Hobbes

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is dominated by chance; this is in sharp opposition to Malcolm, who sees Hobbesian politics as a function of the iron law of human behavior. But perhaps it is simply a different Modernist reciprocity: where Peirce argues chance makes room for law, Hobbesian law makes room for chance; it invites contingency’s forceful intrusions as requiring forceful response.7 Then, the Vichian idea of autochthony as difficult, pessimist, and the processes of pre-civility as fraught with collective moments of great dysfunction, and only ironically functional, is an intransigently “brave” notion of autochthony very different from the Modernist, post-Kantian “dream” Pippin pursues as Modern archetype (MPP, 107). And Vichian impersonality can be a powerful derogation in the development of notions of agency: it can be sociality as not particularly, or, particularly not, social. Then the Vichian Ages, as conditions of possibility, are severe temporal conditions, constraining the narratives of political potential and action. They impose, in short, the ineliminable differences Benjamin insists are the essence of reproductions: similarity necessarily enclosed in difference. Hobbes and Vico offer a very broad, deep, specific sense of possibility/impossibility in civil affairs in part as a result of rhetorical habits. They proffer a pessimism enlarged by habits of using counter-factuals to frame debate. Hintikka speaks of a “widening of possibilities” in Early Modernity; certainly, their facility with possibilities enlarges Hobbes’ and Vico’s civic reach, as expansiveness in inquiry informs ingenuity in deliberative policy; and rhetoric’s strong political interests, born of the need to define and pose possibilities, pushes modal interests to the center. Modal interests that are demands: the proclivity for possibility is incorrigibly reflexive; stating the possibility requires certification; it calls upon my sense of my potential. Yet by philosophical standards their political theorizing is perspicuous failure: 1) there is no ideal state; 2) no persuasive combination of politics and morality; 3) the revelations are of failures, contests, distressingly partial successes. Still, it is certainly not the case that these political talents of Hobbes and Vico are taken up, extended in Modernity. Again, the Vichian and Hobbesian secession had an inadequate, Modernist succession. Recognizing the lack of success of their secession acknowledges that modern rhetorical inquiry is more a range of possibilities posed than the actualization of an available rhetorical potential in a solid program. Yet, if we follow Hintikka’s positive argument, the existence, or the recognition of unrealized possibilities has anti-determinist force. The initiatives of Hobbes and Vico, in their lack of Modernist success, furnish Modernism with,

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simply, unrealized possibilities, and thus offer a liberating or expansive potential.

Conclusion: Using Possibilities To summarize: granting Modern rhetoric its possibilities, my aim is to distinguish useful Modernist rhetorical strategies, responsive to context, expansive of issues. I am making a case for rhetoric as valuable civil inquiry: 1) by resorting to a notion of an originary Hellenic rhetoric, functioning only inside politics; 2) by defining rhetoric as inquiry, engaged, from the beginning in the rescue of topics from, and in opposition to, philosophy, an opposition that is functional, specifying, essential. 3) But, a primary and significant element in its opposition is its primitive, early devotion, asserted in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, to possibility as mode, rather than to the necessity intricated with philosophical systematizing. The engagement with describing the “general space of possibility” is fundamental to rhetorical inquiry. 4) This devotion is claimed as liberating, liberating inquiry, that is, from various puzzles, mysteries generated by philosophical systemic ambition. 5) For, in accordance with its political core, it becomes inquiry that works with socially defined agency and purpose, avoiding the solipsism of philosophy’s fascination with the complex variations of subject: self, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, person. 6) And, finally, as engaged in the task of finding and posing political or civic possibilities, it is engaged as well, therefore, in alterations of the rich problematic of time. Rhetoric’s strength is the connection of its very diffuse focus on civil capacity and action, with its specific engagement with possible capacity and action in possible time. Rhetoric “does” only a particular layer of behavior, and also, only as manifested in gestures and performances, premises argued, goals contested. To return to the questions: where do we locate Vico’s Three Ages? Hobbes’ Leviathan? Machiavelli’s Prince? The questions, themselves, suggest that by focusing on modality, one deals reflexively with inquiry’s basic interests, motives, values. Here in all three cases, possibility, it seems, is primitive choice, controlling the framing of investigation. To consider Vico as practitioner as well as topic of intellectual history, we can hypothesize that the primary example of posing a possibility as both clarification and engagement, of modal speculation as strenuous intervention, is Vico’s “barbarism of reflection” defined as late, decadent stage in civil

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development, “. . . where no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will” (“una somma solitudine d’animi e di voleri” [NS, 1106]). This is Vico’s politicalrhetorical speech-act of admonition, a contribution to the deliberation about future civil states; it poses a possibility. In furnishing a peroration for the New Science, it follows the imperative of rhetoric: the inquirer must clearly enunciate and pose possibilities in his investigation of civil process. Thus, “barbarism of reflection,” solitude as destructive solipsism, is possible consequence in possible development, subsisting in a saturated context of impossibilities, of intensive debility as consequence; it is a generalized account that functions as warning in civil discourse. It is a brief, thick narrative of a possible world, a persuasive offering of a troubling possibility, rejecting privacy as both determinist and uncivil. The complex—moralising, deterministic, solitary— defines dysfunction.8 “Barbarism of reflection” is an exemplary modal initiative of unrealized possibility, of possibility as potential clarification. The posing of its possibility functions as a strong justification of Vichian civil, not moral, inquiry. Simply put, the topics of moral inquiry are suspect, the strategies vitiated by a habit of addressing primarily the issues of privacy, by the failure to notice the necessary derivation of the moral from the civil. But this Vichian reframing of inquiry represents, I would argue, a strong anti-philosophical moment. Vico’s ambition is both “metaphysical,” that is to say, he is claiming to attempt a fundamental, all-encompassing investigative program, a “First Philosophy,” and, profoundly reactive to the dominant Cartesian and post-Cartesian metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the philosophical subject, and thus the epistemological assumptions and practices that follow from that definition. I am suggesting a different Vico-Hegel connection; Pippin tells us that Hegel’s 1807 turning point was a turning away from both bare, “scientistic” empiricism and from the “metaphysics of the subject.” For Vico the Cartesian metaphysical (i.e., invoking “substance”), subject represents a warrantless intrusion of epistemological hubris, a misplaced invocation of metaphysics. The “deep solitude of the spirit” Vico defines is not an originary psychological state of a “substantive” subject, but a participant’s seduction, a mistaken vector of socially defined agents’ action. But there is more. Rhetorical modality may offer a defined therapy for a defined philosophical problem. In Glendinning’s Being with Others, we find an account of a Heideggerean anti-metaphysical initiative that most certainly both invests Heidegger’s rhetorical revival, and suggests a conti-

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nuity of rhetorical definition between Vico and Heidegger. For, “barbarism of reflection,” as possibility, raises another issue in Modernist intellectual history where modality intrudes in the definition of the subject. Pippin centers his account of Hegelian context on the Kantian concept of “selfconsciousness as the condition of possibility for the sensory world”; the Hegelian formulation denies the radical insularity of the isolate “grammatical” subject, and makes way for mutual recognition, like-mindedness, as cognitive goal. Glendinning goes on to argue that the internal structure of human behavior’s “general space of possibility” is describable by the internal structure of writing: that is, human behavior can be read as writing (an anonymous capacity not requiring the isolate self-presence of an author); here Glendinning cites Wittgenstein’s aphorism “seeing behavior is seeing the living soul” as epitomizing investigative goal.9 This predicates the non-existence of a gap between inner private states of mind and external signs. And, of course, Glendinning uses Heidegger’s exemplary conceptualization of Dasein’s being, as possibility, as possibility of beingwith-­others, Mit-einander-Sein.10 Both Pippin and Glendinning are engaged in disputing the use of the flawed Western principle, “the metaphysics of the subject,” the insistence on the radical self-presence of the subject, thus the radical gap between inner and outer, the gap that is the source of skepticism, the “other minds problem” (HI, 94). Both, then, define Modernist initiatives in the social definition of the subject. Both assume the deep background of Modernism requires the modality of possibility to explain a belief central to rhetorical habits of action in inquiry; the function of possibility in framing occurs at a most basic level, more exigent, perhaps, than the role of clarification of definition assigned to it by Hintikka. But there is still more: the 2005 Tanner lectures of Axel Honneth suggest that what is at stake in the Modernist discussion is a thorough revision of the entire epistemological project, a redefinition of the primary tasks and basic operations of inquiry. And, wittingly or not, the revision seems to offer a very strong opening for the reconsideration of the possibility of rhetoric as serious inquiry.11 Pippin privileges “mutual recognition” as cognitive strategy and value, essentially interpersonal, a shared experience, a grasp of another’s grasp; it can also be seen as a version of Heidegger’s definition of the central rhetorical topic; Miteinandersein. Honneth privileges “recognition”—Anerkennung, reconnaissance, acknowledgment—as preliminary, vital, and engaged in the Heideggerean sense of care, Sorge; it is the quality of “preliminary” that strongly qualifies our action and contemplation for Honneth. Honneth joins the Modern discussion by opposing

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recognition to “reification,” the “forgetting,” passing over of recognition: a fatal error of strategies of knowing. But, correcting Lukács’ simple materialist etiology— capitalist exchange as exclusively formative—Honneth suggests a dual role of institutional practices— defined very ingeniously— and ideologies, and, indeed, claims that Modernist autonomy itself, the autonomization of a specific inquiry goal, motivates forgetting (59; 82). For, it is the memory of the preliminary recognition that, for Adorno, guarantees the adequacy of the grasp, the pertinence of our concept for us. Honneth notes that both Heidegger and Lukács deny the knowledge produced by a simple confrontation of a neutral observer with the world (30; 35). For John Dewey it is “pathological” to forget our rootedness in an experience of qualitative interaction (57; 78); for Adorno the pertinence and quality of our conceptual thought depends on consciousness of its original “pulsion”; this is a guarantee of its non-fictive nature (57; 79). But the Honneth thesis which glosses Pippin suggests something more: to place knowledge (in perhaps Hawthorn’s sense), in this wider context of recognition, reconnaissance, calls upon rhetorical capacities and procedures. It assumes as preliminary, generative, the domain where rhetoric operates; what is “preliminary” are all the elements of interpersonal, or civil dynamics that rhetoric makes its peculiar responsibility, but with a shift in temporal direction. Honneth paraphrases Adorno: “the preciseness of our knowledge depends on the extent of emotional recognition or affective acceptances of as many perspectives as possible” (47; 61). It assumes the inquiry’s task as a retrospective expansion of past possibilities. Honneth thus both glosses Pippin’s Modernist inquiry values and suggests another justification of rhetorical inquiry, another mapping of the space of possible rhetorical operations, another dimension of the experience of discovery; and, he suggests that without this confirming resonance of experience, solipsism (as reification, as dimunition of possibility) threatens again. If the ambition of Hintikka’s canvass of possible worlds is conceptual clarity, and of Buchanan’s exposition of possibility is investigative adequacy, the ambition of Honneth’s opposition of reification and recognition is placing civil inquiry at the core of inquiry in general; then, the definition of civil as preliminary defines rhetoric as primary. For, Honneth’s “recognition of the preliminary” replicates rhetoric as inclusive, supple, sophisticated— cohesively pessimist, alert to possibility. Or, primary as egregiously specific, valuable. While the philosophical concern with necessity easily connects with a metaphysics of the subject, the rhetorical concern with possibility, connects with the narrative of

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the difficulties, demands of defining and maintaining social agency. The re­jection in Vico’s “barbarism of reflection” of solipsism is principled, based on a very rich appreciation of the failure of individualist models and values in civil inquiry; the Vichian reliance on impersonal agency is, like Glendinning’s anti-humanism, anti-moral narcissicism, and recalls Balanchine’s Classical impersonal as countering aesthetic narcissicism. Vico’s civil focus, in short, is not narrowly political, and his cose civili are not mysteries, puzzles in the manner of the philosophical intrigues with mind-body, language/world that are controlled by the naïve “humanist” model of capacity Glendinning opposes. And Vico’s civil initiatives should stimulate revisions of our notions of Vichian “common sense” as far too thin, too static; we tend to reduce his anthropological developmental account into a commonplace moralist discourse, regarding common sense as a personal moral capacity. But it is self-delusion to claim to make first-person decisions (cloaked as “common sense”) when the terms and conditions are set by “common sense,” are orchestrated by trends and intrusions of a complicated historical etiology; the delusion of competence is rooted in the delusion of moral grace; to take into account the complications is an act of civil courage. To be sure, Vico addresses not a Modernist philosophy, not cognitive innovation, not post-Hegelian epistemological excitement, but an Early Modern sense of political loss. It is a loss of Classical political philosophical certainty, and is, in essence, a decoupling of the public and the political, where the aggrandizement of the public—where “public” can be simply a series of linked private enclosures—attenuates the political.12 The absence of “democracy” and “republic” in the New Science is no accident. These global political forms are not pertinent to Vico’s Early Modern prob­ lematic. Still, obviously, the connection between Vichian innovations and Modernist inquiry is very strained; there are not simply difficulties in Modernist political context, but of Modernist political investigative initiatives. Williams, agreeing with Vico, I think, disputes modern assumptions that the extension of the public encompasses, results in, the extension of the political. And, Williams notes some terminological errors that invest modern ethical theory when it attempts, first, to systematize, basically replacing “thick” concepts, richly descriptive, with “thin” reductive ones, and second, tries to insure that political theory provide a personal morality, one that, inevitably, gives a confused account of both public/political and personal activities. Williams accuses Modernist theory of a false ambition of purification, employing “thin, abstract, over-generalised concepts,”

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and eschewing the “thick” concepts derived from an intimate address of capacity and action. What I argue is that the strand of Modernist context exploited by the Modernist rhetorical recuperation, with its strong sense of socially mediated subject, and with its duty of seeking mutual recognition, avoids the philosophical thinness and supports a phenomenological description of substantial political experience, with phenomenology here considered as essentially a claim for shared access by inquirers. Certainly cognitive solipsism undermines the possibility of political capacity and action; at least, this seems the trajectory of Williams’ account of “From Sincerity to Authenticity.”13 Here sincerity, measured as description of successful intrusion in civil discourse, may be supplanted by authenticity as private, solipsist temptation or flaw. The rejection of solipsism is principled, based on a rich account of the failures of the intrusion of intention, narrowly conceived. It is clarifying to note the effacement of rhetoric in the post-SS1924 work of Heidegger is accompanied by his insistence on authenticity: “authenticity,” that is, as “the most extreme possibility of Being.”14 Most extreme; but, perhaps the extremity works against being-with-others as anthropological premise. Again, a focus on modality suggests a different, practical connection between Vico and Hegel that bypasses the epistemological puzzles that Pippin assures us were daunting to, unsolved by Hegel. Vico can be hypothesized as a working phenomenologist before the fact; bracketing a domain of competence, working austerely with a range of behavior sealed off from debilitating puzzles. Thus, we noticed that Hintikka regards Vico’s theory of maker’s knowledge as a pertinent context to Hintikka’s investigation of modality. But what Vico describes in his rhetorical-legal hermeneutic are societies “making” the crucial practices of mutual recognition, as, for example, in the long series of transactions of claim and counterclaim in Roman legal history. Vico’s rich accounts of making legal-political knowledge in its sure sense of the facticity of motives, contests of motives as powerful, practices of creating institutionalized “like-mindedness,” constitute, in effect, a phenomenology of the Roman experience of mutual recognition: shared, fairly stable rules in confrontation with instability, rules recognized as in accord with “common sense” as “civil,” as unreflective judgement, that must deal with instability or lose status. The shared, unreflective judgements are not only operative, they are sufficient starting points for construal of standards, or for debate. And, of course, the intrusion of the demands for mutual recognition as civil goal are responsible for, and ground the intrusion of rhetoric as political competence and inquiry

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practice: Brunschwig’s prospective/generative rhetoric. And note as well that expansiveness in the consideration of mutuality in all its rich historical manifestations expands our sense of the strategies. Just so, perhaps, we can place the role of “rhetorized psychology,” Hobbesian or otherwise, in the program. To return again to Heidegger’s expansive discussion of fear in the SS1924 lectures (a brilliant gloss, recall, on Aristotle’s Rhetoric II); this defines fear not as private state of mind, an intractable psychological state, but as joint operation, generative of political possibility: “fear makes us deliberate,” Aristotle and Hobbes tell us; or, our fears push us into tactics of mutual recognition. Thus, rhetorical habits, multiplying narratives of affective exchange, supply the terms of mutuality, the words that foster the mutual recognition which Pippin assures us Hegel claimed as a primary goal. The narratives, figures, arguments suggest the parameters of the truth of “the possible shapes of the Spirit,” as “social existence” (HI, 147). True, rhetoric is all and only political, and the capaciousness can be dismaying, capable of giving a taut, responsive reading of a barbarism of reflection; this Modernist rhetoric also rereads autonomy not as solitude of spirit but as a full, at times disquieting, range of civil possibility, of spirit as social existence. There are still more observations to be made on the effects of modal proclivity. There is a positive evaluation of untidiness and a corresponding devaluation of what Glendinning decries as philosophy’s goal of “conceptual exactness.”15 The devaluation stimulates a compensatory interest in modulation, refinement, expansiveness, a creative untidiness that spans a range of investigative interests.16 Thus, certainly it is the case that a focus on possibility is supported by and supports a preoccupation with time, process, and a commitment to notice and account for fluidity, expansiveness in civil inquiry and civil work. Vico, as possibly the most committed to transformation, fluidity, can also contemplate transformation as reversal, inquiry as capable of retreat, thus, the “barbarism of reflection.” Recalling Aristotle’s assignment of deliberative rhetoric to the future tense, recalls that politics as Meyer’s negotiation of differences is, as well, negotiating change, contingency, therefore engaged in finding, creating policy possibilities of intrusion, response to future event. Detecting a possibility is forming a policy of the effective. Or, effective and “right.” The negotiation must take account both of the claim of the normative to stability and of normative fluidity, the ineluctable instability of norms, values entailed by the varied demands of negotiating “with others.” Obviously, rhetorical habits consider the constraints on the acts of pos­ing, projecting possibilities as political acts. If a major social science

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inquiry imperative is, as Hawthorn claims, to locate actuality in a field of possibilities—and, here, perhaps he invokes Hintikka’s assertion that the use of any modal notion involves reference to more than one possible state of affairs—then submission of possibility to argument expands or contracts the parameters of the actual political field, the domain of policy. To consider possibilities is an act of negotiative clarification; ingenuity should shape policy. And, at the same time, rhetorical habits, multiplying narratives, selecting figures, supply the useful possible terms of mutuality, the fresh words that insure the mutual recognition that Pippin assigns as value to Hegelian program. Here, ideological constraints, necessitous clichés are discounted as dilution, not expansion, in terms of developing capacity and action. A strong interest in the utility of possibility, in sum, becomes an exceedingly sharp focus on dysfunctional poverty, civil dimunition, conversation-­stoppers. The proclivity must also reckon impossibilities, such as the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus, total transparency, unimpaired rationality. And thus Hobbes’ rhetorized psychology places at risk the dominant notions of contract, obligation. At the same time, premature assertion of impossibility is a flaw of political process, and thus the salience of rhetorical habits of delaying such assertions. A very high proportion of rhetorical activities have to do with modality. A very small proportion of modal statements do not have to do with modal rhetorics: there is, almost always, a persuasive—posing, asserting, denying, contesting—agenda. Certainly, rhetorical competence encompasses the mechanics of expressing possibility: the minutiae of voice, tense, specific address, names. “The general space of possibility,” the location of the acts of defining and posing specific possibilities obviously requires notations of time: duration, transpiring, indefiniteness of extension. Possibilities, in a sense, occupy a “parallel reality,” and their statements must reflect subtle shades of duration, policy windows. In Aristotle’s Topica we have already a recognition of the peculiarities of rhetorical time: topics involve relations of generalities as either principles of argument or maxims drawn from those principles, with the particulars, necessarily embedded in argument, which are defined as “aorist,” indefinite.17 There is a definite modal peculiarity to the pronouncements in Heidegger’s account of Dasein, and it is accompanied by peculiarities in the specifics of time. Dasein, indeed, is determined by temporal specificity, Jeweiligkeit, which asserts, it seems, very little. Consider the uses of affect as “already,” or fear as “not yet” in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle on fear; there is no calm, flat-footed assessment of past, present, future— only a connected confu-

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sion, a difficult dependence; it is an account of fear as moving in a relational mode, in an intricated warp of time. Hintikka’s fascination with the Aristotelian ur-texts of modality, dwells on the basic Aristotelian distinctions between gradual and completed actualization of potential, between kinesis and energeia; that is to say, it is a concentrated attention to motion itself as constituting achievement and locating constraint.18 Notice as well that the counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy, require a subjunctive voice. When posing or rejecting a possibility one may think of oneself as using an apostrophe in the subjunctive voice: “O that it were (not) the case” as address to invoke consideration of a parallel reality, an adjacent action as implying a consequent, or missing action. Then, the quarrels over the proper use of substantives like “subject” or “object”; these seem to engage a general rhetorical slipperiness about nouns and their possible ontological demands. All the minutiae of possibility convey a kind of cognitive subjunctive, prejudicing knowledge, stipulating—in a very uneasy way—understanding. Thus Vico: maker’s knowledge is tied to the processual, defined by the specific acts of writing narrative; the Vichian three ages are simply three general spaces of possibility; the barbarism of reflection is itself in the subjunctive voice, occurring in a non-linear future, where the solitude of the spirit has a monitory presence. An age is a state-of-affairs with a peculiar claim to actuality, attributed not to individuals, but to more-than-one; again, solitude is a social vector, not a private state of mind. Here solitude cancels subject (Spirit), promises another state of affairs, projects the possibility of another, cancelling activity by imposing very confused temporal boundaries. Cristofolini’s attribution, cited earlier, of cinematographic impulses to Vico asserts Vico’s New Science program, pursued over many years, as offering a flux of possibles, an investigational succession that gives us the options of incremental, or corrective, or basic change; the expansiveness is fluidity of inquiry that gives us the chance to reorient our response. In the background is the religious goal: Christian isolation, self-perfection, confessed, closed, and—not invoked by Vico. The speculation on “age” shifts the political issues to a different register, and, I will argue, its distance is at the same time liberating, accessible. In summary, there are numerous investigational benefits of modal considerations.19 Hawthorn’s strategic interest—“locating the actual in a range of possibilities” is not simply an act of clarification, but requires the inquirer to deal in versions, semblances, a requirement coordinate with the basic

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rhetorical imperative of persuasive invention.20 When Nietzsche describes rhetoric as necessarily embroiled with inversions, deceits, self-deceptions, and as as attached to artificial means he describes a task, a responsibility, not a flaw.21 Versions have a rationale; posing a possibility has, of course, a different illocutionary effect than stating a necessary conclusion. “Possible” almost requires the query, “possible?” This assigns uncertainty, often raising issues that political philosophy usually engages only to dismiss.22 But the positive connection of modal proclivity with devotion to versions is pessimism. There are a series of linked rubrics that organize inquiry values; “Sophistic” is the rubric I have employed to classify an enduring rhetorical initiative, but the hypothesis is, simply, that pessimism is competence. This is a commitment that certainly marks the MachiavelliHobbes-Vico succession. The link with possibility is the shared, negative assumption that single powerful solutions with single moral justifications are difficult to formulate, sound fictional, unpersuasively realistic. Thus when Syme argues the historical worth of investigating the identity of agents, he is not advocating construing biographies of virtue; on the contrary, he assumes a depressing range of talents, capacities, in action. Also, pessimism as affect of inquiry qualifies reception; it is arguable that the production of versions generates seriousness, invents concern. Consider the Benjamin essay, “Privileged Thinking”; the title assures us he wishes us to engage issues of the politics of inquiry. Here Benjamin attacks T. Haecker’s Catholic interpretation of Virgil, his vain attempt to do theology without politics, and Haecker’s failure to see, on the one hand, that the doctrine of original sin does away with the inwardness and immediacy of sinful experience, and, on the other, that the late Romantic notions of inward Christian spirit Haecker assumes guarantee, wrongly, Western claims to “both actual and possible political domination over others”: “seine faktische und seine mögliche politische Herrschaft” (III, 320; II.2, 57). Benjamin’s description of privileged, untoward thinking is as a blindness to the reach of bad definitions of potential: they taint not simply political action, but the larger, encompassing realm, the possible—the domain of program, of the ideologies of aggression. Then, shifting the focus to a realm of possibility shifts the topic/event to a different register, and requires us to hypothesize, with specificity, parameters, horizons, phases of change. Moreover, the register of “possibility” is a proximate register, with an often rather unspecifiable nearness, to that of actuality: its closeness is its power, and enhances its expressive capacity of critique and correction: of, intriguingly, moral critique.

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Rhetoric’s engagement with the details of existent possibilities distorts necessity as abstraction. Just so, Benjamin selects registers: in the “Berlin Chronicle,” a memoir of his childhood, and in “Hashish in Marseilles” Benjamin painstakingly locates feelings; all the most intimate familial or mystical-physiological experiences generate slight, subtle references to the cityscape—to streets, courtyards, populated streets; or, as voyeur, to Christian ceremonies, to crimes, to eating: politics with a light touch (VI, 465–519, II.2, 595–637; IV, 409–16; II.2, 673–79). Certainly Pippin changes the register of Hegel’s turning point in order to save the initiative for contemporary discussion. The mere assumption of registers shakes systemic ambitions to the core, and certainly upsets moralistic tactics, for moralistic work depends on a unified register of agency and act to counter relativism. The proclivity not only shifts but contends registers, contending systemic philosophical discourse as encompassing, mechanical. Or, contending rhetoric as oratory: there is a rhetorical texture to Hobbesian and Vichian argument that works against the register of oratorical performance; it is a useful thought-experiment to try to locate the anti-dogmatic tendencies of Hobbes’ prose. The definition of register offers much more than a diversity within the single, actual realm. It is not just a pluralist tactic; its speculation must encompass the untoward, the dismissed, the bizarre. Perhaps this glosses Hintikka’s claim for the Early Modern salience of the “widening of possibilities”; surely this is as Leibnizian, a possible Vichian context; the disjunction Hintikka notices between the widening of actualities/widening of possibilities is of peculiar interest, with the actualities in tension with the possibilities. Then, the reflexivity of the modality is strong, unavoidable; one can’t observe it without using it. The reflexivity of the operation of the mode is primitive; it invests one of the major inquiry strategies: consideration in their instance requires consideration in ours; to consider remote possibility involves specifying near.23 All the concerns with register, with versions as tentative, with the necessary use of the subjunctive—are related to reflexivity as qualification: thus suggestive, reflecting back, noticing changes of mind. It infiltrates choices of versions, registers. The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture. Then, is this related to issues of historical anachronism: where do you begin in order to report the terms and claims of anachronistic, i.e., remote situations? It is certainly the case that we observe and report their changes in register, their versions in the situations we study—but where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing? How do we choose our registers, versions?

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Consider again Benjamin’s “Privileged Thinking.” Obviously an exercise in reflexivity, it illumines Benjamin’s connection to Marxist dialectic as elucidating the production/consumption of culture and cultural inquiry. He criticizes Haecker’s unreflective interpretation of Virgil; Benjamin’s rhetorical habits allow him to define this as an example of Humanistic rhetoric, a kind of privileged thinking as self-enclosed; it is a “barbarism of reflection,” solipsist. For the modern Humanists like Haecker lack, specifically, awareness of their political capacities. “For if they were [aware] . . . they could not avoid the problem of every truly contemporary interpretation of Virgil: the possibility of Humanism in our own age” (“die Möglichkeit des Humanisten in unserer Zeit” [III, 321; II.2, 574]). But, this “privileged knowledge” turns out to be “the most lethal metamorphosis of cultural privilege.” The inquirer must pose simultaneously both civic possibilities and the possibility of his investigation, a definition that circulates on the level of public exchange and cultural place; the position of the art critic is determined by the position of art as production/consumption functioning in society; both are part of the possibility of failure. The pessimist’s basic question, perhaps the dominant one now —“is politics possible?” Syme speaks of the Augustan Revolution as abolishing or sterilizing politics; rhetoric, defined as functioning inside politics, would lose its place. But rhetoric as inquiry is peculiarly suited, through its pessimism, to give an account of abolition and emasculation, the conditions of possibility furnished by the Vichian age for the “barbarism of reflection.” Or, we could read Vico’s barbarism as a Benjaminian fable of the imperative of motion, of semblances, of the need for consolation for the failure of imitation as strategy. In sum, the rhetorical proclivity for possibility sponsors versions, changes in register, reflexivity: it sponsors expansiveness as primary inquiry value. It is an inquiry belief that not only assumes the possibilities of expansions, discovery, but the expansion of possibilities: inquiry as intrusion. This modal expansiveness is an intrinsic, structured doubleness of habits of mind. For, first, possibilities define: thus Hintikka’s claim that only the consideration of possible, alternate world clarifies; and, second, defining, posing, possibilities is the pragmatic task of rhetoricalpolitical activities: the task of a true, narrow, practical intervention. All follows from the initial Aristotelian assumptions: rhetoric functions inside politics; rhetorical inquiry works inside civil process; its function is to theorize the possible means of persuasion; it operates within the domain of the probable, considering that which could be otherwise; political rhetoric addresses the topic of possibility/impossibility. The “insideness”

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is both its limit and its strength vis-à-vis philosophy’s “outsideness,” but it is the recuperation of the original political interest that encompassed rhetoric that makes possible a recovery of investigative edge. And it is the linking of civil inquiry as task to possibility as proclivity that distinguishes the specific corrective capacity of rhetoric in its opposition to the normative philosophy Williams deplores as limited, and defines as well rhetoric’s unique capacity to modernize, to respond to modern loss as well as gain. Rhetoric’s unique capacity stems from its research choice of civic possibility over moral necessitarianism; pursuit of moral necessitarianism can undermine even the Hegelian values of sociality and fluidity Pippin so eloquently describes. Thus Vico’s brilliance in modality work: the barbarism of reflection is a meditation on the determinism/free will opposition that dominated Classical political philosophy. Vico’s devotion to cose civili specifies that individual freedom, lack of constraint, negativity are the very conditions for a complete deterministic postulation. Or, the perfection of the meditation on moral things, cose morali, is the perfection of enclosure, the absence of valence, the erasure of possibility. And he rejects this.

Notes Chapter One 1. Struever, N., “The place of the history of rhetoric in intellectual history; the early modern example,” Intellectual News 3 (Spring 1998), 32. 2. C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Beliefs,” “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1872) in Writings of C. S. Peirce, ed. M. Fisch et al. (Bloomington, IN, 1982), III, 242–57 (FB), 257–76 (HMIC). The earlier (1868) “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Writings, 2, 211–42 (C), contextualizes his inquiry initiative. The strong connection of Peirce’s notions of inquiry and his speculation on modality is made clear in his Monist articles of 1892–1893, especially “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” Monist 2 (1892), 321–37 (DNE), “The Law of Mind,” 533–59 (LM), “The Reply to the Necessitarians,” Monist 3 (1893), 526–70 (RN). Peirce’s antinecessitarianism is a major source of my interest in possibility. 3. I am arguing that Peircian impurity makes a case for rhetorical impurity. Consider his definition of “abduction” as supplement to induction and deduction: abduction is simply “explanatory hypothesis,” a inquiry capacity that “shades into” perceptual judgement: “. . . the result of a process . . . not sufficiently conscious to be controlled, or to state it more truly, not controllable and therefore not fully conscious.” Lecture VII, “Pragmatism and Abduction,” Lowell Lectures, in Collected Papers, ed. Ch. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, MA, 1960), 5, 182. A similar taste for impurity invests Hellenic rhetoric’s beliefs and habits of inclusiveness, suppleness, and “sophistication”— a play upon the originary Sophistic political motives, “The place of rhetoric . . . ,” 33–35. 4. M. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. M. Michalski, Gesamtausgabe 18 (Frankfurt, 2002), 108. The priority of rhetoric to dialectic is mentioned by Aristotle in the De sophisticis elenchis, 184a and b. 5. K. Dockhorn, review of H. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1st ed., Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 218 (1966), 169–220; see as well P. Christopher Smith, Hermeneutics of the Original Argument (Evanston, IL, 1998). I discuss one aspect,

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temporality, of the SS1924 rhetorical interest in “Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerean program,” in Heidegger and Rhetoric, ed. D. Gross and A. Kemmann (Albany, NY, 2005), 105–30. 6. M. Meyer, “Postface,” Aristote: Rhétorique: des Passions (Paris, 1989), 139; B. Cassin claims that Hellenic rhetoric is subordinated to politics as architectonic; “Bonnes et mauvaises rhétoriques: De Platon a Perelman,” in Figures et conflits rhétoriques, ed. M. Meyer and A. Lempereur (Brussels, 1990), 31. 7. J. Ober, The Athenian Revolution; Essays in Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 89, 91. 8. It is arguable that the work of J. De Romilly and B. Cassin on Sophistic is the best work on Hellenic rhetoric: see, for example, De Romilly’s Les grandes Sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès (Paris, 1988); B. Cassin, L’effet sophistique (Paris, 1995). 9. J. Hintikka, U. Remes, S. Knuuttila, “Aristotle on Modality and Determinism,” Acta philosophica fennica 24.1 (1977), c. 2, 31f. See the provocative (idiosyncratic?) essay of S. Buchanan, Possibility (London, 1927), 33; he points out the many usages of possibility, and, in particular, its essential role in Aristotelian logic. The principal use is, however, in coping with our “lot”: a plurality of theoretical systems, relatively opaque, linked by mutual relations, producing dilemmas, and requiring the narrowing, sharpening of possibilities for clarification of notions (14–15). Possibilities, in short, have responsibilities (33). Further: James Porter’s Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, 2000), offers a narrative of Modernist Classical philology that illumines the motives of rhetorical Modernism I wish to establish. Here Porter claims that Nietzsche both detected and used an exemplary Hellenic philosophical accommodation of rhetorical modal initiatives. In his early (1867– 1868) account, Democritean atomism counters the necessity of Eleatic monism. In Democritus’ universe of atoms and void, void subverts necessity, “in producing a gap in an otherwise homogeneous universe, and thus makes for the possibility of motion . . . it is the tension between void and atoms that keeps the material world in constant flux” (NPF, 86). This assurance of flux, time, chance, possibility enables rhetorical modal riposte to the hegemonous philosophical necessity. Porter claims the depth, seriousness of Nietzsche’s early engagement with Democritus nourishes his later investigations of Classical rhythm and music, language and rhetoric (NPF, c. 3 “Being on Time,” 127f; c. 5, “After Philology,” 225f). Nietzsche admires the rigor, elegance of Democritean inquiry, “that shimmering myth of natural inquiry in antiquity” (109, 111); what Democritus comes to see in nature is not “the sturdy structure of existence but its mere conditions of possibility” (107). 10. Aristotle, Ars rhetorica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1959); Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1946), 1355b25–26; 1356b32–1357a5. “Endechomenon” is usually translated as “available,” but “available” speaks presence, carries less inventive responsibility. 11. See H. Lawson-Tancred, “Introduction,” Aristotle (On the Soul) (London, 1986), 13, 21, 68–69. P. Aubenque, “Logos et pathos, in Corps et âme: sur le D’anima d’Aristote, ed. C. Viano (Paris, 1996), 37–49.

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12. G. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1991), 122. I will invoke the work of the philosopher Bernard Williams later; Hawthorn’s association with Williams was, in my opinion, of importance to his interest in modality. See also Buchanan, Possibility. This is a post-Kantian effort to reposition possibility in inquiry, correcting Aris­totle; Buchanan claims “the validity of possibility as a measure of actuality” (97–98). In Kant “possibility appears as the creative and systematizing concept that runs through discursive or theoretical knowledge, purged of all ontological impurities, rendering intelligible some of the more obscure dogmas that lay the traditional dynamism (Aristotle) open to the charges of occultism” (139). To be sure, Buchanan asserts that he is trying to evade the “demon” of pragmatism. 13. Hintikka et al., “Aristotle on Modality and Determinism,” cites Sorabji’s advice to specify the relations of modalities to each other and to time, coincidence, chance, in his correction of Time and Necessity: Studies in Aristotle’s Theory of Modality (Oxford, 1973), 7–8. 14. And thus Quintilian on possibility in deliberative rhetoric: “It appears to me, therefore, that where necessity exists, there is no room for deliberation, any more than where it is clear that a thing is not feasible. For deliberation is always concerned with questions where some doubt exists. Those therefore are wiser who make the third consideration for deliberative oratory to be tò dunatón or ‘possibility’ as we translate it; the translation may seem clumsy, but it is the only word available.” Institutio oratoria (IO), trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA, 1963), III.8.25; David Marshall brought this text to my attention. B. Saiz Noeda, “Proofs, Arguments, Places,” in Quintilian and the Law, ed. O. Tellegen-Couperus (Leuven, 2003), 95–110, considers the place, locus, as basis for argument; the place a facultate, uses the distinction an voluerit, an potuerit, would or could, possibility as simple crucial issue of capacity for guilt or innocence, whether the party would or could perform (V.10.49–50). 15. To focus on the indigenous Roman developments of rhetorico-legal hermeneutic offers a richer account of civil rhetoric than a survey of the theoretical connections of Cicero or Quintilian to Aristotle’s Rhetoric; but see J. Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam, 1989). And, to be sure, Heidegger also describes bookish retreat when rhetoric becomes a school discipline and its habits of action in inquiry are relegated to a school exercise, and the very sharp, precise sense of duty to action is dulled, Grundbegriffe, 110.

Chapter Two 1. E. Grassi, for whom Heidegger was both mentor and colleague, emphasizes Vico’s “Renaissance Humanism” as academic allegiance, a transformed Romanitas, in both his Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, PA, 1980); and his Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism: Four Studies (Binghamton, NY, 1983).

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2. Hintikka, “Gaps in the Great Chain of Being,” “Leibniz on Plenitude, Relations, and the ‘Reign of Law,’ ” “Kant on the Great Chain of Being,” in Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies of the History of Modal Theories, ed. S. Knuuttila (Dordrecht, 1981), 7, 273, 287. 3. John Aubrey on Hobbes, “Brief Lives”: Chiefly by Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, Between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1898), 357. References to Hobbes are to the W. Molesworth edition, Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, rep. (London, 1994); references to the Leviathan (L); to Human Nature (HN); to De corpore politico (DCP); to the Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil War of England (B); of Hobbes’ Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit, ed. W. Molesworth (London, 1839), the De homine will be referred to as De hom, and the De cive, and De corpore as such. 4. Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (Paris, 1993). Thus Pichot: “Si la physique d’Aristote étant une biologie, la biologie de Descartes est une physique (une mécanique),” 388. “Au xviie siècle, le grande disparition, c’est celle de la vie,” 389. 5. R. Sorabji, “Body and Soul in Aristotle,” Philosophy 49 (1974), 63–89; G. E. R. Lloyd, “Aspects of the Relationship between Aristotle’s Psychology and his Zoology,” in Essays on Aristotle’s “De anima,” ed. M. Nussbaum and A. Rorty (Oxford, 1992), 147–67. 6. L. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. E. Sinclair (Chicago, 1984), esp. c. 3, “Aristotelianism”; later Strauss claims Hobbes’ theory is in explicit and systemic contrast to Aristotle’s (79). I cannot fathom how Strauss recognized the strength of the connection, since it counters Straussism. P. Aubenque, “Logos et pathos,” 37–49. That is to say: “rhetorized” signifies civil use; there is very little interest at all in designing a simply private domain of faculty interaction, an inaccessible, because private, subject: an inaccessibility that protects claims for unique powers, a supra-physical possession. 7. This is in contrast to Tom Sorrell, who claims that Hobbes has a “philosoph­ ical psychology continuous with physics,” and describes Hobbes’ route from the passions to the principles of civil philosophy as “bypassing the sciences,” in “Hobbes’ Scheme of the Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. T. Sorrell (Cambridge, 1996), 53, 55. But the rhetorical concern with elocution is based entirely on a physiological/psychological account of the continuum of human faculties; no continuum, no elocution. To be sure, there are many anti-Aristotelian sentiments, especially in the Behemoth, see esp. 215f, 218, 234–36, 348, 362. 8. S. Schaffer, trans., “Hobbes’ Physical Dialogue (1661)” (Appendix), in S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 347. 9. A. Gargani, Hobbes e la scienza (Turin, 1971), 107–9. 10. The placement of the division between human and animal in the continuum of capacity is crucial; see my “Rhétorique et philosophie naturelle au XVIIe siècle: Le cas de Marin Cureau de la Chambre,” in Ethos et pathos: Le statut du sujet rhétorique, ed. F. Cornilliat and R. Lockwood (Paris, 2000), 133–52.

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11. On the three tasks: Cicero, Brutus, trans. G. L. Hendrickson (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 185; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.2.4. Cicero insists the passions must inform oratory as “sanguis in corporibus,” certainly strenuously biological: De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1959), II.310. 12. Aristotle, De motu animalium, ed. and trans. by M. Nussbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp 700b4f: if sensation, then pleasure/pain; if pleasure/pain, then desire and avoidance. 13. W. Fortenbaugh, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric on the Emotions,” in Articles on Aristotle 4: Psychology and Aesthetics, ed. J. Barnes et al. (London, 1979), 133–53. 14. Y. Zarka, “The Political Subject,” in The Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. T. Sorrell and L. Foisneau (Oxford, 2004), 167, 172; see as well T. Sorrell, “The Burdensome Freedom of Sovereigns,” 184: the sovereign “has to desert the persona of an individual, and thus his own freedom.” 15. Notice in the De homine (95), the “rhetorical” definition of deliberare: “quam in utramque partem habet libertatem deponere.” 16. P. Pellegrin, “Le De anima et la vie animale,” in Corps et âme, 492. 17. “Appetite, fear, hope, and the rest of the passions are not called voluntary; for they proceed not from, but are the will; and the will is not voluntary . . .” HN, 69; this is a peculiar inversion of the figure paronomasia. 18. Cf. L, 197; “Of Liberty and Necessity,” vol. IV, 266. 19. P. Dumouchel, Émotions: Essais sur le corps et le social (Paris, 1995), 71–72, 92. I. Hacking’s review, Times Literary Supplement (July 17, 1998), of Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), points out that according to James, emotions in Early Modernity are inner (like ideas), and the possibility of expressing them was a sort of happy accident, no part of their essence. But for Hobbes, in my view, passions are the basic engine of interpersonal activity. Then, James should note that the vast majority of the statements on the passions are to be found in the highly accessible, widely disseminated rhetorical texts; she has only three references to Cicero, two to Quintilian. 20. See my “Dilthey’s Hobbes and Cicero’s Rhetoric,” in Rhetorica movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich Plett, ed. P. L. Oesterreich and T. O. Sloane (Leiden, 1999), 233–61; W. Dilthey, “Die Funktion der Anthropologie in der Kultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart, 1960), vol. 2, 416–92; also “Hobbes Entwicklung,” 360–90. 21. Hobbes speaks, of course, against the background of the many analyses of rhetorical dysfunction in the memoir material of late republican Rome: the Ad familiares of Cicero, for example. 22. M. Meyer, “La passion exprime la différence dans le sujet” in “Postface” to his edition of Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Aristote: Rhétorique, Des passions (Paris, 1989), 133; cf. L, 61; Meyer places great emphasis on the role of difference in politics. 23. A. Funkenstein, “Natural Science and Social Theory: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vico,” in Vico and the Science of Humanity, ed. G. Tagliacozzo and D. P. Verene

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(Baltimore, 1973), 191. Cf. N. Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D. Gobetti (Chicago, 1993), 38–44. 24. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA, 1993), vol. 1, 40f, on the first mode or tropos on differences with animals. Cf. L, 11, 28, 33, 44, 48, 156–57. See Sorrell, “Hobbes’ Unaristotelian Political Rhetoric,” 98–99; R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 285. 25. A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 331–35, 339, 341. 26. Dumouchel, Émotions, 87. 27. G. Sfez, “Machiavel: la raison des humeurs,” Rue Descartes 12–13 (1995), 11. 28. On the relations of rhetorical and dialectical topics, see J. Brunschwig, “Rhétorique et dialectique, Rhétorique et Topiques” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, ed. D. J. Furley and A. Nehamas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 57–94. 29. D. Thouard, “Hobbes et la rhétorique; un cas complexe,” Rhetorica 14 (1996), 333–39. Thouard contrasts “l’opposition entre une méthode logique et un objet que à rhétorique parait plus apte à épouser dans ses infinies variations,” 339. 30. Q. Skinner argues topics are simply dishevelled, vulgar beliefs, in Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 263f. 31. M. Meyer, “Le problématologie comme clé pour l’unité de la rhétorique,” in Historie de la rhétorique des grecs à nos jours, ed. M. Meyer (Paris, 1999), 298. Meyer claims that while all dialogue reflects question and answer, rhetorical questioning as open is opposed to the “propositionnalisme” of logic, where “toutes les questions sont résolues par les premises”; rhetorical use of topics is intrinsically different from that of dialectic. 32. E. Stump has illumined the complex, yet efficacious relations between topics and rhetoric, topics and dialectic and logic in the Classical and medieval background; “Dialectic and Aristotle’s Topics,” in Dialectic and Its Place in the Development of Medieval Logic (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 11–30. 33. Cicero, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA, 1960), II.6. See Noeda, “Proofs, Arguments, Places,” 105: topics are defined variously as “seating, foundation of argument, places where arguments reside, are concealed, drawn forth; as ‘reservoirs of ideas,’ slots or ‘cells’ where arguments are stored.” 34. B. Cassin, “Philosophia enim simulari potest, eloquentia non potest: ou, le masque et l’effet,” Rhetorica 13 (1995), 105–24. 35. O. Bird, “The Tradition of the Logical Topics: Aristotle to Ockham,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962), 307–23. 36. W. Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. G. Highet (Oxford, 1965), II.c. 3, c. 6; cf. HN, 75.

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37. Dockhorn, review of Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, cites Julius Victor on rhetorical enthymemes as “. . . oratio apud homines, qui non recondite disputationum subtilitate, sed communi sensu universa percipient,” 172. 38. Theophrastus, from Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle’s Topica I; in Theophrastus of Ephesus: Sources for His Life and Writings, ed. W. Fortenbaugh et al. (Leiden, 1992), 122A. 39. Just so, Cicero sees the dialectician as more concerned with precision in generality, but he sees the orator as necessarily, always engaged with the particular case, the hypothesis or causa; see M. Leff, “The Topics of Argumentative Invention in Latin Rhetorical Theory from Cicero to Boethius,” Rhetorica 1 (1983), 23–42. Leff points out the rhetorical use can slight neither common beliefs and patterns of inference nor the special circumstances of use. And thus Hobbes attempting to move on the highest level of generalization while responding to the civil war, “Ad lectores,” De cive. 40. This is of course Dumouchel’s argument; for Hobbes, passions are not intimate states of the subject, Émotions, 44. 41. Dumouchel, “Voir et craindre un lion,” Rue Descartes 12–13 (May 1995), 98; for Hobbes “les processus cognitifs ne peuvent jamias être parfaitement libres des passions,” 99. 42. This Aristotelian phenomenology of listening applies to all argument: see B. Cassin and M. Narcy, Le decision du sens; le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique d’Aristote (Paris, 1989), 1006a25–26, 185–86. See also the Rhetoric, 1359a19; 1400b34–35; also Theophrastus from Dem. Eloc., 222, in Fortenbaugh et al., eds., Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought, and Influence (Leiden, 1992), 696. 43. A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996). 44. Brunschwig makes the point that rhetorical manuals themselves stress innovation: rhetorical texts are prospective/generative vs. dialectic’s retrospective/ prescriptive, “Rhétorique et dialectique,” 81. 45. Schaffer, “Hobbes’ Physical Dialogue” (Appendix), Leviathan and the AirPump, 348. 46. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651, 296. 47. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651, 285f. “In utramque partem” as skeptical strategy is in Cicero, Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1933), II.iii.7. 48. Y. Zarka, “Hobbes et la pensée politique moderne,” in Deux interprétations de Hobbes, in Le débat: histoire, politique, société 96 (September-October 1997), 92–100. 49. See the discussion of Buchanan on possibilities as a valid analytic system of variables that “waits upon” actuality. Funkenstein describes a parallel, but distinctive use of counterfactuals in the reworking of medieval imaginary experiments in

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17th-century scientific inquiry; he develops the role of the scientific imagination in producing limiting cases, counterfactuals as expository context; true, the mode of possibility hems in, rather than expands. See Theology and the Scientific Imagination on hypothetical reasoning, all the varieties suggesting “possible worlds”; esp. 11, 152f, 172f. E. Garver supplied this reference. 50. “Quando quaedam ab aliquot, utrum rem aliquam propositam facere debeat an praetermittere, dicitur deliberare, id est, quam in utramque partem habet, libertatem deponere,” 95. Cf. Leviathan, 52, where the alternation of deliberation does not end in absolute knowledge. 51. Dialogue of the Common Laws, VI.4; Leviathan, 117; DCP, 83. 52. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 443. 53. See V. Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in En­ gland, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp c. 6. 54. J. G. A. Pocock, “The True Leveller’s Standard Revisited; An Afterword,” in The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State, ed. M. Mendle (Cambridge, 2001), 283–91. Pocock insists that the context of the debate is the omnipresence of authority, “a tissue of authority structures,” 289. 55. Just so, R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation (New York, 1994), 220–21, argues that it is the rigorously binding quality, rather than its voluntarism, its free consent, that distinguishes Renaissance commercial contract theory, and uses The Merchant of Venice as text to illumine the severity of the bond as the source of Venetian hegemony. 56. A. Funkenstein, “Natural Science and Social Theory,” 193; Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 344. 57. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, ed. T. Bergin and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY, 1968),paragraph 179; also Giambattista Vico Opere, ed. A. Battistini (Milan, 1990), I.179: “. . . di considerer l’uomo in tutta la società del gener umano.” (All references are to the Bergin/Fisch edition.) 58. A. Pons, “Una storia senza ‘propri nomi,’ ” in Il sapere poetico e gli universali fantastici, ed. G. Cacciatore, V. G. Kurotschka, E. Nuzzo, and M. Sanna, in Studi vichiani 40 (Naples, 2004), 275–86. I will use in this discussion sections of an earlier version, “The Impersonal in Vico’s Classicism,” ISPF-LAB, Numero I-2005; Saggi: Atti del Convegno Internazionale; Il Corpo e le sue facoltà: G. B. Vico, ed. G. Cacciatore et al. This began by citing George Balanchine, “the Classical endures because it is impersonal,” New York Times, January 2, 2004. Balanchine claims a severe Classical formalism of movement as essence, entirety of dance. He opposes it to Romanticism and Romantic subjectivity in narrative plot, with their displays of internal states of mind, Romantic personality; I argue that Vico pursues, like Balanchine, an elegant, rigorous, impersonal formalism. B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 4, argues that the original Greek ethical issue “How should one live?” is usefully impersonal in opposition to a “personal” morality as modern institution.

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59. R. G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), absolute presuppositions are not propounded, 32–33. 60. Fisch and Bergin, New Science, xxxix (introduction). 61. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1960); see as well The Roman Aristocracy (Oxford, 1986), 14: “. . . biographies of emperors are a menace and an impediment to the understanding of history in its structure and processes.” 62. A. Watson, “Legal Isolationism, III,” The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, GA, 1995), 158–71. See as well my “Hobbes and Vico on Law: A Rhetorical Gloss,” New Vico Studies 19 (2001), 63–85. 63. On Vico’s “use” of rhetoric as a “sublimation” of rhetoric, see D. Marshall, “The Impersonal Character of Action in Vico’s De coniuratione Principum Neapolitanorum,” New Vico Studies 24 (2006), 81–128. O. Tellegen-Couperus, “Style and Law: How to win a case by use of emphasis,” 237–45, and J. W. Tellegen, “The Reliability of Quintilian for Roman Law,” 191–200, both in Quintilian and the Law, are strong advocates of the dense intrication of Roman rhetorical and legal competences, presuppositions, practices. 64. G. Crifò, “Droit et rhétorique chez G. Vico,” in Mélanges offerts à Raymond Van der Elst (Brussels, 1986), 103–4. 65. A. Watson, “Law and the Roman Mind,” in Roman Law and Comparartive Law (Athens, GA, 1992). 66. M. Papini, “Vicende seicentesca di Minimi e Conati,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 22–23 (1992–93), 169; Papini speaks of impersonality as value in inquiry, 139, 140. 67. An argument for the centrality of book III, “The Discovery of the True Homer” (Ricerca del vero Omero) (NS), to Vico’s scientific program is suggested by James Porter, who claims that the “Question of Homer” encapsulates the modern, post-Wolfian, philological issues; “the history of the Homeric texts is the history of philology”; Homer is, in sum, “a possibility” that orients research, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 72, 74–75, 65. 68. B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 149f. 69. R. G. Collingwood, Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 48: here Collingwood describes the Christian discovery of “providence” as the construct of unintentionality in history. 70. R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1978), 340. 71. Etymologia or paronomasia was the figure “cum ex vi nominis argumentum elicitur,” Cicero, Topica, viii, 35. The search for the root, etymon, from which the word in question was derived was, as a search for origo, origin, a search for the power, vis, force of the word. See my “Fables of Power,” Representations 4 (1983), 108–27. 72. In the “Continuation by the Author, 1731,” Autobiography, trans. M. Fisch and T. Bergin (Ithaca, NY, 1944), 196; cf. Vita scritta da se medesimo, in Opere, I.81:

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Vico, when offering his corrections and critique of his 1730 text, insists Homer’s “blameless” Achilles does not meet the conception of hero as the term is used by scholars. But Homer is valuable while getting it wrong; the heroic period is a period of complex, at times ironic, patterns of civil abuse; the complexity does not simply obscure heroic possibility, it makes the performance and naïve attribution impossible. 73. De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in Opere, 158–95; Study Methods of Our Time, trans. E. Gianturco (Ithaca, NY, 1990). 47–70. 74. Fumaroli, “Ego scriptor: Rhétorique et philosophie dans le Discours de la méthode,” in Problématique et réception du Discours de la méthode et des Essais, ed. H. Méchoulan (Paris, 1988), 31–46. Fumaroli describes how the memoir functions as critique of standard royal historiography in the 17th century, employing a middle style, presenting the reader with a pure and necessarily partial witness of personal truths, it qualifies the claims of authority delivered in the grand style; see the excellent articles on the Early Modern memoir in Fumaroli’s La diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris, 1994), there are four articles of great interest. 75. A. Battistini, Note, in Opere, II.1241. 76. N. Struever, “Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. W. Jost and W. Olmsted (Oxford, 2004), 438. 77. This, I would argue, is the implication of NS, 349: “He who meditates this science narrates to himself this ideal history in so far as he himself made it for himself”: “. . . ch’in tanto chi medita questa Scienza egli narri a se stesso questa storia ideal eterna, in quanto . . . egli . . . esso stesso sel faccia . . .” 78. P. Cristofolini, “Introduzione,” Scienza nuova 1730, Opere, VIII (Naples, 2004), 11. The “practica” appears in Correzioni, Miglioramenti, ed Aggiunte Terze, 511–14, followed by the Ragionamento prima on the XII Tables. 79. Cristofolini, “Introduzione,” 8. 80. It is intriguing that Vico accuses Hobbes of affinity for chance, not necessity. But the Hobbesian “conditions of possibility” are so unique that perhaps Vico, not Hobbes, confuses chance with possibility (recall Buchanan’s warning, Possibility, 104–5). Or, perhaps Hobbes’ focus is on, not necessitarian order, but necessitarian disorder. 81. “. . . nella serie de’ possibili la quale ci è permesso d’intendere, e per quanto ce n’è ce n’è permesso, possa pensare o più o meno o alter cagioni di quelle ond’escono gli effetti di questo mondo civile,” NS, 345 (my emphasis). D. P. Verene thus cites Vico’s letter to Esperti in 1726 to suggest this was a dominant concern: “. . . today the world either fluctuates and undulates among the tempests of human customs in accord with the chance of Epicurus or is nailed down and affixed to the necessity of Descartes; and thus it either abandons itself to blind fortune or allows itself to be dragged along by deaf necessity; it cares little or nothing to control the one by the indomitable forces of reasonable choice or to avoid, and where it is not

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possible, to temper the other,” “Vico’s Reply to the False Book Notice; the Vici Vindiciae,” New Vico Studies 24 (2006), 130; cited from Epistole, ed. M. Sanna, Opere di Giambattista Vico (Naples, 1992), v. 11, 122–29. 82. In the “Ad lectores” of the De cive, Opera philosophica, II.142, Hobbes speaks of a “civilis scientia.” 83. See my “Montaigne’s Ciceronian Pessimism,” Montaigne Studies 14 (2002), 49–64. 84. NS, 349. Hobbes: “demonstrabilia sunt in iis tantum rebus quarum causae in nostra potestate sunt,” De homine, 93–94. See F. Tricaud, “Civil philosophy is demonstrable . . .” in Hobbes and Spinoza, ed. D. Bostrenghi (Naples, 1992), 281– 95. Tricaud opposes the demonstrability in the verum /factum principle, in the De homine, X.5, and the dedicatory epistle to Six Lessons, VII.183–84, to the argument from the solidarity of the sciences of motion and political motion in the De corpore, De cive, Leviathan. 85. “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868), 103–14; “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868), 140–57; both appearing in Writings of C. S. Peirce, vol. 2. 86. L, 117; DCP, 83; Dialogue of the Common Laws, VI.4. 87. I. A. Richards, Richards on Rhetoric: I. A. Richards, Selected Essays, 1929– 1974, ed. A. E.Berthoff (Oxford, 1991), 53. 88. Cf. Sorrell’s account of this passage, “Hobbes’ UnAristotelian Political Rhetoric,” 100–101. 89. See, for example, A. Watson, “Legal Isolationism III,” in The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, GA, 1995), 158–71.

Chapter Three 1. B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ, 2002); In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, NJ, 2005) (note that Geoffrey Hawthorn was the editor of this volume); Philosophy as Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore (Princeton, NJ, 2006); The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. M. Burnyeat (Princeton, NJ, 2006). 2. B. Williams, “Political Philosophy,” in Philosophy as Humanistic Discipline, 167, argues that inquirers should have “a sense of the systematic demands of philosophy without demanding a system within moral or political philosophy themselves.” This is truly rhetorical theoretical insouciance. 3. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 9, 76. 4. J. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492– 1530 (New Haven, CT, 2006); F. Stern, Five Germanies I Have Known (New York,

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2006), states the rationale for using counterfactuals— e.g., what would have happened if Adenauer had joined the Weimar government?— crisply; he wanted, primarily, to show that the Nazi regime was neither accidental nor inevitable, neither by chance or necessity, 4, 10. 5. Thus R. Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York, 2007); the failure of a military policy stemmed from the lack of qualifying, explanatory scenarios dealing with “2nd, 3rd, 4th consequences” of a particular decision (the destruction of Monte Cassino monastery). 6. A. Bennett, The History Boys (New York, 2006). Bennett speaks of “subjunctive history”: “It is more than a game. Thinking about what might have happened alerts you to the consequences of what did,” 90. 7. To be sure, Rawls’ project is itself an exercise in modality; his primary assumption is of a (very odd) possible world: “. . . the fiction of contracting parties making a rational choice under ignorance,” in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 29. 8. Williams, “Liberalism of Fear,” In the Beginning Was the Deed, 55, 60, 61. 9. Ibid., 53, 67. 10. Ibid., 67. 11. Williams, “An Essay on Collingwood,” in The Sense of the Past, 341–58. Williams is somewhat conflicted about Collingwood, however; it is not entirely praise when he states that Collingwood is a hermeneuticist, not a foundationalist (355); and Williams finds troubling the Collingwoodian notion that metaphysics is a historical discipline; but it is Collingwood’s sensitive descriptions of the internal tensions in metaphysics that substantiates his historical thesis. 12. Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, Opere, I.107: “E ciò a torto, poiché come la scoperta degli argomenti viene per natura primo del giudizio sulla verità.” 13. J. Hintikka, “Gaps in the Chain of Being,” in Reforging the Chain of Be­ ing, 8. 14. But see S. Knuuttila, “Time and Modality in Scholasticism,” Reforging the Great Chain of Being, 217f, on the later, Scotus’ notion of possibility as simply an alternate state of affairs, much more familiar to us. 15. Temporality is a crucial factor in Heidegger’s development of the ideas advanced in SS1924. Thus in The Concept of Time /Der Begriff der Zeit, trans. W. McNeill (Oxford, 1992), delivered in July 1924 (i.e., during the SS1924 course), Heidegger insists on the temporal dimension of existence and deals with possibility at length, 9f. Thus “Dasein als menschliches Leben ist primar Möglichsein”; “Dasein as human life is primarily being possible,” 12/12E, and, possibility complicates past, present, future: “Dasein begriffen in seiner äussersten Seins Möglichkeit, ist die Zeit selbst, nicht in der Zeit,” See J. N. Mohanty, “Phenomenology and the Modalities,” in Language, Knowledge, and Intentionality: Perspectives on the Philosophy of J. Hintikka, ed. L. Haaparanta et al., Acta philosophica fennica 49 (1990), 110–22. Mohanty cites Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, s. 143 on 110.

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16. This is a recollection of a McKeon student, Eugene Garver. McKeon, of course, is a great sorter: he employs ranges, lists of distinctions, superimposes numbers of explanatory matrices, in his remarkable development of an account of inquiry in general—investigation into everything — modality is certainly one strategy. Thus, see his sorting use of the modality of the “possible” in “Discourse, Demonstration, Verification, Justification”: “Discourse is not about necessary, probable, chance, or impossible occurrences: the subject of discourse is the possible, and the realm of universal discourse is the omnipossible,” Selected Writings, ed. Z. McKeon and Wm. Swenson (Chicago, 2005), II.154. I owe this reference to Swenson. Note McKeon’s equation, or equivocation, of rhetoric and discourse: “discourse has supplanted metaphysics and epistemology as architectonic methods,” SW, II.165; “rhetoric has replaced metaphysics as architectonic art,” in “The Use of Rhetoric in a Technological Age,” SW, II.209. Thus, the subject of rhetoric is the possible? Yet, note that McKeon does not see the quarrel of rhetorical and philosophy as I do: as a renewable, generative debate. Rather, he speaks of transitions, transmutations between philosophy and rhetoric, “The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy,” SW, II.100–101. Consider his “poetry and rhetoric, which may be dangerous and immoral instruments assume their perfect forms in dialectic and philosophy,” “Introduction,” Thought, Action and Passion (Chicago, 1954), 22–23. Or, while he claims “arts of rhetoric” may effect transitions between rhetoric and philosophy, yet, in regard to a specific 20th-century revolution “no art of rhetoric had been found adequate to the possibilities of the shift in thinking,” “Methods,” SW, II.97– 98. Then, the somewhat condescending “every philosophy has a place for rhetoric” somewhat qualifies rhetoric as architectonic, “Philosophy of Communication and the Arts,” SW, II.324. As well, rhetoric and philosophy are both subsumed; Mc­ Keon asserts that his overarching engagement as one with “pluralism and practical criticism,” a program developed at Chicago, 1932–1952, “Criticism and the Liberal Arts,” SW, II.41n. Still, to my mind, pluralism and practicality are modal fascinations. Finally, I am back to a Thucydidean resolve: he claims that if the Athenians and Spartans didn’t use the arguments of his antilogies, they should have; if Mc­ Keon didn’t say possibility sorts rhetoric, he should have. 17. R. Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1980), see esp. II, c. 8, “Deterministic and Indeterministic Accounts of Possibility” (128–40), and Sorabji’s personal intervention on responsibility (251f). On “necessity” as more desirable (50). A thorough account of the current discussion of hard determinism, soft determinism can be found in Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005). 18. W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1992), “Necessity and Language,” 628–51; 640. 19. Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 251, 227. 20. Wm. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999).

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21. Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 251; Hintikka, in “Intentions of Intentionality” claims a strict connection of intention and possibility as mode. “Intentionality is not a matter of relations aiming within the world. Its gist lies in comparisons between several possible worlds. It is an interworldly business, not an intraworldly one.” In Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities (Dordrecht, 1975), 195. In other words, the investigation of civil life must be expansive, and the disposition of rhetorical inquiry is to expand the range of considerations. 22. E. Garver, “After Virtù: Rhetoric, Prudence and Moral Pluralism in Machiavelli,” in Prudence: Classical Virtue, Post-Modern Practice, ed. R. Hariman, (University Park, PA, 2003), 73n83, citing Williams, “The Truth in Relativism,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981), 132–43. 23. Garver, “After Virtù,” 82–83, 84. 24. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 207; cf. S. Wolin, The Politics of Vision, 259; separateness is again a disavowal. 25. This, to be sure, takes place in an ongoing rhetorical-philosophical conversation. Thus in Descartes: “Action and passion are always a single thing,” Passions of the Soul, trans. S. Voss (Indianapolis, 1989), Article I.19. Or compare an earlier “rhetorical” intervention, when Lorenzo Valla eliminated passion as a separate predicament; it is, simply, action. Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. G. Zippel (Padua, 1982), I.154; II.445. 26. Cassin, “Philosophia enim simulari potest, eloquentia non potest: ou le masque et l’effet,” 13. 27. Cassin, “Bonnes et mauvaises rhétoriques,” 34. 28. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds, 185, 187. Cf. Hintikka, Models for Modalities, 153. 29. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds, 186n23. 30. I am arguing that the strong initiatives in Benjamin’s work replicate those in Porter’s account of a “possible” post-Nietzschean “philology of the future,” both severe in methodological skepticism and deeply engaged in refinement of aesthetic judgement. And, as well, Porter’s account of the philological background clarifies Benjamin’s claim of a connection through Jochmann with Vico’s “philosophical philology.” 31. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XI.3. The references in my text to Benjamin are to the Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1974f), and to the Harvard/Belknap edition of translations, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, I, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings; II, ed. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith; III, ed. Eiland and Jennings; IV, ed. Eilands and Jennings (Cambridge, 1996–2003). See “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” II.2.409–38; II.2.794–818. Benjamin refers to gesture in Baudelaire as well in “Central Park (3)”; I.659; IV.163. 32. Benjamin, Selected Writings, “Franz Kafka,” II.2.418–19, 427; II.2.801–2, 808: the argument is dense, fractured. It is this rhetorical dimension of gesture

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that G. Agamben fails to notice in his “Notes sur le geste,” but then Agamben also denies the connection between political and biological life that underpins Aristotelian rhetoric, where gesture is both hermeneutic and performative; “Dans cet exil,” in Moyens sans fins, trans. D. Loyanza, D. Valin (Paris, 2002), 59–71, 149. 33. Passagen-Werken, Gesammelte Schriften, V; Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999). On the Atlas project see C. Imbert, “Warburg, de Kant à Boas,” L’Homme 165 (2003), 11–40. I would argue that Benjamin’s theoretical investments of the early 1930s —Marxist, Surrealist, Freudian, Jungian—are not thoroughly digested. As R. Teidemann maintained, the meaning of the constructs “remained iridescent; it never achieved any terminological consistency,” V.34; Arcades Project, 942. The convolutes, as a rhetorical structure, resist theory, present the “dreams, phantasmagoria,” i.e., ideologies as veils. Let me also invoke Alan Magee’s photomontage of “Walter Benjamin in Paris”; Magee presents Benjamin himself as a collector’s item, an intent, disheveled doll, posed against the background of a dim Parisian shop-façade. Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) appeared too late for me to consult it carefully. Weber roots his notion of “-abilities” in Derrida’s discussion of possibility in Limited Inc: i.e., “iterability” is the possibility of repetition, not repetition, “Introduction,” 5–6. Note that while Weber mentions (331n3, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) on possibility, he does not invoke the thicker, more intriguing development in Concept of Time. 34. The English of the first version, I.2, 435–69, is in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, with an introduction by H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Book, 1969), 217–51. The translation of the second version, VII.350–88, is in III.101–33; the translation of the third, I.2.471–508, is in IV.251–83. 35. In “On the Trail of Old Letters” Benjamin displaces centrism (IV.944; II.2.557); “. . . to do justice to a single significant letter, to illuminate it in all its factual references, its allusions and details, means going to the very heart of a person’s ‘humanity’ ” and specifies the assembly of “the facts, the data, and the names,” as “an achievment that need be no mere philological accretion, but a true human gain.” He robs sober tradition of its aura. 36. P. A. Meyers cites Benjamin’s remark: “Annex; the Vico-filiation; the inner connection with my work,” Benjamin-Archiv, ms. 424 (II.3.1406), in his “Notes on Now; Benjamin’s Vico and Vico’s Benjamin,” in Il mondo di Vico/ Vico nel Mondo, ed. F. Ratto (Perugia, Italy, 2000), 383–408. This is a much shortened version of his “The World of Speech and the Passage of Time,” which is of intrinsic interest to the modality issue. It is Meyers who suggested to me the Vico/Benjamin connection. Benjamin notes Jochmann’s connection to Vico’s development of metaphor, of poetic origins in “ ‘The Regression of Poetry’ by Carl Gustav Jochmann,” II.2.584–85; IV.364–65. 37. Benjamin’s recasting of the tragic as model recalls Vico’s insistence on the idiosyncrasy of the heroic as model, Vita, 81; Autobiography, 196.

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38. I am claiming Benjamin as a rhetorical Modernist, but not, perhaps, exemplary in the sense of the High Modernism of Picasso, Joyce, Stein. Rather, the work consolidates the secession of Early Modernity. High Modernism is certainly committed to critique, disinvestment, alternate scenarios, divergent possibilities, but is focused more on chance, artistic deftness with contingency. Thus Jasper Johns’ commitment to “the flow of paint,” to brush-work chance as guaranteeing authorial control. The embrace of chance is an extension, not contraction of identity, personal accomplishment: C. Tomkins, “Jasper Johns,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2006.

Chapter Four 1. Williams, “Making Sense,” Truth and Truthfulness, 242. 2. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds, 185. 3. Williams, “Modernity and Ethical Life,” In the Beginning Was the Deed, 42–43. 4. Pippin, Modernism as Philosophical Problem, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1999), 8, 11. See also his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997). Pippin’s philosophical definition gives a fine-grained account of a receptive Modernism. But we must contrast this with the description of a looser, unreceptive Modernism in D. E. Wellbery and J. Bender, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). They claim that the decline of rhetoric can be traced to “five impossibilities”of Modernity: the presence of scientific objectivity, literary subjectivity, liberalism, print media, and the nation-state. But these five impossibilities can be re-read as five possibilities: the confrontation objectivity/subjectivity initiates argument about discursive sincerity/authenticity; liberalism is a troubled, contestatory platform; print media are the base for the expansiveness of digitized print; varieties of nationalism multiply polemical opportunities. 5. Part of the epistemological excitement, of course, is the denial of the centrality, or even usefulness, of epistemology; see esp. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 1979), and the exchanges in Rorty and His Critics, ed. R. Brandom (Oxford, 2000); here, where Rorty tells us there is no need to think of a non-human reality at all, he shows that he himself is the product of the epistemological excitement he deplores (217). 6. R. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, 1989); I used the J. Hoffmeister edition of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg, 1952). 7. Pippin warns us that it would be premature to see the PhG as a “wholesale shift to the concerns of social and political theory”; and claims that “none of these distinctly social and political elements [of his later texts] play a role in the PhG account,” HI, 155, 156.

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8. Buchanan, Possibility, “Kant,” c. 6, 115n, insists on the prominence of possibility in Kant: possibility is the “key concept” of the Critique of Pure Reason, 117; Buchanan’s definition is Kantian—“that which agrees in intuitions and concepts with the formal conditions is possibility,” 14. 9. One must note that here Pippin cites Heidegger’s introduction of the nonCartesian concepts of “world” and “care” as “originally constitutive of the possibility of knowledge,” HI, 148. 10. J. Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known: Historical Perspectives in Epistemology (Dordrecht, 1974). 11. Hintikka, “Gaps in the Great Chain of Being,” in Reforging the Great Chain of Being, 6. 12. J. Hintikka, “Intentions of Intentionality,” Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities (Dordrecht, 1975), 195; Knowledge and the Known, 214–15. 13. T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time (Berkeley, CA, 1993), c. 4, “The Religion Courses, 1920–21,” 149–212. 14. R. Makkreel and J. Scanlon, eds., Dilthey and Phenomenology (Washington, DC, 1987). Pippin will speak of the transformation of Dilthey’s and Husserl’s influence in the “mythic” effort of Heidegger in his later work, Modernism as Philosophical Problem, 134; I find Heidegger’s later career as of lesser interest to this modality thesis. 15. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 251. The entire passage is emphasized in Hei­ degger’s text. I discuss the SS1924 account of Aristotelian fear in “Alltäglichkeit,” cited above, 109–10. 16. M. Heidegger, Der Begriff der Zeit, ed. F. W. Hermann, Gesamtausgabe, v. 64 (Frankfurt, 2004). It includes the text of the 1924 lecture, Concept of Time, cited above. The first section deals with the Dilthey-Yorck correspondence, 7–16. 17. S. Glendinning, On Being with Others: Heidegger-Derrida-Wittgenstein (London, 1998), describes the use as a “constant anonymous publicness,” 57. 18. Dockhorn, review of Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 19. T. Kisiel, “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” in Gross and Kemmann, eds., Heidegger and Rhetoric, 131–60. 20. See the review of D. Gross, Rhetorica 24 (2006), 436–40. He considers S. Metzger and W. Rapp, eds., Homo inveniens: Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik (Literatur und Anthropologie, 19) (Tübingen, 2003); P. D. Krause, ed., Rhetorik und Anthropologie (Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 23) (Tübingen, 2004). In compressed form, P. Oesterreich, “Thesen zum homo rhetoricus,” Rhetorica 20 (2002), 289–98. 21. P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris, 1962), c. 2, esp. 94–144; Aubenque, of course, echoes the German initiative in characterizing rhetoric as a “practical anthropology” (267). 22. C. Ramnoux, “Nouvelle réhabilitation des Sophistes,” Revue de Metaphysique et morale 73 (1968), 1–15. See S. Gilman, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric

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and Language (Oxford, 1989), for a remarkable Nietzschean discussion of rhetoric, but probably not in the least taken account of in the 19th-century Modernist discussion. See, however, the mid-century Italian recuperation of the Sophists: M. Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. K. Freeman (Oxford, 1954); A. Rostagni, “Un nuovo capitolo nella storia della retorica e della sofistica,” Scritti minori, I, Aesthetica (Turin, 1955); M. Buccellato “Sulla retorica sofistica,” in Studi di filosofia greca in onore di R. Mondolfo (Bari, Italy, 1951). Certainly both the French and the Italian accounts are Nietzschean in their rearrangements of generic potentialities, the expansive sense of fluidity in high cultural developments. And certainly they are anti-Platonic; the recuperation is more of a Sophistic structure of inquiry with its devotion to rhetorical competence; yet it could be called “Nietzschean” only with difficulty. 23. For one example, M. Detienne and J-P. Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence: La métis chez les Grecs (Paris, 1974). 24. Particularly the texts mentioned above: J. De Romilly, Les grandes sophistes dans l’Athènes de Péricles; B. Cassin, L’Effet sophistique. The perspicacity of their accounts also confirms T. Albaladejo’s claim that the history of rhetoric is central to its definition; change, continuity explicate investigative value; “From Corax and Tisias to Cyber-Rhetoric,” ISHR Conference, Strasbourg (2007), 8: “The history of rhetoric is not an accessory part or dimension of rhetoric, but an essential part of rhetoric.” 25. J. De Romilly, Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Paris, 1956). 26. Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhétorique (Paris, 1958), 2 vols.; M. Meyer, ed., Histoire de la rhétorique des grecs à nos jours (Paris, 1999). I might add that the richest program in the French historiography of rhetoric that focuses strongly on politics is that of M. Fumaroli; all issues in cultural history become issues in cultural politics. 27. Exemplary, perhaps, is De Romilly’s linkage of rhetorical concern for affect with powerful legal constructs; thus “sweetness” is entangled with equity, in its oppositional force against harsh justice; the possibilities themselves are heavily textured, intricate with rhetorical affect as well as political maneuver, La douceur dans la pensée grecque (Paris, 1979). On linguistic colonization, see the collection, Après Perelman: Quelles politiques pour les nouvelles rhétoriques?, ed. R. Koren and R. Amossy (Paris, 2002), esp. G. E. Sarfati, “Aspects épistémologiques et conceptuels d’une théorie linguistique de la doxa,” 57–90. 28. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 47–49. 29. Cf. Peirce, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” “Reply to the Necessitarians,” cited above; “Evolutionary Love,” Monist 2 (1892), 183 (EL). Or, RN, 560: “Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all things the most obtrusive. That it is absolute, is the most manifest of all intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and conscious, is what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can scarcely master the hardihood to deny.”

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30. C. S. Peirce, “Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing, No. 1,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978), 147–55. 31. Williams, “Postscript,” Ethics and the Limits of Possibility, 197f. 32. RN, 555; cf. Peirce, “Consequences,” already cited, 213. Contrast Peirce on Hegel’s chain of reasoning, however: “with every link a handful of sand squeezed into shape by a dream,” “Evolutionary Love,” 190.

Chapter Five 1. Nietzsche’s critique is precisely of the central German Idealist moment: for Nietzsche, Schopenhauer takes “Kantian philosophy as simply an extraordinary rhetorical instrument,” “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. R. T. Gray (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 240. 2. L. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000). Gossman’s work itself is the product of an investigational sodality, a group at Princeton, led by Carl Schorske, to investigate the interconnections of cities and high cultures. 3. Thus compare with Vichian providence Gossman’s assertion that Burckhardt’s “Providence is not a predetermined program, in other words; divine agency, if such there is, remains free and ultimately inscrutable” (Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 344). Gossman treats at length Burckhardt’s Hellenic pessimism; his notion of the natural antagonism of the polis and philosophy is a different version of Ober’s opposition; but Burckhardt’s Bildung, as goal has nothing to do with the state; apolitia is not simply the attitude but the virtue of the cultured; (this has qualifications, to be sure). 4. Gossman also makes a comparison between Bachofen’s and Vico’s notion of divination (Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 117). 5. In Modernism as Philosophical Problem, Pippin makes his distaste for hermeneutics clear; Heidegger’s project was simply “perpetual hermeneutics” (138); Pippin disdains “radical hermeneutical styles” (170); his critique of Derrida contains the observation that Derrida saw philosophy as essentially rhetoric (a low form of hermeneutic) (173); he is distressed by the notion that “everything is simply interpretation all the way down” (178). But it is mystifying that the American pragmatist R. Rorty also does not take account of the Modernist implications of Peirce’s elaborate pragmatic program. 6. Just so, Porter’s account of Nietzsche stipulates metaphysics as historical task in Porter’s account of the early Nietzschean Democritean initiative which argues the “inescapability” of metaphysics (NPF, 21). Nietzsche’s Democritus gave us a dire metaphysics where “chance” performs on the first level of belief: it is utterly basic. Compare Peirce’s “chance makes room for law” with the Democritean void which makes motion possible; chance is blind purposeless necessity (108), a necessity that

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is not rational, not beautiful, not terminal (86). Then, consider Porter’s tactic of combining two negatives: “the essential anachronism of Classical scholarship,” with “the definitive loss of Classical antiquity” (118); here Porter suggests the strong reversal in Nietzschean inquiry: the definition of “Classic” as “the myth of pure possibility itself” (274). Classical scholars have misread Classical metaphysics. 7. N. Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the 30 Years War (Oxford, 2007). 8. The Necessitarian creates dysfunction in all inquiry, scientific as well as philosophical. 9. Glendinning, On Being with Others, 4, 54–55. 10. Heidegger’s definition of Aristotle’s rhetoric is as “the first fundamental hermeneutic of the everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) of being-with-others (Mit­einander-Sein); Being and Time, trans. J. McQuarrie and E. Robinson (London, 1962), 178 (s. 138). 11. A. Honneth (described as a third-generation member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory), Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie (Frankfurt am Main, 2005); Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, trans. J. Ganahl (Oxford, 2008); La Réification: Petit traité de Théorie critique, trans. S. Haber (Paris, 2007). The French translation is, to my mind, preferable. 12.What is at issue is the Habermasian model of the structural change of publicity in Modernity; see Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 340; Williams, “Modernity and Ethical Life,” In the Beginning Was the Deed, 47–48. 13. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 172–205. 14. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 10E. 15. One could remark, however, the “thinness” of the philosophical language used by Glendinning to develop his notions of “being with others”; he can’t, seemingly, escape from analytic exact neatness; there are practically no Glendinningian tactics that are not available in more edgy rhetorical formulations; in contrast Williams struggles, successfully, against analytic thinness. 16. Buchanan, Possibility, specifies the untidiness as ineluctable context: our “lot” is a plurality of theoretic systems, relatively opaque, producing dilemmas, and requiring the narrowing, sharpening of possibilities (14–15). 17. Alexander Aphrodisiensis, In Aristotelis Topica, Proemium, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, ed. Academia litterarum regia Boruscia (Berlin, 1882–1909), t 2.2. 5, 21–27. 18. Hintikka, Aristotle on Modality and Determinism, c. 4. 19. True, Williams suggests that necessity and possibility can be pretty useless concepts in ethical philosophy (“The Women of Trachis,” The Sense of the Past, 50). And, according to the Kneales, Quine proposes the elimination of modal constructs, and advises us to “abandon the whole theory of modality together with the talk of propositions and attributes it seems to require.” But surely the elimination would profoundly affect political deliberations; a great deal of the exchange seems to be about things that the interlocutors know jolly well may not happen, or could

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not happen. Quine’s proposal is exemplary of the general lack of fit between modern philosophy and politics. On the other hand, we can consider three short tracts which use modality in their titles; in each case the use suggests strong motives: J. Schlanger, Impossible sagesse (Paris, 2007); J.-L. Nancy, Juste impossible (Paris, 2007). É. Maurin, L’égalité des possibles: La nouvelle société françoise (Paris, 2002). In Impossible sagesse, impossible designates wisdom as challenge; a primary, indefinite aspiration, distinguishing potential; in Juste impossible (prepared for a conference of young adults), impossible names a basic, and again, indefinite motivating force, its unobtainability giving direction; in L’égalité des possibles, the substitution of equality of possibility for equality of opportunity marks a different sense, less moralistic, of “subjective” responsibility. 20. The original, and probably most central rhetorical formula is that of Gorgias, in Diels-Kranz, Fragmente de Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1960), vol. 2., Gorgias, 23: his claim that the deceived are more right “dikaióteros” than the not deceived refers to use of theatrical semblances, illusions. “Versions,” of course, raise the issue of the immense, and not much contested, benefit of fictions; eg. The 19thcentury novel, more than the 19th-century history-writing, is a domain of ethical inventiveness, the source of judgemental care. Thus Buchanan compares imaginative with scientific possibilities: the novel “spreads a vast canvas of possibility, on which actual affairs may be projected and seen in perspective,” and claims that from the novel “we can make journeys of possibility in any direction” (Possibility, 25). 21. Nietzsche, “Schopenauer as Educator,” Unfashionable Observations, 180. 22. Pippin connects rhetoric and hermeneutics; G. Bruns notices modern hermeneutic’s connection with provisionality. Provisionality, he claims, is a primary characteristic of Modernity, or at least, of Modernity in art. “This experience of possibility is what modernism is” (64) in “The Hermeneutical Anarchist.” In Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, and J. Kertscher (Cambridge, MA, 2002). Note again the vital connection of rhetoric and mode: Kisiel devotes the penultimate section of his The Genesis of Being and Time to the “Primacy of Possibility,” 439–44. He had claimed that Heidegger’s lecture of July 1924, “The Concept of Time,” was the “primitive form” of the 1927 text, Sein und Zeit. Certainly SZ reargues the hegemony of possibility, and re-claims Dasein as possibility. In short, the strong consideration of possibility as mode transpired within the context of the rhetorical work of the SS1924 course. 23. Q. Skinner suggests modal proclivity as reflexively useful, in reflection on “rumination” on inquiry. He states firmly that 17th-century texts, such as Hobbes’, are not “able to tell us how to conduct our lives.” Skinner argues, however, that history can help us “appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times in different possible worlds . . . Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of inquiry what we should think of them,” in Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), 107, 117.

Index actuality, as mode, 1, 3–7, 76 —as defined by possibility, 6, 11, 40, 48, 58, 126; in Vico, 48–49, 58 —as difficult of access, 7, 42, 49, 106 —in Modernism, 110; in Hegel, 93–95; potentiality to actuality, 5–7, 14–18, 74, 76; and Wirklichkeit, in Benjamin, 85–86 Agamben, G., 145n32 Albaladejo, T., 148n24 Alexander Aphrodisiensis, 150n17 Arendt, Hannah, 87, 100, 147n19 argument, rhetorical: antilogies, 102; counterfactuals in, 6, 36, 40, 49, 68, 89, 125; as deliberation, 18–21, 23, 34–39; and dialectic, 4, 25–28, 39; and persuasion as goal, 3–7, 24, 102; and possibility, 75; and topics, 17, 25–32; in utramque partem, 5, 34–35, 74 Aristotle: and argument, 4–6, 17–24; and biologism, 6, 13–15, 21–23, 44; in Early Modernity, 9–10; in Hobbes, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28–30, 78; in Hobbes and Vico, 63; and modality, 4–7, 67, 70–73; in Modernity, 67, 76, 98–101, 117, 123; and physical process (dunamis, kinesis, energeia), 5, 14–15, 22, 40, 75–76, 78, 83, 125, 132nn10–11, 135n12, 147n15 Aristotle, works of: De anima, 6, 16–17, 79; De interpretatione, 70; Metaphysics, 71; Physics, 5, 15, 63, 83; Rhetorica, 4–6, 79, 128; De sophisticis elenchis, 101; Topica, 17, 124 Atkinson, R., 142n5 Aubenque, Pierre: and Aristotle, 6, 14, 17, 101, 132n11, 134n6, 147n21

Aubrey, John, 13, 134n3 audience (listener, reception): in Hobbes, 29–34, 41; in Hobbes and Vico, 64; in Montaigne, 58; in Pippin, 113 Battistini, A., 56, 140n75 beliefs (doxa), and shared beliefs (endoxa): endoxa as topoi, 27–28; in Hobbes and Vico; in Peirce, 3–4, 7 Benjamin, Walter: and Kafka’s rhetoric, 81, 87–88; and Modernism, 81–88, 108, 110, 126–28; and post-Kantian, postNietzschean, 81; and rhetorical habits, 8, 81–84; and rhetorical performance, 86–87; and topics (convolutes), 82–83; and Vichian inquiry, 84–86, 128, 144nn30–32, 145nn33–37, 146n38 Benjamin, works of: “Astrology,” 85; “The Author as Producer,” 86; “Berlin Chronicle,” 127; “Central Park,” 83; “The Doctrine of the Similar,” 85; “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” 82, 83; “Hashish in Marseilles,” 127; “The Mimetic Faculty,” 85; PassagenWerk, 82–83; “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer,” 86; “Privileged Thinking,” 126, 128; “ ‘The Regression of Poetry’ of G. C. Jochmann,” 145n36; “The Rigorous Study of Art,” 84; “The Task of the Translator,” 84; “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 83 Bennett, A., 142n6 Bird, O., 27, 136n35 Blattner, William, 74, 143n20

154 Bobbio, N., 136n23 Bruns, Gerald, 151n22 Brunschwig, J., 136n28, 137n44 Buccellato, M., 148n22 Buchanan, Scott, 41–42, 120, 132n9, 133n12, 137n49, 140n80, 147n8, 150n16, 151n20 Burckhardt, Jacob, 111–12, 149nn2–4 Cassin, B., 26, 79, 101–2, 132n6, 132n8, 137n42, 144nn26–27, 148n24 Cicero, and inquiry, 16, 58, 75; and counterfactuals, 68; and genres, 75; and Hobbes, 22, 26, 34, 35, 37; and reflexivity, 79–80; and rhetorical-legal hermeneutics, 8; in Vico, 46–47, 60, 77, 135n11, 137n39, 137n47 Cicero, works of: Ad familiares, 75; De inventione, 75, 79; Topica, 26–27, 75 Collingwood, R. G., 43, 69–70, 83, 85; and Hintikka, 97; and Peirce, 113–14, 139n59, 139n69, 142n11 common sense (sensus communis), 7, 27, 31, 33; and commonplaces (loci communes, koinoi topoi), 17, 31, 33; in Hobbes, 26–27, 30, 31, 37; in Vico, 43, 121–22 contingency (chance), as mode, 2, 11, 42, 53–54, 57, 70, 107; Vico on chance in Hobbes, 59, 115–16; in Peirce, 103–4, 113–16 Crifò, G., 47, 139n64 Cristofolini, G., 57, 125, 140nn78–79 decorum (kairos, quod decet, appropriateness as canon), 22–23, 28, 32, 56, 74 Descartes, René: and Early Modernity, 11, 43, 56–57, 61–62, 104–5; and Modernity, 113, 118, 144n25 Detienne, M., and J. P. Vernant, 101, 148n23 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 20, 24, 99, 135n20, 147n14 Dockhorn, Klaus, 4, 99–100, 131n5, 137n37, 147n18 Dumouchel, P., 19, 135n19, 136n26, 137nn40–41 Elliott, John, 68, 89, 141n4 eloquence (as oratorical performance), 29; in Benjamin, 86–87; as index sui, 79; inhospitability to, 60–61; and inquiry habits, 74–75, 90, 127 Enlightenment, 10, 52; and Modernity, 65, 107–8

index enthymeme: as sententia, 26–27 ethos: and Benjamin, 87; and Hobbes, 15, 20; and Quintilian, 3 etymology: in Vico, 47, 54, 60, 111–12, 139n71 Fisch, Max, 43, 45, 139n60 Fortenbaugh, W., 135n13 Fumaroli, Marc, 56, 140n74, 148n26 Funkenstein, Amos: and state of nature, 22, 23, 61, 135n23, 136n25, 137n49, 138n56 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 99–100, 131n5, 151n22 Gargani, A., 134n9 Garver, Eugene, 77–78, 106, 144nn22–23 Glendinning, Simon, 118–19, 121, 123, 147n17, 150n9, 150n15 Gorgias, 151n20 Gossman, Lionel, 111–12, 149nn2–4 Grassi, Ernesto, 133n15 Gross, Daniel, 147n20; and A. Kemmann, 132n5 Habermas, Jurgen, 54, 150n12 Hacking, Ian, 135n19 Hawthorn, Geoffrey: 6, 40, 67–68, 80, 89–90, 120, 124–25, 133n12, 144nn28–29, 146n2 Hegel, G. W. F., and Modernism, 92–97. See also Robert Pippin Heidegger, Martin: and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 44, 52, 99–100, 102, 124; and Glendinning, 118–19; and Modernism, 108–9, 122; and temporality, 99–100, 102, 124, 131nn4–5, 132n5, 133n15, 142n15, 147n9, 147nn14–16, 149n5, 150n10, 150n14, 151n22 Heidegger, Martin, works of: “Concept of Time,” 100, 102; Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 4, 6, 98–100, 114, 122–24 hermeneutic, rhetoric as, 1; Pippin vs., 113; rhetorical-legal, 8–9, 25; in Vico, 42, 65–66, 68, 71, 115, 116 Herodotus, 50 Hintikka, Jaako: and Aristotle, 5–6, 71–72, 76, 125; and Classical modality, 5–6, 116; and Early Modern modality, 10–11, 116, 127; and Modernist modality, 119–20, 122–24; and possible worlds semantics, 6, 11, 59, 70, 97–98, 120, 125, 132n9,

index 133n13, 134n2, 142n14, 144n21, 147nn10–12, 150n18 Hirschman, Albert, 61 Hobbes, Thomas: —and argument; as deliberation, 18–21, 35, 37–38, 63, 105; deliberation as politics, 13–25; geometry as topic, 26, 30–31, 33; mutual recognition in, 39; natural logic as topics, 25–33; passions as topics, 29–30, 34–35, 63; and topics, 17, 64 —and Aristotle: and Aristotelian physical process, 14–18, 40–41, 59, 78; and Aristotelian rhetorised psychology, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 23, 29, 90, 124; and his biologism, 13–17, 21–23, 37–40, 59; vs. Ethics and Politics, 13, 14, 30 —and passions: 16–18, 21, 24, 29, 30, 44, 60, 62, 90, 123; on original terms, 36–37, 40, 59–60, 134n3, 138n50; and political inquiry, 13, 36–46, 76; as politics, 22–25, 29–30; and reception, 29–34, 41, 64; as secessionist thinker, 9–12, 65–66, 68, 71, 90, 115–16; on terms of Classical philosophy, 18, 19, 22, 34–39 Hobbes, Thomas, works of: Behemoth, 18, 32; De cive, 15, 35, 41n82; De corpore, 15, 18–20; De homine, 14, 15, 21, 35, 138n50; Dialogus physicus, 14, 33; Human Nature, 13–14, 16–21, 24–26, 29, 37–38, 63; Leviathan, 13, 15–24, 26, 29, 34–42, 62–63, 65, 76, 117 Homer (and heroism) in Vico, 44, 50, 55, 68, 71 Honneth, Axel, 119–20, 150n11 Husserl, Edmond, 99, 147n14 Imbert, C., 145n33 irony: in Vico, 10, 43, 50, 53, 90, 98, 111 Jaeger, Werner, 27, 136n36 James, Susan, 135n19 Jochmann, C. G., 145n36 Kafka, Franz: in Benjamin, 81, 87–88 Kahn, Victoria, 138n53 Kant, Emmanuel: conditions of possibility for knowledge, 71; and Hegel, 92–93; and Modernism, 108, 133n12, 147n8; Nova dilucidatio, 12. See also Robert Pippin

155 Kisiel, Theodore, 100, 147n13, 147n19, 151n22 Kneale, William and Martha, 72, 143n18, 150n19 Knuuttila, S., 142n14 Leff, Michael, 137n39 Lloyd, G. E. R., 13, 134n5 Lovejoy, A. O., 10–11, 70, 97 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 25, 59, 77–78, 87, 106, 126 Makkreel, R., and J. Scanlon, 99, 147n14 Malcolm, Noel, 116, 138n52, 150n7 Marshall, David, 139n63 McKeon, Richard, 71, 106, 143n16 Meyer, Michel, 38, 61, 102, 123, 132n6, 135n22, 136n31, 148n26 Meyers, P. A., 145n36 modality: in Aristotle, 5–7; in Early Modernity, 10–12, 77–78; as Hobbesian and Vichian, 10; modality in Classical inquiry, 5–7; modality as sorting inquiry, 71–73, 76–77, 106; modal logic, modal rhetoric, 1, 98, 105; and modernity, 66, 103; Peirce and modality in Modernism, 113–14. See also actuality, contingency, necessity, possibility; and Roman rhetoric, 7–8 Modernism: in Early Modernity, 9, 26, 65–66; in Hobbes and Vico, 9–10, 25, 45, 58, 66–67, 70, 89–90, 100, 115–129 passim; and Modernizing, 2, 12, 67, 90–91, 107;and the recuperation of rhetoric/politics, 1, 91, 117. See also Robert Pippin Mohanty, J. N., 142n15 Montaigne, Michel, 2, 58 Moss, Ann, 32, 137n43 necessity, as mode: in Burckhardt, 111; and Early Modernity, 11–12, 41; in Hobbes, as physical, 20; and Machiavelli, 77–78; and Peirce, 103–4, 113–14; and philosophical inquiry, 2, 4–7; and possibility as correlative, 72, 103; in Sorabji, 71–73; as Stoic, 57; and temporality, 70; and Vico, 52, 57. See also philosophy (Classical moral, political)

156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101, 108–9, 111, 112, 115, 126, 132n9, 144n30, 147n22, 149n1, 149n6, 151n21 Nominalism, 30, 33; and Hobbes as conventionalist, 72 Ober, Josiah, 4, 6, 12, 79, 132n7 Oesterreich, Peter, 101, 147n20 Papini, M., 48, 139n66 passions (pathos): and Benjamin, 87; in deliberation, 18–21, 38; in Hobbes and Aristotle, 16–24; as motus animi, 16, 47, 53, 78; passionate topics, 29–30, 34–35, 63; and politics, 60, 62–63; and Quintilian, 2, 16, 20; as social, not private, 19, 30 Peirce, C. S.: anti-necessity, 103–4, 113–14, 131n2; and biologism, 113–14; and Classical rhetoric, 7–8, 75, 79; and Descartes, 61, 104–5, 113; and Hegel, 105; and Hobbes, 4, 105; and Hobbes and Vico, 58; and inquiry, 1–4, 75, 79, 87; and Kant, 104–5; and politics, 105–6, 112; and Vico, 43, 61, 105, 131nn2–3, 149n6, 148n29, 149n30, 149n32 Peirce, C. S., works of: “Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” 10, 103–4, 113–14, 131n2; “Fixation of Belief,” 2, 4; “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 2–4; “The Law of Mind,” 3, 4, 105, 113; “Pragmatism and Abduction,” 131n3; “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties,” 104, 141n85; “Reply to the Necessitarians,” 3, 103–4, 113–14, 131n2; “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 3, 4, 104, 113 Pellegrini, P. 135n16 Perelman, Chaim, 73, 102, 148n26 pessimism, in inquiry: in Cicero, 58; in Classical rhetoric and Sophistic, 2, 5; in Hobbes, 19–20, 24, 31, 39–40; in Montaigne, 58; in Peirce, 105; in Vico, 46, 53 philosophy (Classical moral, political), 12, 43, 58, 64–66, 68–70, 121; antiClassicism: Hobbes vs. individualist politics, 39–40; personal genres, 56; vs personal intention, 46, 49; and personality, cult of, 54; vs. solitude, 52–53, 129; vs. solitary cognition, 43;vs. solipsism, 117, 128–29; Vico’s anti-individualism, 12, 18,

index 43, 56; Vico vs. privacy of illumination, 42, 118. See also Bernard Williams Pichot, Andre, 13, 134n4 Pippin, Robert: and Hegelian sociality and fluidity, 92, 95–96, 105, 107, 110–11, 114, 129; and Heidegger, 108–110, 112, 115; and his intrusion of possibility in PhG, 93–95, 109–110, 127, 93–99; and modernism, 2, 81; Modernism as philosophical problem, 92; and Modernist rhetoric, 96, 107–9, 119; and the Phänomenologie des Geistes, 93–99; as post-Hegelian, 92–96, 107, 110, 114–16, 118, 119, 12; as post-Kantian, 92–93, 107–8, 110, 112, 116, 119, 146n4, 146nn6–7, 147n9, 149n5, 151n22 Pippin, Robert, works of: Hegel’s Idealism, 92–96, 123; Idealism as Modernism, 110; Modernism as Philosophical Problem, 92, 107–110, 113, 115–16, 118 Plato: and definition of rhetoric, 4; and dialogic rhetoric, 76; in Williams, 89 Pocock, J. G. A., 37, 138n54 Pons, A., 138n58 Porter, James, 68, 81, 132n9, 139n67, 141n3, 144n30, 149n6 possibility, as mode: as endechomenon, 5–6; as dunamis, 5–6, 15, 41 —in history, Benjamin, 84, 126–27; Classical, 1–7; Early Modernity, 10–12; in Hobbes, possibility as motion, 14–18; in Peirce, 3, 104; in Pippin, conditions of possibility in Modernity, 91–96; in Vico, impersonal and possibility, 48–50 —and impossibility, 5–6, 18, 39–41, 70, 84, 109; as not contingency, 42; and unrealized possibilities, 6, 57–58, 66–67, 72, 76, 116, 125 —in inquiry, 57, 66–68, 125–129; and inquiry values, 56, 63, 106, 128; and possible worlds semantics, 6, 11, 97–98; and rhetoric, 4–6, 7, 12, 42, 89, 91, 113, 128 Quine, W. V. O., 150n19 Quintilian, 8; ethos and pathos, 3, 20; gestus, 81, 133n14, 135n11, 144n31; and passions as motus animi, 16, 75, 79 Ramnoux, C., 147n22 relativism, 69–70

index

157

rhetoric, history of: Hellenic rhetoric, 4–7, 117; Hellenic rhetoric as Sophistic, 4–5; Roman rhetoric, 7–8; and Early Modernity, 9–10; and Enlightenment, 10, 65; and Modernism, 90, 102; in German rhetoric, 98–101; in French rhetoric, 101–2; and the recuperation of the Classical, 1, 91, 117 —and academic disciplines, 9–10, 56–57, 78–79, 91, 102–6, 108; and biologism, in Aristotle, 5–6; in Hobbes, 13–17, 21–23, 31–39, 59; in Modernism, 98–102; and rhetorical techniques and values, 73–75, 125–28; in Vico, 44, 49 —and politics, 1, 4, 11, 17, 44, 91, 105, 117 rhetoric versus philosophy (and mode, possibility vs. necessity), 1–2, 5–7; in Early Modernity, 9–10, 12, 24–25, 42, 59; in Modernity, 66–67, 71–73, 79, 91, 103, 117, 120; vs. moral necessity, 11, 58–59, 64–66, 114, 117, 129; Ober on, 4, 6, 12, 79; rhetoric vs. determinism, 7, 41, 105; rhetoric as political, philosophy, not, 1, 4, 11, 17, 91, 117 Richards, I. A., 62, 141n87 Romilly, J. De, 101–2, 132n8, 148nn24–25, 148n 27 Rorty, Richard, 146n5, 149n5 Rostagni, A., 148n22

status, causae, 8, 47 Stoic, Epicurean (solitary moralism): in Vico, 43, 49, 52–53, 57, 59 Strauss, Leo, 14, 17, 78, 134n6 Struever, N., 131n1, 134n10, 135n20, 138n58, 139n62, 139n71, 140n76, 141n83 Stump, E., 26, 136n32 Syme, Ronald, 45–46, 60–61, 128, 139n61

Saiz Noeda, B., 13, 133n14, 136n33 Sarfati, G. E., 148n27 Sennett, Richard, 53, 138n55, 139n70, 150n12 sententia, as enthymeme, 26–27, 29 Sextus Empiricus, 22, 136n24 Sfez, G., 136n27 Shapin, S. and S. Schaffer, 134n8, 137n45 Shklar, Judith, 69 skepticism, 74, 110; in Hobbes, 22–23, 34; in Vico, 50 Skinner, Quentin, 136n30, 151n23 Smith, P. Christopher, 131n5 Sophistic: in Early Modernity, 10; in Hellenic thought, 4–5; in Hobbes, 10, 39, 41; in Modernity, 101, 126, 132n8, 148n22, 148n24 Sorabji, R., 13, 41, 71–73, 133n13, 134n5, 143n17, 143n19 Sorrell, Tom, 134n7, 135n14, 136n24, 141n88

Valla, Lorenzo, 12, 51, 144n25 Vattimo, G., 113 Verene, Donald P., 140n81 Vico, Giambattista: anti-Descartes, 43, 61, 105, 118; anti-Stoic/Epicurean, 43, 48, 52–53, 57; and barbarism of reflection, 117–18, 121, 123, 128–29; and biologism, 44, 47–49, 59; and common sense, 43, 121–22; and corsi /ricorsi, 47–48; and cose civili, not morali, 42–43, 45, 49, 97, 121–22, 129; and Early modernity/ Modernity, 9–12, 66–67, 77, 90; as endoxa, 30; and Gadamer, 100; and Hegel, 118, 122; and Hintikka, 97–98; and history/ myth, 42, 50–51, 55, 85–86; and Hobbes, 36, 42–44, 47–59, 116; and Homer (heroism), 42, 50–51, 55; and the impersonal, 36, 42–54, 56, 116, 121; and irony, 43, 50, 53, 55, 90, 98, 111; and poiesis, 43, 45, 48, 52; and Providence, 44, 52, 54,

Tellegen, J. W., 139n63 Tellegen-Couperus, O., 139n63 temporality, 70–71: and De interpretatione, 70; and Heidegger, 74, 99–100, 124, 142n15 Theophrastus, 28, 137n38, 137n42 Thouard, D., 25, 136n29 Thucydides, 50–51, 102 topics (topoi), 6, 14, 17, 26, 27; as commonplaces (koinoi topoi), 17, 31; geometry as topic, 26, 30, 31, 33; and Hobbes’ “natural logic,” 25–34; as lines of argument and maxims, 21–28, 31; passions as topics, 17, 29, 34–35, 63; and politics, 25, 27, 30; and possibility, 25, 27, 28, 33; in Modernity, 69, 110; in Vico, 45, 49 Tricaud, F., 141n84 Tuck, Richard, 33, 136n24, 137n46, 137n47 Untersteiner, M., 148n22

158 Vico, Giambattista (cont.) 149n3; and Roman law (rhetorical-legal hermeneutic), 8, 44–47, 49–50, 54–57, 60, 62, 65–66, 68, 71, 77, 90, 114, 116, 122; as secessionist thinker, 9–12, 42, 65–66, 68, 71, 90, 115–16; and three Ages, 49, 57, 64, 71, 119, 125; and topoi, 45, 49, 138n57, 139n72, 142n12, 149nn3–4; and verum/factum, 59, 97–98 Vico, Giambattista, works of: Autobiography, 55–56; Scienza nuova (1730), 57; Scienza nuova (1744), 42–53, 57, 118, 121–22, 125; Study Methods, 55–56 Warburg, Aby, 82–83, 145n33 Watson, Alan, 46, 62, 139n62, 139n65, 141n89

index Weber, Samuel, 145n33 Wellberry, D. E., and J. Bender, 146n4 White, H. V., 52 Williams, Bernard: on Descartes, 62; on mode, 77–78; on myth/history, 50–51; on philosophy, limits of, 67–69, 80, 121–22, 128; and rhetoric, 52, 80, and rhetoric in Modernity, 89–91, 103, 115, 133n12, 138n58, 139n68, 141nn1–2, 142nn8–11, 144n22, 144n24, 146n1, 146n3, 148n28, 149n31, 150nn12–13, 150n15, 150n19 Wisse, J., 133n15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 72, 119 Wolf, F. A., 50, 68 Zarka, Y., 34, 61, 135n14, 137n48