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One of the great paradoxes of the seventeenth-century intellectual tradition, and part of the strangeness of Hobbes's title, is that a book setting out so mathematically to destroy metaphorical language should present itself as an extended trope, a
Leviathan. At every stage of its [End Page 795] argument, from the description of the commonwealth as a body to the account of the Roman Church as a kingdom of faeries, Hobbes relies heavily upon figurative language to advance his arguments. The
contradiction between Hobbes's theory and his practice offers one of the text's primary and peculiar challenges. There can be no doubt about the existence of the contradiction. Within the tradition of the seventeenth-century's new philosophies, his
condemnation of metaphor is among the most uncompromising. For Hobbes, metaphors and other "senseless and ambiguous words," are mere ignes fatui proceeding from the errancy of impassioned imagination (3:37). Note the materialist's pun: words that do not
adequately cohere with things are "sense-less." To reason upon metaphors "is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt" (3:37). Verbal chaos leads to cultural chaos. (The association of metaphor with
natural marvels, ignes fatui, is telling and characteristic.) Among the four kinds of language abuse, Hobbes gives metaphors a primary place, describing them as words used "in other sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others" (3:20)
. Deceit and equivocation are main themes in his opposition. Counsellors to the sovereign are forbidden to employ tropes because they "are useful only to deceive, or to lead him we counsel towards other ends than his own" (3:246). In matters of
demonstration, counsel, and "all rigorous search of truth," Hobbes admits that "sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude.... But for metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded" (3:58-59). The same judgment appears
in his statement that "in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches ['the use of metaphors, tropes, and other rhetorical figures, instead of words proper'] are not to be admitted" (3:34). At the end of an early chapter on speech, Hobbes deems "
metaphors, and tropes of speech... less dangerous" forms of "ratiocination" than morally charged signifiers such as gravity and stupidity, but he does so only "because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not" (3:29). The dismissal of
metaphor from the rigorous search for truth (and certainly the Leviathan is that) is absolute and unqualified
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Anticke/Grotesque/Dreams
Prospero. You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and 1880
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve 1885
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled: 1890
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
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Alto Ingegno: Oxford’s Sin
By its nature the sublime, “produced by greatness of soul, imitation, or imagery,” cannot be contained in words, and Longinus often refers to its heights as reached by journey, or flight: “For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the
true sublime; it takes a proud flight, *and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard*.” Longinus focuses on figurative language as a vehicle for such flight, and argues that it is not just the writer who is
transported by sublimity, but the reader as well.
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La Forme In-Formante: A Reconsideration of the Grotesque
Sylvie Debevec Henning
Since it’s appearance as wall decorations in the Early Roman Empire, the grotesque has been seen as disturbing and unsettling. It disrupts the classical perception of ordered reality by failing to conform to accepted standards of mimesis and decorum.
Moreover, it contravenes rationalism and any systemic use of thought. Relying instead on what Mikhail Bakhtin has called an “inner logic,” it contests the very premises of conventional logic, e.g., the principles of non-contradiction, difference and
identity..This “logic of the grotesque,”it follows, employs contradiction and undecidability in order to reveal the insufficiency of traditional categories and dichotomous distinctions. Specifically it questions the opposition between the ludicrous
and the fearsome, on the one hand, and the familiar and the uncanny, on the other. In turn even these two pairs of false opposites are shown to be intertwined in a network of agonistic relationships. Thus the grotesque, rather than being a play with
terror, as John Ruskin describes it, or a “play with the absurd” as Wolfgang Kayser insists, might more appropriately be called a play with the very indeterminacy of existence. The grotesque reveals that nothing is as clear and distinct as we would
like. Nothing is either totally identical with itself nor totally different from everything else. Indeed, where we would find boundaries and barriers, there are only OVERLAYS and IMBRICATIONS.
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Sublime and Grotesque Shakespeare - Paradox
Upon the Effigies of my worthy Friend, the Author Master Willian Shakefspeare, and his Workes
Spectator, this Lifes Shaddow is; To see
The truer image and a livelier he
Turne Reader. But, observe his Comicke vaine,
Laugh, and proceed next to a Tragicke straine,
Then weepe; *So when thou find’st two contraries,
Two different passions from thy rapt soule rise*,
Say, (who alone effect such wonders could)
Rare Shake-speare to the life thou dost behold.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)