Naming the unnamable

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's general will

pp. 123-136

in: Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1978

Abstract

Legal culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced a preoccupation with the will of an author. A very particular sense of the divine came to be associated with an author of nature. The state too came to be described as an autonomous(auto-nomos)self-conscious author. The author, situated outside and prior to expression, produces the expression. If any juridical agent could trace violent conduct to the will the state as author, the conduct was transformed from an arbitrary subjective fiat into an objective authoritative act. As I suggested in Chapter Two, Thomas Aquinas had acknowledged the importance of such an author. His author, though, was considered invisible. His was the Author, a divine authorizing origin of all natural and human laws. Hobbes' authors, in contrast, were considered human agents or "artificial persons' in his terms. Human authors, sharing conventions about the signification of words, created a social contract. They delegated their authority to a supra-artificial person, the Leviathan, whose laws guarded the terms of the contract and guided social behaviour. The Leviathan and all offices of the state were "actors' who played with the intent of the contract.