THE PATH TOWARD NON-COGNITIVISM
Locke’s Desire and Shaftesbury’s Sentiment
Beginning with the early Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of Locke, Mandeville, and Montesquieu, and culminating in the hybridization of moral and economic theory in Francis Hutcheson, Smith, Ferguson, John Millar, and James Steuart, we can observe a strategic shift in social theory that promises, if not to remedy, then at least to contain the apparent irrationality of the Hobbesian will. As C. B. Macpherson argued some time ago, Hobbes himself had already hinted at such a shift inasmuch as his concept of “possessive individualism” appeared to find its natural complement in a free market system of some kind or other.1 Yet the major shift arguably occurs after Hobbes, as a new generation of intellectuals replaces his bleak view of human agency with a meliorist conception of individual and communal flourishing mediated above all by economic behavior. It thus cannot surprise that after Hobbes’s extreme voluntarism, the concept of the will should have rapidly faded from moral philosophy. Hobbes’s troubling bequest to his successors had been a model of human agents determined by blind and unself-conscious compulsion, itself the offshoot of a mechanistic theory of life as sheer tropism triggered by contingent objects of desire. Such a framework offered no “openings” of any kind, no possibility of self-transcendence, let alone of a gradual ascent toward knowledge and an inner ordering of moral agents by means of focused and deliberate habituation. There is very little in Hobbes to suggest that social processes (education in particular) could ever counteract the rigid inner determinacy of human agents.
The question that came to preoccupy post-Hobbesian thought was how to recover the potential for moral and spiritual flourishing in the wake of Hobbes’s uncompromising assault on teleological and Christian-Platonic models of human agency. Beginning in James Harrington’s writings and continuing all the way through Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, it is clear that the only way to answer Hobbes was by reclaiming the inner life of the person as an authentic and significant source of moral reflection and responsible action. Yet this prolonged effort at rehabilitating reason as something more than mere calculation—indeed, as substantially free—comes with two significant qualifications. First, reason is no longer juxtaposed to the will but, rather to the passions. Second, thinkers from James Harrington and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, to Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant replace the Aristotelian-Thomist dialectic that had posited the will in a necessary relation with the intellect with an empirical antagonism between selfish passions and rational interests. While this change of basic focus and guiding concepts was to produce significant complications of its own (some of them still bedeviling humanistic inquiry today), it did at least have the advantage of dramatically expanding the intellectual and social constituencies that could reasonably be expected to participate in such debates to begin with. Thus, in contrast to the civic republicanism of James Harrington and Algernon Sidney that directed its post-Hobbesian arguments to a narrow political elite, moral philosophers and essayists of early Georgian England—mindful that an overly interventionist take on scribere est agere might lead to much unpleasantness—no longer treat social, economic, and moral theory as a proxy for strident political claims.2 Rather, the focus of writing shifts from political controversy to more mediated accounts of social, religious, and cultural processes, with quasi-forensic attention being brought to bear on the affective sources of moral and social action. The intent here is descriptive rather than normative, and the new rhetoric—being directed at a broad, mobile, and amorphous readership rather than political elites—presents us with sustained psychological analyses rather than explicit controversy.
Against the backdrop of a widespread retreat from all-or-nothing political partisanship, the elemental conflicts of late seventeenth-century politics are supplanted by a new brand of philosophy that abandons the peremptory style of deductive argument from first principles in favor of inductive reasoning that proceeds from “phenomena, or effects, and from them investigate[s] the powers or causes that operate in nature.”3 As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, it is particularly in Scotland that moral philosophy emerges as a counterweight to the radical (evangelical) branch of Calvinism with its deep-seated suspicion of rational demonstrations of any kind. Having, in Theodor Adorno’s memorable phrase, “abandoned the royal road to origins,” the essay form in particular comes to exemplify the overall provisional, thesis-like character of early eighteenth-century secular culture. It disavows the previously accepted “distinction between a prima philosophia . . . and a mere philosophy of culture” and, in so doing, no longer assumes that “a totality is given” at all. The result is a highly self-conscious, mediated rhetoric in which philosophy, theology, psychology, and what was to become sociology constantly intersect, alternately furnishing background information or the central topic under discussion. In Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Swift, Defoe, Addison, Steele, and eventually Hume’s highly popular Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1754), among others, an unpredictable enjambment of multiple, previously distinct registers—urbane wit, satire, soliloquy, Stoic sententiousness, Socratic dialogue, Ciceronian exemplarity (all of them liable to be brought up short by grub-street realism)—attest to the greatly expanded rhetorical scope and versatility of writing and its role in shaping a broader culture of literacy.4 The hortatory and counterfactual idiom that had shaped the competing moral visions of Pascal, Calvin, Bunyan, La Rochefoucauld, St. Ignatius, and Baltasar Gracián, among others, increasingly yields to a proto-sociological analysis of phenomena that today are the province of behaviorism, market research, social psychology, and cultural anthropology.
This reorientation of political thought from constitutional to moral and social theory, and of its idiom from the controversial to the conversational, reflects the peculiar genius of early Whig policy which, concerning 1688, “preferred to argue that the government was not dissolved, that traditional institutions retained their authority, and that the actions taken and being taken were to be justified by reference to known law.”5 Observing how the financial revolution of the early eighteenth century had “rendered society more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself,” J. G. A. Pocock thus sees the auratic power of the state in manifest decline.6 In its custodial role (later echoed by Otto von Bismarck’s famous characterization of the state as a “night-watch”), the meaning of government shifts from the literal (Hobbesian) idea of sovereign dominion to neo-Stoicism’s intellectual concern with “managing the passions.” Inasmuch as the consolidation of the modern liberal nation-state involves the migration of power from an auratic to a bureaucratic model, the Leviathan is eclipsed by a complex and evolving array of economic practices first mapped by Scottish Enlightenment theorists keen to trace the metamorphosis (at once imperceptible and inexorable) of raw passion into self-disciplined interest. Yet with rationality having been redefined as an exercise in sublimation, the capacity of societies to conceive and articulate normative ends (and an overarching framework for practical choices that invariably have to be made) has undergone further erosion. For even as an irrational will is gradually transmuted into the quasi-rationality of self-interest, itself disciplined by the superagency of the modern market, the resulting “element of reflection and calculation” is strictly concerned with means.7 What is more, the contraction of rationality to a “reckoning” of efficient means already posited by Hobbes gradually atrophies the intellectual scope of individuals and societies to the point that questions concerning ends are themselves marginalized as the eccentric and more or less irrational province of religious culture.
In its broad outlines, this scenario has been the subject of a variety of political, sociological, psychoanalytic, and anthropological accounts tracing the rise of modern disciplinary society (Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault), the migration of the individual from embeddedness in feudal structures to its administration by modern institutions (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen), and the emergence of an introjected subjectivity (Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias) made possible by the “transformation of hetero-constrictions into self-constrictions that characterize the move from the late-classical period to the modern one.”8 As one distinct phenomenon of this broader transformation, moral philosophy arises as a concerted attempt to translate the speculative interests and normative concepts of philosophical theology into a world whose political stability and economic flourishing (after 1700) were felt to require mimetic techniques of observation and description. Over time, the ongoing quest of that fledgling creation called Britain for political legitimation and stability becomes more closely aligned with the diverse projects of moral and aesthetic self-description. The key term here is “harmony”—the word that George Frideric Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s “St. Cecilia’s Ode” (1739) was to explore with such rich melismatic and harmonic effect.9 This broader trend also explains why much eighteenth-century moral philosophy seems to accept from the outset that reconciling or harmonizing the tension between reason and the passions could only succeed as a subtle but persistent re-description of prevailing empirical practices. Discarding the normative and emphatically counterfactual rhetoric of institutional religion, moral philosophy instead attempts to translate a noumenal and ineffable will into empirically observable passions. The latter, by dint of their commutation into interests and sentiments, furnish evidence for an inner, “moral sense” credited with reliably anchoring the self in moral and social space. Inasmuch as the eighteenth century conceives of morality no longer as knowledge but as feeling, the voluntarist antagonism of will and intellect, while not wholly resolved, has been deflected into the empirical challenge of how to manage the passions. To thus recast the problem as the ancient, Stoic challenge of the self’s quest for inner balance, harmony, and the methodical expurgation of false judgments was to reaffirm the inner life (rather than political or religious institutions and frameworks) as the principal focus of moral theory and as the dominant (perhaps the only) source of moral self-legitimation. As we shall see, in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and especially in Adam Smith, this meliorist and oblique disciplinary approach to the emotions entails some acute problems of its own; and it was in response to these that the entire project of moral philosophy would eventually be challenged in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s critique of “inner” states and in Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe’s view of modern moral philosophy as oblivious of its conceptual inheritance and, hence, as a terminally incoherent enterprise. In particular, Anscombe insists, the “concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought,’ ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are the survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives, and are only harmful without it.”10
While the shift in question appears to push the metaphysical concept of the will to the margins of eighteenth-century moral theory, it would be a mistake to conclude that it had ceased to be an issue altogether. Concepts as foundational to human inquiry as those of will or person do not just vanish; rather, their function is either metonymically displaced onto other terms, or they are themselves being absorbed into and redefined by a different intellectual tradition. To some extent, both developments occur in the case of the will after Hobbes. On the one hand, its voluntarist construction before 1700 is now being absorbed into an empiricist and notably hedonistic theory of human action. Hobbes’s notion of the will as the “last appetite” had arguably prepared for this shift to a strictly empirical and occasional model of human agency. Yet it is Locke who completes this downward transposition of the will from an active and dynamic metaphysical source to the epistemological zero-degree of literally mindless passions and, in so doing, prepares the ground for Mandeville’s scandalous portrait of hedonistic human agents consumed by the eternal present of desire. In his Essay, Locke thus takes up the question of “power” that Hobbes had treated so restrictively—viz., as nothing more than a matter of efficient causation and devoid of any human, spiritual, and reflective dimension. Echoing Hobbes’s account of the will as the “last appetite,” Locke thus asks “whether a Man can will, what he wills”—a question repeated verbatim in Schopenhauer’s 1839 Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will.11 For Locke, unequivocally, the answer here has to be “no.” Yet there’s the rub, for what prompts this view is an already implied understanding of the will as nothing more than efficient causation, the mental equivalent of Newtonian force: “We must remember, that Volition, or Willing, is an act of the Mind directing its thought to the production of any Action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it.”12
Two contradictory movements shape Locke’s reasoning here. On the one hand, he insists on the complete absence of any inner, reflective, indeed human dimension from the will, which he construes as nothing but quasi-mechanical efficacy. Yet that does not address the obvious fact that the will constitutes a distinct human attribute, one whose “antecedent probability” (John Henry Newman) has been ratified by some two millennia of philosophical arguments concerned with elucidating its complex phenomenology. For the will does not simply act but as an active power is itself a focus for human consciousness—viz., as something felt, observed, questioned, from within. Its reality is inseparable from its correlative phenomenology. The question thus arises whether the physico-mechanical account of the will as sheer efficient force can ever be anything more than a makeshift metaphor aimed at capturing some ineffable psychological process. To pose that question is to close in on the second, arguably opposed tendency observable in Locke’s account of the will. And it is this tendency that ultimately vitiates his implicit understanding of mental and physical processes as wholly convertible and his attempt to furnish a coherent and exhaustive epistemology of the inner life strictly in terms of mechanical causation. Even as this larger objective is pursued with increasing vigor in the later editions of the Essay, Locke remains unable to expunge the psychological, affective quality from his account of the will, for the obvious reason that if he were to do so the very notion of a will would effectively disappear. It would no longer have phenomenological status, would not appear for the self and, thus, would once again become an object of metaphysical conjecture, a noumenon of precisely the kind to which Locke’s empiricism is so firmly opposed. The dilemma bears tracing a bit further, if for no other reason than that subsequent eighteenth-century moral philosophy can be divided into those (voluntarist, mechanist, and associationist) thinkers who fail to recognize it as a dilemma and others (Platonists, virtue ethicists, Trinitarian personalists) who do. Struggling to minimize the psychological and affective dimension of the will (“it being a very simple Act”), even while retaining some affective notice as prima facie evidence of the will’s existence and operation, Locke thus describes “the Will, or Preference” (so his revealing appositive) as “but the being better pleased.” With charming circularity, Locke now observes that
to the Question, what is it [that] determines the Will? The true and proper Answer is, The Mind . . . If this Answer satisfies not, ’tis plain the meaning of the Question, what determines the Will? Is this, What moves the mind, in every particular instance, to determine its general power of directing, to this or that particular Motion or Rest? And to this I answer, The motive, for continuing in the same State or Action, is only the present satisfaction in it.13
As he proceeds to desynonymize the will from desire, Locke appears caught between a strictly occasional conception of the will that Ockham and Hobbes had bequeathed him, and his manifest need to retain some phenomenological evidence of the will in actu. The problem with the latter requirement is that it implies a distinction between the mere fact of a person willing this or that and some psychological quality whereby the same agent knows or at least feels herself or himself to be willing. Were Locke to abandon this latter requirement altogether, the will would quickly atrophy to a mere inference drawn from the fact that a person appears to be acting. Moreover, the conundrum would not end there, for in the absence of the will as a primary inner reality, we would have no reason to construe certain processes manifestly unfolding before us as bona fide “actions” at all. In the end, mental life will then have been no longer explained as a self-sustaining reality; rather, it will have been dissolved into a linear, calculable, and seemingly inevitable sequence of force transfers, a process altogether devoid of consciousness, significance, and responsibility.
Unsurprisingly, this fundamental dilemma registers in a number of uneasy verbal qualifiers and rhetorical maneuvers. Consider the following two instances. In the first, Locke stipulates the non-discursive, indeed wholly inarticulate nature of the will: “Volition is conversant about nothing, but our own Actions; terminates there, and reaches no farther; and that Volition is nothing, but that particular determination of the mind, whereby, barely by a thought, the mind endeavours to give rise, continuation, or stop to any Action.”14 The parenthetical qualifier (“barely by a thought”) hints at Locke’s deeper perplexity as to whether to treat the will strictly as a mechanical force or as a state of mind which, however minimal its content, may yet become itself the focus of conscious “attention.” As remains to be seen, Hutcheson’s critique of Mandeville and, indirectly, of Locke homes in on precisely this key question: whether the will circumscribes and determines the totality of our inner life or, alternatively, whether the person qua self-conscious agent knows herself or himself to be willing something. Ultimately, Locke realizes that some rudimentary mental function needs to be retained independent of whatever happens to be the contingent, present concern of the will. Reluctantly pressing his quest for some inner, phenomenological evidence of the will, he thus wonders just “what is it that determines the Will in regard to our Actions?” His telling and consequential answer is that this causal determinant has to be found in “some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a Man is at present under.” Yet almost immediately Locke identifies the source of such uneasiness as desire itself: “Desire being nothing but an uneasiness in the want of an absent good, . . . desire and uneasiness is [sic] equal.”15 If the will is the determining, efficient cause of action, uneasiness stands in the same relation to the will, and desire completes this metonymic chain by being the primordial trigger of such unease. While one may fear that Locke is caught in an infinite regress of explanatory concepts, their relation is not altogether equivalent. For in each case, there appears to be a diminished level of awareness accompanying the inner state. To will something necessarily entails the conscious deliberation and ultimate judgment as regards the means requisite for and appropriate to securing the object or end in question. By comparison, this representational and cognitive dimension has all but vanished where a person’s consciousness of her or his “uneasiness” is at stake. Here the consciousness of my feeling ill at ease and that very state appear only minimally distinct, and in the case of desire the difference has vanished altogether, such that consciousness-of-desire is ultimately desire itself. The alternative, which Locke does not entertain, would be a conscious, likely fetish-based staging and nurturing of desire, in which case (following Slavoj Žižek) we should speak of “fantasy” rather than desire. Extending Descartes’s selective appropriation and re-orientation of ancient Stoicism, Locke here reveals the full extent to which the Platonic view of desire (viz., as an imperfect reaching for the good and the beautiful) had eroded. As Charles Taylor observes, already in Descartes “the metaphysical aura of desire had been discredited as ‘total illusion,’” leaving the human agent “utterly unmoved by the aura of desire. In a mechanistic universe, and in a field of functionally understood passions, there is no more ontological room for such an aura. There is nothing it could correspond to. It is just a disturbing, supercharged feeling, which somehow grips us until we can come to our senses.”16
Locke’s argumentation, subsequently known as “psychological hedonism,” rests on the premise that all internal, mental action or volition responds to generic cues of either pleasure or pain, which in turn may arise from the senses or be associated with some kind of mental representation. For all his protests against Hobbes, Locke “had in fact taken over Hobbes’s belief that human nature is under the governance of two masters, pleasure and pain,” and thus had embraced the in essence mechanistic view of mind as inherently reactive and incapable of inner causation. Desire thus becomes “a piece of intermediary mechanism, operated on by present pleasures and pains and by the thought of future pleasure and pain, and itself having the power to produce volition or will.”17 Significantly, such a hedonistic model of mind entails the de facto loss of all temporal perspective. To be sure, mind still is cathected onto the future, albeit only as the projected locus of a pleasure it wishes to possess here and now. Conversely, the past is but lapsed time, a distant repository of pleasures and pains devoid of any continued significance. It is this axiomatic confinement of mind qua will or, ultimately, desire to an eternal present that vexed Shaftesbury about his former tutor. As he remarks in a letter to Philip Dormer Stanhope (7 November 1709), if “he [Locke] had known but ever so little of antiquity, or been tolerably learned in the state of philosophy with the ancients, he had not heaped such loads of words upon us.”18 Stephen Darwall’s recent claim that Locke, in the second edition of his Essay, appears to embrace a model of the will as self-aware and autonomous (“Will is the faculty of self-conscious self-command”) seemingly in line with Cudworth’s neo-Platonist model of mind as self-possessed, perplexes.19 At the very least, we must bear in mind that willing and self-awareness remain, for Locke, at all times circumscribed by the temporal punctum of some present desire and “uneasiness” and, thus, cannot give rise to a self-revising and reflective person capable of grasping her or his discrete acts of willing within a broader narrative framework. As long as the question is couched in terms of present exigencies and desires, the self’s awareness of having or, rather, being in the grip of such ephemeral states should not be confused with moral self-consciousness.
Manifesting “a very curious blend of hedonism and rationalism,” Locke’s Essay can make its central case only by performing a metonymic slide toward a purely affective, non-representational, and inarticulate source of willing, thereby denuding human personhood and flourishing of all formal inner time consciousness and narrative development.20 A reductionist account that traces back consciousness and will (Aquinas’s “intellectual appetite”) to the psychosomatic tropism of “uneasiness” and, ultimately, to desire as the primal energy source of all mental activity implies a total loss of any historical and hermeneutic perspective. Inasmuch as Lockean consciousness is being reborn every minute or second, it is only ever being informed but can never recognize itself as having been formed. To be sure, Locke grants that sooner or later consciousness will have representations, yet on his account it is hard to see how it should ever know itself to be having them. Denuded of any abiding content, perspective, or counterfactual scenario to the representations it actually happens to encounter in the here and now—that is, those that sensation and desire have contingently referred to it—the inner life has become all but a fiction. Mind in Locke’s Essay functions rather like today’s microprocessor, a value-neutral relay station for binary notices variously and unaccountably drifting in and out of its dispassionate circuitry. Hume’s mind-as-theater metaphor would draw this conclusion openly by conjuring up persons or actors devoid of any perspective on their own reality and development. Yet already in Locke’s Essay, the skeptic’s notion of un-souled human beings, lacking any inner gyroscope, and hence strictly reactive to contingent sensations and desires, looms large. The Lockean self is an epistemological vagrant of sorts, unable to achieve any temporal perspective on her or his flourishing, let alone grasp and articulate normative commitments of any kind. The discretion of such consciousness extends no further than the 0-1 binarism that will have the “self” either embrace or reject bits of information as desirable or undesirable, pleasant or painful. Recoiling from the “Hobbes-Locke thesis of natural indifference,” Shaftesbury regards Locke’s self as alarmingly bereft of all ideational, aspirational, and temporal dimensions.21 It may have abstract representations of “the Good” but appears intrinsically agnostic and indifferent to them unless desire suggests that they are within immediate reach, in which case, prompted by a quasi-instinctual “uneasiness,” the self may conceivably grope its way toward an object vaguely associated with the good. What is more, the Essay affirms as much without even worrying about the costs entailed by this apparent reduction of the inner life to what is immediately and obviously present:
It may be said, that the absent good may by contemplation be brought home to the mind, and made present. The Idea of it indeed may be in the mind, and view’d as present there: but nothing will be in the mind as a present good, able to counter-balance the removal of any uneasiness, which we are under, till it raises our desire, and the uneasiness of that has the prevalency in determining the will. Till then the Idea in the mind of whatever good, is there only like other Ideas, the object of bare unactive speculation; but operates not on the will, nor sets us to work.22
One may naturally wonder why Locke should assume that the mind will only ever espouse those objects and goods ready-to-hand, while maintaining affective neutrality vis-à-vis anything on the order of an idea or good such as might arise from “unactive speculation.” The likely answer is that in conceiving of the mental architecture strictly in terms of efficient causation, Locke has implicitly deprived consciousness of the capacity to choose or cultivate a good for intrinsic reasons. His naturalist contention that “Good and Evil . . . are nothing but Pleasure or Pain, or that which occasions, or procures Pleasure or Pain to us,” shows why a strictly epistemological model of mind cannot persuasively account for ethical awareness or commitments.23 It lacks a sense of obligation, simply because such a “complex” idea should never arise from bona fide “reflection” but only through a (mechanical) combination of simple ideas that Locke views as inherently “mindless” and inaccessible to reflection. Lockean consciousness is not a source of meanings but a product of inherently meaningless (material) causes; hence the sole factor credited with determining the will is the conspicuous and adventitious presence, desirability, and presumed attainability of a distinct object. Questions of content and value are entirely incidental or, at the very least, strictly subordinate by comparison. As the Essay puts it,
that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionately to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it . . . [for] ’tis uneasiness alone operates on the will, and determines it in its choice . . . For the will being the power of directing our operative faculties to some action, for some end, cannot at any time be moved towards what is judg’d at that time unattainable: That would be to suppose an intelligent being designedly to act for an end, only to lose its labour; for so it is to act, for what is judg’d not attainable.24
As these last lines make clear, Locke’s Essay signals a significant advance in the transfer of a conception of method first pioneered by Galileo and Francis Bacon from objective to subjective phenomena. Locke’s resistance to the possibility that moral meanings, such as a sense of obligation to another human being, might arise from an internal (and causally indeterminate) process of deliberation, judgment, and action rests on the premise that one method—conclusive and efficiently mono-causal in nature—must be capable of explaining all phenomena, both those objective ones “out there” and the subjective processes of the mind.
More than anything else, it is this commitment to method that drives modernity’s strictly epistemological view of knowledge and explanation. Wondering whether moral obligation is something that we arrive at by a process of sustained introspection and interpretive reasoning, Locke ultimately rejects that possibility in Book IV of his Essay. Instead, he insists on locating the moral life “amongst the Sciences capable of Demonstration: wherein I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematicks, the measures of right and wrong might be made out, to any one that will apply himself with the same Indifferency and Attention to the one, as he does to the other of these Sciences.”25 This is an apt illustration of how (as Edmund Husserl was to argue in The Crisis of the European Sciences) the triumph of scientific method had created a world of “idealities” whose relation to the world (Lebenswelt) of phenomenological experience had become increasingly tenuous. Finding such idealities methodologically intractable, Locke’s Essay thus declares them altogether irrelevant to scientific knowledge and, ultimately, beyond the scope of rational inquiry. Such a view is indeed a logical entailment of a nominalism to which Locke was unquestioningly committed, so much so that he appears quite oblivious to the fact that nominalism, too, amounted to a complex intellectual tradition in its own right. As his exchanges with some of his contemporary realists (John Norris, Edward Stillingfleet) make apparent, the mere supposition that ideas and (moral) meanings of any kind could ever be conceived other than as abstractions from particular and distinct empirical sensations strikes Locke as so outlandish that he seems literally at a loss for words. Where Stillingfleet posits “that Peter, James, and John . . . [share] a common nature, with a particular subsistence proper to each of them,” Locke’s response amounts to little more than a blank stare in epistolary prose: “I do not understand what subsistence is, if it signify anything different from existence.”26 Two conclusions can be drawn here. First and foremost, we see in Locke’s Essay the de facto abandonment of the ancient notion of logos capable of integrating scientific knowledge and human experience. As Husserl puts it, “if man loses this faith, it means nothing less than the loss of faith ‘in himself,’ in his own true being.”27 The second point follows from the “de facto” phrase; viz., Locke’s embrace of voluntarism and nominalism is so complete and, to him, self-evident that he can no longer engage competing traditions of inquiry, most eminently that of realism. A major liability, often unnoticed, of such peremptory commitment to voluntarism and nominalism is that in premising all knowledge on the temporal and logical punctum of individual volition and sensation the modern self is rendered strangely inarticulate. It cannot grasp points of view that proceed from a principle other than some singular and isolated external prompt. What is more, a philosopher committed to the axioms of nominalism sensu strictu will also be ill-equipped when it comes to grasping the distinction between merely opposed and positively incommensurable modes of reasoning. For a philosophy that has a strictly occasional understanding of how meanings are formed is necessarily bereft of any meta-conceptual perspective—which is to say, unprepared to perceive how its own intellectual project arises within the long durée of a specific tradition. Locke’s well-known scorn for the “schoolmen” thus blinded him to empiricism’s considerable debt to at least some of them (most prominently Ockham).
Beginning with Shaftesbury and culminating in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the post-Hobbesian rehabilitation of the inner life does indeed appear to come at the expense of a pervasive inarticulacy. In particularly fulsome ways that predicament emerges in the mimetic behavior of Smith’s “impartial spectator” and the concurrent displacement of virtue from the realm of action to the social ideal of “praiseworthiness”—a descendant of Aristotle’s megalopsychia, which had so bedeviled the history of virtue ethics for the previous 1,800 years.28 To begin with, it helps to recall how the civic republicanism of James Harrington had begun, ever so cautiously, to challenge Hobbes’s quasi-existentialist and pessimistic view of human psychology. Against Hobbes, Harrington maintains that “the right and wrong of action are determined by the inner condition of the agent, not by law and not by consequences.” Hence, “what Hobbes takes as man’s natural condition is for Harrington what people become when they are ‘corrupt.’” Whereas for Hobbes “desires and impulses do not respond to perceived good,” Harrington and, even more emphatically Shaftesbury, insist that feelings “are the sources of good in the world.”29 A far more consequential rejection of Hobbesian voluntarism is found in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, written in the early 1690s, first published in 1699, and the centerpiece of his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)—a work of great influence on the eighteenth century during which it underwent no less than eleven successive editions. Hinting at Hobbes’s de facto (if not admitted) atheism, Shaftesbury begins his Inquiry by arguing for the embeddedness of every individual within “a SYSTEM of all Things, and a Universal Nature.” By definition, every human being is both ordered toward and (at least potentially) capable of participating in that system’s “harmony.”30 To suggest otherwise is to hypostatize a human being effectively bereft of all “sense”—a word whose pivotal, albeit ambiguous career in eighteenth-century moral philosophy seems to commence with Shaftesbury.
A student of Locke and, just as importantly, an avid reader of the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury first published an anonymous edition of Benjamin Whichcote’s Sermons. As Shaftesbury insists, to conceive of God as the source of goodness, justice, and order necessarily means according these notions eternal status. They cannot be merely contingent on a (potentially fluctuating) divine will but depend on what he calls a “natural moral Sense”—this being the first time that the concept makes its appearance in English philosophy:
for wher-ever any-thing, in its nature odious and abominable, is by Religion advanc’d, as the suppos’d Will or Pleasure of a supreme Deity; if in the eye of the Believer it appears not indeed in any respect less ill or odious on this account; then must the Deity of necessity bear the blame, and be consider’d as a Being naturally ill and odious, however courted, and solicited, thro’ Mistrust and Fear. But this is what Religion, in the main, forbids us to imagine . . . For whoever thinks there is a GOD, and pretends formally to believe that he is just and good, must suppose that there is independently such a thing as Justice and Injustice, Truth and Falshood, Right and Wrong; according to which he pronounces that God is just, righteous, and true. If the mere Will, Decree, or Law of God be said absolutely to constitute Right and Wrong, then are these latter words of no significancy at all. (SC, 2:27, 29)
To suppose that the divine will constitutes the sole source of meanings is to subscribe to a purely occasional and conceptualist idea of reason and to hold that meanings are instituted only in a performative sense, that is, established by ascription rather than by recognition. Such a universe Shaftesbury regards as intrinsically devoid of value and quite impossible to conceive as an object of worship. In uncharacteristically decisive language, he thus affirms the existence of a basic, innate moral sense (a phrase he hardly ever uses but which, plausibly, Hutcheson and Hume took to be one of Shaftesbury’s main intellectual bequests): “Sense of Right and Wrong therefore being as natural to us as natural Affection itself, and being a first Principle in our Constitution and Make; there is no speculative Opinion, Persuasion or Belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it. That which is of original and pure Nature, nothing beside contrary Habit and Custom (a second Nature) is able to displace” (SC, 2:25). Shaftesbury’s claim here may seem dogmatic or, at the very least, indemonstrable and of evidently metaphysical provenance. Yet to contest or reject it for that reason as “circular” is to fall back on a Lockean (empiricist) framework whose curtailment of knowledge to methodologically deducible, value-neutral, and plainly demonstrable “data” Shaftesbury here means to oppose.31 In fact, the impulse to reject the self-authorizing claim that is being made here for “natural Affection” likely arises from the equally problematic—because equally indemonstrable and in origin nominalist—assumption that feeling can by definition only ever amount to something occasional, empirical, and sui generis. To the question as to whether “these mental Children, the Notions and Principles, of Fair, Just, and Honest, with the rest of these Ideas, are innate?” Shaftesbury’s alter-ego in The Moralists, Theocles, responds by pointing out that what matters is not at what point in time these basic “Notions and Principles” are formed. Rather, the crucial
question is, whether the Principles spoken of are from Art, or Nature? If from Nature purely; ’tis no matter for the Time: nor wou’d I contend with you, tho you shou’d deny Life it-self to be innate, as imagining it follow’d rather than preceded the moment of Birth. But this I am certain of; that Life, and the Sensations which accompany Life, come when they will, are from mere Nature, and nothing else. Therefore if you dislike the word Innate, let us change it, if you will, for Instinct; and call Instinct, that which Nature teaches, exclusive of Art, Culture, or Discipline. (SC, 2:229–230)
As it happens, Shaftesbury’s contrary affirmation, viz., that the affection in question is “a first Principle in our Constitution and Make,” merely transposes into the eighteenth century’s emergent “word-cloud” of sense, sensation, sentiment, affection, etc. a key concept of humanistic inquiry that had endured from Plato and Aristotle all the way through Aquinas.
What Locke had disallowed when rejecting “innate ideas” constitutes for Shaftesbury an indispensable, shared ground for understanding the rational and ethical nature of human agency most fully mapped by Aquinas. Inasmuch as this “natural Affection” must be understood as something all human beings have in common, their sociality and rationality are indeed convertible—at least up to a point. Aquinas had analyzed this basic moral sense under the name synderesis and, importantly, he classifies it as a “natural habit, not a power” (synderesis non est potentia, sed habitus). In defining synderesis as a natural habit all but synonymous with natural law, Aquinas emphasizes that this moral sense is but a point of departure and, as such, in need of constant cultivation. It must not be misconstrued as some ready-made, apodictic inner certitude. Notably, in his response to the third objection (which, by way of Augustine, affirms that within “the natural power of judgment there are certain ‘rules and seeds of virtue, both true and unchangeable’”) Aquinas emphasizes the complementarity of the practical reason or “judgment” (prudentia) and this inner sense. Both here and in his subsequent discussion of conscience (ST, I Q 79 A 13), Aquinas thus takes care not to mystify synderesis and conscience as a metaphysical “power” of sorts but, instead, to stress its evolving, act-like nature. The very basic moral orientation that is universally infused into every human being (“do good,” “avoid sin,” etc.) merely constitutes the “seed” (Augustine’s term) or dynamic source for the progressive cultivation of rational personhood in dispositions, habits, and the virtues. As such, synderesis offers no determinate judgments or rational appraisals of the good. Rather it constitutes a basic phenomenology of what it means for us to be ethical agents—that is, both capable of making moral choices and obligated to do so. Thus it manifests itself affectively and with minimal articulacy; in Aquinas’s words, “synderesis is said to incite to good, and to murmur at evil [instigare ad bonum, et murmurare de malo].” It furnishes human life with a basic orientation and with the energy potential required if the narrative of moral self-fashioning is ever to get underway. As he puts it, “those unchangeable notions are the first practical principles, concerning which no one errs [circa quae non contingit errare]; and they are attributed to reason as to a power, and to synderesis as to a habit. Wherefore we judge naturally both by our reason and by synderesis.”32 Even for the skeptic Hume, it is a given that “the mind by an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the evil, tho’ they be conceiv’d merely in idea” (HT, 280).
Bearing this model of synderesis in mind we can pinpoint a crucial shift in the way that theoretical reflection about agency unfolds after Shaftesbury. Prior to Kant, positing a basic, indispensable moral orientation tends to be the norm—with Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville still something of an exception. What prompts this affirmation of an innate orientation toward the good, however diversely it may be articulated in the empirical world, is that without it theory would quickly lose all model-building force. Its authority would be reduced to a merely reactive (and likely pessimistic) appraisal of what is empirically and, it would seem, irreversibly at hand. No longer would theoretical discourse be able to set forth a coherent and rational framework for human flourishing. Unsurprisingly, then, the shift from a model of vision toward one of critique increasingly drives eighteenth-century theoretical inquiry to challenge synderesis and the will as unwarranted metaphysical assumptions and, in the absence of acceptable proof, to reject them outright. It is instructive to ponder this demand for discrete material evidence of any concept, so representative of Enlightenment intellectual culture (and so seemingly rational), with some care and to raise some basic questions. First, can modern critique, which refuses to affirm anything prior to its own operation and outside its own conceptual jurisdiction, ever legitimately reject the first principles of a wholly different intellectual project? One naturally thinks here of an ancient, therapeutic model of philosophy rather less concerned with the empirical verification of facts and the formal-syllogistic demonstration of what may be predicated about them. Instead, the focus of premodern thought (Platonic, Stoic, or Augustinian) is unfailingly on knowledge as an integral (though hardly the only) feature of human life, understood as a self-revising narrative in which practical and theoretical reason are complementary and of equal dignity. Second, is an Enlightenment model of critique not also obligated to engage the entire conception whose premises it questions? For how can modern critique justify its selective questioning of the premises and principles of all other theoretical and moral systems, unless it is also prepared to advance an equally comprehensive, alternative account of human flourishing? Finally, can there even be such a thing as a wholly neutral intellectual stance—a view from nowhere uninformed by some distinct tradition of rational inquiry? Beginning with Mandeville’s critique of Shaftesbury and Gilbert Burnet’s and John Clarke’s rationalist objections to the postulate of a moral sense in Francis Hutcheson’s 1725 Inquiry, what changes is not simply the status and reality of the will and of an innate moral sense but the very nature of theoretical inquiry itself. Echoing Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre insists that there can be no such thing as a critical and rational argument unfolding independent of a specific intellectual tradition: “it is indeed only relative to some competing theory or set of competing theories that any particular theory can be held to be justified or unjustified. There is no such thing as justification as such, just as there is no such thing as justification independent of the context of any tradition.” Moreover, MacIntyre notes, “the first principles of such a theory are not justified or unjustified independently of the theory as a whole.”33
Few eighteenth-century thinkers rival the degree to which Shaftesbury embraces this notion of philosophical argument as embedded within deep intellectual genealogies and unfolding as a sustained and highly self-conscious reflection on the various traditions feeding into it. His indebtedness to neo-Platonic and neo-Stoic thought, fused with a strong investment in classical Roman rhetoric and the Christian emblematic tradition (vividly engaged in the engravings prefacing the individual parts of Characteristicks), is as apparent as his appropriation of these iconic traditions is original.34 Nonetheless, his philosophical arguments also exhibit a strikingly modern quality, such that the reality of the innate moral sense pivots on the supplement of the aesthetic, itself the indispensable medium for clarifying what synderesis contains in nuce. In this regard, it is especially noteworthy about Shaftesbury’s appeal to the synderesis-like “natural Affections” that their authority is no longer complemented by an account of conscience, or by a fully developed model of prudence. Rather than arguing for the cultivation of habits (e.g., conscience) and virtues, particularly the crucial intellectual virtue of good sense or “judgment” (prudentia), Shaftesbury’s distinctly modern outlook seeks to mediate the basic “natural affections” by means of an aesthetic regimen. In other words, the containment and ordering of the will is not entrusted to a process of introspection and self-examination but, instead, is said to hinge on the cultivation of “taste.” Hence, even as he follows the Cambridge Platonists in retaining a conception of logos that had endured from Plato and Plotinus through Anselm and Aquinas, Shaftesbury “rejects all those mystical conclusions which Henry More, especially, had drawn from this doctrine.”35
Yet precisely here Shaftesbury’s project also reveals some of its nascent tensions. To reject the mystical implications that tend to be an entailment of a Plotinian view of the inner life such as Henry More in particular had argued it is all very well. Yet if Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks mark “the moment when the internalization of moral theory is established and . . . sentiment becomes important as a moral category,” the inner coherence of sentiment, its continuity as a “disposition” (as opposed to some fleeting, contentless “state” of passion) has yet to be phenomenologically secured.36 Volition simply cannot be thought as pure physics, as sheer “passion” (thūmos) and quasi-physical “motion” (kinēsis). For to so remove it from the domain of reasoned choice and judgment (Aristotle’s prohairesis; Aquinas’s electio) is to undermine rationality—understood not as some external attribute or trait contingently ascribed to human beings but as the essence of personhood itself. Shaftesbury thus is fundamentally opposed to the Ockham-Hobbes-Locke school of thought, which is defined by its procedural quest for autonomy and its insistence on the verifiability of all theoretical claims and practical commitments in propositional language. The result of that strain Shaftesbury takes to be a precarious nominalism for which all meanings (moral and otherwise) prove contingent on the authority underwriting them, an authority destined to face the instant and total collapse of such meanings as soon as the divine affirmation that supports them is either withdrawn or somehow placed in doubt. By contrast, the Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury (variously drawing on Plato, Plotinus, and Epictetus) understand the logos as fusing transcendent order and human articulacy in a single ontology. In his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (published posthumously in 1731), Cudworth reformulates his critique of reductionist and deterministic accounts of human agency from his 1678 True Intellectual System of the Universe. Having identified Ockham as a key proponent of that view, he rejects voluntarist attempts at collapsing the intrinsic and immutable rationality of forms into the divine will said to have ordained them; for to do so is to obliterate the distinction between formal and efficient causes: “God himself cannot supply the Place of a formal Cause . . . it is impossible any Thing should Be by Will only, that is, without a Nature or Entity, or that the Nature and Essence of any thing should be Arbitrary . . . For though the Will and Power of God have an Absolute, Infinite and Unlimited Command upon the Existences of all Created things to make them to be, or not to be at Pleasure; yet when things exist, they are what they are, This or That, Absolutely or Relatively, not by Will or Arbitrary Command, but by the Necessity of their own Nature.”37 Put differently, the idea of reason necessarily implies its unconditional self-identity and continuity and, as such, is properly constitutive of our selfhood rather than some trait predicatively associated with the self as an “accident.”
Elsewhere in his Characteristicks, Shaftesbury directly engages the voluntarist view of reason as wholly contingent on the affirmations of the will, as well as voluntarism’s fragmentation of the will into a series of discontinuous and strictly sui generis affective states. To adopt that view, as his interlocutor in The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody does, is tantamount to collapsing the distinction between form and meaning, between a transcendent order and its contingent instantiation as subjective experience. Responding to the suggestion “that the current Notion of Good . . . , our real Good is PLEASURE,” Shaftesbury thus points out that such a position in effect short-circuits our very structures of communication and ultimately ends up with a tautological and solipsistic model of language that Hegel’s Phenomenology would later subject to a withering critique in its opening analysis of “sense-certainty.” To his interlocutor’s proposed conflation of the idea of the good with pleasure, Shaftesbury dryly responds with a request:
If they wou’d inform us “Which,” said I, “or What sort,” and ascertain once the very Species and distinct Kind [of pleasure]; such as must constantly remain the same, and equally eligible at all times; I should perhaps be better satisfy’d. But when Will and Pleasure are synonymous; when every thing which pleases us is call’d PLEASURE, and we never chuse or prefer as we please, ’tis trifling to say, “Pleasure is our Good.” (SC, 2:128)
Inevitably, the radically nominalist and naturalistic approach to moral argumentation devised by Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and Locke expires in an endless series of tautological affirmations wholly bereft of any explicit and intelligible criteria for what is being affirmed (“We are pleas’d with what delights or pleases us”).38 Furthermore, the outright conflation of moral meanings with the contentless pleasure (or pain) supposedly occasioned by their experience also highlights the ambivalent role of the word “sense” in eighteenth-century moral epistemology. Any reading of Shaftesbury will thus have to attend to “the rich contradictions between claims of knowledge and assertions of feeling” and to “assumptions about intersubjective knowledge that run counter to the prevailing empiricist epistemologies with which they are contemporary.”39 For the Epicurean, whose “Self-passions” are too strong and who, Shaftesbury argues, invariably becomes miserable in the erratic pursuit of pleasure, “sense” is a wholly unstructured, non-teleological, and non-cognitive occurrence. It is a sheer punctum, a “sense” pared down to the physiological tropism of mere “sensation,” and it leaves the individual “as highly pleas’d as Children are with Baubles” (SC, 2:128). In more colloquial terms, Shaftesbury here restates a critique that the Cambridge Platonists, in particular, Cudworth, had advanced against models of human consciousness as a strictly passive and reactive mechanism. These objections warrant recalling, if only to illustrate how modern humanistic inquiry had from the outset constituted itself dialectically, viz., as a series of confrontations with reductionist and mechanist attempts to explain or indeed dissolve the notion of human. Just as Plato’s “education” (paideia) and Aristotelian inductive reasoning (epagōgē) had been shaped in response to the apparent dissolution of reason into a random collision of minimal units of matter (by Protagoras, Democritus, and Leucippus), and just as Erasmus (drawing on Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola) opposed the fatalist model of agency expounded by Luther, so Shaftesbury is not simply asserting a certain concept of moral agency, responsibility, self-awareness, and freedom. Rather, he takes himself to be arguing for the non-generalizable character of human experience by dialectically engaging, and exposing the incoherence of, the intellectual traditions of voluntarism, nominalism, and their fusion in Locke’s hedonistic model of the self.
Cudworth’s critique of the word “sense” as supposedly circumscribing the entire scope of human consciousness proved crucial here, just as it continues to be of relevance to the latest installment in the debate on the human—that waged between proponents of neuro-scientific reductionism and those keen to defend the distinctive reality and intrinsic freedom of human consciousness.40 As Cudworth notes, the key trait of human agency is what we would nowadays call its “intentionality”—that is, having a perspective or attitude vis-à-vis those phenomena that contingently present themselves to its attention: “No Sense can judge of itself, or its own Appearances, much less make any Judgment of the Appearances belonging to another Sense, . . . wherefore that which judges of all the Senses and their several Objects, cannot be it self any Sense, but something of a superior Nature.”41 To insist on the “Different Natures of Sense and Intellection” does not eo ipso amount to some gratuitous and seemingly counterfactual claim. For the customary usage of the word “sense” by physico-mechanical models of (human) nature and perception proves incoherent insofar as it does not distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, which is to say, between a material process and the “event” of intellection whereby the former crystallizes as a focal point of awareness—that is, as an intentional object. Against Cartesian dualism, Cudworth (as also his fellow Platonists, More and Whichcote) thus maintains that the body itself, and all those notices that it appears to receive, is wholly enmeshed with the representational structure of mind:
for as much as Sense is not meer Local Motion impress’d from one Body upon another, or a Body’s bare Reaction or Resistance to that Motion of another Body, as some have fondly Conceited, but a Cogitation, Recognition or Vital Perception and Consciousness of these Motions or Passions of the Body, therefore there must of necessity be another kind of Passion also in the Soul or Principle of Life, which is vitally united to the Body, to make up Sensation . . . Neither is this Passion of the Soul in Sensation a meer naked Passion or Suffering; because it is a Cogitation or Perception which has something of Active Vigour in it.
Building on this model, Shaftesbury’s concern in his Inquiry is to restore the explicitness of “sense” as a mental phenomenon and, by extension, the temporal continuity of the person as a rational agent intentionally and purposively interacting with persons and saturated phenomena that cumulatively define her or his social world and the moral meanings whose “actualization” (in the sense of Hegel’s Verwirklichung) alone invests human life with narrative continuity and purpose.
Unlike the neo-Platonists, however, Shaftesbury pursues this objective in distinctively modern, anti-metaphysical ways. Whereas Cudworth ultimately winds up stigmatizing “sense . . . [as] a kind of drowsy and Somnolent Perception,” Shaftesbury is more invested in the continuity of “affections” than in the cogency of propositions. Key for him is the self-identity of “affection” over time and its aesthetic connectivity with the qualia of other minds.42 While the semantic band-width of “affection” and “sense” in Shaftesbury and some of his successors (Hutcheson and Smith in particular) seems enormous and may well strike readers today as incoherent, a fair-minded approach to the Characteristicks must resist the impulse of seeking conceptual and definitional clarity for terms that are after all expressly introduced as alternatives to narrowly epistemological and eo ipso reductionist accounts of agency. Inasmuch as “natural affections link human beings to one another [and so] direct the moral sense,” their vagueness was meant, and colloquially was understood, to cover “an entire range of desires, impulses, feelings, emotions, fundamental dispositions, and occasionally even passions.”43
While the content and semantics of “affection” and “sense” are notably vague, the matter is at least partially remedied by Shaftesbury’s uncompromising affirmation of the way that mind at all times knows itself to be having, or to be imbued with, affective dispositions of a certain kind. Like the Cambridge Platonists before him and Coleridge a century later, he thus insists on self-awareness as an absolute given, a reality ontologically convertible with the very fact of our existence as persons. In his Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury does not so much oppose as declare irrelevant the ongoing skeptical, Pyrrhonist attempt to subject the I, or cogito, to forensic scrutiny and, thus, to premise all philosophy on the resolution of this epistemological dilemma of self-reference. To begin with, he points out how “doubt” already implies self-reference: “that there is something undoubtedly which thinks, our very Doubt it-self and scrupulous Thought evinces.” Against “the seeming Logick of a famous Modern” (i.e., Descartes) and those “nice Self-Examiners, or Searchers after Truth and Certainty” (SC, 3:117–118), Shaftesbury maintains that self-reference is a premise without which philosophy would never have any occasion to begin, and absent which humans would never feel inclined to construe their relation to the world through various, competing accounts of virtue and the good.
Naturally, the continuity of the I may always be potentially vitiated by “false memory,” and the truth of self-reference may turn out “no more than Dream.” Yet even to experience the Cartesian’s defining anxiety about possible (self-)deception is to acknowledge that the I has Being, rather in the Heideggerian sense of in-der-Welt-Sein. As a source and focal point of “care” (Sorge), the world is indeed given, and the epistemological dilemma (if we consider it to be one) of self-reference only arises because of the I’s antecedent embeddedness within, and orientation toward, the world as a source of existential curiosity, desire, and anxiety. Only on the strength of some such ontology could Hume later remark that “all kinds of uncertainty have a strong connexion with fear” (HT, 285). Against the Pyrrhonist’s apparent vexation—“that Identity can be prov’d only by Consciousness; but that Consciousness, withal, may be as well false as real, in respect of what is past”—Shaftesbury offers this deceptively simple and disarming argument:
I take my Being upon Trust. Let others philosophize as they are able: I shall admire their strength, when, upon this Topick, they have refuted what able Metaphysicians object, and PYRRHONISTS plead in their own behalf. Mean while, there is no Impediment, Hinderance, or Suspension of Action, on account of these wonderfully refin’d Speculations. Argument and Debate go on still. Conduct is settled. Rules and Measures are given out, and receiv’d. Nor do we scruple to act as resolutely upon the mere Supposition that we are, as if we had effectually prov’d it a thousand times, to the full satisfaction of our Metaphysical or Pyrrhonean Antagonist. (SC, 3:117–119)
The first reality is not the enigmatic structure of the cogito but that of life and action, always already unfolding as any self happens upon the “world.” Consequently, it is not epistemology but ethics—for Shaftesbury intimately entwined with aesthetics—that should be the principal focus of philosophy. Yet even those “refin’d Speculations” that lead Descartes to restrict truth to those certainties with which the cogito is left after having subjected appearances to the most rigorous, methodical, and indeed gratuitous doubt support Shaftesbury’s claims concerning the primacy of life. Viz., the very quest for an error-proof demonstration of the cogito’s certainties can only be conceived as a philosophical project by a philosopher who implicitly knows himself to be already enmeshed with the reality of other minds. As we shall see, Shaftesbury thus regards the Stoic genre of the Meditation or Soliloquy, no less than its Christian successor genre of Confession, as intrinsically social and dialogic.
Likewise, Shaftesbury flat-out rejects the Lockean concept of self-consciousness as a merely derivative property contingent on (and delimited by) the empirical state in which it unfolds, such that “Socrates asleep, and Socrates awake, is not the same Person.”44 By declaring any two discrete mental states to be inherently discontinuous, indeed incommensurable, Lockean empiricism had imprisoned itself within “a distracted Universe.” Loss of personhood goes hand in hand with loss of world, the inevitable result of both being a pervasive sense of disaffection and anomie: “how little dispos’d must a Person be, to love or admire any thing as orderly in the Universe, who thinks the Universe it-self a Pattern of Disorder . . . Nothing indeed can be more melancholy, than the thought of living in a distracted Universe” (SC, 2:40). Against this dystopic vision of a world peopled by creatures “morose, rancorous and malignant” (SC, 2:47), Shaftesbury seeks to reaffirm a finely spun web of inner and outer relations and continuities, a type of “Moral Arithmetick” (SC, 2:99) that means to affirm the balance, proportion, and harmony of the person’s subjective faculties. Virtue is genuinely possible as long as the microcosm of the human individual and the macrocosm of nature and society have been brought into fortuitous and enduring alignment: “to deserve the name of good or virtuous, a Creature must have all his Inclinations and Affections, his Dispositions of Mind and Temper, sutable, and agreeing with the Good of his Kind, or of that System in which he is included, and of which he constitutes a part” (SC, 2:45).
Striking and consequential for the turn taken by moral philosophy throughout the eighteenth century is Shaftesbury’s overtly aesthetic concern with the form of relations, as well as his notable indifference to the actual content or semantic value of the terms on which his philosophy relies. Indeed, aesthetics for Shaftesbury “occupies the central position of the whole intellectual structure.” The quintessentially Platonic view that “everything real partakes of form, that it is no chaotic amorphous mass, but possesses rather an inner proportion and evidences in its nature a certain structure, and in its development and motion a rhythmic order and rule” is, for Shaftesbury, the basic premise, indeed the condition of possibility for all rational agency.45 Rationality and virtue are indeed a kind of “Moral Arithmetick” inasmuch as “to stand thus well affected, and to have one’s Affections right and intire” (SC, 2:45) requires the cultivation of formal harmony and inner beauty. Just as important, however, weighs the fact that in so identifying life with the dynamic and proportionate operation of form, Shaftesbury advances his defense of reason against Hobbes’s voluntarism and Gassendi’s materialism (both informing Locke’s dispersal of the self into a myriad discontinuous, empirical states) to the near exclusion of any identifiable, normative good. In merging reason into the continuity of the “intire Affection”—what Kant’s third Critique would later elaborate as the “proportionate accord” (proportionierte Übereinstimmung) of the faculties that is the basis for all rational judgment—Shaftesbury has effectively secured the coherence of reason only by evacuating it of all content.
The second part of the Inquiry thus features a steady stream of references to the “constant relation” between the inner disposition of creatures and “the Interest of a Species, or common Nature” (SC, 2:45), to “the Order or Symmetry of this inward Part” (SC, 2:48), and to the fundamental integrity, continuity, and self-identity of the inner life. Shaftesbury calls it “intire Affection” (SC, 2:64) and is quick to link it to the moral “integrity” of consciousness. His further contention that “to have this INTIRE AFFECTION or INTEGRITY of Mind, is to live according to Nature” (SC, 2:65) also means to stress the autonomy of the human individual and, in so doing, all but severs the ties between virtue and organized religion. Here again we see how and why the concept of the will all but disappears from the scene so abruptly after Hobbes and why, among eighteenth-century thinkers, only Kant will once again accord it a pivotal role in moral reasoning. For Shaftesbury, the harmonious ordering of the affections unfolds as a strictly immanent process, and it is not to be supervised by or answerable to the superego of any institution or transcendent deity. Just as to suppose that “Religious Affection or Devotion is a sufficient and proper remedy” depends on contingent and notably extraneous factors (“’tis according as the Kind may happily prove”), so any overriding concern with “self-inspection” is liable to be a mere show of virtue (“the vainer any Person is, the more he has his Eye inwardly fix’d upon himself” [SC, 2:67–68]). Clearly unsympathetic to clericalism, mechanical habituation, and the external authority of religious institutions, Shaftesbury is a perfect example of what Charles Taylor has recently analyzed as the “buffered, anthropocentric identity” by means of which modern thought seeks to identify and take possession of “a secure inner mental realm” against the inherited order of myth, magic, and enchantment. Moreover, Shaftesbury is an early and highly influential case of what, for Taylor, constitutes “a growing category of people who, while unable to accept orthodox Christianity are seeking some alternative spiritual sources.”46
Subtly advancing his quest for a position of intellectual and affective autonomy that wishes to eschew Hobbes’s bleak finitude, Shaftesbury thus stresses the inner coherence and harmony of the mental life—a virtual reality in which affective and conceptual experiences continually and, in his view, fortuitously merge. Thus he urges that the “Solutio Continui, which bodily Surgeons talk of” (SC, 2:49) should also be recognized as the premise for any understanding of the inner life. Up to a point, his position in this regard anticipates Coleridge’s late, neo-Platonist view of human personhood as constitutively self-aware and continuous, a claim most palpable where the operation of conscience is involved.47 For Shaftesbury—herein diametrically opposed to Hobbes and Locke—it is axiomatic that “every reasoning or reflecting Creature is, by his Nature, forc’d to endure the Review of his own Mind, and Actions; and to have Representations of himself, and his inward Affairs, constantly passing before him, and revolving in his mind” (SC, 2:69).48 What he calls “the united Structure and Fabrick of the Mind” and the “necessary Connexion and Balance of the Affections” amounts to an ontological framework; it must not be misconstrued as a mere “accident” or as some metaphysical inference ventured about the constitution of the mind. In other words, it is not a “certain” proposition but a case of phenomenological certitude that has Shaftesbury affirm that “we cannot doubt of what passes within our-selves. Our Passions and Affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the Objects may be, on which they are employ’d” (SC, 2:99). It is telling, in this regard, that Shaftesbury’s aesthetic intuitionism also leads him to reject Locke for his supposed failure to appreciate the harmony of the cosmos and the inner life: “Had Mr. Locke been a virtuoso, he would not have philosophized thus. For harmony is beauty.”49
The alleged shortcomings of Locke’s aesthetic sensibility notwithstanding, Shaftesbury’s position remains problematic and elusive in several respects. For one thing, in claiming that “our Passions and Affections are known to us” Shaftesbury leaves the epistemological and conceptual status of such knowledge undetermined. The most plausible hypothesis here is that he means to posit a “moral sense”—an inherently latent awareness of the self as capable of achieving inner “harmony.” What is known so unconditionally here is but the “certitude” of an inner “feeling.” Rationality thus seems vindicated, albeit in a strictly intuitionist and prospective manner and at the price of being denuded of all actual content. Once recalibrated as a formal-aesthetic “sense”—that is, as an inner experience that acquires phenomenological distinctness both in and through our relations with others—rationality can no longer furnish a plausible foundation for the commonwealth. Instead, it is reconstituted as but a (contingent) benefit of patterns of sociality such as happen to transpire within an already established community. Reason thereby has been transmuted into an eventuality, a utopia that can only fade into view incrementally, and only if the formation and practices of individual moral character are guided by its continual anticipation.50 The elusive, shape-shifting style of Characteristicks compounds Shaftesbury’s evidently ambivalent outlook on the metaphysical and theist underpinnings of virtue. As the divided and vexed responses of contemporaries to his work confirm, “the pleasure of reading Characteristicks, intended to entice a reluctant, philosophically ignorant audience into the pursuit of virtue, became instead an end in itself, a substitute for moral thought.” The key question thus becomes how to appraise Shaftesbury’s fusion of traditional concepts (self, virtue, will, etc.) with a notably modern, experimental outlook on philosophy as literature: “is this fusion to be interpreted rhetorically . . . or is it a more fundamental attempt to unite ethics and aesthetics?”51
A second, closely related issue concerns the highly speculative argument that aesthetic education and a growing versatility in our relation with form will produce the inner harmony that Shaftesbury associates with virtue and morality. Numerous questions are left unanswered by Shaftesbury’s account, such as how the beautiful and the merely “agreeable” are related; how the mind advances from the mere contemplation of beauty to the approval of the moral meanings allegedly embodied in it; and how one is to know whether those meanings themselves, or indeed the beauty allegedly mediating them, are more than “an adventitious projection.”52 From Shaftesbury onward via §59 of Kant’s third Critique, Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and writings on the “Metamorphosis of Plants,” all the way to its nostalgic obituary in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, this integrative, Platonist narrative of Bildung has been advanced countless times. Yet time and again this idea also found itself challenged by a radically disjunctive skepticism that makes the reality of every particular thing or state contingent on our ability to identify the efficient cause that (supposedly) brought it about.
By its very design, however, Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks neither can nor means to offer such proof. For his vision of moral personhood produced by an aesthetic Bildung at once highly mediated and uncertain as regards its anticipated dividends had been shaped precisely by Shaftesbury’s opposition to Hobbes’s and Locke’s deterministic account of mental life. There is indeed good reason, then, to suppose that for Shaftesbury “a problem of selfhood need not be understood as a dilemma of selfhood” and that in his writings, herein echoing the ancient philosophers he so admired, “the ‘self’ was more of an achievement than a ‘given thing.’”53 In his later dialogue, The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), Shaftesbury thus strikes a highly self-conscious, oratorical pose as Philocles sketches for Palemon how rational culture and civil order arise aesthetically and progressively widen in scope:
Here, in my turn, I began to raise my Voice, and imitate the solemn way you had been teaching me. “Knowing as you are,” continu’d I, “well-knowing and experienc’d in all the Degrees and Orders of Beauty, in all the mysterious Charms of the particular Forms; you rise to what is more general . . . Nor is the Enjoyment of such a single Beauty sufficient to satisfy such an aspiring Soul. It seeks how to combine more Beautys, and by what Coalition of these, to form a beautiful Society. It views Communitys, Friendships, Relations, Dutys; and considers by what Harmony of particular Minds the general Harmony is compos’d and Commonweal establish’d. Nor satisfy’d even with publick Good in one Community of Men, it frames it-self a nobler Object, and with enlarg’d Affection seeks the Good of Mankind. It dwells with Pleasure amidst that Reason, and those Orders on which this fair Correspondence and goodly Interest is establish’d. Laws, Constitutions, civil and religious Rites; whatever civilizes or polishes rude Mankind; the Sciences and Arts, Philosophy, Morals, Virtue; the flourishing State of human Affairs, and the Perfection of human Nature; these are its delightful Prospects, and this the Charm of Beauty which attracts it.” (SC, 2:120)
This remarkable flourish of affirmative rhetoric lies midway between Seneca’s Moral Epistles and Kant’s critical utopia in the third Critique, particularly in his account of “aesthetic ideas” as a “representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to it” (Critique of Judgment, 157). Indeed, a faint echo of Shaftesbury’s idea can still be detected in Stendhal’s definition of beauty as “a promise of happiness” (une promesse de bonheur).54 Closer to home, this meliorist view also underwrites Edmund Burke’s insistence that the cohesion and durability of any political community is necessarily anchored in its aesthetic appeal: “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Burke expands this view by arguing that to so conceive of the state as a communal, ritual artifact is to acknowledge God’s will. Beauty thus is extolled as an “oblation of the state itself,” a ritualized staging of a people’s moral cum political commitments to “be performed as all public solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in music, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, . . . with mild majesty and sober pomp.” In what may well be an inadvertent hint at his widely suspected Catholic sympathies, Burke thus justifies the idea of a polity suffused with aesthetic and affective appeal as “public consolation.”55
However inadvertently, Burke’s contention that community can only be realized and sustained as a beautiful artifact cannot but point back to a fallen, ectypal world of self-interested, amoral, and disaggregated selves. Such an aesthetic philosophy aims to compensate for modernity’s conspicuous inability to imagine a politics that is attuned to a notion of the good. As in Walter Benjamin’s account of Baroque melancholy and Theodor Adorno’s lifelong attempt to chart the relation of art to a quintessentially “damaged life,” Shaftesbury’s ironic and Burke’s pessimistic appraisal of aesthetics and the beautiful as “consolation” for the terminal loss of the good reveals modern moral philosophy’s deep estrangement from a world that should never have turned out the way it did. Like Burke some eighty years later, Shaftesbury also finds himself “promoting [his] central vision in a world not structurally or intellectually hospitable to it.”56 His mournful outlook on a modern (voluntarist) model of agency and the stunning costs of its apparent triumph is signaled in his carefully chosen classical epigraphs and in the sophisticated emblematic frontispieces for his various essays in the Characteristicks. Furthermore, the above passage also shows Shaftesbury’s quasi-emergentist idea of reason as a highly contingent narrative progression that markedly differs from the determinate and normative view of being as entelecheia found in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. Like Plato, Cicero, and a number of the Stoic thinkers whom he revered (Epictetus above all), Shaftesbury repeatedly insists on the strong “connection between philosophy and character development.”57
In his enjambment of moral community with aesthetic education—subsequently writ large in the works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Gottlieb Herder, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—Shaftesbury’s oratory acknowledges the hazards of pursuing a pedagogical project in a world dominated by calculative, instrumental, and abstract notions of rationality. Being equally opposed to “metaphysical speculation, scientific investigation, Hobbesian self-interest, Lockean relativism, the atheistic tendency in freethinking, [and] the mercenary ethics of Anglicanism,” Shaftesbury’s own thought is profoundly dialectical in its response to intellectual models he deems exhausted, ineffectual, or morally compromised.58 Writing during a period when the division of moral from political authority seems extreme, his arguments are imbued with a strong anti-institutional and anti-systematic energy.59 Crucially, this opposition to “system” prompts Shaftesbury to criticize his own writings, in particular the “dry PHILOSOPHY and rigid Manner” of his own earlier Inquiry, whose author his later “Miscellaneous Reflections” depict “as a plain Dogmatist, a Formalist, and Man of Method; with his Hypotheses tack’d to him and his Opinions so close-sticking, as wou’d force one to call to mind . . . some precise and strait-lac’d Professor in a University” (SC, 3:117, 84). For Shaftesbury, who had not attended the university and who repeatedly expressed his dismay at how “we have immur’d her [Philosophy] (poor Lady!) in Colleges and Cells,” both the analysis and practice of rational self-cultivation cannot possibly be ceded to “mere Scholasticks” (SC, 2:105). On the contrary, no longer tied to the flourishing of institutions, and quite deliberately exempted from the normative (and allegedly illiberal) authority of ecclesial and secular political discourse, reason is to be achieved by way of an infinitely reflexive and ironic cultivation of the individual as he or she interacts with a rich array of expressive forms.
The anti-ecclesial and anti-institutional pathos of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks hints at the beginnings of what by the end of the century emerges as the middle-class program of Bildung, pursued with either ironic self-awareness or philistine earnestness. As regards these latter alternatives, Shaftesbury clearly inclines toward an ironic stance. Nearly a century before Friedrich Schlegel was to make irony the linchpin of his Romantic poetics, Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy (1709) at once advances and undermines the idea of aesthetic pedagogy in an intensely reflexive, opening meditation on whether the study of beauty can ever lead to moral improvement. In a letter of 1712, Shaftesbury identifies four basic literary genres (the demonstrative, epistolary, miscellaneous, and dialogic) as his main resources, leaving out the soliloquy, which he regards “as an aspect of dialogue.” At pains to distinguish his own practice “from the Christian tradition of meditation that [he] despises,” Shaftesbury views being “a good Thinker” all but coterminous with “being a strong Self-Examiner, and thorow-pac’d Dialogist, in this solitary way” (i.e., of the genre of soliloquy).60
Though partial to Epictetus, Shaftesbury may well be echoing Seneca’s Epistle 38 (“On Quiet Conversation”), in particular, the author’s advice to Lucilius that the entire Stoic regimen of rational self-examination is best served by a process of dialogue, rather than by abstract lessons unilaterally imparted or philosophical reading pursued in seclusion: “The greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul [quia minutatim increpit animo] . . . Words should be scattered like a seed; no matter how small the seed may be, if it has once found favourable ground, it unfolds its strength and from an insignificant thing spreads to its greatest growth. Reason grows the same way [Idem facit ratio].” A distant echo of Plato’s theory of knowledge as a gradual “awakening” (anamnēsis [Meno, 81b–87d]), the “Stoic idea of learning is an idea of increasing vigilance and wakefulness” whereby reason constitutes itself successively, and inductively, through the methodical evaluation of impressions and our responses to them.61 In sharp contrast to the top-down model of instruction practiced by the Epicureans, the dialogic model succeeds by inducing its participants to embrace the provisional, evolving, and partial status of their representations, and to form the habit of suspending assent to all impressions. Habits and routines of this type should not be misinterpreted (pace Foucault) as sociopolitical constraints or non-cognitive mechanisms conspiring against some woolly-headed notion of the human. Rather, they are techniques aimed at enabling the individual to participate in the logos and, thus, to become a genuine “citizen of the world [politēs tou kosmou].”62 Yet as with the political utopia sketched in Kant’s late writings, themselves landmark documents of neo-Stoicism, the method that is to take us there remains forever a work in progress. Indeed, to be true to its spirit, it must also be turned against the dialogic framework whereby Seneca, Cicero, and Epictetus proffer exemplars of their philosophy for their respective disciples.
So there lies the rub: the very genre of dialogue (which in Shaftesbury is barely masquerading as Soliloquy) demands an acutely and ongoing hermeneutics of suspicion. Indeed, as Shaftesbury himself points out with great delight and wit, the genre’s established conventions—merely by virtue of being recognizably that, conventions—inherently conspire against the task of pushing introspection to the point of genuine discovery. In the end, he realizes, his persistent cultivation of a uniquely ironic and prevaricating rhetoric of introspection may not prove an effective remedy either to the Roman “leprosy of Eloquence.” For the genre of the soliloquy is likewise compromised, if not by an author’s designs on then certainly by his professed indifference to the reading public. The writer dispensing advice about how to write is like “an Empirick talk[ing] of his own Constitution, how he governs and manages it, what Diet agrees best with it,” and so forth. Yet to the reader there is nothing appealing about “the experimental Discussions of his practising Author, who all the while is in reality doing no better, than taking his Physick in publick.” Moreover, as an often exhaustively detailed transcript of what “passes in this religious Commerce . . . between them and their Soul” would seem to suggest, those indulging “this self-discoursing Practice” often pursue their own moral self-discipline with gluttonous and exhibitionist fervor; indeed, they are “a sort of Pseudo-Asceticks” (SC, 1:101–105). A fuller reading of Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy than can here be pursued would show his intense awareness of the insoluble dialectical entanglement of a hypostatized inner life deemed capable of Platonic ascent toward the good and an inventory of rhetorically over-determined forms and genres such as will invariably compromise that very ideal even as they serve to give expression to it. Yet far from being a logical impasse or metaphysical dilemma, this manifest conflict between medium and message constitutes both an acute challenge to and an intriguing thematic proposition for Shaftesbury’s aesthetic cum moral project. It is only through a continued wrestling with foreign-determined and wayward rhetorical and aesthetic forms that moral character and vision can come into relief and, perhaps, even into positive alignment. Only in Kant’s third Critique will this central insight of Shaftesbury be fully rehabilitated.
1. Macpherson, Political Theory, 53–70.
2. In lieu of a missing second witness needed to secure Algernon Sidney’s conviction for high treason, the prosecution presented (and selectively quoted from) a copy of his Discourses Concerning Government (written in 1680, though not published until 1698), which the presiding judge accepted, ruling that “to write is to act.” His conviction having been thus secured, Sidney was executed on 7 December 1683.
3. Colin McLaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748), quoted in MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 250.
4. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature 1:11–12; on the distinctive type of cultural work performed by the (new) genre of the English essay, see Gigante, Great Age, xv–xxxiii. MacIntyre remarks on “how philosophical discussion extended beyond university classes” to private seminars, for tradesmen and youths, to Athenaeum-style institutions such as Edinburgh’s Rankenian club (founded in 1718), Glasgow’s Literary Society (founded in 1752), and Aberdeen’s Philosophical Society (founded in 1758). The result, he notes, was “that rare phenomenon, . . . a philosophically educated public, with shared standards of rational justification” (Whose Justice? 248). For Hume’s particular strategy of coding into his writing a new form of middle-brow literacy, see Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, esp. 21–44.
5. Pocock, Virtue, 224. As Pocock goes on to note, this new-found appreciation for historical continuity also explains why beginning around 1698 “the defense of the Whig regime was beginning to find the once Tory feudal interpretation of medieval history usable for its purposes” (ibid., 231); on the shift from controversy to conversation, see Mee, Conversable Worlds, esp. Chapter 1, which traces the growing investment in polite and non-committal conversation in the increasingly commercialized world of mid-eighteenth-century England.
6. Pocock, Virtue, 112.
7. Hirschman, Passions, 32.
8. Esposito, Bios, 48. See C. Taylor, Secular Age, 90–158; Giddens, Consequences, 1–29, and, on the transformation of intimacy, 112–150; Elias, Civilizing Process, esp. his account of the transformation of external power into self-constraint (2:363–435); on the transformation of experience and “interior stabilization” of human experience by modern institutions, see Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, esp. 40–73 and 238–251. Most of these accounts owe much to the philosophical anthropology first formulated in Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit and then extended into the specialized, disciplinary vocabulary of modern sociology (Comte, Durkheim, Weber) and Freudian psychoanalysis, esp. in Civilization and its Discontents (1929).
9. Especially in the Chorus (no. 3) of “St. Cecilia’s Ode” (“From harmony, from heav’nly harmony / This universal frame began”). A cultural history of the term in the first half of the eighteenth century would furnish an abundance of material and conceptual analogues. On the re-conceptualization of harmony in music and the beginnings of modernity, see Chua, Absolute Music, 13–22. See also Dahlhaus, who notes that the eighteenth-century emphasis on exemplarity and harmonious structures—providentially revealed in equal temperament tuning, the mathematical ratio of intervals, and the balanced symmetries of musical forms, and said to reflect a natural, cosmic order—often works against the very legitimacy of Musiktheorie: “In the treatises of this epoch [the eighteenth century] we notice an effort to reconcile what is ordinarily meant by ‘theory’ with the fixed principles of a normative musical poetics [Satzlehre] inherited from the seventeenth century” (Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 7; see also his account of “Nature” in musical theory [ibid., 37–42], and Dahlhaus, Klassische und Romantische Musikästhetik, 21–49). Still among the best accounts of classical musical form and the “coherence of the musical language,” is Rosen, Classical Style, esp. 57–98. For analogous explorations of harmony in eighteenth-century painting, one might turn to the frontispieces for Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, the studied symmetries of posture and the ambient landscape in Gainsborough’s early conversation pieces (e.g., Mr. and Mrs. Andrews), yet also the insistent, anti-commercial stress on a different conception of order—arising organically rather than from “improvement”—in Tory landscapes; see Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 14–54; Everett, Tory View, 91–122; Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 1–63; and Barrell, Dark Side of Landscape, 35–88.
10. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 1. Similar arguments have subsequently been advanced by MacIntyre, AV, esp. 6–35 and 204–243; for a somewhat different appraisal of Anscombe, see Cora Diamond, who argues that for Anscombe “ethics can be done without [the background of Christian moral traditions]” and that “moral evaluation, like ‘unjust’ or ‘courageous,’ have no need of the background divine law.” Still, she concedes that for Anscombe, as for MacIntyre, the difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of moral philosophy arises from the fact “that certain concepts require for their content or intelligibility background conditions which are no longer fulfilled” (“Losing Your Concepts,” 257).
11. “The question therefore is not whether a man be a free agent, that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be silent, according to his will; but whether the will to write and the will to forbear come upon him according to his will, or according to anything else in his power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech” (Hobbes, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” 16); on Schopenhauer, see the discussion below, 471–477.
12. Essay, Bk. II, Ch. 21, §25, §28.
13. Essay Bk. II, Ch. 21, §29 The previous quote (“. . . but the better pleased”) refers to the first edition of the Essay, also Bk. II, Ch. 21, §29. For a detailed account of Locke’s confusion in this passage, and for his often perplexing adjustments in the second edition of the Essay, see Darwall, British Moralists, 152–160. Darwall convincingly maintains that Locke’s arguments on the will dialectically feed off Cudworth’s published and unpublished arguments on free will and moral agency, esp. his Treatise of Freewill (published in 1838).
14. Essay, Bk. II, Ch. 21, §§29–30; last italics mine.
15. Ibid., §31.
16. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 136.
17. Foot, Moral Dilemmas, 120, 122.
18. Shaftesbury, Life, 416.
19. British Moralists, 159. While Darwall is right to detect “several Cudworthian echoes in Locke’s thought” (ibid., 163), his attempt at assimilating Locke to his broader narrative about the emergence of “judgment internalism” (9) in modern moral philosophy remains unconvincing in part because the temporal, narrative dimension of thought—so manifestly absent from Locke’s self—is never really identified as missing. Yet it is just this aspect of moral flourishing that lies at the heart of Platonic, Plotinian, and neo-Platonist thought.
20. Foot, Moral Dilemmas, 125.
21. C. Taylor, Sources, 253. On Shaftesbury’s response to Locke, see also Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury,” 287–290.
22. Locke, Essay, Bk. II, Ch. 21, §37.
23. Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 28, §7.
24. Essay, Bk. II, Ch. 21, §§35, 36, 40. Schneewind is right to note that the “Lockean will, though an active power different from motives, has no rational ordering principle of its own” (Invention, 300).
25. Essay, Bk. IV, Ch. 3, §18. On this passage, see Foot, Moral Dilemmas, 128f.
26. Quoted in Milton, “John Locke,” 133.
27. Husserl, Crisis, 13. As he continues, “more and more the history of philosophy, seen from within, takes on the character of a struggle for existence, i.e., a struggle between the philosophy which lives in the straightforward pursuit of its task—the philosophy of naïve faith in reason—and the skepticism which negates or repudiates it in empiricist fashion.”
28. The principal source here is Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b1–1124a30, with the critical term, μεγᾰλοψῠχία, which has been variously translated as “magnanimity,” “pride,” or being “high-souled.” On the longstanding debate of how to read Aristotle’s apparent characterization of μεγᾰλοψῠχία as a virtue or at least a complement of the virtues (1124a2), see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 23–44. From within an Augustinian tradition, the generous self-appraisal of moral agents that Aristotle’s term implies is, of course, exceedingly close to the vice of pride; and even if such a reading may appear anachronistic, the ambivalence of μεγᾰλοψῠχία is indeed evident in (not just imported into) Aristotle’s argument: “Even if consciousness of one’s own moral worth simply supervenes on virtuous activity, it is nevertheless possible to pervert it by treating it as an external good to which the pursuit of virtue can be instrumentalized.” Moreover, the claim to autonomy contained in this notion downplays, perhaps even denies, the contingency of one’s socialization and character formation. Hence, Aristotelian “magnanimity in fact involves serious self-deception, inasmuch as the magnanimous person fails to remember the goods she has received from others and thus arrives at a false estimate of her own self-sufficient greatness” (ibid., 41–42); on the role of “praiseworthiness” in A. Smith, see Den Uyl and Griswold, “Adam Smith.”
29. Harrington, quoted in Schneewind, Invention, 293–294, 298.
30. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 2:11; henceforth cited parenthetically as SC. On the significant role of the Cambridge Platonists on subsequent critiques of modern voluntarism and Hobbesian thought, see Schneewind, Invention, 194–214 and C. Taylor, Sources, 248–259; E. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, esp. 42–85; and, on Cassirer’s ambivalent relationship to Christian Platonism, see Wisner, “Ernst Cassirer.” On Shaftesbury’s relation to the Cambridge Platonists, see Rivers, Reason, 2:127–132; regarding the increasing importance of the Cambridge Platonists (esp. Smith, More, and Cudworth) on Coleridge’s later writings, see below, 484–488.
31. Citing the same “remarkable claim” from the Inquiry, Yousef sees Shaftesbury’s argument “rest on a number of related, often circular, assertions about nature, affection, and the ‘good’ of individuals,” and she specifically seems uncomfortable with his deducing “both the existence of impulses . . . and the specific moral and emotional content of those impulses, from the observation that social life is natural to human beings” (“Feeling for Philosophy,” 614). For other strong readings of Shaftesbury, see Darwall, British Moralists, 176–206; and Marshall, Figure of Theater, 9–70.
32. ST, I Q 79 A 12. On Aquinas’s notion of synderesis and conscience, see McCabe, “Aquinas on Good Sense.” Drawing on Aquinas’s early Questio Disputata de Veritate, McInerny notes how, unlike the “purely cognitive” judgment of conscience, choice “consists in the application of knowledge to affections . . . My choices reveal my character, the condition of my appetite, whereas the judgment of conscience reveals my cognitive ability to see that a given act is forbidden” (“Prudence and Conscience,” 300). As an act, not a habit, conscience does not err, though “judgment” (prudentia) certainly may: “one errs in choice and not in conscience” (Aquinas, quoted in ibid., 301). For a perceptive discussion of how synderesis reappears in the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of Dugald Stewart, see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 330–334.
33. Whose Justice? 252.
34. For the engravings, see http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view &id=1565&It (accessed 30 November 2010). Even while away in Naples in 1711, Shaftesbury took an active role in shaping (at times also sketching) the frontispieces for Characteristicks, as his exchange of letters and some twenty pages of notes (known as the Riders Diary and found at the Public Record Office in London; Shaftesbury Papers, PRO 30/24/24/13) make clear. He continued to be involved with the three artists (Closterman, Trench, and Gribelin) in the design and execution of these engravings until his death on 15 February 1713. For a detailed account of the production and emblematic significance of these frontispieces, see Paknadel, “Shaftesbury’s Illustrations” and, also, Branch, Rituals, 123–134.
35. E. Cassirer, Enlightenment, 84.
36. C. Taylor, Sources, 258. As Den Uyl points out, however, “at issue is not [Taylor’s] internalization per se, but rather the type of internalization, which can have a classical form quite different from modern subjectivism” (“Shaftesbury,” 302). The question of whether what Shaftesbury calls the “intire Affection” constitutes a state or disposition, and whether the attainment of such affective experiences is itself something motivated or spontaneous will prove crucial to Hutcheson’s Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728). Hutcheson’s concern with whether there can be such a thing as non-conscious emotions is closely related to the enduring distinction between states vs. dispositions or background emotions and episodic emotions; on this issue, see Nussbaum, Upheavals, 69–77.
37. Cudworth, Treatise, 16; see also 25–27. On the Cambridge Platonists’ opposition to voluntarism and its termination in Hobbesian physico-mechanical and empiricist accounts of nature, see E. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, 42–65.
38. In a 1726 sermon, Joseph Butler remarks that to assert “that no Creature whatever can possibly act but meerly from Self-love” and that, consequently, “every Affection whatever is to be resolved upon into this one Principle” is a deeply incoherent position to take: “this is not the Language of Mankind: Or if it were, we should want Words to express the Difference, between the Principle of an Action, proceeding from cool Consideration that it will be to my own Advantage; and an Action, suppose of Revenge, or of Friendship, by which a Man runs upon certain Ruin, to do Evil or Good to another” (no. 15, “Upon the Love of Our Neighbor,” in Fifteen Sermons, 205–206).
39. Yousef, “Feeling for Philosophy” (609, 611). In her analysis of the “strangely complementary structure” linking skepticism and sympathy” Yousef over-emphasizes Shaftesbury’s “vigorous affirmations of the irresistible self-evidence of moral feeling.” One ought to distinguish here between the self-evidence accorded to the feeling as a phenomenon, which cannot be contested without charging that it has been reported in bad faith—itself tantamount to the inference of another type of feeling—and the subsequent cultivation of a specific feeling as an aesthetic simulacrum, which for Shaftesbury is the only way to access its intrinsic significance and social import. In Shaftesbury, then, affective immediacy is a point of departure, not an all-encompassing answer to the specter of Hobbesian and Lockean skepticism.
40. For a concise and effective critique of “neuro-scientism” (i.e., the misguided importation of neuro-scientific concepts and assumptions into humanistic inquiry, including literary study), see Tallis, Why the Mind is Not a Computer, 7–36; for an alternative, still science-based defense of the “I” as self-identical, self-aware, and continuous over time, see Tallis, I Am, esp. 22–89 and 220–286.
41. Cudworth, Treatise, 69–70, 75.
42. Ibid., 78–79, 90.
43. Dupré, Enlightenment, 122.
44. Locke, Essay, Bk. II, Ch. 1, §11.
45. E. Cassirer, Enlightenment, 152.
46. Secular Age, 301–302. As Dupré notes, “what distinguishes Shaftesbury from most other deists is that, for him, religion is more than a matter of reason” and that, in his largely affective account of religion, he “anticipates Schleiermacher’s romantic theory of religion” (Enlightenment, 249); likewise, E. Cassirer remarks how for Shaftesbury “concentration on the nature of the Absolute is now replaced by a complete analysis of the formative forces within the ego” (Enlightenment, 152). As regards Shaftesbury’s account of God, the most detailed remarks are to be found in “The Moralists,” esp. SC, 2:119–123, 2:159–166, and 2:201–205. Rivers’s characterization of Shaftesbury as “the perfect Stoic theist” urging the compatibilism of the “general MIND” with the “particular MIND” (SC, 2:201) seems correct; see also his essay “Deity” in The Philosophical Regimen (in Life, 13–39).
47. For Shaftesbury, what “is alone properly call’d CONSCIENCE” is not produced by some external, institutional, or metaphysical super-ego: “for to have Awe and Terror of the Deity, does not, of it-self, imply Conscience.” The converse is true—viz., that “religious Conscience supposes moral or natural Conscience” (SC, 2:69).
48. Ibid.; regarding Shaftesbury’s break with his onetime tutor, Locke, see Schneewind who, following Robert Voitle’s biography (The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713), locates the beginnings of that break during the time that Shaftesbury composed the Inquiry in the late 1690s (Invention, 296n).
49. Letter of 7 November 1709 (Life, 416).
50. As Schneewind notes, “Shaftesbury in fact leaves the door open to skepticism by insisting that the capacity to appreciate moral harmony is as much in need of education or training as the capacity for aesthetic judgment” (Invention, 305).
51. Rivers, Reason, 2:113, 115. Berkeley’s vehement objection to Shaftesbury’s motto, πάντα ὑπόληψις (“All is Opinion” [SC, 2:233]), as the expression of a capricious, self-indulgent subjectivism rather deliberately ignores the phrase’s Stoic origins in Marcus Aurelius and, thus, its evident advocacy of “a rigorous mental and moral discipline.” Still, Rivers is right to note how “Shaftesbury’s excessive self-consciousness about what he is doing in Soliloquy deprives his example of practical value” (120), a point also made by Philip Skelton, who in 1744 expresses vexation at how Shaftesbury “so refines the plain and intelligible Science of Morality, that it is impossible for his Reader to find out its foundation, to distinguish, whether it is seated in the rational, or sensitive Part of our Nature” (quoted in Rivers, Reason, 2:121).
52. Darwall proceeds to argue that “a number of important Shaftesburean strains come together at just this juncture—his theology, philosophy of nature, and notions of enthusiasm, love, creative inspiration, sympathy, and mind,” and that “the resulting doctrine of moral sense . . . is far from the empiricist moral sentimentalism of Hutcheson and Hume.” In fact, Shaftesbury’s is “a rationalist theory of moral sense” (British Moralists, 187).
53. Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury,” 280. While Den Uyl may well be right to identify the Soliloquy, rather than the Inquiry, as the “central text for Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy . . . because it alone gives us the method of moral improvement” (283), a fuller account of Shaftesbury’s overall oeuvre would quickly exceed the focus and purposes of the present argument.
54. Stendhal’s aphorism (La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur) appears in Chapter 17 of De l’amour (1822).
55. Reflections, 172, 196–197. On the role of aesthetics in Burke’s Reflections, see Furniss, Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, 113–196; Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 275–302 and, on the defensive (at times paranoid) logic of Burke’s aesthetic politics, ibid., 84–91. As is the case in Burke, so “Shaftesbury’s epistemology is psychological, and it depends on a fusion of the vocabularies of ethics and aesthetics, the good and the beautiful, which is ultimately Platonic in origin” (Rivers, Reason, 2:141).
56. Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury,” 277.
57. Ibid., 285; it cannot surprise that Shaftesbury’s aesthetic approach to virtue ethics insists on the primacy of praxis over theory and, like Plato and Aristotle, posits that “theoretical insight into moral conduct is in many significant respects the result of, not the precondition for, proper character formation” (289).
58. Rivers, Reason, 2:86.
59. On the political, cultural, and religious milieu of late seventeenth-century England, see Brewer, Pleasures, esp. 3–55.
60. Rivers, Reason, 2:106, 108. The 1 September 1712 letter to Micklethwayte is also quoted there.
61. Nussbaum, Therapy, 340.
62. Epictetus, Discourses, 2.10.3.