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ABSTRACT
Shaftesbury started his literary career in 1698 with an edition of Whichcote’s sermons. At the same time he worked on An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699) and his ‘Crudities’, which were incorporated after August 1698 in the Askêmata manuscripts. In this paper I argue that Shaftesbury’s critique of John Locke is based on central ideas from Whichcote’s sermons. In his examination of Locke’s epistemology and moral philosophy he uses Whichcote’s arguments, concepts and keywords. Locke’s rejection of the ‘innate ideas’ reduces man to an abstract being, ‘absolutely indifferent towards whatever is presented to him’. In opposition to this reduction he posits Whichcote’s Connatural Notions, ‘the principles of which Man doth consist, in his very first Make’, i.e. the categorial form of human feeling, discernment, understanding and judgment. These connatural principles include the idea of good and evil, i.e. the foundation of a non-legalistic, autonomous morality.
Notes
1 See Großklaus (Natürliche Religion und aufgeklärte Gesellschaft).
The page numbers referring to Shaftesbury’s writings, including his edition of Select Sermons, are those of the Standard Edition [SE]: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Complete Works, Correspondence and Posthumous Writings. Abbreviations used:
Whichcote
Locke
2 This collective name encompasses Xenophon, Plato, the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and his commentator Simplicius, Cebes, Plutarch, Maximus Tyrius, the poets Persius and Horace and with certain reservations the moralist and ‘professed Sceptick᾿’ Cicero. See Chartae Socraticae SE II 5. See also Uehlein (Stoisch, wahrhaft sokratisch).
3 SelSerm 19. For a detailed account of the history of the text, the transcription of the sermons in short-hand by the merchant and philanthropist Thomas Firmin (1632–1697), his two manuscript books that have survived, and for Shaftesbury’s faithful editorial practice, see SelSerm 13–28.
4 Moral 340–54; MR 258, 32 note in SE I 4, 200–2004; SecChar 217.
5 So in a letter to General Stanhope, 7 November 1709: ‘Dente lupus, cornu Taurus petit. Unde, nisi INTUS / Monstratum.’ (Horace, Sat. 2, 1, 52, original emphasis. The wolf attacks with fangs, the bull with horns – how was each taught, if not immanently, from instinct). Cf. SecCh 231, line 26: ‘Among other Citations, Remember Marcus, on ye Rictus of Wild-Beasts & (and here innate Ideas).’
6 Letter to Stanhope (note 5).
7 SelSerm 286. Apart from this ‘Demonstration by the Effect, which I take to be the best’ he alludes to the omnitudo realitatum and the ens realissimum and perfectum but does not unfold these arguments.
8 For a systematic treatment, critique and emendation of the cosmological argument see Cramer, Gottesbeweise und ihre Kritik; ‘Natürliche Theologie und Theologie aus Offenbarung’. For the present discussion of the proofs of god’s existence see Buchheim, Hermanni, Hutter, Schwöbel, Gottesbeweise als Herausforderung für die moderne Vernunft.
9 The idea of the ‘perfectly Good’ and the maxim Omnia in Deo Deus point to the platonic tradition in general. Alcinous, for example, puts together all the characteristics which Shaftesbury attributes to god in The Handbook of Platonism ch. 10, 3. (Translation in Stanley’s History of Philosophy, London, 1656, among Shaftesbury’s books. Modern translation and commentary by John Dillon, Oxford, 1993). For a an intensive explication of the Good in Neoplatonism see Beierwaltes, Procliana, 9–108.
10 Ask 113; Inqu 140; Moral 62–4; MR 54.
11 Ask 216-36 (Natural and Economical Self), here 222. See Uehlein, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 65.
12 Soliloquy, 284, original emphasis. Locke, Essay II, xxviii, 7, 13.
13 That his turn to the religion of love (SelSerm 54, 56) implied a kind of freedom different from his coercive knitting together of free agency and reward did escape his attention?
14 Ask 209. See Shaftesbury’s Index SE I 4, s. v. Virtue.
15 SelSerm 110: ‘Men know by the Use of their Reason, that there is a God: And then when a Man receives any Proposition from God’s Authority; that, is Faith. Natural Knowledge, you see, is anticedent and Fundamental to Faith’. Cf. Theism as ‘fundamental to all religion’ Moral 58 f.; 142; LcE 354 etc. For an excellent exposition of this relationship see Pannenberg, Theologie und Philosophie, 11–36 and Cramer, ‘Natürliche Theologie und Theologie aus Offenbarung’, 257–74.
16 Ask 113; Inqu 110–14; Moral 144–6.
17 Presumably James Stanhope. TNA: PRO 30/24/22/2 fols 150–1. Rand, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, 344–7.
18 Ask 278; Inqu 135; Moral 153.
19 AC 370, original emphasis. Shaftesbury hesitates to oppose central tenets of Christianity directly. This furthered the tendency to ‘christianise’ his philosophy. See Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, 175–99. Walter M. Hatch, the editor of the sole (but incomplete) Characteristics in the nineteenth century (London, 1870) still calls him a Christian Philosopher.
But there lies a deep ambiguity in Shaftesbury’s dialectic. He does not simply dismiss the idea of another life, but he neutralizes this article of the Christian belief — ‘I believe in […] the Resurrection of the body, And the life everlasting’ (Apostles’ Creed) — and makes it indifferent, immaterial, superfluous.
‘Shaftesbury is the most dangerous enemy of religion, since he is the finest’ (Lessing, ‘Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend’, 12. Brief (1759), in Werke, Band 5, S. 56).
20 Virtue ‘in completely nonlegalistc terms’ is excellently elucidated by Darwall, The British Moralists, 193–206.
21 ‘Deiformity’ SelSerm 194, 209, 250 passim. For the patristic tradition of this belief see, for example, Origenes, Contra Celsum III, 28 (end); Athanasius, Against the Arians I, 39; III 34 (end) and Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists, 18–23 and Fürst and Hengstermann, Die Cambridge Origenists, 11–33.
22 Letters to Anthony Tuckney, Salter 44 and 46. ‘The summe of what I said, in my speech, in sermons, and otherwise; amounts to this – that materia theologiae naturalis is demonstrabile, by reason; and materia fidei sacris litteris contenta est summe credibilis; and satisfactorie to reason’.
23 Such indecision does not always result from an act of epoché, it can imply that the religious belief in question is indifferent and immaterial for the moral person. See AC 391 and ‘Resolutions. Religion’ Ask 499–503.