Shaftesbury on the ‘Natural Secretion’ and Philosophical Personae

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Notes

¹ ‘Prokopē’ is the title of a short chapter in Shaftesbury’s Askēmata, two manuscript notebooks kept in the London Public Record Office, PRO 30/24/27/10 – hereafter referred to as Askēmata – vol. 2, 188–93 (Shaftesbury’s original pagination). The long‐awaited edition of Askēmata by F. Uehlein is announced in the ‘Standard Edition’: W. Benda, G. Hemmerich, W. Lottes and U. Schöldbauer, Shaftesbury, Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, in English with German Translation, 21 vols planned in five series, edited by E. Wolff et al., (Stuttgart: Fromman‐Holzboog, 1981–).

² Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, in Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by D. J. Den Uyl, 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001) – hereafter referred to as Characteristics – vol. 1, 97–8. Den Uyl’s edition is based on the 1732 edition, which is faithful to the 1714 edition.

⁵ Soliloquy, in Characteristics, vol. 1, 107. One of the first scholars to detect the importance of Soliloquy was R. Marsh, Four Dialectical Theories of Poetry: An Aspect of English Neoclassical Criticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965).

³ The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, edited by B. Rand (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900).

⁴ The only monograph devoted to Askēmata – although through Rand’s edition – is F. Uehlein’s, Kosmos und Subjektivität. Lord Shaftesburys Philosophical Regimen (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1976).

⁶ What Shaftesbury has in mind is the meditative soliloquy, not the strategic one. This distinction is essential to the understanding of his argument. When Hamlet speaks to himself on the stage, does his soliloquy express his inner thoughts to the audience, or rather, is it intended to be heard on the stage by the other characters in order to inform or mislead them? Soliloquies are very common in Shakespearian drama. It certainly depends on the context whether they are used as means of expressing private thoughts through public speech (in that case the character is just thinking aloud and the soliloquy is a conventional representation of inward discourse), or are supposed to be overheard by other characters on the stage (then the self‐discoursing character is not thinking aloud, but is actually speaking). Shaftesbury quotes Hamlet’s soliloquies as an instance of the Stoic struggle with ‘fancies’. He does not formulate the distinction between meditative soliloquies and strategic ones, but he points the way towards it when, in a footnote of Soliloquy (in Characteristics, vol. 1, 108), he quotes from Persius’s Satire II: ‘Illa sibi introrsum, & sub lingua immurmurat: ô si / Ebullit patrui præclarum funus […]’ (‘Inwardly to himself and secretly he mutters: “O if only my rich uncle could suddenly be buried” […]’) The expression of such a wish is a good, albeit malicious, instance of meditative soliloquy. In the preceding verse, which Shaftesbury does not quote, we find also a case of strategic soliloquy, to which Persius shrewdly opposes the meditative one: ‘Mens bona, fama, fides, hæc clare, et ut audiat hospes.’ (‘He says aloud, so that a passing stranger may hear: “[If only I could have] a good mind, fame and credit”.’) There is a gap between the feigned soliloquy (through which we want others to hear that we want to be good) and the other one (in which we express to ourselves our deep wishes). This is enough to suggest that the kind of soliloquy that matters to moral philosophy is not the strategic, but the meditative one.

⁷ B. Rand’s edition of Second Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914) is even worse than his edition of Ask‐ēmata. Fortunately, the manuscripts have been recently edited with care, although without annotations: Second Characters/Schriften zur Kunst, in Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, series 1, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Fromman‐Holzboog, 2001).

⁸ For a general and well‐documented account of Shaftesbury’s thought, see I. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, II, Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

⁹ J. G. Hayman, ‘Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 10:3 (1970), 491–504. In his biography, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University, 1984), R. Voitle extends the use of the concept to account for Shaftesbury’s multifaceted personality in political, social or domestic contexts.

¹⁰ Hayman, ‘Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona’, 498.

¹² Askēmata, vol. 2, 301–2. My transcriptions from the manuscript are literal: misspellings and odd punctuation are kept.

¹¹ The distinction appears also in Characteristics. See e.g. Soliloquy, in Characteristics, vol. 1, 207: ‘That in the very nature of things there must of necessity be the foundation of a right and wrong taste, as well in respect of inward characters and features, as of outward person, behaviour, and action.’

¹⁵ Here Shaftesbury hints at his grandfather, the Machiavellian first Earl of Shaftesbury.

¹⁶ Askēmata, vol. 2, 200.

¹³ Askēmata, vol. 1, 59. The development about ‘Self’ runs throughout the first book.

¹⁴ Askēmata, vol. 2, 194 and 228, respectively.

¹⁷ On ‘relations’, see Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus, II, 22, 18–20.

¹⁸ ‘Inversion’ is defined as ‘the wresting of [preconceptions] from their natural and vulgar sense into a meaning truly natural and free of all delusion and imposture’. Askēmata, vol. 1, 112.

¹⁹ Askēmata, vol. 1, 59.

²⁰ Askēmata, vol. 1, 133, cited below.

²¹ On ‘attention’, see Discourses of Epictetus, IV, 12.

²² Discourses of Epictetus, III, 24.

²⁴ Askēmata, vol. 2, 201. The dialogical examination of ‘what I am’ does not suppose that we are transparent to ourselves. On the contrary, we have to question our own desires and representations in order to make them declare what they value and aim at.

²³ According to Hayman (‘Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona’, 503), Shaftesbury ‘invariably appealed to the individual’s consciousness of his own being and the possibility of developing a coherent character from this consciousness’. That account of personal identity suits Locke, not Shaftesbury.

²⁶ Miscellaneous Reflections, IV, 1, in Characteristics, vol. 3, 121.

²⁵ Askēmata, vol. 1, 59, quoted above.

²⁷ Shaftesbury refers to his own practice of ‘self‐discourse’.

²⁸ Askēmata, vol. 1, 110–11. We have here a distinctive instance of ‘self‐discourse’, which requires an explanation. According to the Stoics, as rational beings, we would not desire something if we did not believe that it is a good thing. Believing that it is a good thing amounts to saying (implicitly) to oneself that it is good. That is the first stage of implicit inward discourse. The second stage, in which ‘soliloquy’ consists, is that of explicit inward discourse, or, to put it more precisely, of the second‐order inward discourse that gradually makes explicit the first‐order one, i.e. the evaluations that are silently attached to representations. As Shaftesbury puts it in Soliloquy, in Characteristics, vol. 1, 107: ‘Our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that ’tis the hardest thing in the world to make ’em speak out distinctly. For this reason, the right method is to give ’em voice and accent.’ The logical concept of dianoia (discursive thought) is obviously behind the Shaftesburian notion of the moral soliloquy. The purpose of the ‘self‐discoursing practice’ is to question our ‘fancies’ or ‘ideas’ so that they reduce themselves to what they consist of. Soliloquising aims at producing cognitive representations (phantasiai katalēptikai), i.e. representations that do not exceed what they represent. See Discourses of Epictetus, III, 8. It is well known that the ancient Cynics and Stoics used to value parrhesia – frankness in speaking the truth to others. To put the whole argument in a nutshell, the Shaftesburian soliloquy may be correctly viewed as the equivalent of parrhesia (free and plain speech) in the relation to oneself.

²⁹ Askēmata, vol. 1, 154.

³⁰ Askēmata, vol. 1, 133.

³² Askēmata, vol. 2, 371. Shaftesbury refers to Discourses of Epictetus, III, 21, 13–16.

³¹ Soliloquy in Characteristics, vol. 1, 125: ‘These are the airs which a neighbouring nation give themselves, more particularly in what they call their memoirs. Their very essays on politicks, their philosophical and critical works, their comments upon antient and modern authors, all their treatises are memoirs. The whole writing of this age is become indeed a sort of memoir‐writing.’

³³ Askēmata, vol. 1, 72.

³⁴ Soliloquy in Characteristics, vol. 1, 103: ‘I hold it very indecent for anyone to publish his meditations, occasional reflections, solitary thoughts, or other such exercises as come under the notion of this self‐discoursing practice. And the modestest title I can conceive for such works, woud be that of a certain author, who calld them his cruditys.’ Here Shaftesbury has obviously in mind Thomas Coryate, but that may apply to Robert Burton as well.

³⁵ Soliloquy in Characteristics, vol. 1, 98.

³⁷ George Berkeley, Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained, §3, in The Works of George Berkeley, edited by T. E. Jessop and A. A. Luce, 9 vols (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1948–57), vol. 1, 252.

³⁶ On Berkeley’s attack on Shaftesbury, see L. Jaffro, ‘Berkeley’s Criticism of Shaftesbury’s Moral Theory in Alciphron III’, in Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, edited by S. H. Daniel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 199–213.

³⁸ Sensus Communis in Characteristics, vol. 1, 46.

³⁹ John Toland, Clidophorus, in Tetradymus (London, 1720), 94.

⁴⁰ On the French Prophets episode and Shaftesbury’s response, see H. Schwartz, The French Prophets. A Study of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth‐Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); M. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’. The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

⁴¹ Askēmata, vol. 1, 120–1.

⁴² Soliloquy, in Characteristics, vol. 1, 160: ‘The simple manner, which being the strictest imitation of nature, shou’d of right be the completest in the distribution of its parts, and symmetry of its whole, is yet so far from making any ostentation of method, that it conceals the artifice as much as possible: endeavouring only to express the effect of art, under the appearance of the greatest ease and negligence.’

⁴⁵ For Shaftesbury, as for Epictetus, the three great ones are Socrates, Diogenes, Zeno. The first one is Socrates.

⁴⁶ Askēmata, vol. 2, 362.

⁴³ Soliloquy, in Characteristics, vol. 1, 121.

⁴⁴ Hayman, ‘Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona’, 493.