Flesh in the Age of Reason (21 page)

Hobbes painted life black – he was a secular Calvinist, peddling his own version of Original Sin – and the legacy he left to later philosophers was dismal indeed. But was man truly such a wretch? If so, could anything be done about it, except endorsing that reign of prophylactic terror set out by the author of
Leviathan
? Two who grasped the nettle were the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and Bernard de Mandeville.

It must be rare for one philosopher to be present at another’s birth, but that is just what happened in 1671 in the case of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, whose nativity was attended by John Locke, secretary and personal physician to the baby’s grandfather, the leading Whig statesman of the day. Locke’s advice was soon to guide the 1st Earl during the Exclusion Crisis and their subsequent exile in the Dutch Republic. As well as being the key philosopher of Whiggery and liberal individualism, Locke became the grandson’s tutor.

Following his return to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the noble teenager devoted himself to prolonged study of the Greek and Latin authors, with particular attention to Plato,
Xenophon and the great Stoics – Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The Whig principles he inherited were strengthened by readings in the English republicans, especially James Harrington; and he also evidently read widely in divinity, being attracted to latitudinarian divines like John Tillotson, then Archbishop of Canterbury, whose rational theology, faith in human reason and distaste for dogmatism appealed to the young Earl’s cool and classical temper. Most congenial of all were the Cambridge Platonists, notably Benjamin Whichcote and Ralph Cudworth who deemed the standards of good and evil absolute and immutable, not relative or (as for the Calvinists and Hobbes) dependent simply on God’s will. His preferred authorities espoused a benevolist concept of the Deity, a respect for human reason in its quest for truth, and an optimistic affirmation of man’s natural sociability and predisposition to good.

Shaftesbury was affronted by Hobbes’s view of man as fundamentally selfish, by his nominalist denial of inherent and disinterested goodness, and by his
apologia
for absolutism as the only recourse in a wicked world. He owned first editions of his tutor’s
Essay concerning Human Understanding
and the
Two Treatises of Government
(both 1690), evidently read soon after publication, and Locke may have tried out on his pupil some of the educational ideas expounded in his
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693). Deeming the new-born mind a sheet of blank paper, wholly indeterminate and plastic, it followed for Locke that education was all, nurture counted for far more than nature: ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.’ His aristocratic tutee may not have found these egalitarian views wholly palatable, and a sometimes tense relationship developed between tutor and pupil and, more broadly, between certain of Locke’s teachings and the identity to which the young Earl aspired.

In most ways, Shaftesbury turned out the wished-for product of his model education. His politics were to remain impeccably Whig, his hatred of Catholicism and the Stuarts lifelong and passionate; he detested absolutism’s trammelling of the mind; and he proved the staunchest advocate of English liberty – ‘We are now in an Age’, he
proclaimed, ‘when
Liberty
is once again in its Ascendant. And we are our-selves the happy Nation, who not only enjoy it at home, but by our Greatness and Power give Life and Vigour to it abroad.’ Yet through temperament – he was languid and aloof – and the accidents of health – he grew up weak and asthmatic – he avoided the life of politics as pursued by his grandfather, becoming instead reclusive, given over to bookish and aesthetic pursuits.

While impeccably Whiggish, Shaftesbury nevertheless in some ways revolted against Lockean indoctrination – indeed, he occasionally attacked his ‘foster-father’ in a manner plainly Oedipal; ‘’twas Mr. Lock’, he griped in 1709, ‘that struck at all Fundamentals, threw all
Order
and
Virtue
out of the World, and made the Very Ideas of these…
unnatural
and without foundation in our Minds.’ What were his grounds for believing this? It was Shaftesbury’s accusation that ‘Virtue according to Mr. Lock, has no other Measure Law or Rule, than Fashion & Custome’. Locke had no doubt questioned the dogma that moral absolutes were graven on the mind – all came from experience – but the Hobbist gibe would have made the tutor turn in his grave.

Shaftesbury patently had no sympathy for those egalitarian elements in Locke (and before him, Hobbes) which levelled all innate attributes. Ever the aristocrat and connoisseur, his thinking exuded self-possession in the inherent superiority of the polite cultured gentleman. ‘To
philosophize
, in a just Signification, is but to carry
Good-Breeding
a step higher,’ he proclaimed: ‘For the Accomplishment of Breeding is, To learn whatever is
decent
in Company or
beautiful
in Arts: and the Sum of Philosophy is, To learn what is
just
in Society, and
beautiful
in Nature, and the Order of the World.’ No breeding, no philosophy – no justice or beauty, nothing fine.

Hobbes had made it virtually incumbent upon his successors to adopt, in their rebuttals, the analytic and anatomical method which he had wielded to such effect. It was essential to dissect the social animal, reduce it to its elements, and determine what made the human machine tick. Shaftesbury took up the challenge. Although not personally devoted to natural science – unlike Locke, he had no
medical training – he was fascinated by self-anatomy. In the century after Vesalius, ‘anatomizing’ had become a popular literary and philosophical genre, both in the sense of grasping a subject through formal partition and division, as in Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), and also in the sense of prying beneath the surface to unveil hidden truths and lance festering sores – for instance, Philip Stubbs’
The Anatomy of Abuses
(1583). Self-anatomy, introspection into one’s own body (
autopsy
in the literal sense), was the vogue: ‘I have cut up mine owne
Anatomy
,’ declared John Donne in his
Devotions
; ‘dissected myselfe, and they are got to read upon me.’

Performing such a philosophical ‘autopsy’, to bare the nature of the self, was also crucial to Shaftesbury’s philosophical enterprise, in fulfilment of the oracle’s decree: ‘That celebrated
Delphick
Inscription,
RECOGNIZE YOUR-SELF
, was as much as to say
Divide your-self
, or
BE TWO
. For if the Division were rightly made, all
within
would of course, they thought be rightly understood, and prudently managed.’

At the age of 23, Shaftesbury disclosed to Locke, with a fine rhetorical flourish, his commitment to this holy grail of
nosce teipsum
. ‘What I count True Learning, and all wee can profitt, is to know our selves,’ he declared:

Whilst I can gett any thing that teaches this; Whilst I search any Age or Language that can assist mee here; Whilst such are Philosophers and Such Philosophy, whence I can Learn ought from, of this kind; there is no Labour, no Studdy, no Learning that I would not undertake.

But the Cartesian version of this journey into the interior – Descartes’s much-trumpeted ‘discovery’ of the ultimate Archimedean point in Reason – was, laughed Shaftesbury, quite fatuous:

’T
WILL
not, in this respect, be sufficient for us to use the seeming
Logick
of a famous Modern, and say, ‘
We think
: therefore
We are
.’ Which is a notably invented Saying, after the Model of that like Philosophical Proposition; That ‘
What is, is
.’ – Miraculously argu’d! ‘If
I am; I am
.’

Descartes claimed to be on a truth trip, but he was just going round in solipsistic circles. One had to revert one stage further – the real
problem was: ‘What constitutes the
we
or
I
?’ And this once more raised Locke’s question of the integrity, constancy or oneness of the first person pronoun: whether, as Shaftesbury powerfully put it, ‘the I of this instant, be the same with that of any instant preceding, or to come’. With this still unsolved, the ego in the
cogito
counted for nothing.

Introspection bred doubts and led Shaftesbury to recurrent ruminations on the theme of ‘Who am
I
?’, even driving him to the conclusion that ‘I [may] indeed be said to be lost, or have lost My Self.’ A continuing motif of the speculations recorded in the privacy of his notebooks was the unending quest for self-understanding: ‘What am I? who? whence? And to what or whom belonging? with what or whom belonging to me, about me, under me?’ The speculations of a discerning individual given over to introspection, Shaftesbury’s self-probings could be radical in their implications. In his publications, and all the more so in his confidential manuscripts, there flowed streams of consciousness, reflection and commentary, expressive of his grasp of the mercurial and broken nature of consciousness: ever-changing, impulsive, revelatory, quixotic and even self-contradictory in both mood and content. Shaftesbury found the creative quality of his own sensibility engrossing – he grew self-absorbed. Brooding upon it and recording it, it was living proof to him of the presence, power and uniqueness of the human soul that his mind was a spring, forever bubbling up with passions and
aperçcus
.

Shaftesbury had no dread that, at least for noble souls, the flighty and fragmentary quality of consciousness would spell danger. Unlike Collins and other subversive freethinkers, he had not the slightest polemical itch to show that the fleeting character of the mind was evidence of somatic dependence or sickness – that the soul was simply a secretion of the brain which fluctuated, and might perish, with the body. Neither did he entertain fears that the self would crash in consequence of imperfections of memory – indeed, he took issue with Locke’s grounding of ‘conscious selfhood’ on continuity of memory: what counted was the spirited blaze of the moment. ‘Notable
reasoners about the nice matters of identity’, he noted, with a hint of a sneer towards his tutor,

affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. And what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If,
whilst I am
, I am but as I should be, what do I care more? and thus let me lose
self
every hour, and be twenty successive selfs, or new selfs, ’tis all one to me.

Aristocratic cool indeed! Was it not the privilege of a lord to lose himself once in a while, and reinvent himself as he pleased? The status, indeed stateliness, of a nobleman shielded the Earl from the risk of personality disintegration: did he not have a title, a pedigree, a stately pile? Whatever his state of mind, the gentleman in him commanded respect. It was almost as though only the insecure bourgeoisie had the need for something so prosaically reassuring as that insurance policy, continuity of personhood.

Shaftesbury was lastingly charmed by the flair and creativity of his genius. Although he was no Christian, his idealistic, Neoplatonic theosophy dwelt upon the glories of the Deity, the beauties of Creation, and the unbridled participation of the noble soul therein, those ‘Things of a
natural
kind: where neither
Art
, nor the
Conceit
or
Caprice
of Man has spoil’d their genuine order’.

The converse of this elevation of the lofty brilliance of the mind lies in the pungent distaste Shaftesbury so often expressed for the flesh. ‘S
HOU’D ONE
, who had the Countenance of a Gentleman, ask me’, he recorded with disdain, ‘Why I wou’d avoid being
nasty
, when nobody was present’ – what he is talking about is blowing his nose in private – ‘In the first place I shou’d be fully satisfy’d that he himself was a very nasty Gentleman who cou’d ask this Question; and that it wou’d be a hard matter for me to make him ever conceive what
true Cleanliness
was.’ However, he continued, showing contempt for both his body and his imagined interlocutor,

I might, notwithstanding this, be contented to give him a slight Answer, and say, ‘’Twas because I had a Nose.’ Shou’d he trouble me further, and ask again, ‘What if I had a Cold? Or what if naturally I had no such nice
Smell?’ I might answer perhaps, ‘That I car’d as little to see myself
nasty
, as that others shou’d see me in that condition.’ But what if it were
in the Dark
? Why even then, tho I had neither Nose, nor Eyes, my
Sense
of the Matter wou’d be still the same; my Nature wou’d rise at the Thought of what was sordid: or if it did not; I shou’d have a wretched Nature indeed, and
hate my-self
for a Beast.

As this highly revealing instance shows, the Platonist and the fastidious nobleman thus joined in their aversion to the squalor of snot – that too too solid flesh: sparks of the intellect might happily intrude upon Shaftesbury, but not emunctory emissions.

In similar vein is the emphatically heretical memo he penned under the entry for
Somation
(a word seemingly of his own invention, presumably referring to bodily business):

A wretchedly foolish and selfish human creature thinks he has to do with his body and that it is still some part of himself and belonging to him even when he is out of it. A wiser mortal thinks his body no part of himself and belonging to him even when he is out of it. But a truly wise man thinks his body no part of himself nor belonging to him even whilst in it.