Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (February 26, 1671 – February 4, 1713), was an English politician, philosopher and writer.

Philosophy

Shaftesbury's philosophical importance is due mainly to his ethical speculations, in which his motive was primarily the refutation of Hobbes's egoistic doctrine. By the method of empirical psychology, he examined man first as a unit in himself and secondly in his wider relations to the larger units of society and the universe of mankind. His great principle was that of Harmony or Balance, and he based it on the general ground of good taste or feeling as opposed to the method of reason:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• In the first place man as an individual is a complex of appetites, passions, affections, more or less perfectly controlled by the central reason. In the moral man these factors are duly balanced. "Whoever," he says, "is in the least versed in this moral kind of architecture will find the inward fabric so adjusted, ... that the barely extending of a single passion too far or the continuance ... of it too long, is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery" (Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, Bk. II. ii. 1)
• As a social being, man is part of a greater harmony, and, in order that he may contribute to the happiness of the whole, he must order his extra-regarding activities so that they shall not clash with his environs. Only when he has regulated his Internal and his social relations by this ideal can he be regarded as rule moral. The egoist and the altruist are both imperfect. In the ripe perfection of humanity, the two impulses will be perfectly adjusted.

Thus, by the criterion of harmony, Shaftesbury refutes Hobbes, and deduces the virtue of benevolence as indispensable to morality. So also he has drawn a close parallel between the moral and the aesthetic criteria. Just as there is a faculty which apprehends beauty in the sphere of art, so there is in the sphere of ethics a faculty which determines the value of actions. This faculty he described (for the first time in English thought) as the Moral Sense (see Hutcheson) or Conscience (cf. Butler). In its essence, it is primarily emotional and non-reflective; in process of development it becomes rationalized by education and use. The emotional and the rational elements in the moral sense Shaftesbury did not fully analyse (see Home).

Related Topics:
Hobbes - Butler - Home

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

From this principle, it follows:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• that the distinction between right and wrong is part of the constitution of human nature;
• that morality stands apart from theology, and the moral qualities of actions are determined apart from the arbitrary will of God;
• that the ultimate test of an action is its tendency to promote the general harmony or welfare;
• that appetite and reason concur in the determination of action;
• that the moralist is not concerned to solve the problem of freewill and determinism.

From these results we see that Shaftesbury, opposed to Hobbes and Locke, is in close agreement with Hutcheson, and that he is ultimately a deeply religious thinker, inasmuch as he discards the moral sanction of public opinion, the terrors of future punishment, and the authority of the civil authority as the main incentives to goodness, and substitutes the voice of conscience and the love of God. These two alone move men to aim at perfect harmony for its own sake in the man and in the universe.

Related Topics:
Hobbes - Hutcheson

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Shaftesbury's philosophical activity was confined to ethics, aesthetics and religion. For metaphysics, properly so called, and even psychology, except so far as it afforded a basis for ethics, he evidently had no taste. Logic he probably despised as merely an instrument of pedantic judgment for which, in his day, and especially at the universities, there was only too much ground.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The main object of the Moralists is to propound a system of natural theology, and to vindicate, so far as natural religion is concerned, the ways of God to man. The articles of Shaftesbury's religious creed were few and simple, but these he entertained with a conviction amounting to enthusiasm. They may briefly be summed up as a belief in one God whose most characteristic attribute is universal benevolence, in the moral government of the universe, and in a future state of man making up for the imperfections and repairing the inequalities of the present life. Shaftesbury is emphatically an optimist, but there is a passage in the Moralists (pt. ii. sect. 4) which would lead us to suppose that he regarded matter as an indifferent principle, coexistent and coeternal with God, limiting His operations, and the cause of the evil and imperfection which, notwithstanding the benevolence of the Creator, is still to be found in His work. If this view of his optimism be correct, Shaftesbury, as Mill says of Leibniz, must be regarded as maintaining, not that this is the best of all imaginable but only of all possible worlds. This brief notice of Shaftesbury's scheme of natural religion would be conspicuously imperfect unless it were added that it is popularized in Pope's Essay on Man, several lines of which, especially of the first epistle, are simply statements from the Moralists done into verse. Whether, however, these were taken immediately by Pope from Shaftesbury, or whether they came to him through the papers which Bolingbroke had prepared for his use, we have no means of determining.

Related Topics:
Moralist - Leibniz - Pope - Bolingbroke

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The influence of Shaftesbury's writings was considerable both at home and abroad. His ethical system was reproduced, though in a more precise and philosophical form, by Hutcheson, and from him descended, with certain variations, to Hume and Adam Smith. Nor was it without its effect even on the speculations of Butler. Of the so-called deists Shaftesbury was probably the most important, as he was certainly the most plausible and the most respectable. No sooner had the Characteristics appeared than they were welcomed, in terms of warm commendation, by Le Clerc and Leibnitz.

Related Topics:
Hume - Adam Smith - Leibnitz

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In 1745 Diderot adapted or reproduced the Inquiry concerning Virtue in what was afterwards known as his Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu. In 1769 a French translation of the whole of Shaftesbury's works, including the Letters, was published at Geneva. Translations of separate treatises into German began to be made in 1738, and in 1776-1779 there appeared a complete German translation of the Characteristics. Hermann Hettner says that not only Leibnitz, Voltaire and Diderot, but Lessing, Mendelssohn, Wieland and Herder, drew the most stimulating nutriment from Shaftesbury. His charms, he adds, are ever fresh. A new-born Hellenism, or divine coitus of beauty presented itself before his inspired soul. Herder is especially eulogistic. In the Adrastea he pronounces the Moralists to be a composition in form well-nigh worthy of Grecian antiquity, and in its contents almost superior to it. The interest felt by German literary men in Shaftesbury was revived by the publication of two excellent monographs, one dealing with him mainly from the theological side by Dr. Gideon Spicker (Freiburg in Baden, 1872), the other dealing with him mainly from the philosophical side by Dr. Georg von Gizycki (Leipzig, 1876).

Related Topics:
Diderot - German - Hermann Hettner - Voltaire - Lessing - Mendelssohn - Herder

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Authorities

In Dr. Thomas Fowler's monograph on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in the series of English philosophers (1882) he was able to supplement the printed materials for the Life by extracts from the Shaftesbury papers in the Record Office. These include, besides many letters and memoranda, two Lives of him, composed by his son, the fourth earl, one of which is evidently the original, though it is by no means always closely followed, of the Life contributed by Dr Birch to the General Dictionary. For a description and criticism of Shaftesbury's philosophy reference may also be made to James Mackintosh's Progress of Ethical Philosophy, W Whewells History of Moral Philosophy in England, Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics (Channing's translation), Sir Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, Windelband's history of Philosophy (Eng. trans., 1893); WM Hatch's unfinished edition with appendices of the Characteristics (1870); JM Robertson's edition of the Characteristics (1900); B Rand's Life (1900).

Related Topics:
James Mackintosh - Jouffroy - Sir Leslie Stephen - Martineau

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For his relation to the religious and theological controversies of his day, see, in addition to some of the above works, J Leland, View of the Principal Deistical Writers, V Lechler, Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, J Hunt, Religious Thought in England, CJ Abbey and JH Overton, English Church in the Eighteenth Century and AS Farrar's Bampton Lectures; G Zart, Einfiuss der englischen Philosophen seit Bacon auf die deutsche Philosophie des 18ten Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1881).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~