Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Early Life

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, was born into a prominent noble family. At the time of his birth, his grandfather, the first earl of Shaftesbury, towered in the forefront of English politics as a champion of liberty and an advocate of Parliamentary power. He was to become an important founder of the Whig Party and a contributor to the development of the two-party system. Because of his son’s ill health and frailty, he became his grandson’s guardian and oversaw the boy’s early education, until the age of eleven. The first earl’s political activity placed him in opposition to King Charles II, and to escape a charge of treason, he was forced to flee to Holland, where he died in 1683. Afterward, Anthony’s father, the second earl, who suffered from an incurable malady that left him an invalid, assumed responsibility for his son.

Anthony’s early education followed the principles of his grandfather’s secretary, philosopher John Locke , who selected a young woman named Elizabeth Birch as his tutor. Known for her ability in Latin and Greek, she enabled her pupil to master these languages by the age of eleven. Evidence suggests that, even from an early age, classical literature and philosophy were congenial to the young earl’s temperament. Following the death of Anthony’s grandfather, Anthony’s father sent him to a preparatory school, Winchester College, where schoolmates taunted him about his grandfather’s Whig politics. Before completing his studies, he left Winchester to take a three-year grand tour of Europe, accompanied by a tutor and his lifelong friend, Sir John Cropley. They traveled to France, Italy, Bohemia, Austria, and Germany before returning to England in 1689. Following his return to England, he devoted an additional five years to his studies.

Life’s Work

In 1695, he was elected to the House of Commons, in which he served three years. In Parliament, he remained a loyal Whig, voting for measures that would extend the liberty of the king’s subjects, but his brief career was not distinguished, largely because of his shy and reticent nature. In 1698, hoping to improve his frail health, he left for Rotterdam, Holland, where Locke had earlier lived. In the liberal atmosphere of Rotterdam, Anthony conversed with learned men, both Dutch and English, and continued his study of the classics. The extensive library of his friend, merchant Benjamin Furly, enabled him to continue his studies.

In November, 1699, upon the death of his father, he inherited his title and was placed in charge of large estates. He spent two years in the House of Lords, but the polluted London air aggravated his chronic asthma, so he retired from public life and left London in 1702. He devoted himself primarily to learning, art, managing his properties, and corresponding and conversing with friends. It is often noted that he retired from public life to devote himself to other pursuits because of his frail health, but it is equally noteworthy that his retirement coincided with the accession of Queen Anne and the return to power of the Tory Party that he opposed. His voluminous correspondence indicates that he spent much effort guiding promising young men in their studies and careers and taking care of his interests in England.

His retirement from public life did not offer him much comfort, because after 1704, he was in chronically bad health. The exact cause remains unknown, but his letters refer to asthma, colds, and recurring fevers; it seems likely that he suffered from tuberculosis. During 1703 and 1704, he again lived for a year in Holland, but afterward he resided in England until 1711. There, he lived in numerous places—at his country estate Wimborne St. Giles in Dorsetshire; at Chelsea and Reigate, where he owned houses; and at the houses of friends. His frequent relocations were often motivated by efforts to improve his health.

In 1709, Shaftesbury married Jane Ewer, the daughter of Thomas Ewer, a country gentleman of Hertfordshire. Their union produced one son, also named Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was to become the fourth earl. In 1711, accompanied by Lady Shaftesbury and their servants, he left England for Europe to seek a more favorable climate. He settled in Naples, but after fifteen months, he died there in 1713. Near the end of his life, too enervated to write, he had others copy his letters from dictation.

Shaftesbury’s early publications were for the most part anonymous. In 1698, he wrote a preface to an edition of sermons by Benjamin Whichcote, a moderate clergyman associated with the Cambridge Platonists. In his preface, Shaftesbury observes that true virtue is not motivated by hope of future rewards or fear of punishments, a viewpoint indicative of the ethical cast of thought that formed a major theme of his writings.

His first important philosophical work, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, appeared anonymously in an unauthorized edition in 1699. In it, he outlines his moral sense theory for the first time. A revised version appeared in the first edition of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

In 1708, he published his A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, also anonymously. The work was prompted by events of the early 1700’s. A splinter group of French Huguenots, known as Camisards, had adopted religious observances that included speaking in tongues and specific prophecies. Camisards who had settled in England predicted the imminent destruction of London by fire and set a specific date when one of their number would arise from the grave, a prophecy sufficiently specific to be easily discredited. Numerous Englishmen, unaccustomed to religious zeal so extreme, argued that the Camisards should be suppressed for their “enthusiasm.” In his pamphlet, Shaftesbury suggests that the proper antidote for excessive zeal is satire though raillery and ridicule. His solution, though moderate by comparison, opened him to the animosity of those who thought that nothing associated with religion should be ridiculed. He developed his position on satire further in Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, arguing the propriety of wit and raillery in the marketplace of ideas.

The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody outlines Shaftesbury’s optimism and religious views. It attempts to explain the ways of God to humankind, depicting the Creator as one who created not the best world imaginable but the best possible. Written in dialogue form, The Moralists is perhaps Shaftesbury’s most ambitious work. The year after The Moralists appeared in print, he published Soliloquy: Or, Advice to an Author, outlining his essentially neoclassic literary principles and accounting for the formation of taste. In this work, he makes the Platonic assertion that truth and beauty are one.

In 1711, these works, along with miscellaneous reflections, were gathered into his major work, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Shaftesbury spent his final months in Naples revising and expanding this work for its 1713 edition and writing other works largely concerned with aesthetics. He left numerous letters, fragments, and miscellaneous writings that were later published, but his influence was based essentially on the works included in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

In philosophy, Shaftesbury limited himself to ethics, aesthetics, and religion; thus, he cannot be considered a systematic thinker. In fact, he disapproved of systems, considering them too restrictive; as an admirer of Socrates, he believed truth should be sought through dialectic and discourse. His writings, often published anonymously, reflect unusual diversity of genre: letters, dialogues, minor treatises, essays, and, as in The Moralists, for example, a blending of genres.

In religion, Shaftesbury, like other intellectuals of his time, distinguished between personal observances and publicly expressed philosophical views. He outwardly conformed to the Church of England, considering support of the national church essential to the good order of society, yet his religious writings are essentially deistic in that he advocates a general, rational, and somewhat impersonal religion. Unlike earlier deists of the seventeenth century, however, he did not argue for innate ideas. His concept of deity was of an impersonal, wise, benevolent Creator who ruled the world through general laws. Despite his opposition to the Camisards, Shaftesbury was inclined toward tolerance of religious diversity, including non-Christian religions. An advocate of general religious principles that are shared by numerous faiths, he distrusted accounts of miracles and abhorred what he termed enthusiasm, or excessive zeal. He believed that the nature of the Creator might be inferred from the order found in nature and the universe, and he advocated an optimistic view holding that the existing universe represented the best possible one. Although he was an exponent of progress, he considered the classical tradition a better foundation for progress than the Hebraic.

In ethics, he began as an opponent of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes , who had advanced a purely egoistic, self-centered ethics, based on determinism. Shaftesbury argued for a more compassionate ethics based on what he termed the moral sense, a concept that he introduced to philosophy. His views are based on assumptions about human psychology heavily influenced by classicism and represent an effort to establish ethics on a nonreligious basis.

Unlike other creatures, human beings are capable of reason and reflection. These powers enable them to discern the order and beauty that exist in the universe. This quality, in turn, leads to a social sense, an appreciation of the order of human society that improves and enriches human life. The moral sense focuses on what upholds and advances this order of society and the universe, whereas evil consists of disrupting the order. A virtuous life consists of a balance between self-interest and the social affections. Although Shaftesbury realized that humankind often falls prey to destructive tendencies brought about by what he terms unnatural affections, human beings are in his view basically good and find beauty in improvement. Where pain and suffering are concerned, Shaftesbury, believing them inevitable, commends Stoic acceptance.

Shaftesbury’s aesthetics was such that he may be more an art critic than a philosopher. Although he held a broad interest in classical art and antiquities, his writings center on painting and literature. As a literary critic, he is firmly neoclassical, upholding the principles of classical Greek and Roman literature as he understands them. In art, he admires balance, proportion, and idealized nature. The painters he recommends include Raphael for his natural, balanced rendition of human emotion, and Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin for their mythological and classical landscapes that idealize the natural setting. Convinced that ordered art improves one’s morals, he scorned art that he labeled “gothick”—strained, violent, excessive, or unbalanced.

Influence

Paradoxically, despite Shaftesbury’s emphasis on classicism in philosophy and art, he is generally regarded as a pre-Romantic thinker, and important themes of his work sustain such a view. His view of the natural goodness of humanity, his emphasis on liberty, his optimism about the potential for improvement of humankind and society, his inclination to see people as part of a larger world system infused with spirituality, his general acceptance of the idea of progress, and his distrust of systems and science all represent ideas and positions advocated by Romantics of various stripes. His ideas were readily available to early Romantics, for Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times went through nine editions between 1711 and 1790 and was translated into French and German.

Shaftesbury absorbed the dominant intellectual currents of the Enlightenment and transmuted them into his own optimistic system. His work achieved popularity in part because of his graceful, genteel, somewhat precious style. On the whole, his influence was widespread but not deep. His cosmic optimism is reflected in Alexander Pope ’s An Essay on Man (1733-1734) and selected essays in Joseph Addison ’s The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714; with Richard Steele ). Philosopher Francis Hutcheson attempted to derive a systematic ethics derived from Shaftesbury’s concept of a moral sense. Hutcheson attempted to demonstrate how individuals develop a social sense as a kind of logical response to observations involving pleasure and pain. Other philosophers who reflect Shaftesbury’s influence include Bishop Joseph Butler , Adam Smith , and David Hume , though they sometimes discredit rather than accept his positions. In both France and Germany, Shaftesbury was cited by numerous philosophers and thinkers, though his optimism was easily reduced to absurdity through a slight distortion. The belief that the world was the best possible creation might be extended to the idea that evil and suffering are good, an idea that Shaftesbury did not propose. This idea was attacked by Voltaire in Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759) and Samuel Johnson in Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale by S. Johnson (1759).

Bibliography

Bernstein, John Andrew. Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant: An Introduction to the Conflict Between Aesthetic and Moral Values in Modern Thought. London: Associated University Press, 1980. Bernstein explores Shaftesbury as a precursor to modern ethics and aesthetics. Whereas Shaftesbury assumed a kind of Platonic unity and harmony between the two, later thinkers have seen them as divided and even opposing. The chapter on Shaftesbury demonstrates how his view of both is at base psychological and is dependent on his generally deistic religious outlook.

Brett, R. L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1951. Brett places Shaftesbury within the Augustan literary context of his time. A major thesis is that Shaftesbury attempted to keep philosophy attuned to the arts, in opposition to empiricism, which tended toward science. Brett stresses the Christian element in Shaftesbury’s thought and credits him with providing general guidelines for literary theory of the Augustan Age. He somewhat exaggerates the philosopher’s influence on contemporaries and on the Romantics.

Grean, Stanley. Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967. In the two major parts of his book, Grean places Shaftesbury’s philosophy within its historical contexts. Part 1 explores views on the nature of philosophy and religion, with extensive probing of Shaftesbury’s views on enthusiasm. The book’s second part explores ethics, its relation to religion, and the meaning of beauty. Grean strongly defends the internal logic and consistency of Shaftesbury’s ideas.

Klein, Lawrence E. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Analyzes Shaftesbury’s Whig political views as they appear in his life and writings. Klein argues that his politics are influenced by his concept of politeness. He draws heavily on An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Shaftesbury’s personal notebooks, applying modern discourse analysis to illuminate Shaftesbury’s methods of writing and clarify his social intent. The book’s second part explores Shaftesbury’s ideas that institutions such as the church and monarchy must be further limited in society for liberty and culture to advance.

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of. The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury. Edited by Benjamin Rand. London: Thoemmes Press, 1995. A look at Shaftesbury’s ideas through an examination of his life and letters.

Voitle, Robert. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Voitle’s book, the most reliable biography available, provides a careful examination of Shaftesbury’s writings. Thoroughly researched, the book draws heavily on unpublished and previously suppressed writings to interpret Shaftesbury’s life and works. An examination of revised and unrevised versions of the writings enables Voitle to trace the development of Shaftesbury’s thought, revealing differences between the earlier and later writings.