Abstract

In the 6 treatises that Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, collects in 1711 under the name of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, he explains the nature of truth and exacts a corresponding reform of his contemporaries. Shaftesbury considers truth a quality of ancient thought and behavior, and reform a turn to antiquity. Shaftesbury's "antiquity," however, is not a historical time and place, but a moral category comprising the excellence lost to modernity. There are severe theoretical and practical problems with this project of truth and reform, many of which Shaftesbury both fights and invites with his rather unique logic. In practical terms Shaftesbury believes "ancient" virtue accessible to moderns via a seriously prepared and executed reintroduction of the preeminent genre of "ancient" thought and writing, the philosophical dialogue. Shaftesbury extols the healing potential of the genre in the early stages of his program of reform, and then presents a dialogue himself that shows how a philosophical education toward the fullness of truth converts even a skeptic. This dialogue, The Moralists, is the crux of Characteristics, and it fails to be "ancient." Saturated with the language and concerns of modernity, the dialogue rebuts Shaftesbury's claim of personal exemption from modernity and questions his fitness for transcendence. Shaftesbury both acknowledges and denies this in his final Miscellaneous Reflections. This "missed transcendence" is traced by means of a logical and rhetorical analysis of Characteristics. Shaftesbury's failure is also qualified with the help of both genre theory concerning philosophical dialogue in the eighteenth century, and theories of dialogue, history, and the quotidian as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot, and Mikhail Bakhtin. From such perspectives, and taking into account the compelling mental drama of Shaftesbury's struggle with truth, Characteristics turns out a rather successful work of literature and philosophy