Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract

Character, Self, and Sociability in Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 314 pages. $90.Most readers of this review will be familiar with famous portrait of eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, painted by Scotsman Allan Ramsay in 1766. In it, Hume is wearing a powdered wig, a scarlet red coat and waistcoat embellished with fine gold brocade and buttons, and a lace cravat and cuffs. He is looking directly at viewer, and his shoulders are squared toward viewer as well. As Viccy Coltman writes in her contribution to this volume, portrait has come to personify Scottish Enlightenment in dust jackets and conference posters (168). In context of her chapter titled 'Peculiar Colouring of Mind': Character and Painted Portraiture in Scottish Enlightenment, Coltman's comment might seem to be a simple throwaway description of iconic status Ramsay's painting has achieved among modern scholars. Yet, upon further examination, Coltman's observation offers subtle hints indicating that we may have missed something by naturalizing this image of Hume as a synecdochal symbol for Scottish Enlightenment. Or more importantly, we may have forgotten why-besides depiction of its inimitable subject-this painting represents Scottish Enlightenment so succinctly. Coltman's answer, and primary focus of this collection of essays, is word character.'Character' is a spacious term, encompassing at once whole human species, each distinct nation, and particular individuals, Silvia Sebastiani writes in her superb contribution to this volume titled National Characters and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate (187). Sebastiani's piece engages formation of national as each nation, region, or group of people becomes differentiated from each other and specialized according to their particular brand of division of labor as they progress through stages of economic development broadly identified in Scottish stadial history: hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial stages. Scottish conjectural history was an innovation that worked to provide data for Scottish Enlightenment project of what Hume called in his Treatise of Human Nature of man. The science of man, as described by Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning in volume's introduction, was a programmatically antitheoretical attempt to gather truths about human nature in form of insights based on observation of manifestations of customary life, daily transactions between individuals in society (4). This collection of essays addresses multifaceted ways in which eighteenth-century debates over concept of character helped elucidate foundational principles for science of man in form of sociability, selfhood, and sympathy.Surprisingly, most of these essays do not engage with recent conversations in philosophy and literary criticism that treat modern conceptions of selfhood. In fact, concerning three probably most well-known and mostoften referenced studies in modern selfhood-Charles Taylor's Sources of Self (1989), Jerome Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy (1998), and Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of Self (2005)-only Stephen J. McKenna's essay on Adam Smith-outside of volume's introduction-chooses to challenge any of these influential works. (Seigel also has an essay in this volume.) But, as editors clearly state in introduction, question of self has a long history and the present volume does not retrace this ground, though discussions that follow owe much to important work by Charles Taylor, Jerrold Seigel, Dror Wahrman, Deirdre Lynch, Barbara Taylor, and others (8). Upon further consideration, decision to steer clear of these conversations on selfhood is probably right one for this collection of essays. The introduction does work of situating essays within fields of philosophy, history, and literary criticism-as well as within current discourses on eighteenth-century rhetoric and narrative. …