New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller Clive Probyn New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today, ed. Patrick Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Pp. 327. $78.95. There are eighteen essays in this handsome, scrupulously edited, and well-produced collection, not counting a brief prefatory address from Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, the twelfth Earl of Shaftesbury. All originate from a three-day conference on the third Earl held in Nuremberg in August/September 2012, the purpose of which was to report on the latest research into the Earl’s life, work, and intellectual context. The underlying aim of both the conference and the collection of published papers was to present a broad spectrum of interpretation reflecting the European cosmopolitanism of their subject. Established [End Page 175] scholarship includes that of the editor, whose premise is that “Reading Shaftesbury is difficult” (no argument there, one might suggest), Michael B. Gill (on top form with an essay on Politeness, Honesty, and Virtue, with a glance at Diogenes and the ethics of public copulation), Lawrence E. Klein (with a stately reading of Shaftesbury’s readers in the eighteenth century), and Isabella Woldt, whose notable recruitment of neuroscience in a discussion of Shaftesbury’s concept of Freedom and “Compatibilism” is one of several novel approaches in the collection. A smaller group of essays takes up Shaftesbury’s views and capacity as a theoretical and practical gardener, and the standout contribution here is Suzannah Fleming’s study of the estates at St. Giles and Little Chelsea, basing her aesthetic arguments firmly on contemporary estate maps and household accounts. Sir William Temple’s interest in sharawadgi and Shaftesbury’s interest in the aesthetics of irregularity bring the East to the West in Yu Liu’s graceful, Confucian essay on the latter’s “Passion for Wild Nature”; in China “gardeners never lined things up into any geometrical shape or symmetrical order, but not because they were lazy or unskilled (as some Jesuit missionaries to China once thought).” Shaftesbury admired the skilled artisan without feeling that he should become one. His horticultural theorizing (and perhaps also his asthma) excluded him from picking up a spade himself. Similarly, his deep fascination for ideas of freedom—for those rich, educated, and socially responsible enough to understand it and be trusted with its exploration—sits perfectly alongside the patrician’s iron control over the vulgar business of printing and publishing his own work. James Pratt’s study of Shaftesbury’s collaboration with Simon Gribelin, the engraver and codesigner of the plates in Characteristicks (1714/15), not only raises the artistic profile of a man to whom Shaftesbury condescended as a mere “engine” or “instrument” of his own higher purposes but also tells us that Pope’s November 2, 1716, instructions to Gribelin relate not, as George Sherburn suggested, to the second edition of Dryden’s translation of du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting but to Pope’s own Works, published on June 3, 1717. It is good to see a skilled artisan emerging from the shadows. The central enigma for the modern reader of Shaftesbury is his challenging, sometimes irritating, often baffling combination of the formal procedures of philosophy and the “freedoms” of oblique literary suggestion, putting stress on traditional relationships between content and style, statement and tone, logic and allusiveness. For readers chiefly interested in Shaftesbury’s philosophical regimen, Andrea Gatti tells us to think of Shaftesbury as a pedagogue at odds with the temper of the age. She argues that Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism is “often a mere mask meant to cover his Stoic convictions,” a device to sweeten the pill of his message about Stoic rigor and discipline at a time when post-Restoration England was in no mood for self-denial. Laurent Jaffro similarly indicates how and why Shaftesbury uses stories, fables, and tales in The Characteristicks and Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author: read them not as literary asides but as essential, enabling procedures that liberate thinking from traditional formal method (on the will, self-control, necessity, and freedom). But there is again a caveat. In a private letter to one of...