Shaftesbury's Stoic Impoliteness in the Soliloquy and Askêmata

Abstract

Abstract: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, is widely understood as a philosopher of politeness. This essay shows the constructive role that impolite writing plays in his Characteristics (1711). Shaftesbury is impolite in two ways: he engages in inappropriate public soliloquy, and he uses vivid medical imagery of vomit and other bodily fluids. These two kinds of impolite speech are connected, and both point back to the private program of rigorous stoic exercises, the Askêmata , that Shaftesbury undertook in the years leading up to the publication of the Characteristics. Shaftesbury exploits the existence of these notebooks to practice a benevolent philosophical deception on contemporary readers, pretending to reveal secrets about himself that in fact remain hidden and demonstrating his indifference to reputation by risking rebuke from readers. But his impolite metaphors of bodily fluids function as waste in the critic Sophie Gee's sense of a remainder left over after something has been made. As such, they function as a textual trace of Shaftesbury's own philosophical process.