Reading David Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' by Babette Babich;

Author:Babette Babich;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Whig Hellenism

When the second system derived from inner

subjective grounds, is the system of the moral

sense, which has nothing philosophical about it

at all. In recent times it is particularly notable in

the English Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.

It won’t catch on so much in Germany, and for

this one has Wolff to thank.

Kant, Lectures on Moral Philosophy

The parameters of the British theory of taste and civil society were defined by the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713). The rhapsodic and dialogical form of his texts liberated philosophy from the learned tome, and anticipated the textual practices employed by enlightenment writers to take philosophy out of the schools and into civil society.206 They also set the agenda for the synthesis of commerce and virtue which occupied British social philosophers during the eighteenth century. In the collection of essays Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Shaftesbury justified the “Revolution Principles” with a philosophy of taste. He followed his tutor Locke in regarding judgment as discrimination, but stated its providential validation in terms of the teleological Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists. More than Locke’s, his writings exemplify what Kant later identified as an “amphiboly,” identifying not only sense and idea, but extending this equation to individual interest and universal end. The repression concealed in this identification was exposed by Bernard Mandeville (1670 – 1733) in his Fable of the Bees. Mandeville claimed that Shaftesbury’s equations of sense and idea, interest and end, and commerce and virtue could only be maintained through violence and deception. His claim was amply borne out by the subsequent defences of Shaftesbury’s position, and was eventually conceded by Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Shaftesbury’s correspondence collected in the Philosophical Regimen207 frames his moral and metaphysical theories within a definite political setting. While continuing the family’s Whig politics of limited monarchy, protestant succession, and the liberty of subjects under law, he was not of the generation of 1688 who considered commerce necessarily injurious to virtue. Shaftesbury’s commitment to the “Revolution Principles,” his “zeal for the Revolution, and for that principle which effected it”208 is distinguishable from the vulgar ‘enthusiasm’ of the moral reformers; he preferred the equation of virtue and beauty over that of virtue and piety. Both virtue and beauty rested on a providential telos which ensured the realization of a “beautiful order.”

Shaftesbury defends this position in his outline of the three possible approaches to practical philosophy in the essay “The Picture of Cebes,” one that

establishes a providence disposing all things in the most beautiful order, and giving to man a capacity to attend to its laws and to follow them; another that attributes the disposition of things to atoms and chance and that makes the pursuit of pleasure its end, and that which takes neither way, but judges things not to be all comprehensible, and therefore suspends opinion entirely.209

Shaftesbury does not reject the Epicurean and Sceptical positions out of hand (positions he later attributed to Hobbes and Locke), but considers their tenets inadequate as foundations for virtue. For him, three elements

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