Humor as the Mark of Rationality

Humor as the Mark of Rationality

CHAPTER 1

SHAFTESBURY

RIDICULE AS THE TEST OF TRUTH

How happy would it be, therefore, to exchange this vulgar, sordid, profuse, horrid laughter for that more reserved, gentle kind, which hardly is to be called laughter, or which at least is of another species?

—Shaftesbury (The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury)

Modern philosophy’s study of humor in the good life begins with a British philosopher of the Enlightenment, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s search for a form of humor “suitable with one who understands himself” (Life, 226) places humor at the core of the philosophic ideal of self-knowledge. As he revives the ancient philosophical practices that emphasize the importance of humor in the active philosophical life, he recalls the irony of the Xenophonic Socrates, the Aristotelian virtue of wit (eutrapelia), the Cynic’s ideal of free speech, and the Stoic’s use of humor to advance moral education, and assigns to each an important role in modern philosophy.

Shaftesbury’s originality lies in his unprecedented and unparalleled defense of humor, wit, ridicule, and good humor as important epistemological tools that promote truth and rationality. Shaftesbury considers ridicule a test of truth, humor a tool for reason, properly educated laughter a form of critical reflection, and good humor or cheerfulness the disposition in which philosophical and religious truth are most effectively comprehended. He views humor as a necessary tool for self-education and moral advice in the philosopher’s inner dialogue, conversation, and writing. Humor counters overwhelming enthusiasm, deflates emotional excess, discloses intellectual and moral obtuseness, and enables a sense of proportion necessary for a philosophical character. In philosophical conversation, wit and humor—more efficacious than earnest criticism for the distance they create between passion and argument––promote the philosophic goal of rationality as free critical debate. Finally, the use of humor and wit in philosophic writing annuls the writer’s authority, thereby promoting the autonomy of the reader, a necessary condition for developing independent thought and moral self-education. Critics and commentators have addressed many of these interconnected themes, but their treatment of Shaftesbury’s discussion is random. In contrast, I emphasize in this chapter the richness of Shaftesbury’s treatment of humor and its centrality to his understanding of the good life.

Shaftesbury was raised and educated in the first Earl’s household by John Locke, thus giving rise to the latter’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The third Earl had received under Locke’s tutelage a thorough education in Greek and Latin, which made him remarkably knowledgeable in ancient philosophy. Reviving the ancient ideal of the active philosophical life, Shaftesbury attempted to harmonize a political life with a philosophical one, alternating between intense public service and periods of philosophical retreats, until he abandoned London for health reasons (1711). His grandfather founded the Whig party, which the third Earl generally supported although not unconditionally so. Following Locke’s advice he began his adult life by extensive travels through the continent, living twice in Holland where he befriended French Protestants and skeptics, and most probably became acquainted with Spinoza’s philosophy.

Shaftesbury founded the “moral sense” school of ethics, according to which natural affection for virtue predisposes human beings to act virtuously. Although much of Shaftesbury’s work differed from the dominant style of philosophical discourse of his era and the philosophical tradition since then, his philosophy was very much in vogue during the first half of the eighteenth century, so much so that Oliver Goldsmith was prompted to write that Shaftesbury had “more imitators in Britain than any other writer I know” (Goldsmith 1759, 15). Indeed, Francis Hutcheson, the most important English-speaking philosopher between Berkeley and Hume, championed his thought, and Mandeville, Berkeley, and Butler testified to Shaftesbury’s importance by criticizing his work. Shaftesbury also enjoyed an equally high status abroad. Leibniz praised him. Montesquieu referred to him as one of “the four great poets” of the Western world along with Plato, Malebranche, and Montaigne (Montesquieu 1979, VII, 171), and his eulogy of Shaftesbury was paraphrased by a multitude of learned men in France, Germany, and England. Shaftesbury’s influence could be traced in the work of the French philosophers LeClerc, Voltaire, and especially Diderot, and through the efforts of Robert Molesworth, Shaftesbury’s writings influenced the Dublin scene as well as numerous writers of the Scottish enlightenment. Herder labeled Shaftesbury the “beloved Plato of Europe” and the “virtuoso of humanity,” who “has had a marked influence on the best minds of our century, on those who have striven with determination and sincerity for the true, the beautiful, and the good.”

Shaftesbury provided the philosophical basis for the eighteenth century’s change of attitude toward laughter, which propelled humor into British social, economic, and political significance:

First had come the Puritan, enthusiastic, morose, and austere, then the rake, cynical, gay and debauched: two extremes in agreement of the natural depravity of human nature, and either intensively holy or intensely profane. What good-natured men wanted was a more equable way of life, in which the archetype was neither the saint nor the wit but the benevolent and goodhumoured gentleman, cheerful in his religion, sober in his wit: his theologians were the latitudinarian divines, his journalists were Addison and Steele, his philosopher Shaftesbury … (Tave 1960, 3)

The typical English moralist of the Enlightenment, Shaftesbury was representative of the widely prevailing way of thought sweeping Europe throughout the eighteenth century, during which amiable humor replaced Hobbes’ laughter of superiority. The new view of humor as incongruity, which Shaftesbury helped to promote, elevated it to an unprecedented moral and intellectual height, creating thus an appreciation of humor that continues to this day.

Shaftesbury’s original views on humor not only influenced his contemporaries, but also had an enormous subsequent effect on aesthetics. Despite his extreme criticism of contemporary satire, especially the work of Swift, Shaftesbury justified satiric attempts to establish moral and social truths. Moreover, his views on the relation of humor to truth, reason, virtue, and religion launched an ongoing debate among philosophers, characterized by Richard Brett as “an interminable philosophic controversy over the subject of ridicule, which rose to a special prominence and roused peculiarly strong emotions” (Brett 1951, 168). In particular, Shaftesbury unmistakably influenced subsequent philosophers who defended humor, notably Hamann and, either directly or not, Kierkegaard. Shaftesbury’s innovative views and widespread influence require that we begin with the Enlightenment philosopher to formulate the main issues of the role of humor in modern philosophy.

Significant as Shaftesbury’s views are, it is not an easy task to extract from his work an explicit theory of the role of humor in the good life. First, he purposefully avoids a systematic exposition of his thought. Although he delineates his own project with various references to ancient philosophy, it is Socrates who is his pre-eminent philosophical model. Accordingly, Shaftesbury maintains that the aim of the philosopher is to edify by furthering the other’s autonomy. By contrast, the magisterial approach, which induces passivity before authority, is not suitable to philosophy’s aim and capacity. Philosophy aims at producing moral agents, and the form of Shaftesbury’s collected writings, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is meant to meet this challenge by transforming readers into philosophers who are morally intelligent agents. Moreover, the magisterial approach violates the limits of human knowledge, promising more than philosophy can provide. Endorsing the skeptical methodology of various Greek philosophers and such moderns as Pierre Bayle, Shaftesbury urges his readers to embark on an open-ended quest for truth. With the exception of one early systematic work published without his consent, he writes letters, dialogues, and miscellanies, which he considers more suitable to his educational goals. This style of philosophizing, however, presents an obstacle in the way of a clear-cut understanding of his views on humor.

Second, Shaftesbury makes extensive use of wit, humor and irony, and on occasion assumes an external perspective ostensibly not his own, which occasionally obscures the meaning of his writings. His The Adept Ladys (1702), a short satire on some representatives of the Quakers, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), and Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), establish Shaftesbury as a wit and bring him notoriety as a champion of raillery in discussions of such serious subjects as religion; but they also ambiguate his views on the tools he uses to convey his message. Edward Fowler, the hostile author of Reflections upon A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1709), while finding the letter has “sparkling Air, nice Turns, and clever sorts of Fancy, or lively Allusions,” has conceded its wit to be “full of Wind, and much Froth” (Fowler 1709, 24; quoted in Wolf 1993, 565). Moreover, in the five highly discursive essays, Miscellaneous Reflections on the Preceding Treatises, and other Critical Subjects, Shaftesbury added to the Characteristics, he assumes the voice of a commentator on the contents of the latter. He presents himself in the Miscellaneous as a “critic or interpreter of this new writer” who comments on “some late pieces of a British author.” The “author of the preceding treatises,” he qualifies as “being by profession a nice inspector into the ridicule of things” (Misc., I, ii; CR II, 163), and deems the author of the Miscellanies a “mere comic humorist in respect of those inferior subjects,” which, after the manner of his “familiar prose satire,” he presumes to criticize (Misc., V, i; CR II, 446). Editor Lawrence Klein justly remarks, then, that Shaftesbury takes great care in giving the Characteristics play, both in the sense of humor and playfulness, and in the sense of variety and openendedness (Klein 1999, xiii). The humor and playfulness that characterize Shaftesbury’s work, while fitting his purpose, hinder a clear understanding of his views on humor.

Third, the nature and purpose of Shaftesbury’s humor is not entirely clear on the basis of his writing style and the available biographical evidence. The biographical details about Shaftesbury’s humor are scarce. We know that he could appreciate ridicule’s bite because in his early teens he probably had to endure it from his classmates, and throughout his life he must have continued to encounter the scorn his grandfather’s name provoked. Raised by the latter, he may have been influenced by the remark his grandfather used to repeat, as Locke recorded: “There were in every one, two men, the wise and the foolish, and that each of them must be allowed his turn. If you would have the wise, the grave, the serious, always to rule and have the sway, the fool would grow so peevish and troublesome, that he would put the wise man out of order and make him fit for nothing.” Moreover, Shaftesbury’s style generates disagreement among commentators as to the quality, naturalness, and purpose of his humor. Stanley Grean notes Shaftesbury’s “heavy use of irony and satire, particularly when dealing with religious issues” (Grean 1967, xvii). In contrast, Richard Wolf (1993) finds Shaftesbury’s works humorous and devoid of the biting wit of his contemporaries, such as Jonathan Swift’s. Wolf adds that both Shaftesbury’s reservations about raillery and his manner of harnessing wit and humor in the service of philosophy were strongly influenced by his devotion to certain strands of classical thought and to classical models, especially those of Socrates, Xenophon, and Horace (Wolf 1933). Similarly, John Toland suggests that Shaftesbury’s innate disposition is toward “Socratic Irony and innocent Raillery” (Toland 1721, viii). John Robertson, in contrast, finds Shaftesbury melancholic in his private notebooks, not written for publication and published posthumously as Exercises (Askêmata). Robertson concludes that humor, ridicule, and banter are not natural to Shaftesbury, but the outcome of self-discipline (Robertson 1963, xxi–ii).

Fourth, Shaftesbury holds strong reservations about his advocacy and use of satiric wit that are clearly seen in his Exercises and his reply to Leibniz’s critique of the Characteristics (1711). Referring to himself in the third person, he writes:

Particularly in what relates to the two great concessions of that author in favour of raillery and the way of humour. Does not the author himself secretly confess as much in his work? And does he not seem to despise himself … when, after having passed his principal and main philosophical work … he returns again to his mixed satirical ways of raillery and irony, so fashionable in our nation, which can be hardly brought to attend to any writing, or consider anything as witty, able, or ingenious which has not strongly this turn?

More than any other work he wrote, The Adept Ladys illustrates the sort of jester’s performance for which Shaftesbury castigated himself. His biographer, Robert Voitle, labels it a “hasty jeu d’esprit and not a very witty one” (Voitle 1984, 199). The challenge Shaftesbury set for himself for the first time in the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was to manage his dangerous talents as a writer of raillery in order to encourage thought and virtue in his reader. Wolf suggests that in Shaftesbury’s subsequent works “it is the concept of a fair, decorous, and proportionally appropriate raillery that makes his approach very different from that found in The Adept Ladys and in such works as Swift’s Tale of a Tub” (Wolf 1993, 7). Similarly, John Hayman aligns Shaftesbury with Augustan satiric reformers, such as Addison and Steele, who are intent on curbing the malice of contemporary raillery and providing a proper model of good humored mental disposition (Hayman 1968, 1970). Given the expectations that an author’s wit exemplifies his views on wit and humor, assessing Shaftesbury’s reservations about his use of wit is relevant to understanding his views.

A fifth difficulty for a study of Shaftesbury’s view of the role of humor in the good life is his inconsistent use of relevant terms. Shaftesbury uses raillery, ridicule, banter, buffoonery, laughter, comic, satire, wit, humor, and good humor. Moreover, he confesses to lacking an appropriate term for designating the kind of laughter he advocates, that “more reserved, gentle kind, which hardly is to be called laughter, or which at least is of another species” (Life, 226). Stuart Tave remarks:

If we look closely at what he means by “ridicule,” we find something far more benevolent than satiric, something very like the familiar figure of “good humour,” heightened by an airy, gentlemanly ease. We can do no better than go directly to his opponents, who saw this quite clearly, though to them it was clearly evidence of Shaftesbury’s confusion or dishonesty. (Tave 1960, 35)

Leibniz, for example, notices as well that Shaftesbury is an inconsistent advocate of raillery or ridicule. He maintains that when Shaftesbury introduces the concept of “good humor,” he partly retracts from his position on ridicule. Shaftesbury seeks no quarrel with his critic but rather is honored and satisfied by “the candor and justness of his censure.” Laurent Jaffro, a contemporary scholar sympathetic to Shaftesbury’s endeavor, similarly remarks on Shaftesbury’s inconsistent use of terms:

… in the same discourse, Shaftesbury confounds laughter (in its different forms), smile, mockery and amiable pleasantry; he moves from passions to styles and literary genres; he substitutes to laughter the general problem of ridicule and the question of the art of ridiculing. At the end of these metamorphoses, laughter is nothing else than reflection” (Jaffro 1996, 43; my translation).

Although this is an apt description of Shaftesbury’s confusion of terms, I suggest that there is a certain degree of consistency in their use.

A sixth and final obstacle to a systematic exposition of Shaftesbury’s view on humor is voiced in his reply to Leibniz’s criticism of his thesis on ridicule. Shaftesbury’s response is to admit that his views on “the way of humour” are continuously evolving. Françoise Badelon justly remarks, then, that “the place of laughter is the object of a permanent discussion in Shaftesbury’s work” (Badelon 2000, 29; my translation).

The question I address in this chapter is: What is the role of humor in the Shaftesburean good life? Keeping in mind the problems involved in attempting a systematic account of humor within the Shaftesburean good life, I first introduce Shaftesbury’s view of the good life. I then differentiate between good humor, ridicule, humor, and wit in subsequent sections that center on Shaftesbury’s views of the comic, ridicule, humor, and wit. I suggest that Shaftesbury refers to ridicule as humor when used in inner dialogue and as wit or humor when used in conversation. Following eighteenth-century custom, wit and humor are not clearly differentiated although Shaftesbury does on occasion suggest that the former is a means to the latter. Ridicule and raillery are not discarded in favor of good humor, as some commentators have argued (i.e., Leibniz, Tave): good humor cannot fulfill a critical function, whereas ridicule can and Shaftesbury is definitely interested in the corrective and critical role of laughter no less than in the open and cheerful disposition that goes by the name of good humor.

A study of Shaftesbury’s views of the tragic and the comic as they apply to life is important for determining the appropriate attitude toward it, whether life should be approached in earnest or jest. I suggest that Shaftesbury’s attitude is encapsulated in his notion of good humor, which is nonetheless not clearly differentiated from humor. I address ridicule subsequently as the principal term for which Shaftesbury is renowned, clarifying its relation to truth and reason, and introducing Shaftesbury’s application of ridicule in fighting fanaticism, curbing enthusiasm, and criticizing organized religion. An elaboration on ridicule’s application as humor within inner dialogue or soliloquy, and as humor and wit within philosophical conversation and writing follows. In the concluding remarks, I assess the originality and feasibility of using humor within the good life as recommended by Shaftesbury.

A comprehensive study of the comic and related notions such as ridicule, humor and wit, and good humor within Shaftesbury’s thought has not been undertaken. Although all comprehensive studies of Shaftesbury address some of his views on ridicule, wit, humor, and good humor, they tend to focus on a limited aspect of one or two views in isolation: the political aspect of the freedom of ridicule (Grean 1967); the cultural aspect of humor and politeness (Klein 1994); Shaftesbury’s view on ridicule as a test of truth and its influence on satire (Brett 1951) or the controversy it generated (Aldridge 1948); the relationship of enthusiasm and humor (Larthomas 1985, 1986); and the role of humor and wit in writing (Benda 1982), in conversation (Malherbe 2000), in communication in general (Jaffro 1998), and in sociability (Brugère 1999). Moreover, these studies do not explicitly connect humor and related notions to the Shaftesburean good life because the question of their role in such a life has not been asked. This chapter fills a lack, then, by providing a comprehensive study of all the notions related to the comic that are relevant to an understanding of Shaftesbury’s view of the good life, and in explaining their necessary role in attaining to such a life. I argue that without the use of ridicule, humor and good humor, the Shaftesburean good life cannot be attained.

THE GOOD LIFE

“The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system,” Shaftesbury asserts (Soliloquy, iii, 1; CR I, 189). He attests thus to his main inspiration, the open-ended teachings of Socrates, not only as interpreted in its more orthodox form by Plato, but also as expressed more popularly by Xenophon. Despite the Greek and Roman sources of Shaftesbury’s thought, in particular Platonism and Roman Stoicism, Shaftesbury’s main purpose is to address contemporary needs. More interested in reforming the morals, manners and taste of his day than in discursive reasoning, he aims to promote liberty by devising a cultural program for a post-courtly European culture. To this end, he criticizes the court, ridicules the Church, and rebukes contemporary philosophy for its aloofness from practical affairs and neglect of its role as moral and political educator.

Shaftesbury tells us that his “design is to advance something new, or at least something different from what is commonly current in philosophy and morals” (Misc., III, i; CR II, 251–2). Hardly distinguishable from good education, philosophy for Shaftesbury is a practical endeavor. He intends to bring philosophy back to the everyday world, an aspiration that explains the themes, design and style of his work. Like Hobbes and Locke, who strengthened their influence by writing in plain language, Shaftesbury aims to reach a lay audience unfamiliar with philosophical terminology. Shaftesbury endeavors to rescue the philosophical tradition of the Cambridge Platonists from their dull and pedantic folio volumes, in order to make them available to individuals of culture and sensibility. Bemoaning philosophy’s fate in the modern world, Shaftesbury complains, “she is no longer active in the world nor can hardly, with any advantage, be brought on the public stage. We have immured her, poor lady, in colleges and cells, and have set her servilely to such works as those in the mines. Empirics and pedantic sophists are her chief pupils” (Moralists, I, 1; CR II, 4–5). It appears he convinced his contemporaries of the importance of his project, for Addison, the editor of the Spectator, is a close reader of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and subscribers are duly informed of the paper’s policy to bring “philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses” (quoted in Brett 1951, 41).

To justify his approach, Shaftesbury depicts the English gentleman bored and bullied by clerics and academics. He regularly denigrates the clerical and the homiletic, the academic and the pedantic. He considers sermons and lectures unsuitable vehicles for edification, and often dismisses or ridicules their formal, systematic, consistent, methodical, and abstract character. He blames these traits for the sterility of most philosophical writing. He condemns the style of the pulpit and the classroom as authoritarian or “magisterial,” a word that, in light of its Latin origin—magister—combines a reference to the schoolteacher and to the magistrate. Indeed, as Laurence Klein notes, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics is a collection of “rhetorical gambits aiming to represent a discursive practice distinct from that of the lecture or the sermon” (Klein 1999, xiii).

Shaftesbury maintains that a more polite approach than the lecture or the sermon is required for a more effective philosophy. For Shaftesbury, politeness, a term referring to the conventions of both good manners and refined conversation, fulfills the fundamental rhetorical necessity of making concessions to the knowledge, interests, and attention span of an audience. In this respect, Klein explains, Shaftesbury aims to regulate “style or language by the standard of good company and people of the better sort”—members of the English upper orders, wealthy although not necessarily landed gentlemen, educated and literate although not necessarily learned, men of the world who could naturally be reached through humor, playfulness, variety, and open-endedness (Klein 1994, 75; 1999, xiii). Shaftesbury replaces the magisterial manner with a polite form of writing that is more informal, miscellaneous, conversational, open-ended, and skeptical.

Philosophy, insists Shaftesbury, should make people effective participants in the world. Neither an intellectual discipline for specialists nor a profession, it is rather wisdom accessible to every thoughtful individual: “If philosophy be, as we take it, the study of happiness, must not everyone, in some manner or other, either skillfully or unskillfully philosophize?” (Moralists, iii, 3; CR II, 150; see 153). Given the profusion of human weaknesses, however, it is a therapeutic enterprise as well. In order to understand how philosophy succeeds as a practical activity in pursuit of moral self-knowledge and moral transformation, Shaftesbury’s views of virtue, enthusiasm, and beauty should be explored: Virtue is a noble enthusiasm that forms an inward harmonious beauty, unattainable, however, without the use of humor.

VIRTUE

Shaftesbury’s philosophy reflects the change in attitude toward nature and evil in the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, when, as Basil Willey explains, “the Fall is no longer a haunting obsession, and whatever may be true of man, Nature is now to be contemplated as the finished and unimprovable product of divine wisdom, omnipotence, and benevolence” (Willey 1986, 35). Shaftesbury parts company with theologians who postulate a personal Devil, as well as with philosophers like Bayle who propose a Manichean approach to evil. His optimistic philosophy plays a major role in transforming nature from a fallen world into a revelation of divine goodness and beauty. Nature in this view is God’s good creation designed for human use and enjoyment.

The world is providentially ruled by a Supreme Mind that may be alternatively conceived as the Soul of the universe or as a personality that transcends the world. The Supreme Mind’s rule is absolutely beneficent: Nothing in the universe is “ill” relative to the whole, and everything is as it must be. In this perfect universe the goodness or evil of each system is judged in terms of the functioning of the system as a whole: “Pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, good and ill, seemed to me everywhere interwoven,” declares Philocles, the protagonist of The Moralists, “and yet, this tapestry made of many contrasting colors produces a harmonious over-all effect” (Moralists, i, 2; CR II, 14). That which we consider “evil” is comparable to some of the details of this tapestry, the shading in a picture, or the dissonances in a symphony. Nature, the Sovereign Artist, creates harmony out of contrasting elements. According to this view “seeming blemishes” are the results of limited perspectives. Nature does not err, and “when she seems most ignorant or perverse in her productions, I assert her even then as wise and provident as in her godliest works” (Moralists, i, 3; CR II, 22).

Shaftesbury views Nature as an arena of conflicting forces and interests in which the lower species must always yield to the higher, the lesser to the greater. In this ecologically ordered world of mutual interdependence among living organisms in their natural setting, terrestrial forms are maintained by mutual sacrifice and surrender, as one species preys on another. If in the hierarchy of organisms the sacrifice of one species is considered appropriate at the lower levels, it must be so at all levels, including the human. Each system of organisms is contained in some larger system to which its own interest or good is subordinated. Ultimately, all species are subject to “the superior nature of the world” (Moralists, i, 3; CR II, 22). According to this view, we must not expect exceptions to be made to preserve individual creatures or even species that are necessarily transient. Not only is it justifiable for one species to prey on another, but also disasters such as earthquakes or floods, which harm individual creatures or destroy whole species, are justified on the grounds that all lesser systems of beings must submit to the necessary order of nature as a whole.

The absolute “benevolence” of the ruling Mind, according to Shaftesbury, serves as a model for the proper frame of mind of the human being. People are so constituted as to find happiness in all benevolent affections and actions, and misery in the contrary. For Shaftesbury, continuously changing Nature manifests a perfect adjustment of matter to form, and form to environment, as in Stoic doctrine. Shaftesbury finds the same perfection in the harmony of the human affections, as in the harmony and proportion manifested in the greater world. Delight in evil, he acknowledges, exists but it is “unnatural” (Inquiry, II, ii, 3; CR I, 331).

This being so, all cajolery and terrorism used by religion are vicious and fallacious. God, he claims, is to be loved without hope of reward or fear of punishment. In Shaftesbury’s view true religion should be based on nature rather than on revelation. Religion is an enemy of virtue in so far as it deprecates human good nature and relies on future rewards and punishments: “Little were you aware,” Theocles exclaims in The Moralists, “that the cruel enemy opposed to Virtue should be religion itself!” Theocles concludes that “by building a future state on the ruins of virtue, religion in general, and the cause of a deity is betrayed; and by making rewards and punishments the principal motives to duty, the Christian religion in particular is overthrown, and its greatest principle, that of Love, rejected and exposed” (Moralists, ii, 2; CR II, 256).

Orthodoxy is also the enemy of true or natural religion because it establishes faith not on the beautiful and harmonious order of things (the best and only genuine external evidence), but on miracles, that is, on violations of this order.

Immortality is likely enough, Shaftesbury holds, yet future happiness is not a reward for right living, because virtue and happiness are the same. Similarly, future punishment should not be an incentive for acting morally because such considerations weaken natural moral interests and because there is no merit in moral acts prompted by fear of punishment. Nonetheless, he concedes that a strong hope of future reward and fear of future punishment may lead men into habits conducive to true virtue, whereas a weak belief in future rewards and punishments is entirely detrimental to morality.

Virtue is natural to humankind, but is nevertheless subject to refinement. Perfect virtue in this view amounts to a perfected taste in morals. To be good-humored and cultured is to be religious and moral, and thus happy. Conversely, malevolence and malfeasance lead to misery.

Shaftesbury advocates this view of virtue as early as his first publication, a laudatory preface to an edition of sermons by the Cambridge Latitudinarian, Benjamin Whichcote (1698). Whimsically apologizing for publishing yet more sermons when so great a number have already been preached and printed with so little apparent effect, he asks, why it is that men who profess to be Christians live the lives they do. This is not, he suggests, on account of any radical depravity to be found in mankind, but rather because exhortation is misdirected when religion is perverted to serve political ends. In response to the view that natural sociability and goodness are not innate human characteristics, which is accepted by atheists and defenders of religion alike, Shaftesbury affirms the divine perfection of nature and the “good nature” of the human being against atheists, who see the universe as a chaos of atoms, and against the orthodox, who hold that we live in a world that has been permanently ruined by the fall of Adam.

Like Nature, Shaftesbury claims, human beings are essentially “good,” and, in contradistinction to Hobbes’ view, naturally sociable. Human virtue consists, he says, in “following Nature,” in the sense that it is a reproduction within the individual microcosm of the harmony and proportion manifest in the greater world. In the Inquiry (1699), Shaftesbury proposes to differentiate the “good and natural” affections, which are directed toward the general welfare of a group, from the “ill and unnatural,” which are directed neither toward private nor public good. We possess by nature a faculty he calls the “moral sense,” which enables us to both distinguish between right and wrong and prefer the right (Inquiry, I, iii, 2; CR I, 262). This faculty is closely akin to the aesthetic sense, by which we recognize and approve the harmonious and proportionate. The virtue of a rational creature consists in a “rational affection” toward what is right, that is, a “just sentiment” or a “proper disposition” (Inquiry, I, iii, 2; CR I, 262).

Shaftesbury follows the Stoics in holding that the conditions for our happiness are internal and subject to our own power, that “opinion” is important in attaining the good life, and that the highest good is not the “tumultuous joy” of unregulated passions, but a “constant, fixed, and regular joy, which carries tranquility along with it, and which has no rejolt” (Life, 116). Heavily influenced by Greek thought, Shaftesbury’s philosophy is nonetheless crucially shaped by a modern way of thinking, as is also evidenced in his theory of enthusiasm.

ENTHUSIASM

Shaftesbury’s theory of enthusiasm, which accounts for the importance he attributes to humor, is another modern twist of an ancient view, in this case the important role Plato assigns to enthusiasm in his philosophy (Phaedrus 241e, 249e, 253a, 263d; Ion; Symposium). For Shaftesbury, enthusiasm is the inner movement of the human spirit, carrying it beyond itself toward the vision of the good. Only the mind so “taken up in vision” is capable of the affection that is the essence of the moral life—the life in harmony with Nature and God.

Shaftesbury’s theory of enthusiasm thus resolves an epistemological problem. Knowing with certainty that all things work for the best presupposes a comprehension of the universe as a whole that is impossible for the finite mind to grasp (Moralists, iii, 1; CR II, 108). Because it is impossible to know that everything “demonstrates order and perfection,” we must rely on enthusiasm or ultimate commitment to show us the way (Moralists, ii, 4; CR II, 67). Human beings are able to surmount the limitations of finitude, and, at least at moments, to intuit the harmony of the whole universe, through ecstatic moments of faith or enthusiasm in which the mind is “caught up in vision.” Shaftesbury’s final epistemological appeal is not to evidence or logic alone, but to enthusiasm. He considers enthusiasm a rational process that does not contradict logic or evidence, but rather affords a higher vantage point from which logic and evidence derive their meaning. This is the only standpoint from which one can be reconciled to a view of the paradoxical relationship of universal and particular providence, and to the concept of particular evils embedded in the universal Good.

Enthusiasm arose within Protestant discourse as a way to characterize and disparage the excesses of Protestant fervor. The term first appeared in the early seventeenth century, meaning “divine possession,” and by 1656 the word “enthusiast” first appeared in an English dictionary, where it referred to Reformation Anabaptists as “a sect of people that thought themselves inspired with a Divine spirit, and to have a clear sight of all things which they believed.” “Enthusiasm” may have been transformed into a general slur against Nonconformists because it attacked religious positions in terms of the believer’s psychology and “transferred religious argument from issues of doctrine to estimations of social personality” (Klein 1994, 162). In the Restoration period, the valence of “enthusiasm” was entirely negative, but, by the 1690s, the term came under transvaluative pressure. Shaftesbury made a twofold contribution to the transformation of “enthusiasm.” First, he joined in the transvaluation, establishing a positive meaning for it. Second, he continued the polemical and denigrating uses of “enthusiasm,” but found new objects for them.

Shaftesbury’s rehabilitation of the affections as foundations of moral agency sanctioned a re-estimation of passionate phenomena such as enthusiasm. Shaftesbury embraces enthusiasm as an important expression of natural affection, as he explains referring to himself in the Miscellany: “So far is he from degrading enthusiasm or disclaiming it in himself; that he looks on this passion, simply considered, as the most natural, and its object as the justest in the world” (Misc., II, i; CR II, 176). Although enthusiasm at best is Platonic divine love inspiring in the individual an understanding of the order of the world and a respect for ultimate beauty, the notion can be applied to lesser states of inspiration as well. At all levels of intensity, however, enthusiasm lifts the individual beyond his ordinary capacities into a higher level of cognition enabling the intuition of matters beyond the self. In this respect, enthusiasm is an essential feature of humanity, closely related to the sociability first described by Shaftesbury in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue.

Unless refined, enthusiasm is vulgar and conducive to vice, delusion, and self-deception. In his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), motivated by the appearance in London of a group of prophetically inspired Christians, Shaftesbury sets the “prophets” aside and, applying his notion of enthusiasm, proceeds to attack the Church. Zealots can be found inside the established Church as well as at its borders. Because enthusiasm is a pervasive feature of human life, enthusiastic prophets are all too likely to pass it on to the reigning clerics and magistrates, thereby giving rise to fanaticism. Thus, Shaftesbury takes a stock element of Anglican polemic and turns it against the Anglican Church, or at least its High Church functionaries.

In keeping with the Protestant tradition he inherited, Shaftesbury defines religious enthusiasm as “uncontrolled passion.” He portrays “every worshipper of the zealot-kind” as affectively unhinged, “no longer self-governed, but set adrift to the wide sea of passion” (Misc., V, iii; CR II, 353–69). He makes clear that enthusiasm in general is a condition in which sound affections escape the mind’s control and grow to excess—a classic instance of the loss of autonomy, as depicted in the Inquiry. Moreover, as the Inquiry leads one to predict, enthusiasm is highly conducive to vice. In addition to affections that are inherently vicious, affections can become vicious if not harmoniously balanced or moderated by reason: “Above all other enslaving vices, and restrainers of reason and just thought, the most evidently ruinous and fatal to the understanding is that of superstition, bigotry, and vulgar enthusiasm” (Misc., II, i; CR II, 180; see also Misc., V, iii; CR II, 345).

Shaftesbury describes “virtue itself” as “no other than a noble enthusiasm justly directed and regulated” (Misc., II, i; CR II, 176). Enthusiasm is not only the culmination of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, but also the dynamic element that enlivens it and sets his thought apart from that of the Deists and rationalists of the Augustan age. Although his allegiance lies with reason, Shaftesbury insists that reason must continually strive to transcend itself. The processes of discursive reason are not, and can never be, sufficient for achieving a complete understanding of the harmonious universal order.

BEAUTY

Shaftesbury’s view of the ultimate harmony of nature necessarily leads him to assert the substantial unity of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Nature is a teleological continuum in which all things contribute (when viewed in the largest sense) to the good and the beautiful. Thus, he writes, “the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth” (Essay, iv, 3; CR I, 94). Harmony and proportion are the classic attributes that link this triad of values: “… what is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable; what is harmonious and proportionable is true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good” (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 268–9).

The harmonious and the proportionate are also the fruitful or the useful in the highest sense (Misc., II, ii; CR II, 207). The physical harmony of the body, Shaftesbury notes, is linked with attractiveness and health, just as emotional harmony is a prerequisite for virtue. However, utility, as Shaftesbury uses the term, does not have merely a material or economic connotation, but is broadly conceived as comprehending all that is useful in achieving the larger ends of human life. Therefore, it is not merely the appearance of beauty that counts but the beauty that lies within. External beauty’s purpose is to lead us to the inner beauties that are “the most real and essential,” and that not only afford the greatest pleasure but also are of the highest benefit.

The taste for the aesthetic in Shaftesbury’s thought is nowhere more clear than in his emphasis on harmony and proportion that is a groundmotif of his metaphysical and ethical theory, as well as of his aesthetics. “The study and love of symmetry and order” is not only the basis of our appreciation of beauty; it is also the source of philosophical and scientific inquiry (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 267). He finds in it the basis for the disinterested pleasure that the study of mathematics affords. The mind delights in those “inward numbers” that designate the ultimately proportionate relationships of all that participates in Being itself: “There is a power in numbers, harmony, proportion and beauty of every kind, which naturally captivates the heart and raises the imagination to an opinion or conceit of something majestic and divine” (Misc., II, 1; CR II, 174). There is “a natural joy in the contemplation of those numbers. That harmony, proportion and concord, which supports the universal nature and is essential in the constitution and form of every particular species or order of beings. …” There is a “beautiful, proportioned and becoming action” (Inquiry, II, ii, 1; CR I, 296), which is “improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue, which is itself no other than the love of order and beauty in society” (Inquiry, I, iii, 3; CR I, 279).

Shaftesbury refers again and again to music, architecture, and painting analogies when defending his theory against the Hobbes-Locke thesis of natural indifference toward the good. According to the latter view, nothing is intrinsically good or bad, admirable or contemptible, except in relation to some law or rule under which it is made to fall, and backed by penalties: “That all actions are naturally indifferent; that they have no note or character of good or ill in themselves; but are distinguished by mere fashion, law, or arbitrary decree.” In contradistinction to this view, Shaftesbury maintains that right and wrong are just as fixed to standards in nature as are harmony and dissonance in music. Something akin to harmony or proportion of numbers is to be found in all these fields. In Soliloquy, the true artist is said to be one who is not “at loss in those numbers which make the harmony of a mind. For knavery is mere dissonance and disproportion” (Soliloquy, i, 3; CR I, 136). The genuine artist must have an eye or ear for these “inward numbers” (Soliloquy, iii, 3; CR I, 217), and “the real honest man … instead of outward forms of symmetries, is struck with that of inward character, the harmony and numbers of the heart and beauties of the affections …” (Misc., II, i; CR II, 177).

The meaning of “inward numbers” as a key to the virtuous character is obscure: It is not clarified in Shaftesbury’s writings and perhaps was not fully clear to him. There may be some Platonic-Pythagorean background to it, which presumably he inherited from Ficino and the Cambridge Platonists. Does he find a basic resemblance between a moral and a mathematical insight? This line of thought has been developed by a number of thinkers of this period, including Samuel Clarke, Sir Isaac Newton’s collaborator, and William Wollaston. Charles Taylor suggests that these thinkers are wrong, however, because

the key analogy behind his numbers and proportions seems to be not so much mathematical necessity as the requirements of orderly wholes. The good life, the good character, was one in which everything took its right place and proportions, no more, no less. The key concept was therefore something like the original Platonic or Stoic one of a whole of things, ordered for the good. One finds the standards by which to live, the firm criteria in nature of the right, through a grasp of the whole order in which one is set. The good person loves the whole order of things. (Taylor 1989, 254)

Shaftesbury does not limit the “natural joy” he describes to the contemplation of harmony and proportion in the fine arts, but finds this joy in the whole range of human activities and pleasures. For Shaftesbury, harmony is not merely a mechanical symmetry of parts in a whole, but rather an organization manifesting an inner creative power. Far from viewing harmony as a static balance of forces, he thinks of it dialectically as the product of a complex interplay of tensions. This is clearly evidenced in his views of the inner harmony of the affections and of the ultimate harmony of Nature. Although he praises symmetry, he does not view harmony as a simple balance of uniform elements. This is evident in his description of the beauties of the natural world, which reveals a genuine appreciation for irregular or asymmetrical design (Moralists, iii, 2; CR II, 125).

For this reason Shaftesbury maintains that “the science of virtuosi and that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same” (Soliloquy, iii, 3; CR I, 217). The virtuoso appreciates or creates aesthetic form. Because for Shaftesbury aesthetic and moral forms are continuous, to be a virtuoso is one of the best preparations for the moral life; better, he remarks, than mere pedantry or empty scholarship. The true virtuoso understands the principles of harmony that underlie both good art and genuine character. “The moral artist who … is thus knowing in the inward form and structure of his fellow-creature, will hardly, I presume, be found unknowing in himself, or at a loss in those numbers which make the harmony of a mind” (Soliloquy, i, 3; CR I, 136). Shaftesbury explains that this does not apply to the artist who merely copies external forms, but to the one who represents “the graces and perfections of minds,” that is, the moral artist who knows the laws of internal form (135).

Beauty is one of Shaftesbury’s “innate” ideas, one of those “ideas” that humans are “really born to and could hardly by any means avoid” (Misc., I, i; CR II, 178). Beauty depends upon the sense of harmony and proportion that Shaftesbury considers “con-natural” and one of the strongest capacities of the mind. Indeed, in addition to explicitly equating the quest for goodness with the quest for beauty, Shaftesbury contends that becoming moral involves becoming a kind of “self-improving artist.” The term self-improving artist is particularly apt, as it captures Shaftesbury’s idea that living well involves taking oneself to be a work of art that one should strive to make as beautiful as possible. Or, as Shaftesbury put it, the “wise and able Man” is he who “having righter models in his eye, becomes in truth the architect of his own life and fortune” (Moralists, iii, 2; CR II, 144). Thus, Shaftesbury’s moral theory culminates in an aesthetic of creative “inward form,” and his legacy is none other than the Greek idea of the beauty of morals. This renewed connection between morality and beauty is one of Shaftesbury’s major contributions to the history of ideas.

The moral or good life should never degenerate into moralism, ossified virtue, or mechanical conformity to external or too abstractly applied laws. The good life requires the spontaneity rediscovered after reflection, invention, and creativity; it requires a certain genius. Shaftesbury invites moralists to see in morality one of the fine arts, maybe the finest, given that morality is the art of living.

Shaftesbury insists that humor is indispensable for the practice of the art of living. The good life lies in the cheerfulness, the happiness, and the quietude that result from the exercise of a virtuous character. The harmony of the virtuous character is an effect of proportion, moral tact, and the spontaneity, art, or genius required for its continuous creation. Humor is essential for attaining this character because it teaches proportion, it has the flexibility necessary to promote tact and the art needed to work with one’s character in a creative and spontaneous manner.

Yet Shaftesbury does not clearly differentiate between good humor and humor, and between ridicule and humor. Thus, both the following discussion of the comic, which introduces the notion of good humor, and the subsequent discussion of ridicule are relevant to an understanding of the role of humor within the Shaftesburean good life.

THE COMIC

The question of whether life is tragic or comic may be important in its own right. In a study of humor in the good life, it gains added significance because whether we perceive life as tragic or comic may determine whether it should be approached in earnest or jest. For Shaftesbury life is neither tragedy nor comedy, thus neither gravity nor jest is the proper attitude toward it: It is rather a mixture of earnestness and jest. For want of a better term, Shaftesbury deems this mixture, “another species of laughter,” which he identifies sometimes as good humor and sometimes as humor (hilaritas). Good humor and humor are not clearly differentiated, but Shaftesbury occasionally suggests the latter is a means to the former. Humor is a remedy for the melancholy he diagnoses as the source of both a tragic view of life and certain forms of the comic. Shaftesbury’s reasons for assessing life as neither tragedy nor mere comedy, as outlined later, shed light on his views of good humor and humor, and on his difficulty of differentiating the two.

THE TRAGIC AND THE COMIC

Shaftesbury rejects the idea that existence is ultimately tragic on the grounds that the cosmic system excludes all real ill, the world is ruled by both universal and personal providence, human nature is good, death is natural, and virtue secures happiness.

Evil is relegated to the status of appearance and is denied thereby ultimate reality. Nothing that is wholly evil can exist because it would be entirely self-negating (Moralists, ii, 3; CR II, 57). Evil, for Shaftesbury, is not an absolute entity; it can only be understood as part of the structure of our experience. The common error human beings make is to evaluate the natural order in relation to the satisfaction of their individual needs and desires. It is the species as a whole, however, and ultimately the universal scheme of things that must be given primary consideration. Nature is “not for man, but man for Nature,” and it is man who must “submit to the elements of Nature, and not the elements to him. Few of these are at all fitted to him, and none perfectly” (Moralists, ii, 4; CR II, 73).

Nonetheless, Shaftesbury maintains that providence works in and through all events, even the smallest. That is, no part of the universe is logically exempt from the purposive control of the Supreme Mind. Although Shaftesbury holds that “Providence is in all,” that it is both universal and particular, it is only when we see it as universal can we understand it as particular. This line of reasoning leads Shaftesbury to the extreme statements found in his Exercises, the private notebooks published after his death: “Persuade them that to be affronted, to be despised, to be poor or to smart, is not to suffer; that the sack or ruin of cities and destruction of mankind are not in themselves ill; and that with respect to the whole, these things are orderly, good, beautiful.” One should learn not only to accept whatever happens in the course of events, but also love it, whether it is “hardship, poverty, sickness, death.” God kills “kindly, fatherly; for the good of everything, and as the preserver of the whole” (Life, 30, 43). Shaftesbury uses more carefully guarded language in the Characteristics, though the underlying sentiment is the same.

This is the kind of optimism that Voltaire mercilessly lampoons in Candide (1759). For Shaftesbury, however, the notion of evil is significant for designating the existence of unfortunate events in relation to individuals or nations. Shaftesbury does not deny that evil is an actual part of our experience; it is absolute, not proximate, evil that he rejects, and he does so on the grounds that it has no ontological status. His treatment of proximate evils is rigorous and his optimism is by no means naïve and unrealistic. He does not gloss over or deny the depth or the extent of moral and social evils, and he is keenly aware of the power of irrational impulses, the “unnatural affections,” in human nature. His letters reveal more clearly than the Characteristics that he views life as a continuous struggle against evil forces and corrupted interests. He never advocates the inevitability of progress, and he negates the moral perfectibility of humanity. In The Moralists, Palemon cries out: “Oh! What treacheries! What disorders! And how corrupt is all!” (Moralists, i, 2; CR II, 13).

Shaftesbury does not ignore the reality of suffering nor seeks to blind us to the tragic facts of our finite experience. Finite tragedies, those from which we suffer in experience, should be properly interpreted, however, as an integral part of a rationally governed whole. To this purpose, we need a right view of God. In contrast, melancholy is at the origin of an erroneous view of religion that yields a tragic view of life: “The melancholy way of treating religion is that which, according to my apprehension, renders it so tragical, and is the occasion of its acting in reality such dismal tragedies in the world” (Letter, 4; CR I, 24). It is imperative for Shaftesbury to dissociate religion from melancholic and tragic moods. Otherwise, instead of knowing God, in whom there is no darkness, we risk ascribing our morose attitude and vindictiveness to Him. Melancholy distorts our vision of the world and dread prevents a true understanding of God. Projecting our illtemper unto God impedes us from approaching Him freely and joyfully. Only ill-humor fails to recognize that God is “the best-natured” mind in the word: “I very much question whether anything besides ill-humor can be the cause of atheism; and certainly nothing else can make us think the Supreme manager sullen, sour, or morose” (Letter, 5, 3; CR I, 29, 17–18).

In this passage as well as in others, Shaftesbury’s view of melancholy as “ill-humor” is expressed in the terms of the ancient theory of “humors” still in vogue in the eighteenth century. Originally referring to bodily liquids whose balance or imbalance results in health or illness, humoralism is a variant of Empedocles’ theory of the four “roots” (earth, air, fire, water), later named the four “elements,” the four qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry), and the four temperaments. The four humors and four qualities are phlegm (water, or a watery substance), which is cold and moist; blood, which is hot and moist; black bile or gall, secreted from the kidneys and spleen, cold and dry; and yellow bile or choler, secreted from the liver, hot and dry. Theophrastus (Aristotle’s follower and the playwright Menander’s teacher) and others developed a set of characters based on the humors to which Shaftesbury is referring. Those with too much blood were sanguine, with too much phlegm phlegmatic, with too much yellow bile choleric, and with too much black bile melancholic. The idea of human personality based on humors contributed to the character comedies of Menander and, later, Plautus. For many centuries, humoralism was accepted culturally as well as medically. Although the theory of humoral types was quite fashionable in England at the end of the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century the meaning of the English term humor became progressively disengaged from the theory of liquids. Humor was employed more frequently to designate a disposition of character and to refer to the disequilibrium of humor that reinforces certain psychological traits.

We know of humor’s power against melancholy since antiquity as well as through the Renaissance school of medicine of Montpellier, where the French doctor Louis Joubert published treatises on the therapeutic value of humor. Humor, Shaftesbury suggests, “is a kind of specific against superstition and melancholy delusion” (Essay, iv, 1; CR I, 85). Arising from the fear of chaos and arbitrariness in nature, melancholy yields disorders such as atheism, fanaticism or superstition—another form of depraved religion. By undermining melancholy or ill-humor, humor helps in attaining the contrary disposition of character—good humor. Shaftesbury maintains that emotional states determine our outlook on life. Thus good humor acquires an epistemological value for him as the only disposition that enables us to perceive the truth about God, nature, human nature, and virtue.

Shaftesbury’s argument for good humor can be found in the second miscellany section commenting on his defense of raillery in Sensus Communis. Some of the issues about humor, good humor and religion are broached here, although not rigorously pursued. Adopting a formal pose, Shaftesbury announces:

1^st. That wit and humor are corroborative of religion, and promotive of true faith.

2^nd. That they are used as proper means of this kind by the holy founders of religion.

3^rd. That notwithstanding the dark complexion and sour humour of some religious teachers, we may be justly said to have in the main a witty and good-humored religion. (Misc., II, iii; CR II, 217)

The apparently rigorous form of exposition quickly dissolves into loose argument, interspersed with anecdote and stylistic digression before it is abandoned entirely (217–37). Shaftesbury toys here with the relation between seriousness and formal method. Failing to provide a formal exposition of his thoughts, he begs the “methodical reader” to forgive a “writing which is governed less by form than humour” (236).

Shaftesbury’s third point is the most substantive. Unfortunately, he abandons his experiment in “formalism” before attending to it. Nevertheless, it is clear that the proposition is intended to praise concepts of divinity as beneficent, interpretations of Jesus as morally exemplary, and the ethic taught by Christianity as benevolent. Shaftesbury devotes considerable attention to the second point, maintaining that the chief “voices” in the Judeo-Christian tradition speak in a good-humored way. Shaftesbury classifies as good-humored writers the authors of the Old Testament, Jesus, the Apostles, and God (227–31). Christ’s miracles “carry with them a certain festivity, alacrity, and good humour,” and God’s good-humored attitude toward Jonah, and even Satan, is for Shaftesbury a model to be emulated. Since the evidence of God’s cheerful and good-natured ways are everywhere, he concludes that we have “in the main a witty and goodhumoured religion” (217; 229–31). Acknowledging religion as witty and good-humored, as Shaftesbury proposes, would counter the sourness of enthusiastic intolerance: “All I contend for is to think of [religion] in the right humour … Good humour,” he writes. Insofar as the Characteristics constitute a “plea for complacency, sociableness, and good humour in religion,” it seeks to submit religion to the discipline of politeness (224).

Perceiving human nature as irremediably flawed may provide an additional argument for viewing life as tragic, but Shaftesbury’s bitter view of humanity expressed in certain passages of his precocious Inquiry Concerning Virtue is attenuated in his later work, The Moralists. Palemon delivers an angry harangue against humanity in the first few pages of the book, yet Palemon’s attitude reflects the very idea that the dialogue as a whole seeks to refute.

Shaftesbury’s optimism regarding humanity is based on his belief in innate social feelings and a natural capacity for correcting imperfections. Shaftesbury maintains that each particular organism in Nature “certainly and constantly produces what is good to itself, unless something foreign disturbs or hinders it, either by overpowering and corrupting it within, or by violence from without. … All weaknesses, distortions, sicknesses, imperfect births, and the seeming contradictions and perversities of nature” result from the influence of some alien element (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 106). There exists a built-in tendency in all organisms to correct their own ailments or flaws. Although his argument seems particularly weak at this point, he seems to see in humor and wit the remedy for human ailments: “… nature has given us [humor] as a more lenitive remedy against vice, and a kind of specific against superstition and melancholy delusion” (Essay, iv, 1; CR I, 85); “for against serious extravagances and splenetic humours there is no other remedy than this [wit]” (Letter, 2; CR I, 15). Indeed, melancholy is manifested in isolation and an indifference to social duties and affections for our fellow humans. An excessive love of self, which breeds melancholy, interferes with our duty to an undifferentiated friendship for humanity. To cure melancholy is to put an end to isolation by enabling the social affections necessary for virtue. Humor as a natural cure for melancholy helps bring about the happiness that virtue secures. The role of humor in Shaftesbury’s view nuances his earlier bitter view of humanity.

Finally, death, seen by the vulgar as tragic, is for Shaftesbury a natural and harmonious process: “It is a consummation. All the numbers are full; the measures perfect; the harmony complete” (Life, 266). The virtuous man has nothing to fear from death, because “by virtue all is made well; for now, if for now only; for hereafter, if for hereafter” (258–66). Death is not to be feared and virtue is sufficient both for this life and an afterlife.

Shaftesbury’s rejection of the tragic view of life is firmly grounded, then, in his denial of the ultimate existence of evil, his affirmation of innate goodness and the human ability for self-correction, his confident belief in a benevolent and humorous God, and his conviction that wit and good humor play an important role in religion. Because life is not a tragedy, melancholic and grave attitudes toward life should be eradicated through the remedies with which nature has provided us, namely, wit and humor.

GOOD HUMOR

Life is not tragic for Shaftesbury. This does not mean that he sees it as comedy. He records his thoughts on the matter in his notebooks:

The buffoon on the stage. We are all but spans and candleends. But this is a jest. Is it so? Bring me a Caligula; ‘twill be quickly earnest. The comedy of the Gallo-Greeks. Excellent play. Admirable comedian. Nothing more instructive. Who could better make this out? Who ever saw this ridicule better and showed it more perfect? But this was horrid! Was it so? When the jest is turned, it seems it is in earnest and not to be laughed at … For what jest with one who considers vicissitudes, periods, the immediate change and incessant eternal conversions, revolutions of world? (Life, 66, 193–4)

Shaftesbury admired Epictetus and may have been influenced by the Roman Stoic philosopher’s views on laughter. For Epictetus the worst vices are lack of endurance (intolerantia), which is a developed form of grief, and lack of restraint (incontinentia), which is a persistent inclination toward hilarity. Epictetus finds fault with hilarity (elation animi) because it expresses excessive joy in all that appeals to our appetite. He recommends shunning hilarity and practicing soberness: “Laughter should not be much, nor frequent, nor unrestrained,” he advises, and recommends that the philosopher “avoid provoking laughter” as well: “It is a habit from which one easily slides into the ways of the foolish, and apt to diminish the respect which your neighbours feel for you” (Epictetus 1937, CLXV, CLXXI). Shaftesbury develops these views in his Exercises:

No comedy (mere comedy). … In the things within is earnest. In the things without, what is all but jest? … see then if the greatest seriousness be not a very jest. Therefore, be it jest or earnest with others, it can be neither to thyself. Their jest, their earnest: both in a manner a jest. But the use of this jest, a serious matter and far from jest. So then use it right within; and for without remember the medium and find the balance as become thee. (Life, 193–4)

Shaftesbury’s internalization of jest may be a response to the Epictetan rejection of laughter. Moreover, by distinguishing between the vulgar and the philosophical use of jest, Shaftesbury lends philosophical value to internal laughter.

Another ancient philosopher Shaftesbury seeks to emulate in the matter of jest is the Xenophonic Socrates. Contrary to the doxology of ancient philosophy, Shaftesbury describes a genealogy according to which Socrates “containing within himself the several genius’s of philosophy, gave rise to all those several manners in which that Science was delivered.” The manners to which Shaftesbury refers are the sublime, the comic, the methodical, and the simple, each associated with one of Socrates’ disciples. Plato, “of noble birth and lofty genius, who aspired to poetry and rhetoric,” according to Shaftesbury, followed the sublime route. Antisthenes, “of mean birth, and poorest circumstances, whose constitution as well as condition inclined him most to the way we call satiric, took the reproving part, which in his better-humoured and more agreeable successor [Diogenes] turned into the comic kind.” Aristotle is the progenitor of the methodical (or scholastic) manner of philosophizing. The fourth is Xenophon the polite, “another noble disciple, whose genius was towards action, and who proved afterwards the greatest hero of his time” (Soliloquy, II, ii; CR I, 254–6).

Shaftesbury finds in Xenophon an author who “was as distant, on the one hand, from the sonorous, high, and pompous starin; as, on the other hand, from the ludicrous, mimical, or satiric” (Soliloquy, II, ii; CR I, 254–6). In his notes for a projected book on the life of Socrates (“Design of a Socratick History”), Shaftesbury complains that Plato’s version of his master was sometimes too buffooning. Xenophon “took the genteeler part, and softer manner. He joined what was deepest and most solid in philosophy, with what was easiest and most refined in breeding, and in the character and manner of a gentleman.”

The most frequently cited author in the Characteristics is not Xenophon, however, but the first century bc satirist and popularizer of Stoicism—Horace. Shaftesbury sees in Horace a fellow aspirant of Stoic wisdom, who succeeded in using his comic gifts in the service of philosophy when addressing an audience predisposed to wit and humor rather than severe virtue. In writing for men such as the corrupt Maecenas, the Roman poet is forced to conceal his Stoicism “artfully” with “an Air of Raillery.” Shaftesbury notes, however, that Horace at his best employs a refined form of humor, observing a “just measure” of irony that can be distinguished from the scurrility of his Epicurean period. Shaftesbury associates this superior form of irony with the Socratic way, and commends it as “not offensive, Injourouse, Hypocritical, Bitter, and contrary to all true simplicity, Honesty or good Manners.”

Shaftesbury’s view of the right use of jest leads to a criticism of the satirists and the unrestrained comics of both antiquity and his era. Contrary to Horace, who used wit to promote philosophic truth, Shaftesbury condemns Lucian of Samasota, the second century ad satirist, for being dissolute in style and manners, denouncing him as a wretch, profane, “horridly Vicious and Licentious.” The Greek playwright Menander is moral and polite, as is his Roman counterpart, Terence, but the remaining playwrights are condemned by Shaftesbury: “As for Aristophanes, a Plautus, a modern play, modern wit, raillery, humour, away!” Shaftesbury also finds fault with ridicule as practiced in his day: So excessively and extensively this distasteful wit is used, that the ablest men in affairs of state are the most notable buffoons, the most celebrated men of letters, the greatest masters of burlesque (Essay, i, 2; CR I, 44–45). “Buffoonery, satire and the common wit” are examples of contemptible human pursuits (Life, 53); contemporary satire is “scurrilous, buffooning, and without morals or instruction” (Soliloquy, ii, 3; CR I, 173), and Swift is detestable, obscene and profane—a false wit. Satire is the necessary outcome of melancholy:

All splenetic people, whether naturally such or made so by ill usage, have a necessary propensity to criticism or satire. The spirit of satire rises with the ill mood, and the chief passion of men thus diseased and thrown out of good humour is to find fault, censure, unravel, confound and leave nothing without exception and controversy. (Misc., II, 3; CR II, 384–5)

Shaftesbury’s view of life as no mere comedy is reflected in his criticism of comedies and satires that attempt to raise a laugh with no regard for morality.

Following the Stoics, Shaftesbury maintains that there is a correlation between the way we view reality and our attitude toward it. However, the vulgar attitude is not indicative of the true state of things: “The same rash opinion creates the evil as the good, where in reality there is neither. … Why tragedy? Why a stage? Why witnesses?” (Life, 203). In contradistinction to the vulgar view of reality, he resolves that “no more of these parts to act, no tragedy. No comedy (mere comedy)” (Life, 193–4). Violent alternations from earnestness to jest should be particularly avoided: “Ridiculous! In humour; out of humour. Now no jest; now no earnest. Now play, odious; now seriousness, more odious. All joy (good news!). All sorrow (bad news again!)” (Life, 193). He portrays accordingly his ideal as a balance:

This middle genius, partaking neither of hearty mirth nor seriousness … If on the one hand thou strenuously resist what offers from the vulgar side and that facetious comic kind, whatever it be of wit, jest, story, and the like; and if, on the other hand, thou as strenuously resist and abstain from that as ridiculous seriousness and solemnity in these affairs, eager contention and striving in the concerns of others, and for the reformation and conviction of others. (Life, 194–5)

Elsewhere he describes “a mirth not out of the reach of wit is gravest. A gravity not abhorrent from the use of that other mirth. In this balance seek a character” (Life, 362). The mixture of “jest” and “earnest” that Shaftesbury calls “soft irony” characterizes the social self at its best, that is, a social self that corresponds with the philosophical self: “Such a tenour as this, such a key, tone, voice, [is] constituent with true gravity and simplicity, though accompanied with humor and a mind of raillery” (Life, 362–6). While the Shaftesburean ideal self maintains gravity and simplicity, it mitigates seriousness with humor and raillery.

Because Shaftesbury believes that the appropriate attitude toward life that is neither tragic nor comic is a middle way characterized by neither hearty mirth nor seriousness, he is not interested in the satirical method but rather in a “sober kind of cheerfulness.” He admires the method of the magistrate who uses no “caustics, incisions, and amputations,” all satirical methods, but “softest balms,” and “with a kind of sympathy” soothes, satisfies, and endeavors “by cheerful ways, to divert and heal” (Letter, 2–3; CR I, 17, 12, 14). Good humor is his explicit remedy for the melancholy of satire (Misc., II, iii; CR II, 223).

Both in the Exercises and in an unpublished text in Latin, “Pathologia sive Explicatio Affectum Humanorum,” Shaftesbury portrays his ideal by differentiating between hearty laughter and a gentler kind of laughter. In the Exercises, he writes:

How happy would it be, therefore, to exchange this vulgar, sordid, profuse, horrid laughter for that more reserved, gentle kind, which hardly is to be called laughter, or which at least is of another species? How happy to exchange this mischievous, insulting, petulant species for that benign, courteous, and kind? This rustic, barbarous, inane, for that civil, polite, humane? The noisy, boisterous, turbulent, loud, for the still peaceful, serene, mild? (Life, 226)

He advises himself to use this kind of laughter only: “Remember what a happiness, improvement, enjoyment, to reserve all that is humorous and pleasant in the temper for such geniuses as those, and for that divine facetiousness (if so I may call it) of the divine man [Epictetus]” (Life, 82). The geniuses whose laughter he seeks to emulate are, as we have seen, Socrates and his follower Xenophon, the playwright of the new comedy Menander, but also the cynics Demonax and Diogenes, because cynicism was praised by Epictetus. This philosophic laughter, the Epictetean “divine facetiousness,” Shaftesbury calls good humor, or simply humor—the term by which we know it today.

A telling description of Shaftesbury’s favored kind of laughter can be found in the unpublished Latin text that antedates A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm—“Pathologia sive Explicatio Affectum Humanorum.” His general argument in this work is that Horace, while laughing, provides a complete description of Stoic epistemology in the third satire of his second book. It is all a matter of judging Horace’s irony, and his laughter, aright. Shaftesbury’s treatise finishes with a long discussion on the nature of laughter, whose end he reiterates in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. As his later prose in English tends to avoid the pedagogic style that characterizes “Pathologia,” nothing he subsequently writes on the subject of laughter is as precise as its description in “Pathologia.” In this work, Shaftesbury distinguishes between two different kinds of laughter, jocositas or mockery, which is a form of evil, and hilaritas, the Latin term for humor, which is a form of admiration:

For hilaritas [humor] and jocositas [mockery] are not the same thing. Indeed, hilaritas, this sort of moderate laughter which can be mastered is a form of admiration, a certain joy which is born of the spectacle or the examining of an exterior object that we judge beautiful. For if we consider this object as pertaining to ourselves, either naturally or at the end of the effort which allowed us to make it ours, immediately such joy deteriorates into boastfulness or pride, if it is about very high qualities. Jocositas is a sort of hearty laughter, which does not let itself be managed, for it is the joy that a shameful hideousness in another causes us, which is foreign to us but as if it represented a good for us. Pleasure and joy can come from a good and beautiful object, either such or one which we take it for such. Since such a laughter is no desire nor aversion nor pain, but pleasure and joy, it follows necessarily that its object, that is, this ridicule or this evil, is held as good and beautiful from our point of view. It is therefore from malevolence and hatred that this laughter stems, it is therefore a species of evil (malevolence), a pleasure derived from the misfortune of another. (P.R.O 30/24/26/7, I, my translation)

The remainder of the text makes Shaftesbury’s case clear—because jocositas or hearty laughter cannot be tamed, it must be eradicated. As Shaftesbury explains in his notebooks, until this kind of laughter is completely eliminated, laughter cannot be controlled. Only when hearty laughter has entirely vanished, can the other kind of laughter—“this sort of moderate laughter which can be mastered”—be used without fear of losing control. The second kind of laughter, hilaritas, derives from admiration and laughs with beauty rather than at ugliness. Admiration should be directed only outwards, for when directed inward it turns into pride or boastfulness. As in the Exercises, Shaftesbury calls hilaritas good humor or simply humor.

Through his notion of humor, Shaftesbury revives an ancient philosophic ideal that furthers the eighteenth-century view of humor as amiable. The notion of amiable humor is promoted by, and in turn helps to promote, close interrelations between jest, on the one hand, and earnestness, tragedy, tears, melancholy, sympathy, and pathos, on the other. The ideal of amiable humor underlies Shaftesbury’s disapproval of other forms of the comic whose aim is not moral criticism and also presupposes the taming of any other kind of laughter.

Shaftesbury is part of the Cambridge Latitudinarian tradition, which holds a similar view on the importance of good humor. According to the Latitudinarians, nature and reason as the first manifestations of divine light are not wholly corrupted by the fall. Claiming an affinity with John Tillotson, the archbishop of Canterbury, as well as to the Cambridge divines, the Latitudinarians insist on the necessity of a good disposition because faith lies not in sermons but in practice, and true practice cannot be motivated by fear. Shaftesbury’s first venture into literature is a laudatory preface to an edition of sermons by the Latitudinarian Benjamin Whichcote (1698). For Whichcote humor is the appropriate disposition of the Christian. He argues that Christian life is not based on fear of sanctions, whether civil (as he thought Hobbes held) or divinely decreed (as in radical Calvinism, which he perceives as melancholic). On the contrary, he claims, Christian life presupposes the development of a good nature, the cultivation of a good temperament, and the prayer of joy.

The Latitudinarians consider (good) humor in this sense to be identical with the religious attitude, but they oppose raillery and wit. Tillotson distinguishes between joy that facilitates the reception of Revelation, and ridicule and wit that erroneously attack the most sacred subjects. Stuart Tave suggests that “the subsuming category of ill-natured wit, of which raillery was the social form and satire the literary, was ridicule, and against this, the root of evil, the severest attack was made” (Tave 1960, 27). Shaftesbury is not only part of the Latitudinarian tradition, but also more generally, of the seventeenth-century movement that attempted to bring joy back to religion. He deviates considerably, however, from the Latitudinarian tradition: In equating wit and humor, he transforms Whichcote and Tillotson’s views on humor from a disposition toward religion into a judgment of religion. Moreover, whereas both consider good humor an attitude that opens the mind to faith, the Latitudinarians reject ill-intentioned wit or raillery. Shaftesbury, in contrast, defends wit and raillery unconditionally, allowing its use in matters of religion as well. For this reason, Shaftesbury’s views of ridicule, humor, and wit cannot be reduced to his ideal of good humor.

RIDICULE

Shaftesbury ascribes epistemological value to good humor as the attitude through which truth is most likely to be grasped. Important as good humor is to the Shaftesburean good life, Shaftesbury is best remembered by both defenders and adversaries as the proponent of a doctrine compressed into the phrase “ridicule, the test of truth.” Ridicule is an important term in an investigation of Shaftesbury’s view of humor in the good life, not only because the term has been closely associated with him, but also because it is the key to understanding Shaftesbury’s views of humor and wit. Determining the meaning of “ridicule, the test of truth,” requires, first, examining Shaftesbury’s explanations of the relations of ridicule with truth and reason; and, second, understanding how Shaftesbury uses the notion of ridicule in his writings.

RIDICULE AND TRUTH

The phrase “ridicule, the test of truth” never appears in exactly this form in the Characteristics, although Shaftesbury comes close to it in several places. There are four passages that seem to refer to ridicule as the test of truth. The first passage associates reasoning with the test of ridicule: “How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?” (Letter, 2; CR I, 10). The second suggests that justified raillery is a principal proof of truth: “Truth, ’tis supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject” (Essay, i, 2; CR I, 44). The third substitutes wit and humor to ridicule: “Without wit and humour, reason can hardly have its proof or be distinguished” (Essay, i, 5; CR I, 52). Finally, the fourth passage suggests that humor and gravity test each other: “‘Twas the saying of an ancient sage … that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which should not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear serious examination was certainly false wit” (Essay, i, 5; CR I, 52). A closer approximation to “ridicule, the test of truth” is found in some of the index entries Shaftesbury listed in the 1712 edition of the Characteristics:

Ridicule, its Rule, Measure, Test.

Test of Ridicule.

Truth bears all Lights. —Ridicule a Light, Criterion to Truth.

    (CR3 III)

The controversy surrounding Shaftesbury’s view of ridicule and its relation with truth and reason has generated a heated debate in the eighteenth century, which is addressed at the end of this chapter. To this day, commentators are divided in their understanding of the meaning of Shaftesbury’s views of ridicule. The majority of contemporary scholars, however, agree that the phrase “ridicule, the test of truth” does not adequately represent Shaftesbury’s views because, they point out, he is advocating “the test of ridicule” and not a “test of truth.”

Shaftesbury never implies that “Ridicule is the only infallible test of truth,” as one of his contemporaries claims, nor does he ever contend, as another charges, that ridicule “may be successfully applied to the investigation of unknown Truth” (Brown 1751a, 6). For Shaftesbury, ridicule is not a means to discovering new truth, nor is it a logical proof of the truth or falsity of a proposition. It is doubtful that Shaftesbury ever thinks of ridicule as a mode of cognition. Ridicule is an instrument of reason, and it is reason ultimately that must distinguish between truth and falsehood. Nonetheless, there are four major ways of understanding what Shaftesbury means by ridicule as the test of truth.

1. One way of understanding “ridicule, the test of truth” is to take the phrase at face value and to assess it in light of Shaftesbury’s theory of truth. Shaftesbury holds that reality is an organic, harmonious, and perfectly congruous whole. Any statement that is true, or any statement that is descriptive of this reality, cannot but refer to these features, and although these characteristics may not give us a definition of truth, they do provide us with a criterion of truth. On the contrary, anything that lacks the characteristics of organic harmony and congruity is unreal. Any statement, therefore, that is incongruous, any statement that reveals an internal disharmony, is untrue. Falsehood is characterized by a quality that can only be described as ridiculous.

To assess Shaftesbury’s view of ridicule, his view of truth should be further clarified. Shaftesbury never doubts that a genuinely free interplay of ideas ensures that the best will prevail; only bad ideas suffer when subjected to free and humorous treatment:

I can very well suppose men may be frightened out of their wits, but I have no apprehension they should be laughed out of them. I can hardly imagine that in a pleasant way they should ever be talked out of their love for society, or reasoned out of humanity and common sense. A mannerly wit can hurt no cause or interest for which I am in the least concerned; and philosophical speculations, politely managed, can never surely render mankind more unsociable or uncivilized. (Essay, ii, 3; CR I, 65)

Shaftesbury’s defense of freedom of thought is based on the assumption that truth is more powerful than error: “Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance” (Letter, 1; CR I, 6). Falsity mimics truth, exists only as its parasite, and lies paradoxically reaffirm it. Thus, Shaftesbury is overwhelmingly confident that, where men are allowed free trial and experience, truth will prevail: “Let but the search go freely on, and the right measure of everything will soon be found” (Letter, 2; CR I, 10). In accordance with Shaftesbury’s belief that free trade in goods is indicative of a healthy economy, free trade in ideas indicates a healthy culture. Free exchange of ideas is important for the religious sphere as well. As expected from an advocate of rational religion, reason for Shaftesbury presents no threat to religious truth. True theism can only benefit from the establishment of an entire philosophical liberty (Life, 353), by which he means rational discussion in contradistinction to an appeal to emotions.

Shaftesbury’s confidence in the power of truth to maintain its own in free discussion may seem optimistic, but it is not naïve. He recognizes that human beings may err as well as be misled by others, and that liberty can be abused, but he believes that generally extremes balance each other and are tempered by good manners; atheists in his own time, he notes, are using “modester and more polite” language (Life, 353). It is important to remember, finally, that his optimism about the predominance of truth is conditional on the degree to which human beings attain self-mastery and harmony of the affections, which are the prerequisites of sound reasoning and true freedom.

In a world where truth predominates and reason always benefits by free discussion, ridicule can pose no threat. In A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm Shaftesbury asks: “What ridicule can lie against reason?” (Letter, 2; CR I, 10). Indeed, he suggests that virtue has less to fear from its “witty antagonists” than from some of its ardent defenders. Yet, one cannot help asking, what about wit that is not “mannerly” and philosophy that is not “politely managed?” Like others in the eighteenth century, Leibniz believes that the widespread use of ridicule might hurt truth itself because “men love less to reason than to laugh.” Though he approves the use of wit against fanaticism, Leibniz fears the consequences of its application to the “truly good and sacred,” for anything, regardless of its merit, can be made to appear ridiculous. Moreover, Leibniz thinks that since laughter escapes reason and thus tends toward excess, the distinction between vulgar and moderate laughter is aleatory. The vulgar is more extensive than generally assumed: a great number of educated persons are vulgar with regard to reason, Leibniz believes. To count on reason to regulate laughter is illusory. Shaftesbury is particularly open to this criticism, Leibniz suggests, for at times he seems to forget the questionable ends to which humor may be put.

Two answers to these objections can be found in the Characteristics. The first is that humor should be controlled and regulated; the second is that truth is congruous and harmonious. Acknowledging the excesses to which wit may be carried, Shaftesbury’s first answer insists primarily on the auto-regulation of humor:

’T’is in reality a serious study to learn to temper and regulate that humor which nature has given us as a more lenitive remedy against vice, and a kind of specific against superstition and melancholy delusion. There is a great difference between seeking how to raise a laugh from everything, and seeking in everything what justly may be laughed at. (Essay, iv, 1; CR I, 85)

There is a difference between “genteel wit” or “true raillery,” on the one hand, and mere “buffoonery” or “banter,” on the other. For Shaftesbury, the former is an instrument of reason; it presupposes self-control and the regulation of the passions. The latter form of laughter, “banter,” is a passion, as are “extravagant mirth, airiness, humour, fantasticalness, buffoonery, drollery,” whose control is as difficult as it is necessary and might come at the social cost of appearing uncouth:

There is nothing more unsafe, or more difficult of management. … It is enough to say that it is wholly unmanageable whilst any of that impotent sort remains, or whilst anything of this kind is in the least degree involuntary in the temper, and not perfectly under command. But what strength of mind, constancy, and firmness this implies is easy to understand. (Life, 152–3)

Moreover, laughter is “malignity hid under humanity” (160). It should be rejected since it runs counter to sympathy:

Consider the thing itself; in the bottom, what? [malevolence]. … Gall, venom; but of a different kind, and more hidden. That anger; this contempt. That reproof; this reproach. … See it in excess, see it when given way to and soundly followed. The characters it forms, the tempers, humors, morals of such as these. … The wellbred people … and the mere vulgar—porters, carmen, clowns; and to which of these most belongs the hearty laugh? …

Caligula, whose whole character was of this sort: a play, sport, a mockery of mankind; … and all this with humour, raillery, wit, a comedy. … Go to prison and see things there. Who merrier (as they say) than those jail-birds? See … the character of the galley-slaves and common rogues. The humour of the soldiery when most of all cruel and in the very actions of cruelty. … Who merrier? Where is drollery, buffoonery, jest more perfect or more thorough? Where is the laugh heartier, sounder? Who have more of it? Deeper of it? Who have it in more perfection, more bona-fide, and (as they say) from the very heart? Poor, mad people and naturals, how treated? … The diversion of seeing Bedlam. The usual entertainments of princes and such as those: the court fool, the dwarf, man-monkey, or any such mockery of human kind … yet what is better received than these jests? What a better laugh? See the malignity of this, and by this judge of all other laugh. (Life, 225–6)

This amounts to a rejection of laughter. It is surprising coming from the advocate of the freedom of ridicule, but not from “the friend of man,” as Herder called Shaftesbury.

As with any other passion, laughter can be tamed by Stoic techniques of self-mastery: “The best practice and exercise is to go by contraries, just in the teeth of temper, just opposite to humour” (Life, 195). Another exercise is to “laugh alone and even at serious times, or rather then most at all.” Choosing laughter “at contrary times, and excite to it rather than be carried to it by temper,” helps control it. More advice includes avoiding “drollery and obscenity,” which are of “the ill sort” that pertain to “that wrong and involuntary kind.” The general guiding maxim is Epictetean: “Let not your laughter be excessive” (82). Shaftesbury uses the Stoic techniques of inversion and reduction: Inversion is defined as “the wrestling [of fancies] from their natural and vulgar sense into a meaning truly natural and free of delusion and imposture”; reduction, to use a medical metaphor, is to purge a representation artificially inflated, and as though it were purulent, in order to reduce it to its true principle (P.R.O. 30/24/27/10, 112, 354). With inversion and reduction, humor (hilaritas) takes the place of mockery (jocositas), as the goal of the soliloquy is to tame impotent laughter in order to make room for laughter as an instrument of reason. Moreover, the eradication of hearty laughter is necessary in order to find a balance between gravity and mirth: “A mirth not out of the reach of wit is gravest … a gravity not abhorrent from the use of that other mirth …” (362). This is Shaftesbury’s ideal of good humor.

In addition to the private taming of laughter, Shaftesbury maintains that wit and humor tend to correct and refine themselves in company. “Freedom of wit,” thus, is the best protection against false wit or “scurrilous buffoonery”:

… wit will mend upon our hands, and humour will refine itself, if we take care not to tamper with it, and bring it under constraint, by severe usage and rigorous prescriptions. All politeness is owing to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision. (Essay, i, 1; CR I, 46)

Even if wit exceeds its proper limits, which Shaftesbury concedes it may, an appeal to the magistrate for repression by force is not a good policy. If persons do not have the good sense to correct erroneous impressions in their own minds, governmental interference is not likely to help; rather it may make the situation worse, for political repression tends to encourage the “bantering” spirit.

Although thought cannot be forcibly controlled, the public expression of opinion can and should be regulated to some degree. In public gatherings certain conventional limitations should be accepted willingly out of respect for common feeling and as a matter of good taste: “The lovers of mankind respect and honor conventions and societies of men” (Essay, i, 1; CR I, 46). In general, Shaftesbury’s views on tolerance are in accord with those of John Locke and Matthew Tindal, whom he expressly praises. Thus, the liberty he defends amounts to “the liberty of the club,” or the complete liberty of private conversation (Essay, i, 5; CR I, 53).

Shaftesbury’s claim that humor should be both autoregulated and refined through private conversation is his first response to those who criticize his view of ridicule as a test of truth. The second and more fundamental answer Shaftesbury offers is based upon the conviction that truth and virtue are ultimately congruous and harmonious, whereas error and vice are incongruous and inharmonious. Because the essence of the comic for Shaftesbury is incongruity and inconsistency, he sees error and vice as inherently ridiculous. On the other hand, truth and virtue do not lend themselves properly to comic treatment, as their mark is congruence and consistency:

Nothing is ridiculous except what is deformed; nor is anything proof against raillery except what is handsome and just. … A man must be soundly ridiculous who, with all the wit imaginable, would go about to ridicule wisdom, or laugh at honesty, or good manners. (Essay, iv, 1; CR I, 85f)

Shaftesbury concedes that humor may be directed against good causes and against truth itself. He is willing to take this risk, however, because of his conviction that in a free society truth in the long run triumphs. Truth prevails because he believes true wit picks the right objects to ridicule, whereas false wit does not.

The theory that ridicule is a test of truth may be seen as a logical development of Shaftesbury’s optimistic philosophy. Philosophical optimism of the kind advocated in the Characteristics considers evil illusory. Much of what we regard as evil is not evil at all, according to this view, only part of a larger good; but in so far as evil does manifest itself, it conflicts with what is real. It can be laughed at as, strictly speaking, pure nonsense. Intrinsic evil is self-contradictory because ultimately it does not exist. Evil, which is tantamount to ugliness for Shaftesbury, is ridiculous, not only in the sense that it is capable of being ridiculed, but also in the sense that it is silly. This is the belief at the core of Shaftesbury’s remarks on ridicule. One can safely laugh at evil, for good will always stands the test of ridicule, whereas evil will be seen in its true light as foolish. Thus, Shaftesbury maintains “it is the hardest thing in the world to deny fair honesty the use of this weapon, which can never bear an edge against herself” (Essay, iv, 1; CR I, 85).

The idea that ridicule is a test of truth should be understood in light of Shaftesbury’s theory of truth is Richard Brett’s reading. He bases it on his conviction that the idea that ridicule is a test of truth is not something Shaftesbury thought out in passing. More than an aphorism, it is something he consistently maintained, firmly believed, and that moreover makes sense in relation to his view of truth as congruence and falsehood as incongruity (Brett 1951, 171). The problem with this reading is that it makes the relation between ridicule and truth dependent on a view of truth that most of us may find difficult to endorse. Konrad Lorenz’s recent views on humor may shed light on the meaning of Shaftesbury’s view of ridicule as a test of truth without encountering this obstacle.

2. Konrad Lorenz makes humor a detector of insincerity rather than falsehood. Repeating almost verbatim the usual arguments in favor of the idea that ridicule or humor are allies of reason, Lorenz writes that Humanistic ideals “have for their ally a heaven-sent gift of man … a faculty as specifically human as speech or moral responsibility: humour. In its highest forms, it appears to be specially evolved to give us the power of sifting the true for the false” (Lorenz 1966, 252). According to this view, humor is not a detector of error, but of lies and insincerity, and may function as the best test of truth in that sense:

Humour is the best of lie-detectors and it discovers, with an uncanny flair, the speciousness of contrived ideals and the insincerity of simulated enthusiasm. When pompousness is abruptly debunked, when the balloon of puffed-up arrogance is pricked by humour and bursts with a loud report, we can indulge in uninhibited refreshing laughter which is liberated by this special kind of sudden relief of tension. It is one of the few absolutely uncontrolled discharges of an instinctive motor pattern in man of which responsible morality wholly approves. Responsible morality not only approves of the effects of humour but finds a strong support in it … satire is the right sort of sermon for today. In any case, there is no doubt that humour is rapidly becoming more effective, more searching and more subtle in detecting dishonesty. (252–3)

According to Lorenz and Shaftesbury before him, humor, inasmuch as it ridicules insincere ideals, is a powerful ally of morality, and even more so when used as self-ridicule.

3. Like Lorenz, Alfred Aldridge, Ernst Cassirer and Jean-Paul Larthomas translate Shaftesbury’s doctrine of ridicule as the test of truth into a statement about insincerity (Aldridge 1945, 154; Cassirer 1953; Larthomas 1986). Ridicule should be used against a mistaken seriousness and an arrogated dignity, against pedantry and bigotry (Cassirer 1953, 183). Shaftesbury believes that whoever fears the liberty of wit and humor hides his pretensions under false gravity. This is the very essence of imposture (Larthomas 1986, 359). Gravity, seriousness, and formalism are indicative of imposture, and should be eradicated in us first (Letter, 2; CR I, 10–11). But Larthomas adds the following argument: If the relation to truth is false, if the conviction is inauthentic, virtue is only “mechanical.” This is a consistent theme in Shaftesbury, inspired even in the terminology used by one of the Cambridge Platonists, John Smith. In Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion (1660), Smith writes: “There are a sort of mechanical Christians in the world, that not finding Religion acting like a living form within them, satisfy themselves only to make an Art of it. … But true Religion indeed is not Art, but an inward Nature that contains all the laws and measures of its motion within it self” (Smith 1660, chap. 3, sec. 1).

Larthomas’ reading of Shaftesbury elucidates the role of ridicule not as a test establishing truth, but rather as a test of the authenticity of a subjective appropriation of truth. The tact appropriate to the moral sense maintains the mobility of the relation of the finite to the infinite, of the internal form to the Idea, of reason and enthusiasm. Through its relation to the infinite, enthusiasm exalts value; on the other hand, through their relation to the finite, wit and humor minimize and relativize value. The tact required for moral sense presupposes a shift in emphasis from ridicule to the urbanity of wit and humor, and from the other as the target to oneself. This will be explained further in the section on wit and humor.

4. Finally, one more reading of ridicule as a test of truth should be mentioned. For Stanley Grean, the phrase “ridicule, the test of truth” denotes the free and objective state of mind with which we approach a subject and evaluate it (Grean 1967, 123–4). Nothing should be exempt from raillery as a means—whether by satire, irony, farce, or simply asking “is it not ridiculous?”—to examine the various aspects of a subject. Grean suggests that the logical terminology “test” and “criterion,” although misleading, have at least a figurative application: Ridicule has a kind “of proving power in that what cannot stand up under free and humorous examination, in Shaftesbury’s opinion, is not well-grounded in reason and Nature” (Grean 1967, 124).

Stuart Tave, however, dismisses ridicule altogether: not only “Shaftesbury nowhere clearly says that it is a test,” but “his true path was the middle way of good humour” (Tave 1960, 35, 39). Shaftesbury’s true path is indeed good humor, as Tave argues, but I believe he is mistaken in dismissing ridicule, which is the Shaftesburean way of attaining good humor.

With the exception of Tave’s view, the above interpretations are not mutually exclusive. If ridicule is the test of truth for Shaftesbury, as I believe, with Brett, that it is, it follows that whatever cannot withstand free and humorous examination cannot be well-grounded in reason either, as Grean holds, and that ridicule’s chief value may lie in its use as a test of demeanor to unmask imposture, as Aldridge, Cassirer and Larthomas maintain. Examining Shaftesbury’s use of ridicule to restrict enthusiasm—a necessary condition for achieving a harmonious and virtuous character—may help determine the meaning of ridicule as a test of truth.

APPLYING RIDICULE

Shaftesbury uses ridicule to criticize enthusiasm, a popular term at the time denoting religious fanaticism. He suggests that individuals must search inward to discover the principle of mastering enthusiasm for beneficial use. This is accomplished through humor and the rhetorical device of ridicule, whose desired effect is to encourage dialogue and the open testing of ideas.

Two instances of ridicule aimed against religious enthusiasm include a satire and an open letter. In the short satire The Adept Ladys (1702), Shaftesbury mocks representatives of the Quaker sect accused of “enthusiasm,” a state that poses a threat to the enthusiast as well as society because he lacks the self-awareness required for limiting delirium. In A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), a response to the London appearance of a group of prophetically inspired Christians, Shaftesbury anonymously ridicules religious delusion. He proposes good humor as a more efficient means than shrill polemics and publicly orchestrated persecutions to disarm what are considered dangerously deluded people. Shaftesbury introduces humor into the discussion of religion because he believes that there is no better test for the truth of a claim than its ability to withstand ridicule. Good humor not only fosters tolerance, but by permitting wit and ridicule to examine religious doctrine, also furthers freedom of thought.

Not surprisingly, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was greeted with a storm of abuse, its opponents rushing to publish against what they considered an assault on religion itself. In response to several pamphlets attacking the Letter, Shaftesbury wrote Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), where he elaborated his views on humor and did nothing to remove the impression given in his Letter. Shaftesbury’s Miscellaneous Reflections unmistakably ridicules the integrity of priestcraft, the authenticity of the Scriptures, the credibility of miracles, and the High Church’s dangerous pretensions (Misc., II, ii; CR II, 212–4).

Shaftesbury maintains that religion must be subjected to the test of ridicule, a view that disturbed many of his ecclesiastical contemporaries. This idea, however, is not new. John Dryden, for example, considers the “satirical poet … the check of the laymen on bad priests” (Dryden 1926, II, 260; quoted in Grean 1967, 122), and poking fun at clerics a practice at least as old as Chaucer. Shaftesbury, however, gives it a sharper expression. Not only enthusiasm, but also all religious practices and beliefs should be able to vindicate themselves when put to humor’s test. He commends the “reverend authors” who make use of humor to answer heresy and doubt, suggesting that they may laugh some men into religion who had previously been laughed out of it. Shaftesbury finds a deep underlying connection between true religion and “good humor”; in light of the fact that mental attitudes associated with humor open rather than close the mind to true faith, only false religion has reason to fear humorous treatment.

Shaftesbury caricatures the zealot as a figure of unsociability (Moralists, I, iii; CR I, 24–25). The enthusiast attempts to impose his will on others and coerce them into accepting his opinion; Shaftesbury sees him as the opposite of the person whose social interactions foster in others a sense of their autonomy. It is against this antisocial figure that Shaftesbury mounts his defense of raillery as a servant of reason: “freedom of raillery” is “a liberty in decent language to question every thing, and an allowance of unraveling or refuting any argument, without offence to the arguer” (Essay, ii, 4; CR I, 49). The assertion that certain subjects are too grave to be ridiculed should be discarded because “gravity is of the very essence of imposture.” The substance and tone of public discourse has to be as free as possible of unwarranted claims to authority. It is necessary to distinguish true gravity from false gravity, and only the former can withstand ridicule. Moreover, a public discourse that is not grave but “light” is quite probably the most serious discourse of all (Essay, i, 6; CR I, 54).

Because for Shaftesbury enthusiasm is the product of “ill-humor” and fear, persecution is bound to promote not discourage such fanaticism (Misc., II, iii; CR II, 221). The state should thus exercise good humor and seek to allay fears rather than raise them when dealing with socially dangerous fanaticism. This is the only hope, according to Shaftesbury, for inducing an attitude of acceptance toward new or different ideas. The view that fanaticism or enthusiasm is the product of ill-humor or melancholy can be found in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Fanaticism is melancholy mixed with devotion (Locke, 1964 [1690], Bk. IV, chap. 19, sec. 7). Humor can be potently associated with enthusiasm because at the root of enthusiasm lies melancholy:

There is a melancholy that accompanies all enthusiasm. Be it love or religion (for there are enthusiasms in both) nothing can put a stop to the growing mischief of either, till the melancholy be removed and the mind at liberty to hear what can be said against the ridiculousness of an extreme in either way. (Letter, 2; CR I, 12)

By curing melancholy, humor helps achieve good humor. This unique combination of enthusiasm and humor is both original and effective in that it diagnoses enthusiasm as essentially melancholic; and drawing on a centuries-old belief, offers humor as melancholy’s cure.

Shaftesbury’s Letter opens a debate on the relationship between laughter, reason and fanaticism that continues into the eighteenth century. The Letter inaugurates the modern notion of humor and prefigures the romantic understanding of enthusiasm. Historical circumstances account for the writing of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, but it is Plato’s philosophy that explains its meaning. Shaftesbury’s aim is not to condemn or scorn enthusiasts, but to educate them. They should look inward for the principle that will check their delirium. To this end, Shaftesbury proposes a new combination of enthusiasm and humor, which he develops in the treatise, first entitled The Sociable Enthusiast (1705) and published later as The Moralists (1709). The plural in the title signals the existence of two main approaches to morality: a skeptical, critical approach inherited from Locke and Bayle, and a poetic, inspired approach inherited from the platonic Eros and renewed in the Italian renaissance. These two approaches must unite for Shaftesbury in a new “mixture” that offers a new perspective of enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is the capacity to be exalted by great ideas and, like laughter, is characteristic of human nature. Shaftesbury’s view of enthusiasm derives from two Platonic sources: Plato’s comparison in the Ion between poetic inspiration, on the one hand, and Corybantic dancers and Bacchic frenzy, on the other (533e–534a); and his detailed description, categorization, and etymology of madness in the Phaedrus as prophetic, telestic, poetic, and erotic madness (244–245c3). In the dialogue between Ion and Socrates, Plato first ties the term enthusiasm to the way a poet and a person reciting poetry can become enthralled by the divine. God-given madness, like motivational love discussed in the Symposium, is a good phenomenon. Divine inspiration figures in the greatest of achievements: poetry, medicine, rescue from disaster, and philosophical insight. In the precursor to the term enthusiastic, Plato suggests that when the agent is in enthousiazôn, a god is “in” the agent (Phaedrus 241e, 249e, 253a, 263d). Alternatively, when the agent is inspired—a “spirit” (daimon) is “in” her. In the Ion, it is not a failure of rationality to be divinely possessed and, in this sense, out of one’s mind. But it is a failure of rationality not to be able to distinguish between the divine influence and one’s own cognitive activities.

Plato’s distinction in the Phaedrus between different kinds of “madness”—rational madness, god-given madness, and disordered desiderative states or mental illness—indicates for Shaftesbury the possibility of reasonable enthusiasm. Both in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, love and happiness cannot be pursued in an attitude of thorough soberness: Love is madness and philosophers are in love with wisdom; thus, rational madness is an essential part of the good life.

Shaftesbury draws on Plato’s intimation of rational madness to promote a sociable and philosophical enthusiasm that walks a narrow path between delirium and reason. Shaftesbury defines reasonable enthusiasm as that which expresses the sublime in human passions. Enthusiasm is a passion in which philosophers partake as well, granted they know, as Theocles in The Moralists knows, how to use inner transport without lapsing into melancholy.

For both Plato and Shaftesbury human rationality requires enthusiasm. Whereas for Plato rationality includes a motivational force so strong that it is plausibly associated with a god, for Shaftesbury reasonable enthusiasm is initially directed toward the harmony of nature, and only later, toward God. He advances a natural religion, that is, a theistic (or deistic) enthusiasm aimed at replacing disorder with an orderly, harmonious, and proportionate nature created by a benevolent God. The quality of Shaftesbury’s nature worship is best illustrated in the concluding sections of The Moralists. Through Theocles, he indulges in an astonishing outburst on the wonders and perfections of nature, disclosing a degree of enthusiasm unparalleled in any of his writings. Gravity, seriousness, and formalism should be eradicated in order to open the way to well balanced judgment. It is this inward balance achieved through humor that prompts Shaftesbury to abandon “raillery” in favor of “wit and humor.” What began as a ridicule of enthusiasts has been transformed into an inner check on enthusiasm through humor—the term Shaftesbury uses for inner ridicule.

Shaftesbury’s originality lies in the new meaning of enthusiasm he proposes:

… all sound love and admiration is enthusiasm. The transports of poets, the sublime of orators, the rapture of musicians, the high strains of the virtuosi—all this is mere enthusiasm! Even learning itself, the love of arts and curiosities, the spirit of travelers and adventurers, gallantry, war, heroism—all, all is enthusiasm! It is enough; I am content to be this new enthusiast in a way unknown to me before. (Moralists, iii, 2; CR, II, 129)

In contrast to the mysticism cultivated by positive religions, enthusiasm has become a passionate interest for the things of this world without idolizing them. Jean-Paul Larthomas finds in Shaftesbury’s view on wit and humor the English version of the critical spirit of Protestantism that rejects the idol of the tribe. Shaftesbury’s originality lies in creating a new alliance between these two human characteristics—humor and enthusiasm.

HUMOR AND WIT

Shaftesbury maintains that ridicule or raillery should be applied to the inner philosophic life’s soliloquy, as well as to philosophic conversation and writing. In the soliloquy of the inner life, ridicule’s specific aim is to help form a balanced and harmonious character by deflating the passions and curing the melancholy that gives rise to unchecked enthusiasm. When referring to ridicule as a tool used in inner dialogue, Shaftesbury sometimes uses the word “humor.” The character formed through soliloquy is both mirrored and further educated through philosophic conversation and writing by using ridicule, now referred to as “wit and humor.” In accordance with eighteenth-century thought and practice, Shaftesbury does not clearly differentiate between wit and humor. Humor, however, as distinguished from good humor, acquires for Shaftesbury the modern meaning of sympathetic yet critical laughter.

Humor serves as a test of truth through the sociability of dialogue, whether as soliloquy, philosophic conversation or philosophic writing. Humor’s role in soliloquy is to restrain enthusiasm’s excesses, thereby opening the way to achieving a balanced character—the goal of the Shaftesburean good life. Together with wit, humor’s role in philosophic conversation and writing is to further moral education through the combination of sociability and rationality. By challenging the melancholy of solitary reason, humor exchanges life-denying solitude for life-promoting good humor. To understand the role of wit and humor within the Shaftesburean good life, I suggest clarifying the relation between humor and enthusiasm, the role of humor in soliloquy, and the roles of wit and humor within philosophic conversation and writing.

HUMOR AND ENTHUSIASM

Shaftesbury’s uniqueness lies in establishing a significant new alliance between two human characteristics—humor and enthusiasm. He does not consider them essential attributes of human nature nor mere “accidents.” Rather, he refers to them as characteristics, that is, distinctive signs of the human species. Shaftesbury does not write a treatise of human nature, however, because the definition of this “nature” varies within civilizations and throughout history.

Human nature contains the principle of its change, and is thus defined differently in various ancient civilizations, such as “Athens and Persia,” as well as in modern cultures. A movement enabling a dynamic alliance between enthusiasm and humor characterizes human nature. The moralist, according to Shaftesbury, is sensible of the rhythm of subjectivity that spreads and checks itself, switching from exaltation to self-criticism “like a diastole and a systole of the soul,” to use Jean-Paul Larthomas’ analogy (Larthomas 1986, 38; my translation). Within this rhythm, laughter is a sudden degradation, a sudden reduction of value to nothing or almost nothing. Because the soul aspires to heights, this reduction is followed by a new height of emotion. This rhythm should be controlled by defining its limits, that is, its “inward numbers and proportions” (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 270), and by taking into consideration the characteristics of the culture in which one lives.

Shaftesbury’s greatest innovation, according to Larthomas, lies in the form (the determining and limiting principle) of the character each of us creates. Monitoring the self becomes a critical principle for creativity, a “limit” for the genesis of the form in the platonic sense of “limit” found in the Philebus. There Plato introduces the finite element that mingles with and regulates the infinite as that which measures all things, assigns to them their limit, preserves them in their natural state, and brings them within the sphere of human cognition. Plato describes this as harmony, health, order, and perfection.

According to Shaftesbury, each person must create the form of his or her own humanity out of pre-existing matter. Pico de la Mirandola eloquently describes human creativity in similar terms in On Human Dignity:

I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor mortal have I made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. (Pico de la Mirandola 1965, 5)

Shaftesbury’s ideal is the virtuoso, a metamorphosis of the gentleman into an artist of his own humanity. A new sensibility is born, an awareness of the “moral sense” as a creative discernment of the self-forming self. Enthusiasm, he believes, is thus a force inspiring creativity. Voltaire concurred with this idea of enthusiasm. The rarest thing, he writes in the “enthusiasm” entry of his Philosophical Dictionary, is the combination of enthusiasm with reason, as reasonable enthusiasm is the patrimony of great poets (Voltaire 1901a [1764]).

Shaftesbury’s concept of enthusiasm is related to another concept of equal importance for him, the sensus communis. Enthusiasm aspires to communicate itself: In its savage form it communicates by contagion, and in its educated form through persuasion. Laughter too, he claims, is a form of communication because we seldom laugh alone; and when we do, given that laughter is sharing, we presuppose at least a kind of connivance, a tacit form of common sense. For Shaftesbury, laughter also can be the spontaneous censure of the community. Independently of Shaftesbury but along these same lines, Konrad Lorenz has remarked that human laughter resembles the victory ceremony of geese, and that both censure and victory resemble militant enthusiasm (Lorenz 1966, 253). Laughter and enthusiasm are two forms of communication that unite easily, according to Shaftesbury. They transcend themselves in poetic inspiration because we relate to the infinite through enthusiasm and to the finite through wit and humor.

Shaftesbury suggests that the false sublime, or excessive gravity, is easily degradable in enthusiasm: The residue of self-love leads to vanity and imposture. Laughter, on the other hand, corrects the lack of proportion characteristic of enthusiasm’s elevated passion. Laughter limits the excesses of enthusiasm and educates it, provided laughter has already been tamed. Indeed, Shaftesbury insists in his Exercises on the necessity of dominating the hubris of laughter, which leads rapidly to the dissolution or at least to the degradation of the self. A just inward proportion finds an optimum between the two opposed excesses, derisive destruction, on the one hand, and visionary exaltation, on the other, reminding us of the Aristotelian mean between extremes (Nicomachean Ethics 1108a).

Only enthusiasm educated by appropriate wit and humor can liberate the secret genius of each person. Shaftesbury refers to this genius as one’s “inward form” informed by its characteristic or inward proportions: “Where then is this beauty or harmony to be found? How is this symmetry to be discovered and applied? Is it any other art than that of philosophy or the study of inward numbers and proportions, which can exhibit this in life?” (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 270). It remains to be seen how humor works to this end in the inner life.

HUMOR IN INNER DIALOGUE

Humor is a tool in the service of reason whose purpose is to help the individual develop the appropriate character. Through humor, the self apostrophizes itself, that is, holds a counter-discourse with itself, thereby enabling the division required for dialogue in the inner philosophic life. As for Shaftesbury, the essence of philosophy lies in self-creation and self-transformation, the role he allots to humor in the inner life makes it indispensable for philosophy as he understands it. Indeed, he reads the Roman Stoics as guides to the practice of self-formation, and both in his notebooks and in his published works he describes a therapeutic role for philosophy. In Soliloquy, for example, philosophy aims to “teach us our-selves, keep us the self-same persons, and so regulate our governing fancies, passions, and humours, as to make it comprehensible to our-selves, and knowable by other features than those of a bare countenance” (Soliloquy, III, i; CR I, 184). Similarly, in Miscellaneous Reflections, philosophy is defined as “mastership in life and manners” (Misc., III, i; CR II, 254), a discursive interpretation of philosophy that shaped Shaftesbury’s notion of philosophy as public discourse. Since the aim of all moral reflection is to form the moral self, ethical insight without experiential implementation is sterile. Forming the moral self involves prying the autonomous self from its adhesion to society. This is the goal of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics as a whole.

Michael Prince suggests that in the process of describing dialogue as a mimetic genre, Shaftesbury subtly shifts the scene of the dialogue’s enactment from society and the stage to the theater of the mind. Dialogue becomes a dramatic method for self-inspection. The external drama between hero and under-characters both provokes and is provoked by an inner struggle to unite an identity similarly divided between a higher or better self, on the one hand, and lower drives and interests, on the other (Prince 1996, 62).

Shaftesbury’s aim is to discover how we may form that which in the polite world is recognized as good taste: “For who would not rejoice to be always equal and consonant to himself … ?” (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 266–72). Philosophy as “the study of inward numbers and proportions” leads the mind to freedom and independence:

By knowing itself and its own proper powers and virtues … it sees its hindrances and obstructions, and finds they are wholly from itself, and from opinions wrong conceived. The more it conquers in this respect … the more it is its own master, feels its own natural liberty, and congratulates with itself on its own advancement and prosperity. (Misc., IV, i; CR II, 282)

This is the meaning of inward proportion and regularity of affection (Misc., IV, ii; CR II, 290), for “’tis we ourselves create and form our taste. If we resolve to have it just, ’tis in our power. We may esteem and resolve, approve and disapprove, as we wish” (Misc., III, ii; CR II, 271–2).

To form one’s taste demands courage and the will to undertake a radical inward transformation:

But who dares search opinion to the bottom, or call in question his early and prepossessing taste? Who is so just to himself as to recall his fancy from the power of fashion and education to that of reason? Could we, however, be thus courageous, we should soon settle in ourselves such an opinion of good as would secure to us an invariable, agreeable, and just taste in life and manners. (Misc., IV, i; CR II, 282)

“The narrowest of all conversations,” soliloquy, or self-discourse, is the means for this end. Nonetheless it is “wholly impracticable without a previous commerce with the world; and the larger this commerce is, the more practical and improving the other … is likely to prove” (Misc., III, i; CR II, 252). Given that the relation to fellow human beings cannot be dissociated from the relation to oneself, the dialogue as defined by Shaftesbury corresponds to the soliloquy or conversation with oneself in the following sense: the soliloquy is possible only if it is conceived as a dialogue, that is, only if the self divides in two (Malherbe 2000, 130). Humor enables such division because humor is a doubling of and a distancing from oneself. It is not only a critical disposition towards others, but also toward oneself. Laughter is simply the social expression of the development of the critical spirit. Because there is no separation between external social criticism and internal criticism with respect to humor for Shaftesbury, laughter is seen as an exchange with others as well as with oneself.

Shaftesbury compares criticism to surgery, suggesting that a person practice on himself this type of operation, for he has “the highest tenderness and regard” for the patient and yet can “act with the greatest resolution and boldness.” By virtue of this soliloquy, he becomes two distinct persons. Surgeon and patient become preceptor and pupil, who teach and learn respectively (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 103–12). The ancient doctrine of “the daemon, genius, angel or guardian-spirit” to whom we are strictly “joined and committed from our earliest dawn of reason or moment of our birth,” Shaftesbury redescribes as the doctrine whereby “we had each of us a patient on ourselves,” that “we were properly our own subject of practice” and that “we then became due practitioners when, by virtue of an intimate recess, we could discover a certain duplicity of soul and divide ourselves into two parties” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 112). Rather than a dialogue of equals, the discussion resembles a Socratic dialogue, in which one voice is persuasively interrogatory and the other is passively indicative.

David Marshall explains that Shaftesbury conceives the inner world as a realm in which the conditions and capacities of discourse are applicable (Marshall 1986, 9–73). Indeed, Shaftesbury re-describes the Delphic inscription “Know thyself” as an exhortation to soliloquy:

This was, among the ancients, that celebrated Delphic inscription, “Recognize yourself!,” which was as much as to say, “Divide yourself!” or “Be two!” For if the division were rightly made, all within would, of course, they thought, be rightly understood and prudently managed. Such confidence they had in this homedialectic of soliloquy! (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 113)

Furthermore, Shaftesbury maintains that human beings naturally feel a division within themselves between a better self—the “true and natural self”—and a worst self (Soliloquy, iii, 1; CR I, 183). Laughter serves as a criticism of the worst self. This is the basis of Shaftesbury’s method of inward dialogue or “soliloquy,” which he regards as an essential means of self-knowledge and self-mastery:

“Mere quibble!,” you will say, “for who can thus multiply himself into two persons and be his own subject? Who can properly laugh at himself or find in his heart to be either merry or severe on such an occasion?” (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 105)

By imagining themselves as “two distinct persons,” individuals can examine themselves and their conduct with the hope of achieving self-understanding and self-improvement (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 105). This method is another aspect of Shaftesbury’s concept of rational self-reflection or “conscience.” Imperfect persons cannot be virtuous without self-denial, that is, without subduing the false self and controlling their passions. Yet the truly evil person cannot engage in this inward colloquy because he cannot face himself.

In Soliloquy, Shaftesbury writes, “dialogue is at an end. The ancients could see their own faces, but we cannot” (Soliloquy, i, 3; CR I, 134). Dialogue nonetheless plays a key role in Shaftesbury’s thought, for dialogue also provides a way to come to terms with the self. Dialogue provides not only the medium but also the structure for philosophical thinking. It offers a private “looking glass” in which we “might discover ourselves, and see our minutest features nicely delineated, and suited to our own apprehension and cognizance.” The form of writing used by poets and philosophers is advocated as a form of thinking, a “pocket-mirror” of the mind in which we should “by virtue of the double reflection, distinguish ourselves into two different parties.” This work of self-inspection is what Shaftesbury calls the “dramatic method” of philosophy. The reflection provided by this dramatic method is double because “two faces … present themselves to our view” (Soliloquy, i, 3; CR I, 128–9): we face ourselves divided into two parts, playing or impersonating two different interlocutors. However, in order to become a spectator of this double reflection of ourselves in dialogue, we must first divide ourselves. The division into two parts by the dialogic method is itself doubled: One is divided to face an image of oneself divided in two; one becomes an audience to oneself playing two different parts. This double and doubling reflection is the image and enactment of the message which, according to Shaftesbury, comes to us from the Greeks, “that celebrated Delphic inscription,” which Shaftesbury renders as “recognize yourself: which was as much as to say, divide yourself, or be two” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 113).

The “lover, author, mystic,” and “conjuror” cannot be left to themselves the way “the man of sense, the sage, or the philosopher” can (Soliloquy, i, 3; CR I, 126). For the former “the world is ever of the party” (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 109). The philosopher, however, should not need to address his thoughts to a real or imaginary partner. Philosophers who are “able to hold themselves in talk are never less alone than when by themselves” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 113). Shaftesbury’s “home-dialect of soliloquy,” based on a dialectical “doctrine of two persons in one individual self” establishes an “inspector or auditor … within us” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 113, 121–2). Thus, the dialogist is independent of the other because he internalizes the other within himself, or externalizes a part of himself to play the role of inspector (from spectare: to look) or auditor. As David Marshall explains, “the act of soliloquy allows one to be by oneself because it sets up a scene of theatre within the self” (Marshall 1986, 38).

This is a “dramatic method” by which a “person of profound parts” (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 105), acting as if he were alone, divides himself into actor and audience and gives his thoughts “voice and accent” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 113). The philosopher plays the part of actor, playwright, and director in the play which, according to Shaftesbury, has only “one character or principal part” and “is almost one continued moral: a series of deep reflections drawn from one mouth, upon the subject of one single accident” (Soliloquy, ii, 3; CR I, 180). The Shaftesburean philosopher talks to himself “in different persons, and under different characters” (Soliloquy, iii, 2; CR I, 207). In addition to being by himself, Shaftesbury’s philosopher is also besides himself when in the “method of soliloquy”:

By a certain powerful figure of inward rhetoric, the mind apostrophizes its own fancies, raises them in their proper shapes and personages, and addresses them familiarly, without the least ceremony and respect. By this means it will soon happen that two formed parties will erect themselves within. For the imaginations or fancies being thus roundly treated are forced to declare themselves and take party. (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 123)

Philosophy, in these terms, turns the mind into a sort of play: into a dramatization of itself. An individual gives rise to different persons who act out points of view and represent their interactions. In this manner, writes Shaftesbury, we are instructed “to personate ourselves” (Soliloquy, i, 2; CR I, 114). To personate, from the Latin perso-na-re (to represent, bear the character of) and originally from perso-na (mask), means to act or play a part, presumably the part of a character in a drama. That is, to learn to act, play, represent, or exhibit dramatically is to assume a character for ourselves. The dramatic method of soliloquy in its dialogic mode teaches us to dramatize our own characters.

Michael Prince suggests that Shaftesbury sees “the mind as capable of sustaining a dramatic interplay of diverse voices” (Prince 1996, 53n). The goal of the inward dialogue is to educate the passions through reason in order to change habits. The practice the Stoics use is to “set a contrary habit to counteract this habit.” Echoing Epictetus, Shaftesbury asserts that “the best Practice and Exercise is to go by contraryes, just in the teeth of Temper, just opposite of Humour.” As the human temper is suspended between poles of expectation and dejection, the solution of such pendular movements is an object of training. Moreover, the very polarity of the emotions is the basis of a dialectical method. The principle of Shaftesbury’s philosophical regimen as described in his Exercises is a deliberate self-contrariness. Lawrence Klein explains that “the over-florid emotional palette had to be countered by the self-conscious pursuit of pallor and grayness, and vice versa” (Klein 1994, 86). In this respect, Shaftesburean self-directed humor functions by apostrophizing fancies with inward exclamations of “Ridiculous!” Shaftesbury’s originality lies in his use of humor as a means of deliberate self-contrariness with the purpose of deflating the emotions, especially the passion of enthusiasm.

HUMOR AND WIT IN PHILOSOPHIC CONVERSATION

Shaftesbury insists that soliloquy presupposes conversation and a previous commerce with the world: “The larger this commerce is, the more practicable and improving the other [soliloquy or self-discourse] … is likely to prove” (Misc., III, 1; CR II, 252). Philosophic conversation, which mirrors the character that is formed inwardly, presupposes the inner dialogue of the philosophic life.

Quoting Horace to the effect that “a jest often decides weighty matters better and more forcibly than can asperity” (Horace, Satires, I, x, 14, 15.11), Shaftesbury suggests that reason is well served by a lighter conversation:

If rational discourses (especially those of a deeper speculation) have lost their credit, and are in disgrace because of their formality; there is reason for more allowance in the way of humour and gaiety. An easier method of treating these subjects will make them more agreeable and familiar. (Essay, i, 6; CR I, 54)

By being critical, a humorous conversation undermines unwarranted assertion; by being open-ended, it illuminates various aspects of the subject at hand; and by being amiable, it encourages further discussion. Such a conversation has other virtues as well. For one thing, it is free:

It is the habit alone of reasoning, which can make a reasoner. And men can never be better invited to the habit, than when they find pleasure in it. A freedom of raillery, a liberty in decent language to question every thing, and an allowance or unraveling or refuting any argument, without offence to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations any way agreeable. (Essay, i, 4; CR I, 49)

Ideal conversation is a moral framework for public interchange, according to Shaftesbury, because conversation of this sort embodies the norms of freedom, equality, activity, and pleasure. In allowing individuals to become more rational and more autonomous, it fits into an emancipatory program. At the same time it is a model of intellectually productive discourse because it provides the best conditions for the advancement of reason.

Imposing silence on an audience by making them unwilling listeners is an undesired alternative to ideal conversation, according to Shaftesbury. In an oratorical situation one participant appropriates the discourse to himself. In this case, an unequal relationship between orator and auditor takes the place of a shared exchange of words among participants in a conversation. When one person monopolizes the conversation, dominance replaces equality, gravity replaces lightness, discomfort replaces pleasure, and dogmatism replaces skepticism. Reason is less efficiently served in the oratorical situation not only because criticism is silenced but also because auditors are more likely to be repelled than convinced (Essay, i, 4; CR I, 49–50).

The orator that is characterized in Sensus Communis is the same figure as the reformer against whom Shaftesbury warned in his notebooks: The “reformer” sanctimoniously brings his self-seriousness to bear on others in a way that tends toward offensiveness and affectation. Yet substituting conversation for oratory is not enough, Shaftesbury claims, because there is plenty of conversation in society already. However, it is trivial. Because conversation is usually composed of acts of mutual flattery among hyper-sociable beings, the discussion is bound to degenerate into inanity. Because such conversations generally constitute the English elite’s social and intellectual environment, Shaftesbury sees their degeneration as a grave problem. According to Philocles in The Moralists, conversation requires reason and learning as well as playfulness and dalliance. Instead of the prevalent forms of elite life, Philocles envisions other forms inspired by antiquity, where:

Reason and wit had their Academy, and underwent this trial; not in a formal way, apart from the world; but openly, among the better sort, and as an exercise of the genteeler kind. The greatest men were not ashamed to practice this, in the intervals of public affairs, in the highest stations and employments, and at the latest hour of their lives. (Moralists, i, 1; CR II, 9)

The sensus communis, according to Shaftesbury, develops the sort of wit and humor that ridicules justly and without offence: “For without wit and humor, reason can hardly have its proof or be distinguished.” Shaftesbury recalls the formula of the sophist Gorgias Leontinus: “It was the saying of an ancient sage that ‘humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity, of humour.’ ” He adds that one should suspect a truth that cannot stand against raillery, and humor that is not tempered with gravity: “For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious, and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit” (Essay, i, 5; CR I, 52).

The more accurate translation of the passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric reads: “Gorgias said it was necessary to spoil the seriousness of opponents by jest and their jest by seriousness” (Rhetoric 3.18.7). Shaftesbury transforms the sophist’s rhetorical advice into a statement with philosophic import. This accords with his belief that eloquence and philosophy should converge. As we recall, “truth, it is supposed, may bear all lights, and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject” (Essay, i, 1; CR I, 44). For Shaftesbury then, the object of conversation should lose its seriousness so that the wits may approach it freely, discuss it and evaluate its truth. Humor, thus, is policed and is therefore neither derision nor buffoonery. Liberty of tone, he claims, is nothing but the expression of the liberty of thought that is indispensable when approaching truth.

Because no subject, whether moral, political, or religious, is important in itself, it is the enunciator’s seriousness that is at stake and not that of the conversation. Laughter may appear to some as a sign of violence, but for Shaftesbury it is an indication of tolerance (Misc., III; CR II, 238–73). The amiable nature of humor does not follow from a principle of charity or external sociability, but is intrinsic to its operation. Railing against the declared importance of a truth changes the relation to the other. In attacking a principle, one is in danger of threatening the other’s liberty of thought, and the discussion may degenerate into a battle of dogmas and, ultimately, of passions. Raillery, however, detaches truth from its passionate origin: Both the other and oneself find or regain the capacity for free examination and thereby a possibility of concord, or at least a possibility of entering into an accord that is indispensable to conversation.

As Shaftesbury consistently repeats, the practice of humor presupposes mutuality (Essay, i, 1; CR I, 44; iv, 3; CR I, 97). The distance from oneself that humor creates opens a space for the examination of truth and enables conversation to unfold without any of the speakers appropriating or claiming authority. Therein lies humor’s merit. Conversation is a social form in which liberties are tried and truths are proposed, corrected, and established through discussion. To prefer good humor over rigid formalism is to socialize the discourse, that is, to place oneself in the true condition of discourse. This is a rational task; it is the opposite of melancholic reasoning, which is the mark of a temperament that tends toward isolation.

From this exchange arises a sense common to all the interlocutors. Shared notions emerge from the discussion and are corrected by it. This common sense reflects the conversation, for everyone refers to it as that which can regulate the discussion and decide the question at hand. Agreement regarding content is not reached spontaneously, however. Common sense proceeds, initially, from a sort of good will, from a love of the public res: “A public spirit can come only from a social feeling and sense of partnership with humankind” (Essay, iii, 1; CR I, 72). The controversy is tempered by a natural social affection, that is, by benevolence toward all human beings. Common sense is then generated in the conversation without losing this relational quality—each tests his own sense with respect to the other. Because common sense is shared truth, it cannot impose itself as a corpus of more or less shared prior principles. Rather, it emerges slowly. Both its determined content and its regulative power are established in accordance with liberties that do not conflict with each other. This is the same process we use for appreciating a work of art. According to Shaftesbury, the acknowledged truth of a work emerges from a dynamic relationship between points of view and the harmony of various kinds of appreciation for the work. In this way, conversation gives an aesthetic turn to philosophy.

Following the eighteenth-century tendency to view humor and wit as more or less synonymous, Shaftesbury does not clearly differentiate between humor and wit. Wit is the exercise of the mind that practices humor. It is a judgment that points to the inability of pure speculative reason to govern the lives of human beings and their ideas. Wit contributes to the art of conversation, which, by grounding philosophy in human activity, turns it into a lively practice. The judgment inherent in wit draws attention to a more flexible and refined reason that takes into consideration the power of primitive human nature. By enabling a purification of sensibility, wit bears witness to the affective power of judgment. Wit points to the entertaining power of the mind when the mind is seen not only as an intellectual operation, but also as a creator of a philosophic style that privileges pleasantness in the text or in conversation over the dry gravity of treatises and systems. In the necessary passage from the natural to the policed state, wit furthers philosophic speculation through a sociability characterized by polite behavior, ideas and sentiments (Essay, ii, 3; CR I, 65–66). To make use of humor is to exercise wit––a wit constituting the operation of the mind when it works in singular turns—that is, to exert the keen observation of the philosopher through benevolent criticism of earnest reason.

Philosophic conversation plays a major role in Shaftesbury’s project to make the good life accessible to all. By playing a crucial role in philosophic conversation, humor and wit help to attain the virtue and happiness of the good life. Philosophy, then, is knowledge acquired through conversation, a discourse governed by the rules of tolerance and the conventions it selects, and an inquiry that criticizes itself through wit and humor and that delights in the beauties and pleasures of the truths it discovers. Inasmuch as philosophic conversation does not require relinquishing freedom of thought, it strengthens our freedom to question everything by enabling us to adopt both the tone and the form of the discourse. This project is described and exemplified in the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Times, Opinions, and in the notebooks as well, where Shaftesbury defines the ideal of social behavior as a middle position between frivolous sociability and rigid gravity. For both the individual and society at large, he aspires to a synthesis of sociability and philosophical seriousness that also parallels his goal in philosophic writing.

HUMOR AND WIT IN PHILOSOPHIC WRITING

Shaftesbury’s intellectual project can be cast as a search for an adequate form of philosophy both as an introspective endeavor and a social activity. This search affects the manner of writing philosophy as well:

In reality, however able or willing a man be to advise, it is no easy matter to make advice a free gift. For, to make a free gift indeed, there must be nothing in it which takes from another to add to ourselves. In all other respects, to give and to dispense is generosity and goodwill, but to bestow wisdom is to gain a mastery which cannot so easily be allowed us. Men willingly learn whatever else is taught them. They can bear a master in mathematics, in music or in any other science, but not in understanding and good sense. It is the hardest thing imaginable for an author not to appear assuming in this respect. (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 103)

For advice to be accepted it should be proffered lightly: “I have taken it strongly into my head that there is a certain knack or legerdemain in argument, by which we may safely proceed to the dangerous part of advising and make sure of the good fortune to have our advice accepted if it be anything worth” (Soliloquy, i, 1; CR I, 104). Humor and wit provide the lightness and agility necessary for philosophy as moral education:

As grave however as morals are presumed in their own nature, I look upon it as an essential matter in their delivery to take now and then the natural air of pleasantry. The first morals which were ever delivered in the world were in parables, tales, or fables. And the latter and most consummate distributers of morals, in the very politest times, were great taletellers and retainers to honest Aesop. (Misc., IV, i; CR II, 283)

Humor frees both the reader and the author—the author becomes unassuming while the reader is free to appropriate the moral truth as she wishes.

The aim of using humor in philosophic writing is twofold: First, to reach a larger public as did ancient philosophers in their exoteric writings in antiquity; and second, to encourage independent reflection in the reader. The writer’s use of humor is self-effacing, thereby enabling the reader to engage in the inner work necessary for moral improvement.

The views of the Cynics and Roman Stoics on the role of humor within moral teaching are relevant to Shaftesbury’s own view. The mixture of humor and popular philosophy was characteristic of Cynic literature. By the middle of the third century bc., Cynicism had evolved a type of literature, the serio-comic (to spoudaiogeloion), that offered definite genres for the popular exposition of philosophy. By that time, both the Epicureans and the Stoics were prepared to popularize their teachings. The Stoics always used Cynic literary genres for their exoteric teachings. By “speaking the truth, laughingly” (Ridendo dicere verum), the Stoics promoted the importance of taking oneself less seriously than is the custom. To that end, they recommended a style based on a mixture of humor and seriousness that proposed laughter as a means to assuming a more balanced perspective of serious matters.

Shaftesbury recommends wit and humor in philosophic writing for the benefit of the author as well. The full title of his work Advice to an Author is preceded by Soliloquy, thereby drawing attention to the melancholy of the solitary creative writer (Soliloquy, iii, 2; CR I, 197–212). To fight melancholy the author must transcend his solitude. The very act of writing should be an exercise in sociability: Wit is assigned a primary role, accompanied by humor whose aim is to erode all that is life-denying.

The priority Shaftesbury assigns to criticism, ridicule, tolerance, and a more egalitarian pedagogy leads also to a defense of mixed and low genres (Prince 1996, 29–35). The doctrine of ridicule, for instance, accompanies a defense of satire, parody, and comedy. Shaftesbury maintains that “the only manner left in which criticism can have its just force amongst us, is the ancient comic; of which kind were the first Roman miscellanies or satiric pieces” (Soliloquy, ii, 2; CR I, 169). In this passage he elevates the miscellany and satire. Elsewhere, however, he seems to prefer the burlesque and the parodic novel. These forms are valued for their active agency in the world. They effect change by parodying outdated values. Parody enables an easier and more familiar dissemination of cultural knowledge, and provides a model of inclusiveness that replicates and encourages new patterns of social transformation. The exemplary artist in this case is not the virtuoso who has “in a manner” set himself above the world. Instead the exemplary artist is the “counter-pedagogue” who, of necessity, violates order and proportion for the sake of criticizing society’s false values. Shaftesbury likens himself to Cervantes in order to explain why his own writings (“these my miscellaneous works”) are mixed genres, why the champion of classical unity is himself a “mere comic humorist” and a compositor of “prose satire” (Misc., V, i; CR II, 314; Prince 1996, 36–37).

Shaftesbury draws political analogies between genres and institutions, equating mixed genres with a desirable solution to political absolutism. Moreover, he establishes theological analogies between magisterial modes and schismatic debate, prescribing comic forms as a cure for textual absolutism. He advocates a range of dialogic and comic genres that preserve the freedom of the reader. The genres that serve his ideal of writing as conversation include the essay, the miscellany (Misc., I, iii; CR II, 94), the letter, and the dialogue (Soliloquy, ii, 3; CR I, 198–9). Regardless of genre, Shaftesbury strives to write in “the way of Chat,” that is, according to the discourse of easy and accessible conversation (Misc., II, iii; CR II, 216–7).

Shaftesbury assigns central significance to the letter as a polite genre because letters are a form of writing one level removed from public conversation. A defining feature of the essay as a form of writing is the recognizable and self-explanatory voice. The essay appears to be spontaneous, uncertain, and free of formal constraints. Miscellany, like satire and parody, is valued for its active agency in the world. Its formal inclusiveness captures the undirected energy of the society at the time, which was becoming increasingly mobile, mixed, and impervious to received structures of subordination. Shaftesbury sees in the essay “a more familiar style,” appropriate to “pleasanter reflections,” and offers a clear definition of the essay style, namely as the “way of Chat” combined with such discursive qualities as informality, raillery, liberty, grace, and, quite explicitly, pleasure (Misc., II, iii; CR II, 216–7).

Shaftesbury assigns the highest value to dialogue as the perfect vehicle for philosophical training. He makes a case for the formal as well as the intellectual value of dialogue. Dialogue, he claims, elides prose and poetry, the philosophic and the literary; yet its essential value lies in its effectiveness in leading the reader to self-knowledge.

Although the Characteristics is Shaftesbury’s grand endeavor in discursive philosophy, another unrealized project reveals much about his ambitions for philosophical writing. This is his “Socratick History,” a series of translations from the chief ancient sources on the life of Socrates, set among introductions, explanatory essays, and notes by the Third Earl. Although he did not complete the project, Shaftesbury filled a notebook with reflections that indicate not only his moral and civic concerns, but also his formal criteria for philosophy and his view of the role of the comic in philosophy.

From the notebook for the “Socratick History,” we learn that Shaftesbury sees in the Xenophonic Socrates a vindication of the active ideal of philosophy as opposed to the contemplative ideal embodied by Plato. He writes on the projected book’s role in edification, on the inclusive intended audience of the book, and on the role of humor in it. He would use humor “if possible or as much as possible,” endeavor to be “entertaining and eloquent,” imitate Plato’s Apology as an instance of “that air of negligence and good humour,” and quote Horace frequently “because he is now so much in esteem, and by this there would appear an Air of Gallantry and Humour” to the book (P.R.O. 30/21/27/14, 50, 52, 75). Adopting a somewhat distanced stance toward the matter, he would maintain a laughing irony about it.

This projected work is meant to be both moral, that is, philosophical, and polite. Its politeness, intended to make it a pleasurably attractive piece of reading, would be a function of the author’s politeness. He would preserve moral scale, eschewing at one end of the spectrum excess detail and elaboration and on the other mysterious depth and abstraction. He would consistently avoid the temptations of didacticism, dogmatism, and authority. Rather, he would be diffident and unassuming. Such an authorial stance amounts to an imitation of the ancient sources as Shaftesbury perceives them. Socrates is the original not only for the picture of the moral philosopher, but also for the dialogic and ironic authorial manners of the texts written by Plato and Xenophon.

The composite form of the Characteristics supports Shaftesbury’s project of increasing the autonomy of the reader by reducing the authoritative character of the author. Although it contains pieces labeled “miscellanies,” the Characteristics is itself precisely such a miscellany, and Shaftesbury’s remarks in favor of miscellanies are applicable to the entire work. The miscellaneous character is not simply a matter of genre, but also of voice as well, because by virtue of its composite character, the Characteristics is not a monologic discourse.

Humor plays a crucial role throughout Shaftesbury’s discussion of philosophy in all its varied forms, whether soliloquy, conversation, or writing. A method for challenging all forms of irrationality, humor denotes a fundamental capacity for the apprehension of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Humor is a liberating tool freeing us from patterns of action and thought that are ultimately life-destroying. Humor is an essential element of the tact requisite to moral sense and the sociability necessary to common sense. Without humor the virtue and happiness constituting the Shaftesburean good life are unattainable.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: HUMOR, GOOD HUMOR, RIDICULE, AND THE SHAFTESBUREAN GOOD LIFE

Shaftesbury had an immense influence on aesthetics in Britain and abroad. His Characteristics went through eleven English publications by the year 1790, and his work became classics in England. Numerous writers of the Scottish enlightenment adopted Shaftesbury’s doctrine of enthusiasm, and through the efforts of Robert Molesworth, his writings influenced the Dublin scene, especially Francis Hutcheson’s early work. Shaftesbury enjoyed an equally high status in Europe. Germany proved to be particularly receptive to Shaftesbury’s philosophy, and his aesthetic theory contributed significantly to the rise of Romanticism there. Even as his star was waning in England, his concepts were helping to shape the ideas of Kant as well as Lessing, Mendelssohn, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, and Schiller. Richard Brett notes that “German scholars have often shown a greater appreciation for Shaftesbury’s importance and the distinctive character of his thought than Anglo-American scholars” (Brett 1951, 206). In Germany and Scandinavia, Shaftesbury was considered a romantic figure. His influence on the eighteenth-century Danish writer, Ludwig Holberg—Søren Kierkegaard’s unacknowledged mentor—and the Swedish critic, Thomas Thorild, led to the romanticism of these northern thinkers.

Shaftesbury has assigned humor an unparalleled role within philosophy, which may be encapsulated in the following tenets: (1) ridicule is the test of truth; (2) humor and good humor have a habilitating function with regard to truth; (3) to be effective, criticism must be humorous; and (4) humor is the mark of rationality. I assess the originality and feasibility of Shaftesbury’s views by addressing these four tenets.

RIDICULE AS THE TEST OF TRUTH

The view that ridicule is the test of truth, which has been synonymous with Shaftesbury’s name, is undeniably original, as no one before has ever proposed something similar. This view makes sense, however, mainly within the context of Shaftesbury’s metaphysics and epistemology. Shaftesbury holds that reality is an organic, harmonious, and perfectly congruous whole. Any statement that is descriptive of this reality cannot but refer to these features, and although these characteristics may not give us a definition of truth, they do provide us with a criterion of truth. On the contrary, anything that lacks the characteristics of organic harmony and congruity is unreal. Any statement, therefore, that is incongruous, any statement revealing an internal disharmony, is untrue. Falsehood is characterized by a quality that can only be described as ridiculous.

To maintain the view that ridicule is the test of truth, then, requires embracing the religious faith that Shaftesbury’s metaphysics represents. Shaftesbury argues for his optimistic metaphysics in two ways: On the one hand, he contends that the evidence of benevolent design to be found in the natural world establishes the existence of a ruling Mind that is benevolent and all powerful; on the other hand, he reasons that given such a directing Intelligence, it necessarily follows that the cosmic order is good. However, he admits that to know with certainty that all things work for the best would require that we comprehend the universe as a whole, an impossible task for a finite mind (Moralists, iii, 1; CR II, 108). It is at this point that the doctrine of enthusiasm becomes relevant. The human being is able to surmount the limitations of his finitude and, at least at moments, to intuit the harmony of the Whole in the ecstatic moments of faith or enthusiasm in which the mind is caught up in vision. Enthusiasm is the fulfillment of our highest potentialities as rational beings—the extension of the powers of reason in its highest limits. However, “reason” is understood here in its broadest sense: it includes and is more than the processes of discursive intellect. It comprehends the whole realm of common concepts that arise from the shared life and experience of the human community.

One of Shaftesbury’s basic arguments is that no one can believe in God and his goodness without first having a clear conception of God and goodness. By goodness alone trust is created (Moralists, ii, 5; CR II, 92). Thus, reason precedes faith and ethics precede theology. True religion depends on philosophy, but philosophy in turn depends on religion. Philosophy and reason for Shaftesbury are broadly conceived. Not a narrow empiricism or a strict rationalism, philosophy is a discipline so comprehensive that it can take in the realm of enthusiasm as well. Reason and faith are neither inconsistent nor opposed. Faith is a commitment of the whole person, intellectually, emotionally, and volitionally. But it is philosophy rather than theology that is made the final judge of all sciences and all knowledge, for by philosophy “religion itself is judged, spirits are searched, prophecies proved, miracles distinguished” (Soliloquy, iii, 1; CR I, 193).

Judged as a purely rational system that attempts to justify God’s ways to humankind, Shaftesbury’s philosophy fails. The evidence he presents can be matched by an equal amount of counterevidence. Stanley Grean suggests that much of what Shaftesbury thought clearly implied a designing Mind, we see today as a product of natural mechanisms of adjustment operating according to the patterns of statistical probability. Yet as a religious faith, his philosophy finally stands or falls to the extent that it makes “the tragic and the absurd endurable by including them in an ultimately meaningful universe” (Grean 1967, 87–88). As a philosophy of life, it falls short for many in the contemporary world because, despite his realism, Shaftesbury’s effort to see the necessity of all things prevents him from doing full justice to the inexplicably tragic dimensions of human experience.

Without taking into account Shaftesbury’s metaphysics, the view that ridicule is the test of truth is controversial. The controversy over whether ridicule is a test of truth—whether ridicule is the proof of truth, or one of its tests, or not at all indicative of truth—and the ensuing controversy of its relation with reason—whether ridicule is a faculty that operates independently of reason or in conjunction with it—occupies an important place of concern for philosophers of the eighteenth century. Never before has the relation between ridicule and truth been put on the agenda, or the definition of ridicule as a faculty been entertained; and never before has the way it works with reason been explored. The view that ridicule is a test of truth, then, generated a heated controversy in the eighteenth century, which deserves a thorough examination.

Although Shaftesbury’s theory of ridicule brought him scorn from various quarters, there were those who supported it and not only from the ranks of the Deists and the Free Thinkers. Francis Hutcheson, who was a devout Presbyterian minister, saw nothing in it to upset the beliefs of true religion. His early work, Reflections upon Laughter (1750), is an elaboration and defense of Shaftesbury’s views. His thesis is the same as Shaftesbury’s: One can ridicule religion and morality, but ridicule will not prevail against truth. It is precisely this that allows ridicule to be a criterion of truth. Anthony Collins, who supported Shaftesbury’s theory in his Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony (1729), followed Hutcheson.

In his The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), the English poet and physician Mark Akenside (1721–1770) apodictically declared that ridicule is a test of truth and that it functions as an independent sense or faculty. He was astonished that divines like William Warburton, who attacked Shaftesbury, should imagine they were serving religion by vilifying ridicule as the favorite weapon of the Free Thinkers: “… it is beyond all contradiction evident that we have a natural sense of feeling of the ridiculous,” Akenside writes, and a good reason may be assigned “to justify the Supreme Being for bestowing it” (Akenside 1744, 105–6). It is a valid faculty, he argues, for practical rather than theoretical matters. Just as the faculty of reason examines a metaphysical proposition and rejects it for being false when its content, which was said to be equal to another, is then shown to be unequal, “so in objects offered to the mind for its esteem or applause, the faculty of ridicule feeling an incongruity in the claim, urges the mind to reject it with laughter and contempt” (7). Akenside’s sense of ridicule is the converse of the moral sense; the moral sense is the instinctive recognition of whatever is beautiful, true, and good. The sense of ridicule, on the other hand, is the recognition of whatever is deformed, false, and evil. The final cause of the sense of ridicule, the good reason justifying the Supreme Being for bestowing this sense on humans, is the aid it affords reason in depressing the giddy aims of folly. Unlike reason, the sense of ridicule acts “at once/ By … prompt impulse.” Thus,

… benignant Heaven,

Conscious of how dim the dawn of truth appears

To thousands; conscious what a scanty pause

From labours and from care, the wiser lot

Of humble life affords for studious thought

To scan the maze of nature; therefore stam’d

The glaring scenes with characters of scorn,

As broad, as obvious to passing clown,

As to the letter’d sage’s curious eye. (Akenside, III, 269–77)

Unlike Hutcheson, although similar to Shaftesbury, Akenside does not make a distinction between laughter and ridicule. Laughter for Akenside is synonymous with ridicule, “gay contempt,” or “gay derision.” His primary interest is in ridicule as a weapon. Akenside is important because where Hutcheson, with his thoughts on burlesque, had spoken only of a contrast of dignity and meanness, Akenside generalizes this principle to “some incongruous form,/ some stubborn dissonance of things combin’d,” and he seems to be the first to provide a well-known analysis of laughter in which the words “incongruous” and “incongruity” appear. Incongruity in itself, however, is of little significance for him, “for the sensation of ridicule is not a bare perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas; but a passion or emotion of the mind consequential to that perception” (Akenside 7). The passion or emotion he is referring to is scorn. In the 1744 version of the The Pleasures of Imagination, most of the passage on ridicule and laughter was devoted to a satiric cataloguing of the various levels of contemptible behavior.

Support for ridicule as a test of truth is also offered by Lord Kames. Following Akenside in regarding ridicule as an independent faculty, Kames maintains that in addition to our sense of beauty and grandeur (sublimity), we have a sense of ridicule equally competent in its sphere and necessary for detecting improprieties. Kames takes it for granted “that ridicule is not a subject of reasoning, but of sense or taste” (Kames 1762, II, 183). He rephrases the question of ridicule as a test of truth, stating it “in accurate terms” as “whether the sense of ridicule is the proper test for distinguishing ridiculous objects from what are not so.” He comes to the conclusion that it is the only true test, for the subject “comes not, more than beauty or grandeur, under the province of reason” (184). The person who has taste applies the test of ridicule to any subject that has acquired an unnatural degree of veneration, separating it from its artificial connections and exposing its native improprieties. Kames follows Shaftesbury and Akenside in asserting that intrinsically grave and serious matters are not vulnerable to attacks from ridicule and that ridicule should not be condemned because it is subject to abuse. “Were we destitute of this test of truth,” he concludes, “I know not what might be the consequences: I see not what rule would be left us to prevent splendid trifles passing for matters of importance, show and form for substance, and superstition or enthusiasm for pure religion.” Though those who have a talent for ridicule are quick-sighted in improprieties, Kames finds that the talent “is seldom united with a taste for delicate and refined beauties” (184).

Thomas Reid, one of the Scotch Common Sense philosophers, also developed Akenside’s account of the sense of ridicule later in the eighteenth century. In determining first principles, Reid argues in 1785, we find great difference of opinion among philosophers, but fortunately Nature has given to the candid and honest part of mankind a way of arriving at unanimity—common sense. It is due to common sense that “every man is a competent judge … the learned and the unlearned, the Philosophers and the day-labourer are upon a level, and will pass the same judgment, when they are not misled by some bias.” Opinions that contradict first principles are not only false, like all errors, but literally absurd. To discountenance absurdity, Nature has given us, he claims, a particular emotion—ridicule—which seems to be intended for this very purpose of putting out of countenance what is absurd, either in opinion or practice. Ridicule includes both a feeling and a particular act of judgment based on the principles of common sense. According to Reid, ridicule is a weapon that cuts with as keen an edge as argument. In the same way that argument refutes error, ridicule exposes absurdity. If no blinding prejudices interfered, he says, no absurdity could withstand the pencil of a Lucian, a Swift, or a Voltaire (Reid 1863 [1785], essay VI, chap. IV, 438–9).

In his Essay on Ridicule (1753), Allan Ramsay maintains that ridicule is a test of truth and, in contrast to Akenside, Lord Kames, and later Reid, that it is part of the reasoning process. Ramsey intimates that he has “long thought that those advocates for ridicule, who set it in opposition to reason, did its cause very little honour or service” (Ramsay 1753, 7). Ramsay admits the weaknesses in Shaftesbury’s system: Shaftesbury had confused ridicule with cheerfulness, pleasantry and good humor, none of which may be classed as a test of truth. Yet, Ramsey attempts to prove that ridicule is “one of the tests of truth (by its detection of falsehood) and, as such, to be indulged without any limitation” (4–5). Examining examples of ridicule in the works of authors of acknowledged wit, Ramsey comes to the conclusion that there are two sorts of ridicule. One, which may be styled simple, direct or unreflected ridicule, “consists of the bare representation of what is improper in manners or actions.” The other, argumentative ridicule, is employed in discussing propositions, or matters of enquiry, and is “the art of showing that to be ridiculous which is imagined to be so” (79; 7). Only this sort of ridicule pretends to be a test of truth, based on the principle only vaguely implied by Shaftesbury that ridicule is part of the reasoning process. Argumentative ridicule, according to Ramsay, is a type of analogical reasoning used to oppose false opinions (41; 53).

Ramsey admits that ridicule is a mode of eloquence—the art of convincing and persuading—but because persuasion is based on reason, eloquence must not be separated from argument. Ridicule as a species of persuasion belongs to the mixed kind of eloquence, and because ridicule is argumentative, it is one of the methods of reasoning (17). The only difference between ridicule and serious reasoning, according to Ramsey, is that ridicule excites laughter in the hearers, but serious argument does not (30). In support of Shaftesbury, he maintains “that gravity is the proper test of ridicule, and ridicule the proper test of gravity.” Ridicule pretends to destroy only falsely serious arguments and only they shun and disclaim its test (33). Ridicule should be employed upon objects both “false and important,” that is, false opinions held in great solemnity and seriousness. Thus, the use of ridicule justified when dealing with religious subjects (47). Finally, ridicule in public instruction is more than a sugar coated pill used to render the discussion palatable; it is rather an essential part of the argument: “In speculative, as well as in active life, the ways of wisdom are really ways of pleasantness” (82).

On the other side of the controversy, champions of religious orthodoxy in particular were quick to concentrate their attacks on Shaftesbury’s theory of ridicule. The third dialogue of George Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) is devoted to an examination of Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Alciphron, who in this dialogue represents Shaftesbury, is led to admit that five and six centuries before his day anyone who had believed the Copernican system, or that blood circulates, would have been laughed at and scorned. Yet any of Alciphron’s contemporaries who did not believe these theories would now be equally ridiculed. If truth has any permanence, Berkeley concludes, ridicule is no criterion of truth and falsehood (Berkeley 1901, II, 149).

In reply to both Shaftesbury and Akenside, the clergyman William Warburton clarifies the controversy by insisting that it should be stated whether ridicule as a test of truth refers to the recognition of an error already known or the means to detecting a new error. Warburton flatly denies that ridicule is a test of truth if it means the detection of error (Warburton 1811). He does not state, however, whether he regards ridicule as part of reason, but his friend, the clergyman John Brown, made a great effort to establish that it is a passion operating independently of reason and, as such, incapable of serving as a test of truth. Brown’s most significant contribution is the trend of thought, later developed by William Preston, which reveals the variable and subjective nature of ridicule (Preston 1788). He claims that because of its variable nature, ridicule is really a measure of esteem or valuation, and not of truth (Brown 1751a). This is the most telling argument against ridicule’s capacity to be a test of truth.

Brown clearly regards ridicule as a passion and takes Shaftesbury to task for exempting it from the rule of reason, particularly since Shaftesbury is careful to stress the role of reason in the good life in all his writings. This is the real issue and the point of contention between Brown and Shaftesbury. Brown and Shaftesbury hold reason to be the highest faculty of mankind, but unfortunately neither of them clearly articulates its relation to ridicule. Shaftesbury merely implies that it is associated with ridicule, while Brown fails to prove that it is a separate faculty. In his treatment in verse of the same subject, An Essay on Satire Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Pope (1751b), Brown assumes that Shaftesbury regards ridicule as a rational faculty: “Lo Shaftesbury rears her high on reason’s throne,/And loads the slave with honors not her own” (quoted in Aldridge 1945, 148, n. 65).

The most convincing arguments of the debate are Ramsay’s on the one hand—that ridicule is part of the reasoning process and as such a test of truth, and Brown’s on the other—that because of its variable nature, ridicule is really a measure of esteem or valuation, and not of truth (Ramsay 1753, 70, n. 12; Brown 1751a). Alfred Aldridge sums up the issue thus:

The entire controversy, including the cogency of Shaftesbury’s original treatises, depends upon whether ridicule is or is not regarded as a rational faculty. If it is, as in Ramsay’s essay, it is a test of truth; otherwise, it is not. Thus the whole controversy, like many others, really resolved itself into a matter of proper definition. (Aldridge 1945, 155–6)

Shaftesbury merely implies, I suggest, that reason is associated with ridicule, but does not clearly articulate reason’s relation to ridicule.

The discussion about ridicule’s relation to truth and reason subsided at the end of the nineteenth century and has not been resumed since. Yet the controversy over ridicule’s relation to reason promoted the endorsement among Shaftesbury’s followers of a theory of humor as incongruity, a theory that emphasizes the cognitive nature of humor. The view of humor as incongruity is an alternative to Hobbes’ definition of laughter as an expression of one’s sense of superiority. Hobbes arrives at the conclusion that laughter is a manifestation of pride, vanity, and scorn after having examined laughter from psychological, moral and social perspectives. He defines laughter in Human Nature (1640) as a “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (Hobbes 1839–45, IV, chap 9, sec.13). In a parallel passage in Leviathan (1651), he criticizes facile self-congratulating laughter:

Sudden glory is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of Pusillanimity. For the great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves only with the most able. (Leviathan, vol. 3, part I, chap. 6, sec. 27)

Great persons do not scorn others; Hobbes explains elsewhere that great persons do not need to compare themselves with their inferiors in order to attain a correct measure of their worth:

Great persons, that have their minds employed on great designs, have not leisure enough to laugh, and are not pleased with the contemplation of their own power and virtues, so as they need not the infirmities and vices of other men to recommend themselves to their own favour by comparison, as all men do when they laugh.

Hobbes’ definition of laughter explicitly refers to laughter at one’s own past foibles. This does not mean that Hobbes interprets laughter as a sympathetic act. Rather, self-referential laughter is still a form of superiority that “put[s] the rest into jealousy and examination of themselves” (Hobbes 1839–45, IV, chap. 9, sec. 13, 45–47). However, he also insists that “laughter without offence must be at the absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and when the company may laugh together” (46–47). One can argue that, for Hobbes, laughter that rises from incongruity, not from a sense of superiority, is really the only legitimate kind. Stuart Tave emphasizes, however, that this view is certainly not the eighteenth-century reading of Hobbes (Tave 1960, 69).

HUMOR AND GOOD HUMOR AS HABILITATING TRUTH

The relation of ridicule to truth—whether it is or is not the test of truth—does not exhaust Shaftesbury’s views on the epistemological value of humor and good humor. In maintaining that humor and good humor enable us to grasp the truth, he imparts to these notions a habilitating role.

Shaftesbury means by truth, first, the right view of God, the world, and human nature, which for him are God’s benevolence, nature’s harmony, and innate human goodness. Good humor as the predisposition to gaiety is a necessary condition for understanding goodness: “We must not only be in ordinary good-humour, but in the best of humours, and in the sweetness, kindest disposition of our lives, to understand well what true goodness is …” (Letter, 4; CR I, 24–25). Thus good humor acquires an epistemological value for Shaftesbury as the only disposition that enables the perception of the truth about God, nature, human nature, and virtue. Strictu sensu, then, good humor promotes truth if the world is indeed good and harmonious. If the world is not such a place, Shaftesbury’s recommendation of good humor is prudential advice, based on his view that emotional states determine our outlook on life.

Good humor has a habilitating function with regard to truth in another sense as well. It provides the openness necessary for the pursuit of truth, that is, through pleasant, free and well-intentioned conversation. It is through conversation that the truth of human matters is pursued, if not reached, and there is no conversation without social pleasure. Good humor establishes an atmosphere of tolerance that invites the other’s opinion.

For Shaftesbury, “humors” evolve from a prelogical state as fluids to a logical state as “good humor.” Good humor symbolizes the passage from the natural state to the policed state. The development of good humor is a logical, reflexive use of “humor,” which makes gaiety a figure of social truth illuminating the entire community’s need to control its future. The movement from “humor” to good humor culminates in an intellectual act of judgment according to the equation: Reason equals taste and taste equals cheerfulness. The recourse to good humor inaugurates, then, the truly cultured era of humanity, when truth can be pursued through reasoning. Cheerfulness and laughter are used to achieve a serious aim: the eradication of a community built exclusively on the prelogical stage of the emotive communication of “humor” as temper.

If good humor has a habilitating function with regard to truth, it remains to be seen whether humor also promotes truth. The answer is hindered by the fact that in Shaftesbury’s writings humor is not clearly differentiated from either good humor or ridicule. In the unpublished “Pathologia,” for example, Shaftesbury portrays a new kind of laughter, hilaritas, or humor, which delights in the beautiful rather than in the ugly. This form of humor is not easily differentiated from good humor. Nevertheless, an assessment of its value and originality is in order.

If we take hilaritas to mean good-natured humor, I do not know how much Shaftesbury should be credited for innovating on this subject. There are important antecedents to Shaftesbury’s hilaritas, and he appeared to have been familiar with a number of them. In contradistinction to the accepted view, as stated, for example, by Max Eastman in The Sense of Humor, Louis Cazamien, Henri Haury, and earlier, Mary Grant, maintain that the discovery of benign humor is not an eighteenth-century phenomenon (Eastman 1972 [1922], 167; Cazamien 1952; Haury 1955; Grant 1924, 148). Ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers differentiated between kinds of laughter and favored the mild and good-natured laughter, as exemplified by Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics’ preferred choice of irony or humor.

Socratic irony, as understood by Xenophon, is Shaftesbury’s ultimate model in the Exercises, but Aristotle also serves as a model for good-natured laughter. The Aristotelian virtue of eutrapelia, the social virtue of cheerfulness, or wit, is the antecedent of Shaftesbury’s notion of good humor. Employing his usual tripartite division, Aristotle maintains in the Nicomachean Ethics that the excess of laughter is buffoonery and its deficiency is boorishness. Nonetheless, there exists a “true wittiness” characteristic of an honorable and free person:

But those who joke in a tasteful way are called ready-witted, which implies a sort of readiness to turn this way and that; for such sallies are thought to be movements of the character, and as bodies are discriminated by their movements, so too are characters. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4.8. 1127b ff; see Rhetoric, 2.12 1389 11–12)

The ready-witted (eutrapelos), being a tactful person, does not utter injurious or offensive comments, whereas the buffoon says and does anything in order to raise a laugh. Only the ready-witted, being a refined person, can decide what is appropriate and what is inappropriate regarding laughter and what is suitable for a free man to say and hear.

Aristotle’s view of humor is reprised by Cicero, who clearly shows a theoretical preference for good-natured humor: his “hilaritas” as well as “festivitas” imply a kindly spirit of jesting (Grant 1924, 107). It is the Stoic Panaetius (c. 185–109 bc), however, whose views are best preserved in the adaptation of his work On the appropriate by Cicero in the latter’s De Officiis, who incorporates Aristotle’s views into Stoicism to make the school palatable to the Romans. Panaetius takes virtue to be a mean between two vices, and this doctrine, alien to true Stoic principles, forms the basis of the treatment of laughter in Cicero’s De Officiis. Moreover, Socrates becomes for Panaetius the ideal embodiment of Aristotle’s eutrapelos, or Cicero’s liberal joker (his coining for Aristotle’s free man). This kind of humor Panaetius found to be the most appropriate for the plain style his teacher Diogenes of Babylon developed. Panaetius assailed the aesthetic and moral coarseness of Cynic speech with its vulgar and frank humor as a sin against social propriety, favoring instead Aristotle’s definition of the liberal jest.

George Converse Fiske traces the development of the theory of diction and humor appropriate to the sermo or conversational discourse in plain style—the type of oral and written expression favored by the truthloving Stoics—formulated for the Romans by Diogenes of Babylon and Panaetius, and employed as a result of their influence in nearly all the literature emanating from the Scipionic circle. This was a society of the noblest and most intelligent men of Rome that gathered around Scipio Aemilianus and his Greek friends, the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius (Fiske 1920, 17; 1919). Fiske maintains that the Socratic theory of irony—the type of liberal humor pervading the conversations of Socrates and the Platonic dialogues—that was widely prevalent in the Scipionic circle accords with the rhetorical theory appropriate to the conversational discourse in plain style. We know that through Roman philosophers, the Hellenistic schools of philosophy influenced later generations in the Renaissance, Early Modern times and the Enlightenment, and we also know that Shaftesbury was steeped in Roman philosophy. Thus, if we take Shaftesbury’s hilaritas to mean good-natured humor, we cannot credit him with much originality.

However, the good humor of hilaritas stems from the admiration of (external) beauty. There are no views of laughter in ancient philosophy that come close to Shaftesbury’s admiration for beauty. Nevertheless, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, an important forerunner of Shaftesbury (Robertson 1963, xxxi), uses hilaritas to define a new form of laughter, which has been translated into English as “cheerfulness” or gaiety (Ethics, III, P11Schol.). According to Spinoza, cheerfulness cannot be excessive and is always good while its opposite, melancholy, is always evil (Ethics, IV, P42, and Dem.; P44Schol.). Spinoza differentiates in most of his writings between scorn and mockery, which he rejects, and laughter, which he embraces. In the Political Treatise, he warns us not to scorn or mock, urging us, rather, to understand humankind (1951, I, 4). In the Ethics, mockery is defined as a form of hatred, and thus a kind of sadness, which can never be converted into joy. Laughter and joking, when not excessive, in contrast, are characterized as pure joy, partaking thus in Spinoza’s pantheistic God-Nature (Ethics, IV, P45 Cor. 2, and Schol.). Similarly, in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, he differentiates between mockery and ridicule, on the one hand, and laughter, on the other: “Mockery and ridicule rest on a false opinion and indicate an imperfection in he who mocks and ridicules,” he writes. “They indicate an imperfection in him who mocks because either what is mocked is ridiculous or it is not.” If it is not, it should not be mocked. If it is, it should be amended by other means than mockery. In contradistinction, “laughter is not related to another, but only to the man that notices something good in himself; and because it is a kind of joy, there is nothing to say about it which has not already been said about joy,” that is, it is always good (1985b, II, chap. 11, 115–6).

Spinoza’s hilaritas or cheerfulness may be an antecedent to Shaftesbury’s good humor. Editor John Robertson has maintained that Shaftesbury’s philosophy is none other than Spinoza’s. However, there are important differences between the hilaritas of each philosopher. Although for Shaftesbury the source of hilaritas is always external, an admiration of external beauty and never of oneself, the source of Spinoza’s hilaritas is internal, a delight in oneself. It is Spinoza that innovates radically. Shaftesbury’s hilaritas innovates in the admiration of beauty it involves, given that Shaftesbury has adopted the ancient philosophers’ association of ridicule with ugliness or disharmony, but Shaftesbury limits the range of hilaritas by excluding one’s character from being a source of admiration.

There are also differences between Spinoza’s attitude toward mockery and Shaftesbury’s attitude toward ridicule. Although Spinoza does not mock even when the object is ridiculous, but suggests improving it by other means, Shaftesbury considers humor a tool for improving oneself as well as others. Thus, Shaftesbury’s view of humor is more akin to Descartes’ view of mockery: A moderate use of mockery could correct vices by making them appear ridiculous (Descartes 1955, II, sec. 124–7). The comparison between Shaftesburean humor and Cartesian ridicule can be made because Shaftesbury conflated humor, not only with good humor, but also with ridicule. Regardless of its role as the test of truth, ridicule, in the form of humor, may have a habilitating role with regard to truth in inward dialogue, in conversation, and in writing. This is the subject of the next section.

HUMOR AS EFFECTIVE CRITICISM

Shaftesbury holds the view that criticism, to be effective, should be humorous. Independent of the view of “ridicule, the test of truth,” this view is still premised on the lesser assumption that truth cannot be hurt by humor. Because truth can withstand “all lights,” including that of ridicule, Shaftesbury asserts that humorous criticism should not to be feared.

Moreover, to be effective, criticism should be humorous, first, because criticism is most effective when specific and humor is always specific. Brand Blanshard reminds us that “most of us are incapable of moving freely in the world of pure universals … we must touch ground again pretty often to renew our strength and courage … most men’s minds are so constituted that they have to think by means of examples” (Blanshard 1980, 140). Second, humor reduces anxiety, alerts the mind, and enhances creativity as well as liberty of thought—all processes that ameliorate reasoning and open-mindedness. Finally, humor itself enables cognitive change. Because in humor our perception becomes more attentive, the sensible world takes on a new value, and its image becomes clearer under the humorist’s gaze. His gaze acquires the acuity of a new vision; and as all the senses participate in this change, it is the whole of our perception that is modified (Cazamien 1952, 107). John Lippitt has recently explained how these characteristics of humor and similar characteristics of irony are helpful in moral transformation (Lippitt 2000b, 159).

The view that effective criticism must be humorous has been in practice since the exoteric moral teachings of the ancient philosophers and revived by Renaissance and modern philosophers. Hub Zwart reminds us that moral criticism is a comic genre: “Since time immemorial, moral criticism used to be intimately connected with comedy and laughter” (Zwart 1996, 17). Although the value of laughter for purposes of reform was not recognized by Aristotle, nor included in his theory of the liberal jest, Aristophanes was conscious that a serious moral purpose could be served by laughter (Frogs, 339), and Plato in one passage seems to admit as much (Republic, fifth book, 452 D). But it is with the later Cynics that there is a formal alliance of laughter to moral teaching.

One important Cynic trait was the use of laughter to help convey paradoxical thinking in order to attract and influence a wide audience. The common people, unlike the eager young companions of Socrates, had neither the leisure nor the inclination to “follow the argument wherever it might lead, not caring how many digressions were made, provided that truth was attained in the end” (Plato, Theaetetus, 172 D). They wanted the lessons of philosophy presented ready digested and in an easily remembered form. Primarily to cater to their needs, there evolved the literary forms that comprise the genus of the serio-comic, the prose forms of which were mainly the adaptation and popularization of “Socratic” literature, while in verse the influence of the old gnomic poetry, the Mime, and Comedy are all discernible. The serio-comic (To spoudaiogeloion) was the distinguishing mark of Cynic literature (Strabo, xvi. 759). According to Demetrius, “the moralists often employ humorous forms of composition on suitable occasions, as at festivals and banquets, and in attacks on luxury … such is the manner of Cynic literature” (Demetrius, 1932, 170). The aim of these philosophers was to combine the dulce (the pleasurable) and utile (the useful), or rather to enforce the utile by means of the dulce. The proponents of this device explained its logic in the following simile: They were like physicians who smear the edge of the cup with honey that the draught may not prove so bitter.

The evolution of the serio-comic is in the main an attempt to adapt the “Socratic” forms of popular philosophical propaganda to the requirements of the Hellenistic age. The conversation and character of Socrates had given rise to the Socratic dialogue that in the hands of Plato became perhaps the supreme achievement in prose form. The spirit of Socrates’ irony and Plato’s brilliant fancy had introduced into the Socractic dialogue an element of the geloion (laughable) in the form of parody and myth. A less serious form of composition was the Symposium; and the Memorabilia of Xenophon was the first work in a genre that was to gain great popularity in the third century bc and later. Finally, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle had used the epistle for philosophical exposition. For the Cynic teachings, verse also was employed. These were the traditional forms of philosophical propaganda available by the end of the fourth century bc.

The Cynics developed a powerful and many-sided instrument for popular philosophical propaganda from the “Socratic” literary forms and the old gnomic poetry, and the serio-comic was a fertile influence successively on Hellenistic, Roman, and later Greek literature. Cynicism influenced all the Hellenistic schools of philosophy (Long 1996). The Stoics always used Cynic literary genres for their exoteric teachings. The vehicle for Stoic popular propaganda or preaching was the diatribe, the chief genre of the serio-comic in literature; but the Cynics’ devices also influenced the remaining Hellenistic schools, Epicurianism, and Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Rhetorical strategies depending on intricate comic structures, particularly those of parody, were a conscious technique of exoteric philosophical literature, as well as of dramatic comedy; thus it was recognized in practice, if not in theory, that the power of humor to alter our perceptions by exposing latent incongruities was a means of generating critical thought from a new perspective. This recognition provided the aesthetic justification for the varied forms of literary jesting produced in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods. In fact, an observation voiced by Caesar Strabo in the discussion of wit in Cicero’s De Oratore suggests that the serious ramifications of humor had come to be widely appreciated: “There is no type of joke from which serious inferences may not be drawn” (2.250; cf. 2.262–3.52). And Horace adds: “A jest often decides weighty matters better and more forcibly than can asperity” (Horace, Satires, I, x, 14, 15.11).

For Shaftesbury, all philosophy is exoteric moral teaching. Hence, he revitalizes the ancient philosophers’ device for exoteric moral teaching and defends the necessity of its use for all the forms of his philosophical expression, from inner dialogue to philosophic conversation and writing. As Huston Smith reminds us, most people are exoteric, which means that feeling or experience counts for them more than thought (Smith 2000, 259). Brand Blanshard urges the philosopher to be careful with the beliefs he is attacking, because they are intertwined with hopes and fears:

On the great issues of philosophy many of men’s hopes and fears do hang. … It is true that the philosopher must live in a drier climate than most men would find habitable … but … If the philosopher is a good human being, he knows that many of the beliefs he is attacking are intertwined inextricably with the hopes and feelings of those who hold them, and his controversial manner will take note of these involvements. (Blanshard 1980, 127–32)

When philosophy is not conceived as an esoteric activity, humor can be helpful in furthering philosophy’s critical aims.

While not original in itself, the view that effective criticism must be humorous innovates when it is implemented in inner dialogue and the reciprocity of conversation, rather than in the one-sidedness of philosophic writing or teaching. In inner dialogue, the role of humor is disciplinarian: It forms and corrects one’s judgment by reducing the arrogant seriousness and false grandeur of the self. It is a negative instruction that aims at self-knowledge and self-formation through awareness of the limits of self-expansion. In conversation, the inter-subjective condition of the comic presupposes a commonality of both feeling and judging (implicitly) things, situations, and ideas. We have to temper this spontaneous judgment by another form of reflexive consciousness of common sense, which is called taste or tact. But when this is done, judgment equals good sense, and laughing, as judging, is reason working to diminish the excesses of sensibility. Laughter produces a derisory awareness of the subjective when the subjective is confronted by an authentic rational judgment. “The things themselves,” explains Ernst Cassirer, “upon seeing their images as mirrored by this elemental power of the intellect, recognize, so to speak, their true inner proportion and return to it. In so doing they regain their appointed place in reality” (Cassirer 1953, 179).

We must introduce judgment in the initial affective dynamic of laughter by confronting laughter with sense. With humor, the notion of sense takes root in the exchange between persons, revealing in the process of communication the moment when sense vacillates. The philosophic value of humor lies in its being a privileged instrument of sense, because humor is a vacillation of sense that confirms or refutes within the coherence of the whole that which one believes. Laughter can be a criterion of sense because it incorporates a theory of sense that enables the interrogation of human practices. Conversation is the par excellence locus of humorous expression because through a succession of questions and answers conversation enables humor to exert a tight criticism of sense in the name of a pre-existing common sense. This is why humor––the criticism of sense by laughter––provides a foundation for philosophical criticism. In the Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, laughter as humor is an instrument of reason, making the exercise of humor a social art that is both sensible and intelligent. As a measured and measuring laughter, humor, thus, is an expression of the philosophical orientation of the art of conversation.

Shaftesbury also innovates in singling out enthusiasm as the main human characteristic humor should criticize. The aim of the association between humor and enthusiasm is to make enthusiasm creative rather than visionary. The Enlightenment and the Aufklärung begin with a fundamental conflicting attitude towards enthusiasm, one that seeks to eliminate the irrationality of superstition without drying up the fountain of its fervor. Following Shaftesbury, Kant entrust English humor with the important mission of resolving this conflict.

The association of humor with enthusiasm did not strongly influence continental philosophers (Larthomas 1986), but Voltaire used the connection when plagiarizing Shaftesbury’s Letter in his Treatise on Toleration. Laurent Jaffro remarks that Voltaire implicitly presupposes that reason used in earnest is not satisfying as a corrector of enthusiasm. He implies that reason without laughter is more dangerous than laughter without reason (Jaffro 1996, 230). Moreover, the poet Christoph Martin Wieland and the playwright, aesthetician, and theologian Gotthold Ephraim Lessing were the first, but not the last, German authors who have understood humor’s significance. Wieland holds that wit and humor are immanent methods that enlighten inspiration, and Lessing exemplifies the association of humor with enthusiasm in his notion of “creative critique.”

In the German sensibility of the epoch, both aesthetic and religious, the most appropriate word to translate Shaftesbury’s new enthusiasm was “Freude” (joy). Larthomas maintains that this accounts for “a lyrical fervor in the theme of joy, in poetry as well as in music, which explains, perhaps, a certain romantic rejection of humor” (Larthomas 1986, 368; my translation). There is a difference between Romantic irony and Shaftesburean humor. The Romantic spirit (Witz) translates the finite’s inadequacy to express the infinite, perceived by the “absolute liberty of the self,” as Johann Gottlieb Fichte would say. Irony manifests the refusal, but also the incapacity, of the incessant play of the imagination to satisfy itself in finite determinations. Irony becomes, then, the spur of the creative process; according to Frederick Shlegel’s definition, it is “a continuous succession of self-creation and self-destruction.” It is the ego that creates (or destroys) itself in the work, since it is the ego that feels itself infinite when confronting nature, and later the whole of reality, where the ego sees only the play of its imagination. This explains the yearning that saddens the romantic spirit (Witz), and makes it an aspiration that is always unsatisfied.

Shaftesburean wit and humor proceed from an inverse sentiment. Caught in the manifestation of an infinity of profusion and plenitude (The Moralists, iii, 1; CR II, 110f.), the self becomes aware of its limits without suffering melancholy: “Wit is the critical awareness that sheds light on the distance separating the infinite demand of the Idea from the finite forms with which we work” (Larthomas 1986, 369; my translation). The difference between the enthusiasm of The Moralists and this aspiration, this romantic Sehnsucht in which Werther indulges so unhappily, lies in a lucid mistrust of the indeterminate and its languishing charms. According to Larthomas, Romantics “lose themselves readily in the evocation of the unlimited, a projection of the cherished Self’s power whose fundament is nostalgia or the ‘desire of desire’ ” (Larthomas 1986, 369; my translation). Shaftesbury would have undoubtedly considered with some irony this delectable Sehnsucht, especially since he always connotes the adjective “romantic” with nuances of chimerical “melancholy,” or of extravagant exaltation epitomized in Cervantes’ Don Quijote. He would have been suspicious of a Schwärarmerei, an extravagant enthusiast defined by excessive sentimentality, a dreamer in his relationship to the infinite. One should distance oneself from this dangerous type through the love of the limit in the Greek sense, that is, the love of form. The “beautiful soul” is the Greek soul, who loves form. Shaftesbury would have recognized it in Goethe’s classicism, but not in Jean Paul, Tieck, or even Novalis’ romanticism.

Shaftesburean humor is the sign of the awareness of finitude. Humor is the acceptance of an inward measure, of an equilibrium that welcomes the inward truth of every situation, even if and maybe because, understanding does not always comprehend the why and how. Humor, for Shaftesbury, is thus the positive expression of the awareness of our limits, both as intelligent and sensible beings.

HUMOR AS THE MARK OF RATIONALITY

Shaftesbury’s view that humor is the mark of rationality complements his view of effective criticism as humorous. First, Shaftesbury equates rationality with critical dialogue; by further equating criticism with humor, however, Shaftesbury makes humor the mark of rationality.

Reason, for Shaftesbury, is dialogical and rhetorical. Knowledge is part of social life and, thus, reason depends on laying down the conditions for reasonable social conduct. Truth about human matters is not discovered through abstract philosophy, but through the rigors of conversation. Reason is directly sociable, a factor of morality and community. Society is more important than the individual because it enables a vaster and more fecund reflection. Conversation establishes communication, which is necessarily grounded in community. Conversation is the model of communication of all philosophic truth and the ability to converse is one of the most defining characteristics of the person who uses his reason. The dialogical polyphonic model of conversation inspires all discourse that aims at rationality or truth. Thought exists only when it puts passion into movement; it is best advanced through conversation, whose characteristics are mobility, unpredictability, and dramatization. Conversation must be aporetic, free, and open-minded to fulfill its critical function. Reason does not reason, but converses, for Shaftesbury, and free conversation is aporetic.

In this matter, as in other matters, Shaftesbury draws his inspiration from the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who used dialogue to discuss philosophic questions. The characters of Plato’s dialogues, and especially Xenophon’s, test each other’s positions with wit and humor, Shaftesbury believes, seeking to arrive at ideas that can withstand the criticism of ridicule. This is the means by which reason should operate, because “without wit and humour, reason can hardly have its proof or be distinguished” (Essay, i, 5; CR I, 52). Shaftesbury equates criticism with humor, as humor is a vacillation of sense that confirms or refutes that which one believes within the coherence of the whole. Humor is a criticism of sense by laughter, which constitutes the premises of philosophical criticism, as we have seen in the previous discussion of humor as effective criticism.

By equating criticism with rational thought, and further equating humor with criticism, Shaftesbury makes humor the mark of rationality. In his equation of criticism with rational thought, Shaftesbury anticipates Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. By taking the additional step of equating humor with criticism thereby making humor the mark of rationality, Shaftesbury advances a view that is entirely original, without precedent or followers. This view can be accepted as a better version of Karl Popper’s thesis that critical thinking is the very essence of rationality because it takes into consideration the psychological resistance to criticism that Popper acknowledges but refuses to address.

Rarely has there been a thinker who has invested humor and ridicule with such a mighty task as represented by Shaftesbury’s four tenets, namely, that ridicule is the test of truth, that humor and good humor have a habilitating function with regard to truth, that criticism must be humorous in order to be effective, and that humor is the mark of rationality. Shaftesbury is the first to attribute an important role to humor, ridicule and good humor within philosophy. Because the practice of reason is a practice on oneself, and because true knowledge lies in self-knowledge and self-formation, the creation of a harmonious and virtuous character is the goal of the philosophical life––the good life as Shaftesbury conceives it. Humor has never been given a higher place within the good life: As a liberating, life-giving, and life-forming power of the soul, humor is constitutive of the Shaftesburean good life, for without humor, the good life cannot be attained nor maintained.

Shaftesbury’s views on humor and good humor as the state of mind in which truth is best apprehended influenced his translator, the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788). Hamann follows Shaftesbury in holding that humor (and Hamann adds irony) are epistemologically necessary for apprehending God, although his view of God differs from that of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s influence on Hamann is important in itself, but for an enquiry into the role of humor in the good life, it is Hamann’s, as well as his follower, Johann G. von Herder’s, influence on Søren Kierkegaard that is significant. Accordingly, Hamann’s views are introduced in an intermediary chapter before addressing Kierkegaard’s views on the role of humor in the good life.

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