Flesh in the Age of Reason (22 page)

Such extravagant sentiments have a touch of the Pythagorean, and evoke classical asceticism of various strands. Shaftesbury, it is clear, far more trenchantly than Locke, derided the old doctrine of substantial form, that is, the body as the
sine qua non
of personal identity. ‘Why this hankering after the flesh? this clinging, this cleaving to a body?’, he demanded, a neo-pagan sounding bizarrely like some Puritan tub-thumper:

What art you afraid should be taken from thee? what art thou afraid of losing?
Thyself
? What is then lost? A tooth? Wilt you go out for a tooth? Go then? A hand, a leg, a whole body, and what more? Is not this the furthest? and is not this in reality less still than the tooth?

Such clinging to the flesh made no sense, because ‘self lies not in the body’. For ‘I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason’.
Here was the Lockean doctrine of ‘conscious selfhood’ taken to rather extreme (and evidently élitist) lengths: the nobleman clearly regarded his flesh as a bridgehead of vulgarity distressingly lodged within himself.

What was of prime importance for Shaftesbury was the disciplined self-control imparted by reason. ‘’Tis the known Province of Philosophy to teach us
our-selves
,’ he explained in his significantly titled
Soliloquy
(1710), ‘keep us the
self-same
Persons, and so regulate our governing Fancys, Passions, and Humours.’ Not the flesh but philosophy was the sure guarantee of sameness and oneness. And the goal of such self-command was the attainment of perfect autonomy: ‘a mind, by knowing
it-self
, and its own proper Powers and Virtues, becomes
free
and independent…. The more it conquers in this respect the more it is its own
Master
.’ Along parallel lines, he remarked in some drafts that ‘He who has once form’d himself… He, and He alone, is truly Free.’

Shaftesbury aimed to vindicate human nature against misanthropic detractors – both secular Hobbesians and Calvinists who, by treating man as fallen and predestined, outrageously rendered God vindictive and vengeful – they proceeded, he remonstrated, ‘
as if Good-Nature, and Religion, were Enemies
’. So negative was their idea of God that it made them in effect ‘Daemonists’ – worshippers of a malevolent deity.

Owing much to the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury’s vindication of God and human nature expressed itself in a double thrust. He invested deeply in loveliness of form; human nature would be perfected when it truly appreciated the beauties of Creation. ‘O glorious
Nature
! supremely Fair, and sovereignly Good!’, he apostrophized,

All-loving and All-lovely, All-divine! Whose Looks are so becoming, and of such infinite Grace; whose Study brings such Wisdom, and whose Contemplation such Delight; whose every single Work affords an ampler Scene, and is a nobler Spectacle than all which every Art presented!

He was hardly less of an enthusiast for man-made splendours – noble houses, classical sculpture, painting in the grand manner, epic poetry.
The vocation and perfection of the great-souled man lay in aesthetic projects and cultural accomplishments. Virtue, knowledge and beauty formed a club of the good – the only trinity Shaftesbury ever acknowledged: ‘For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick.’

With comparable intentions, he was, furthermore, ardently committed to the vindication of man as a social animal, in the Aristotelian tradition. Refuting the Hobbesian
homo lupo lupus
while also distancing himself from Locke’s
tabula rasa
, Shaftesbury aimed to show that man was born gregarious. And through the polish produced by sociability, he could be perfected: ‘If
Eating
and
Drinking
be natural,
Herding
is so too. If any
Appetite
or
Sense
be natural, the
Sense of Fellowship
is the same.’

A keyword in this philosophy was sympathy, indeed something close to Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic ideal of a universal sympathy. ‘
To sympathize
, what is it?’, he inquired; ‘To feel together, or be united in one Sence or Feeling – the Fibers of the Plant sympathize. The Members of the Animal sympathize. And do not the heavenly Bodyes sympathize? why not?’ In brief, both aesthetically and socially, Shaftesbury aimed to be the vindicator of human nature.

In practical terms what this meant was a stalwart advocacy of ‘good humour’, especially to keep at bay that melancholy which was the malady of the élite and the fanaticism infecting the vulgar. Whereas religious zeal all too readily triggered morbid preoccupations and deeds, religion ought to be a matter of the reasonable and the rapturous: ‘Good Humour is not only the best Security against Enthusiasm, but the best Foundation of Piety and true Religion.’

In holding that human nature was to be championed not just against Hobbists and Calvinists but also against the vulgar, Shaftesbury (like Mr Spectator) donned the guise of a doctor of society, diagnosing social pathologies and probing their root causes. ‘The Human Mind and Body are both of ’em naturally subject to Commotions,’ he thus observed, ‘and as there are strange Ferments in the Blood, which in many Bodys occasion an extraordinary Discharge;
so in Reason too, there are heterogeneous Particles which must be thrown off by Fermentation.’ The great-souled man was, axiomatically and self-evidently, worlds apart from the herd: magnanimity was inherently noble. Shaftesbury nevertheless devoted much energy to anatomizing and vilifying the masses. Blind creatures of habit, they were incurably subject to dire psycho-pathological disorders which made them project their narrow-mindedness upon the universe: themselves racked by fear, they responded by fantasizing a terrifyingly malign universe.

It was notably in
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
, his study of enthusiasm, published in 1711 in reaction to the eruption of godly hysteria among the Camisards, the so-called ‘French Prophets’, that Shaftesbury exposed deranged fervour in the religious sphere. Drawing on Lucretius, Epicurus and other classical philosophers, he exposed false faiths as the emission of dark and distorted imaginings. Twisted fancy conjured up visions of mean and vindictive deities who sported with defenceless man and demanded blood and sacrifice to satisfy their petty whims. What produced these sick men’s dreams? The body was to blame. Unhealthy flesh bred vapours and other internal disturbances; these occluded the brain, which then distorted sense inputs, the result being a distorted perversion of reality. Here also lay the explanation, according to Shaftesbury, in a typically erudite digression, of ‘panic’:

We read in history that Pan, when he accompanied Bacchus in an expedition to the Indies, found means to strike a terror through a host of enemies by the help of a small company, whose clamours he managed to good advantage among the echoing rocks and caverns of a woody vale. The hoarse bellowing of the caves, joined to the hideous aspect of such dark and desert places, raised such a horror in the enemy, that in this state their imagination helped them to hear voices, and doubtless to see forms too, which were more than human: whilst the uncertainty of what they feared made their fear yet greater, and spread it faster by implicit looks than any narration could convey it. And this was what in after-times men called a
panic
.

Shaftesbury detested vulgar anthropomorphism in religion, in whatever manifestation. He warned against crude portrayals of God in man’s image, as warped by cramped and peevish minds, but he also deplored the gross anthropomorphic tendencies of orthodox piety: ‘Dost thou, like one of those Visionaryes, expect to see a Throne, a shining Light, a Court & Attendance? is this thy Notion of
a Presence
? and dost thou wayt till then, to be struck and astonish’d as the Vulgar are, with such appearances & Shew? – Wretched Folly!’ In a similar context, Cudworth had quoted Xenophanes: ‘If Oxen, Lions, Horses and Asses, had all of them a Sense of Deity, and were able to Limn and Paint, there is no question to be made, but that each of these several Animals would paint God according to their respective Form & Likeness, and contend that he was of that shape & no other.’ Petty-minded men thus made monsters out of their own minds. By contrast, much as for the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury’s Deity was an Ideal Presence everywhere immanent and all-perceiving.

The defence of religion mounted in Shaftesbury’s
Characteristicks
in the dialogue between Philocles and Theocles had a view to demonstrating such a ‘universal Mind’. That Mind sustained the cosmic order, which supported the social order, which in turn guaranteed noble minds their autonomy. Shaftesbury endorsed Locke’s refinement of the self into consciousness, but took it further: man could devote his energies to knowing himself, and to being himself, provided that he was truly patrician.

One who crossed swords with Shaftesbury was the controversialist, Bernard de Mandeville. The Whig aristocrat and the Rotterdamborn physician-satirist shared certain commitments; both espoused post-1688 Whig values, both championed Great Britain and the United Provinces against the Sun King and rejoiced in political freedom; both hated ‘gravity’ and pretentiousness, and deflated them with ridicule. But there the similarities ceased. Sprung from the bourgeoisie, Mandeville’s sympathies were populist through and
through: unlike the remote Earl, he prided himself upon being street-wise and plain-speaking.

Shaftesbury-mouthpieces were introduced into various of Mandeville’s writings, and made to spout high-flown and disinterested sentiments which eulogized human nature. ‘His Notions I confess are generous and refined,’ Mandeville conceded, and he did not condemn such altruistic views:

This Noble Writer (for it is the Lord
Shaftesbury
I mean in his Characteristicks) Fancies, that as Man is made for Society, so he ought to be born with a kind Affection to the whole, of which he is a part, and a Propensity to seek the Welfare of it. The attentive Reader, who perused the foregoing part of this Book [Mandeville’s
Fable
], will soon perceive that two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine.

His Lordship’s system, however, was pie in the sky; it failed the reality test.

In stark contrast to the head-in-the-clouds idealist, Mandeville stubbornly portrayed himself as the voice of feet-on-the-ground realism. ‘
O
NE
of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves
’, he expostulated, ‘
is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are
.’ And what they really were, at bottom, were Hobbesian egoists.

It is, of course, hardly an accident that this man who loved playing the no-nonsense realist was a practising physician and medical author, professionally inured to the blunt truths of the flesh. He gloried in strutting around in the persona of a hardbitten dissector of human nature, one of ‘the curious, that are skill’d in anatomizing the invisible Part of Man’. ‘Could we undress Nature’, he explained – Mandeville habitually conflated the medical and the sexual – ‘and pry into her deepest Recesses, we should discover the Seeds of this Passion before it exerts it self, as plainly as we see the Teeth in an Embryo, before the Gums are form’d’ – an unusually chilling image.

Though initially (like so many others) a champion of Descartes, Mandeville learnt from experience that strict mind–body dualism
was an obstacle to understanding. It was impossible to make progress in fathoming man without paying close attention to the flesh and its ceaseless symbiosis with thought. The body was forever influencing the mind, and vice versa. ‘When a Man is overwhelm’d with Shame,’ for instance, ‘he observes a sinking of the Spirits; the Heart feels cold and condensed, and the Blood flies from it to the Circumference of the Body; the Face glows, the Neck and Part of the Breast partake of the Fire.’

To ignore or disdain the flesh in the manner of Shaftesbury was myopic folly or hypocrisy. As a doctor of society, it was his job to be concerned, Mandeville insisted, with the actual operations of bodies individual and politic, with social functioning and breakdown, with how dysfunctions could be cured or palliated by the expert. ‘Laws and Government are to the Political Bodies of Civil Society’, he programmatically announced at the opening of his
magnum opus
, ‘what the Vital Spirits and Life it self are to the Natural Bodies of Animated Creatures.’ In the body politic and natural alike the master anatomist discovered that huge consequences stemmed from the petty and seemingly trivial – ‘small trifling Films and little Pipes that are either over-look’d, or else seem inconsiderable to Vulgar Eyes’.

The doctor’s solution to the enigma of human nature was spelt out clearly in his
The Fable of the Bees: Or the Knaves Turn’d Honest
of 1714, an extended reworking of ‘The Grumbling Hive’, some doggerel rhyming couplets published nine years earlier. The
Fable
presented a cautionary tale of how a prosperous, acquisitive commercial society (London, Amsterdam) could be brought to its knees by a sudden conversion to ‘honesty’ – that is, as understood in Christian or classical terms, the pursuit of self-denial and austere virtue.

The ultimate motive force behind society, revealed the
Fable
, was pure Hobbesian self-interest. The outcome did not have to be Hobbes’s state of terror, however, for the trick of society lay in converting basic survival instincts (eat or be eaten) into less socially destructive – indeed socially beneficial – vices, for instance, envy and avarice, and the love of honour, glory and reputation. Practices were devised whereby, without abandoning one whit of their essential
egoism – quite impossible! – people made themselves socially useful, by masking it. Indeed, it was greed, vanity and
amour propre
which actually kept the social merry-go-round turning – they provided work and created wealth through the intricate mechanisms whereby social ostentation, display and eminence supplanted naked physical aggression. Rank, ostentation, ornament, equipage, fame, titles and suchlike show and splendour provided the psychological satisfactions necessary to displace gross violence while gratifying the ‘odious part of pride’. Among these artificial virtues which society affected, honour was crucial: ‘In great Families,’ he bantered, ‘it is like the Gout, generally counted Hereditary.’