Self, Soliloquy, and The Eudaimonic Method in Shaftesbury

Year 2025, Issue: 24, 1 - 22, 10.03.2025

Selena Özbaş

https://doi.org/10.46250/kulturder.1576610

Abstract

Starting with a preliminary discussion on post-theory and the eudaimonic turn, this article aims at exploring the role of self, soliloquy and the eudaimonic method in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy. To investigate this point, the article will first address the ideological, political, and cultural contexts of Shaftesbury’s thought in relation to the advent of the Cambridge circle in the seventeenth century. But later, by abandoning this critical framework and following in the footsteps of the new hermeneutics of trust, the article will adopt a post-critical approach and will try to demonstrate the eudaimonic method in Shaftesbury, the literary critic and philosopher. In accordance, the article will address Shaftesbury’s picture of soliloquy as an encomium to ethical agency as opposed to moral passivity. Thus, in identifying in the neo-Platonist and the Enlightenment self a moral automatism, it will be maintained that he proposes a virtuous sense of self that does not have a fixed but rather a developmental outlook. This is portrayed vividly in his Soliloquy where the dividing of the self and the engagement with soliloquy become forms of self-dialogism. Through acts of soliloquisation, it will be maintained that Shaftesbury develops a dynamic form of self which is actively engaged with the ‘activity of virtue’. The conclusion draws on the point that Shaftesbury’s soliloquy as a literary and philosophical act informs the development of an ethical self. The importance of this point lies in the fact that this continuity implies Shaftesbury’s centrality to well-being studies as a eudaimonic practitioner.

Keywords

Shaftesbury, soliloquy, self, the eudaimonic turn, ethical agency

Shaftesbury’de Öz, Özkonuşma ve Eudaimonik Yöntem

Abstract

Bu makale, kuram sonrası ve eudaimonik dönüş hakkında belirleyici bir tartışmadan başlayarak, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Üçüncü Shaftesbury Earl’ünün Soliloquy (Özkonuşma) isimli eserinde öz, özkonuşma ve eudaimonik yöntemin rolünü araştırmayı hedeflemektedir. Bu noktayı araştırmak için, makale önce Shaftesbury’nin düşüncesinin ideolojik, politik ve kültürel bağlamlarının on yedinci yüzyılda Cambridge çevresinin yükselişiyle olan ilişkisine değinecektir. Fakat daha sonra, bu eleştirel çerçeveyi terk ederek ve yeni güven hermeneutiğinin adımlarını takip ederek, makale kuram sonrası bir yaklaşımı benimseyecek ve edebiyat eleştirmeni ve filozof Shafstesbury’de eudaimonik yöntemin varlığını ortaya koymaya çalışacaktır. Bu bağlamda, makale Shaftesbury’nin ahlaki pasifliğe karşı etik eyleyiciliğe bir övgü olarak özkonuşma düşüncesine atıfta bulunacaktır. Böylelikle, neo-Platonist ve Aydınlanmacı öz anlayışlarında bir otomatizm tespit ederek, bunun yerine belirlenmiş değil gelişimsel olan erdemli bir öz anlayışı önerdiği savunulacaktır. Bu düşünce en açık bir biçimde, özün bölünmesinin ve özkonuşmanın öz-diyalogun formları olarak ortaya çıktığı Soliloquy (Özkonuşma) isimli eserinde ortaya çıkmaktadır. Özkonuşma eylemleri aracılığıyla, Shaftesbury’nin aktif bir biçimde ‘aktif erdem’ ile meşgul olan dinamik bir öz düşüncesi geliştirdiği fikri savunulacaktır. Sonuç kısmı, Shaftesbury’nin edebi ve felsefi bir eylem olarak özkonuşmasının etik özün gelişimini belirlediği noktasından hareket edecektir. Bu noktanın önemi, bu devamlılığın Shaftesbury’nin eudaimonik bir pratisyen olarak iyilik çalışmalarındaki merkezi konumunu ima etmesinde yatmaktadır.

Keywords

Shaftesbury, özkonuşma, öz, eudaimonik dönüş, etik eyleyicilik

Ethical Statement

I hereby declare that the information provided is true and correct. I also understand that any willful dishonesty may render for refusal of this submission.

References

• Amir, Lydia B. (2015). “Shaftesbury as a Practical Philosopher”. Haser: Revista Internacional de Filosofia Aplicada, 6: 81-101.
• Aristotle (1999). Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Hackett Publishing Company Inc.
• Armstrong, David. (1978). Nominalism and Realism. Universals and Scientific Realism, Vol.1. Cambridge University Press.
• Brett, R.L. (2020). The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Routledge.
• Cassirer, Ernst (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Yale University Press.
• Cassirer, Ernst (1953). The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans. James P. Pettegrove. University of Texas Press.
• Cohen, Ted (2008). Thinking of Others: On The Talent for Metaphor. Princeton University Press.
• Cooper, Anthony Ashley (1900). The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen. Ed. Benjamin Rand. The Macmillan Co.
• Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (2000). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge University Press.
• Crisp, Roger (2019). Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham. Clarendon Press.
• Cudworth, Ralph (1996). A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. Ed. Sarah Hutton. Cambridge University Press.
• English, James F. and Heather Love (2023). “Introduction: Literary Studies and Human Flourishing.” Literary Studies and Human Flourishing. Eds. James F. English and Heather Love. Oxford University Press, 1-24.
• Felski, Rita (2011a). “Context Stinks!”. New Literary History, 42: 573-91.
• Felski, Rita (2011b). “Suspicious Minds”. Poetics Today, 32(2): 215-34.
• Felski, Rita (2015). The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press.
• Gerson, Lloyd P. (2023). Plato’s Moral Realism. Cambridge University Press.
• Goldie, Mark (1993). “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism”. Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Eds. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge University Press, 209-31.
• Irwin, Terence (2015). “Shaftesbury’s Place in The History of Moral Realism”. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 172(4): 865-82.
• Israel, Jonathan I. (2001). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford University Press.
• Kaldas, Samuel M. (2024). The Cambridge Platonists and Early Modern Philosophy: Inventing the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge University Press.
• Kamtekar, Rachana. (2012). “Speaking with The Same Voice as Reason: Personification in Plato’s Psychology”. Plato and The Divided Self. Eds. Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain. Cambridge University Press, 77-101.
• Klein, Lawrence E. (1994). Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-century England. Cambridge University Press.
• Klein, Lawrence E. (2004). “Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol.13. Eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford University Press, 217-23.
• Kosman, Aryeh (2013). The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology. Harvard University Press.
• Lucian (1915). Vol. II. Trans. A.M. Harmon. Loeb Classical Library 54. Harvard University Press.
• Moi, Toril (2017). Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. The University of Chicago Press.
• Moore, C.A. (1916). “Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England”. PMLA, 31(2): 264-325.
• Murdoch, Iris (2014). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. (1993). “Social Justice and Universalism: In Defense of an Aristotelian Account of Human Functioning.” Modern Philology, 90: 46-73.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. (2010). “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Eds. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost. Wiley-Blackwell, 241-67.
• Pawelski, James O. and D.J. Moores (2013). “What Is the Eudaimonic Turn? and the Eudaimonic Turn in Literary Studies”. The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies. Eds. James O. Pawelski and D.J. Moores. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1-64.
• Plotinus (2018). The Enneads. Trans. George Boys-Stones. Cambridge University Press.
• Pocock, J.G.A. (1989). Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. The University of Chicago Press.
• Purviance, Susan M. (2004). “Shaftesbury on Self as a Practice”. The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2(2): 154-163.
• Renz, Ursula (2012). “Changing one’s Own Feelings: Spinoza and Shaftesbury on Philosophy as Therapy”. Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy. Ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer. De Gruyter, 121-38.
• Ricoeur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. Yale University Press.
• Ricoeur, Paul (1992). Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. The University of Chicago Press.
• Swift, Jonathan (1741). Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence. E. Curll.
• Whichcote, Benjamin (1698). Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot in Two Parts. Awnsham and John Churchill.