No . 124
The Trusty Servant
Despite not being terribly well treated at school , Shaftesbury made a central contribution to British moral thought , and it was this : that human beings share in having a moral sense . In other words , good and evil are not simply judgements that are made in the rational mind , but are things that we primarily feel . The building blocks of this moral sense are taught and developed by appreciating Platonic notions of beauty , order and harmony in the natural world ; then after recognizing beauty we make it the basis of our own moral action . Thus , from seeing beauty in the world , Shaftesbury ’ s new and original idea is that we will seek to reflect this beauty in our behaviour , or , like good Wykehamists , in our manners . It is no accident that the title he gave to his monumental collected works , which first appeared two years before his premature death from tuberculosis in 1713 , is Characteristics of Men , Manners , Opinions , Times . In the Fellows ’ Library we have a rare 1737 edition of the Characteristics , complete with beautiful engravings and the spellings and typographical idiosyncrasies typical of the period .
It is not entirely far-fetched to imagine that Shaftesbury ’ s belief that human beings are inherently designed to appreciate beauty was somehow nurtured by his walks around Meads , or through the water meadows , or by attending services in this very building . Morality , for Shaftesbury , consists in a uniform sense of the Good in the world and in human nature : in his writing he consistently promotes the existence of a natural impulse towards benevolence . This was in marked contrast to the mainstream thought of his period , which held that moral motivation was grounded in the rewards and punishments of the afterlife . Shaftesbury rejected the central concept of 17 th - century British moral and political philosophy embodied in Hobbes ’ s notion of the social contract . In Leviathan , Hobbes argues that human beings , if left to languish in what he calls the ‘ state of nature ’ are fundamentally self-interested . Living , he writes , ‘ in continual fear , and danger of violent death ….. the life of man [ is ], solitary , poor , nasty , brutish , and short .’
Shaftesbury , importantly and radically , departs from this widely-held view . For him , the selfish beings Hobbes described in his state of nature bear no resemblance to humans as they actually are . Humans are naturally sociable ; living in society and seeking out the fellowship that this implies are humankind ’ s natural condition . Indeed , for Shaftesbury the private moral action of an individual is only correct if it conforms to the public morality of a given group . There is something uniquely attractive and appealingly modern about this . If we are to follow Shaftesbury , a community such as ours ticks all the boxes . We are social in that we cooperate , collaborate , assist and challenge one another ; we are surrounded by a great deal of beauty which , Shaftesbury suggests , we ought to reflect in our own behaviour ; and the Hobbesian state of nature seems then , for the most part , to be unsubstantiated and relegated to an outdated philosophical view of the world . But while Shaftesbury claims that all humans are instinctively imprinted with a sense of right and wrong , he also believes that a great deal of cultivation and refinement is necessary in order to develop correct and proper judgement . Virtue and good taste may be natural , and that is all well and good , but it turns out that a proper education is needed for people to achieve them : one must be oriented to goodness by three key ingredients : manners , charm and taste . In the final chapter of his Characteristics Shaftesbury sums up his overall project as follows :
‘ It has been the main scope and principal end of these volumes to assert the reality of a beauty and charm in moral as well as natural subjects , and to demonstrate the reasonableness of a proportionate taste and determinate choice in life and manners .’
Shaftesbury ’ s goal , then , is to show that not every preference is equally appropriate to human nature , and that there is such a thing as ‘ good taste ’ in art and morality . He went further , claiming that beauty and goodness are ‘ one and the same ’, so that moral or mental beauty turns out to be more fundamental than physical beauty . To his detractors this lays him open to the accusation that he appealed more to the aesthetic aspirations and outlook of the moneyed upper classes to which he belonged than to the emerging masses of what would fairly soon become industrialised Britain . Not everyone , after all , could – as he did – go on a grand tour at the age of 16 .
In spite of this , Shaftesbury clearly has important things to say about what our moral sense should be . You needn ’ t look too far to conclude that humanity seems increasingly prone to compete in what one might call the Hobbesian paradigm , with Messrs Trump , Kim and Putin providing ample evidence of the triumph of brutish self-interest . We have progressively less recourse to objective standards of moral goodness ; the most dominant will becomes sovereign , and morality is as often as not located in a race towards the abyss .
Shaftesbury , who breathed the air we breathe and , who walked the paths you yourselves trod each day when you were boys here , laid some of the key foundation-stones for the open-mindedness and tolerance of the Enlightenment . He offers us an alternative , accessible and highly appealing way of looking at the world and of considering what it might mean to be human .
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