Natural Beauty

Exploring Shaftesbury's ideas on nature, virtue, and beauty

In the next two posts, we’ll be looking at the life and work of Shaftesbury, the 18th-century British philosopher who developed a philosophy of moral beauty (inspired by Stoicism). In Part I we’ll introduce his life and work, explore the beauty-virtue connection, and examine his ideas on structure and order in beauty. In Part II we’ll apply these ideas to virtue, looking at moral beauty and how this concept is still useful for us today. These two posts were originally published in 2023, but I think they are important so I’m bringing them back again for fresh consideration. Hope you enjoy!

Shaftesbury’s Life and Writings

One of the most interesting (and currently under-appreciated thinkers) of the early modern period was Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713). He was so important to philosophy in the 18th century that the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, among others—all had to grapple with Shaftesbury, either to criticize or be inspired by his work. Hume, now considered by far the greater philosopher, credited him as one of the “philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing.” Eighteenth-century German thinkers, from Leibniz to Goethe, were especially influenced by his thoughts on nature and beauty. Leibniz went so far as to call his work “beyond Plato and Descartes,” while Herder called him “the beloved Plato of Europe” (Michael B. Gill, A Philosophy of Beauty, p. 12).

Unfortunately, Shaftesbury’s style and Stoic-influenced subject matter fell out of fashion in the second half of the 18th century, and most people today either ignore him or don’t take him seriously as a philosopher. This is a shame. He has much to offer anyone interested in philosophy as a way of life, particularly those of us following a Stoic path.

Although Shaftesbury doesn’t often mention Stoicism in his published works, Stoic ideas form the undercurrent of almost his entire philosophy. And his private notebooks, which he labeled Askemata (Greek for “exercises”), make it clear that he attempted to live and think as a Stoic. I don’t think anyone could read Shaftesbury’s Askemata [1] and not come away impressed by his commitment to Stoic principles. (For those who want to know more about these philosophical notebooks, I highly recommend John Sellars’ article Shaftesbury, Stoicism, and Philosophy as a Way of Life.)

Of course, he expressed this commitment in his own way, responding to his own times and the demands of his particular life. As an earl, Shaftesbury had many political responsibilities, which he undertook without relish but to the best of his abilities. He strikes me very much as a latter-day Marcus Aurelius, performing his courtly responsibilities because it was his duty, not because he enjoyed the power or prestige. He much preferred a life of quiet contemplation and study to an active political life, where he had to deal with intrigue, dishonesty, and people who were very unlike himself.

For better or worse, Shaftesbury’s ill health actually did require him to be away from England for several stretches of time. He spent several philosophically fruitful years in Holland, where he consorted with the philosopher Pierre Bayle and developed some of his central ideas of moral philosophy (in his work The Moralists). Later, after he had married and had a son, he spent the last years of his life in Naples, recovering his health but also writing about aesthetics. These writings would become influential in establishing the study of aesthetics in the English-speaking world.

However, the label “aesthetics” can be misleading, because what Shaftesbury was really writing about was Stoic beauty. Throughout his oeuvre, but especially in his magnum opus, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Shaftesbury constructs his ideas of beauty on the Stoic conception of virtue. He doesn’t say this is what he’s doing, but to anyone versed in Stoicism it’s quite clear he is highly influenced by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Stoic ideas passed down through Diogenes Laertius (Sellars, 2016).

The Characteristicks is quite an interesting work. It’s basically a compliation of several different pieces Shaftesbury wrote throughout his life: On Enthusiasm; An Essay on Wit and Humour; Advice to an Author; On Virtue and Merit. In the last years of his life he hand-picked and edited this collection several times, so we know it’s a good representation of what Shaftesbury actually believed. For modern readers, his baroque style is a bit hard to get through, even compared to other 18th-century philosophers. It’s partly because of this ornate literary style that he has been neglected as a serious philosopher.

While I wouldn’t recommend Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks to everyone, I do recommend a modern book that closely examines his philosophy: Michael B. Gill’s A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art. In this excellent and insightful work, we learn how Shaftesbury’s views on nature and virtue relate to his well-known framework of aesthetics. Michael Gill does not really examine the links between Shaftesbury’s philosophy and Stoicism, but he does a wonderful job of explaining his take on virtue, nature, and art.

In fact, Shaftesbury’s views on nature, virtue, and art are (in good Stoic fashion) completely intertwined. As Michael Gill says, “For Shaftesbury, what is fundamental is beauty, which can belong to nature, to artworks, to bodies—and to minds. Virtue is a kind of beauty, and, as a kind of beauty, it attracts” (p. 65). Let’s look now at Shaftesbury’s philosophy of beauty and virtue, guided by Gill’s Philosophy of Beauty, but with an eye to how this philosophy relates to Stoicism.

The Beauty-Virtue Connection

Some philosophers read Shaftesbury’s work as primarily a statement on aesthetics; others recognize his work as primarily a statement on virtue, but with strong connections to beauty (e.g., Esther Tiffany’s article from 1923). It depends on which angle you want to emphasize. For me personally, it seems clear that his primary concern was virtue, and only secondarily did he concern himself with what we would call aesthetics.

While his love of beauty was sincere and profound, he also recognized that the subject of beauty was more appealing to many people than virtue (and still is!). Shaftesbury probably had a number of practical reasons for framing virtue in terms of beauty, including:

• Linking virtue to beauty makes it more palatable to a worldly audience, who would already be very familiar with the pursuit of beauty. For example, Shaftesbury’s Advice to an Author is thinly disguised as a treatise on the style and subject matter of writing, but it finishes (like most of his works) by recommending the pursuit of virtue through art (in this case, writing).

• We want to shape our desires toward something desirable, rather than simply running away from vicious impulses—carrots, not sticks. As Michael Gill says, “The comparison of virtue to beauty advances Shaftesbury’s goal of replacing the then-dominant commandment-based concept of duty with a view of virtue as delightful and attractive” (p. 110). As a practicing Stoic, I can certainly relate to the effort to move toward something attractive. The way Stoic theory analyzes motivation, we can’t help but be pulled toward those things we believe to be good. (We’ll discuss this more in the next post.)

• Appreciating the beauty of nature and art can help to cultivate our character and refine our sense of moral beauty. In this way, artistic appreciation can be a step toward virtue: “Shaftesbury thinks that sensitivity to beauty in one arena can carry over to sensitivity to beauty in another. Appreciation of order of any kind, even of “the meanest subjects,” can be ‘assistant to virtue,’ since virtue is itself a kind of beauty” (Michael Gill, p. 120).

• Sensitivity to beauty is a unique and distinguishing characteristic of humans (Michael Gill, p. 129). Like other Stoics, Shaftesbury bases his philosophical inquiry on nature, finding that humans differ specially from other creatures in our awareness and admiration of beauty. This appreciation is part of what makes us human, so we find meaning in life when we develop our capacity to appreciate beauty.

In associating virtue with beauty, of course, Shaftesbury follows in the footsteps of the ancient Greeks, including the ancient Stoics. The Stoic tenet that “only the beautiful is the good”—developed by Chrysippus and later espoused by Seneca and Cicero, two of Shaftesbury’s favorite authors—includes both the beauty of the natural world and the beauty of human virtue.

Both these types of beauty attract us because of a particular ordering of their parts: in the case of nature, the harmonious functioning of many parts as an integrated whole, and in the case of a human, the harmonious functioning of our psyche as an integrated whole. In both cases, it’s not just any sort of order that we find beautiful, but only the type of order that optimizes functionality for that particular entity (whether it’s a plant, a person, an ecosystem, or a planetary system). As Aistė Čelkytė puts it in The Stoic Theory of Beauty with respect to virtue:

Virtue confers benefit not because it has simply any kind of structuring capacity, but because it structures in accordance with what is best in human beings…Virtues confer benefit in respect to their structuring capacity, but they themselves also have a certain structure which gives them aesthetic value. It seems that at least to some extent, Chrysippus was aiming to show that there is a significant overlap between ethical good and aesthetic value.

Čelkytė, p. 68

Beauty in this sense is not the fundamental function of virtue but a secondary-level property that supervenes on the beautiful. Čelkytė compares the aesthetic value of virtue to “the use of aesthetic properties by scientists as special attributes of especially apt scientific theories” (p. 68). When choosing between two possible theories, scientists are drawn to the one they consider more simple, coherent, and elegant—in short, more beautiful. These aesthetic properties are not related to the truth of the theory, but they nevertheless make it preferable. So “beauty supervenes as a kind of secondary value on properties that are intrinsically valuable themselves” (p. 69). I think Shaftesbury would have agreed: what’s important is not the aesthetic properties in themselves, but what they reveal about the underlying composition of the scientific theory or virtuous character.

The Structure and Order of Beauty

Shaftesbury understood that nature exhibits a functional order and structure that we humans (with our capacity for seeing patterns and organization) find beautiful. For the Stoics and for Shaftesbury, beauty is an inherent, objective property of the world, not a subjective judgment in the eye of the beholder. It would be beautiful regardless of our judgment of it. We just happen to be capable of recognizing and appreciating its order, structure, and harmony.

Shaftesbury certainly did. Michael Gill emphasizes his conviction—clearly influenced by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius—that the world is a beautiful, complete system:

A word Shaftesbury adverts to time and time again, is “system.” Careful study of the natural world shows that small systems function as parts of bigger systems, that bigger systems function as parts of still bigger systems, that those bigger systems function as parts of even bigger systems, and so on. Study of the natural world eventually reveals that all these embedded systems function as parts of one entire system, a system of all things.

Michael Gill, p. 40

What’s important about a system, though, is that’s it’s not merely a random or haphazard collection of things, but an ordered and orderly amalgamation that functions successfully together. This property of unity, harmony, and order—in both Shaftesbury and the Stoics—is what makes something beautiful:

Shaftesbury uses numerous words to refer to the property that all beautiful things possess: unity, harmony, regularity, proportion, order, symmetry, balance…Every part of a beautiful thing agrees with all the rest. All its elements work together to form a singularly perfect system.

Michael Gill, p. 37

In writing about beauty, Shaftesbury repeatedly emphasizes this element of proportionality and the relationship of part to whole; he writes of “unity of design,” “character of unity,” “a real whole by a mutual and necessary relation of its parts,” and “a whole, coherent and proportioned in itself” (Michael Gill, p.36). This harmonious part-to-whole relationship was also prominent in ancient Stoic conceptualizations of beauty. Arius Didymus, for example, wrote:

Just as beauty of the body is a symmetry of its limbs consisted with respect to each other and to the whole, so too the beauty of the soul is a symmetry of reason and its parts with respect to the whole of it and to each other.

Stobaeus, 5b4, cited in Inwood and Gerson

So there is a long tradition in Stoicism of seeing beauty in both the harmonious, structured functioning of the world and the harmonious, structured functioning of the human psyche. Shaftesbury, steeped as he was in Stoic thought, and growing up in a privileged environment surrounded by beautiful things, naturally picked up on this association between beauty, nature, and virtue.

Next time…

In Part II of this series, we will continue thinking about the structure of beauty, looking specifically at how humans fit into this picture. Channeling ancient Stoic ideas on oikeiosis and “natural affection,” Shaftesbury combined beauty and ethics to create a new theory of moral beauty that is still of interest today. Please join me next time as we continue to explore Shaftesbury, his legacy, and his fascinating ideas on aesthetics and ethics.

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Notes

[1] I would not necessarily recommend the Askemata to anyone as a model of Stoic practice. In his personal writings Shaftesbury is incredibly harsh on himself for every perceived failing and for not living up to his role model, Marcus Aurelius. At times it was rather painful for me to read. So in some ways it’s actually an example of what not to do as a Stoic. However, as a historical document, and as a means of understanding Shaftesbury’s life, it can be very valuable.

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