Philosophy as advice

Shaftesbury's “Soliloquy” had the subtitle, “Advice to an Author,” linking his essay to that broad genre of literature published in early modern Europe under the denomination of “advice.” Though advice literature ranged from guides on governance for princes to handbooks on social punctilios for the upwardly mobile, much of it concerned the means and goals of a satisfactory life. The genre was the chief vehicle for the dissemination of the language of “politeness” in the seventeenth century. Since Shaftesbury was engaged in raising that concept to new complexity and centrality, it was fitting to pay the genre tribute in this essay's title. More generally, Shaftesbury's project was deeply related to the advice genre since his writing covered behavior, morals, and politics, and was ethical and pragmatic in orientation. However, because advice literature was didactic, its style was direct, indicative, and unambiguous. Inserting “advice” in his title, Shaftesbury evoked the genre as a foil for the discursively complex activity that “Soliloquy” both enunciated and instantiated.

“Soliloquy” commenced with a meditation on “the Way and Manner of advising” itself. According to a commonplace, Shaftesbury wrote, no one is better for the advice he receives. Suggesting that it is one thing for an advisor to proffer advice but quite another for an advisee to absorb and follow it, the commonplace posed the problem of persuasion, the most elementary of rhetorical quandaries. Indicating effective vehicles for the practice of advising and embodying them in his own text were central tasks of Shaftesbury's mature project.