[In the following essay, Griffin analyzes Shaftesbury's Soliloquy, examining its ideas about the role of the author and arguing that the work shows how eighteenth-century notions about rhetoric differ from contemporary rhetorical thought.]

Vous savez que je suis habitué de longue main à l'art du soliloque. Si je quitte la societé et que je rentre chez moi triste and chagrin, je me retire dans mon cabinet, and là je me questionne and je me demande: Qu'avez vous? de l'humeur? … Oui … Est-ce que vous vous portez mal? … Non … Je me presse, j'arrache de moi la vérité. Alors il me semble que j'ai une ame gaie, tranquille, honnête and sereine, qui en interroge une autre qui est honteuse de quelque sottise qu'elle craint d'avouer. …

Je conseillerai cet examen secret a tous ceux qui voudront ecrire; ils en deviendront a coup súr plus honnétes gens et meilleurs Auteurs.

Diderot 2:2 89-90¹

The “art of soliloquy” that Diderot describes here is not his own invention—his source is an essay by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1711), in which the practice of self-examination is recommended as the essential prerequisite to authorship. In this essay I would like to take both a practical and theoretical look at this eighteenth-century practice. As a writing teacher, I have discovered that the soliloquy encourages students to develop what I'll call “authority,” a voice or ethos that is not only individual but commands respect. Practice, however, is never independent of theory; as Berlin cautions, “to teach writing is to argue for a version of reality …” (“Contemporary Criticism” 766). The version of reality that underlies Shaftesbury's soliloquy is a rich mix of Platonic epistemology and classical rhetorical notions—a complex theory that the practice of soliloquy doesn't necessarily imply, since specific practices can result from a number of different theories. However, Shaftesbury's ideas are in themselves useful counterpoints to some modern assumptions about rhetoric. The “art of soliloquy” is thus worth our reconsideration, both pragmatically and theoretically.

The soliloquy that Diderot adopted from Shaftesbury is an imitation of Platonic dialogue, a strict exchange of question-and-answer designed to effect an internal division, and thus allow the thinker to distinguish better ideas from worse. It is a process of judgment, a way of defining one's own values. Shaftesbury argues that this internal search for values must take place before the author addresses his public, for two reasons. First, authorship is an assumption of authority; to publish one's thoughts to the world is to presume to give advice. So “all authors are, in a manner, professed masters of understanding to the age” (Sol. 1:104), who must be sure of their own ideas before they try to persuade others. Shaftesbury's second, and related, concern is the influence of the audience on the author. A premature consciousness of an audience's desires can influence thought itself—the anxious writer may think whatever his audience would most like to hear. Shaftesbury's example is the cleric who pens “private” meditations with an eye to eventual publication, who becomes for his public an “author-character … always considering how this or that thought would serve to complete some set of contemplations, or furnish out the commonplace book from whence these treasured riches are to flow in plenty on the necessitous world” (Sol. 1:109). Shaftesbury's eighteenth-century authors might seem at first to have little in common with student writers, who are in most cases not writing for publication, and whose work is not intended to instruct but to demonstrate that they have absorbed instruction. And writing teachers are more apt to complain that students ignore audience than that they are unduly influenced by it. If we look more closely at the nature of student writing, however, we see that in fact student writers are expected to develop authority in their writing, and that they are as vulnerable as Shaftesbury's cleric to the desires of their audiences.

Most writing assignments students are given demand a rhetorical response. We introduce them to genres that are both public and persuasive, e.g., opinion essays, analysis and criticism of texts. Even purely expository works, like research reports, are arguably persuasive in an implicit way. Finally, we ask students to imagine readers beyond their immediate classrooms, to write as if for the public. And that means we are asking that they write as if they had authority, an ability to command attention and respect for their views. Composition pedagogy, then, should offer them some means of developing authority—something beyond the mere imitation of the authoritative forms of the genre. Students know that format, footnotes, and academic jargon don't truly entitle them to take positions or make claims. To speak with true authority, they must have some inner sense of the value of what they're going to say.

I would also argue that students are uncomfortably aware of the desires of their audiences, especially since academic success frequently hinges on pleasing professors. When student writing is ineffective, it can be seen as lacking audience awareness, a conclusion that modern research tends to validate. But researchers have also recognized the problems of audience awareness. Ede and Lunsford point out that an exclusive focus on what the audience wants “in its extreme form becomes pandering to the crowd” (159) and undermines the writer's responsibility to determine the meaning of her own work. Elbow has recently noted the inhibiting effect of audience awareness; he suggests preliminary writing that closes out audience altogether, as a way of overcoming writer's block. Students in particular “often feel ‘they don't have anything to say’ until they have succeeded in engaging themselves in private desert island writing for themselves alone” (Elbow, “Closing” 65).

Both objections echo Shaftesbury's warning against the “author-character,” who has lost all identity in his preoccupation with pleasing his audience. Student writers are particularly vulnerable to such a loss. They are not only asked to take on a public voice, which may feel unfamiliar to them, but are then evaluated on their performance by their instructors. They thus begin with a sharp anxiety about pleasing this immediate audience, and become, for their instructors, a particular type of “author-character”—the good student. They produce prose that has the qualities they assume college professors admire, e.g., inflated diction, formal tone, that meticulous attention to “rules,” whether appropriate or not, that Rose has observed. They also become entangled in the “character” that the genre seems to demand, whether research scientist or literary critic, and are understandably awkward in its imitation. They are, finally, almost anyone but themselves.

Self-discovery, according to Berlin, is itself the end of many current “expressionistic” rhetorical theories (Rhetoric 145-55). In Shaftesbury's rhetoric, it is only the beginning—but an absolutely essential beginning. Escape from the “author-character” can be achieved by turning within, by substituting the self for the external audience, by listening for self-approval. Once internal conflicts are resolved, however, the author takes up her proper role, i.e., influencing public opinion. Self-discovery is not, however, easily achieved. Shutting out audience isn't sufficient; the author is left to confront her own mysterious subterfuges. “One would think,” Shaftesbury notes, “there was nothing easier for us than to know our own minds, and understand what our main scope was; what we plainly drove at, and what we proposed to ourselves, as our end, in every occurrence of our lives. But our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that 'tis the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly” (Sol. 1:113). Shaftesbury's warning here, that the mind can mask thoughts from the thinker, is not often echoed in current composition texts, most of which assume that the mind's ideas are relatively accessible and can be accepted at face value. Frequently, the emphasis is on the collection of ideas, as if overcoming a lack of content were usually the writer's problem. Too often, there is no suggestion that the ideas students have gathered may be suspect. Yet we all know that not all the thoughts that occur to us during a session of brainstorming are equally good—some are irrelevant, others vague, others illogical. These we may eliminate quickly. What we are not likely to notice are those ideas that are suspiciously self-serving, that arise from assumptions so deeply held as to go unquestioned.

The soliloquy questions those assumptions; like Platonic dialogue, its motive is to shake faiths that are unwarranted, to unmask the true nature of ideas. The dialogue exercises of current composition textbooks have rather different motives. True, modern pedagogy has never lost a sense of the efficacy of dialectical thinking. In The Practical Stylist, for example, Baker reminds us that “our minds naturally swing from side to side as we think” (16), and then recommends using the swing to construct proleptic argument, by favoring one side of the swing: “The basic organizing principle here is to get rid of the opposition first, and to end on your own side” (17). The dialogue exercises recommended in textbooks reflect this approach to dialectical thinking; internal opposition is useful as a representation of possible external opposition. These exercises thus differ from the soliloquy in a subtle yet significant way. The structure is the same, an exchange of relatively brief questions and answers. But the exchange is not seen as essentially internal, even when the writer is playing both roles. When the “other” of the conversation is not a real person—friend, fellow student, or teacher—it is the writer's imaginative construct of another person. Instructions frequently specify this: “Imagine that you are discussing the subject you have to write on with another person, but you do the talking for both …” (Cowan 19); “Imagine one reader, someone who would question your assessment of the problem or your tentative solution” (Axelrod 189). Such dialogues, however solitary, have a different dynamic than the soliloquy. They carry the writer to the outside, encouraging anticipation of audience objections, helping the writer prepare possible responses.

In a few cases, the existence of internal “voices” is suggested; then the direction of the dialogue begins to reverse, to turn inwards, and become the self-examination of soliloquy. One set of instructions characterizes the voice of the other as “a tough stranger in your head who keeps pestering you with questions” (Duke 86). A brief pamphlet of 1971, Herum and Cummings' Writing: Plans, Drafts and Revisions, specifically notes the unmasking power of the exercise; “the clash of minds in a dialogue can force hidden ideas and feelings to the surface” (70). The switch from dialogue to monologue, they argue, involves choosing the best voice, a voice in part created from the dialogue itself:

Because it has been listening to the other voices, that voice can now anticipate their questions and objections in monologue form. Not only that, but the voice you choose might find that it has learned something from the others and that its original stance is no longer what it used to be. …

(74)

Shaftesbury's soliloquy operates in much the same way—from the inner debate of voices, the wiser one emerges. It is important, however, that the soliloquy not involve an imagined audience; writers must know that they are speaking only to themselves, must identify as their own the ideas and feelings, certainty and doubt, that the exercise reveals. To illustrate the process more concretely, I'd like to present two student soliloquies, one written by a relatively unsophisticated freshman, the other by an advanced student. In both cases the instructions given were to ask a question, answer it, and alternate question and answer, keeping both fairly brief, until the conversation seemed to end. Since most of us have had at least casual conversations with ourselves, it's not difficult to model soliloquy for the students. Nor do most students have trouble producing these exchanges. Occasionally, a writer is so unused to any kind of self-criticism that she will ask only questions to which she has prefabricated answers. More often, students involve themselves in a thicket of doubts, as this freshman does in response to George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language.”

Q: How do you react to the statement “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”?

A: I guess my first reaction would be that it is scary.

Q: What do you mean scary?

A: Well, in a way you are brought up to trust politicians in three piece suits, and to think that they lie is scary. Politicians have a big responsibility on their hands.

Q: You just trust politicians who wear three piece suits?

A: I didn't mean it that way, but I guess if a bag lady went out on a stage to make a serious political speech I wouldn't take her very seriously.

Q: What if she were telling the truth, and had some good ideas?

A: I still don't think I would take her very seriously.

Q: Isn't that a form of discrimination?

A: Sure it is.

Q: Then why would you react that way?

A: I'm not sure. I recognize it's discrimination, but I still feel that way. Maybe it isn't acceptable because it is out of what we consider proper.

Q: So are you saying appearance makes the politician?

A: A good appearance doesn't hurt. Maybe appearance is another shield politicians hide behind.

This writer faithfully followed the instruction to begin with something that disturbed her, an assertion of Orwell's that she finds “scary.” In a move typical of soliloquy, she stops to ask herself what she means by the term. Her answer is tentative, and leads to a contrast between two icons, so to speak, the three-piece suit and the bag lady. The strictness of the dialogue form allows this writer to pursue the meaning of these symbolic types, and label her own distrust of the bag lady “discrimination.” “Sure it is,” she agrees, reaching the soliloquy's point of certainty. An assumption she would like to hold about the relative trustworthiness of politicians in three-piece suits has been shaken—not by an outside critic, but by the critic inside her own head.

For some freshmen, the soliloquy is their first exercise in self-questioning. Most advanced students have already experimented with methods of testing their own ideas and tend to use the soliloquy in more varied and complex ways. Students in a pre-law writing course, for example, did use it to construct proleptic argument, by proposing possible objections to their own positions and then answering them. The reflexive nature of the soliloquy, however, involves the writer simultaneously in both roles, proponent and opponent, prosecution and defense. In this student's soliloquy on the insanity defense, the result is a playful nagging voice that keeps the problems of the argument constantly before the thinker. The soliloquy begins with the problem of defining insanity for legal purposes. The writer is drawn to motivation as the crucial difference, and speculates that the insane motivation comes in a different way:

Q: So what you want to look for is a problem with the killer's wiring.

A: In a way, yes. We can trace the behavior of a “normal” killer to some sort of logic based on desire, greed, passion, anger, etc. We can say he was angry because of A or he was desperate because of B, where A and B are things we can accept as part of the real world.

Q: Whatever that is.

A: Hush. I'm on a roll. Okay. But the insane killer's motives may also be traced to A or B, but there's a problem in the way the stimulus we recognized as reality is processed. The insane killer adds an element of his own to the cause/effect decision to kill somebody. And if that element depends upon something outside what we consider the real world, we can recognize that as insane.

Q: This is all a complicated way of saying it depends, right?

A: It depends.

The description of insane motivation that the writer is working out is sophisticated, and one that legal experts have developed in greater detail, as she found when she began to research the subject. The other voice here seems merely to interfere with the construction of the theory, and at one point, the writer tells it to be quiet—“Hush. I'm on a roll.” But its presence can't be ignored; its objections are valid. And immediately after her attempt to quiet it, she picks up its objection to the indefinite nature of the term real world and begins to work that into her theory, by qualifying its use, i.e., “what we consider the real world.”

Of course, one might object that students asked to write soliloquies merely imitate forms of cross-examination that are available to them in their social context, from “L. A. Law” to the marginal comments of instructors. Even if the exercise begins as imitation, however, it can end in serious self-examination. Students are not always enthusiastic about the possibilities they discover in their soliloquies. For every student delighted with the prospect of becoming her own critic there is another who complains that the exercise has undermined her ideas, and now she doesn't know what to think—and the essay is due. Certainly invention techniques that merely generate lists of usable ideas are more efficient. But do they produce more thoughtful essays? Soliloquy may lead to an essay without a clear thesis, to an almost heretical expression of doubt. If the teaching of rhetoric should include critical thinking, perhaps the clear expression of doubt is itself a legitimate pedagogical goal. In practice the soliloquy adds to the arsenal of invention techniques with self-discovery as their end, a collection that begins with Rohman and Wlecke's journal-keeping, meditation, and metaphor exercises,² and now includes various forms of freewriting, brainstorming, and of course dialogue. Shaftesbury, however, does not propose the soliloquy as merely one more invention exercise—he claims that it is the essential prerequisite to authorship. “'Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a strong self-examiner and thorough-paced dialogist in this solitary way” (Sol. 1:112). The soliloquy is crucial for Shaftesbury because of his underlying epistemological and rhetorical convictions. Those are worth a closer examination, both for what they imply about the practice of soliloquy itself and as they represent a strand of rhetorical theory bypassed in the eighteenth-century rush to empiricism.

According to Shaftesbury, soliloquy is necessary because the mind is self-deceptive, because “our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that 'tis the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly” (Sol. 1:113). Shaftesbury attributes the mind's self-deceptiveness to its double nature, “two persons in one individual self” (Sol. 1:121). The only way to distinguish these two “persons,” to make them speak out distinctly, is to divide in a self-conscious way. The process begins, Shaftesbury explains, “when by a certain powerful figure of inward rhetoric the mind apostrophises its own fancies, raises them in their proper shapes and personages, and addresses them familiarly, without the least ceremony or respect” (Sol. 1:123). In the ensuing dialogue, the mind's ideas, or “fancies,” will divide into two parties, those of Appetite and those of Reason:

Those on the side of the elder brother Appetite are strangely subtle and insinuating. They have always the faculty to speak by nods and winks. By this practice they conceal half their meaning, and, like modern politicians, pass for deeply wise, and adorn themselves with the finest pretexts and most specious glosses imaginable; till, being confronted with their fellows of a plainer language and expression, they are forced to quit their mysterious manner, and discover themselves mere sophisters and impostors who have not the least to do with the party of reason and good sense.

(Sol. 1:123-24)

This description invokes two classical notions, one freely acknowledged and the other merely implied. The description of the mind as a duality of better and worse is clearly Platonic, and the soliloquy, Shaftesbury owns, is modeled on Platonic dialogue (Sol. 1:128). The other assumption here is that effective rhetoric is linked to good character. The voice of Reason triumphs in the internal debate not by virtue of the ideas it proposes—the whole purpose of the soliloquy is to judge those ideas—but through its straightforward rhetoric, the “plainer language and expression.” Appetite also announces itself rhetorically, with the worst kind of sophistry, “subtle,” “insinuating,” “specious,” remarkable more for what it omits than what it says. Shaftesbury is here echoing a classical doctrine, most fully developed by Quintilian, that the good orator is necessarily the good man.³ His innovation is to apply this doctrine to an internal rhetorical contest. The inner orator who argues most effectively is also the more virtuous part of the self.⁴

Once the author has identified his own better ideas, he can address the public with authority. And his authority will be effective, because his audience has that same double nature of better and worse, Reason and Appetite. The final point, and most basic assumption, of the Soliloquy is that all humans share basic notions of value. It is evident, Shaftesbury claims, “that in the very nature of things there must of necessity be the foundation of a right and wrong taste, as well as in respect of inward characters and features as of outward person, behaviour, and action” (Sol. 1:216-17).⁵ Shaftesbury's assumption of a common sense of right and wrong allows him to assume that those arguments that the self approves will be rhetorically effective for the public, a correspondence that Isocrates also assumes, in his claim that “the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ when we deliberate in our thoughts” (327).

As all audiences have ideas of Reason, they also have those of Appetite—and in his essay, Shaftesbury sadly concludes that the audiences of his day may be ruled by this baser part. But the audience's poor taste can never excuse the author's poor performance. Authors are responsible for correcting taste, not catering to it: “One would expect it of our writers that if they had real ability they should draw the world to them, and not meanly suit themselves to the world in its weak state” (Sol. 1:171) Authors, finally, can serve as agents of moral change; like the ancient poets, they can be “authentic sages for dictating rules of life, and teaching manners and good sense” (Sol., 1:104). They cannot take on this role, however, until they have resolved their own inner conflicts, through soliloquy. Only then can they be sure that their rhetoric appeals to the higher nature of their audience, rather than its baser one.

Although Shaftesbury's advice is coherent in its own terms, there are three major points here that are problematic in the context of current composition theory: the nature of the self, the evaluative function of common sense, and the ethical obligation of the rhetor. A thorough discussion of each point is beyond the scope of this paper, but I would like to suggest some ways in which Shaftesbury's ideas offer useful perspectives on some current issues.

Modern theory has taken issue with the very concept of self, as an autonomous entity. In the field of composition theory, this scepticism about the self has found its strongest expression in the work of the “social constructionists.” However, their notion that the ideas of the individual are determined by social structures is still controversial; as Patricia Bizzell noted recently, her own work “seems to arouse the most violently negative reactions in its implications that people as intellectual agents are totally constituted by the discourse communities to which they belong” (229). Those negative reactions have several possible sources. Bizzell mentions the “American ambivalence about belonging to any community” (229). Jim Corder hit a different note, and a very personal one, in his lament for the poststructuralist death of the author: “… if the author is not autonomous, I'm afraid that I've lost my chance not just for survival hereafter …, but also for identity now” (301).

Shaftesbury's “author-character” suggests a third sort of objection, that is, if authors are in fact “constituted” by their communities, the distinction between author and audience blurs. Shaftesbury's “author-character” is an example of a writer almost totally identified with his potential readers. He is not a deceptive rhetor, who holds one opinion, but offers his audience another, for his own purposes. In the “author-character,” the desire to please is so strong that he never has an idea of which his readers might disapprove. His flattery is thus ingenuous and entirely sincere. Of course, we might see such a writer in a positive light, as one in harmony with his community, expressing shared values. A more negative interpretation is one that Stewart borrows from Fromm, describing the self that merely reflects a social role as “a pathological phenomenon, the result of which is deep insecurity and anxiety and a compulsion to conform” (50; Stewart 79). However we regard such a character, the problem is that such deep agreement of the individual with her community erases the need for rhetoric in anything but a superficial sense, since there will be no disagreement on basic values, at least within specific social groups or discourse communities.

Individuals do think within the social and cultural constraints of particular communities, yet I doubt that any community exists in which disagreement about basic values never occurs. Burke points out that even the rhetoric used to affirm community values is evidence of the potential for discord: “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (22). Rhetoric exists because individuals disagree.

And where individuals disagree, the question of authority arises. The rhetor is not always a spokesperson for community values—frequently she is trying to persuade a community to change its values. In that case, her authority, her sense of having something important to say, cannot come from the community—it must come from herself. Yet we distrust the self as a judge, for a complex of reasons that have philosophical, political and cultural roots. Shaftesbury's self, however, is not a simple reference point that operates in an immediate, intuitive way. It is an internal parliament of discordant voices, a microcosm of the divided community, that must persuade itself, effect some sort of internal agreement, before it can persuade others.

The notion of the divided self has been lost to composition pedagogy, largely because the Scottish empirical rhetoricians rejected it.⁶ Current composition theory, however, seems to have rediscovered the double self. Murray, for example, describes a “first reader” who engages in a kind of dialectical activity with the writing self: “The self speaks, the other self listens and responds, the self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates” (140). Elbow moves toward the Platonic duality by explicitly positing a “second reader” as “a kind of ‘best self’” (Writing 179) that makes judgments on the writing process as it occurs. Finally, in a classroom-based study, Roth found empirical evidence of the split self in students' approach to the unanalyzable general audience. They “geared themselves to the public at large—at times, paradoxically enough, by addressing their own best selves” (51).

One objection that Berlin raises to these “expressionistic” approaches to rhetoric is that truth, here, is accessible only to the individual who discovers it: “Truth can thus be known but not shared, not communicated” (Rhetoric 12). Murray, Elbow, and Roth all envision the discoveries of the other or “best” self as communicable; the real sticking point seems to be the source of the discovery, the positing of truth as an inner reality. The “transactional” rhetoric that Berlin favors sees truth as the product of a rhetorical transaction, “an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object, audience, and language—operating simultaneously” (Rhetoric 15). Transactional rhetoric seems to avoid the dangers of both idiosyncratic visions and dictatorial audiences. Truth, for each community, is finally negotiated.

The notion that truths, or values, are thus cooperatively determined is attractive, but it too suggests difficulties. What happens, for example, if one of the interacting elements is absolutely corrupt? In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca face the problem squarely in their discussion of the adaptation of the speaker to the audience. The orator must fit his behavior to the audience, they argue, yet some audiences are morally corrupt. In such cases, the authors remind us, “the orator is nearly always at liberty to give up persuading an audience when he cannot persuade it effectively except by the use of methods that are repugnant to him” (25).

Shaftesbury's “common sense” is a different kind of solution to both the problems of idiosyncratic values and morally corrupt audiences. Rather than advising an honorable retreat, he charges authors with the moral obligation to effect a change, to “draw the world to them” (Sol. 1:171). No audience is so absolutely corrupt as to be beyond the reforming power of rhetoric, because all audiences share with their authors this natural evaluative capacity, “Reason” or “common sense,” as Shaftesbury alternatively calls it. As Shaftesbury discusses more fully in an earlier essay, Sensus Communis; An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour [SC] (1709), “common sense” is what finally ties the individual to his community, since it not only discovers common values but simultaneously creates in the individual a concern for the common welfare (SC 1:69-72).

The most ethical motivation for writing is this concern for one's community. And here Shaftesbury's theory falls into line with the most recent opinion. Research in composition is unlike that in many other fields, in that it never seems to leave behind the pragmatic concerns of pedagogy, the question of what to do in class on Monday morning. Researchers seem particularly aware of the ethical implications of writing instruction, of its power to effect social change. Bizzell justifies her “cultural criticism” approach with the hope that “the activity of cultural criticism will foster social justice by making people aware of politically motivated ideological concealments” (225). Robert J. Connors refers to the ethical motivation of composition scholars more simply as the “open and almost ingenuous desire to do some good in the world with our study and our teaching” (327). Bizzell and Connors want to give students not only the power to persuade but also the power to resist persuasion. But to do that, students must understand more than the principles of good writing or the effect of rhetorical strategies. They must be able to determine ethical values. No composition pedagogy can foster “social justice” unless it teaches students to distinguish the just from the unjust; no writing teacher can do good in the world unless she gives her students some means of deciding what the good is.

Shaftesbury's advice to authors brings into focus this central problem for any writer, the necessity of determining first the nature of the good. Composition pedagogy too often presents writing as an ethically neutral activity. And students too often think of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, as ethically negative. “Rhetoric,” they volunteer, “is what sleazy politicians use to convince you that something they want for themselves will be good for everyone.” The move from neutral to negative is not surprising. If we present rhetoric as the art of persuasion without discussing the art of deciding what the end of persuasion should be, our students will of course sense that rhetoric can be used for evil as well as good ends. Yet we are not teachers of ethics; most of us are reluctant to impose any particular set of values on our students, and frown even at attempts to create a common culture that might eventually produce a shared set of values, as the troubled response to Hirsch's work indicates.⁷

Our pedagogical goal, however, should be to provide the impetus for thinking about values, and the means for developing them. Shaftesbury never advises his authors to think in a certain way—he emphasizes instead the social importance of the author's role, his potential for influencing his community. Authors inevitably have authority; people will be affected by their words. Our students need to recognize their authority as writers, take seriously their potential influence. They must begin, then, with a serious search for their own values—or their rhetoric will be merely manipulative. The soliloquy gives writers an opportunity to develop values, without positing such values for them. It demonstrates a rhetoric that is more than manipulation, one that begins with a rigorous examination of one's own ideas.

Notes

1. Diderot had translated the Soliloquy into French in 1771.

2. Rohman and Wlecke mention the colloquy as part of the classic meditation, but do not give explicit instructions for it (26-32); it may have certain similarities to Shaftesbury's soliloquy, which has also been called a colloquy (Marsh, “Shaftesbury and the Inward Colloquy,” 18-47).

3. For a fuller discussion of the vir bonus doctrine in Quintilian, see Alan Brinton, “Quintilian, Plato, and the Vir Bonus.”

4. The fact that rhetoric is an essential component of internal judgments of value makes Shaftesbury's theory “epistemic” in Berlin's terms, i.e., that rhetoric is involved in the discovery of truth. See Rhetoric and Reality 165.

5. In a later essay of the Characteristics, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Shaftesbury calls the ideas of value “pre-conceptions,” and argues that they are divine in origin (2:135-36).

6. Smith, Campbell, and Blair all objected specifically to Shaftesbury's doctrine of the divided self.

7. Profession 89 gives a fair sampling of such responses.

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———. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody. Characteristics 2:1-153.

———. Sensus Communis; An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor. Characteristics 1:43-99.

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