American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century. by Robert Ginsberg Review by: Peter Walmsley Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Winter, 1988-1989), pp. 250-253 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (ASECS). Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2738876 . Accessed: 27/12/2014 19:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The Johns Hopkins University Press and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Eighteenth-Century Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.252.96.28 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:13:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 250 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES ciplinary lines, inspiring equally new approaches and accomplished, concentrated iscussion of more eighteenth-century writers. GLORIA SYBIL GROSS California State University, Northridge ROBERT GINSBERG, Ed. The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987. Pp. 245. $32.50. Robert Ginsberg has brought together nine essays that examine a range of eighteenth-century philosophical texts. The emphasis throughout is on detailed stylistic and rhetorical analysis, much in the vein of John J. Richetti's Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and valuable contributions are made to the study of Rousseau, Leibniz, Herder, Kant, Shaftesbury, Pope, Hume, and Wollstonecraft. A few of the works examined may be unfamiliar , but the collection remains accessible; all the contributors have taken care to convey the themes and character of the texts as they engage in a closer scrutiny of their hetoric. The Philosopher as Writer should, then, prove of general use as an introduction to methods of reading eighteenthcentury philosophy, with rhetorical, generic, feminist, and literary historical approaches represented. There is, surprisingly, no deconstruction here, but the volume shares with Richetti's book a willingness to address philosophical as well as literary issues. These studies in the style of philosophical discourse not only reveal the rhetorical purposes of the authors but frequently illuminate aspects of his or her thought and method. Hume was a confessed votary of "literary fame," and two of the most illuminating contributions vindicate his claim to the title he most coveted: man of letters. In "'Ardor of Youth': The Manner of Hume's Treatise' Donald T. Siebert considers the tone of Hume's first excursion in philosophy. In later life Hume was critical of the "positive Air" of the Treatise, attributing this dogmatism tohis youthful exuberance and intellectual excitement. Siebert explores this hint, drawing a parallel between the confessional Conclusion to Book I and the earlier letter to Arbuthnot inwhich Hume describes his nervous breakdown. The Conclusion is "extravagant and personal" (p. 182), a whimsical intrusion which violates the decorum established in the Treatise. Hume also errs in Books II and III when he uses the first person to explore the psychology ofvice, inadvertently making himself an example of libertinism. But Siebert is also sensitive to the appeal of the prominent persona of the Treatise. Hume's depreciative s lf-portraiture establishes a mood of candor: "Having experienced with Hume the salutary doubt, we This content downloaded from 131.252.96.28 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:13:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS 251 can go on to philosophize in that careless manner he recommends openminded , tolerant, resilent" (p. 196). Hume's kill at dramatizing philosophical inquiry is likewise the subject of Ginsberg's contribution, a paragraph by paragraph istory of his own reading of the essay "Of the Standard of Taste." We learn that while Hume's strategies of repetition, allusion, example, and even story-telling keep the essay's many implicit themes alive in the reader's mind, the vagaries of the argumentits digressions, antitheses, and unsatisfactory conclusion -help effect "our participation i the living thought" (p. 222). By making constant demands on our judgment, he essay becomes apractical education in taste. Ginsberg's pursuit of rhetorical detail, which makes the essay longer than Hume's original, is complemented byhis analyses of Hume's more dubious esthetic pronouncements. Ethos emerges as a concern in much philosophical writing in the century . In "Rousseau's Two Discourses: The Philosopher asRhetorician," Lester G. Crocker first examines the panoply of rhetorical devices at work in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Rousseau's radical attack on the corruption that attends the advance of civilization demands an aggressive polemic stance. Crocker then turns to the Discours sur lorigine de l'inegalite parmi les hommes, arguing that its structure is a strategic reversal of Rousseau 's own thought processes. The philosopher hides his didactic purpose-a bitter condemnation of modern morality-beneath n engaging pseudo-history of early society. Argument becomes a servant of rhetoric, a means ofjustifying and communicating the author's emotion. Here, as in his earlier work on Rousseau, Crocker discloses the prophetic author within the text. Voice is a key issue in Robert Markley's contribution, which sets itself the task of placing the Characteristicks' moral and stylistic "disinterestedness " in its historical context. Markley locates Shaftesbury's prose in the tradition of Fletcherian wit, where style strives to embody good breeding in language. Shaftesbury's writing, like his moral thought, asserts "stable social values and timeless moral and aesthetic truths" (p. 143). Markley effectively pursues this theme in concise discussions of the various tyles of the book, as well as Shaftesbury's moral esthetics, attitudes toward Seneca and Shakespeare, and defense of criticism. This is a convincing and refreshing argument, hough Markley does not attempt to explain some of the more problematic features ofthe Characteristicks' rhetoric. Berkeley was one reader who found Shaftesbury's rhapsodic self-dialogue atodds with his promotion of the external forms of good breeding. Harry M. Solomon notes that "for most philosophers metaphor isa kind of contamination" (p. 123), an irrational ssociation polluting the crystal flow of deductive argument. Solomon challenges this view and reveals the special heuristic powers of metaphor. Pope's metaphor of God as the soul of the world in An Essay on Man keeps the moral and the empirical in play This content downloaded from 131.252.96.28 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:13:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 252 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES at once, while reminding the reader of its own hypothetical character. "Regulative " and "performative," themetaphor serves Pope's multiple aims as a philosophical poet. While it engages the thoughts, emotions, and will of the reader, it also works to hold these different realms of experience in harmony. Two essays investigate rhetorical failures. Laurie A. Finke attributes the disorder of A Vindication fthe Rights of Woman to Wollstonecraft's difficulty in shaping a new rhetoric for her radical vision. On one hand, she is obliged to conciliate a hostile male readership by adopting the pointedly ratiocinative and aggressive style of traditional philosophy. On the other, she struggles to subvert this masculine rhetoric with a more effective and indirect mode as she describes the female xperience. The victory ismixed in Finke's view, since this second rhetoric totters on the brink of "bourgeois sentimentality" (p. 166). Stephen F. Barker makes a similarly guarded efense of "The Style of Kant's Critique of Reason." The Critique is notoriously crabbed and awkward , but its abstractness is somewhat relieved by Kant's use of metaphor to draw our attention tohis philosophical task and chart his progress. Barker notes that Kant's prose is muddiest where the thought ismost difficult, and explores the philosophical justification for the work's cumbersome "architectonic ." Barker also provides a lucid synopsis of the Critique's purposes and themes, but his most interesting point, that Kant personifies the faculties of the mind and then deploys them in a mental melodrama, needs elaboration and substantiation from the text. Eighteenth-century critics and writers seem obsessed with genre, and, as Berel Lang has argued, philosophers were no exception. Their title pages make emphatic generic statements, often tempting readers with dialogues, letters, and essays instead of treatises or anatomies. John A. McCarthy's "The Philosopher asEssayist: Leibniz and Kant" describes the German essay as spontaneous and organic, sceptical yet lyric. He provides meticulous expositions of Leibniz's "Ermahnung an die Teutsche" and Kant's later and more familiar "Was ist Aufladrung?" Though McCarthy's sense of the flexibility of the essay almost renders it meaningless a a critical category, his readings of these very different works preserve one salient feature of the genre: "the impression of dynamic thinking" (p. 51). In "Herder's Craft of Communication" Wulf Koepke is obliged by the neglect Herder has suffered inthis century to provide an introduction to his intellectual project. This overview permits Koepke to plot the progress of Herder's whole career as a writer of philosophy. Herder was aware of the emotional roots of language and of a need to revitalize philosophical discourse, and Koepke shows him opting for more poetic genres, such as the dialogue and the essay, in his later work. In these forms the philosopher does not seek to demonstrate a principle, but instead recounts an intellecThis content downloaded from 131.252.96.28 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:13:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS 253 tual journey, a tale of discovery that permits the reader to grasp the truth as his own. If a single theme merges from these independent essays, it is that hese philosophical writers sought amore engaging rhetoric. Their cause, to cite Markley on Shaftesbury, was "to make the language of philosophy an active social force rather than merely a vehicle of scholastic definition a d debate" (p. 147). This was more than just an attempt to popularize philosophy for a growing readership. They recognized that he inductive text, one which leads the reader through a natural process of acquiring knowledge, ismore readily and thoroughly assimilated than the deductive treatise. Chief among the virtues of The Philosopher as Writer is its contributors' ability to preserve the explorative character of these texts, to convey some of the excitement of discovery that attends the reading of eighteenth-century philosophical discourse. PETER WALMSLEY McMaster University RAYMOND BENTMAN. Robert Burns. Twayne's English Authors Series , No. 452. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Pp. 155. $19.95. DAVID DAICHES, PETER JONES, AND JEAN JONES, EDITORS. A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730-1790. Edinburgh: University Press, 1986; distributed by Columbia University Press. Pp. xi, 160. $32 cloth; $16 paperback. That the Twayne series dealt with four hundred and fifty one other authors before Burns may suggest he difficulties n teaching his work as much as the depreciated value of his critical stock at the moment. Nevertheless, it is difficult toimagine a better introductory work than this canny contribution to the series. Raymond Bentman has succeeded in combining the modem Burns of David Daiches and Thomas Crawford with the contemporary one of Carol McGuirk and, by extrapolation, Frederick Bogel. He has done so without surrendering hisown readings or forgetting the expectations of the Twayne reader. Bentman depicts Burns as "a poet of universal emotion described in terms of concrete, everyday experience" (p. 68), a man of conflicts, and a benevolist-a word and an -ism on which this book depends a little too heavily. He is thus reluctant tosee Burns as either mercenary or political, and extraordinarily forgiving ofhis "love" life ("But he was capable of deep love for women, and his relationships were those of genuine attachments" [p. 80]). This content downloaded from 131.252.96.28 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:13:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions