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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.744)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Michael B. Gill, professor of philosophy at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. And we're talking about his book, A Philosophy of Beauty. Appropriate cover, beautiful cover. Shatsbury on Nature, Virtue and Art. Dr. Michael Gill, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Gill (00:28.231)
Thanks a lot, it's wonderful to be here, PJ, thank you.
PJ Wehry (00:32.216)
So just off the bat, Dr. Gill, tell me, why this book?
Michael Gill (00:37.959)
Well, I guess part of it comes just autobiographically from this tendency I have to slip back in time. So I started out studying Kant and I thought after a while, no, I can't really understand Kant until I understand some predecessors. And so I slipped back and eventually got to Hume. And I thought, well, I can't really understand Hume unless I understand Hutchison because he's so influenced by Hutchison. And
Then after spending another six months on Hutchison, I said, I can't really understand Hutchison unless I understand Shaftesbury. So that's how I slipped back into Shaftesbury, which is a tendency I've had. And then when I got to Shaftesbury, one of the things that just immediately struck me was the great challenge of the surface of his text. He's a really unusual writer. And when I say unusual, some would take that to be euphemistic.
In his day, in 1710 and 1720, he was thought of as a great stylist, as one of the greatest writers of his day. Before too long, and certainly by the 20th century and the 21st century, it's much more common to see his texts as difficult and unruly and needlessly complex and tricky and hard to understand. And a lot of people I know who like
the philosophy of that period will say, I just can't read it. It's just too literary. It's too Byzantine. There are too many self references. And so just as a writer, I found him fascinating. And I love the challenge of trying to take on this text and make as much sense of it as possible. Why did something that people in 1720 thought was the greatest stylist of the day come to be thought of as
really just unpleasant to read and not worth it. And I wanted to figure out why it was worth it. And then there's also just the fact that he's an enormous influence. mean, he's, he's one of the very first people writing in English to speak of aesthetics. Most histories of British aesthetics will start with Shasbury. His influence on moral theory and the moral sense theory is equally profound. think he had incredibly prescient things to say about religion.
Michael Gill (03:02.075)
and politics and psychology. So his influence is enough to justify it in my mind along with those other matters. And then finally, I just found it inspiring the more I got into it and the more I read the idea of trying to find the beauty in the universe, trying to make of your life a work of art, trying to make your life into something beautiful.
and how he tries to develop that and how he tries to develop that through a lot of ambivalence and a lot of psychological and interpersonal difficulties was just fascinating to me. So it ticked a lot of boxes philosophically, historically, but also just in a question of style and fun and challenge. So that's why I got into writing the book.
PJ Wehry (03:57.57)
Thank you. Great answer. And kind of leads into one of the main questions I wanted to ask, because it immediately presents itself. I love that his philosophy of beauty, his focus on beauty shows up so much in the form of the book, both in its multitude of genres and in its cover and its art. I'm, you know, can you talk a little bit about.
how he used the book itself as an object and how he used the different genres to showcase his philosophy of beauty or even to maybe better explain it.
Michael Gill (04:33.969)
Yeah, absolutely. He was incredibly attentive to the physical book, as well as incredibly attentive to style and to voice and to character, to all of that. With regard to the physical book, one feature is that he wanted to make one book that had harmony and unity because his notion of beauty is of unity and harmony.
to him that that is what makes something beautiful. And so he wanted to bring all of the things he had written together into a harmonious whole. And he wanted to do that by creating this book. And towards that end, he, for instance, wrote an index, which seems kind of banal to us. But it's very hard to find a book written in English prior to this that had an index. And that's one indication of attempt to try to make it whole.
After he had written the main works, he then wrote what he called miscellaneous reflections, which were hundreds of pages in which he tried to bring all the different ideas together and show how they fit together. With regard to the art, that's an incredibly interesting feature of it. So he wrote all the works that eventually became characteristics earlier. And then when he put them together, the first edition came out. But between the first edition and the second edition,
He commissioned artists to come up with woodcuts for all of the different pieces, as well as some additional ones, which he wanted to be beautiful. He wanted them to help tell the story because for him, the visual arts were just as important as the written arts. So you find these features of the book throughout as you're reading. Then there are details about particular
voices that he has, which we can get into. But each of the works, and there are six of them in characteristics, are written by a different voice. They're written by a different character. In this, he's kind of like Kierkegaard in that he's not speaking in his own voice. He takes on voices. And then a lot of the fun and challenge of reading is trying to figure out how the different voices fit together because they speak to each other. One character will talk about an earlier character that he had written.
Michael Gill (06:59.699)
So it becomes almost like a philosophical novel. Sometimes when I'm reading him, I think he's more like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche than analytic philosophers. But I even sometimes get this kind of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pinchon quality to him with so much self-referential bit and so much complexity and so much fun because he's funny. So.
All of that went into trying to make a book that would be readable, that would be entertaining, that would grab people. And it worked in 1711. It hasn't worked as well in the 21st century, but I'm trying to change that.
PJ Wehry (07:44.204)
Yeah, you're doing a great job. I mean, I of course want to recommend the people buy your book, but you're also doing a great job of selling his work. It's very clear that you enjoy it. You're excited about it. I'm also reminded of like it sounds almost like a Nabokov pale fire, you know, like that.
Michael Gill (08:01.107)
Absolutely, absolutely. So the pale fire comparison is one that I've I've thought about too because you know pale fire, course he's got the main text and then he's got all the notes and You you get a weirdly similar thing. I don't think his his his personality is not like the vocals He's got a very different personality He's got different ideas for sure. But yeah, I totally agree with what you're saying just as in pale fire you have
PJ Wehry (08:19.566)
Not many peoples are.
Michael Gill (08:31.335)
this poem and then you have the author with notes about the poem, but the notes about the poem are actually part of the novel. You get exactly the same thing in characteristics where it's in three volumes. And the last volume, the entire volume, which is longer than any other single work, are his notes on his previous work. And then he has notes to the notes. So it's like David Foster Wallace with footnotes and then footnotes to the footnotes.
And he knows what he's doing. It's not like he's just carried away with himself and he can't stop. He's very calculating in all of it. The voices are not him. He is creating something. He is creating a work of art and he knows he's doing it. So yeah, Pale Fire, definite comparison, even though you're going to get a very different personality in the two works.
PJ Wehry (09:27.374)
Yes, and I appreciate you saying that. When you say creating a work of art, how does that reflect what he thinks art is and what he thinks beauty is? What is he looking to create?
Michael Gill (09:38.152)
Yeah, so his concept of beauty, put very, very simply, oversimplified, is of harmony and order and system. And he uses balance. He uses a lot of words. think this is one of the problems in his view, is that he uses all these words and he thinks it's all the same thing. And I'm not sure beauty is one thing, but we'll just put that so we can come back to that.
But the purpose in beauty is to live a better life. The purpose in beauty is to appreciate the way the universe is and to bring yourself in accord with the goodness of the universe. So while he thinks art is beautiful for its own sake in a certain sense, he also certainly thinks that art should make people better.
and to make someone better is to turn their soul into something of beauty, which means to turn their soul into something that's unified. So what does that mean? I think here he's very similar to Plato in Book Four of the Republic, where Plato says the just soul is the harmonious soul, is the soul that's in concert with itself, that doesn't have internal conflict. I think that's what Shaftesbury thinks a beautiful soul is. And he thinks art can inspire us
to make of ourselves something beautiful. This is one way that he's really different, I think, from his immediate successors, Hutchison and Hume. Hutchison and Hume talk a lot about beauty as well, and they're very influenced by Shaftesbury. But when they're talking about beauty, almost always, they're talking about our assessments of a beautiful object, as opposed to the first personal artist's perspective on creating something beautiful.
And Chastbury certainly talks about our assessment of beautiful objects, but unlike Hutchison and Hume, he's incredibly attentive to the first personal perspective of trying to make something beautiful. So he talks about artists and what they're doing. And he wants you to see living a life as having the same kind of structure as an artist trying to make something beautiful. And the book is supposed to do that.
Michael Gill (12:06.395)
And part of the reason it's so difficult is he wants you to be thinking for yourself how to do this. He doesn't want to just give you certain ideas that you passively accept. He's trying to spur you to some kind of realization of how you can go about making of your life a work of art.
PJ Wehry (12:28.408)
So you've talked a little bit about the, if I'm hearing you correctly, the difference between him and his successors. What are some of the threads? I have to admit, I started studying Kant and I looked a little bit at Hume and I looked at, just, bought Hutchison and then we've been in the, we've, we have five kids. So I've been a little bit on pause. I think I probably would have eventually gotten to Shaftesbury. I like, could feel this journey with you.
Michael Gill (12:54.822)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (12:54.926)
What do you see as one of those unifying threads? What are some of those threads that show up in his successors that we, mean, obviously Kant enormously influential. What do we still see today? know, hume on taste, those sorts of things.
Michael Gill (13:08.657)
Yeah, yeah, first of all, I'm glad to hear there's someone else who slips back in time. Yeah, that happened to me in the writing of my dissertation. just kept falling every six months. I fell like 50 years back. It was eventually I just had to stop and say, OK, this is as far back as I'm going to go. As far as the threads that he has in common with Hutchison and Hume, there's some really prominent
PJ Wehry (13:14.37)
All the time.
Michael Gill (13:37.886)
powerful ones. The one that he's probably most famous for is the moral sense or the idea that morality originates at least partly in sentiment and not in reason alone. It's a little more complicated and not quite as clear in Hutchison as it is, sorry, in Shaftesbury as it is in Hutchison Hume. It's much clearer in Hutchison Hume, but there is no doubt that Shaftesbury thinks
moral judgments do ground out at least partly in how we feel about things, in our sentimental response to things. And that's a massive influence. And that shapes the course, certainly of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, but of a great deal of moral philosophy going forward. Another way that he was a massive influence on Hutchison and Hume, but also many other philosophers,
was his attempt, to my mind, successful to defeat egoism. So if there's one view, there are a lot of views actually that he's opposed to, but there's no view that he's more opposed to than what he perceives as the Hobbesian and Lockean view that humans are motivated entirely by self-interest. And this, think, is one of his greatest achievements in what we would call psychology. I think he gives a very astute
and sophisticated analyses of human psychology. And he establishes to his satisfaction that humans are motivated by a lot of things other than self-interest, such as altruism. One thing that's super interesting about his attack on egoism and his affirmation of altruism is while he does that, he doesn't say altruism or concern for others is all good.
He says, actually, most of the problems that we get into in politics and religion come not from people being overly selfish. It's from people caring too much about one part of the world rather than other. It's partisanship. It's party. And party, which leads to all sorts of vicious enthusiasm and conflict.
Michael Gill (16:02.407)
The love of party is not selfish. The love of party is born of our sociability. It's because we have incredibly strong feelings towards our in-group. But unfortunately, these incredibly strong feelings towards our in-group lead into antipathy to those in the out-group. And this leads to partisanship and this leads to all manner of problems. on the one hand, a very positive view of human nature. We're not entirely selfish. We really do care about other people.
On the other hand, not a Pollyanna view, because actually what he calls the herding mechanism, the herding mechanism tends to lead to more problems in society than pure selfishness. He thinks pure selfishness is not very nice, but purely selfish people don't tend to cause as much mischief as vicious partisans.
That was another influence, this attack on egoism.
PJ Wehry (17:03.918)
There's a, I wish I could remember the exact quote, but it's Chesterton talking about, there's nothing like a true, like a robber baron is not as bad as someone who has that really twisted, but super conscientious moral sense where they're constantly hounding you. It seems the similar idea.
Michael Gill (17:19.441)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. mean, he's and this is something that Hume picks up on a lot. He's worried more about fanatics and people who are driven by crazy enthusiasms than he is by sober egoists. Sober egoists are a problem, but not as much. So
He's really concerned about that. And in the first book that he wrote in 1699, The Inquiry Concerning Virtue, he starts out by discussing how belief in God affects our moral character. And he says some things there that I don't know if many people could have said and gotten away with it. He was an Earl. Actually, at that point, he wasn't yet an Earl, but he was very high born.
PJ Wehry (18:15.554)
He had that privilege.
Michael Gill (18:16.689)
We had that privilege and get away with it. But what he says there is if you believe in an entirely good God, that's going to be good for your moral character. And he talks about that. He says, if you're an atheist and you don't believe in God, you can still make correct moral judgments. can still have a moral, you still have a moral sense. You can still be good. He thinks it's harder. He thinks it's really hard to be entirely virtuous if you don't believe in God, because the world.
is so unfortunate. So many bad things happen in the world that if you don't believe there's a purpose for it, it's hard to keep your confidence in doing the right thing. But he thinks it's possible. It's just, it's really hard not to give in to despair. So that part is super controversial because it's very common in the 17th century to think atheists can't be moral. Not even non-Christians can be moral, let alone atheists. But then the third part is that he says,
PJ Wehry (19:10.988)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Gill (19:15.565)
much worse than atheism is belief in fanatical religion is, and he's really criticizing Puritans here, is belief in a God who punishes people for things they didn't do, belief in a capricious God. This will corrupt and pervert your moral sense. And this will make you much worse than you would be if you just didn't believe there was any God. So he's certainly a theist. He certainly thinks we should believe in God and then it's going to help your character.
But you could be virtuous. It's just really hard to hear an atheist. And much worse than atheism is fanatical false religion, which he associates with the Puritans, among many others. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (19:58.99)
I think you mentioned this in the introduction. This is something I personally appreciate. It's something I love to see in philosophy that he defines a lot of his reasons positively rather than negatively, was kind of the, at the time was the way people was like, it's not like this or we don't do like, we do the right thing because we don't do evil rather than he's like, no, we should be pursuing it because it's beautiful.
Michael Gill (20:23.891)
Yeah, yeah. In some ways, I wanted to make that I don't know how successful I was in this running theme line throughout the whole book, which is that he's really a positive philosopher. He's trying to be just as you say, he's trying to give a vision and impress upon you how things can be good, how you can be better, how life can improve as opposed to
defining his philosophy negatively. And I think this is where his personality becomes interesting to me and how he writes. I actually think this was hard for him because I actually think he as a person was really negative person. I think he struggled with misanthropy. I think he found people really hard. I mean, sometimes...
PJ Wehry (21:18.04)
Yeah, I loved your biography on that. Sorry.
Michael Gill (21:22.533)
Yeah, I mean, he's ambivalent because he's also very charming and he clearly loves people in one respect. But there are many times in his life when he just wants to retreat and he finds people just so difficult and he wants to love God. He wants to think the world is a beautiful, good place. But so often he's just incredibly impressed by how terrible things are. And so.
He wants to be positive. He wants to be positive towards other people. He wants to be positive towards God. He wants to be positive towards creation. And yet he's got these tendencies that he very clearly recognizes towards negativity. And I identify, I mean, this, this, resonates with me, you know, uh, what sort of person do you want to be? Do you want to be someone who's always fixating on how bad things are and who gives in to negativity?
PJ Wehry (22:04.11)
Yeah.
Michael Gill (22:15.803)
No, you might not want to be that person, but that might be the tendency you have. And he struggles with that. And when you read his unpublished notebooks, you see this really intimate struggle that he's having with himself over that. And I think the way he thought he could resolve this, the solution was to write philosophy in the way he did. And that's what he's trying to do.
Yes, I too appreciate this positivity that he's trying to put throughout his work. And I find it super interesting that it didn't come natural to him. It was very much a conscious effort to do that, both in his personal life and in his writing.
PJ Wehry (23:07.766)
And I wanted to make this connection and let me just see if this, when we were talking about his anti-partisan stance, the reason he thinks partisanship is so bad is because it focuses too much on one part and is not harmonious. So it's not beautiful, which is what he thinks moral is. Is that, just a little link there. Okay.
Michael Gill (23:17.01)
Yeah.
Michael Gill (23:30.003)
Absolutely. so virtue is integrity. Integrity is another word for wholeness, being integral. And there are two senses of integrity that he uses. When we speak of integrity, we generally mean just inside one person. If I have integrity, that means I'm consistent with myself. But when he speaks, but he means that. But it also means the integrity of humanity, certainly of your political.
PJ Wehry (23:59.224)
Mmm.
Michael Gill (23:59.54)
unit. And so, yeah, just as you say, if you are putting one part in a conflict with another, or you see the rise of one part as inextricably linked with the downfall of another part, that's the equivalent of having internal conflict in your soul. That's the equivalent of being Plato's unjust person. You have this conflict and you shouldn't
promote that in society any more than you should promote it in yourself, any more than you should promote it in your art. So yes, absolutely, that's the connection there. That's exactly right. And ultimately, we're supposed to be in harmony with all of humanity. But I think he's reasonably cautious about saying he expects that of people.
He has two of his characters argue about this. And one of his characters says, yeah, you tell me I need to love all of humanity. I don't think that's psychologically plausible. I can love my friends. I can love a few other people. Maybe I can love people in my party. I don't know. But love all of humanity. It's too mysterious an object. It's like, I can't do that. It's too...
It's too massive and just psychologically. And Hume actually speaks directly on this point. And he agrees with that character. He says, human psychology cannot form the idea of all of humanity in a way that we can have pot. And so Shasbury has one of his characters say that, but it's a dialogue. And his other character says, well, it's really hard, but.
You can try and maybe you can get there. So, and this is a way in which his being able to write dialogue really serves his purposes here, because he can kind of say both things. He can express these sorts of doubts that Hume would later agree with, but he can also express the aspiration. He might've been more optimistic about that than I am, certainly more than Hume was, but clearly his optimism is tempered.
Michael Gill (26:19.717)
and he can get that across in a dialogue. So that's one place in which the form that he's using is so effective for getting across what he wants to do.
PJ Wehry (26:34.606)
I love that so much. That is so genuine. This is where they talk about a hand reaching out from the past. You're like, thank you that someone finally said it, that loving all of humanity is just so big. I've met some of humanity. Can we just admit it's hard?
Michael Gill (26:54.867)
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. Yeah, it's really hard. Yeah, and he acknowledges that it's pretty hard. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (27:05.709)
Excuse me. did want to ask too, you know, we've looked at his successors and one of the really interesting things is he was closely tied with John Locke for a little bit and then seemed to drift away and there seems to be some influence and John Locke wanted probably more influence. seems like, what are the influences from John Locke, but what are the distinct differences from John Locke that we see from?
Michael Gill (27:34.12)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (27:34.382)
I don't know if we've said it, so the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, right? He's got multiple names.
Michael Gill (27:40.764)
Yeah. So, so backing up a bit about Locke, this is great story. I think it's really fun. This is another of the things that makes it fun to write about Shaftesbury. His biography is entertaining. So backing up a little bit, a couple of generations, Shaftesbury is the third Earl of Shaftesbury. His grandfather,
is the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The first Earl of Shaftesbury was maybe the most important politician of his day, had a real fall from grace. There's a lot to say about the first Earl in English political history. And the first Earl of Shaftesbury hired as his factotum one John Locke. And John Locke had an enormous influence on the upbringing of our third Earl.
So the second Earl needed a wife. So John Locke went out and found him a wife. Then they had a son, which is our Shaftesbury, and Locke was put in charge of his education. He didn't educate him himself, but he hired the tutors for Shaftesbury. And they knew each other all of Shaftesbury's life. And they were very friendly. mean, they were like family members. mean, Locke was kind of like a
favorite uncle of Shaftesbury's. He was around a lot, which is extraordinary that the two philosophers had such a connection. And they continued to talk basically until Locke died when Shaftesbury was in his early 30s, I think it was. And obviously Shaftesbury learned a lot of philosophy from Locke. What were the differences?
What's interesting is that Shasbury thought the differences were more important than the similarities. the, well, three related areas of difference. One area of difference was on innate ideas. Locke thought, famously argued in the first book of the essay, that there are no innate ideas. And Shasbury thought, he didn't say there were innate ideas because he didn't want to tangle.
Michael Gill (30:04.913)
with Locke's argument, but he said, let's not call them innate ideas, but we have these instinctive dispositions. And he used a stoic idea of instinctive dispositions and he just didn't want to get into the philosophical arguments with Locke. But I think he really did disagree with that. The other major place he disagreed was something we've talked about already, which is human motivation. So he attributed to Locke, rightly or wrongly,
PJ Wehry (30:28.077)
Yes.
Michael Gill (30:35.739)
an egoistic view of human motivation and specifically an egoistic view of religion. So he attributed to Locke and I think there are some questions about whether he was fair to Locke here, but I'm going to bracket that for now. He attributed to Locke the idea that our only reason to be moral is because, or our ultimate reason to be moral, not our only, but our ultimate reason to be moral is that that's how we can get to heaven. And if we're immoral.
will go to hell and that God's rewards and punishment were the ultimate justification for morality. And Shasbury thought that was an incredibly pernicious view. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that if people came to believe that they would become more selfish. And he had what has come to be known, I think, as the over-justification hypothesis. Do you know this literature, the over-justification hypothesis?
So this is a study that was done years ago, but I think the 1970s, where students, young students who loved to read books were given money to read a certain number of books. And then after they were given money to read a certain number of books, they stopped reading books on their own. And if they weren't given the money, they would no longer read the books. And this came to be known as the over justification on positives. When we start rewarding people for things that they like to do for their own sake, it will pervert.
why they want to do it. And Chesper says exactly the same thing about religion. He says, we should be moral and we should be religious because it's beautiful, because it's the right thing, because it accords with our soul. But if you convince people, the only reason to do it is you'll go to heaven if you do and you go to hell if you don't. That will actually succeed in perverting people's motivational structures. And they will become that way. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And Heathawt Lock did that.
He thought that was the gravest danger that Locke's philosophy posed. Again, rightly or wrongly is a question. And yeah, third point. Yeah, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (32:43.694)
Do you mind if I-
sorry, this just, my wife and ha and I had this conversation about five years ago as our kids were getting older about like doing chores in the house. And my wife was like, do we give them an allowance? She's like, maybe she, I was like, it, it will teach them. I mean, and this is what we often happens. You see people who had allowances, not always, right. But when they get older, they struggle doing chores in the house because there's no, they have to relearn it. Right. And anyways, it's just a, we, I,
Michael Gill (32:52.541)
Sure.
Michael Gill (33:06.481)
Yeah.
Michael Gill (33:13.754)
Absolutely.
PJ Wehry (33:16.642)
It was such a like, it's such a practical idea and it's so important.
Michael Gill (33:20.723)
Yeah, I resonate with that entirely. Yes, know. Absolutely. I think you can see this sort of phenomenon often in children and older people. And I think not the only time, but one of the times where Shaftesbury is just really, really psychologically astute. There are a bunch of other things where I think he says things in this flowery kind of complex,
maybe even Byzantine language that sounds like it's antiquated and sounds like it's something really of little relevance. But when you get into what he's saying, I think it's a very current, understandable, clear and persuasive psychological claim. This is one of those cases. But I think there are other places where he does that as well.
And yeah, I too think that in addition to the experimental data, parental data support this.
PJ Wehry (34:27.042)
Yeah. Well, and I mean, small government, you know, like we see, I mean, it's a, I don't know that that's a fascinating idea. don't want to, that feels like a real rabbit trail. You were about to make a third point. I just wanted to give a practical example.
Michael Gill (34:40.847)
Yeah, well, yeah, the third point and these three points actually all kind of interconnect for sure. But the third point is Locke's view of scripture and Schaffsbury, I don't think there's any doubt Schaffsbury was a theist. I don't think there's any doubt that he believed in God. He believed God was good. I think there is some doubt.
about whether it makes sense to call him a Christian, although what that would mean, you we could argue to the cows come home, but he's, he's really has a very skeptical questioning view of scripture in a way that Locke does not. So Locke has an attitude towards scripture that lots of people had, but that Shaftesbury is pulling away from. So Shaftesbury,
is very early in developing what would come to be known as a historical critical attitude towards the Bible. And he thinks, well, of course, the Bible was written by fallible human beings at particular period in time with particular political and cultural influences and motives. And he's not dismissing it, but he says to understand it, we need to understand the languages.
We need to understand who wrote it. We need to understand why they wrote it. He says, you know, there were a whole bunch of other things written at the same time that ended up in what we would call the Apocrypha. And those decisions were made later by people with their own political and cultural pressures. And again, he's not dismissing it. He's not saying we throw it all out, but he's saying we have to understand it this way. And that is really pretty ahead of the game.
in 1700 and related to that is his criticism of miracles, which gets into a lot of his religious philosophy. So he's got a lot to say about religion. And he was, he was certainly accused of being a religious. And to be honest, the sense of religion that would have counted among most people in 1700.
Michael Gill (37:09.463)
England, maybe he was a religious, but he certainly didn't think of himself as a religious and he certainly had a certain kind of religion.
PJ Wehry (37:17.526)
Is that another thread that we see through to Hume?
Michael Gill (37:20.467)
Yes and no. So, yeah.
PJ Wehry (37:24.174)
Welcome to philosophy.
Michael Gill (37:30.739)
Hume's arguments against belief in God in the dialogues concerning natural religion, I think at times are attacking directly Shaftesbury. So an influence on Shaftesbury, but a negative influence on Hume. So Shaftesbury gives very extensive arguments for belief in God, and they're basically arguments from design.
arguments, look at the beauty of the universe, look at the order of the universe, look at the great harmony of all things. And this is totally central to his view of beauty. Beauty is order and harmony and balance and proportion. And he says, when you look at the universe and you look at science and you look at nature and you look at how everything fits together, you see the entire universe is this incredible work of art. Great balance, great order, great harmony.
And the only explanation for that is a good God, a God who's an artist who creates the greatest beauty of all. And Hume in the dialogues of natural religion just goes at it. mean, Hume, his arguments against that argument from design are just incredibly extensive and really strong. And I don't know for sure that he had Shasbury particularly in mind.
But I believe he did. And if he didn't, he might as well have had. That's one way there's an influence, but negative influence. There are two other, well, there many, but there are two others, but I'll pause for a second because there are two other different ways he talks about Shasbury in this yes and no way.
PJ Wehry (39:16.014)
Yeah, and if you don't mind so Shasper is arguing for God's existence but against miracles is there is there a Almost sounds like Spinoza in some sense. Is it a very deistic? Is that is that what we're looking at from a label perspective I can put that way
Michael Gill (39:27.345)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, so that is a really good question, PJ. And I'm going to have to unpack that a little bit. absolutely, Shasbury thought this argument for God is actually incompatible with miracles. And he thought belief in miracles is actually irreligious because a great artist or great craftsman
PJ Wehry (39:41.676)
Yeah, go for it.
PJ Wehry (39:55.67)
yeah.
Michael Gill (40:03.955)
make something that works. They don't need to come in periodically and shift things around and jury rigs up. Oh, I better fix that because it's not working properly. And that kind of machine is less perfect, is less beautiful than a machine that works perfectly. And he says, you know, this is backwards. This is people who say you need miracles to believe in God are saying when the universe is disordered and irregular and requires all these ad hoc
Jerry-rigged interventions that shows it's of the greatest intelligence whereas when it works perfectly and everything happens as it's supposed to according to elegant laws That shows there's no mind. He says it's exactly the opposite. So For shaftsbury Miracles are irreligious. They create the wrong attitude towards god so so yes to all that the
Part I kind of want to unpack is deism. So he is labeled a deist often. And of course, he's got a lot in common with deism here because the idea is there are these natural laws and the natural laws explain everything. So yeah, he's like a deist there, but he explicitly tries to distance himself from deism. And the reason he tries to distance himself from deism is
He believes that our appreciation of God should have an emotional component. He believes that understanding the beauty of God's creation shouldn't be merely a scientific, rational apprehension, that it should create in us this positive emotion, this love, this love that inspires us to try to make of ourselves something that matches the harmony of the world. And he argues against the deist, or at least tries to distance himself from the deist
insofar as they are cold and only rational. The other side of that equation is enthusiasm. So the enthusiasts were all about this emotion without any of the rationality. And I see Shasperi's trying to thread the needle or maybe get the best of deism and enthusiasm. He wants the rationality of deism and he wants the emotional uplift.
Michael Gill (42:30.801)
of enthusiasm. And he thinks he can get that with what we've come to call a cognitively loaded idea of beauty, a cognitively loaded cognition, appreciation of beauty, which is a current idea that, again, I think he was completely on top of in 1710.
PJ Wehry (42:52.558)
Great answer. Thank you. And I realized what I actually did is I asked like four questions in one.
Michael Gill (42:58.641)
No, there were good questions.
PJ Wehry (43:01.454)
Is there any link to Spinoza?
Michael Gill (43:05.807)
Not that I know of.
PJ Wehry (43:07.278)
Okay, okay. was just, I'm just thinking of the argument against miracles because of the orderliness. That was a shot in the dark.
Michael Gill (43:13.575)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will be honest with you, PJ. It wouldn't shock me to find there's a connection I don't know about, but not that I know of.
PJ Wehry (43:25.912)
Well, and it might not be possible to find it, like even if he read it but it wasn't in his library or someone talked to him about it, right? Like there's stuff that we don't know too.
Michael Gill (43:33.073)
Well, yeah, mean, he was in the Netherlands. knew Baal. So yeah, there's something to find out there that I don't know. Maybe there's something to find out there. Yeah. You can look into it, I'll look into it. You look into it. We'll see where we get it.
PJ Wehry (43:40.162)
Right. That's right.
PJ Wehry (43:47.406)
Yeah, no, no more work, please. Sorry, I wasn't. I just reminded me of Spinoza. It was a random question.
Okay, I got there was something else in it that wrote down I have so many threads here that are just awesome. I think, what I'd like to ask kind of as we, I want to be respectful of your time.
Besides reading Shaftesbury, which you've done a great job of selling him as funny, how often do hear someone say, you should read this philosophy is funny? That might be like the second time on the show.
Michael Gill (44:24.243)
I guess.
Can I just bracket here and say one of the things, one the bits that's funny is, you know, we have this, I'm interrupting you here, but you know we have this notion of a humble brag.
PJ Wehry (44:35.138)
Yeah, don't go for it!
Yeah, sure.
Michael Gill (44:39.335)
He's totally on that. He identifies people who do the humble brag and he identifies them perfectly. It's really funny. He talks about the sort of person who complains because they think too much. They say, I always think too much. really envy those people who just can go about their life without having to think so much and think about all the complications. My life is so much harder. I wish I were like them, which of course is just, you know, and he says,
He doesn't use a little brag, but I mean, that's what he says. He says, of course they're just bragging about how thoughtful they are and how intelligent they are, but they're putting it, and it's hilarious, but it's astute. I mean, he's good. He's good. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:21.198)
Yeah. it's awesome. No, no, it's good. besides reading Schasbury and besides reading your excellent book, which is, thank you for making something approachable that is Byzantine, but also how short it is also a joy and clear, right? Like, thank the Lord. What is something that after someone has listened to us talk about this philosophy of beauty,
Michael Gill (45:38.963)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:50.68)
What is something that you would have a listener do or think about over the next week after listening to all this?
Michael Gill (45:59.249)
Yeah, I think that the line that I find most poignant or pregnant in Shasbury is the idea of being a self-improving artist, which is being an artist of oneself and thinking consciously about what yourself is.
and what sort of things you find beautiful and whether you can make of yourself something like that. I think this conscious attention to self is very salutary in Shaftesbury. In a way, it can sound banal now. I'm not opposed to self-help books, by the way. I don't think self-help is bad. There's a lot of self-help that's good. There's a lot that's bad. But we have this self-help.
And I think a lot of what Chastity is doing is moving in the same direction or trying to get at something through philosophy that a lot of self-help is trying to get to. I would say thinking really consciously about your life as a work of art is a useful, is a useful idea.
PJ Wehry (47:16.578)
Yeah. So beautiful idea to end on Dr. Gill. Wonderful to have you on today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Michael Gill (47:26.033)
It was a pleasure PJ, thanks a lot.