Self, Soliloquy, and The Eudaimonic Method in Shaftesbury

Authors : Selena Özbaş

Pages : 1-22

Doi:10.46250/kulturder.1576610

View : 76 | Download : 44

Publication Date : 2025-03-10

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Starting with a preliminary discussion on post-theory and the eudaimonic turn, this article aims at exploring the role of self, soliloquy and the eudaimonic method in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy. To investigate this point, the article will first address the ideological, political, and cultural contexts of Shaftesbury’s thought in relation to the advent of the Cambridge circle in the seventeenth century. But later, by abandoning this critical framework and following in the footsteps of the new hermeneutics of trust, the article will adopt a post-critical approach and will try to demonstrate the eudaimonic method in Shaftesbury, the literary critic and philosopher. In accordance, the article will address Shaftesbury’s picture of soliloquy as an encomium to ethical agency as opposed to moral passivity. Thus, in identifying in the neo-Platonist and the Enlightenment self a moral automatism, it will be maintained that he proposes a virtuous sense of self that does not have a fixed but rather a developmental outlook. This is portrayed vividly in his Soliloquy where the dividing of the self and the engagement with soliloquy become forms of self-dialogism. Through acts of soliloquisation, it will be maintained that Shaftesbury develops a dynamic form of self which is actively engaged with the ‘activity of virtue’. The conclusion draws on the point that Shaftesbury’s soliloquy as a literary and philosophical act informs the development of an ethical self. The importance of this point lies in the fact that this continuity implies Shaftesbury’s centrality to well-being studies as a eudaimonic practitioner.
Keywords : Shaftesbury, özkonuşma, öz, eudaimonik dönüş, etik eyleyicilik