The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848 part 3

After Habermas
The eighteenth century has long been regarded as an “age of
conversation” in which forms of polite sociability developed (conversation
in this period could mean “company” or “society”), structured around
metropolitan coffee-houses, clubs, salons and country-house entertaining.
Much influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s account of the “public sphere”, an
idealized model of human interaction in the Enlightenment emerges in
which European bourgeois subjects congregate in the newly created social
spaces of salons and coffee-houses to exchange ideas freely, equally and
reasonably in an environment governed by the rules of politeness.4 These
gentlemen spoke on their own authority on what the period characterized
as matters of “general ethical humanism, indissociable from moral,
cultural and religious reflection.”5 According to Habermas, such
conversations developed into a critical discourse, through which the
people monitored state authority, and modern democracy was ultimately
born.
Habermas’s account has itself been subject to much criticism in recent
scholarship, usually on the grounds that his idealized model of the
bourgeois public sphere as rational, male and egalitarian rests on a set of
unsustainable exclusions.6 Further, as Peter de Bolla points out in Chapter
Nine of this volume, Habermas’s account is seriously flawed in the ways
he understands, and demarcates, private and public experience in the
eighteenth century. Indeed de Bolla suggests that the Habermasian notion
of the “public sphere”, whether accepted or contested as an account of
aspects of the period, has become “so ubiquitous in the scholarship on the
Enlightenment … that its utility may no longer be very significant.” With
this scepticism towards Habermas’s account in mind, it is noteworthy that
a number of authors in this volume offer versions of conversation that,
explicitly or implicitly, depart from the Habermasian ideal: Ludmilla
Jordanova discusses James Northcote’s gossipy, competitive conversations,
motivated by personal relationships and rivalry; Paul Kerry cites the
familiar “rational-critical” characterization of conversation in eighteenthcentury Germany, only to show how Heinrich von Kleist’s concept of
conversation differs from this; and Jay Fliegelman charts the discrepancies
between democratic ideals of conversation and their practical embodiments.
Further, if we no longer read eighteenth-century conversational
concepts and practices through a Habermasian lens, two possibilities–not
necessarily mutually exclusive–become open to us. Firstly, we may find
ourselves giving less weight to those well-known documents of
eighteenth-century rational conversation that are often invoked by
xii Introduction
commentators on the period, namely, the periodicals, The Tatler and The
Spectator, the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of
Shaftesbury and some of David Hume’s essays. These texts’ emphases on
the improvement and cultivation of the human subject by means of
reasonable conversation on “History, Poetry, Politics”7 may chime with
Habermas’s account of the public sphere, but are–we now know–only one
version of conversation in the eighteenth century, and not necessarily the
dominant one. As Markman Ellis, for example, has shown, rational and
improving conversation had to vie for attention with other forms of
sociability that were “vulgar, popular, subversive, grotesque and sexual”.8
Future research will give us a more accurate map of the relative
significance of rational and “unruly” conversations in the period.9
Secondly, if we are no longer to regard these texts as providing us with
descriptive accounts of life in the eighteenth-century coffee-house or
salon, or perhaps more accurately, accounts of the point at which a
conceptual ideal of conversation is embodied in practice, we are free to see
them as something else: contributions to the normative intellectual projects
of their authors, to their conceptualizations of the disciplines within which
they wrote. To take one key example, Lord Shaftesbury’s ambition to
rescue “philosophy … from colleges and cells” and place it in the domain
of “modern conversations”10 is imitated, linguistically and conceptually,
by Addison and Hume. These texts of Shaftesbury, Addison and Hume are
now taken as exemplars of the spirit of the Habermasian public sphere,
with conversation read invariably as synonymous with rational sociability.
Such glosses may well be valid for Addison’s reinterpretation of
Shaftesbury. They can certainly be substantiated by comments to be found
throughout his periodicals and his well-documented attempts to encourage,
and participate in, what would now be regarded as the culture of the
Enlightenment public sphere. Shaftesbury’s original declaration, however,
has little to do with the construction of a “bourgeois public sphere”, and
everything to do with his conceptualization of philosophy, and in
particular, moral philosophy. As Lawrence Klein writes:
Shaftesbury thought that philosophy should make people effective
participants in the world. It was a practical enterprise and, given the
disabilities from which humans generally suffered, often a therapeutic
one.11
For Shaftesbury, philosophy’s task was to produce moral agents.
Crucially, these putative agents must experience philosophy
conversationally: the two-way interchange of moral ideas (in contrast to a
The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1688-1848
xiii
“top-down” model of transmitting knowledge) encouraged the sought-after
activity and autonomy in the learning subject.12
In this instance, then, conversation is to be understood as a method of
communicating philosophy, as well as the means of making the concept of
practical philosophy a reality: it is necessary to execute Shaftesbury’s
prescriptive philosophical project. Shaftesbury suggests that the language
of philosophy should resemble that of “good company and people of the
better sort”13, but he does not inextricably link philosophical conversation
and the public sphere. The conversations or scenes of instruction he has in
mind could take place almost anywhere–not necessarily in a salon or
coffee-house–and what distinguishes them from other forms of linguistic
exchange is their pedagogic function. Shaftesbury’s notion of conversation
is indebted to classical as well as contemporary models and his rescuing of
philosophy is, in part, understood as a return to its classical heritage. Most
important for us, however, is Shaftesbury’s formulation of a distinctive
concept of conversation which accounts for a particular interaction
between the reader and philosophical text. Any readerly experience which
falls short of engagement with this active pedagogy cannot be classified as
properly conversational in Shaftesbury’s terms.
If we now turn to consider David Hume’s “Of Essay Writing” in
relation to Shaftesbury, instead of in relation to Habermas, we find
discussions of the nature of philosophical language, its relationship to
conversational forms and the role of philosophy, rather than a document in
the development of the Habermasian public sphere. Thus the demise of
philosophy, gone “to Wrack by this moaping (sic) recluse Method of
Study”, is exemplified by its linguistic deficiencies: philosophy is “as
chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and
Manner of Delivery.” Hume argues that philosophical discourse should
model itself on conversation, and that philosophers require experience of
conversation to acquire the “Facility of Thought and Expression”14
necessary to communicate with their audiences. Hume’s central concern is
the formation of a viable philosophical discourse which would succeed in
“alluring us into the paths of virtue by the views of glory and happiness
…”, “…make us feel the difference between vice and virtue” and “excite
and regulate our sentiments”15 without sacrificing “the Substance to the
Shadow.”16 This is philosophical discourse conceptualized in terms of
conversation, and such conversation as ethical sentimental education.
For Hume and Shaftesbury, then, conversation is understood primarily
as a specific means of communicating between readers and philosophical
texts. Such writings draw on conversational forms in order to enable twoway conversations between writers and readers. Thus conversation in this
xiv Introduction
sense becomes conceptualized, to a large extent, as the antithesis of
Habermasian sociability. In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock
relates Machiavelli’s account to Francesco Vettori of “how he comes
home in the evening, puts on formal clothing, and enters into the presence
and conversation of the ancients by reading their books. The conversation
is meant to restore Machiavelli not only to the understanding of politics,
but indirectly to actual civic participation”.17 Hume’s and Shaftesbury’s
readers are prepared, if not for civic participation, at least for ethical
conduct, but, like Machiavelli, they are prepared indirectly, and frequently
alone, through reading. The human interactions, quick-fire exchanges and
bustle of the salon or coffee-house are far away. Instead, the philosophical
text as conversation seeks to shape the subject who may afterwards
become a social subject in the form of, for example, a Humean moral
agent. Towards the end of the long eighteenth century, however, this
particular connection between private and public selves began to
disintegrate. Paul Hamilton writes of the “romantic habit” of “recovery
through one’s own aesthetic…of an intimacy with past writers which can
restore their readers to the citizenship of a neglected republic.”18 For
Hamilton, romantic readers are still characterized according to the
conversational model: they experience “intimacy” with writers. But their
“citizenship” is of a “neglected republic”, that is, an historical or forgotten
state. And there is no mention of virtue or ethics, as there is in Hume and
Shaftesbury. It seems that these romantic textual conversations, in contrast
to those of the earlier eighteenth century, will end in fantasy or illusion.
The early to mid eighteenth-century concept of conversation as a two-way
interaction between reader and text, in which a specific type of
philosophical discourse formed ethical, self-governing subjects, is no
longer in extensive use.
Hume’s belief in the moral and educational value of conversational
forms is taken up and reformulated in much eighteenth-century writing,
perhaps most notably in the didactic and advice literature discussed by
Michèle Cohen in Chapter Six of this volume, but also in the fiction—by
writers such as Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth,
Hannah More, Mary Brunton, Jane West and even Laurence Sterne—of
the long eighteenth century. Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753-
54), for example, notably educates its female protagonists, Harriet, Emily
and Charlotte, through the medium of the conversations held in the cedar
parlour. We turn now to one of Richardson’s most dedicated readers, Jane
Austen, 19 who learned much from the pedagogical scenes of conversation
in Grandison, discovering in them a stylistic technique that she could
appropriate and perfect.