ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what Ernst Cassirer called Shaftesbury’s “purely dynamic standpoint” in order to make visible the irreducible difference of forces in the Earl’s writing rather than singling out autotelic, autonomous force. Force functions across various registers in Shaftesbury: aesthetically (the force of the beautiful form), ethically (the force of natural affections), politically and religiously (the force of coercion), socially (the force of affective communication), and philosophically (the force of reason). The chapter shows that affective force must be immediate and involuntary to counter an equally involuntary coercive political force: for both Hobbes and Shaftesbury, force makes right. On the other hand, Shaftesbury also admits that immediate natural affection is not always normatively right from the start, and a just self-formation requires philosophical reflection. Since critical reason must also function as a mediating force, Shaftesbury’s writing employs different ways of negotiating the admittedly heteronomous intervention of philosophy, its inquisitorial force, in the supposedly autonomous formation of a self with a just moral-aesthetic taste—the therapeutic labor of aiding self-recollection or anamnesis, the enchantments of poetry and rhetoric, and the possibility of self-persuasion.
