The Augustan Angle: Civilised Contingency and Normative Discourse

Abstract

The readings of the last chapter have taken us to the threshold of the eighteenth century. By 1700, the neoclassical discourse of contingency and probability had been established as a coherent and dominant cultural programme as part of the general process of political and social consolidation in Britain. Towards the end of the century, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ implemented a constitutional form of monarchy and a liberal cultural ideology (Whiggism), including – for Protestants, at least – religious toleration. This created the preconditions for a crucial shift of balance between metaphysics, politics, and epistemology. The problems of reconciling their competing claims could now be solved – or at least ‘rationalised away’ – by funnelling the problematic experiential dimensions of reason, nature, and faith into the philosophical and moral terms of ‘common sense’ and ‘politeness’. The epistemological and political thinking of John Locke is exemplary in this respect. Locke’s empirical and practical rationalism allows for those dimensions of reality that, for Browne and others earlier in the century, had formed such a difficult, knotted complex – religion, politics, and secular (individual and social) frames of reference – to be disentangled. In contrast to Browne, Locke holds that the human faculties of perception are exactly matched to earthly requirements and that it is therefore meaningless to yearn for knowledge that transcends these faculties. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke remarks that “[t]he infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our Senses, Faculties, and Organs, to the conveniences of Life, and the Business we have to do here” (2.23.12; 1979, 302). The tensions that had previously led to wars of religion are now relaxed by this deistic interpretation of the cosmos and its related view of natural rights, and these Lockean ideas have an impact on many other areas of human life. As portrayed in Congreve’s The Way of the World, the elite has become secular and self-supporting, self-reproducing, living according to its own laws. Secular problems are addressed by secular solutions. Although marriages still have to take place in a church, they are no longer made in heaven but on earth, based on mutual interests and agreements (the ‘proviso’) – not excluding, obviously, love, as passion and reason (Luhmann 1987). The books of the Puritans have their backs turned to this society, becoming objects of decoration on the mantelpiece in ironic reminiscence of the dii familiares. The competing claims of reason, nature, and faith are defused in the concepts of common sense and gentlemanly politeness. These terms and their implied rules now regulate civil conversation, including knowing where and when to stop or what not to talk about. As literature (in the sense of belles lettres) becomes a part of social conversation, it is increasingly bound by the rules of what is deemed acceptable, and its decorum now implies a social and moral correspondence between authors, genres, and readers.