Halifax and the Art of Power

Halifax and the Art of Power Kevin L. Cope Louisiana State University A vast collection of observations, witticisms, and commonplaces without an immediately apparent, unifying theme, Halifax's political thought, like his literary persona "The Trimmer," is both a satirical character and a cautious consolidation of the Restoration idea of power. Halifax and his age stand apart from their immediate predecessors in their refusal to rely on any optimistic theory of knowledge to justify the assignment of power to sovereign or subject. Recent political events, along with the popularity of dualistic philosophies and materialistic ethics, had uprooted the faith that political, natural, and divine orders could branch together without the severest grafting. No law of nature nurtured authority, no godly revelation blossomed into social institutions. Yet interpreters err in prodding Halifax into the herd of sceptics and probabilists writing in the late seventeenth century.1 Too sceptical for sceptics, Halifax hesitates to accept even the scepticism of his own character, Trimmer, without at least light satire. Fcr Halifax conceived of his thought not only as representative of his era — an era preferring practice to doubt — but also of the historical and philosophicalforces which shaped it, forces which make themselves all too immediately known through their effects on human affairs. For Halifax, power and authority, in artistic as well as political affairs, can elude all challenges even while they decline support from the usual sanctions of God and nature. An aesthetic phenomenon, power is better understood and managed through the precepts of art than the propositions of rational political philosophy. The question confronting Halifax could make the stout tremble: How can one shore up a government with no foundation? How, for example, can one restore a Royalist political structure to a theoretical foundation which was shaky even in its best days, a foundation which often became, for the worldy-wise Halifax, an object of subtle satire, and which, historically , had been unsettled by a long series of political upheavals? The answer to this question, ironically, results from the recognition that the question is incapable of an answer. Like Bishop Sprat, who feared that philosophical discussion of even the most familiar aspects of spiritual experience might lead to dubious "talking" rather than to useful action (Sprat 81-83), Halifax fears that a strictly rational political theory must depend on a system of rational knowledge which overleaps experience, a metaphysics. Because such a system stands outside experience, which Halifax regards as the least doubtable component of a doubt-filled world, any political theory it might engender would open itself to doubt. And nothing is less legitimate in a practical enterprise like politics than is the diadem of uncertainty. Consequently , Halifax borrows his method in political philosophy from the 241 242Rocky Mountain Review positivistic science of the Restoration, a science hungry for useful hypotheses rather than tantalizing truth. Philosophy, Astronomy, & c. have changed their Fundamentals as the Men of Art no doubt called them at the time. Motion of the Earth, & c. Even in Morality one may more properly say, There should be Fundamentals allowed, than that there are any which in Strictness can be maintained. However this is the least uncertain Foundation: Fundamental is less improperly applied here than any where else. (Halifax 210) Science and politics alike depend on hypothetical renderings of ultimate truths. For Halifax, the choice among renderings is predicated as much on aesthetic preference as on philosophical rigor. One axiom supplants another for the same reason that one play draws more applause than another: like Kantian "oughts," one approximates more nearly than does its competitor an undefined aesthetic ideal — an ideal which should, but which, in practice, does not, in any simple or direct way, relate to ordinary experience. The aesthetic and hypothetical character of his thought surfaces not only in Halifax's taste in abstract theory, but also in his notion of experience itself. Most of Halifax's tracts aim to provide compromising, hypothetical solutions to otherwise insoluble problems. No rational science or philosophy can, for example, tell Halifax, in A New Model at Sea, the proper proportion ofgentlemen admirals to common seamen on a ship; a survey of nautical experience will discover only misleading evidence or the self-serving...