The Internal Voices of Invention : Shaftesbury's Soliloquy / Susan Griffin.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and eighteenth century essayist, offered an important piece of advice to writers--talk to yourself. Some composition texts still recommend various forms of internal dialogue as a means of constructing prophetic argument or internalizing a critical voice, but current instructional emphasis has been on audience awareness. Shaftesbury's "desert island discourse" leaves the writer in a self-contained rhetorical situation, in which the self comes to represent a universal audience, and what is decided internally is used in public persuasion. But the author who is anxious to accommodate an audience can become an "author-character"--a public persona--whose thought process is corrupted by his anxiety in the presence of an imagined public, leading ultimately to a loss of identity. In the case of student writing with the composition professor as audience, the results are familiar: inflated diction, formal tone, meticulous attention to "rules," whether appropriate or not. Shaftesbury sees two distinct personas in the individual, which he calls Reason and Appetite, or wisdom and self-interest. Language, for him, is the quintessential tool of self-deception, especially when employed by Appetite, or that worse voice within the self. For Shaftesbury, the mind must confront its own rhetoric and identify its own better half--only then will soliloquy become the route to true knowledge. The person who recognizes his or her inner wisdom can use it to make valid judgments, not only about rhetoric but about life. The soliloquy itself will be, for students, a venture into an alternate epistemological system, a different model of the mind. (NKA)

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