1. British historians
as opposed as Linda Colley and J.C.D. Clark have drawn
attention to what had before been thought too obvious to
merit explanation, but now looks precisely the thing in
need of explanation—how one accounts for a
coherence or underlying identity of interests from the
late seventeenth century onwards, resulting in the
formation of British national consciousness and a shared
sense of belonging because of, rather than despite, all
sorts of sectarian difficulty. Opposed interests dispute
by claiming to be more patriotic. Equally revisionist
American Romanticists have therefore re-characterised the
British Romantic view of the nation as a subject for
management rather than as a Jerusalem to be imagined. See
particularly Christensen and Canuel.
2. See my
Metaromanticism, 249-269, and for a critique,
Jager 304-7.
3. See J. G. E.
Pocock's typically conclusive summary: "The ideal of
politeness had first appeared in the restoration, where
it formed part of the latitudinarian campaign to replace
prophetic by sociable religiosity. This campaign is
carried on by Addison ." (236).
4. See Skinner, ch.
8.
5. For Derrida and John
Searle's classic dispute, between which I am trying to
float a Gricean theory of meaning between, see
Limited Inc.
6. Searle 8-9. Contrast
Strawson's concluding remarks in "Intention and
Convention in Speech Acts": "For the illocutionary force
of an utterance is essentially something that is intended
to be understood. Once this common element in all
illocutionary acts is clear, we can really acknowledge
that the types of audience-directed intention involved
may be very various and, also, that different types may
be exemplified by one and the same utterance" (38).
7. Some philosophers
have objected, though, that Grice's increasingly
confident insistence that performance corroborates
natural meaning (now located in formal sentence structure
rather than illocutionary act) arrests the dialogic or
inter-subjective direction taken by his early, more
tentative theory of meaning. See Grandy and Warner. For a
meticulous account of Grice's development and changing
philosophical context, see Avramides, ch. 1.
8. See Cordner. Cordner
is very careful to distinguish the interpretations of
Aristotle from which he has learnt—MacIntyre,
Casey, Gaita, and, in a more conflicted way,
Williams—from the 'instrumentalist' Aristotelian
who reduces ethics to what Grice would have called
entirely 'natural meanings' (p. 180 n.2).
9. Grandy and Warner,
pp. 48-9, 61-2, 64. Grice lists collaborations with Peter
Strawson, J. L. Austin, Geoffrey Warnock, David Pears,
Fritz Staal, George Myro, and Judith Baker. On the
well-directed life or ethical surrounds of his theory of
meaning, see Grice's "A Reply to Richards" in Grandy and
Warner, especially p. 61.
10. See Hegel's
description of court "flattery" by which the Courtier
preserves independence from the absolute monarch he
serves. But this cultured distance from natural power
becomes indistinguishable from base subservience, much as
the later use of "wit," culminating in Diderot's Le
Neveu de Rameau, identifies spiritual progress with
complete disintegration (Phenomenology, Part VI,
B).
11. See Aristotle,
Book 8, p. 228
12. Luther and
Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. and translated by
Harro Höpfl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
13. For comic
possibilities of the secular differing from itself see
Connolly 45. On the determination to be tragic, recent
reactions to the Pope's lecture in Regensburg, 12
September 2006, on the rational heritage of Christianity,
are instructive.
