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Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury's essay "Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour," published in 1709, famously argues that wit, far from being exploitative or cruel, is deeply ethical and indeed essential for human coexistence.1 Laughter, argues Shaftesbury, is a necessary test for "gentlemen," as withstanding it establishes one's willingness to mix in "common society" (36). But the argument cuts both ways: Shaftesbury suggests that sociability itself is, meanwhile, the basis of the individual subject, such that subjectivity can be understood as the result of encounters with unfamiliar people. Recognizing oneself as a gentleman depends, in Shaftesbury's essay, upon being misrecognized by someone wholly unfamiliar with European customs. Shaftesbury, I am suggesting, uses the idea of foreignness - specifically, an imagined encounter with an imaginary Ethiopian - to produce the very laughter upon which sociability depends, and, in turn, the sociability upon which subjectivity depends. These commitments make "Sensus Communis" an important early theorization of intersubjectivity, and establish Shaftesbury within the prehistory of psychology.
In section I of part II of the essay, Shaftesbury imagines an Ethiopian at the carnival:
If a native of Ethiopia were on a sudden transported into Europe and placed either at Paris or Venice at a time of Carnival, when the general face of mankind was disguised and almost every creature wore a mask, it is probable he would for some time be at a stand before he discovered the cheat, not imagining that a whole people could be so fantastical as ... [to] make it a solemn practice to impose on one another by this universal confusion of characters and persons. Though he may at first perhaps have looked on this with a serious eye, it would hardly be possible for him to hold his countenance when he had perceived what was carrying on. The Europeans, on their side, might laugh perhaps at this simplicity. But our Ethiopian would certainly laugh with better reason. It is easy to see which of the two would be ridiculous. For he who laughs and is himself ridiculous bears a double share of ridicule. (39)
The Venetian carnival season lasted almost a third of the year by the early eighteenth century, operating day and night, in the...