Nicholas Phillipson
Page 19
What interested him most of all was the present state of French and English philosophy. It was here that the English had made the greatest strides and here that Smith quietly aligned himself with Hume by virtually reproducing his list of the philosophers who had made the science of man possible – ‘Mr. Hobbes, Mr. Lock, and Dr. Mandevil, Lord Shaftsbury, Dr. Butler, Dr. Clarke, and Mr. Hutcheson’.8 Rousseau’s appearance as a philosopher of undoubted genius, with a serious interest in the principles of sociability and in the progress of commerce was thus a matter of some interest, not least because his views were seriously and diametrically at odds with his own, with Hume’s and with the Scots’ generally, and it was clearly necessary to challenge them. But a review was no place for such important work. Instead, Smith used his limited space to expose the bare bones of Rousseau’s argument with surgical precision, his scalpel being a comparison between Rousseau’s system and that of the bugbear who had come to play such an important part in shaping Hutcheson’s thought and his own philosophical education, Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.9 Smith’s analysis is so spare and so good that it is worth quoting at length.
Whoever reads [the Discourse on Inequality] with attention, will observe, that the second volume of the Fable of the Bees has given the occasion to the system of Mr. Rousseau, in whom however the principles of the English author are softened, improved, and embellished, and stript of all that tendency to corruption and licentiousness which has disgraced them in their original author. Dr. Mandeville represents the primitive state of mankind as the most wretched and miserable that can be imagined: Mr. Rousseau, on the contrary, paints it as the happiest and most suitable to his nature. Both of them however suppose, that there is in man no powerful instinct which necessarily determines him to seek society for its own sake: but according to the one, the misery of his original state compelled him to have recourse to this otherwise disagreeable remedy; according to the other, some unfortunate accidents having given birth to the unnatural passions of ambition and the vain desire of superiority, to which he had before been a stranger, produced the same fatal effect. Both of them suppose the same slow progress and gradual development of all the talents, habits, and arts which fit men to live together in society, and they both describe this progress pretty much in the same manner. According to both, those laws of justice, which maintain the present inequality amongst mankind, were originally the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow-creatures. Mr. Rousseau however criticises upon Dr. Mandeville: he observes, that pity, the only amiable principle which the English author allows to be natural to man, is capable of producing all those virtues, whose reality Dr. Mandeville denies. Mr. Rousseau at the same time seems to think that this principle is in itself no virtue, but that it is possessed by savages and by the most profligate of the vulgar, in a greater degree of perfection than by those of the most polished and cultivated manners; in which he perfectly agrees with the English author.10
Smith was scrupulous in pinpointing the aspects of Rousseau’s thinking which mattered to his own: his claims that for better or for worse, human beings were at their most natural in the savage state, that need was the mother of the civilizing process, that the civilizing process was a tale of the progressive enslavement of human beings to the opinions and power of others, that the ethical history of civilization was a story of deception and self-deception which was making human beings unrecognizable even to themselves. While Hume had gone out of his way to insist that men were at their happiest when they were active and were best able to live an active life in a commercial society, Rousseau had replied that men were naturally indolent and had only been truly at one with themselves in the savage state when they had been free to indulge their indolence by simple living. And where did Rousseau’s passionate denunciation of civilization leave Hume’s insistence that the human personality had been refined and perfected by the civilizing process? What Rousseau’s critique had exposed were ethical questions about sociability which would have to be addressed if commerce was to be defended from its critics. These questions would confront Smith at precisely the moment when he was preparing to turn his moral philosophy lectures into a book.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Smith’s extraordinary attempt to develop a coherent and plausible account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life without descending into wanton religious scepticism, Mandevillian cynicism or Rousseaunian despair. It would mean making careful experimental studies of the experiences which shape our moral understanding and teach us our duties, of the process of social exchange, and of the ways in which we learn how to evaluate our own conduct as well as that of others; above all, it would mean attending to the effects that these processes had on the human personality. It was an enterprise which meant thinking again about the principle of sympathy on which all forms of human communication ultimately depended.
Sympathy was a concept well known to contemporary moral philosophers and popular moralists. As most schoolboy readers would have known, the ancient Stoics had thought of sympathy as a principle of attraction which made it possible for human beings to live harmoniously with one another, with the natural world and with its benevolent Creator. Modern popular moralists like Addison had used the term extensively to describe the roots of those affections on which friendship and sociability depended. Hume had used the term in a more specialized, philosophical sense to explain why we find ourselves compelled to adhere to the rules of morality and justice. Indeed the notion that human beings communicate much of what they mean through sympathy as well as language was deeply embedded in the polite conversational culture of the Anglo-Saxon and French enlightenments, and had become fundamental to the Enlightenment’s understanding of itself. For Smith, however, this familiar concept carried more explanatory weight than had been realized. His great achievement was to turn it into the governing principle of a theory of sociability on which a general theory of commerce could be based. And while his analysis was to do much to provide Hume’s brilliant eulogy to commerce with the philosophical underpinning it now needed, ethically, his analysis presented a darker, more equivocal, more Rousseaunian even, account of the civilizing process than might have been expected, one that would raise serious problems for the moralist. For neither Rousseau nor his cynical mentor Mandeville were easily answered.
Smith’s book opens with a discussion of the idea of sympathy. He began by tacitly acknowledging that Rousseau and Mandeville had been right in their way to think of pity, rather than selfishness or benevolence, as the affection on which our fellow-feeling for others depends. Pity was ‘the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner’.11 But while it was a useful enough concept for explaining that almost instinctive, unreflecting sympathy we have for the sorrows of others, it was too imprecise and generalized to explain the complexities of so many of our responses to misfortune. Smith illustrated the point with the first of the graphic illustrations for which he was becoming famous, adapted, in this case, from Cicero’s discussion of Stoic ethics in De Finibus. Smith asks you to imagine yourself in a torture chamber watching your brother on the rack. Pity does not begin to describe the depth and confusion of your response, not least because it does not begin to take account of the sheer difficulty of understanding what your brother is going through.
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations [my italics]. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situatio
n, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.12
Smith gives us here a striking and rather disturbing account of human relationships. Even those who think they know each other will soon learn that the only access they have to each other’s minds is via the perilously uncertain route of the imagination. Once my curiosity has been aroused by my brother’s predicament, all I can do is to try to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be in his shoes. Only when physical reactions set in and I find myself trembling and shuddering at the horrors before me am I able to feel that my sympathetic imagination has got as far as it can for the moment. From the very outset, Smith seems anxious for us to think of ourselves in Humean terms, as agents who can never hope to ‘know’ each other’s minds. All we can do is to use our imagination sympathetically to reach what Hume describes as an ‘understanding’ of each other. Strictly speaking we are strangers to one another, constantly engaged in the business of trying to know each other better. In this sense the Theory of Moral Sentiments would develop as a study of the moral and emotional needs of strangers, and the ways in which they seek to satisfy them. The Rousseaunian question – whether those needs can ever be satisfied in society – is one that would remain with Smith for a very long time.
Like Hutcheson, Smith thought that sympathetic engagement was the function of a seemingly natural curiosity which all human beings have in the fortunes of others. Satisfying this curiosity necessarily involved evaluating the conduct of the person concerned and tacitly or overtly rewarding that person with our approval or disapproval and expressions of affection or dislike. For Smith, this process of evaluation and approbation had everything to do with taste and our sense of propriety, our sense of whether an emotion was appropriate to the situation in which the person seemed to be placed. He described it like this:
When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he finds that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the causes which excite them. To approve of the passions of another, therefore, as suitable to their objects, is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathize with them; and not to approve of them as such, is the same thing as to observe that we do not entirely sympathize with them.13
In other words, ‘I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.’14
Smith was doing more here than analyse our responses to the moral conduct of others: he was developing a theory which would show that moral encounters are two-way affairs, and that my attempt to make sympathetic sense of your conduct is likely to be reciprocated by your attempt to make sympathetic sense of mine. In such a situation, Smith observed, we engage in a process of ‘tuning up’ or ‘tuning down’ our responses to each other, exercising those powers of compassion or self-command that will matter so much to his ethics in the hope of developing a relationship in which our sentiments are in ‘concord’ with each other. In that event I shall find myself not only approving of your sentiments, and feeling affection for you, but I shall be in a position to offer you my sympathy in the hope that you will reciprocate. In that case we shall have reached a supremely pleasurable state of ‘mutual sympathy’, pleasurable because ‘the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved’.15 Smith has described what may have been a testing and protracted encounter, for experience has taught us that while mutual sympathy is a source of pleasure, having our offer of sympathy rejected is painful in the extreme. It soon becomes clear that the prudent Smithian will do well to be circumspect in his moral dealings with others and offer only what he is pretty sure will be accepted and reciprocated. It is little wonder that Smith once commented, ‘Man is an anxious animal.’16 We have been shown that morality is a matter of trading sentiments in the hope of being able to conclude a rewarding emotional deal. Smith is describing the ways of the moral market and it is with its principles that his analysis is primarily concerned.
Smith was now ready to stretch the meaning of sympathy far beyond its conventional bounds. He thought that his theory would explain our responses to joy as well as sorrow, and even to ‘disgusting’ anti-social passions like hatred or resentment, commenting that it was clearly easier to sympathize with joy than with sorrow and with both rather than with hatred or resentment. This was a simple observation with momentous sociological implications, throwing light on one of the most striking and important characteristics of any reasonably well-regulated political society – the slavish admiration for the rich and the powerful on which social deference and political stability depend. Hume would be absolutely right in describing this principle as ‘the Hinge of your System’.17 Smith had no hesitation in discussing the absurd delusions on which deference depends, in terms which could only reinforce Rousseau’s conviction that the civilizing process corrupted the human personality:
When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state. It is the very state which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out to ourselves as the final object of all our desires. We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What a pity, we think, that any thing should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even wish them immortal; and it seems hard to us, that death should at last put an end to such perfect enjoyment. It is cruel, we think, in Nature to compel them from their exalted stations to that humble, but hospitable home, which she has provided for all her children. Great King, live for ever! is the compliment, which, after the manner of eastern adulation, we should readily make them, if experience did not teach us its absurdity.18
But the psychological damage inflicted by these delusions did not stop there, for they had the profound and unintended consequence of fuelling the spirit of improvement and competition on which the progress of civilization depended.
It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty. Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer. Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty. For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? what is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them. We see that they afford him food and clothing, the comfort of a house, and of a family. If we examined his oeconomy with rigour, we should find that he spends a great part of them on conveniencies, which may be regarded as superfluities, and that, upon extraordinary occasions, he can give something even to vanity and distinction. What then is the cause of our aversion to his situation, and why should those who have been educated in the higher ranks of life
, regard it as worse than death, to be reduced to live, even without labour, upon the same simple fare with him, to dwell under the same lowly roof, and to be clothed in the same humble attire? Do they imagine that their stomach is better, or their sleep sounder in a palace than in a cottage? The contrary has been so often observed, and, indeed, is so very obvious, though it had never been observed, that there is no-body ignorant of it. From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us.19