Age of the Passions

An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture

John Dwyer

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781898410171
• eBook ISBN: 9781788854351
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The eighteenth century is often described as the age of reason. This book argues that it should also be considered the age of the passions. Eighteenth-century writers recognised the passions as the springs of human life and actions. They began to explore self-interest, sociability and love in ways that would have momentous consequences for the development of western culture. The century's philosophes did not merely acknowledge the existence of the passions; they sought to manipulate them for the good of society. When carefully cultivated, self-interest led to prudent behaviour and national improvement; sociability contributed to inter-group harmony and national identity; the powerful attraction between the sexes metamorphosed into politeness and altruism. This book explores the eighteenth-century language of the passions in its specifically Scottish context, suggesting that Scottish writers such as Allan Ramsay, James Fordyce and James Macpherson were cultural pioneers whose significance goes far beyond the transitory popularity of the literary products they created. It also examines thinkers like Adam Smith and John Millar from a radically different perspective. And it constructs new connections between the philosophy, social thought, sermons, letters, poetry and epic literature of enlightened Scottish society. The Scottish contribution to modern consciousness was nothing short of profound. The Scots brought the passions into the centre of discourse, so they could no longer be ignored, only exploited or repressed.

1
SELF-INTEREST AND SYMPATHY: THE ETHICAL FOUNDATION OF SMITHEAN ECONOMICS

This chapter attempts to explore the connections between Smith’s ethics and his economics. While Smith’s description of the workings of human sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) underscored the role played by sociability and self-command in supporting a complex society, it also allocated an extremely important role to behaviour that can only be construed as selfish. To Smith’s mind, there was no inconsistency between sociability and self-interest. A degree of self-centredness was not only perfectly natural but a propensity which was built into the sympathetic process. It was not something that could or should be eradicated; it was, rather, something which needed to be moderated and controlled. The sympathetic process ensured that self-interest would not step beyond the bounds of propriety, where it could become a socially lethal force.

Smith’s appreciation of the role which self-interest moderated by sociability played in typical social relationships not only allowed him to counter the claims of those who, like Mandeville, reduced all ethical activity to self-love, and those who, like his teacher Hutcheson, disavowed any connection between virtue and selfishness. It also allowed him to imbue the prudent capitalist with socially valuable and even moral characteristics. It was precisely this controlled and ‘dispassionate desire’ for self-advancement, particularly on the part of small-scale agricultural capitalists, which Smith later extolled in the pages of The Wealth of Nations (1776).

I

Smith began his analysis of ‘sympathy’ in the final chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments by suggesting that it was nonsensical to regard a human being as a purely selfish creature. ‘There are evidently some principles in his nature,’ Smith maintained, ‘which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’¹ He went on to argue that man’s natural sociability or propensity to sympathize was the fundamental foundation of human society and its normative structure. But, while this propensity to sympathise with others was part and parcel of the human emotional constitution, sympathy itself was the product of an often complex interpersonal negotiation. Man’s compassion, the desire to sympathize with the sorrow of others, for example, was extremely intense. But the ability to achieve and sustain sympathy with the painful feelings of others was more typically limited. It was restricted because men and women were also self-interested.²

If sociability was normal therefore, so was self-interest. ‘Every man,’ said Smith, was ‘no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care.’³ The ‘preference which every man has for his own happiness above that of other people’ was perfectly ‘natural’, ‘fit’, and ‘right’. As sentient beings and as active agents, it was only natural that humans should be most deeply interested in what concerned themselves. This self-love came from nature and was already apparent in the behaviour of a young child who had little self-control, but ‘whatever are its emotions, whether fear, or grief, or anger, it endeavours always, by the violence of its outcries, to alarm, as much as it can, the attention of its nurse, or of its parents’.⁴

Because he believed that self-interest was perfectly natural and inextricably linked to the human instinct for self-preservation, Smith repeatedly condemned those ‘whining and melancholy moralists’ who were ‘perpetually reproaching us with our happiness’ or who sought to fan the ‘feeble spark of benevolence’ into a disinterested flame.⁵ It was not, he suggested, the Christian love of one’s neighbour, and much less the enlightened ideal of some abstract humankind, which caused individuals to act with tolerable decency and justice towards their fellows. It was a much more limited sociability and a desire for sympathy.⁶

Smith’s account of sympathy illuminated the way in which sociability led to self-control, checking the ‘arrogance of self-love’ and bringing ‘it down to something which other men can go along with’.⁷ Far from denying self-interest, however, Smithean sympathy not only affirmed man’s desire to pursue his own happiness with ‘earnest assiduity’, but also defended the competition for ‘wealth, honours, and preferments’. In the race for these, Smith asserted, the agent should ‘run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and muscle, in order to outstrip his competitors’. And by doing so, the agent would actually obtain the sympathetic approval of any disinterested spectator. This was the case because human beings shared in and sympathized with the care for the self.

A more precise picture of the typical sympathetic process shows just how central to Smith’s ethical model this more powerful attention to the self than to the other was. In order to achieve sympathy between an agent and a spectator, the latter had to do two things. He had to first reconstruct the former’s particular emotion or motivation by ‘changing places in fancy’.⁸ Or, as Smith also put it, ‘by the imagination’ he ‘enters as it were into his body’ and becomes ‘in some measure the same person with him’.⁹ To Smith’s way of thinking, this ‘illusion of the imagination’, did not result in anything like an empathetic correspondence.¹⁰ The spectator could never experience exactly the same emotions as the agent. In most cases, the feelings of the spectator would fall far short of those of the agent or the person ‘principally’ concerned. The ‘imaginary change of situation’ upon which sympathy was based was typically momentary. Other emotions and thoughts, often of a self-interested kind, crowded in upon the mind and prevented the spectator from ‘conceiving any thing that approaches to the same degree of violence’.¹¹

Smith provided an example of the ‘dull sensibility’ which a typical individual felt for the emotions of another by describing the behaviour of a person attending a funeral. The sorrow expressed at such a scene of grief ‘generally amounts to no more than an affected gravity,’ he suggested.¹² Although the spectator of a scene of woe sometimes reproached himself for his lack of sensibility, and even worked himself ‘up into an artificial sympathy’, such a state was generally ‘slight’ and ‘transitory’. Human beings were far more concerned about their own problems than they were others. Though naturally sympathetic’, they ‘feel so little for another, with whom they have no particular connection, in comparison of what they feel for themselves’ that the ‘misery of one is of so little importance to them in comparison even of a small convenience of their own ...’¹³

The second thing which the spectator had to do was to decide whether or not the agent’s emotions and actions were appropriate to the given situation. As the spectator moved imperceptibly from imaginative reconstruction to judgement, so his emotional distance from the agent increased. As judge, he pronounced upon the ‘propriety’ or ‘impropriety’ of the ‘sentiments’ of the agent. The only standard for this judgement, the only ‘rule’ or ‘canon’, was whether ‘upon bringing the case home to our breast, we find that the sentiments . . . coincide and tally with our own’.¹⁴ Whereas men were extremely partial in evaluating their own emotions and actions, however, they were much more impartial when they examined the emotions of others.¹⁵

That man was primarily a selfish creature was recognized in the very nature of sympathetic exchange. Especially with regard to the ‘more extraordinary and important objects of self-interest’, a person appeared ‘mean-spirited’ who did not pursue such objects with ‘some degree of earnestness’.¹⁶ A private gentleman who did not try to obtain an estate, an M.P. who was not interested in his own election, a tradesman who did not try to drum up business, all would be regarded as ‘mean-spiri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Discourse of the Passions
• 1. Self-Interest and Sympathy: The Ethical Foundation of Smithean Economics
• 2. Property and Propriety: The Ideological Context of Adam Smith’s Ethics
• 3. Virtue and Improvement: The Civic World of Adam Smith
• 4. Smith, Millar and the Natural History of Love
• 5. The Culture of Love in an Eighteenth-Century Province
• 6. The Sentimental Savage: A Re-Appraisal of The Poems of Ossian
• 7. The Sentimental Community: Nationalism in the Scottish Enlightenment
• Postscript
• Index