V.i.Adam Smith Problem, His System-Building and th...
As could be imagined, Smith’s substantial theory of sympathy did not escape Burke’s notice[1].In a private letter to Smith[2], Burke(“an Irish Gentleman, who wrote lately a very pretty Treatise on the Sublime,”as David Hume informed Smith[3]) comments acutely:
I own I am particularly pleased with those easy and happy illustrations from common Life and manners in which your work abounds more than any other that I know by far … there is so much elegant Painting of the manners and passions, that it is highly valuable even on that account.(qtd.in Raphael 28)
It seems that Burke is very sensitive on the means of mediation reflected in Smith’s work, which, for him, are illustrations and paintings of “common Life and manners,”or “manners and passions.”In the review he wrote for his periodical the Annual Register[4], Burke repeats some of the comments made in the letter:“The illustrations are numerous and happy, and shew the author to be a man of uncommon observation.His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing”(qtd.in Raphael 28).Again, Smith’s emphasis on the visual dimension of the sympathetic sentiment is captured by Burke, who is said to be “a man of uncommon observation.”The theory of moral sentiments approaches the effects of the visual medium of painting through a presentation of “manners and passions”in the verbal medium of language.These should not be read as passages of self-denial of what is outlined above in his aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful.Rather, here the stress is more upon “manners and passions,”“common life and manners,”with which Burke is more than concerned with, and they are more likely to be narrated than described in Burke’s ideological packaging.It is possible that Burke sees in Smith’s book a new stage of visuality in language and representation, regarding its communication of English “manners and passions,”which explains his sense of resignation—“I own …”All of this may as well go with a sense of identity politics for Burke as well.Difference can be tolerated within the imperial boundaries of the British, whether Irish or Scottish.Thus it does not matter very much if these “illustrations”and paintings suggest Smith’s aspiration to pictorial realism, which Burke’s aesthetics holds as French.
Probably much less provincial than Burke, Adam Smith makes a grand claim of universality in the formation of an ethic and epistemological subject visually, which is realized in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments.It was published in 1759 and since then put under constant revisions until its sixth edition coming out in 1790, a few weeks before the death of its author.The very first sentence of this book addresses the question of sympathy as a universal principle of human beings:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, 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.Of this kind is pity or compassion, 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.(Smith 1984:9)
Sympathy here is theorized as a moral issue upon luck:upon either happiness or miseries of others.Even the “greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society”(9) Smith argues, is not altogether without this pity or compassion.As a moral philosophical argument, this suggests a strong influence upon him from the moral philosophical agenda in the Scottish Enlightenment, chiefly because of the role of accorded sympathy by Hutcheson and Hume[5].It is also very obvious that the words such as “soever,”“evidently,”“nature”are among the universalism vocabulary of the British Enlightenment.Perhaps this can be made in defense of Smith against criticism of Thomas Reid’s kind, which is that Smith establishes an essentially “selfish”system of sympathetic sentiment since it forms a moral judgment about a person’s attitude or behavior based on how I would feel if I were in that person’s situation[6].This leads to an interesting observation upon a naturalizing and universalizing gesture reflected in another place, interest in the economic welfare of humanity this time in the opening pages of The Wealth of Nations:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest, we address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their selflove, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.(Smith 2000:16)
In 1762, a year after the second edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and five years before the third, Smith was lecturing on the material that grew into The Wealth of Nations[7].The latter was published in 1776, two years after the fourth edition of TMS.So different and opposed do The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations appear at the first glance that for some years scholars refer to the task of their reconciliation as the “Adam Smith problem”.For these scholars, the moral philosopher who makes sympathy the basis of social behavior in The Theory of Moral Sentiments does an about-turn from altruistic to egoistic theory in The Wealth of Nations owing to the influence of the French Physiocratic thinkers whom Smith met in his French trip.The argument goes that his economic theory and moral philosophy conflict with each other, with sympathy as a contrast to self-interest.Smith could have forgotten his economic ideas, while revising his moral philosophy till the last phase of his life, or vice versa.H.T.Buckle suggests a duality-hypothesis upon human nature from Smith’s theories:one sympathetic and the other selfish[8].How shall we deal with these two universal but seemingly different economies of humanity, one based on sympathetic emotions, another on economic if not materialistic interest?I will try to address this question from a preliminary reading of his The Theory of Moral Sentiments.This would be an interpretation of the emergent forms of abstraction and exchangeability in the history of capitalism.My argument sees this Janus-faced Adam Smith in his moral philosophy and political economy as a figure strategically corresponding to a social transition from the local to the global in the formation of the British Empire.This chapter takes “empire”not as an empirical process that takes place “out there”in the world, as many historians and social scientists have presumed it to have been.Rather, I show “the empire”as an instituted affective economy that involves the entire economy of the subject’s perceptual and cognitive, various framing devices of a mental theater, and figured conditions of communication like market and the print medium.Following Sanjay Krishnan’s “reading the global,”I advance an approach to the comparative study of cultures that is attentive to epistemic and affective apparatuses[9].What it involves is an attention to the texture in which perceptual and cognitive framing of self is produced of contextual unevenness and heterogeneity, so as to learn “how to displace or unsettle its lines and rules of perception”(Krishnan 5) in order to activate other/less conformist ways of feeling and knowing about transactions between self, mediation and institutions of subjectivities.Through Adam Smith’s political economy of sentiments, a theatrical selfhood, language and rhetoric, we see an apparatus of empire upon the borders between home and world, the private and the public, the foreign and the intimate.(https://www.daowen.com)
Adam Smith’s theories, either on moral sentiment, rhetoric and belles letters, or political economy help to posit a specific category of subjects as the abstract and the universal, “the idea of a system”as set out by Smith himself in his “History of Astronomy[10]”.Edward Gibbon admired The Wealth of Nations as a “science”and a “system”:“the most profound and systematic treatise”and “an extensive science in a single book[11].”This very strongly conscious gesture of system-building and theory-developing in the British Enlightenment can be unpacked with help from postcolonial and feminist theories of difference.What is of interest is that Smith, right in the first sentence, draws an ethics of the Enlightenment category “Man”as spontaneous reaction—“interest,”that is—to actual or imagined visual pleasure into his picture of a sympathetic moral sentiment.Sight and its pleasure principle offer(sometimes processed as “live”by the brain[12]) a buffer zone between a gravitating[13] ego center and its periphery, which makes this “man”extensively universal.It reminds of James Woodrow, who compares Smith’s accounting for the principal phenomena in the moral world from the one general principle of sympathy, with “that of gravity in the natural world [14].”This nature of Smith’s system-building guarantees the existence of “some principles,”which, in turn, produces an economy of extension through emotional reflux.It accords well with the rising significance of visuality in print medium in the eighteenth century, through which the imperial subjects can anticipate the nature of tactile contact with distant objects.Sight becomes foresight and pre-mediates knowledge of other places[15].
For Adam Smith, fellow-feeling can contract distances:“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation”(Smith 1984:9).It substitutes situations through the mediated experience of imagination.Thus, sympathy acts as an imaginative act, as an agreement between sentiments, one possible way out of man’s affective solipsism through a geographical extension of oneself.At the same time, paradoxically, this is out of the realization of mutual inaccessibility between autonomous individual minds.For instance, in a remarkable thought experiment added to his discussion on “the Influence and Authority of Conscience”in 1790[16], Smith suggests the impossibility of practicing the sympathetic impartial spectator from an average European, who, “from the place and with the eyes of a third person,”makes moral adjudication between two parties in a physically distant place of the “great empire of China”in the consequence of an earthquake[17].As part of the inward shift of a split self caused by distant and non-communicating human beings, this mention of China in the framework of a fictitious moral case dates back to Rameau’s Nephew and The Paradox of Acting by Denis Diderot(1713—1784), who, as Carlo Ginzburg writes, “took his example from a Jesuit treatise on casuistry”(Ginzburg 1994:50).It goes through François-René de Chateaubriand(1768—1848) and Honoré de Balzac(1799—1850)[18].Though he might, in the initial shock, writes Smith, “make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life,”or in a soberer moment consider “the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe,”he would eventually return to his normal life “with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened”(136).The distant millions would not be registered in the European sympathy economy.But consider, Smith writes, that
the most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance.If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?(136-137)
Seeing is believing and feeling.The distant geographical location(as well as cultural alienation) of China and its not being accessible by a discourse of free circulation and commerce of the Western capital[19] make it an emotional other that could not be accommodated into this sympathy economy.This historical period that saw dramatic expansion of the human and geopolitical space toward which the average members of society are supposed to be emotionally and morally responsible [20].Nevertheless, moral sympathetic strangeness seems more difficult to overcome than simply geographical distance.Though, almost two decades before the publication of Smith’s treatise, David Hume already remarked in a section of his A Treatise of Human Nature entitled “Of Contiguity and Distance in Space and Time”:“A West-Indian merchant will tell you, that he is not without concern about what passes in Jamaica; tho' few extend their views so far into futurity, as to dread very remote accidents”(Hume 1978:429), he probably would also “ignored the moral and juridical implications of it”(Ginzburg 1994:56)[21], like the average European person in Smith’s moral philosophy of sentiments.
Indeed, one can take the popular trope of sympathy of the eighteenth century as what builds affective affinities between the circulating commercial markets, credit, and public opinion acting at great distances.It was a century with increasing social mobility as the British empire was being formed.To this observation, we can adduce David Marshall’s comment that sympathy is “structured by theatrical dynamics that ...depend on people to represent themselves as tableaux, spectacles, and texts before others”in order to suggest how closely the identifications, on which sympathy depends, rely both in practice and in theory, on a notion of “exchange”that includes representational and economic dimensions [22].Exchanges between persons, places, and commodities became more necessary than they had once been.In chapter 7 of the first volume of his sentimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy(1759—1767), Laurence Sterne describes a village midwife, who, as
she had all along trusted little to her own efforts, and a great deal to those of dame nature,—had acquired, in her way, no small degree ofreputation in the world;—by which word world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or thereabouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived, is supposed to be the center.(Sterne 1:10)
The additional proclamation of a provincial English parameter of four miles indicates a world much beyond the local midwife’s reputation, whose existence Sterne’s readership is obliged to imagine and anticipate.The world is so obviously global that Sterne’s message of irony could be easily missed.This is the world in which Adam Smith was writing.His Theory of Moral Sentiments is what Janet Todd calls “the end of a line of British moral philosophy”that admits “the sentimental aim of trying systematically to link morality and emotion[23].”Sympathy thus offers us a window into the trans-subjective condition of affective ‘mediality’ at the moment of modern mobility[24].