Nature and philosophy: Adam Smith on stoicism, aesthetic reconciliation, and imagination

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 187-213

  Griswold Jr , Charles L ^a  

^a Boston University   (United States)

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EID: 0042935231     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF01248555     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. The Praise of Folly, trans. C.H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 42-43.
2. For an excellent discussion of the role of "nature" in ancient ethical theory see J. Annas' The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 2.
3. See Basil Willey's The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London: Chatto and Windus, 1940).
4. Letter of Sept. 17, 1739, quoted in D. F. Norton's David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 3. In the Treatise III.i.2, ii.1, Hume discusses the different senses of the word. The problem of the relevance and sense of "nature," that is, was well established by the time Smith wrote the TMS.
5. Trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965).
6. H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), bk, I, ch. VI.2. Sidgwick sees appeals to nature as a way of moving from 'what is' to 'what ought to be,' and thinks that move impossible (p. 81). He concludes "On the whole, it appears to me that no definition that has ever been offered of the Natural exhibits this notion as really capable of furnishing an independent ethical first principle" (p. 83). Sidgwick attacks the Stoic dictum that we are to 'live according to nature' in bk III, ch. XIII.2 on the grounds that it is both circular and vacuous. The reference to Mill is to his essay "Nature" (published in 1874),
7. reprinted in John Stuart Mill: Nature and Utility of Religion, ed. G. Nakhnikian (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 3-44.
8. For the references see Annas' Morality, pp. 137-141.
9. An example of the former may be found in J. Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
10. The quoted phrase has a variety of meanings. Some versions, such as that of A. Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990),
11. resurrect parts of a Smithean perspective within a "naturalized" framework. S. Hampshire remarks in Two Theories of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 54: "By naturalism I here mean the habit of representing judgements about the moral strengths and defects of persons as resembling in most respects judgements about the physical strengths and defects of persons, and of representing virtue as an excellent state of the soul or mind, and vice as a diseased state of the soul or mind, manifested in action, just as health is an excellent state of the body." This is a more classical, Aristotelian view of naturalism.
12. I advert to the Liberty Classics edition of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981). Hereafter referred to as WN.
13. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), ed. A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael, VII.i.1. Hereafter referred to as TMS. Unless otherwise noted, all page references in the body of my essay advert to the TMS.
14. The sense of the term "nature" I will focus on is the central theme of E. Kohák's The Embers and the Stars: a Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): "By 'nature' in a similarly generic sense we shall mean the nature presented in lived experience, the primordially given cosmic context in which humans find themselves and to which they themselves belong in their bodies and minds. . . . What is at issue between naturalism so conceived and its denial is not the nature of 'nature' but rather the place of the human in the cosmos. . ." (p. 8).
15. The "dialogical" or "rhetorical" dimension of Smith's writing is discussed in my "Rhetoric and Ethics: Adam Smith on Theorizing about the Moral Sentiments," in Philosophy and Rhetoric 24 (1991): 213-237.
16. I will not be discussing here whether or not Smith's interpretation of the Stoics is in fact accurate. He focuses mainly upon Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and to a much lesser extent Cicero and Seneca, and then in a rather selective way. He ignores Stoic logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, concentrating on what he takes to be its moral philosophy.
17. At III.5.7 Smith writes: "The happiness of mankind, as well as of all other rational creatures, seems to have been the original purpose intended by the Author of nature, when he brought them into existence. No other end seems worthy of that supreme wisdom and diving benignity which we necessarily ascribe to him; and this opinion, which we are led to by the abstract consideration of his infinite perfections, is still more confirmed by the examination of the works of nature, which seem all intended to promote happiness, and to guard against misery. But by acting according to the dictates of our moral faculties, we necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the happiness of mankind, and may therefore be said, in some sense, to co-operate with the Deity, and to advance as far as in our power the plan of Providence." Shortly after this pronouncement, however, Smith observes that natural sentiments often reject the "natural course of things," and then provides us with the quotation from the Bishop of Clermont (discussed below) that calls into question the sunny optimism of the statement just quoted.
18. The reference is to Smith's discussion of familial affection, in which he notes that "the sense of propriety," far from requiring us to approve of a person who feels nothing, say, for his own children, leads us to blame his lack of that "extraordinary sensibility." He adds: "The stoical apathy is, in such cases, never agreeable," and that the "poets and romance writers" - he names Racine, Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni - are "better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus" (III.3.14). For an excellent recent discussion of the differences between the standpoints of the moral actor and philosopher, a discussion particularly apposite to my remarks about Smith and Stoicism, see B. Williams' "The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics," in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 153-171.
19. We are reminded of Nietzsche's comment: '"According to nature' you want to live'? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?" Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), sec. 9, p. 15.
20. The translation is in The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Newly translated from the Greek: with Notes, and an Account of his Life (Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1742). The names of the translators (the Introduction to the book refers to "the authors of this translation") are not printed on the title page; but a letter from Francis Hutcheson (May 31, 1742) indicates that he and James Moor (eventually a holder of the Chair of Greek at Glasgow University) are the translators.
21. For the letter see J. Bonar's A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (rpt. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 13-14.
22. Much later in the book, Smith uses the same phrase when again discussing the influence of fortune on our moral judgments: "This great disorder in our moral sentiments is by no means, however, without its utility; and we may on this, as well as on many other occasions, admire the wisdom of God even in the weakness and folly of man" (VI.iii.30).
23. "The scheme of nature regarded in its whole extent cannot have had, for its sole or even principal object, the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them, is mostly the result of their own exertions. Whatsoever in nature gives indication of beneficent design proves this beneficence to be armed only with limited power; and the duty of man is to co-operate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating but by perpetually striving to amend the course of nature - and bringing that part of it over which we can exercise control, more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness." J. S. Mill's "Nature," in John Stuart Mill: Nature and Utility of Religion, p. 44.
24. Smith is of course picking up an old theme in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cf. Shaftesbury's Advice to an Author: "For harmony is harmony by nature, let men judge ever so ridiculously of music. So is symmetry and proportion founded still in nature, let men's fancy prove ever so barbarous, or their fashions ever so Gothic in the architecture, sculpture, or whatever other designing art. Tis the same case where life and manners are concerned. Virtue has the same fixed standard. The same numbers, harmony, and proportion will have place in morals, and are discoverable in the characters and affections of mankind; in which are laid the just foundations of an art and science superior to every other of human practice and comprehension. . . . For Nature will not be mocked. The prepossession against her can never be very lasting. Her decrees and instincts are powerful and her sentiments inbred." In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (rpt. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1964), pp. 227-228.
25. "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imitative Arts," in Smith's Essays on Philosophical Subjects (hereafter abbreviated EPS) II.30, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), pp. 204-205.
26. In the paragraph preceding the lines quoted, Smith remarks "Time and measure are to instrumental Music what order and method are to discourse. . . . By means of this order and method it [our aesthetic enjoyment] is, during the progress of the entertainment, equal to the effect of all that we remember, and of all that we foresee; and at the conclusion, to the combined and accumulated effect of all the different parts of which the whole was composed" (EPS II.29).
27. "History of Astronomy" IV.76, in EPS, p. 105.
28. "History of Astronomy" IV. 19, in EPS p. 66:
29. intellectual "systems in many respects resemble machines. . . . A system is an imaginary machine." Also "History of Ancient Physics" 9, in EPS pp. 113-114: "As soon as the Universe was regarded as a complete machine, as a coherent system, governed by general laws, and directed to general ends, viz. its own preservation and prosperity, and that of all the species that are in it; the resemblance which it evidently bore to those machines which are produced by human art, necessarily impressed those sages with a belief, that in the original formation of the world there must have been employed an art resembling the human art. . . . The unity of the system. . . . suggested the idea of the unity of that principle, by whose art it was formed; and thus, as ignorance begot superstition, science gave birth to the first theism. . . ."
30. While Smith very often uses this metaphor, in one place he uses an organic metaphor. I refer to WN IV.ix.28, where he compares the ability of the "political body" to withstand the false prescriptions of political economists to that of the human body to withstand bad medicine. This fortunate fact is attributed to the "wisdom of nature." Cf. TMS VII.iii.1.2: "Human society, when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philosophical light, appears like a great, an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects."
31. "History of Astronomy" IV. 13, in EPS p. 61: Smith seeks to show that ". . . the repose and tranquillity of the imagination is the ultimate end of philosophy . . . ," while wonder and perplexity provoke philosophy (a term that here includes science). At I.i.4.2 Smith refers to "the various appearances which the great machine of the universe is perpetually exhibiting, with the secret wheels and springs which produce them."
32. Smith's philosophy thus confirms D. Lachterman's thesis that "the 'idea' giving significant shape to the 'constellation' of themes ingredient in modernity, in both its revolutionary and projective modes, is the 'idea' of construction or, more broadly, the 'idea' of the mind as essentially the power of making, fashioning, crafting, producing, in short, the mind as first and last poietic and only secondarily or subsidiarily practical and theoretical . . . making is definitive of the mind's 'nature' or better of its comportment in and toward the 'world'." The Ethics of Geometry (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 4.
33. Smith concludes the "History of Astronomy" with the remarkable statement: "His [Newton's] principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system. The most sceptical cannot avoid feeling this. . . . And even we, while we have been endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phaenomena of nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one [Newton's], as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bring together her several operations." IV.76, in EPS pp. 104-105.
34. For further discussion of Smith's differences with Plato, see C. Griswold and D. Den Uyl's "Adam Smith on Friendship and Love," Review of Metaphysics 49.3 (1996): 609-637.
35. See Part VI of the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 125.
36. Smith remarks that "Man was made for action, and to promote by the exertion of his faculties such changes in the external circumstances both of himself and others, as may seem most favourable to the happiness of all" (II.iii.3.3). Smith has nothing but contempt for systems of virtue produced by "monks and friars," systems which value "the futile mortifications of a monastery, to the ennobling hardships and hazards of war" and to the contributions of "all the heroes, all the statesmen and lawgivers, all the poets and philosophers of former ages; all those who have invented, improved, or excelled in the arts . . . all the great protectors, instructors, and benefactors of mankind" (III.2.35).
37. I quote from "Of the Imitative Arts" II.30, in EPS p. 205.