How Enlightened was the
Enlightenment?
Billericay 2018 Week 6:
Human Nature in David Hume and Adam Smith
Links:
1. The ‘British Enlightenment’:
Gertrude Himmelfarb
(2004) argues that the British Enlightenment was different to the French, since
the British were more concerned with moral
philosophy (than with science and more abstract ideas about the power of
reason etc).
As Pope (1688 – 1744) put it: ‘The proper study of mankind is man’ and: it is better ‘to adjust the
true nature and measures of right and wrong’ than the distance and movements of
the planets.
On the other hand,
Anthony Pagden (2013) includes Italian and French thinkers i.e. Vico and Buffon
in his account of those who were concerned with a new approach to morality.
Pagden calls his chapter on these thinkers ‘A science of man’ to indicate that
Enlightenment thinkers were trying to understand human nature in a new, more
rigorous way. Most of these thinkers also rejected the older school of thought
which based human affairs on ‘natural laws’. (Russell 1946 makes much of this
transition).
2. Predecessors to David Hume and Adam Smith:
The Earl of Shaftesbury wrote in 1699 An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit: virtue comes from a
‘moral sense’ the ‘sense of right and wrong’ – not from religion,
self-interest, sensation or reason. We
also had a ‘natural affection’ which he saw as ‘social affection’ virtuous man
is motivated by ‘a natural affection for his kind’. Locke was wrong, he argued,
to believe that moral sense was learned: this would make it determined by
‘fashion and culture’… (and relative!).
Himmelfarb notes
(p33):
“‘Benevolence’,
‘compassion’, sympathy’, ‘fellow-feeling’, a ‘natural affection for others’ …
was the basis of the social ethic that informed British philosophical and moral
discourse for the whole of the eighteenth century…. They all agreed that [the
moral sense] (or something very like it) was the natural, necessary, and
universal attribute of man, of rich and poor alike, the educated and uneducated,
the enlightened and unenlightened. They also agreed that it was a corollary of
reason and interest, but prior to and independent of both.”
On the other hand, Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees 1705
tried to refute Shaftesbury by arguing that: self-love is the primary
motivation of all men, and it can be reduced to pleasure and pain. Fellow
feeling and condolence for others was a spurious passion (and one which
afflicted the weakest minds the most…) - ‘what we call evil in this world,
moral as well as natural, is the grand principle that makes us sociable
creatures.’
Smith dismissed these
views as ‘licentious’ and ‘wholly pernicious’ – Mandeville was also attacked by
Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon…
Francis Hutcheson in 1726 wrote: An Inquiry Concerning
the Original of Our ideas of Virtue or Moral Good – he defended Shaftesbury’s ideas
(especially the ‘moral sense’) against Mandeville. He was in fact the first to
use the expression: “The greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’ NB it was
not Helvetius or Bentham! And it was not the same idea as theirs, because for
utilitarians it derives from rational calculations of utility.
Hutcheson argued that
fellow-feeling cannot come from self-love, because it involves feeling others’
pain. It was ‘antecedent to reason or
instruction’ (Himmelfarb p 32). Reason alone cannot guide us – we need our
senses in situations where the problem is self-preservation, and we need our
moral sense when we need to ‘direct our actions for the good of the whole’.
3. David Hume.
3.1 Life and work
It was widely felt
(e.g. by Rousseau) that human beings had learned more about the world in the
last hundred years than in the preceding millennium, but they knew precious
little about themselves.
1740 Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. Pagden says this
‘changed the nature and the future direction of what we now call the philosophy
of mind. He felt that it had got little attention – except that he was denied a
chair at Edinburgh in 1745, and another (in logic) at Glasgow six years later. (His
dismissal of miracles was not popular!). So he re-wrote it in 1748 as ‘Enquiry
concerning Human Understanding’ and then in 1751 published ‘Enquiry Concerning
the Principles of Morals’.
After his death in 1776, his ‘Dialogues concerning Natural Religion’
were published, undermining all the then most attractive arguments for the
existence of God (Brian Magee 1998/2010).
He therefore held no academic post (few Enlightenment thinkers did,
apart from Kant), but worked as a librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in
Edinburgh, and made a living from selling his books (‘no mean feat’ says Pagden
in an age where there was no copyright and royalties didn’t exist).
He wanted to reach as many people as possible among ‘the elegant part
of Mankind, who are not immers’d in the animal life’. He further divided the
‘elegant part’ into the ‘learned’ and the ‘conversible’ (the average educated,
intelligent but non-specialist reader).
In the past, he felt, all learning had been ‘shut up in colleges and
cells’ – so it had lost touch with the real world. The ‘conversible’ too, had
become cut off from refined conversation and were amused by ‘gossiping stories
and idle remarks.’
By the end of the century Hume’s works had become the most widely read
and influential philosophical works in Europe. Kant said he had been aroused
from his dogmatic slumber by Hume. ‘Hume remains the single most influential
proponent of a secular ethics based on a ‘science of man’ the Enlightenment
ever produced.’ (p 128)
3.2 ‘Mitigated scepticism’ and a science of man:
He starts with an
empiricist premise, that it is only from experience that our knowledge of the
existence of anything outside ourselves can be ultimately derived, whether the
experience be our own or someone else’s’ (Magee). We cannot know that a
material world exists externally to, and independently of, ourselves.
This is for Hume a
point about knowledge: we deal in hopeful probabilities, not in certainties. He
even argued that while we can be aware of our experiences, we cannot experience
an experiencing self – I am just a bundle of sensations.
For Hume all
knowledge (science, natural sciences etc) has ‘a relation to human nature [and
must therefore ‘in some measure depend on the science of Man.’ We must start by
trying to understand human nature before we can move on to further knowledge.
‘There is no question
of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there
is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted
with that science.’
We should not waste
time trying to understand ‘primary causes’ (as the theologians did) – we can
only learn from experience or ‘secondary causes’. We cannot experience God, so
we have no evidence for His existence.
This echoes Alexander
Pope’s:
‘What can we reason,
but from what we know?
…
Know then thyself,
presume not God to scan,
The proper study of
mankind is Man.’
Hume has no time for
‘theories of everything’ says Magee.
He also says that causality
itself cannot be ‘observed’ – though we can observe two events one following
the other, and this, says Magee, raises a deep problem for science, but Hume
doesn’t stop at this point (an unmitigated sceptic).
3.3 ‘Reason is the slave of the passions’
Our aims in life are
not chosen by our intellects, but by our desires, emotions, passions, tastes –
feelings of every sort. Hence ‘Reason is the slave of the passions’
Choices we make as we
go through life will be based on our feelings, together with assumptions about
connections between events, our experiences and those of others. This is part
of what he means by ‘custom’ (see below). Without ‘custom’ we would have no
knowledge of the world (‘that fire burns… or that turnips are fit to eat’ as
Paden puts it). ‘Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.’
The ancient writers
had drawn up ‘schemes of virtue and happiness’ without basing them on human
nature. Studying human nature means, then, studying everyday lives, habits and
customs – also the records of events. We cannot carry out experiments on
people, but all this evidence really comprises ‘collections of experiments’ by
which the political or moral philosopher ‘fixes the principles of his science’.
We are thus in fact observers
of our selves – but at least what we observe is the product of our own
behaviour. (Unlike in the natural sciences).
(Pagden compares this
approach to Hobbes, Leibniz and Spinoza – and especially to Giambattista Vico,
whose writings appeared between 1725 and 1744. Thus he makes less of the
distinction that Himmelfarb makes between the British and the European Enlightenments).
Hume’s Treatise was
‘An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral
subjects. ‘Moral’ here is broader than how we use the word – it is derived from
‘mores’ in Latin, and includes customs and manners. We need to study those
things which lead us to have a particular set of mores/manners: government,
public affairs, ‘the plight or penury in which the people live, the situation
of a nation with regard to its neighbours’ etc.
Since this is the
antithesis of ‘vast, organised systems of belief (Magee), ‘we should hold our
opinions and expectations diffidently, knowing them to be fallible, and should
respect those of others.’ He believed that a ‘disinterested benevolence’ was an
essential quality of human nature (disinterested = divorced from personal
relations and affections). He believed in a ‘sentiment’, a ‘moral sense’, a
‘moral taste’ common to all men. (Himmelfarb p 34).
Thus, based on
investigation and systematic observation we could derive a rational grasp of
our shared world – or ‘enlightenment’.
4. Adam Smith 1723 – 1790,
4.1 Smith’s ethics:
Sabine comments that the
philosophy of Adam Smith’s time, as with Locke 100 yrs before, was an odd
mixture of empiricism (the basis of
scientific method: we find out about the world by observing its behaviour) and a belief in natural law/natural rights,
which must be God-given): for Smith, "natural law (God's law)" could
be seen in the empirical regularities at work in society. Later thinkers would undermine ‘natural law’
as an idea.
A key idea of writers
such as Adam Smith, (and Shaftesbury and others), was that we all have an innate moral sense – a ‘sympathy’ as Smith put it,
which allows us to imagine what others are feeling,
and which then brings us to feel with - to sympathise with - them, and hence to
condemn whatever is making them suffer and praise what is making them happy
etc.
This was a step on from Locke and Newton, for Locke – while believing in
innate reason, did not believe in an innate moral sense. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1690
stated there were no ‘innate practical principles’ ( = moral principles). For
Locke, education was essential to bring about moral awareness. Presumably this
position was based on his views on learning, which are empiricist: the senses
are the main route to our learning…
NB. Note particularly that Smith is talking of feelings, not of rationality. Gertrude
Himmelfarb stresses this point (p 137 - 8), linking Smith and his fellow
members of the Scottish Enlightenment to the later romantic movement.
She also quotes
Smith’s words: ‘it is by the imagination
(my emphasis) only that we can form any conception of what are his [the
unfortunate’s] sensations.’
Moreover, there is an
aesthetic side to this, since those for whom ‘the beauty of order, of art and
contrivance’ is important are those who will support those institutions that
promoted the ‘public welfare’.
In his ethics: “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” 1759 he
tackled questions of: the individual
& society, conflict and co-operation, self-interest and altruism.
The opening words (Extract TMS 1) contain a
statement of his view on the ability of humans to feel pity, compassion,
benevolence, sympathy.
Extract
TMS 1. “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 unto 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 lively manner… By the
imagination we place ourselves in his situation… we enter, as it were, into his
body and become in some measure the same person with him.” (Opening words of
TMS)
Note the role of the
imagination here:
‘it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what
are his sensations.’
Note also that we do
not imagine ourselves feeling the
suffering etc of the other, but we ‘become in some measure the same person with
him’ – so sympathy is not a selfish/self-centred principle (a man might also
sympathise with a woman’s pain in childbirth…). Also, he says that we have an
‘immediate sense and feeling’ – we do not come to it as a result of
reasoning.
He argued that there
must be an element of perceived common interest for any
society to function,
and that we acquire our moral sense from
being in society, being with others
(see later, on Rousseau).
TMS 2. Were it possible that a human creature
could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with
his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety
or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his
own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face. All these are objects
which he cannot easily see... and with regard to which he is provided with no
mirror which can present them to his view.
Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror
which he wanted before. [from Raphael,
D.D.: Adam Smith, Fontana 1985]
TMS 3. We suppose ourselves the spectators of
our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this
light, produce upon us. This is the only
looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people,
scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. [TMS I iii (iii) (?)]
4.2 How are ethical standards formed? [see: Cole and Strauss, Cropsey]
There are four steps
in the formation of ethics and social standards:
1. self-judgment
2. imagining effects
of our actions on others
3. imagining others'
perceptions/assessments of our actions
4. social code and
sanctions
To pass to stages 2
and 3 we make use of the idea of an ‘impartial
observer’ - so it is not just a question of thinking ‘how would we feel?’ –
since that might lead to ‘distortions’ in our judgment of others’ feelings.
In other words, the
basis of morality is sympathy not abstract reason (but S & C: only rationality can promote freedom...) Here there is a strong contrast with Kant.
Smith is therefore
attempting to ground ethics in a ‘scientific’, humanist approach: ethics must be derived from "man as
man." This, it can be argued (S
& C), represents a ‘democratisation
of morality’ - as against earlier formulations e.g. Plato: philosophers
discover the ethical ‘truth’; and the Christian view: God reveals the truth.
In a
similar vein, Himmelfarb makes much of the ‘implicitly democratic
character’
of Smith’s political economy (p 67)… after all, she points out, the
labourer
is the source of value. Moreover, whilst the market mechanism works on
the basis
of self-interest, he acknowledged that too much self-interest leads to
selfishness,
which in society is prevented by family ties, neighbours etc; these
factors
don't work in the economy. He even says that the self-interest that drives
the
market (the desire to own more, out of fear of being poor and envy of the rich)
is a
"corruption of our natural sentiments"
4.3 Smith’s view of human nature was somewhat egalitarian:
‘The
difference in natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than
we are aware of… By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half
so different from a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a
greyhound from a spaniel’ (p 69) - in this Himmelfarb believes Smith to be very
different to the French philosophes, who were, as I have suggested, explicitly
elitist.
Finally, it is worth
saying that in Smith’s view, since feelings of sympathy are natural, there is
no need for the state to try to enforce them (he was opposed to the ‘civic
humanist’ tradition (e.g. Rousseau) where the kind of society you live in is
crucial to determine whether you are moral or not.
5. Discussion:
That this discussion
of the inter-relationship between thinking and feeling is an ongoing one, see
the obituary (Guardian Weds 9th Nov 2011) of the philosopher Peter
Goldie, who wrote: The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (2000).
(died 2011 age
64).
He didn’t accept
either ‘feeling theories’, because they tended to make emotions self-enclosed,
and not take into account people, actions and events; but also disliked
cognitive approaches – because while emotions might be a matter of judging
people and events (i.e. ‘outward-directed’), that doesn’t account for their
‘visceralness.’ You could be aware (make a judgment) that someone is loveable
without feeling love for them.
He proposed a
neo-cognitive approach of ‘feeling towards’ – ‘thinking with feeling.’ Emotions
are directed towards the object of your thought, but they act more quickly – as
in immediate practical response of e.g. repulsion at rotten meat (evolutionary
benefit here). A nod to David Hume as well...
Emotions should
not be simply assessed as rational or irrational, but judged according to their
appropriateness and proportionality in specific situations [Adam Smith?]
Nor should they be
seen primarily in terms of beliefs and desires, - since we need to know what
they are like to the person experiencing them.
Often they can
make sense only as parts of a whole life – part of the narrative we glean about
others and tell ourselves about our own life.
He tried to make
sense of topics – grief, jealousy, other emotions, artistic response – which
philosophers tend to over-intellectualise.
See: Emotions: A
Philosophical Exploration, 2000. The
Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion and the Mind (sent for publication 2011).
For recent evidence
that we are not the rational creatures that we might like to think, see the
book by Daniel Kahneman’: Thinking, Fast
and Slow (Allen Lane, 2011). He shows, for example, that confidence (a
feeling) can lead us to make logical mistakes, or mistakes in dealing with
statistics. The best example of this is the 2008 financial crisis that struck
America and Europe!!
Footnote on the
emotions:
(a) Jules Evans,
Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary, U of L. Also author of:
Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations.
Article in
Guardian 31.01.13:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/jules-evans? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/30/stoic-stiff-upper-lip-feelings (article)
We have since end
19th century prided ourselves on our ‘stoicism’ – though the real
Stoics believed it was important to understand the feelings, acknowledge them,
not repress them. They believed in talking about their feelings, much (says
Evans) as CBT does now.
Darwin was crucial
in shaping modern attitudes, alongside imperialism, and science... in promoting
a racial hierarchy and arguing that ‘savages weep copiously from very slight
causes’ while ‘Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest
grief.’ Likewise, men were less emotional than women, and the upper classes
less than the lower...
Nowadays cancer
specialists (Dr Lindsay Forbes, in British Journal of cancer) argue that a
‘stiff upper lip’ can lead to cancer: especially if we don’t acknowledge
symptoms early. Note also the contrast with modern Toryism, where Dr Phillip
Lee (GP and MP) suggests the NHS is buckling under the strain of the
hypochondriac baby-boomers who lack the ‘stoicism’ of their parents!!! [See
also pp4augustineandaquinas, point 1.3 on Stoics)
References:
Bryan Magee: The
Story of Philosophy, Penguin 2016
Russell: A History
of Western Philosophy, Unwin 1946
Gertrude
Himmelfarb: The Roads to Modernity, Vintage, 2004
Anthony Pagden: The
Enlightenment and why it still matters, OUP, 2013
Daniel Kahneman’:
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, 2011