Flesh in the Age of Reason (51 page)

In other words, we want our actions to be not merely directly gratifying to ourselves but to bring the gratification of others’ esteem. We seek praise, and therefore aim to do that which is praiseworthy. Society operates a value system of moral approbation and condemnation predicated upon the natural capacity to sympathize or pity.

Some of Smith’s sharpest observations highlight the dialogue between body and sensibility. The body evidently affects the mind – our health determines our spirits. But, equally, the mind affects the
body, for example, in blushing. Various inflections of bodily conduct win or lose approbation. Physical grossness – gluttony, farting, belching – is dis-esteemed: ‘Such is our aversion for all the appetites which take their origin from the body: all strong expressions of them are loathsome and disagreeable.’ That applies particularly to physical actions shared with the ‘brutes’. And context is all: ‘To talk to a woman as we should to a man is improper: it is expected that their company should inspire us with more gaiety, more pleasantry, and more attention’ – and there is a sting in the tail: ‘an entire insensibility to the fair sex renders a man contemptible in some measure even to the men.’

In all these responses, the workings of the imagination are critical. Imagination determines the limits of sympathetic projection. ‘The true cause of the peculiar disgust which we conceive for the appetites of the body when we see them in other men,’ explained Smith, ‘is, that we cannot enter into them. To the person himself who feels them, as soon as they are gratified, the object that excited them ceases to be agreeable.’ Thus, he went on, ‘when we have dined, we order the covers to be removed; and we should treat in the same manner the objects of the most ardent and passionate desires, if they were the objects of no other passions but those which take their origin from the body.’ Here Smith may have had in mind the succeeding of sexual elevation by sexual disgust.

Acknowledging the role of imagination in the formation of moral judgements, Smith proposed (with an obvious reference back to Addison and Steele) the device of the ‘impartial spectator’. This was many things for him. It could be the identity of a real person (‘the attentive spectator’) in concrete situations, whose approval was valued. More pertinently, this ‘impartial spectator’ lay more within the imagination than in the real world – the fiction was the ‘supposed spectator of our conduct’. At the most sophisticated level, the figure was thoroughly internalized as ‘the abstract and ideal spectator’, or, in other words, conscience. This internal tribunal – ‘the demi-god within the breast’ – was thus a monitor, an alter ego, conjured up to negotiate social intricacies. ‘When I endeavour to examine my own conduct,’ Smith meditated,

when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent in a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.

Smith’s theory of the building of a social personality deriving from sympathies – putting ourselves in others’ shoes – should be read in the context of the practical morality already advanced by Addison and Steele and Hume, with their recognition that society was complex and required astute skills in difficult social situations to help people lead effective, happy and virtuous lives and avail themselves of expanding opportunities. Overall, Smith was a sensitive observer of learnt responses to psycho-social situations, an analyst (anticipating, we might say, Norbert Elias) of the adaptive social constraints regulating attitudes towards the embodied self and its functions.

He was an acute observer of the deep ambiguities in social attitudes towards bodies. We sympathize with pain experienced by others – but only up to a point. For pain reminds us of the physical, and too much concentration on and absorption in the physical is disgusting. Yet pain in others, when accompanied by danger, engages our sympathies:

We sympathize with the fear, though not with the agony, of the sufferer. Fear, however, is a passion derived altogether from the imagination, which represents, with an uncertainty and fluctuation that increases our anxiety, not what we really feel, but what we may hereafter possibly suffer. The gout or the toothache, though exquisitely painful, excite very little sympathy; more dangerous diseases, though accompanied with very little pain, excite the highest.… Some people faint and grow sick at the sight of a chirurgical operation; and that bodily pain which is occasioned by tearing the flesh, seems, in them, to excite the most excessive sympathy. We conceive in a much more lively and distinct manner the pain which proceeds from an external cause, than we do that which arises from an internal disorder. I can scarce form an idea of the agonies of my neighbour when he is tortured with the gout, or the stone; but I have the clearest conception of what he
must suffer from an incision, a wound, or a fracture. The chief cause, however, why such objects produce such violent effects upon us, is their novelty. One who has been witness to a dozen dissections, and as many amputations, sees, ever after, all operations of this kind with great indifference, and often with perfect insensibility. Though we have read, or seen represented, more than five hundred tragedies, we shall seldom feel so entire an abatement of our sensibility to the objects which they represent to us.

Such psycho-physiological responses had significant consequences:

The little sympathy which we feel with bodily pain is the foundation of the propriety of constancy and patience in enduring it. The man who under the severest tortures, allows no weakness to escape him, vents no groan, gives way to no passion which we do not entirely enter into, commands out highest admiration.… We approve of his behaviour, and from our experience of the common weakness of human nature, we are surprised, and wonder how he should be able to act so as to deserve approbation.

Smith was characteristic of the Scottish Enlightenment in his alert charting of changing norms of body socialization. Despite certain caveats, both Hume and Smith believed that economic development and the resulting sophisticated commercial and urban society were working to improve the personality, bringing into being more sensitive, responsive, advanced subjects. Hume believed that the customary bonds of society, and Smith that the hidden ties of economics, would create the social glue which critics feared analytical or possessive individualism would corrode. Critics of Hume in particular were fearful that his rejection of religious commandments, his scepticism as to absolute truths, and his stress upon the atomistic nature of consciousness would prove corrosive. Indeed, individualism undoubtedly opened the doors to new forms of introspective
anomie
, to the possibility of individuals experiencing themselves as solitary, disconnected outsiders. Some, like Hume, had nervous breakdowns, some went mad, while new movements, including Romanticism and William Godwin’s anarchism, developed more extreme forms of
individualism. Hume and Smith, however, were broadly optimistic, subscribing as they did to the progressive vision of historical change so prevalent among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Notably in post-Union (1707) Scotland, the starkness of the contrast between the traditional society of the Highlands and Islands on the one hand, and the rapidly developing midlands valley from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the other, made it especially tempting to juxtapose the savage and the civilized, past and present, and reflect upon how much had been shed – for better or for worse – in the creation of civilization. It was very common to picture the savage mind as barely rational, gripped by terror of the unknown, unpredictable and overpowering events of nature – volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, droughts, floods, lightning, eclipses, comets. Fear and the desire to appease destructive forces beyond led mankind to invent deities to be worshipped and placated. Hume held that all religion whatsoever had its origins in such fear and ignorance. In this he echoed earlier sceptics, for example Mandeville, who held that primitive man assumed that an ‘invisible enemy’ lurked behind

every Mischief and every Disaster that happens to him, of which the Cause is not very plain and obvious; excessive Heat and Cold; Wet and Drought, that are offensive; Thunder and Lightning, even when they do no visible Hurt; Noises in the dark, Obscurity itself, and every thing that is frightful and unknown.

In time, Hume argued, the progress of the mind drew monotheism out of polytheism, clarity out of confusion. Similarly, according to Adam Smith, psychological processes gradually transcended these primitive responses to the terrifying world, and saw order – through study of the cycles of the seasons and so on. The collective mind advanced from wonder to understanding, and reason replaced panic reaction.

The psychological and aesthetic dynamics of fathoming nature were pondered by Smith in a remarkable meditation on the history of astronomy. Addressing Plato’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder, he proposed that it was the mind’s uneasiness with the
strange which provided the driving force for attempts to eliminate perplexity through theories, models and formulas. The roots of scientific thinking lay in the psychological – surprise at the unexpected would be followed by relief upon assimilating irregularities into the familiar. A scientific theory gave satisfaction when it overcame disquiet at anomalies: ‘philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature,’ he summarized,

Nature, after the largest experience that common observation can acquire, seems to abound with events which appear solitary and incoherent with all that go before them, which therefore disturb the easy movement of the imagination; which makes its ideas succeed each other, if one may say so, by irregular starts and sallies; and which thus tend, in some measure to introduce… confusions and distractions.… Philosophy, by representing the invisible chains which bind together all those disjointed objects, endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances.

The savage mind thus experienced disorder everywhere, and the progress of science marked the mind’s quest for regularity. Uniformity and order were desiderata of the striving, restless progressive intellect at least as much as they were present in nature. Smith thus inlaid the rise of science into the wider evolutionary history of the mind advanced in conjectural histories of civilization. No more a Christian than Hume, he acclaimed science as ‘the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’.

In respect of science, Smith and others judged this progress unalloyed. In other domains of life, this transformation of the psyche from primitive sensation to civilized reason was a mixed blessing, for primitive responses to Nature had also involved the immediacy of the imagination which fired the finest poetry and epics. That explains why Adam Ferguson and others looked back to earlier mentalities for the peaks of poetry. The old bardic authors, including, Ferguson believed, Ossian, were unsurpassed in imaginative power.
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The
advent of civilization had resulted in a shift in poetric mentality which gave rise to more sophisticated, regular and civilized expressions of poetic craft, but these had the drawback of being dilute, tepid and conventional. The poetic psyche gave way to that of prose, rhapsody and possession yielded to logic.

This loss of poetic voice or soul was a problem which transcended the divided identities of the Scots: it also preoccupied many late-eighteenth-century English intellectuals, anxious about psychological wholeness and alienation. Briefly in the
Lyrical Ballads
and explicitly in
The Prelude
, William Wordsworth pondered the position of the poet in the history of consciousness. For Wordsworth, civilized Augustan versifying, as practised by such popular authors as Erasmus Darwin, was meretricious. He had no illusions about a return to the bardic verse of a bygone era, but he did entertain hopes that the peasantry still possessed some core of their native instinctual responses – paralleled perhaps by the natural sensibility of children – which he, as a Lake District poet, would be able to share and voice. ‘Low and rustic life was generally chosen’, he explained in a famous passage in the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads
,

because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated.

The boldest attempt to vindicate the status of the modern mind came from Wordsworth’s older contemporary, the Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart, who may be taken as the successor of Adam Smith in his embodiment of the aspirations of Scottish Enlightenment thinking. Stewart linked the march of mind with the emergence of modern Scotland and, more specifically, with the role of Edinburgh University as the educator of the new élite. In his discussion of Smith’s
Dissertation on the Origin of Languages
, he summarized his project as being to grasp ‘by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated
nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated’. He sought to document the introspective psychology of the operations of the mind: it was the office of the enlightened to create a proper, analytical, clear-headed understanding of how the mind worked.

Heightened self-awareness would distinguish the intellectual over the herd. Natural philosophy became science, Stewart held, when enquiry, freed from exploded metaphysical conjecture, was directed towards discovering, by observation and experiment, the laws governing the connection of physical phenomena. The transformation of the philosophy of mind was to be similar. The phenomena of consciousness must be approached without conjecture, and the laws of their connection established inductively. The aim of a science of mind was to arrive at a knowledge of the ‘general laws of our constitution’ which would correspond to Newtonian principles in physics, and, like them, make possible the deductive explanation of a great range of phenomena.