Adam Smith's comparative system of moral sentiments

For Adam Smith, society’s collective view of an action or an attitude depends upon the context in which it is displayed. A nobleman’s high opinion of himself might be interpreted in a variety of ways. If that Lord’s opinion matches our collective opinion, then he is “high-minded,” “magnanimous.” But if our opinion of the man is lower than the Lord’s, he is “proud;” if he acts to raise society’s opinion artificially, through lies or flattery, he is vain. In society, comparison underlies the process of evaluation, whether it is a social behavior or a social product such as goods or art. Juxtaposed to eighteenth-century Britain, for Smith, is the figure of a deserted island. He speculates, “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,” (162). Standards and rules for evaluating anything that has a social existence need to be produced comparatively.

From his awareness of an action’s social implications and its subsequent social appraisal, Smith sheds absolutist criteria for evaluating behavior. Considering the wide array of contextual possibilities, Platonic ideals and Kantian imperatives appear short-sighted and naïve. On aesthetics, Smith argues,

When a critic examines the work of any of the great masters in poetry or painting, he may sometimes examine it by an idea of perfection, in his own mind, which neither that nor any other human work will ever come up to; and as long as he compares it with this standard, he can see nothing in it but faults and imperfections. But when he comes to consider the rank which it ought to hold among other works of the same kind, he necessarily compares it with a very different standard, the common degree of excellence which is usually attained in this particular art; and when he judges of it by this new measure, it may often appear to deserve the highest applause, upon account of its approaching much nearer to perfection than the greater part of those works which can be brought into competition with it. (30)

His support of comparative aesthetics implies a utility that absolutist standards lack. Judging works comparatively enables a critic to move past deviation from an ideal to the piece’s relative strengths and weaknesses.

Yet for Smith’s method of evaluation to work, he must construct numerous comparisons that triangulate an action’s value. A subject witnesses an action, and without necessarily knowing it, he takes several steps to judge that action. He compares the action with his opinion of it. Smith returns to the example of the pride and vanity: “If we compare [the proud man and the vain man] with their own pretensions, they may appear the just objects of contempt. But when we compare them with what the greater part of their rivals and competitors really are, they may appear quite otherwise, and very much above the common level,” (378). The second move of the subject, then, is to evaluate the action against other actions, similar in kind, in that social context. From this comparison, the subject can recalibrate his initial opinion of the action. However, he must also question the way in which he perceives the action. So he returns to the social context again to distill contrasting other opinions of the action. In this process of pulling together opinions from society, the subject formulates the figure of the “impartial observer.” There may be a temptation to think of the impartial observer as a reinvention of the common idea of one’s conscience. But the impartial observer is distinct in that it is entirely culled from one’s experiences with other people, and it is formed through the habitual practice of this culling, in other words, through practice.

The “impartial observer,” thus, is the keystone of Smith’s comparative system. He explains,

Whatever judgment we can form concerning [actions], accordingly, must always bear some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the judgment of others. We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves in his situation, we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it, by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. (161)

The “impartial observer” concretizes the society (or for Smith, just the other people) around the individual into a coherent, singular opinion. Smith conceives of the observer as a type of “looking glass,” through which we view the actions of others and our own behaviors. The person born in isolation becomes socialized through his development of the “impartial observer,” and “he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments,” (162). Smith’s own comparatively descriptions of abstract qualities such as vanity, pride, and magnanimity reveal that the mirror of the impartial observer is as requisite for depicting social behavior as it is for perceiving it. The observer provides the standard by which to distinguish pride and vanity from magnanimity and present those qualities in the medium of writing. As Hooke’s microscope mediated factual physical vision, Smith’s observer mediated factual social vision.

Unfortunately, if we apply pressure to the “impartial observer,” Smith’s system more closely resembles the absolutist systems, which he replaces. While it simplifies the process of comparing one’s views and actions to those of other people, the impartial observer becomes an absolute ideal in its abstraction of society. Smith capitalizes on its built-in murkiness and obscurity by creating a figure that adapts to any culture or fashion – it is the agent of that ubiquitous but ephemeral thing we call ‘public opinion.’ The impartial observer, at once, condenses the disparate views of a group of people and deracinates moral authority from any real source.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; to which is added, A dissertation on the origin of languages. Ed. by Dugald Stewart. London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden (1875). Electronic: Google Books.

Plato, Part 1

The critical line running from Nietzsche to Derrida charges Plato (c. 426-c. 347 BC) with sending the West on a logocentric wild goose chase for ultimate ends (e.g. Truth, the Good, the Beautiful), as well as with exiling vital artistic energies from the center of human affairs. On the other hand, the mainstream inheritors of the intellectual schools supposedly begun by Plato typically use each of the “habitual categories” of modern thought—“nature, politics or discourse” (Latour, Modern 3)—to denigrate the intellectually impure or irregular quality of Plato’s dialogues. These latter critics see in Plato’s use of shared aesthetic prejudices to explain the structure of matter (Timaeus), linguistic wordplay to support moral reasoning (Republic), and physical evidence to determine correct naming practices (Cratylus) the acts of an undisciplined premodern rhetorician more interested in swaying audiences than in discovering ultimate causes. In the criticism of Plato as a mere rhetorician, however, one sees a possible answer to the Nietzschean charge. Plato, as the head of an Academy that emphasized not only dialectic but mathematics and astronomy, surely was capable of producing the kind of topical, logical treatise associated with Aristotle, yet he deliberately chose the dialogue—a form populated with friendships and rivalries, imprecise terms, and unexpected mythmaking—as his written account of various philosophical issues. The Euthyphro offers a clue to Plato’s curious choice of form:

S: What are the signs of difference that cause hatred and anger? Let us look at it this way. If you and I were to differ about numbers as to which is the greater, would this difference make us enemies and angry with each other, or would we proceed to count and soon resolve our difference about this?

E: We would certainly do so.

S: Again, if we differed about the larger and the smaller, we would turn to measurement and soon cease to differ.

E: That is so.

S: And about the heavier and the lighter, we would resort to weighing and be reconciled.

E: Of course.

S: What subject of difference would make us angry and hostile to each other if we were unable to come to a decision? Perhaps you do not have an answer ready, but examine as I tell you whether these subjects are the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad. Are these not the subjects of difference about which, when we are unable to come to a satisfactory decision, you and I and other men become hostile to each other whenever we do? (7b-d)

For Plato, a highborn Athenian who lived through the wars with Sparta, the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, the restoration of a democratic government, and the execution of the greatest person he ever knew by that same restored democracy, the question of how a society threatened from without and within might best take action was not an abstract one. Could the many—and sometimes conflicting—ultimate realities, values, and myths Plato proposes constitute means to social agreement and action rather than intellectual ends in themselves? If so, then the fact that Plato frequently alights on what moderns would consider aesthetic concerns in his supposed quest for moral-scientific truth suggests that he believed that a myth of reality solidly grounded in or reconciled with our “habitual categories” of nature, society, and language was needed to save Athens from itself. What might Plato’s famously “mixed” dialogues teach us about the myths of reality preserving our own modern world?

(Next week: Cratylus! Republic! Timaeus! Theaetetus!)

Harvesting Conversational Fruit in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Before recounting a series of loosely connected conversations between Samuel Johnson and his company, James Boswell pledges to “present my readers with a series of what I gathered this evening from the Johnsonian garden,” (622). For Boswell, the magnitude and range of Johnson’s intellect were best displayed in his conversation. The “Johnsonian garden” was the metaphorical crop Boswell harvested each time he visited with Johnson. The species of conversation produced by Johnson and cultivated by Boswell distinguished itself from common talk as a form of art. After one evening, Johnson commented to Boswell that he had dined with “‘a very pretty company;’ and [Boswell] asked him if there was good conversation, he answered, ‘No, Sir; we had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed,” (867).

When conversation did occur, Johnson and his friends esteemed it as any other artistic production. During a discussion of Gray’s Odes, Johnson likens them to “forced plants raised in a hot-bed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all,” (769). Poetry and conversation share this metaphorical status as the fruit of the minds of men. A respondent claims that the Odes would be better if they had been “literally cucumbers,” but Johnson chides him for this exaggeration by retorting, “‘Yes, Sir…for a hog,” (769). The Odes may be literary cucumbers but to wish them “literally cucumbers” is to deny poetry’s privileged status as mental fruit. Conversation’s place on this higher plane of intellectual production – separate from agricultural productions that are fit for hogs and humans – presented Boswell with the problem of publication.

Unlike many other oral productions of art (such as ballads, plays, and oratory), conversation has no print or scriptural equivalent. It was neither based on a scriptural production nor commonly reproduced in print. When conversation was depicted in print, it was because it possessed unique value as in parliamentary records or it was fabricated for its usefulness as a literary device as in Thomas Tyer’s contemporary Political Conferences (1780) (or Socratic dialogues for that matter). As The Life of Johnson’s lasting fame confirms, Boswell’s project of preserving his friend’s conversation was unprecedented. His descriptions of transcribing conversation and apologies for less than perfect records shed light on what his method looked like. On one occasion, he explains:

I found, from experience, that to collect my friend’s conversation so as to exhibit it with any degree of its original flavour, it was necessary to write it down without delay. To record his sayings after some distance of time, was like preserving or pickling long-kept and faded fruits, or other vegetables, which, when in that state, have little or nothing of their taste when fresh. (622)

Yet what does “to write it down without delay,” mean? Did Boswell have a pen and paper recording conversation as it was happening? Given his penchant for women and drink, he probably did not record it later in the evening. So if Boswell were recording the previous night’s conversation in the morning, what was lost? What were his criteria for recording conversation?
Following a night of conversation, Boswell met with Johnson the next day to compare their memories of the discussion that occurred:

He put me in mind of some of it which had escaped my memory, and enabled me to record it more perfectly than I otherwise could have done. He was much pleased with my paying so great attention to his recommendation in 1763, the period when our acquaintance began, that I should keep a journal; and I could perceived he was secretly pleased to find so much to the fruit of his mind preserved; and as he had been used to imagine and say that he always laboured when he said a good thing – it delighted him, on a review, to find that his conversation teemed with point and imagery. (664)

At other times, Boswell relies on the accounts of friends to recreate a conversation. From the similarities between the conversation recounted across a variety of sources, certain requirements for transcription can be inferred.

But before speculating on those requirements, I might ask what did Boswell want his transcriptions not to be? By positioning his records against that of Mrs. Thrale, Johnson’s longtime friend, he indicates what qualities he wants to emphasize in his own. Of the conversation that Mrs. Thrale included in her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, Boswell remarks, “we find she noted, at one time or other, in a very lively manner, specimens of the conversation of Dr. Johnson, and of those who talked with him; but had she done it recently, they probably would have been less erroneous; and we should have been relieved from those disagreeable doubts of their authenticity, with which we must not peruse them,” (956). Boswell’s portrayal of Thrale as an unscrupulous transcriber began much earlier in Life of Johnson. He goes out of his way to record incidents that depict her bending the truth or mixing up the details of a story so that he can undermine her credibility. After she refers to a story about an old woman that is actually about an old man, Boswell pounces on the opportunity to correct her. He comments that “I presumed to take an opportunity, in presence of Johnson, of shewing this lively lady how ready she was, unintentionally, to deviate from exact authenticity of narration,” (646). The end of the work ties together all of the anecdotes of her carelessness with this reminder: “I have had occasion several times, in the course of this work, to point out the incorrectness of Mrs. Thrale, as to particulars which consisted with my own knowledge. But indeed she has, in flippant terms enough, expressed her disapprobation of that anxious desire of authenticity which prompts as person who is to record conversations, to write them down at the moment,” (952).

Boswell’s attention to the “veracity” of conversation addressed in his remarks on his transcriptions, the records of other he employs, and those he dismisses contribute to a consistent conception of preserved conversation. In addition to the specimens themselves, these remarks on conversation create an impression that the printed version has been deracinated from his original environment unadulterated, but the uniformity in format of his accounts suggests that something happens to conversation when it gets reproduced in The Life of Johnson. As Johnson is the subject of the work, he is also the center of conversation, often getting the last word and the better of his combatants. Conversation is streamlined with one subject per account colored by all the detail Boswell can muster. The noise of marginal discussions or interjections is muted. These are only initial thoughts on what happens to conversation in its transcription/translation to print, but Boswell’s preoccupation with the “Johnsonian garden” makes his Life a good starting point for considering conversation in print more generally. And from it, a couple fundamental questions emerge: What can conversation do in speaking that it cannot do in print? What does the form of conversation facilitate that other literary genres do not?

Johnsonian Liberty

During his career as a lawyer, James Boswell asked Samuel Johnson for his legal opinion on several occasions. Johnson provided Boswell with detailed arguments, and he even wrote speeches for Boswell to deliver. In 1776, Boswell called on Johnson again, but this time for a personal matter. Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, was set to entail his property so that it could only be passed down to members of his family. As part of the legal process of entailment, Boswell, the next heir of the estate, had to consent to his father’s plan. Boswell, however, thought that the land should be entailed to male heirs not only for propriety sake but also because his great-uncle had passed over his daughters and left the estate to his nephew. That decision, in Boswell’s mind, set a precedent, to which future generations should adhere. In his letters to Johnson on this matter, Boswell describes his dilemma as a moral one – it would be disrespectful to their ancestors to entail the family’s estate without attention to their example. By choosing to pass over nearer female relations in his will, Boswell’s ancestor had demonstrated his will that primogeniture be upheld.

In light of Boswell’s reasoning, Johnson’s response must have come as a surprise because, in spite of his staunch Toryism, he disagreed with Boswell. Johnson too viewed the former Lord Auchinleck’s will as a precedent, but for what he did not to do rather than what he did. Boswell’s ancestor may have passed over female heirs, but he did not entail the estate.

Johnson’s rebuttal to Boswell is not so much an opposing sociopolitical stance as it is a logical corrective. Both men are using precedent as their primary criterion for determining the proper course of action. This move requires them to draw an analogy between Lord Auchinleck’s circumstance and his ancestor’s. In Johnson’s opinion, if Lord Auchinleck had to pass over female heirs to leave his estate to a male (i.e. he did not have a son), he would be justified in doing so; by entailing the estate, however, he is no longer following a precedent but establishing one. Boswell’s ancestor had the option to entail the estate as well, and his decision not to entail is the precedent to which Boswell should draw his analogy. Boswell’s argument draws a false analogy between the act of bequeathing and entailing.

But why does the distinction between bequeathing and entailing matter? In all likelihood, Boswell’s ancestor did believe in primogeniture and his will supports that inference. For Johnson, the importance of this distinction – and the reason he chooses to correct Boswell’s false analogy – lies in his concept of liberty. He contends, “he who inherits an estate, inherits all the power legally concomitant;’ and that ‘He who gives or leaves unlimited an estate legally limitable, must be presumed to give that power of limitation which he omitted to take away, and to commit future contingencies to future prudence,” (488). Those two consequences of “leav[ing] unlimited an estate legally limitable” coordinate liberty on two planes – synchronic and diachronic. In an isolated moment, one’s liberty only extends as far as it does not infringe or limit another person’s liberty. If one were to transport Lord Auchinleck’s descendants back in time and make them neighbors, Auchinleck’s liberty to entail their property would infringe their liberty to bequeath it as they chose just as it would if Auchinleck were to restrict the liberty of one of his actual neighbors. Beyond the direct limitation of another’s liberty, the choice to entail restricts the ability of future generations to address “future contingencies.” In other words, exercising a liberty also ripples outward into the future beyond those directly affected by it. The act of entailment, and any action whose consequences extend in time, is, as Johnson suggests, a “usurpation” that “prescribe[s] rules to posterity, by presuming to judge of what we cannot know,” (487).

The example of entailment functions as a paradigm for the proper use of liberty by synthesizing the direct and indirect consequences of liberty’s expenditure. This example functions as a paradigm because it cannot function as a rule – the paradigm is a moral framework of last resort. The morality of choosing not to entail is founded on the fact that it is a choice; to impose a rule on Lord Auchinleck would limit his liberty in the manner that an entailment would his heirs’ liberty. As Johnson observes, “he who inherits an estate, inherits all the power legally concomitant.” Johnson’s recommendation can only be a template of what one ought to do. Yet his model of liberty’s proper use – one that “leaves unlimited an estate legally limitable” and “commit[s] future contingencies to future prudence”- would resurface as the culmination of a dilemma of liberty that began across the Atlantic Ocean that same year.

castrate this

One of the most frustrating and, unfortunately, deeply embedded concepts in 20th-century psychoanalysis is the castration complex, first articulated by Freud then dilated by countless other psychoanalysts to follow, including Jones, Horney, Lacan, and Irigaray. Each of these thinkers attempts--and fails, I suggest--to show how the castration complex inescapably causes gendered subjectivity while deserving no blame for the violences of such an interpolation. Among the various interpretations of the phallus, Irigaray perhaps comes closest to a bearable explanation, though she, too, fails to recognize some fundamental problems with the phallus and woman's apparent yearning for it.

Briefly: the castration complex for women begins with the pre-Oedipal phase, in which the girl loves and desires the mother. Around this time the girl, erstwhile satisfied with her clitoris, sees and somehow comprehends the penis, and realizes not only that her clit is a poor substitute for it, but also that her mother does not possess a penis, as she previously thought. Unlike the male child, who fears castration when he understands that some people lack a penis, the female child feels like she was born castrated, as was her mother. She thus begins to hate the mother and transfers her love from mother to father, in the hope that the father will eventually provide her with a penis—a hope that, somewhere along the line, gets transformed into the wish for a baby. This summary, reductive and biased as it is, will nevertheless allow us to see some of the fundamental problems with the castration complex.

so much depends
upon
a phallus

… but why? Why is the assumption that to have is more desirable in this instance than, to use the fraught word employed by so many psychoanalysts, to lack? When did lacking earn such a negative connotation and, for that matter, why is lack the term of choice when other, less negative concepts could have been used? No theorist in my ken has thought to reframe the genitalia in terms of a female purity and a male surplus—an odd oversight in light of the historical connotation of women as excessive, leaky, and uncontainable. Isn’t the penis just that, though? It is in excess of the body by virtue of its exterior position, while the female genitalia is contained and safe, so to speak. (There are some notable objections to this characterization—I am thinking particularly of Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed, in which she explores the English Renaissance woman’s portrayal as a leaky vessel—but they’ll have to wait for a longer exploration of this topic, as will further consideration of Lacan's idea of lack.)

The point of this post is not to right the wrongs of the castration complex or to make a feminist argument for the supremacy of the vagina over the penis. It is, instead, to point out an unchallenged assumption in a concept that still holds sway in the 21st-century western psyche, and to set the stage for more musings on the concept of lack, particularly with regard to gender, affect, and kinship.

Not Reading for the Plot in Robinson Crusoe

The simplest essay will tell you that providence is one of Robinson Crusoe’s (1719) central themes, but it will not tell you from what Crusoe develops his notion of providence. Certainly, the type of providence to which Crusoe refers descends from a Protestant education, but I argue that it is more specifically founded upon and modeled after a particular reading practice. On his island, Crusoe begins his journey toward repentance after “having open’d the Book casually, the first Words that ocurr’d to me were these, Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me,” (73). The verse’s applicability to Crusoe’s misery strikes him with an overwhelming sensation of relief. Its usefulness compels him to memorize the lines so that he could “mus[e] upon them very often,” (73).

Paired with scriptural reading is a terrifying dream Crusoe has of God’s appearance before him. God declares of Crusoe’s misfortunes, “All these Things have not brought thee to Repentance,” (74). Both the words of the preceding verse and these of his dream make a great “impression” upon Crusoe. Neither sentences are sought after or result from active self-reflection, but unexpectedly appear to Crusoe. And in each instance, Crusoe’s process is the same: he encounters the sentences, he feels a tremendous emotive response to the words, and he commits those words to memory so that he can bring them forward in his mind whenever he so desires.

The chain of events shared between Crusoe’s reading and dream experiences form a pattern that can be replicated as a daily exercise. As he begins a habit of reading scripture every morning, he experiences the same “providential” encounter as earlier. He recounts that he was “earnestly begging of God to give me Repentance, when it happen’d providentially the very Day that reading the Scripture, I came to these Words, He is exalted a Prince and a Saviour, to give Repentance, and to give Remission: I threw down the Book, and with my Heart as well as my Hands lifted up to Heaven, in a Kind of Extasy of Joy,” (75). His description combines the spontaneity of his joy with the deliberate practice of his reading. Only by habituating himself to a daily reading routine can Crusoe facilitate seemingly incidental revelation. This routine becomes a form of mental and spiritual conditioning. He writes that he “began to exercise my self with new Thoughts; I daily read the Word of God, and apply’d all the Comforts of it to my present State,” (88).

The phrase “exercise my self with new thoughts” connects his reading to his other endeavors on the island, which are coordinated by a group of terms. Crusoe pursues each goal he sets on the island through a process of “exercise”, “experiments, or “essays.” When he first succeeds in agriculture and pottery, he does so after a period of “experiments,” (81, 94). In both cases, “experiment” signifies the development of a proper method formulated by changing different variables over the course of a series of trial methods. An “essay,” in the sense of a try, indicates a similar approach; “after a great many Essays and Miscarriages,” (114) Crusoe successfully makes “both Butter and Cheese” from the milk of his domesticated goats.

Reading, then, is another routine in a constellation of routines that constitute Crusoe’s daily life, but he distinguishes reading in its connection with providence and revelation. When Crusoe is preoccupied with a fear of the “Appearance of Savages,” those “Word[s] of Scripture [come] into [his] Thoughts, Call upon me…” (122). This second side of reading (that is revelatory and providential) lifts it from other habitual practices that only yield anticipated results, whether they be cheese, pottery, or wheat. The routine of reading provides a means for communicating with, understanding, and perceiving emotions that are unexpected or at least unplanned for. It gives Crusoe a way to make sense of the world as a place, which distributes the punishments and rewards of God.

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: Printed by Baldwin and Craddock, Paternoster Row) 1831.