Flesh in the Age of Reason (50 page)

If the first book of the
Treatise
was thus shockingly sceptical, the last two books, on the passions and morals respectively, struck a more conciliatory note. Analysis of such desires as pride, love and hate uncovered internal feelings or sentiments which Hume called the ‘moral sense’. In thus delineating propensities integral to human existence, Hume noted that Christian theologians and Platonic philosophers alike had condemned such appetites, for being sinful or mutinous. For Hume, by contrast, feelings, albeit egoistic, were the true springs of such vital and cohesive social traits as love of family, attachment to property and the desire for reputation. Rather as for Mandeville, pride and other pilloried passions were the very cement of society. Dubbing its denigrators ‘monkish’, Hume defended pride when it was well-regulated; indeed, magnanimity, or greatness of mind (that quality of all the greatest heroes), was ‘nothing but a steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem’. Pride was needed for a person to acquit himself well in his station – indiscriminate humility would reduce social life to a standstill. Much that was traditionally reproved from the pulpit as egoistic and immoral was reinstated by Hume as beneficial.

Charging man that he ‘ought’ to struggle against his nature was, in any case, about as useful as ordering falling apples to resist gravity. Unlike the cynical Mandeville, however, the complacent Hume wanted not to outrage his readers but to reconcile them to the realities of human emotions, beliefs and conduct, and guide them to social usefulness. What mattered in that respect was that desirable social conduct arose not from reason but from feelings. Hence Hume’s celebrated paradox that reason was and ought to be ‘the slave of the passions’ – since the emotions, like the force of gravity, constituted motives and hence controlled what people were actually moved to do. Reason
per se
could not prompt action, it was not of itself a
motive
.
‘ ’Tis not contrary to reason’, he reflected outrageously, ‘to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’ Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as that civil war between reason and the passions pretended by Plato: ‘Reason… can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’

Personal identity, in short, was something in flux, discontinuous, confusing and complicated. Hume never broached ‘multiple personality’ as such, but, echoing Locke, he clearly thought people were different awake and sleeping and in various moods. Identity was not a given but a variable, a construct upheld by memory, habit and custom, and by the bonds of society. Memory was a powerful instrument but it was also imperfect, and Hume was always emphatic about how much people forgot – he challenged readers to remember exactly what they were doing, or what they were thinking, in previous months.

In a celebrated group of essays about different philosophies, Hume made clear his stance towards the relation between philosophy and life. In ‘The Platonist’ and ‘The Stoic’, he implied that such philosophical ideals were wholly divorced from the realities of living. In ‘The Epicurean’, he argued that the achievement of pleasure and the elimination of pain alone were good. Pleasure might be bodily, such as that cultivated in physical health; the superior forms of pleasure were mental, however, obtained in freedom from anxiety. The wise, who had nothing to fear from those around them, could ultimately find their pleasure in friendship.

Epicurus – for whom read Hume – further employed atomism as a weapon against superstitious fears of gods and demons, thereby countering both the unhappiness which superstitions caused, and the dread of death. Since the atoms of which the soul was composed dispersed upon death, humans need not fear.

For Hume, the Stoic sage exemplified virtue, not merely by living rationally in harmony with nature, but also by understanding that rationality, and consciously assenting to it. Believing that unruly passions posed a threat to virtue, the sage used his reason to master them, engendering an apathy or indifference towards them. Hume’s
assertion that the ‘true philosopher… subdues his passions, and has learned, from reason, to set a just value on every pursuit’ expressed the gist of Stoicism, but lay in ironic tension to the
Treatise
’s assertion that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passion’.

Here we glimpse the yawning gulf between Hume and William Godwin. Hume held that so tenuous and intangible was our sense of the continuity of self that it needed to be buttressed by a fabric of familiar associations – family, home, place, location, habits and customs. His was a scepticism – in some ways deeply corrosive – the remedy for which was conservatism, cementing things together to create an artificial sense of identity, association and affiliation, so as to counter the tendency to breakdown, Hume’s early nightmare.

Hume’s staunchest friend and closest intellectual ally was Adam Smith. Born in 1723 – twelve years after Hume – at Kirkcaldy in Fifeshire, Smith obtained a sound classical education at the University of Glasgow, being particularly influenced by Francis Hutcheson, the Professor of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson’s teachings were based upon the notion of an innate moral sense and postulated the promotion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number as the ultimate ethical goal. For a Scot of his time, Hutcheson’s outlook was remarkably optimistic and free from the Calvinism of the Kirk.

Smith spent some time at Balliol College, Oxford – an unhappy experience. His academic break came when he was invited to give a series of public lectures in Edinburgh on
belles lettres
. These proving highly popular, he was appointed in 1751 to the chair of logic at his old university at Glasgow, and the year following he transferred to moral philosophy, commencing a period of twelve years which he afterwards proclaimed to have been ‘by far the most useful, and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period’ of his life. The publication in 1759 of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
won him a European reputation.

Smith passed a couple of years from 1764 travelling abroad as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch. In Paris he met the physiocrats, the leading economic thinkers of the day. Returning to London, he spent his time in the reading-room of the recently opened British
Museum, gathering materials for a major economic text. In 1767 he went back to Kirkcaldy to reside with his now aged mother, dictating every morning to a secretary:
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
was finally published in the spring of 1776. The last years of his life were spent in Edinburgh, and he died in 1790, regretting that ‘he had done so little’. While not a Humean sceptic in religion, he seems to have been more of a Deist than a Christian.

The
Wealth of Nations
did not create, but it unambiguously validated, the model of
homo economicus
, that economic player who pursued enlightened rational self-interest, buying cheap, selling dear and maximizing profits. Smith was able to think in this way because he comprehensively rejected established economic theorizing (bullionism, mercantilism, physiocracy and so on) as short-sighted, unscientific and subservient to vested interests, above all those of merchants, farmers and politicians. An economy would work best, he argued, when each individual (
homo economicus
) was left free to follow his own business or to deploy his labour as he pleased. Let the laws of supply and demand operate freely, without privileges, monopolies or government busybodying, and everything would find its own level, rather as in the Newtonian physics to which Smith looked for intellectual support. Efficiency would be optimal, and thirst for profit would ensure that demand – that is, the consumer’s interests – was best met, indeed, it would spur technological and business innovation (the division of labour). Self-interest would optimize the system thanks to the operation, he occasionally wrote, of an ‘invisible hand’, or what Christian followers sometimes called Providence.

Like traditional ‘anti-luxury’ theorists, though reversing their condemnations, Smith stressed the importance of the imagination (rather than mere day-to-day needs) in energizing the economy. Fantasized objects of desire (the ‘luxuries’ so denounced by traditional moralists) were indirectly productive of benefit to society at large. There was, admittedly, a deception in this process – luxuries could not be guaranteed to bring the conveniences, glory and status-gains anticipated – but

it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe.

Homo economicus
was remarkable because he was in so many ways the very bogey figure – the greedy, acquisitive opportunist consumed by gain – universally condemned by classical moralists and Christian theologians alike. Smith, however, accepted the type without moral opprobrium and, indeed, could cast him as a public benefactor, not because of any altruism on the player’s part, but because his activities were wealth-producing. Within a competitive system, profit-oriented activities would prove socially valuable, generating what his teacher Hutcheson, and later Jeremy Bentham, would style the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Wealth production was, in turn, productive of better sorts of people – more peaceful, sociable, cultured and better integrated. The advance of wealth was the creation of a more civilized society.

There has been much discussion as to the legitimation of entrepreneurial economic man at this time, viewed as part of the wider advance of ‘possessive individualism’. Max Weber and R. H. Tawney classically found the root rationale for such individualism in Puritanism, the Christian’s need to prove his justification, before God, by works in a Calvinist world in which the Pope no longer possessed the keys to heaven and purgatory had been abolished: if the Churches could not save, the individual had to, through pursuit of this-worldly asceticism. Robinson Crusoe, the castaway forced to re-create civilization by his own hands, marks the transition between the Puritan’s calling and Smithian profit-driven
homo economicus
.

More important, surely, as a stimulus to Smith was his acute awareness of the economic plight, but also opportunities, of contemporary Scotland – a backward nation catching up fast – and the intellectual value-system of the Scottish Enlightenment. He followed
his great friend Hume in arguing that in the economic development of commercial society lay the key not just to material well-being but to the forging of a social order which would be more peaceful, orderly and progressive, and of personalities better adapted to the modern world.

Smith’s moral teachings spell out his ideal of the modern self. As Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he imparted to his students a moral system that was essentially non-Christian, following in the footsteps of Hutcheson. His mentor’s moral system had been based upon innate faculties – benevolence, sympathy, pride – implanted in the mind by God. Smith agreed that such faculties existed, notably pity and sympathy. The self was a construct of various force-fields of sympathy between individuals, grounded upon an innate capacity for pity: ‘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,’ Smith explained:

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. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it.

Even among ‘ruffians’, he argued, ‘fellow-feelings’ for others are present; there is honour among thieves.

When others are in danger, it moves us; if they are happy, we feel joy with them. Why is this? It is through the capacity to stand in another’s shoes, or by ‘changing places in fancy with the sufferer’:

When we see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.

Sympathy between people is mediated, as this example shows, through the body, its instinctual movements, its facial expressions. It is also ultimately determined by physiology; those with more sensitive, or morbid, nervous systems in some ways sympathize the more:

Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner. The very force of this conception is sufficient, in their feeble frames, to produce that itching or uneasy sensation complained of.

In the moral economy of vice and virtue, public judgements as to the good and the bad are based upon empirically grounded expectations that people will as a matter of fact sympathize with the plight of others. The capacity to sympathize is thus the basis of practical moral responses. As moral actors we experience approval or disapprobation because we are able to put ourselves under others’ skins, project how
we
would wish or hope to behave in those situations, and how we would want our fellows to respond to
our
conduct. ‘Nature, when she formed man for society,’ Smith explained, ‘endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard.’