Abstract
The fourth chapter, “The Image of Suffering,” focuses on the theatrical image in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly his comments concerning Sophocles’ Philoctetes and his debt to the Stoic tradition. Against this Stoic backdrop, Smith’s natural sympathy comes into focus as an individual’s capacity to step outside herself and see her own position in a larger systematic whole, as if she were an “impartial spectator” observing herself from a “cosmopolitan” perspective. In this way, Smith insists, an individual forms “a much more correct image of his own character,” as the individual becomes an image to herself.
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Notes
- 1.
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.II.13. Hereafter cited as TMS.
- 2.
Heaney, The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), 3.
- 3.
Smith, TMS, I.II.13.
- 4.
Smith, TMS, I.II.13.
- 5.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 51.
- 6.
Philoctetes, trans. David Grene, in Sophocles II, eds. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 195.
- 7.
Grene, Philoctetes, 214.
- 8.
Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 11.
- 9.
Lessing, Laocoön, 11.
- 10.
Grene, Philoctetes, 202.
- 11.
Heaney, Cure at Troy, 51–2.
- 12.
Grene, Philoctetes, 233.
- 13.
Lessing, Laocoön, 31.
- 14.
Lessing, Laocoön, 31.
- 15.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10.
- 16.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 18.
- 17.
Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics, (New York: Blackwell, 1987).
- 18.
Sen, Ethics and Economics, 21.
- 19.
Sen, Ethics and Economics, 23.
- 20.
In Self-Interest before Adam Smith, Pierre Force outlines the manner in which the eighteenth-century viewed itself as divided between “Epicureans,” who are thus labeled more for a skeptical guardedness against humanity’s self-interest (rather than any direct connection to either Epicurean or Lucretian thought), and the supposedly civic mindedness of the “Stoics,” such as Smith. Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 21.
Smith, TMS, I.I.1.
- 22.
On the contradictory roles of Smith vis-à-vis the theater, see Ryan Patrick Hanley’s “From Geneva to Glasgow: Rousseau and Adam Smith on the Theater and Commercial Society,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture Vol. 35, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 177–202.
- 23.
Smith, TMS, 37.
- 24.
Heaney, Cure at Troy, 2.
- 25.
Grene, Philoctetes, 236.
- 26.
Grene, Philoctetes, 219.
- 27.
Grene, Philoctetes, 224.
- 28.
Smith, TMS, I.II.9.
- 29.
Smith, TMS, I.II.9.
- 30.
Smith, TMS, I.I.2.
- 31.
Smith, TMS, I.I.3.
- 32.
On this point, my reading here is intended to push beyond the simple theory of the autonomous subject that, since Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel and C.B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, has been the cornerstone of so much eighteenth-century criticism. In this respect, it also functions to as a counterbalance to the Foucaldian tendency within eighteenth studies more generally, the trajectory of which spans from Nancy Armstrong’s seminal reading of Pamela in Desire and Domestic Fiction to Marshall’s Nietzschean or Foucauldian claim that Smith’s subject internalizes the spectator/spectacle division, policing itself according to the internalized law of the “impartial spectator,” but also including Deidre Lynch’s argument in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning, according to which the subject develops as a response to the publishing market’s drive to create “round” characters which in turn give rise to a new, “individual” consumer.
- 33.
Festa outlines the diametrical opposition between Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which presents sympathy as resulting another’s suffering which “strikes upon us in a lively manner,” and Smith’s Moral Sentiments. If Hume’s sympathy opens immediately onto others and dissipates the autonomous individual, Festa argues, Smith’s subject is isolationist. Sentimental Figures of Empire, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 27–8.
- 34.
Much of the first two sections of the Moral Sentiments focus on the double relation between spectator and spectacle, and the delicate balance of modulating the pitch of suffering and sympathy – what Smith continually refers to as “propriety” – that must be maintained in order to bring them into a sustainable harmony. For instance, Smith writes: “In the command of those appetites of the body consists that virtue which is properly called temperance. To restrain them within those bounds, which regard to health and fortune prescribes, is the part of prudence.” TMS, I.II.6. Here, Smith’s sympathy intersects with the traditional terms of temperance and prudence, established in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as sophrosyne and phronesis. In this respect, Smith’s notion of sympathy finds its condition of possibility, from the outset, in suffering “virtuously” or in a manner consistent with arête, so that it as much as guidebook on how to suffer in the proper manner as an index of how to sympathize.
- 35.
For a thorough study of the intersection of iconoclasm and anti-market rhetoric, see David Hawkes’ Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
- 36.
In a section of the essay “Being Singular Plural” entitled “Society of the Spectacle,” Jean-Luc Nancy argues that “the Situationist critique of the spectacle is not an opposition between spectacle and non-spectacle, but an opposition between “good and bad spectacle.” Nancy writes that, “For the Situationists, then, a certain idea of ‘art’ almost always plays the role of good spectacle, and it is no accident that the [bad] ‘spectacle’ for them is first and foremost a falsification of art.” More interestingly for eighteenth-century scholars is his following claim that this opposition itself is already explicit in the work of Rousseau: “What Rousseau thus makes clear [with the spectacle of the people to itself], is the necessity of the spectacle.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 68–9.
- 37.
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part II, Section VII, “Of Compassion.”
- 38.
This is Victor Gourevitch’s translation of the line, un sentiment qui nous met à la place de celui qui souffre. In The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 39.
Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1924), 38.
- 40.
See the chapter “Of Licentious Systems” in TMS, specifically VII.II.99.
- 41.
“Letter to the Edinburgh Review” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Reprint of Oxford UP, 1980), 250.
- 42.
Colleti argues that while Mandeville’s theory remains contingent on an irreducible paradox between virtue and vice, Smith provides a resolution to this problem by transforming private vice into “positive elements the sum of which must also be positive.” My position is an inversion of the one proposed by Colleti: that is, in attempting to “civilize” and humanize Mandeville’s theory, Smith transforms the relation of virtue and vice into a paradox he himself cannot resolve except by disavowing the essential aspect of his moral philosophy: sympathy. From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 213.
- 43.
Force mysteriously refers to Smith’s comment as “tongue in cheek,” as if to dismiss this rather odd “act of ‘philosophical chemistry,’” but I would agree with Colleti that this is indeed the crux of the intersection between Smith and Rousseau, and it is the essential contradiction, however flippantly he may treat it, underlying his own theory of sympathy.
- 44.
Discourses, 152. It is the hyperbolic and excessive example of the child being devoured by a mad sow is further called into question as a serious example as, in another instance, Mandeville writes that, even if “without a considerable mixture of [pity], society could hardly exist,” there is by contrast “no Merit in saving an innocent Baby ready to drop in the fire” because having saved it from falling “we only obliged ourselves; for to have seen it fall, and stove to hinder it, would have caused Pain, which Self-preservation compell’d us to prevent.” Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 56.
- 45.
Rousseau, Discourses, 152.
- 46.
Rousseau, Discourses, 172.
- 47.
Rousseau, Discourses, 152.
- 48.
Smith, TMS, I.I.14.
- 49.
Smith, TMS, I.I.2–4.
- 50.
Smith, TMS, I.I.44.
- 51.
Menley, “Sympathy’s Asymmetry” (paper presented at the annual conference for American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Portland, Oregon, 2008).
- 52.
Smith, TMS, I.II.13.
- 53.
Smith, TMS, I.II.13.
- 54.
Smith, TMS, I.I.30.
- 55.
Smith, TMS, I.II.5.
- 56.
Smith, TMS, I.I.3.
- 57.
Smith, TMS, I.II.7.
- 58.
Smith, TMS, I.II.7.
- 59.
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 108–9.
- 60.
Smith, TMS, I.III. 2. Tellingly, as previously noted, the first reference to the theater elucidates that sympathy means “fellow-feeling,” whether it be joy or sorrow: the “heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us” create a “fellow-feeling with their misery [which] is not more real than that with their happiness.”
- 61.
In its first few definitions, in addition to physiology and market “sympathies,” the OED foregrounds the non-affective notion of sympathy: first, its occult connotations, legible in the example from Sir Charles Sedley’s 1688 “Mulberry Garden” – “I have Sympathy-powder about me, if you will give me your handkerchief while the blood is warm, will cure it immediately” – and then simply “agreement, accord, harmony,” giving as an example Othello’s “There should be simpathy in yeares, Manners, and Beauties: all which the Moore is defective in.” Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sympathy.”
- 62.
Smith, TMS, I.III.3.
- 63.
Smith, TMS, I.I.1. For a thorough examination of the importance of this phrase, see Warren Montag’s “Tumultuous Combinations,” in Mike Hill and Montag’s The Other Adam Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
- 64.
Here, as throughout this book, I insist on the somewhat awkward English word “spectacle” not only to tie provisionally the eighteenth-century work into the discourse of Debord, but also (and more crucially) to insist on spectacle’s ambiguity of place. In the French, as previously suggested, spectacle designates theater as well as show, spectacle, and various other extra-theatrical presentations, so that Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles addresses both the politics of theater and the theatrical state of politics and society.
- 65.
Smith, TMS, I.III.16.
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Carson, C. (2017). The Image of Suffering. In: The Aesthetics of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33963-4_4
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