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Adam Smith and the Problems of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

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Adam Smith and the Problems of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Adam Smith and the Problems of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Arby Ted Siraki Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Arby Ted Siraki, Ottawa, Canada, 2013 ii CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Note on Citations vi Introduction 1 Section I Chapter 1: The Standard of Taste in the Eighteenth-Century 18 Chapter 2: Smith’s Theory of Taste 40 Chapter 3: The ‘Scandal of Taste’ Revisited: Smith’s Insight into the Influence of Socioeconomic Class on Taste 70 Chapter 4: The (Aesthetic) Problems of Sympathy 92 Section II Chapter 5: Beauty and Aesthetic Judgment 114 Section III Chapter 6: Adam Smith’s Solution to the Paradox of Tragedy 158 Chapter 7: Neoclassical Dramatic Theory and Adam Smith 193 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 229 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the aesthetics of Adam Smith. It argues that, despite appearances to the contrary, Smith not only articulated ideas on the subject and was engaged in the aesthetic debates of his time, but that he in many ways innovates on and challenges received opinion—he thus differs significantly from some of his better known contemporaries, including Edmund Burke and David Hume. For this reason, he is not merely a major thinker who happened to dabble in aesthetics; on the contrary, he considered the subject, which appears in nearly all his works, important, and often interrogates its issues in a more studied way. My project thus makes a case for Smith as a significant thinker in the history of aesthetics, one who merits renewed attention. This study does so by investigating the major aesthetic issues of the day, which Smith in fact discusses. It begins by examining Smith’s remarks on taste—the aesthetic issue of the century—which occur largely in Theory of Moral Sentiments. Though seemingly tangential, his discussion of taste is significant as it argues against the predominant eighteenth-century current that maintained the existence of a standard. He also challenges theorists such as Hume who made aesthetic experience classless and, especially via sympathy, disinterested. The study next investigates Smith’s aesthetic normativity and what are for him valid aesthetic judgments, which can be reconciled with his remarks problematizing taste. Here too, Smith appears to argue against the predominant impulse that sought to ground valid aesthetic experience in the immediate; in doing so, Smith demystifies and democratizes aesthetic experience. Finally, the dissertation investigates tragedy, by far the literary genre that most interested Smith, and which also drew attention from better known theorists. The paradox of tragedy—why iv readers and spectators are attracted to painful representations—was an aesthetic issue that vexed many thinkers of the century, and although Smith appears to ignore the issue, we have in his moral theory a solution to the paradox, one that is unique and more satisfying than those of his contemporaries. The project concludes by examining Smith’s relation to neoclassical dramatic theory. Though superficially appearing complacent in uncritically adopting neoclassical doctrine, Smith, even here, is being original. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS One inevitably incurs many debts while undertaking a project of this scope. I was fortunate to receive substantial travel funding from the University of Ottawa and the Association of Part Time Teacher’s Union that enabled me to attend conferences from San Antonio to Athens and many places in between. In the process, I met many wonderful and intelligent colleagues who challenged and encouraged me to think in new ways. I wish in particular to thank the organizers and participants of “The Philosophy of Adam Smith” conference held at Balliol College, Oxford (where Smith attended), in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of his first major publication, Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was my first major conference—held in January 2009, just as I was beginning to sink my teeth into Smith—and everyone, including some of the most respected and famous Smith scholars, not only heard my paper but were very encouraging. Without their kind words, this project may not have been realized. Those around me, my friends and colleagues who patiently heard my complaints and ideas like a broken record, deserve a heartfelt thanks, especially my colleagues at the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. My thanks are also due to my family and parents, who consistently believed in my project even when I did not. Finally, my thanks are due to my supervisor, Frans De Bruyn. Though I unwisely did not always follow his advice, whatever strengths there are in this work are due in part to him. Any remaining faults are my own. vi NOTE ON CITATIONS All references to Smith are to the standard Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, reprinted by Liberty Fund. Citations follow standard abbreviations: TMS (Theory of Moral Sentiments), LRBL (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres), WN (Wealth of Nations), LJ(A) and LJ(B) (Lectures on Jurisprudence, “Reports” of 1762 and 1766, respectively). I have cleaned up quotations from Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and Lectures on Jurisprudence: as they are based on student lecture notes, they contain accidentals and much editorial work. For the reader’s sake, I have removed all such notations and modernized spellings except for correct eighteenth-century ones. For most French works, I have used English translations where possible. In the absence of existing or accessible translations, I have provided my own, as noted. All emphases are original except where noted. 1 INTRODUCTION Adam Smith remains undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers and shapers of modernity, alongside Darwin in science, Marx in philosophy and politics, and Freud in psychoanalysis. My dissertation focuses on Smith’s aesthetic ideas, especially in relation to his eighteenth-century context. Such a project may seem counterintuitive—after all, Smith is best known as an economist and, to fewer people, as a moral philosopher. Despite appearances to the contrary and a paucity of explicitly aesthetic writings, however, Smith was nevertheless engaged in the aesthetic debates of his age and, more significantly, he often elaborates on and challenges received opinion and innovates on his predecessors in interesting ways. There are several reasons that justify this project. Smith has become especially relevant in our time following the financial collapse of 2008, and interest in him has grown in the past few years. For decades, he was studied in the shadow of David Hume and others; fortunately, he has justly found a place as a significant thinker in his own right. There has, in fact, been a recent explosion of academic interest in and scholarship on Smith, particularly in the past decade, a trend that began with Charles Griswold’s comprehensive Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999). This work galvanized scholars interested in Smith as a comprehensive thinker. Indeed, the renewed interest has come from disparate quarters: moral and political philosophy, sociology, history, aesthetics, and literature. Since 2009, in fact, there have been no fewer than half a dozen volumes devoted to Smith alone, along with 1 numerous articles and chapters. Perhaps the most accurate index of Smith’s increasing 1 For instance, Fonna Forman-Barzilai’s Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy (2010), Ryan Hanley’s Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (2009), and Paul Oslington ed., Adam Smith as Theologian (2011). Ildiko 2 importance and popularity, even outside the academy, was the publication of his Theory of Moral Sentiments by Penguin Books, which published this work for the first time in 2009.2 The following year witnessed the publication of The Philosophy of Adam Smith: Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the first and so far only anthology devoted solely to his Theory of Moral Sentiments. The same year also witnessed the publication of a new biography of Smith, Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: an Enlightened Life, along with the long-awaited second edition of Ian Ross’s standard account, The Life of Adam Smith. The list could go on. There has been a similar renewed interest in sympathy recently, the master-concept of Smith’s ethics. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize winning economist, has recently written on applications of Smithian sympathy and impartial spectatorship to global ethics in The Idea of Justice (2009), a position challenged by Fonna Forman-Barzilai, who argues for Smith’s “anti-cosmopolitanism,” that is, the notion that we are mainly concerned for people around us, far more so than people we never see. In his plenary talk at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2008, Bill Gates quoted not the Wealth of Nations, but the opening sentence of the Theory of Moral Sentiments: “[h]ow 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.” Indeed, the fame of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith’s first publication, along with his famous conception of sympathy, seems Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (2012) and Vivasvan Soni’s Mourning Happiness (2010), among many others, devote at least a chapter to Smith. 2 With an introduction by Amartya Sen. 3 to have come full circle. Though ignored for decades, it was a European bestseller in its own day, and was translated no fewer than three times in French and twice in German in the same century.3 There has likewise been a renewed interest in aesthetics—even in evolutionary psychology and neurobiology4—including “pre-Kantian” and especially British aesthetics of the eighteenth century.5 A growing body of scholarship examining Kant’s debts to British thinkers, which had largely been overlooked, has come out during the past decade, including work by Paul Guyer, Vanessa Ryan, and Rachel Zuckert, to name but a few.
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