A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Adam Smith(1723-1790) Vibrations, Moral Sentiments, and “An invisible hand”

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The Scottish Enlightenment: Part 1– A Romantic Prelude

The combination of the skepticism of David Hume and Descartes is a unique and disturbing cocktail that would take the genius of Kant to analyze and synthesize into positive philosophical doctrine. Kant in 1781, as we know embarked on an exercise of extracting the truth from both empiricist and rationalist positions whilst simultaneously criticizing the “Sentiment” of skepticism that permeated these opposing positions. Both forms of skepticism gave, in their turn rise to moral and political consequences that would last for centuries in spite of the attempt by Kant to neutralize the force of the sentiment.

Kant is rumoured to have viewed Smith’s theory of moral sense favourably but he cannot have failed to notice the influence of the skeptical attitude of Hume and the Empiricists that permeated the so-called “Scottish Enlightenment”. In his later work “The Wealth of Nations” Smith is clearly outlining a position which rejects the dogmatic imposition of what he believes are theoretical intellectual systems upon the economic and social interaction of peoples. He is sometimes regarded as one of the fathers of Liberalism but it is not clear that he is committed to the universal value of freedom that we find in the later Moral Theory of Kant. indeed Smiths economic theory paints a deterministic picture of the economic activity of a market driven by economic laws which one must stoically accept the consequences of.

The Scottish Enlightenment was very much influenced by Newton and Hume’s conviction that Newtonian Science should be the lodestar of future moral and social science. Smith was very much a part of this movement. His “Theory of Moral Sentiments” in particular used and modified Hume’s idea of the sentiment of sympathy as one of the atomistic building blocks of all social relations. For Hume Sympathy was an impression/sentiment that was shared by mankind and was the source of benevolent action. Newton believed in atomism and as we have seen from earlier psychological developments “sensation” was believed by many philosophers of the past to be an important “atomic” psychological concept. That sensation or impression should become the “atom” of psychological theory for Hume was not, therefore, a particularly surprising development. The Romanticism of Rousseau’s social and political theory was tempered by a skepticism that regarded civilization as decadent and the arts and sciences produced by man a result of his amour propre(pride). Rousseau’s Romantic upbringing of the hypothetical Emile was an attempt, therefore, to install the appropriate moral sentiments in his literary creation. The Encyclopedists of France, which included Rousseau, were also intent upon a pluralistic view of knowledge and the psychological faculties that marked a clear attitude of resentment toward any authority and its dogmatic pretensions. Impressions, Sentiments, Association, and Imagination were in the cultural air everybody breathed. The invisible hand of Revolution was preparing the cocktail that would explode later in America and France.

Smith’s “atomistic” approach to the explanation of phenomena is actually best illustrated in an essay entitled “Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Language”(1759) which by the way is one of the best illustrations of an imposition of a dogmatic intellectual system upon the phenomena of the social activity of man that it is possible to imagine. The essay begins thus:

“The assignment of particular names to denote particular objects, that is the institution of nouns substantive, would, probably, be one of the first steps towards the formation of language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak but had been bred up remote from the societies of man, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants, intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which are most familiar to them. and which they had the most frequent occasion to mention, would have particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain.”

One cannot but be reminded here of the more modern thoughts of the Early Wittgenstein’s logical atomism in which so-called atomic propositions were concatenations or “associations” of logical names. This modern theory is the startling result of the above ultra-theoretical characterization of language. Smith was no logician even though he held a professorial chair in logic. He instead extolled the virtues of experience and common sense. He did so, however not in an Aristotelian spirit(which he claimed to be the case) but rather in the spirit of a theoretical skeptic who is careful to select which experiences to focus upon. Aristotle never produced a theory of the origins of language but had he done so it probably would have resembled that produced by Julien Jaynes in an essay entitled “The Evolution of Language in the Late Pleistocene”. The methodological commitment to an empirical approach that focuses upon an investigation into the practical origins of language is obvious in Jaynes’s account:

“Words are of such huge moment in the life of men that the acquisition of them and the ability to organize them into sentences that convey meaning must have resulted in very real behavioural changes: and these changes must have been reflected in the artifacts left behind… A differential lingual response to an object is a training of attention upon it. To look at an object and to name it at the same time allows a concentration upon it that otherwise would be absent. Without names for things, we cannot readily get our own or others attention to the right places or keep them there for very long…But the effect of language on behaviour goes much farther and deeper than orientation and attention. Stimuli, when labeled, are actually easier to remember. Children who can name colours better can remember and recognize them. And what is remembered is shaped by the terms that express it. Moreover, stimuli differences when labeled can be responded to in a much more encompassing way: behaviour can be reactions to relational concepts rather than to the actual stimuli themselves, something impossible without words…language thus allows us to code and compare attributes of objects verbally, thereby freeing us from the momentary perceptual impact of one attribute or another…”(A Julian Jaynes Collection, p93)

For Aristotle this would be interpreted as freeing us to think, freeing us for discourse and for the reasoning that occurs in discourse. This is decisive evidence for the Aristotelian definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse. Jaynes presents to us in his theorizing an account of a developmental sequence from an animal condition all the way up the gradations of psuche to our potentiality for rationally justifying our beliefs and actions. In taking us on this journey Jaynes questions the thesis that men used substantive noun language when he lived in caves. It might be thought that the presence of tools is evidence for such a position but making tools do not, in fact, require linguistic guidance that relies upon a system of nouns. Art and techné have always been transmitted by imitation and there is no reason to think of more complicated procedures suddenly springing into existence. Jaynes supports his position by reference to the size of a brain needed to support a language composed of a system of substantive nouns(which for him is a relatively late stage in the process of language acquisition). Jaynes refers to the earlier stages by claiming a gestural origin of language in which incidental signals were differentiated from intentional signals. The time period for this stage was ca 400,000 BC, the brain size of man was definitely not sufficient to support a complex system of language and there is, therefore, good reason to suppose that in this animal condition the signaling system(there are no grounds as yet to even call this a stage of language) was probably composed of 15-20 sounds or cries(as is the case with present-day anthropoids). These sounds would have been controlled at subcortex levels of the brain: at the level of the limbic system of the midbrain:

“The transfer to cortical control occurred, I suggest, by the evolution of additional frontal cortex…thus selectively suppressing and releasing the limbic centres for vocalization beneath it”(Jaynes, p99)

Once this occurred we would have been capable of the first intentional signal which .in true Aristotelian fashion, followed the principle of intensity differentiation, and was probably a cry or scream in response to the approach of danger. This cry was the “atom” of language and could in itself be modified via it’s ending to denote various forms of danger. Jaynes thinks that this period of language development probably lasted to 46,000 BC and in this context, he points to the shape of the skull of the Neanderthals as evidence for his claim: Neanderthal skulls indicated undeveloped frontal lobes which in turn indicate the absence of Broca’s area of speech activation. The next stage in the evolution of language was from the modification of endings to denote forms of danger to using sounds as commands, and this development takes us up to 25,000 BC long after the extinction of the Neanderthals. It is during this stage that Jaynes imagines attitudes of interrogation and negation occurring. It is around this time that we encounter the unique phenomenon of cave paintings which probably illustrates the next stage in the development of language, the invention of life nouns(hence the subject matter of the cave drawings). Jaynes characterizes this stage thus:

“Once animals–particularly those that were hunted–had nouns that could designate them, they had a kind of extra being, one indeed that could be taken far back into the caves and drawn upon the walls…The fact that such paintings only rarely include man drawn with the same life-like similitude may suggest a lack of words for different men”(p103)

After life-nouns, thing nouns emerged for pottery, pendants, ornaments, bronze carvings, harpoons, and spears. Jaynes believes that it is only at this stage that one could categorically state that the brain now possesses what he called “modern language areas”. Jaynes then argues that between 10,000 and 8,000 BC a population of communities stabilized in post-glacial locations and nomadic forms of existence connected with high mortality rates was abandoned. It is at this point, he argues, that names for people evolved:

“once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a sense be recreated in his absence, thought about.”(p104)

The evidence for this development is the proliferation of ceremonial graves. This, then, is a developmental account of language that not only accords with Aristotelian philosophical psychology but also with the Aristotelian methodology involved in the study of animals and their habits. This account also accords well with the principles and causes of the hylomorphic theory. This kind of account contrasts sharply with Smith’s fundamentally empirical/analytical approach evoking the “atoms” of impressions and ideas to explain complex motor/behavioural phenomena– a move that in later philosophical psychology would be recognised to be a kind of categorical or ontological mistake given the fact that impressions or sensations are receptive phenomena(something that happens to man) and behaviour is fundamentally active(something that one does). By later Philosophical psychology we mean to refer also to Kantian “Anthropology” where this ontological distinction was clearly recognized.

Smith is more renowned for his economic theory than his Philosophical contribution in spite of the fact that he occupied the chairs of Logic and Moral Philosophy at Scottish Universities. He was undoubtedly caught up in the maelstrom of the sentiment of the age when he produced his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. In his theory, he paradoxically agreed with his sentiment of skepticism toward Aristotelianism but disagreed over the meaning of one of the central themes of moral sense, namely Sympathy. For Hume, we all shared this feeling as a matter of fact but for Smith, the act of sympathy required an act of imagination or projection of an attitude onto another. There is also the presence of another influence in Smith’s theorizing, that of Bernard de Mandeville which Hamlyn in his work “The Penguin History of Western Philosophy” characterizes thus:

“virtue and public good are in fact based on egoism and selfishness, not(as Shaftesbury maintained) on benevolence and public feeling. Indeed Mandeville claimed that society can be conceived as founded on the fact that each individual seeks his own interest.”(p207)

The distinctly innovatory element of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment” is the introduction of an important distinction between a participator in social activities and an impartial spectator of these activities. This also confirms Professor Brett’s highlighting of observationalism as a major theoretical force during this period. A commitment to an observationalist methodology was predicated upon the drift of European Culture toward a more total commitment toward Scientific assumptions and methodology. Newton’s theory was also parsed through thinkers such as David Hartley who according to Brett was the originator of Physiological Psychology:

“The views of Hartley upon sensation as a physical process were taken directly from Newton’s Principia. In brief, the object of sensation produces the idea of sensation by making an impression on the organism and creating a disturbance of the nerves: these disturbances are called vibrations and said to be “motions backward and forward of the small particles of the same kind as the oscillation of the pendulum and the trembling of particles of sounding bodies”… we are to assume that vibrations are equivalent to a consciousness of vibrations. This point was not seen clearly by Hartley…The activity of mind, here tacitly omitted, was to find its way back into psychology slowly and with difficulty.”

Such was the influence of Newton. Hartley combines the atoms of sensation assumption with an assumption of the law of association and produces a theory in which it is not ideas or things that are associated but physical sensations. Here we find no trace of hylomorphic theory in Hartley. Indeed his largely physiological theory of language becomes in later theorizing a focus of interest for psychiatry in general and Charcot in particular. On Hartley’s account words are firstly, impressions made upon the ear, secondly, the impressions of the action of the organs of speech, thirdly, impressions made upon the eye by written letters and finally, impressions of the action of the hand in the writing of letters. Such a physiological account of four different kinds of sensations was also incorporated into Freud’s writings on aphasia but without any reference to vibrations. Freud in his theories referred to what he termed a pleasure-pain principle that was largely connected to physical action and the mental action of the imagination. Freud thereby placed feelings and emotions and the psychological things that happen to a man in a wider context of activity rather than the restricted arena of affection that arose from the theories of the followers of Newton.

Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments” is characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a phenomenology of morals because of the reluctance of Smith to embrace any kind of rational or philosophical principle in the description or explanation of psychological phenomena. This kind of approach reminds one of the famous British and American Common Sense or pragmatic Philosophy that also similarly attempted to disengage with rational or philosophical explanations of everyday phenomena. Indeed Smith and other anti-intellectual thinkers realized that the atomism of sensations and the mechanism of association could never suffice of themselves to provide sufficiently acceptable explanations of the phenomena being studied and common sense was thus enlisted to assist in the process. Both Philosophy and philosophical Psychology were beginning during these modern ages stretching from the Philosophy of Hobbes and Descartes, to become theoretically technical and practically egoistic at the same time. Physical sensations and the mechanisms of association were both quantifiable and could therefore quantitatively describe the life of an individual striving for a difficult to characterize-life of happiness. The difficulty involved here is essentially that of the difficulty of characterizing from an empirical descriptive point of view the normative nature of all discourse related to the activity of striving to achieve an ideal state. Smith was not, however, a proto-utilitarian in spite of being under the influence of his teacher Hutcheson who argued for the political importance of the concept of happiness: a concept that involved responding to the needs of an individual as well as the demands of society. The essential demand of the individual on his society for Smith and perhaps also for Locke and Hume was to provide happiness. Whether for Smith this was the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number is perhaps an open question. Is the judgment as to what accomplishes or fails to accomplish this goal a matter for the impartial spectator? Will the categories of quantity and relation be the prime categories used in the spectator’s judgments? What is clear is that the idea of “moral sense” is being formed beneath our gaze and in opposition to the ideas of practical rationality that had supported authoritarian structures for decades. It is also clear that Smith was not a moral consequentialist, claiming as he did that the intention of an actor was the fundamental component of a moral act. In Smith moral sense and common sense were being welded together by a commitment to the technical assumptions and methodology of Science without any awareness of the possible conflict involved. The American Pragmatist, William James, captured the power of the philosophy of common sense well when he said:

“For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter: it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means”(Lecture one Pragmatism, p5)

When we add to the above the claim that James makes later, namely that Philosophy bakes no bread it appears that all possible connection between rationality and a flourishing life have been severed. Once this has been successfully accomplished. Once, that is the ideal, and its normative conceptually delineated telos have been dismantled, the man of common sense or the phenomenologist can without fear of contradiction maintain a skeptical attitude toward life, perhaps even a cynical attitude expressed by the words “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”

If happiness is the principle of self-love in disguise as Kant maintains then the logical consequences of such self-love may well be a politics of minimal government intervention allowing market forces to determine the ultimate direction of the movement of society. Smith was, of course, for some intervention and some redistribution of the resources of the society but the invisible hand very clearly had a society in its firm grasp.

The collapse of the standard of rationality was very definitely not something Aristotle would have agreed with although Smith appears to think his position resembled Aristotle’s. The descriptive phenomenological vignettes of the virtues of man in Smith’s work was coupled with a conviction that there was no overarching principle of virtue or practical rationality in Aristotle. This led to a relativistic plurality of competing values which was, however, an incorrect representation of Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle’s definition of areté or virtue was “Doing the right thing in the right way at the right time ” and this was the basic principle that guided all reasoning about action. The feeling of happiness in Aristotle was quite clearly connected to the above basic principle and although in Aristotle there were many ways to achieve the flourishing life all of them would involve doing the right thing at the right time in the right way at crucial moments in one’s life. Aristotle’s impartial spectator would use this basic principle in judgments relating to whether one was leading a flourishing life or not. The idea of an impartial spectator using sympathy and sentiment in relation to the mental faculty of the imagination is a recipe for the relativism we would later encounter in common sense Philosophies such as Pragmatism. The conflict of sentiments, for example, was well documented by William James in his work “Pragmatism”:

“the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Of whatever temperament ….I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of Philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament, a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament… he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-headed view of the universe, just as this or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does not suit it.”

Here James combines the psychological concepts of temperament and sentiment and arrives at a psychological view of Philosophy that managed to eclipse the totality of its achievements and it is difficult not to associate Smith with this unfortunate development. Perhaps Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists in France also played their part in the dismantling of the achievements of Philosophy. Smith himself was involved in the bitter dispute between Hume and Rousseau, the master of the discontents of civilization. Man was born free argued Rousseau but everywhere in chains. Both Rousseau and Smith would have agreed that politicians are not to be trusted to take decisions in the spirit of amour de soi. Amour Propre(pride, ambition, self-obsession) ruled the decisions of those that ruled us and as a consequence, we find ourselves discontent and in chains. This theoretically sentimental Rousseau who wrote a work entitled Emile that spoke so romantically about the ideal childhood of a hypothetical pupil but dumped his very real illegitimate children in an orphanage is an interesting mixture of the sentimental and the hard-headed to say the very least about this state of affairs. Smith himself demonstrates this strange ambivalence in his picture of an impartial spectator who, it appears, cannot use the principles of theoretical and practical rationality to make a decision about what is wrong and what is right. James’s remarks, of course, have managed to eclipse the Kantian idea of an impartial spectator/judge evaluating a philosopher, for example not by their temperament or sympathetic affections but by the arguments they use. Smiths man of sentiment has become many generations later a temperamental man whose judgment is biased by his own “Amour Propre”.

Kant’s Philosophy attempted to extract the truth from rationalism and empiricism and it presented a truly philosophical gestalt of the impartial spectator as a judge who knows and uses the law and the principles of the law to make judgments. But as history has demonstrated even Kantian Philosophy turned out to be merely the crest of a wave of rationalism that would soon break and be swallowed up by the waters of man’s sentiments and temperaments, man’s amour propre.