2 - On Human Nature, Social Norms, Co-Evolution, Natural Selection, and the Human Prospect

Summary

ON SYMPATHY, SENTIMENTS, AND SELF-COMMAND

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments begins by making the point that we are, by our nature, social beings:

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.

(TMS, 9)

This connection is made through our capacity for “sympathy …[which] denote[s] our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (TMS, 10). We feel sympathy with another when we, as spectator, step into that other's being and experience his circumstance as we imagine it is to him. Sympathy is not simply, as is often the connotation, about “pity or compassion” (TMS, 9) for one who is experiencing sorrow. It is about the fellow-feeling we conceive with another in any and all of the circumstances that life presents (love, death, hunger, injury, kindness …).

As I emphasized in Chapter One, imagination is central to Smith's moral philosophy. I described there how, according to Smith, it is through imagination that a philosopher pretends to enter into the mind of the deity. It is also through imagination that a philosopher or any individual pretends to enter into the mind of another person. And just as a philosopher imagines the invisible connecting principles of the deity's design that give rise to the unfolding nature we observe; similarly, one individual observing another imagines the invisible sentiments that give rise to the unfolding actions of that other whom he observes.