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Adam Smith and David Hume: with Sympathy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

F. L. Van Holthoon
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Extract

Why did Hume drop sympathy as a key concept of his moral philosophy, and why—on the other hand—did Smith make it into the ‘didactic principle’ of his Theory of Moral Sentiments? These questions confront us with the basic issue of ethical theory concerning human nature. My point in dealing with these questions is to show what views of human nature their respective choices involved. And my procedure will be to take a close look at the revisions they made to their ethical theories to bring out the contrasting aspects of their views of human nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , May 1993 , pp. 35 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank H. M. Bracken and F. Rosen for correcting my English and keeping me from greater folly.

References

1 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Bryce, J. C., Oxford, 1983, p. 145.Google Scholar

2 The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Mossner, E. C. and Ross, I. S., Oxford, 1977, p. 221.Google Scholar

3 Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, facsimile reprint, London, 1979Google Scholar, lemma SYMPATHY; Johnson mentions fellow feeling and mutual sensibility.

4 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., rev. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1978, Book II, part i, §.11, p. 316.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., Book II, part ii, §.5, p. 365.

6 ‘Editor's Introduction’ to the Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., rev. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1979, p. xxiv.Google Scholar

7 Kemp Smith writes:

Thus Hume has come to recognise that his theory of sympathy as resting on an impression of the self is untenable, and in general that the laws of association play a much less important part in the human economy than he had contended for in the Treatise.

N. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume, a Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines, London, 1941, p. 152.Google Scholar

8 The Section in book II of the Treatise, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’, was used in the first Enquiry, but it was entirely rewritten.

9 The Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, J. Y. T., 2 vols., Oxford, 1969, i. 331–3Google Scholar; cf. Connon, R. W., ‘The Textual and Philosophical Significance of Hume's MS alterations to Treatise III’, David Hume: Bicentenary Papers, ed. Morice, G. P., Edinburgh, 1977, pp. 186–204.Google Scholar

10 Salmon, C. V., The Central Problem of David Hume's Philosophy, New York, 1983, p. 9.Google Scholar According to Husserl we can view the world subjectively or objectively but not at the same time. Kemp Smith, p. 76: ‘the Newtonian influence is recessive, not a dominant factor in Hume's total philosophy.’

11 Hume's first principle reads: ‘That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.’ Treatise, Book I, part i, §.1, p. 4.Google Scholar

12 The best characterization of Hume's theory of association is given by John Wright: It is the synthetic imagination which, on Hume's theory, controls feeling. Indeed, pace Kemp Smith, what is most distinctive and original in Hume's theory of belief is not the claim that our sense of reality comes through feeling: what is distinctive is his account of the way association regulates the transfer of the feeling from an impression to an idea (Wright, J. P., The Sceptical Realism of David Hume, Minneapolis, 1983, p. 209).Google Scholar

13 Engell in a marvellous passage wrote of: ‘A slurry where reason mixes so thoroughly with passion that it is no longer possible to distinguish the two.’ Engell, J., The Creative Imagination, Enlightenment to Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, pp. 52–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Treatise, Book II, part i, §.11, p. 319.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., Book II, part iii, §.7, p. 427.

16 Ibid., Book III, part ii, §.2, p. 494.

17 Ibid., Book III, part ii, §.3, pp. 499–500.

18 Ibid., Book III, part iii, §.5, p. 615.

19 Ibid., Book II, part iii, §.10, p. 450.

20 Enquiries, II, S.iii, part 1, p. 183.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., II, S.iii, part 2, p. 196.

22 In the history of utilitarianism the emphasis shifted from intentions to the effects of actions. The shift was greatly favoured by Bentham's focus on social and political measures and reform, but there was also an ideological impetus involved which can be beautifully illustrated by the following quotation from Mill, James's A fragment on Mackintosh (1835):Google Scholar

Good God! What a doctrine is this? Good actions, and all their effects, all the happiness which human beings derive from the good actions of one another; in fact, almost all the happiness which it is given to them to enjoy; is insignificant, compared with certain pleasurable states of mind antecedent to action [my emphasis] (London, 1870, p. 230).Google Scholar Bentham's negative comment on Smith's (and in the end Hume's) moral philosophy is also characteristic. He wrote in Deontology (cited by Long, D. G., ‘“Utility” and the “Utility Principle”: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill’, Utilitas, ii (1990), 17):Google Scholar

Utilitarianism, working by calculation, is consistent and solicitous beneficence. Sentimentalism [reference to Smith and the Scottish Common Sense school], in so far as independent of utilitarianism, is in effect a mask for selfish[ness?] or malignity, or both for despotism, intolerance, tyranny.

It is risky—as Burns does—to stress the continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. Cf. Burns, J. H., ‘Utilitarianism and Reform: Social Theory and Social Change, 1750–1800,’ Utilitas, i (1989), 211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar His definition of utilitarianism precludes any discussion of discontinuities. He defines it as ‘a form of social theory having as its primary purpose the laying of empirically verifiable foundations for deliberate social change’. By it we already opt for the Benthamic version. I agree with Long that it is important to stress the discontinuities. Cf. Hutcheson, F., A System of Moral Philosophy (1755)Google Scholar, in Collected Works, Facsimile edition, ed. Fabian, B., 5 vols., Hildesheim, 1969–1971, vol. 5, i. 111:Google Scholar

each one is obliged to cultivate his own powers of body and mind so as to fit himself for what offices of goodness and humanity his station may allow; to store his mind with useful knowledge, and with the grand maxims which conduce to a virtuous life.

23 Enquiries, II, §.v, part 1, p. 218.Google Scholar

24 Enquiries, II, §.v, part 2, p. 229.Google Scholar Eugene Heath has pointed out to me that the same quotation occurs in Treatise, Book III, part iii, §.3, p. 603.Google Scholar The context corroborates my thesis that Hume changed the context, but not his basic ideas. In the Treatise the unalterable standard is the recognition of virtue through the mechanism of sympathy; in the Enquiry the standard is utility.

25 Enquiries, II, appendix 1, p. 294.Google Scholar

26 Cf. Hume, a Re-evaluation, ed. Livingston, D. N. and King, T., New York, 1976, p. 1.Google Scholar Livingston in his ‘Introduction’ cites a number of hostile critics, of whom John Stuart Mill is fairly typical. Mill wrote: ‘Hume possessed powers of a very high order; but regard for truth formed no part of his character’.

27 Norton, D. F., ‘From Moral Sense to Common Sense, an Essay on the Development of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, 1707–1765’, Ph.D. thesis, University of California at San Diego, 1966.Google Scholar

28 In an article called ‘A New Scene of Thought’ (not yet published) I argue that the crisis which Hume described to the unknown physician left its traces in the Treatise and particularly made Hume demote Reason to the position of ‘slave’. Cf. Letters of David Hume, i. 14–15Google Scholar; the identity of the physician—identified by Greig as Cheyne and by Mossner as Arbuthnot—does not seem to be clear.

29 James Moore has made a convincing case for the Epicurean influence on Hume, which according to Moore made Hume's moral philosophy very different from Hutcheson's; cf. his ‘The Moralist and the Metaphysician’, Francis Hutcheson, in a supplement to Fortnight 308Google Scholar, Belfast, , 1992, pp. 12–14.Google Scholar

30 Hume corresponded with Hutcheson between 1739 and 1743. He needed and got Hutcheson's help to have book III of the Treatise published by Hutcheson's publisher. When Hume was up as a candidate in 1744 and 1745 for the chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy in Edinburgh, Hutcheson counselled against his appointment as ‘a very unfit person’ for the professorate. Mossner, E. C., The Life of David Hume, Oxford, 1970, p. 157.Google Scholar

31 Enquiries, II, appendix 2, p. 302.Google Scholar

32 Cf. Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L. in the introduction to their edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, 1976, p. 18.Google Scholar

33 Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 3.Google Scholar Andrew Skinner has paid great attention to Smith's theorizing powers emphasizing Smith's model-like approach to reality; cf. his ‘Science and the Role of Imagination’, Skinner, A., A System of Social Science, Papers Relating to Adam Smith, Oxford, 1979, pp. 14–42.Google Scholar

34 Letters of David Hume, p. 313.Google Scholar David Raynor (being endorsed by Raphael) makes a good case for the fact that Hume wrote an anonymous review of the Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Critical Review of 05 1759.Google Scholar Hume being Hume mentions Smith's criticism of his utilitarianism with equanimity without going into details; cf. Raynor, D. R., ‘Hume's Abstract of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, xxii (1984), 52–79Google Scholar (with a reprint of Hume's review) and Raphael, D.D., ‘Anonymous Writings of David Hume’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, xxviii (1990), 271–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Correspondence of Smith, p. 51.Google Scholar

36 Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV, 2.5, p. 188.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., I, 1.4, p. 20.

38 Ibid., VII, ii, 3.21, pp. 305–6.

39 Treatise, Book II, part iii, §. 3, p. 415.Google Scholar

40 Hume for instance rejected as absurd the fruitful mathematical idea that time and space are divisible ad infinitum. Hume introduces here, Flew comments, some ‘very high, wide, and handsome metaphysical findings’; cf. Flew, A., ‘Infinite Divisibility in Hume's Treatise’Google Scholar, in Hume, a Re-evaluation, ed. Livingston, and King, , p. 266.Google Scholar In a long and useful note Norton gives all the meanings of reason in the Treatise; cf. Norton, D. F., David Hume, Common Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician, Princeton, 1982, p. 96, n.4.Google Scholar

41 Treatise, Book I, part iv, §.7, pp. 267–8.Google Scholar

42 Theory of Moral Sentiments, VII, iii, 3.17, p. 327.Google Scholar

43 van Holthoon, F. L., ‘Utility and Human Nature’, in Uit Sympathie, Vijftien Opstellen Aangeboden aan Taco Kastelein, Groningen, 1989, pp. 22–37.Google Scholar