Crazyfinger

Of the Sense of Propriety - 2

Ok, I am back.  We will continue from paragraph 4 of Chapter 1 where we left off in the previous post. 

When a fellow-feeling is triggered in us, not only that we are able to feel another person's suffering, but we also feel their fellow-feeling as well:  "We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived them." 

Smith then generalizes this fellow-feeling and says we can begin to call it "sympathy."  Sympathy, in other words, is a term that "can be made use of to denote our fellow-feeeling with any passion whatever."

So far so good.  I get it, sympathy as a fellow-feeling.  But is that it?  What is so great about expounding on such an obvious feeling that we all feel towards the others?  But wait.  Let's back up a bit.  Are we really aware of how exactly this sympathy operates?   It seems that most of us only know what sympathy really is in a kind of sort of know vague terms.  We have only a  general, intuitive awareness of it.  We know when we feel sympathy, and we can also tell when we don't feel it.  A smiling face evokes a cheerful feeling in us; and a sorrowful countenance reminds us of a melancholy feeling. 

But it's not always the case.  Let's look at an example of a furious man in anger.  There are some things that don't excite any sort of sympathy at all but, as Smith says, on the contrary, "serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them."  "The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies." (paragraph 7) 

Because we don't yet know why this man is angry, in the immediate moment of seeing this angry man, we tend to have feelings against this man himself, rather than against those who caused this anger in him. Not only that, we actually sympathize with all of these others who are the target of this man's anger.  So now all of a sudden there three parties involved here that directly drive our sympathy feeling:

• there is this man himself who is angry;
  
• then there are these people who did something nasty for which this man is angry;
  
• and then there are those others who are afraid and fearful, not know what this angry man will do to them. 

Of these three, our immediate sympathy is towards the third party, i.e., those who are fearful and we become somewhat antagonistic towards the man himself whom we see as the aggressor.

With this example Smith draws a key distinction in the way we feel. This distinction to me is very important all the more because it often doesn't occur to us that we behave this way.  And it actually helps us a lot in our understanding of the human condition when we become aware of this distinction.  What is this distinction?

It is that when we view grief or joy in another person, it creates sympathy in us for the very person who is grieving or joyful: we feel the same emotion for her ("The effects of grief and joy terminate in the person who feels those emotions...") Our sympathy goes from us to them and we are united in that feeling for that moment.  There is no other party involved. 

But when we view an angry woman or a resentful man, in the immediate moment we are more likely to shrink away from this angry or resentful person. All of a sudden it is not just we and them anymore.  We think of all the reasons or causes why this person is angry and we somehow don't step forward immediately so warmly to embrace this angry person.

So I see that it's not all that simple anymore.  Our sympathy, the fellow-feeling, is not all that unconditional and unchanging as we somehow thought that it was, but it actually depends on what type of atmosphere it is that we find ourselves in.  Actually if we really think about it, Smith says, even the grief and joy that we feel are really not all that strong in that spontaneous moment.  We feel it, but until that "What has befallen you?" question is adequately answered, "our fellow-feeling is not very considerable."

Having said all that, at the end of the day, we are bound by this fellow-feeling, this sympathy for the other, really as a basic condition of the way we feel as we go through our daily lives.  There is an exhilarating narrative at the end of Chapter 1, paragraphs 11, 12 and 13 that reminded me of the intensity of the feeling in Job's travails.

Next post will start with Chapter 2 ("Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy").

Of the Sense of Propriety - 1

So we start.  Please participate with your remarks and comments etc.

We begin with Part 1: "Of the Propriety of Action." 

The text I am following can be accessed online here at the Adam Smith Institute.

There is also a PDF file of the entire book from Metalibri here.

Straightaway, without any prelude or bothering with setting a stage, Smith directs his eyes on our way of being, i.e., on how we are, and immediately recognizes that there is something in our nature that make us always interested in the fortune of others. Not only that.  We are not just merely "interested" in others, but their happiness is necessary for us.  It's not that we are all well-wishers or anything, but we are nevertheless interested in the happiness of the others just for the "pleasure of seeing it."

What is this something?  Smith doesn't exactly define what this something is, but offers "pity or compassion" as examples of this "something."  Then he goes on to generalize and says that as all of us, even "the greatest ruffian," have this pity or compassion in us, we derive pleasure or sorrow from seeing other people's pleasure or sorrow.  The title of this chapter is "Sympathy" and I can see what Smith is building up to here.

But exactly how all this happens?  Where does this pleasure or sorrow which we feel come from?  Next in paragraph 2 it gets interesting. Obviously we don't know how other people feel just by watching them or hearing them.  We ourselves don't experience their experiences in this way.  We can see, hear, or touch someone who is hurting or who is happy and we can surely tell that they are happy or sad or so on and so forth.  But "our sense will never inform us of what he suffers." 

Here the distinction is between what is within the capabilities of our senses and what is outside the capabilities of our senses: our senses can tell us about what's going on with the other person but the other person's experience is outside the capabilities of our senses.

So how come we are able to experience this pleasure or this sorrow? Imagination, says Smith, is that unique "faculty" which helps us in experiencing. 

Even with imagination, we are not exactly experiencing the.exact.same.experience of the other person.  But imagination is the one unique faculty which puts us in this other person's shoes and then triggers our own feelings as if we ourselves are going through the pain or sorrow of this other person.

So, with the sense we can comprehend but not experience.  For experience and for feeling we use our imagination.  I think I get it. It sounds so familiar, perhaps that's why I get it. 

This imagination - which I like the way Smith let us into, because he didn't talk about imagination as this ability to think about multi-dimensions or some such abstract thinking - then is the "source of our fellow-feeling." (paragraph 3)   The fellow-feeling arises out of this faculty of imagination that we all possess. 

Paragraph 4 then goes onto expand the notion of this fellow-feeling. When this fellow-feeling is triggered in us, not only that we are able to feel this other person's suffering, but we also feel their fellow-feeling as well:  "We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived them."

In the next post I will conclude this Chapter 1 of Section 1.

Blogging While Reading Adam Smith

As I said in my previous post, in a few days I will begin blogging my first-time reading of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 

I am not trained in economics, but I really don't think of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as an economics text, though his subsequent work is said to be grounded in this book.  To me, this is a basic book.  Of course I haven't read it yet, so I really don't know what is in it. 

But going by the table of contents, it is quite clear to me that in here are developed nearly everything that form the basis for an economics concept.

In this sense, my instinct tells me this book lays the pre-conceptual, in other words a phenomenological, foundation to the field of free-market economy.  I will know if my intuition was right only after I have read the book entirely. 

Seriously, why this book? 

Through many years of thinking things, I have come to appreciate the distinction between understanding through knowledge sharing and understanding through experience sharing. Whenever I see two groups differ, disagree and dig into their positions, I also see something else: that there is an inherent limitation to understanding through knowledge sharing because when we are in the realm of knowledge and expertise, we are dealing with concepts.  Perhaps we need to dig deeper.

Great art (literature, music etc.,) communicates itself and unites us by letting us into an understanding through experience sharing. That is because all great art reaches what lies beneath a concept and evokes our pre-conceptual, our phenomenological being.  I see something similar going on here in this book.  It seems to me that this book is focused on talking about the notions that are pre-conceptual.  About those building blocks that are not yet concepts, but that eventually lead up to an economic concept. 

As I read the table of contents, I see terms such as, "propriety," "prudence," "benevolence," "self-love," "sense of merit and demerit," and so on, that are a far cry from "profit motive," "capital," "public good," etc., that we come to associate with free-market principles.  I can't wait to get into it so please join me and as I post my thoughts on each section, please comment as you see fit.

I am hoping this reading, along with your interaction, will enrich my understanding.  I will post the details of this "Blogging While Reading Adam Smith" experiment in a day or two.   

Back with a Book

I am back with my now on and now off blogging act.  Ever since I stepped into this strange world of blogging, it has been nothing but a roller-coaster ride of sorts.  I hate the acrimonious, the argumentative nature of blog interactions but also feel like I've been fixated only with everything that's negative about this medium.  That's got to change.

I think you have to make friends first in order to enjoy the arguments with them (great, why didn't I see that before?)  Otherwise everything will turn into an acrimonious debate; I squirm just watching one when I see it in a blog's comments section.   

So, instead of posting long-winded comments on other people's blogs, I will try to put my blogging time to good use: pick a book that I haven't read before and blog while reading it.

I've often thought of Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" as the one book that will help me ground my understanding of the world in an economic sense.  But I  never did get to it, until now.  Now, here on this site I am going to blog as I read this book chapter by chapter. 

More details shortly.