Adam Smith and Cicero on eternal return, and harmony of Spheres (with some Spinoza)
My blogging will be uneven this week because I am traveling Stateside to give a lecture (co-authored with Nick Cowen and Aris Tranditis), “Democracy as a Competitive Discovery Process” at the PPE Workshop GMU on Thursday (here).
Even among dedicated Smith scholars Adam Smith’s “History of Ancient Physics” tends to receive little attention alongside its relatively better studied (and much longer) beloved sibling, “The History of Astronomy.” Both were deliberately published posthumously (1795) in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS). I increasingly believe that the two pieces — alongside their companion, “Ancient Logics and Metaphysics” — are an integrated argument. But about that some other time. Anyway, “History of Ancient Physics” closes with the Stoic, rather violent account of eternal return. Here’s the last, Ciceronian sentence of the piece:
But in the system of the Stoics, the intelligence which originally formed, and that which animated the world, were one and the same, all inferior intelligences were detached portions of the great one; and therefore, in a longer, or in a shorter time, were all of them, even the gods themselves, who animated the celestial bodies, to be at last resolved into the infinite essence of this almighty Jupiter, who, at a destined period, should, by an universal conflagration, wrap up all things, in that aetherial and fiery nature, out of which they had originally been deduced, again to bring forth a new Heaven and a new Earth, new animals, new men, new deities; all of which would again, at a fated time, be swallowed up in a like conflagration, again to be reproduced, and again to be redestroyed, and so on without end. 11, p. 116
I usually assume that passages like this on the eternal return are shaped by Seneca’s Natural Questions III.28-29, which has an all-too-vivid presentation of the final day on Earth, before its rebirth. For, throughout his writings Smith exhibits familiarity with Seneca’s works. At Natural Questions VII.25, Seneca clearly anticipates the possibility of scientific progress and takes the perspective of later ages on the ignorance of the present one. (Such progress is a key theme of Smith’s essay.)*
In addition, we know that Smith returned to the History essays to note the return of Halley’s comet and [recall] Halley discusses Seneca in his treatment of comets. In addition, Émilie du Châtelet alerts us to Seneca’s discussion in her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia (recall here). A text I have long thought known to Smith.
Anyway, I have always been struck by the vividness of the quoted sentence: not the least because the lesser deities are also shown powerless against the final conflagration. In addition, through his summary of Stoic cosmology and cosmogeny, Smith is letting his readers entertain the possibility of the creation of men anew.
Recently I re-read Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream, which is the closing section of Cicero’s Republic. Now, in Smith’s time much of Cicero’s Republic had been lost, but Scipio’s Dream seems to have been studied continuously. (By the way, I warmly recommend The Dream of Scipio the (2002) novel by Iain Pears.) The modern editors of EPS, call attention to this fact in a note on the History of Astronomy IV.6, p. 57. (I return to that passage.) They are surely right Smith would have been familiar with it because Cicero looms as large as Seneca as an interlocuter for Smith.
Now, in Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream, the doctrine of eternal return is presupposed, even articulated by Scipio Africanus (the grandfather of the narrator, Scipio Aemilianus) in the following passage: “Why, even if those generations of men to come should care to hand down, in succession from father to son, the glory of each one of us; yet, still, owing to the deluges and conflagrations of the earth, which must happen periodically, we cannot acquire a lasting, much less an eternal renown.” (Translated by W. D. Pearman, 1883)
According to the elder Scipio eternal fame or glory is impossible because the chain of transmissions will be necessarily broken due to a cycle of conflagrations. According to Scipio the cycle itself is an effect of what Plato calls the ‘great year’ (and to which he alludes in Timaeus, Statesman, and Republic), and which Scipio calls ‘the (re)turn year.’ [vertens annus] Hume (recall) alludes to it in his posthumous Dialogues (as does Cicero in The Nature of Gods.) As an aside, the main theme of Scipio’s Dream is rather dear to Smith’s heart, the nature of true glory (as any reader of The Theory of Moral Sentiment can attest) rooted in our love of praise-worthiness distinct from the false love of praise. Be that as it may, and interestingly enough, Scipio can’t say where we are on the Great Year.
Okay, so much for set up.
The sentence from History of Astronomy IV.6, p. 57 that the modern editors of EPS tentatively link to Scipio’s Dream is this one:
It seems to have been the beauty of this system that gave Plato the notion of something like an harmonic proportion, to be discovered in the motions and distances of the heavenly bodies; and which suggested to the earlier Pythagoreans, the celebrated fancy of the Musick of the Spheres: a wild and romantic idea, yet such as does not ill correspond with that admiration, which so beautiful a system, recommended too by the graces of novelty, is apt to inspire.
Whatever are the defects which this account of things labours under, they are such, as to the first observers of the heavens could not readily occur.
Lurking here is a stadial-contextual account of the intellectual developments of cosmology. The system of harmonic proportions, while wild and romantic, is itself a latecomer on the intellectual scene. To put it jokingly, a great deal of Plato’s Great Year must have already passed before the platonic system of the world can be thought possible. And to put it a bit less jokingly, the doctrine of harmony of the spheres is a sign of mankind’s old age.
Smith himself clearly thinks this system of cosmology is false (“defects”). But he also knows that it was partially revived in Kepler, who is described in rather ambivalent fashion: “Kepler, with great genius, but without the taste, or the order and method of Galileo, possessed, like all his other countrymen, the most laborious industry, joined to that passion for discovering proportions and resemblances betwixt the different parts of nature, which, though common to all philosophers, seems, in him, to have been excessive.” (IV.50, p. 84) And, in fact, Smith notes a debt to the Stoics in Kepler, because almost alone among the ancients the Stoics had been willing to deviate from perfect circles: “That the motions of all the heavenly bodies were perfectly circular, had been the fundamental idea, upon which every astronomical hypothesis, except the irregular one of the Stoics, had been built.” (IV.51, p. 85; Kepler treated these orbits as ellipses.)
Smith also thinks the Platonic, Stoic (and Keplerian) harmony of the spheres a kind of intellectual escapism.** As he puts in a passage I love citing a bit out of context:
Those philosophers transported themselves, in fancy, to the centres of these imaginary Circles, and took pleasure in surveying from thence, all those fantastical motions, arranged, according to that harmony and order, which it had been the end of all their researches to bestow upon them. Here, at last, they enjoyed that tranquillity and repose which they had pursued through all the mazes of this intricate hypothesis; and here they beheld this, the most beautiful and magnificent part of the great theatre of nature, so disposed and constructed, that they could attend, with ease and delight, to all the revolutions and changes that occurred in it. EPS IV.13, p. 62 (emphasis added)
Now, in Cicero, Scipio is pushed back to Earthly politics not unlike the stargazer who escapes Plato’s cave in the Republic. Smith himself does not explain why, unlike Kepler, contemplation of the harmony of the spheres has no pull on him. (He is after all quite happy to devote much of his attention to human politics.) But I am remined of a famous passage in Spinoza’s Ethics (Appendix 1):
Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony. Indeed there are Philosophers who have persuaded themselves that the motions of the heavens produce a harmony.
I used to think this passage in Spinoza was directed against Kepler and Huygens. But I increasingly believe that Spinoza is mocking Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream here. Whether that’s right or not, Smith sides with Spinoza against Cicero and the doctrine of natural harmony. That has, I think, implications for the tendency to attribute to Smith a version of such a doctrine in the context of the invisible hand (something I argue against in detail in my book while drawing on a Lauren Brubaker paper); but it also converges with other hints of Spinozism one can find in EPS, or so I have argued (here).
*Of course, there are other ancient non-Stoic sources for eternal return not the least Plato’s Laws.
**Here’s Scipio’s Dream.**And, as I gazed on these things with amazement, when I recovered myself: "What," I asked, "what is this sound that fills my ears, so loud and sweet?" "This," he replied, "is that sound, which divided in intervals, unequal, indeed, yet still exactly measured in their fixed proportion, is produced by the impetus and movement of the spheres themselves, and blending sharp tones with grave, therewith makes changing symphonies in unvarying harmony. For not only is it impossible that such vast movements should sweep on in silence; but, by a natural law, the outermost parts on the one side give a grave, and on the other a sharp sound. Wherefore the highest of all, the celestial zone equipped with stars, whose revolution is more swift, moves with a sharp, high note; while this one of the moon, as it is the lowest, with the deepest tone of all. For the earth, which is the ninth, remaining motionless is ever firmly planted in one spot, clinging closely to the centre of the universe. Now the revolutions of those eight spheres, of which two have the same power, produce seven sounds with well-marked intervals; and this number, generally speaking, is the mystic bond of all things in the universe, And learned men by imitating this with stringed instruments and melodies have opened for themselves the way back to this place, even as other men of noble nature, who have followed godlike aims in their life as men.—[Translated by W. D. Pearman]