Adam Smith, sublime science and some Galileo
The main point of today’s post is to show that Smith uses ‘sublime’ in three distinct, albeit related ways. One of these ways just is Longinus’ sense (as Smith understood it). I quickly set it aside. Because there is another use in Smith, where sublime is associated with an intellectual discipline. This notion of the sublime will be my main focus. I show that it runs through Smith’s writings, and I try to unpack it. There is also a third notion of the sublime (as a characterization of persons and motives), where Smith uses ‘sublime’ in the (ahh) then ordinary sense of exalted. I will close with a few remarks on Burke.
First, in the 1762-3 notes to his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith explicitly refers to Longinus’ On the Sublime. There he mentions that Longinus treats a passage in court by the orator Demosthenes (about a fistfight) as the most sublime. (LJ II.138-9, p. 123) In context, it’s clear that Smith assumes that his students know what Longinus meant by the sublime, and it refers to what we might call literary style.
This is no surprise because Longinus’ work had received renewed attention due to Boileau’s 1674 French translation and a 1739 English translation by William Smith (no relation). So, for example, David Hume explicitly evokes Longinus in his second Enquiry (7.4-5), and subsequently Boileau’s commentary on it (EPM 7.7).
In one of Smith’s earliest (1756) publications, “The Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” Smith uses this (Longinus’) sense of the sublime to describe and praise Rousseau’s writing style and general elevation of morals, and thereby to criticize Mandeville. (EPS 12, p. 251; I return to Smith’s use of Rousseau below.) Smith also uses the ‘sublime’ in this sense when he compares the poetry of Grey to the “sublimity of Milton” (by which Smith presumably means Milton’s poetry) at TMS 3.2.19, p. 123. (See also TMS 3.6.11, p. 175-176; TMS 4.1.6, p. 197; TMS 5.2.10, p. 208; TMS 7.2.1.41, p. 291: TMS 7.4.1, p. 327.) In all cases, where Smith uses Longinus’ notion of the sublime, it’s really a way to describe a literary or rhetorical style.
Second, near the late parts of his (1776) Wealth of Nations, when Smith is analyzing the executive branch’s role in education, Adam Smith notes that “there is scarce a common trade which does not afford some opportunities of applying to it the principles of geometry and mechanicks, and which would not therefore gradually exercise and improve the common people in those principles, the necessary introduction to the most sublime as well as to the most useful sciences.” (WN 5.i.f.55, 785-786) That certain sciences — here geometry and mechanics — and disciplines can be sublime, even most sublime, is a recurring feature in Smith’s system (see also EPS 2.12, p. 46; 4.76, p. 105; TMS 4.2.7, p. 189).* But what he means by it is, not evident.
In addition, Smith recognizes that his judgment is not uncontroversial. For, a few pages before, in his polemical and critical discussion of the curriculum of the medieval university, Smith observes that “What are called Metaphysicks or Pneumaticks were set in opposition to Physicks, and were cultivated not only as the more sublime, but, for the purposes of a particular profession, as the more useful science of the two.” (WN 5.i.f.28, 770-1) After lamenting that experimentation was “greatly neglected,” Smith observes, “the subject in which, after a few very simple and almost obvious truths, the most careful attention can discover nothing but obscurity and uncertainty, and can consequently produce nothing but subtleties and sophisms, was greatly cultivated.” (WN 5.i.f.28, 771).
It appears that the relative ranking in the sublimity of a science is not value-neutral, but dependent on other background commitments. The medieval schoolmen find metaphysics more sublime than mechanics, while Smith reverses this judgment. In context, Smith does not explain how he views the sublime nor does he explain its relationship to utility which he treats as distinct yet somehow (to use a Humean phrase) associated with it.*
When he treats of sublime sciences in Wealth of Nations, he is clearly not referring to Longinus’ sense of the sublime. For the sense in which mechanics or geometry is sublime according to Smith (or metaphysics according to the medieval schoolmen) seems unrelated to literary style. Of course, it’s possible that what Smith is getting at here, is the sense of which science is most elevated that is, has priority (or is Queen among the sciences).
This use of ‘sublime’ has an important pedigree. We can find the conjunction of intellectual systems with the sublime in Hume’s first Enquiry (e.g., EHU 6.4; EHU 8.34-36). More important, in the (1615) Letter to Christina, in the context of discussing whether theology is the queen of the sciences, Galileo ponders the circumstances this might be granted:
For it could be such, either because what is taught by all the other sciences is found to be understood and demonstrated in it, but with more excellent means and with more sublime doctrine [sublime dottrina], in the way that, for example, the rules of measuring fields and of counting are contained much more eminently in the arithmetic and geometry of Euclid, than in the practices of surveyors and accountants; or because the subject, around which theology is concerned, surpasses in dignity all the other subjects which are the matter of the other sciences, and also because its teachings proceed with more sublime means [mezi più sublimi].
Eminent containment is a form of causation in which the cause and the effect differ in nature, but where the effect is contained (conceptually or formally) in the cause. (See here for Tad Schmaltz’s nice explanation for this jargon in Descartes.) And so here sublime points to a certain kind of foundational feature. That is, sublime features of a science/discipline — theology was a science — generate priority. We will see below that Smith does speak of ‘sublime doctrines.’
Be that as it may, even if we set aside Longinus’ sense of the sublime, there is a further ambiguity in Smith’s position on the nature of the sublime in this second sense. In the passages that I quoted from Wealth of Nations, Smith seems to rely on a distinction between the (introductory) principles of a science and a science. It’s the latter and not the principles that are said to be sublime. This is actually quite surprising because for Hume and Smith, and their contemporaries, a principle is a kind of foundational explanatory or causal feature of a theory. Lurking in that distinction in Smith is the somewhat elitist thought that the instruction of the common people may open the door to sublime topics, but that these people may never arrive at full understanding to experience the sublime bits. (Smith himself is a kind of intellectual egalitarian, so he may well lament this.)
That still leaves unclear what features make a particular science or discipline sublime, and how we should think about the experience it gives rise to. At one point, when discussing the reputation and views of the Stoics, Smith suggests that it is their “moral doctrines” that are sublime. (EPS “History of Astronomy,” 4.14, p. 62; see also TMS 7.2.1.38, p. 289])**
In the aforementioned, “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” Smith translates a passage from the Second Discourse in which Rousseau describes how in civilized society “sublime maxims” can exist alongside a “deceitful and frivolous exterior.” (EPS 15, p. 253-254.) However, as we have seen the idea that maxims and doctrines can be sublime is not unique to Rousseau. (See Hume’s Treatise 2.3.6.4.)
The “History of Astronomy” culminates with the following observation on Newton’s “philosophical system:” can “we wonder then, that it should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind, and that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in the imagination the phaenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience.” (EPS 4.76, p. 105). Here what is sublime are the discovered truths expressed by a philosophical system. (For this use of ‘sublime discoveries’ in the sciences, see also TMS 4.2.7, p. 189.)
Now, Smith doesn’t say whether these truths would be sublime if they were merely isolated hunches or working hypotheses. I think what he means to suggest here is that what makes certain content of theories sublime is the role they play in organized or ordered (systematic) intellectual activity as they are contemplated by the inquirer or the highly informed student. And this helps explain why for Smith the principles of a science are by themselves not sufficient to be sublime. (The laws of motion are elegant, but it’s only when they explain the centripetal force on and the curved path of a projectile that they become sublime.)
So, for example, in his own voice, when describing the Stoic system in TMS, Smith writes, “The idea of that divine Being, whose benevolence and wisdom have, from all eternity, contrived and conducted the immense machine of the universe, so as at all times to produce the greatest possible quantity of happiness, is certainly of all the objects of human contemplation by far the most sublime.” (TMS 6.2.3.5, p. 236; see also TMS 6.2.3.6 p. 237]; on sublime contemplation as a Stoic duty, see TMS 7.2.1.46, p. 292).
A divine being is not sufficient to be sublime object of contemplation, it is the role that the Stoic God plays in a wider ordered system — in fact it is the capstone of order in this system — that makes it sublime for the Stoic. In fact, I don’t think Smith endorses this Stoic view, so again this kind of sublime can be thought of as a mind-dependent or co-constituted category. (Whether Smith endorses the Stoic system is a rather contentious matter in scholarship.) However, I also think there is something about Stoicism that according to Smith naturally leads to elevated contemplation. I hope to return to that some time.
Of course, there is some slippage between a sublime discipline, a sublime system that is the central achievement of a discipline, and the sublime objects or truths that are central to that system. I am not suggesting that Smith is being wholly consistent here.
Third, sometimes Smith also seems to treat ‘sublime’ as a category of approval of a person or even a motive, although what gives rise to the approval is something highly elevated. For example, the passage just quoted immediately continues, “The man whom we believe to be principally occupied in this sublime contemplation, seldom fails to be the object of our highest veneration; and though his life should be altogether contemplative, we often regard him with a sort of religious respect much superior to that with which we look upon the most active and useful servant of the commonwealth.” (TMS 6.2.3.5, p. 236) Here it looks that a person who is principally occupied in contemplating sublime objects in intellectual systems also can be sublime. So, for example, he explicitly calls Malebranche a ‘sublime philosopher’ (EPS “History of Ancient Logics and Metaphysics,” 5, p. 125), and in context it’s clear that Smith is not approving of Malebranche’s doctrines.
And, in TMS, he treats some highly principled/elevated or almost angelic motives as sublime: “The man who acts solely from a regard to what is right and fit to be done, from a regard to what is the proper object of esteem and approbation, though these sentiments should never be bestowed upon him, acts from the most sublime and godlike motive which human nature is even capable of conceiving.” (TMS 7.2.4.10, p. 311)
Okay, let me wrap up. So, while Smith and Burke knew and respected each other, Smith’s uses ‘sublime’ in un-Burkean ways. Of course, it doesn’t follow Burke’s sublime is absent in Smith, but that’s for a different occasion. Meanwhile I hope I have whetted your appetite a bit to explore more approaches to a science and its practices that treat it as sublime.
*“[Philosophy] is the most sublime of all the agreeable arts, and its revolutions have been the greatest, the most frequent, and the most distinguished of all those that have happened in the literary world.” (EPS “History of Astronomy,” 2.12, p. 46) Here ‘philosophy’ means ‘natural philosophy,’ and subsequently it becomes clear that Smith is focusing primarily on what we would call cosmological theories and astronomy.
** When describing the Hellenistic and Roman practices of writing commentaries on revered earlier philosophers (and avoiding original work), he writes, “To abridge, to explain, and to comment upon them, and thus show themselves, at least, capable of understanding some of their sublime mysteries, became now the only probable road to reputation.” (EPS 4.20, p. 67) A mystery need not the same as a doctrine. Now, there is more than a touch of satire or sarcasm in Smith’s use of ‘sublime mysteries,’ (and it’s also possible that he is treating this as a mention and not a use), so I don’t want to claim this contradicts the passage just quoted.