Adam Smith's impartial spectator
An essential idea for reading Jane Austen
Look at this passage from Adam Smith, in which he describes how solitude leads us to misunderstand ourselves and the corresponding remedy of a conversation with an external spectator, who makes us realise our error.
In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to ourselves: we are apt to over-rate the good offices we may have done, and the injuries we may have suffered: we are apt to be too much elated by our own good, and too much dejected by our own bad fortune. The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self-command.
from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III, Chapter III, Adam Smith (1790 edition)
This should immediately be obvious to you, as Austen readers, as a crucial aspect of novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Austen is a novelist of daily life and conversation. And it is through conversation that moral revelations are made. Her heroines are not brought to their senses by activity, but by discussion. Think of Elinor and Marianne, Jane and Lizzie.
What follows is a summary of some of the ideas in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Of course, secondhand summaries are much less worthwhile than reading the original. My hope is that this will not only give you a better understanding of Austen’s work, but the temptation to read Smith himself.
Who are you talking to?
It matters very much who this important conversation is with. This person is not merely a vessel for good ideas; they must have developed good virtues themselves.
Throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith relies on the idea of an “impartial spectator”. Smith says that we cannot judge ourselves; we must try to judge ourselves as an impartial spectator would judge us.
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. Whatever judgment we can form concerning them, accordingly, must always bear some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the judgment of others. We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.
Amartya Sen contrasts this to the social contract morality we are familiar with from so much modern philosophy. Whereas the social contract is about a set of established relationships between real people in a real society (and, idealistically, in some sort of global society), Smith’s morality is about impartial arbitration by imagined people. Sen points out that Smith’s criticism of empire, such as the East India Company, was not based on any social contract, but on what the impartial spectator would have made of such behaviour. Smith uses the example of Ancient Greece, where the killing of new born infants was allowed. Long practice blinded them to the cruelty of what they did. Even “the humane Plato” despite his “love of mankind” never criticises the practice. It is not social contracts we ought to use to regulate morality, but the ideal of an impartial spectator.
we even sympathise with the dead
The impartial spectator is important because imagination is the root of morality. When we empathise with someone, we do not feel what they feels they are on the rack and we are not. But we do imagine how it would feel if we were on the rack. So strongly does this work (think of mothers suffering with their infants) that, Smith says, “we even sympathise with the dead.” Indeed, the terror of being dead is one of the things that leads to well-regulated behaviour.
Imaginative sympathy is a crucial human feeling. When we have read a book so much we are bored with it, we can take pleasure in reading it to someone else, and seeing how much they enjoy it: we enjoy their enjoyment, and thus the book again. Our imaginations are highly susceptible to others’. We can summarise Smith saying that moods—shared feelings and dissociative feelings—dominate human life and morality. It is in the constant round of sympathy and disgust, fellow-feeling and looking at each other with incomprehension, that our moral lives are made. Agreement and sympathy are almost synonymous.