What Adam Smith’s Strange Essay on Language Teaches about Commerce

Prior to his death Smith had most of his papers and manuscripts burnt. Apart from his two seminal works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, Smith published little else. Happily, we have lecture notes taken by his students at Glasgow University that now form other Smith books. One essay he published in his lifetime – attached to the third edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1766) – is his curious Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.[1]

What is the connection between language and Smith’s effort in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to demonstrate the moral foundations of commerce?

Smith’s essay is curious because it begins with an odd conceit. Imagine, he asks, two feral humans trying to communicate. They would “naturally begin to form” a language “to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other” (p. 203). Smith encourages us to think the feral could have self-understanding (grasping discrete inner appetites) and an understanding of the world (discerning external objects). He also has us imagine – as if this wasn’t a huge assumption of its own – that they would seek to communicate these two categories of knowledge to one another.

This device is very strange and begs for explanation. There are at least three puzzling things about it, but I suggest that it is designed to show the centrality of symmetry or number to consciousness. This centrality explains business and its moral character.

One oddity is that the conceit hints at something Smith surely did not believe: that the perception of discrete objects is possible prior to language. He would have known that both Descartes and Berkeley reject this belief. Descartes tells us how hard it is to think clearly about objects because “words bring me up short, and I am almost tricked by ordinary ways of talking.”[2] Berkeley, whom Smith admired, argues that things only cohere as discrete objects through the stabilizing function of language.[3] As we will see, Smith’s own account of consciousness seems to preclude the possibility.

Smith adds another detail he likely did not believe. He says the two would turn to “uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects” (p. 203). Smith’s successor at Glasgow, Thomas Reid, argues that natural language is gestural, where the body is used as a communication platform e.g. hand to heart to express fidelity. This is why Reid argues that individuals making contracts is not the primary phenomenon of human sociality: it is secondary to the prior sociality of pantomime.

Smith leans the same way. At one time Smith was working on a book about aesthetics, a life-long interest of his. An essay on the topic is extant and important for understanding Smith. “It is more natural to mimic, by gestures and motions, the adventures of common life, than to express them in verse or poetry.”[4] To this he adds the observation that though peoples with little cultural achievement have been encountered none have been met who do not sing and dance (Of the Imitative Arts, p. 187).[5] Like Reid, this points to pantomime as elementary.[6]

Without comment, Smith has the two feral humans seeking to communicate with one another. This, again, points to pantomime. I do not seek to communicate with a tree or a stream, nor even with most creatures. Those creatures I try to communicate with are those I can imitate by gesture. We can play being cats, dogs, and horses but to imitate a ferret or snake is much, much harder. Pantomime explains why we have sympathy for some animals more than others, and our choice in pets. It is the mutual legibility of the bodily movement of Smith’s feral humans that crafts the elementary sympathy necessary for the possibility of communication at all.[7]

The third peculiarity is the first three words Smith has his feral humans speak: cave, tree, and fountain. These correspond to the needs that they would most urgently wish to communicate, reasons Smith: the physical need for shelter, food, and water. These first words are nouns and literal, they straightforwardly pick out resources of the land. As the editors of Smith’s essay point out, in a letter Smith says the most ancient part of languages are verbs,[8] corresponding to the claim of The Theory of Moral Sentiments that humans are meant for action.[9] The device suggests a third thing Smith does not actually believe.

Why does Smith start the essay this way, then? Stripping the question of language to basics, Smith proposes that language expresses an alignment of resources with bodily integrity. This is what brings people together to talk. As we’ll see later with some passages from The Wealth of Nations, business is about symmetry and proportion. Rousseau dissents.

Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages was published in 1781, some two decades after Smith’s. In a conceit of his own, Rousseau imagines humans with only physical needs. Having no sentiments, or what he interestingly terms “moral needs,” such humans would only communicate through pantomime. Such a language, based on sight and gesture, could support commerce, conjectures Rousseau.[10] As reason for this conjecture, he gives a fascinating example. He cites the traveller Jean Chardin’s account of watching traders from India transact business in public, yet secretly: never saying a word, they grip one another’s hands applying pressure in certain ways to state the terms of the deal (p. 244).

Such a language would not aid morality, however. Literal language – Smith’s cave, tree, and fountain – tracks physical needs, but these divide persons. “Not hunger, nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger wrung their first utterings from them. Fruit does not shrink from our grasp, one can eat it without speaking; one stalks in silence the prey one means to devour” (p. 245).

Not language and alignment, but asymmetry and carnage, attend peoples first encountering one another over resources. “Moral needs” – to woo and protect – gave rise to language and such language is figurative: cries and plaints form “the oldest invented words” (p. 246). Putting it pithily, Rousseau says language was not originally that of the geometer, but the poet (p. 245). About the first language:

“Not only must all of the phrases of this language be in images, sentiments, figures of speech; but in its mechanical aspect it would have to answer to its primary aim and convey to the ear as well as to the understanding the almost inescapable impressions of passion seeking to communicate itself” (p. 248).

Literal versus figurative, resources versus passion, proportion or carnage: Are Smith and Rousseau ships passing in the night, or is there an argument to adjudicate between their inverse positions?

Smith’s justification of commerce rejects Rousseau’s opposition between the geometer and the poet. Smith’s patron was Lord Kames. Kames starts his seminal work on aesthetics observing that vision and sound are the least embodied of the five senses. They act as a hinge linking body and mind. Language appeals to vision (pantomime) and sound (speech). For Smith, therefore, language is inescapably about the body and mind, resource and concept, the geographical and universal, world and self. Kames puts the point beautifully:

“Their [senses of sight and hearing] mixt nature and middle place between organic and intellectual pleasures, qualify them to associate with both; beauty heightens all the organic feelings, as well as the intellectual: harmony, though it aspires to inflame devotion, disdains not to improve the relish of a banquet.”[11]

Language is like a gauze cast over what otherwise seem like disparate principles. That gauze is, ultimately, number. Smith’s device posits a concurrence between need and resources,[12] for symmetry runs throughout existence.

Continuing an ancient and medieval tradition, Lords Shaftesbury and Kames acknowledge the scope of music throughout nature. Kames argues that we are born with a “taste for natural objects.” We naturally respond to vivid colours, for example, and number and measure:

“The observation holds equally in natural sounds, such as the signing of birds, or the murmuring of a brook. Nature here, the artificer of the object as well as of the percipient, hath accurately suited them to each other (Elements of Criticism, p.13).”[13]

Shaftesbury speaks of the “hidden numbers” in language. Elementary societies would have first looked to economic security before seeing clearly “the numbers of their language, and the harmonious sounds which they accidentally emitted.”[14] Leadership in these societies would draw out the “hidden numbers,” for persuasion is the mastery of the “measure of sound,” making “the highest endeavours to please.” Ancient sources confirm, he notes, that founders and framers were termed “songsters” (Characteristics, p. 147).

Smith’s teacher at Glasgow, Hutcheson, argues for proportion throughout nature and thinks of God as a great architect aiming “to adorn this vast theatre in a manner agreeable to the spectators.”[15] In humble things, too: “In motion there is also a natural beauty, when at fixed periods like gestures and steps are regularly repeated, suiting the time and air of music, which is observed in regular dancing.”[16]

The elementary role number plays in consciousness, making possible the regularity of dance steps, shows that geometry and language are not as distant as Rousseau would have us believe. Nations can be sustained by dance, observes Smith:

“Pantomime dancing might in this manner serve to give a distinct sense and meaning to music many ages before the invention, or at least before the common use of poetry. We hear little, accordingly, of the poetry of the savage nations of Africa and America, but a great deal of their pantomime dances” (Of the Imitative Arts, p. 189).

Pantomime dancing and the iPad stem from the same symmetry. The Wealth of Nations famously posits a proportionality “mutual and reciprocal” between country and city.[17] The city offers embellishments and the country resources from the land. The speech of Smith’s feral humans describing resources is the language refined in the economics of civilisations: “As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry which procures the former, must necessarily be prior to that which ministers to the latter” (p. 377).

Smith’s conceit has language begin with the land for human nature is ordered to it: “to cultivate the ground was the original destination of man” (The Wealth of Nations, p. 378). Nor is it accidental that language is articulated in the arts and sciences, for language is the gauze over skin and consciousness. Body and mind, resource and concept, the geographical and universal, these are the coordinates of economics: it is the role of business to find the symmetries between them; and the companies with the best accounts are those where sympathy resonates[18] in their products and management.

Notes

[1] A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 203-26.

[2] R. Descartes, Meditations (Cambridge, 1997), p. 21.

[3] G. Berkeley, Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Thoemmes, 1994), Vol. 1, p. 469.

[4] A. Smith, “Of the Imitative Arts,” Essays on Philosophical Topics (Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 189.

[5] Cf. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, 1981), Vol. 2, p. 776.

[6] It is also continuous with the centrality of theatre in Smith’s thinking. See Sarah Swire, “Adam Smith and the Theatre of the Marketplace,” AdamSmithWorks.org.

[7] For a critical commentary on Smith that explores this idea, see Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (Routledge, 2008).

[8] A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 24

[9] A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 106.

[10] J-J. Rousseau, Discourses and Essay on the Origin of Languages (Harper, 1986), p. 243.

[11] Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (Liberty Fund, 2005), p. 12.

[12] A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Liberty Fund, 1982), pp. 17-18.

[13] Cf. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, p. 378.

[14] Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Liberty Fund, 2001), Vol. 1 p. 146.

[15] F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Liberty Fund, 2008), p. 81. Cf. ibid., p. 8.

[16] Ibid., p. 206, n. 42.

[17] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, p. 376 & p. 378.

[18] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 37.

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