Last year I wrote post (recall) about Sophie Grouchy's analysis of enthusiasm and inserted her into a historical narrative. Shortly thereafter I received a long letter from my friend the mathematical economist, M.A. Khan, showing fatal flaws in my analysis and sketching an alternative interpretation. One nice feature of these digressions, is that every day I can make a fresh start at thinking. What follows is very indebted to his (unpublished) letter.* I rely on Sandrine Bergès' excellent translation (which is available to order from OUP USA today!)
Grouchy turns to enthusiasm in Letter 3 of Letters on Sympathy (LS) when she confronts a possible objection, “the effect here is too great for its cause, and you will no doubt ask yourself why personal sympathy is sometimes so strong while its motives are so weak and nebulous.” (p. 79) The objection relies on a principle, what I like to call David Hume’s ninth rule of causal reasoning, that causes and their effects must be proportional.[1] This principle is assumed throughout Hume’s science of man, and explicitly articulated in his essay “Of Interest:” “An effect always holds proportion with its cause,”. Grouchy does not object to the principle.
The objection amounts to the idea that in describing and explaining various social phenomena, Grouchy has been illicitly appealing to personal sympathy. Personal sympathy (“sympathie individuelle”) is a directed sympathy at a particular person. The reason why the appeal is thought to be illicit (by the hypothetical objection) is that such directed sympathy appears to be ungrounded in the motives said to cause it. These causes are too weak to explain the intense directed sympathy. So, the effect is out of proportion with its cause(s).
Grouchy meets the objection by appealing to enthusiasm, which fills the ‘proportionality’ gap: “enthusiasm, mixing with our soul’s first observations, extends those observations beyond the point to which our factual knowledge alone is able to bring them.” (79) The response to the objection is by no means self-explanatory.[2]
Enthusiasm is the kind of mental or imaginative mechanism that adds, as it were, causal heft to motives such that these are proportionate to an effect like directed sympathy. It does so by reaching beyond the observed facts. In other words, enthusiasm discloses possibilities. The effect of a person in the grip of enthusiasm, and the motives that occasion them,[4] is “intense and sudden personal sympathies.” (LS 3; I use ‘occasion’ rather than ‘trigger’ because it is not the motives that cause enthusiasm, but the person to which sympathy is directed or our aspirations pertaining to that person.) So far so good.
But one may well wonder if this explanation does not simply push the problem back a level. What is enthusiasm such that it can play this role? Grouchy’s response is extraordinarily subtle (that is, this is the passage I screwed up last year):
Enthusiasm comes from the degree to which our soul is able to represent to itself, at the same time and in an indeterminate manner, all the pleasures or all the pains we would gain from a particular situation, or from a certain person and our relationship with him or her. This picture brings together in one instant what should in reality span months, years, and sometimes an entire lifetime. Enthusiasm, therefore, conceives of its object in an exaggerated sort of way; and because it presents the mind with a greater number of objects than it is able to consider distinctly, it is always vague in some respects. (L3, 79-80)
Enthusiasm is itself the effect of mental representations of anticipated, future utility attached to a situation or a person and our relationship to it or him/her. (For other posts on Grouchy's political economy, see here; here; here). First a point about terminology. When Grouchy uses ‘utility’ in LS, she tends to mean -- in common with the usage of Hume, Smith, and Beccaria -- of ‘public interest.’ While there are consequentialist elements in her moral psychology, she is not a Benthamite utilitarian. So, the use of ‘utility’ is anachronistic and potentially misleading.[3] Second, in the passage Grouchy uses ‘enthusiasm’ to refer to (i) the effect of the mental representation and (ii) the feeling associated with the representation. Later she argues that (iii) when enthusiasm has become habitual, she uses it to refer to a disposition.
It is not immediately clear what Grouchy means to convey with the claim that the representation (of such future utility) comes in degrees. Perhaps she means to suggest that the more determinate or (to put it in the idiom of the age) clear and distinct the representation becomes the more enthusiastic we may be. Of course, by her lights, the representation can never be fully clear or distinct (or determinate); in her work on demagogues this matters a lot (recall; and also here). For, “enthusiasm…presents the mind with a greater number of objects than it is able to consider distinctly.” These ‘objects’ turn out to be future states of affairs of a particular kind.
For, the content of the representation is itself something of an impossible idealization of utility: it compresses in time (“it brings together in one instant what should in reality span months, years, and sometimes an entire lifetime”); and it represents, perhaps, mutually exclusive (logical) possibilities (“all the pleasures or all the pains we would gain”). Either way, enthusiasm is in one sense not truth apt. It “exaggerates.”
In her analysis, Grouchy then makes an important distinction between how the enthusiastic representation is experienced by the person under its sway and the person theorizing it.[**] This becomes clear when she describes one of the effects of enthusiasm on “our sensitivity.” It is “subject to another form of amplification born out the multiplication of pains and pleasures we imagine.” Our (enthusiasm, that is) representation of future utility produces “fears and desires” that are “either impossible in reality or at least cannot be found together.” Crucially, “”in the midst of our soul’s turmoil, we cannot untangle this impossibility.” But from the theoretical vantage point she adopts, one can discern “there is even actual error involved here.” That is, conceptually, she anticipates the recently popular distinction between experienced and decision utility (see Kahneman et al).
As noted above, Grouchy also treats habituated enthusiasm as a “disposition:” “if a circumstance or a person has provoked it in us on several occasions, that person or circumstance retains the power of provoking it, independent even of our thinking about it, and we can then consider enthusiasm as a passion of the soul.” (LS 3; later, in LS 5 she emphasizes the role of enthusiasm in reinforcing habit (p. 109.) That is to say, the triggering cause of enthusiasm need not be present actually in order for the mental mechanism to do its work. Merely representing the trigger may lead a predisposed or habituated mind to represent future utility associated with that person/situation.
Grouchy is here presupposing something like a Humean associative mechanism.[10] In particular, she relies on resemblance: “enthusiasm toward certain qualities disposes us to sudden and rash sympathy for the people in whom we think we recognize them.” (80) Here enthusiasm has the effect of intensifying (directed) sympathy for the whole (person) based on properties/features (“qualities”) of it (the person). We may say then that the disposition of enthusiasm is a cognitive heuristic likely to be error prone.
Grouchy is clear that the tendency toward enthusiasm is ground in three personality traits:
- The strength of imagination, which embraces with more or less haste great displays of sensations and events.
- The strength of sensitivity, which is more or less affected by those displays and preserves them with more or less constancy.
By ‘sensitivity’ Grouchy means something like a property of our bodies that facilitates our capacity to experience the world through the senses. The third trait is our tendency to reflect on the triggering cause, which prepares “our hearts…to feel affection” toward the triggering cause. This tendency is a consequence of “the need or desire to find an object for this affection.”
So, she agrees with Adam Smith (recall yesterday's post) that enthusiasm is the cause (and effect) of emotional intensification. But, while Smith makes the kind of enthusiasm in a person be a consequence of their moral character, for Grouchy enthusiasm is a consequence of (morally) generic character traits such as imagination, sensitivity, and our longings. As she sums up her own argument (with a competing account of sympathy), “I have shown how moral pains and pleasures are born out of physical sympathy that has become personal, strengthened by diverse circumstances, rendered more active and energetic by enthusiasm.”
But the key difference with Smith is that for Grouchy, enthusiasm is a representational phenomenon with considerable cognitive complexity and that is essentially connected to the future-orientation of agents and their hopes/aspirations connected to other persons and situations. From this it follows, and this is another important difference with Smith, that Grouchy links enthusiasm to a wider range of social phenomena (including love and demagoguery).
*So, here I ought to absolve him from what follows. But perhaps he shares some measure of blame for any remaining mistakes?
[1] See also Christopher J Berry "Hume on the Customary Causes of Industry, Knowledge and Humanity" in Essays on Hume, Smith, and The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, chapter 11.
[2] In Letter 5, she explicitly calls attention to the “preceding letters about particular sympathy and the effects of enthusiasm.” This reveals that the argument (of at least letters 3-5) of LS is, in part, cumulative.
[3] Having said that, as Sandrine Bergès has argued, there are good reasons to believe that she was familiar with Bentham’s early work. (See p. 14 of the edition.)
[**] Adam Smith also makes some such distinction between the perspective of the agent and theorist, but his account of individual well-being is not proto-utilitarian (see Schliesser 2017: 240).
Comments