Is It Good Will?
By Eli Siegel

go now to the earlier work of Smith that is about good will, only in terms of person to person. The big matter in The Wealth of Nations is the relation of what a person does in a shop or in a field to how the world sees itself. The less known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, could have the subtitle "What Do I Think of You?" In the life and appraisal of Adam Smith by one of the most likable of philosophers, if not one of the deepest, Dugald Stewart, we have the following description of what The Theory of Moral Sentiments is about:

The fundamental principle of Mr. Smith's theory is, that the primary objects of our moral perceptions are the actions of other men; and that our moral judgments with respect to our own conduct are only applications to ourselves of decisions which we have already passed on the conduct of our neighbors.

     Through the many examples of Smith, one sees how much we are affected by what we think other people see in us or how their thoughts are related to our own. No book presents this so richly and, I may say, so gracefully.

A Dramatic Feeling

ccasionally Smith has a dramatic feeling. Take the story that I mentioned yesterday, of Damon and Pythias, where Pythias has made a promise that he'll return to a certain place at a certain time so that Damon won't be punished instead of him by the tyrant. Why does his returning affect us so much? Why does a promise kept, under difficulty, mean so much? When Pythias runs in order to be there to undergo the punishment his friend would otherwise have, it is very affecting. And it is dramatic. One of the earliest Elizabethan plays is on the subject: Damon and Pithias, by Richard Edwards.

     Smith says as he talks of drama:

Whatever is the passion which arises...in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.

That means that if there weren't sympathy, there could be no drama, because we have to become the persons on the stage, particularly the hero or heroine, and we have to undergo their misfortunes and their hopes.

Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness.

This is the reason people cry at a cinema, or in the old days occasionally even at 4 o'clock in the afternoon at one of the radio serials.

We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived them.

     Why is that so? Why do we have this feeling? Why does the drama persist? If any person feels that Genet and Beckett have superseded the good old drama where we cheer a noble impulse, it is not so.

In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the bystander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.

     Shelley goes toward something like this in the poem "The Sensitive Plant," and also in "The Revolt of Islam," and quite a few other poems.

We Become Uncomfortable

ccasionally if someone is rude and behaves badly, we become uncomfortable ourselves. Smith says:

Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality.

     Let's say we saw somebody, in a great access of fellow feeling, pinning a medal on Einstein sort of awkwardly and saying, "Hello, Einstein! How are you today?" We'd get a feeling of discomfort-such gaucherie!

We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behavior-

     I remember when a person in the cinema, like Jack Carson, would do something particularly rude, or Red Skelton-he'd do some gaucherie-and everybody would groan a little. They still do.

-because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.

That is why in seeing a Marx Brothers picture, when somebody, let's say, had cream pie on the back of his suit and we knew it though he didn't, we'd still feel a certain way.

     The question is: does this identification, which occurs, as Smith shows, in manifold ways, scores of ways, and really hundreds of ways-does this have to do with good will?

     For example, let's say a person is born unfortunately in some way or other. The parents are elsewhere. He doesn't have enough money. We know that he doesn't have anything in this world; he doesn't know it. He'll just gurgle with his oatmeal as much as anybody, as much as any rich boy-but we suffer for it; the child does not. A lot of that happens. Sometimes it happens in a hospital, where a child has an ailment that doesn't indispose him too much: the people around him know but he doesn't. Yet we feel for him.

A Child & Mother Are Told Of

mith writes about a situation concerning a child. This is the mighty Smith of The Wealth of Nations :

What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant, that, during the agony of disease, cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder....

     It should be pointed out that Shelley had a tremendous power of identifying himself, even with a flower in distress. He identified himself even with the difficulties of a cloud. This power of identification is in people, as let's say somebody cuts off the head of a flower and you wince a little.

...and out of all these, [the mother] forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant.

     The question which should be seen is whether the feeling that Smith writes of here is good will. And there's more of it shown in this book, I must say, than in any other work on ethics. Kant wrote on ethics, and so did Aristotle, but there aren't these instances of strict feeling.

With regard to the future, [the infant] is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will in vain attempt to defend it, when it grows up to be a man.

     There's a famous American story which is about this matter. It is a very good story-"A Trip to Czardis," by Edwin Granberry. It's about a child who is taken to be around when his father is executed. He doesn't know what's going on. And there is a question: should the child be near or not?

     In all writing we have the need to identify. If a woman is writing about men, she has to become a man for a while. This matter of sympathy, with its relation to good will, is very much in both Smith and Shelley. I shall give quotations from Shelley, but in the meantime, since the work of Smith I am now reading from is much less well known, we should have quotations from this book of 1759.

About Jokes

mith talks surprisingly about mortification. One of the greatest tragedies is that when we tell a joke we think it's funny but it seems that other people just are too dull. This is in chapter 2:

A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks around and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself.

So, laugh and the world laughs with you, but tell a joke and it may not.

     There are a good many little bits of description having to do with good will-some of which I'll get to, I hope-in The Wealth of Nations, outside of its main idea: that countries should love each other commercially. It calls for love among trading communities.     

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