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The precocious Smithian essay on the “History of Astronomy", part of the posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects, provides a list of intellectual sentiments focusing on the often overlooked difference between wonder, surprise, and admiration but, oddly, not curiosity - each of them contend for the early modern equivalents of the ancient Greek θαυμάζειν. Surprisingly Smith scholars rarely turn to curiosity. However Smith pays due attention curiosity.. Alongside intellectual sentiments, curiosity can be superstitious (“anxious”) insofar as rude modes of explanation are evoked. In its refined form, it is tied up to the emergence of philosophical, post-mythological ways of thinking. In this paper I first review the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, an unjustly neglected text, for a genealogy of the styles of writing regarding unrefined intellectual sentiments (curiosity, wonder, surprise and admiration) in LRBL XIX-XX in tandem with the above mentioned analysis in the History of Astronomy. In both texts, the Humean legacy of curiosity in the Treatise, the first Enquiry and the Natural history of Religion looms large.
Secondly I examine the function of wonder and curiosity in Giambattista Vico’s complex project that seemingly contradicts the Smithian approach in many ways including the emphasis laid on mythology in history. In this second part of the paper I argue that Adam Smith’s and Vico’s projects can be fruitfully set next to each other as complementary parts of an Enlightenment project regarding intellectual sentiments.
In Vico’s Scienza nuova, curiosity is an hybrid force leading to a Baconian progressive science but also, under the form of “pure curiosity” to a self-absorbed, obsessive pleasure of knowledge for the knowledge that develops throughout all the stages of the stadial history of human mind. (divine, heroic, human) Simultaneously open to unprecedented forms of inquiry and depended on divine providence, curiosity is a desire of an inquisitive human nature craving for knowledge. In Vico’s thought, the hybrid status of curiosity, that can take the form of either a moderate or a Promethean, “hubristic” desire to inquiry, mobilizes scientific endeavors but it can easily veer off course and generate the naïve, self-deceit both of vulgar wisdom and academic arrogance. While providence plays a key role in Vico’s stadia history, it is helpful to parallel this account with Adam Smith’s account of stadial history that apparently turns the emphasis on socio-economic factors and excludes providence. In splitting curiosity into unrefined and refined though, Adam Smith ascribes some autonomy to this intellectual sentiment alongside socio-economic factors throughout the progress of human civilization.
| Organization | University of Crete |
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