2004 Volume 1 Issue 1 Pages 10-24
This is an introductory essay towards establishing what intellectual and cultural heritage Adam Smith (1723-1790), one of the representative figures of the eighteenth-century “Enlightenment”, specifically “Scottish Enlightenment”, left for the twenty-first century. Attempts are made in this essay to analyze and dissect the thought world of Adam Smith in its logical make-up and intellectual-historical setting.The first thing to note is the intellectual interest Smith took throughout his academic career in the seven subjects of “artes liberales” and those fields of study which fell under the three branches of Logic (or a theory of knowledge), Natural Philosophy and Moral Philosophy according to the eighteenth-century British manner of dividing Philosophy, or logikē, physikē and ethikē in the Stoicist division of sciences.Secondly, in his lectures and essays, Smith discussed and criticized several existing branches of learning or systems of ideas, such as natural philosophy, natural theology, natural morality, natural jurisprudence, and so forth. The point to be noted is that while these names referred to those sciences which were actually taught and prevalent in the intellectual climate of the age in question, Smith stressed the “natural” character of every one of these systems. In this sense he was a legitimate successor to Hume in the philosophy of human nature or Moral Philosophy as it was called in the eighteenth-century climate. By “natural”, Smith meant: starting from the basis of human nature and never getting remote from it; according to human nature; in accordance with the principles of human nature; capable of meeting the basic needs of human nature. Bringing ready-made systems of thought back to the foundation of human nature, Smith reduced them to its principles. By using the method of what K. Marx and, following him, a twentieth-century Japanese philosopher K. Miki called “the genealogy of theories”, Smith demonstrated how physical and social theories, systems of thought, moral and ethical rules, social institutions are formed and constituted on the basis, and starting from the foundation, of human nature.It is important to focus upon the vital role which the “imagination” plays in Smith’s system of thought. It is the imagination that, starting from the basis of human nature, brings into a complete form what remains imperfect on the basis of human nature. Insofar, the imagination takes on the task of artificial completion of what nature cannot carry out to an end.These are the questions which the essay tries to examine. This is in order to reconstruct the imagination and remake it; render it original and creative; and as is the subject of the essays to follow, revitalize it so that it can meet the needs of a new intelligence and help it find its way through the chaos of
