II. THE PLEASURE OF IMITATIVE ARTS

Similar to his exposition in “History of Astronomy” (hereinafter also “HA”), Smith also emphasizes in “Of Imitative Arts” the pleasure the mind enjoys when it creates connections between two objects or situations.Footnote ¹¹ For him, our delight when contemplating artworks “is founded altogether upon our wonder at seeing an object of one kind represent so well an object of a different kind” (“IA,” I.16).Footnote ¹² The use of the verb “wonder” here is not arbitrary. Wonder, in “History of Astronomy,” is the sentiment associated with establishing a link between different observations in such a way that the imagination may go through them without any abrupt interruption in its train of thought (“HA,” II.11). Thus, imitative arts, just like astronomic models, also stimulate the imagination to create connections. However, the link the mind creates here is between the imitation and the imitated object, which, according to the previous passage, should be of different kinds. This connection, as we will see, would be the central aspect to justify our enjoyment when contemplating artworks. As certain scholars have already noted (especially Labio Reference Labio, Paganelli, Berry and Smith2013, pp. 109–111; Semi Reference Semi2016, pp. 94–96), Smith differs from the eighteenth-century predominant view on the topic by stressing the role of difference instead of resemblance to explain esthetic pleasure.

To elucidate how imitative arts depend on a certain distinction to generate delight, Smith draws the difference between the technique employed to produce an artwork and the expression of the same artwork. The latter corresponds to those passions aroused when the spectator contemplates the object, or the idea represented, such as a sensation of joy when looking at a painting that portrays someone happy. The former refers to the technique employed and the materials used for producing that specific work of art. Tapestry, for instance, is made of woven threads; painting is the result of ink on the surface of a canvas (“IA,” I.12). Smith associates the technique employed with the cause of imitation, and the expression with its effect. It is worth emphasizing that the cause of an imitative art differs from its effect or expression, since it is possible to represent the same object in distinct ways, as it also is possible to portray uncountable situations through the same technique. Judging any work of art would take its causes and effects into account, and the same occurs, as we will see later, with sympathy.

The technique employed in (or the cause of) imitative arts, as defined by Smith, reveals the importance of establishing patterns in esthetic pleasure. It is the difference between the technique employed and the object portrayed that provides the gap for the imagination to form a connection. For this reason, Smith starts his essay by describing that an exact copy of the carpet in front of him made of the same materials would be almost identical to the original. Still, it would be a simple copy without acquiring great value (“IA,” I.1). Meanwhile, a painting capable of representing even simple clothes with remarkable detail may be considered a source of great pleasure (“IA,” I.8). The image arouses delight due to its capacity to create a correspondence between articles of different nature: in this case, a canvas and some clothes. Without such a distinction, the imagination does not acquire the degree of uneasiness to elicit curiosity about the representation process and to search for a link: “The pleasure arising from the imitation seems to be greater in proportion as this disparity [between the object imitating and the object imitated] is greater” (“IA,” I.6). Neil de Marchi provides an interesting interpretation by associating this disparity with the “ingenuity involved in producing a connection” (Reference Marchi and Haakonssen2006, p. 140), similarly to astronomic models as described in “History of Astronomy.” Even if the connection is partial, the discovery of how the representation is achieved generates great pleasure in individuals, because human beings feel, after wondering, a particular delight in spawning an association amid different objects.

As described in “Of Imitative Arts,” the ability to prompt the mind to produce connections constitutes the merit of an artwork. This merit varies in proportion to the disparity between the representation and the object represented. For example, in portraying a three-dimensional object in two dimensions, painting will not resemble the original object as a sculpture representing the same object. Even though the similarity of the sculpture is higher, “the disparity between the imitating and the imitated object will be so much less, that even the superior resemblance will not satisfy us” (“IA,” I.10). The degree of similarity or resemblance, therefore, is not as primordial for the pleasure of appreciating artistic works as the intensity of the links produced by the imagination.Footnote ¹³ The greater the difference between the nature of the imitation and what it represents, the stronger the connection the art excites because it would be overcoming a wider gap (a wider difference between representation and the object represented). Consequently, the larger the difference, the higher the merit. Based on this argument, Catherine Labio states that artistic merit, for Smith, would be “the opposite of imitation” (Reference Labio, Paganelli, Berry and Smith2013, p. 116). However, it is important to remember that, although disparity is fundamental to provoke pleasure, artworks still need some resemblance to suggest an association. In sum, Smith explains the pleasure of experiencing imitative arts not by the degree of resemblance to reality but by the capacity to provide the human mind with stronger connections that overcome a wider distance.

As mentioned earlier, the appraisal of art is not based solely on the technique used but also on the expression, which in most cases—such as painting, dance, or poetry—corresponds to everyone’s reaction when imagining themselves in the situation the art represents. It comes not from the technique but from the sensations aroused in contemplating what the representation means. For example, someone seeing a painting depicting a scene of misfortune or listening to a poem describing festive situations thinks about what it would be like to be in that position. Such reflection already elicits sentiments analogous to those present at that imagined moment. Different techniques can, therefore, have very close effects, because such distinctive practices as opera and tapestry can convey an equally melancholic or joyful situation. At this moment, Smith faces the same question as many of his contemporaries: If an artwork expressed grief, how could this experience still be pleasant?

Smith’s first and provisory answer in the essay is that, despite the meaning of the representation, its effect may often be outweighed by the pleasure derived from the disparity between art and the object imitated. Through this logic, he expounds why people can feel so much pleasure by looking at a painting portraying everyday occurrences or even offensive ones, while sculpture—without providing a greater disparity with the objects it represents—would have difficulties in pleasing by imitating the same item or episode. For this reason, Smith emphasizes, we may feel profound pleasure in contemplating Rembrandt’s portraits, even if they represent “a vulgar ordinary man or woman, engaged in a vulgar and ordinary action” (“IA,” I.7). From this argument, we may extract Smith’s opinion on the ample debate about why we may feel pleasure from tragedy. Even by looking at the representation of a tragic moment, the merit of that imitation might be so great that we would still derive pleasure from its contemplation. Indeed, in an insightful article, Arby Ted Siraki (Reference Siraki2010, pp. 218–220) reaches similar conclusions by extracting Smith’s view on the paradox of tragedy from his moral theory, especially from the mechanism of mutual sympathy. Although I return later to this topic in the section on sympathy, it is important to note that, while examining imitative arts, Smith tackles the major question of how human beings react to emotional experiences. With Rembrandt’s example, Smith evidently puts more weight on the imagination’s desire to establish patterns and find connections as a source of pleasure than on the mechanism of imagining oneself in the position represented. The logic behind this argument will be much clearer after examining how music generates pleasure, from Smith’s perspective.

III. THE HARMONY OF MUSIC

Compared with other imitative arts, instrumental music—i.e., music without the companion of poetry or dance—has certain particularities for Smith. Its capacity to imitate is limited, for it does not suggest anything but itself. Not surprisingly, the essay “Of Imitative Arts” offers a direct criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Footnote ¹⁴ who interprets music—in the article “Imitation” from his Music Dictionary Footnote ¹⁵—as the art with the greatest capacity to represent nature, because it can mimic any object or situation (“IA,” II.24). Contrary to this opinion, Smith argues that, with only instrumental music, it is impossible for the listener to discern, with any clarity, the situation portrayed in a specific composition, because “the melody and harmony of Instrumental Music, on the contrary [regarding painting], do not distinctly and clearly suggest any thing that is different from that melody and harmony” (“IA,” II.31). As Chandler (Reference Chandler, Paganelli, Berry and Smith2013, p. 136) has well observed, Smith positions himself with this critic within the eighteenth-century esthetic debate by arguing that instrumental music does not depend on imitation to be pleasurable and arouse emotions in its listeners. Whereas the idea of a certain landscape is quite distinct from the technique employed in painting, music does not suggest anything other than a relationship between its sounds.

Although music does not represent anything beyond its composition, it can still provoke the same feelings as other imitative arts. As we have seen, Smith differentiates the pleasure derived from cause (technique) and effect (representation). Regarding the former, music may bring the same delight as when painting represents an object, since it also involves the surmounting of a gap through the discovery of certain standards by the listener. Finding regularity in a sequence of sounds allows people to foresee the succeeding sounds to come, since “we frequently foresee the return of a period which we know to another which we remember to have gone before” (“IA,” II.29). This movement brings pleasure to the human mind, which can smoothly follow the music’s melody and rhythm,Footnote ¹⁶ without interrupting its thought due to an unexpected sequence: “in the contemplation of that immense variety of agreeable and melodious sounds, arranged and digested, both in their coincidence and in their succession, into so complete and regular a system, the mind in reality enjoys not only a very great sensual pleasure, but a high intellectual pleasure” (“IA,” II.30). In sum, while painting prompts a connection with a phenomenon of different nature, music contains an inherent disparity in itself as a result of its diverse notes.

More surprisingly than observing how instrumental music may stimulate individuals to form connections, Smith expounds on the way music can elicit the same passions someone feels when they contemplate a representation of a joyful or tragic event—that is, the effect of other kinds of arts. As exposed in “Of Imitative Arts,” music can prompt the same effects as painting or poetry by producing a melody and a rhythm that correspond to the feelings awakened by ink or words. This process occurs because Smith attributes different emotions to different rhythms and melodies.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, “a slow succession of resembling or closely connected thoughts is the characteristic of this [melancholic] disposition of mind,” (“IA,” II.20) and “grave [notes] sounds solemn, awful, and melancholy” (“IA,” II.21). In contrast, “a quick succession of thoughts frequently contrasted and in general very slightly connected, is the characteristic of the other [happy and pleasant disposition of the mind]” (“IA,” II.20), and “acute [notes] sounds naturally gay, sprightly, and enlivening” (“IA,” II.21). It is by producing the rhythm and melody of a particular emotion that music may put us in the same state of mind. Thus, a music composition characterized by fast rhythm and acute sounds can make its listeners feel the same as when they look at a representation of someone happy. As Smith beautifully asserts,

Instrumental music, however, does not entirely imitate passions, but it carries the proper characteristics of those sentiments. In Smith’s words, “Instrumental music does not imitate … a gay, a sedate, or a melancholy person; … it becomes itself a gay, a sedate, or a melancholy object” (“IA,” II.22). Notably, instrumental music, as Smith explains, could never imitate passions, because “there are no two things in nature more perfectly disparate than sound and sentiment; and it is impossible by any human power to fashion the one into any thing that bears any real resemblance to the other” (“IA,” II.23). But due to shared characteristics of having rhythms and melodies, music can induce emotions in the human mind. By this mechanism, without depending on any effort to imagine other circumstances or to create a representation—necessary to feel other imitative arts’ expressions—music infects its listener immediately.

As many studies on the history of esthetics have noticed, Smith would be distancing the pleasure of music from the most common form of addressing the merit of artworks: mimesis or imitation. In this effort, he seems influenced by Hutcheson, who had already pointed out an inner sense capable of perceiving beauty through harmony, without depending on any kind of imitation or previous experience.Footnote ¹⁸ “Harmony” is understood here as an order, an arrangement or a system connecting different elements in a way that becomes agreeable to our senses. However, the pleasure that Hutcheson credited to an inner sense, Smith attributed to the imagination. Even with their differences, the student and the teacher provided a very original contribution to art theory because they removed the imitative aspects from instrumental music and explained its beauty through harmony and sense of order (Suzuki Reference Suzuki2014, p. 298; Jaffro Reference Jaffro and Trottein2000, p. 9). Indeed, the philosopher of esthetics Márcio Suzuki (Reference Suzuki2014, p. 303) even suggests that they pointed out in the direction of what Cézanne, Klee, and Kandinsky would later propose with abstract painting, in the sense that feeling esthetic pleasure does not require understanding the artwork’s meaning. While scrutinizing Suzuki’s remark is beyond the scope of this paper, it helps to illustrate how Smith perceived the esthetic sensibility of craving for order as a deeply ingrained disposition of the human mind, which does not require previous experiences to manifest itself.

Although Smith appears to be influenced by Hutcheson in the matter of harmony, he departs from his teacher regarding the relationship between music and sympathy. As mentioned in the introduction, Hutcheson resorts to sympathy as a sort of contagion to address musical expression. Smith, on the contrary, makes music completely independent of sympathy. As we will see, he then mobilizes the principle behind music appreciation to ground his concept of sympathy, primarily through the parallel between emotion and music. With this path, he identifies our tendency to sympathize as a natural attribution of human beings resulting from our pleasure in following the pace of others. Sympathy, meanwhile, becomes a social and complex mechanism that requires sociability to be cultivated and improved.Footnote ¹⁹ Because music does not contain any form of representation and may be considered a purely esthetic appreciation regardless of previous social experience, it allows us to define more precisely where Smith locates human esthetic sensibility in his moral theory.

IV. THE RHYTHM OF SYMPATHY

Sympathy, the key concept of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), is the mechanism by which people evaluate different attitudes, supporting the creation of rules of conduct within a group and providing the necessary bounds for social harmony and stability. As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, Smith’s scholarship has conflicting positions regarding the parallel between esthetic and moral judgments. Among the specialists claiming a distance between them, we may find Knud Haakonsen (Reference Haakonssen and Haakonssen2006, pp. 10–11), who argues that, within Smith’s work, there are two imaginations at work, one for objects (theoretical) and one for sympathy and moral judgments (practical). Although he acknowledges that both imaginations crave establishing connections and patterns, the effort to sympathize derives more from a practical reason to avoid conflict than an esthetic inclination, which would predominate only in the theoretical imagination. Similarly, Brianne Wolf (Reference Wolf2022, pp. 717–723) asserts that taste would provide a means to bond with distant others in a way in which sympathy would be more limited. But even if connected, sympathy and taste would still be grounded on different faculties.Footnote ²⁰ On the contrary, Charles Griswold (Reference Griswold1999, pp. 65–68) underpins the esthetic character of Smith’s view on moral judgments: appraising a play in a theater would involve the same process as evaluating someone’s action. Robert Fudge (Reference Fudge2009, p. 134), with a similar perspective, even uses the term “aesthetic morality” to describe Smith’s moral theory. As already mentioned, although my interpretation remains close to the latter and perceives that the same imagination gives rise to both moral and esthetic judgments, it still maintains that Smith called attention to specific differences between evaluating people and artworks.

In very general lines, sympathy, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, corresponds to the human faculty of imagining someone else’s feelings in a determined circumstance, of trying to get closer to the sentiments of a different person.Footnote ²¹ More precisely, a spectator, when watching the attitudes of an agent, thinks what his sensations and his reactions would be like if he were in those same circumstances (TMS, I.i.1.5).Footnote ²² By using the same vocabulary employed when discussing imitative arts, Smith outlines that this spectator judges the observed action by its causes and effects (TMS, I.i.3.5; II.i.1.2). The former relates to the agent’s motives, and the proportion between those motives and the action determines the propriety of the behavior. If such a relationship is acceptable to the spectator, the conduct is considered adequate; otherwise, it is improper. To explain this movement, Smith illustrates how, in most cases, a scandal at the death of a child would be an adequate reaction, while the same upheaval would be improper in the face of minor situations (TMS, I.i.3.4). For this reason, people would be curious when observing a situation like a scandal to know what prompts that behavior (TMS, I.i.1.9). Meanwhile, the effect corresponds to the behavior’s beneficial or harmful consequences, which define whether the action may be worthy of merit (and reward) or demerit (and punishment) (TMS, II.i.1.2). Nevertheless, throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith gives primacy to the cause of the evaluated behavior, because if we do not approve the agent’s motives, it would be difficult to perceive them as entitled to reward (TMS, II.i.3.1–3).

This brief explanation of sympathy already allows us to ascertain at least three similarities between moral judgments and imitative arts in general (apart from instrumental music). First, both processes involve creating a representation that awakes new emotions not exactly equal to the original passions observed, an aspect already well explored by Chandler (Reference Chandler, Paganelli, Berry and Smith2013, pp. 127–128). Second, not knowing the motives behind certain attitudes, according to Smith, results in a very similar curiosity to when the spectator perceives a representation and wants to find out how the artist managed to accomplish his work.Footnote ²³ Third—and more important for my argument—people evaluated artworks and attitudes by judging their proportion to their causes. Hence, sympathy, like painting and sculpture, is more related to establishing a pattern than the attitude’s nature. Whether a person manifests joy or anger is less important than whether the manifestation is proportional to their motives and the action’s effects. For this reason, Siraki (Reference Siraki2010, pp. 218–222) could deduce a similar interpretation of Smith’s position on why we may feel pleasure when watching an opera or a play representing a tragic situation from The Theory of Moral Sentiments without mentioning “Of Imitative Arts.” In both cases, the pleasure of establishing a connection may surpass the distress provoked by the character of the action or the imitation.

Despite its resemblances with imitative arts, sympathy differs from painting or sculpture in the sense that their causes and effects have dissimilar natures. While the cause of imitation refers to the technique used, sympathy considers the motives behind an actual human’s actions. In other words, when looking at a portrait depicting a man killing another, we would not be curious about his reasons but about how the brush strokes of paint managed to represent so well the men, their emotions, and their actions. Following Smith’s logic, the same would not occur when viewers are seeing an actual assassination. Indeed, the imagination—knowing how to discern fiction from reality—judges them with a different criterion. Differently from what scholars such as Siraki (Reference Siraki2010, p. 214) and Griswold (Reference Griswold1999, p. 67) have argued, the distinction between fiction and reality remains strong in Smith’s work. Of course, it is possible to judge the attitude of a fictional character as we would evaluate a person’s behavior, according to the many examples given throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Footnote ²⁴ Yet, we would not evaluate the quality of a book based on how far we agree with the main character’s decisions, but mostly according to how they are described. We might not morally approve of the acts of many characters while praising how the author depicted the sentiments and motives leading to their choices. For this reason, as scholars such as Jonathan Wight (Reference Wight2006) and Lauren Kopajtic (Reference Kopajtic and Sagar2023) well explored, novels may sharpen people’s abilities to sympathize by stimulating the imagination to relate to the motives and sentiments behind actions. Still, the book remains reckoned as an imitation and is evaluated by its capacity to represent sentiments through words. Meanwhile, people are judged by their actions. In both cases, the imagination tries to connect causes and effects. However, it is not the imagination that works in two distinguished ways (as Haakonsen suggests); only the phenomenon to which the imagination is directed has different causes.

Music, as discussed in the previous section, provides pleasure by giving us harmony to look for and by setting our minds in a rhythm and a melody corresponding to an emotion. Considering that Smith was following this assumption while writing The Theory of Moral Sentiments may help us understand why he employed so many music-related terms when explaining sympathy: “a man whose sympathy keeps the same time to my grief, cannot but admit the reasonableness of my sorrow” and “the person who … either feels no such emotion as that which I feel, or feels none that bears any proportion to mine, cannot avoid disapproving my sentiments on account of their dissonance with his own” (TMS, I.i.3.1).Footnote ²⁵ In those passages, “keeps … time” and “dissonance” evidently refer to the capacity (or not) to follow another’s emotion. In music, after the first impulse to listen to it, we approve its composition and execution if we can follow its notes. Analogously, people would approve of an attitude through the same mechanism: we approve of it only if we can enter at a similar pace after knowing its motives and effects.

The satisfaction provided by music also allows us to recognize how Smith articulates our tendency to sympathize. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, our greatest pleasure derives from the perception of mutual sympathy, which corresponds to the feeling that someone else shares our opinion or approves of our conduct. For example, knowing someone has the same view on a book or the same resentment in the face of an offense is a source of delight for Smith.Footnote ²⁶ Since, as we have seen, each emotion has a particular rhythm, approving someone’s conduct resembles being able to produce a similar rhythm and melody. The feeling that you are in the same pace and tune as others appears to be the main explanation Smith attributes to the pleasure of mutual sympathy, which arrives from a “correspondence of the sentiments of others” (TMS, I.i.2.2). More than mutual sympathy, Smith resorts to this tendency of our imagination to explain the pleasure of sociability and society, which “arises from certain sentiments and opinions from certain harmony of minds, which like so many music instruments, coincide and keep time with one another” (TMS, VII.iv.28). As our delight in looking for a pattern and our propensity to find a regularity make us look for them within music, the pleasure of mutual sympathy provides, for Smith, our first desire and impulse to try to sympathize with others.

With this analysis, it becomes clear that the imagination that listens to music and searches for a pattern in its notes is the same imagination that watches another’s behavior and tries to follow the tempo and the pitch of their emotions. The musical components, however, we look for through sympathy and music are not the same. In music, they derive from how the imagination perceives the relationship between the notes. Meanwhile, sympathy looks for order by trying to enter a similar state of mind after, for instance, knowing the motives that led to the agent’s reaction. Although sound and emotion have different natures, Smith mobilized the same characteristic of the imagination to explain our pleasure from music and mutual sympathy. Hence, having a judgment or conduct approved provides a pleasure analogous to the one originated by finding a pattern in instrumental music; both consist of being able to follow an external progression.

The impact of this analogy between musical elements and emotions on the construction of Smith’s moral theory becomes even stronger when we examine how he accounts for our tendency to sympathize more with small joys than great ones, while the reverse occurs with grief. This happens, as described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and “History of Astronomy,” due to the different tempos of each passion. Joy, on the one hand, is fast-paced, “rushing upon us all at once like a torrent” (“HA,” I.6). Thus, the spectator does not find it difficult to sympathize with small contentment since there is no need for a great effort to follow such an involving pace. Moreover, he is reluctant to be carried away by sudden joy because of the difficulty of pursuing such a rapid and violent rhythm. For this reason, there is the struggle of sympathizing with “sudden revolutions of fortune,” in which “a sentiment of envy commonly prevents us from heartily sympathizing with his joy” (TMS, I.ii.5.1). The opposite process occurs with sorrow, which “comes on slowly and gradually, nor ever rises at once to that height of agony to which it is increased after a little time” (“HA,” I.6). Even if our general tendency to follow joy is superior to grief, the spectator manages to sympathize more easily with deep sorrows than with trivial ones, because “we have some indulgence for that excessive grief which we cannot entirely go along with,” and “we know what a prodigious effort is requisite before the sufferer can bring down his emotions to complete harmony and concord with those of the spectator” (TMS, I.iii.1.6). Thus, our tendency to sympathize easily with contentment and, as Smith depicts later in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, with the rich, relies upon the idea that emotions have certain rhythms.

The passages above reveal how Smith’s view of esthetics reverberates in his functioning of sympathy. Additionally, if we consider “History of Astronomy” as a youth’s essay (Wightman and Bryce Reference Wightman and Bryce1982a, pp. 6–7), The Theory of Moral Sentiments as written while Smith was in his thirties and revised many times throughout his life, and “Of Imitative Arts” as probably a more mature essay, there is strong evidence supporting that the approximation between rhythms and emotions accompanied his thinking throughout most of Smith’s life. However, I am not suggesting that Smith deduced all his conclusions from this human desire to follow regularities. Almost the opposite, my interpretation maintains that this principle becomes, like the law of gravity in “History of Astronomy” (“HA,” IV.76), a form of connecting very diverse behaviors, such as our reactions when reading a book or disapproving of someone’s attitude. As he reiterates in his more epistemological essays, finding a familiar, single, and simple principle able to articulate all the different observations is the main aim of science (for instance, “HA,” II.12). Hence, Smith would be defining our imagination’s propensity to look for order as the principle capable of connecting the various observations of human behavior in both esthetic and moral spheres. In “Of Imitative Arts,” this principle explains why we feel pleasure when staring at a painting or listening to music. Meanwhile, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the same principle lies behind our propensity to sympathize.

V. MUSICAL PASSIONS AND THE HARMONY OF SOCIETY

To extend our analysis of how Smith’s esthetic considerations impact his moral theory, we must finally explore, even if not exhaustively, the way in which he ties social harmony to our desire to be at the same pace as those around us. It is not a coincidence that he emphasizes, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the capacity of music to only imitate social passions, such as grief, joy, and admiration (TMS, I.ii.3.6). Social passions “naturally express themselves in periods which are distinguished by regular pauses, and which upon that account are easily adapted to the regular returns of the correspondent airs of a tune” (TMS, I.ii.3.6). The same idea also appears in “Of Imitative Arts,” where social passions are even called “Musical Passions” (“IA,” II.13).Footnote ²⁷ Musical passions are those that bring people together by their regularity since people look for an order to follow. Unsocial passions, on the contrary, are discordant, irregular, and harsh. The fact that music can only imitate social passions clearly shows the connection between sociability and the presence of a pattern. Emotions, in the same way as music, without regularity are difficult to follow; consequently, they bring uneasiness and discomfort to the human mind and distance people from each other.

In “Of Imitative Arts,” Smith also illustrates that the desire to find patterns leads to proximity and a natural convergence through the interaction between dance and music.Footnote ²⁸ The pauses and gestures of the body and the successive sounds of the music are organized so that their measures coincide. Both are arranged according to time, understood as a musical measure. For this process, it is unnecessary to preconceive the rhythm to be followed, for the regularity of time functions as an invisible hand, constituting an unintentional process. Dance does not determine music, or vice versa. Still, the search for a pattern organizes a single system: “the time or measure of the dance corresponding always exactly with that of the song or the tune that accompanies it and directs it” (“IA,” II.2). Music and dance coincide not due to their nature but due to the human mind’s propensity to look for patterns. Smith’s analysis of these two arts also underscores how much he envisages our desire to follow a rhythm as such a natural tendency that “no nation has yet been discovered so uncivilized as to be altogether without them [music and dance]” (“IA,” II.1). By attributing this esthetic sensitivity to everyone, regardless of their society’s development, and by describing social passions as musical ones, Smith seems to be ascribing the first impetus for socialization and the development of sympathy to our desire for certain harmony.

It is worth remarking that Smith explains both esthetic and moral judgments through the natural propensities of following a rhythm and sympathizing. Although those propensities are common to every human, their improvement and outcome vary among societies. As explained in “Of Imitative Arts,” even savage nations enjoyed dance and music due to humankind’s natural tendency to look for orders. But the same would not occur with poetry. For Smith, poetry encompasses the difficulty of combining meaningful words in a certain rhythm and, therefore, requires a higher level of refinement (“IA,” II.4). Even if prompted by the same propensity as with dance and music, this refinement depends on a multitude of experiences, which differs considerably from place to place. Thus, nations may develop different forms of artwork and tastes. Similarly, sympathy is natural and capable of refinement, resulting in moral rules that vary greatly from one country to another. The diversity of tastes and morals displays how the natural tendency to look for order results in a multitude of different harmonies.

Yet, Smith asserts that “it seems impossible that the approbation of virtue should be a sentiment of the same kind with that by which we approve of a convenient and well-contrived building” (TMS, IV.2.3). This difference is well explained at the end of Theory of Moral Sentiments’ fourth part, where Smith affirms that isolated individuals may develop judgments of taste and preference for objects. However, an isolated person would never feel shame, resentment, or praiseworthiness, because those sentiments depend on sociability and sympathy (TMS, IV.2.12). Sympathy involves someone trying to follow the rhythm of another person, who can also follow or not the first person’s rhythm. The existence of this two-fold movement raises different sentiments when compared with solely listening to music. These sentiments are necessarily social, such as shame and resentment. In other words, the pleasure of being approved by others and following the social rhythm prompts sentiments that an always isolated person could never feel. Nonetheless, even if the feelings of following society are more complex than those of listening to music, both stem from the first impulse of looking for order and harmony. Even if the feelings derived from sympathy and sociability are stronger and more fulfilling, they still derive from an esthetic propensity.

The passage from individuals looking for regularities to a social harmony based on sympathy encompasses the construction of the impartial spectator. Briefly, the impartial spectator, for Smith, may be understood as a pattern everyone continually creates through their experiences to guide them about which attitude is appropriate in each circumstance. Analogously, as people try to decipher the rhythm of a group when joining them to dance and sing, they compose an impartial spectator as an order organizing which conduct usually follows the other. In other words, by observing how others react, people create an ideal pattern that runs smoothly in their imagination with the appropriate proportion between actions, their motives, and their effects. The impartial spectator, thus, may be understood as an “ideal rhythm” of each society, allowing us to perceive Smith’s description of a person trying to adjust their own actions to this impartial spectator as someone trying to follow society’s general pace.

The process above resembles finding repetitions within music and trying to advance the next note to come, but instead of sounds, the individual attempts to anticipate the reactions of others. Consequently, the esthetic inclination towards harmony plays a significant role in constructing moral judgments. Since all members of society continually try to adjust their conduct to the general rhythm, harmony and convergence emerge by establishing standard practices and a shared sense of morality. Within this perspective, society would create its rules through a process that is extensively involved with beauty.

Harmony emerges, however, not only because individuals wish to follow the rhythm of others but also because they admire the beautiful arrangement established by society as a whole. That is to say, people feel pleasure seeing that the different parts and members of society are in harmony. Someone or something out of tune would cause a similar distress as a note out of the rhythm in a composition. With this perspective, Smith expounds that we approve “institutions which tend to promote public welfare” due to “the same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance” (TMS, IV.i.11).Footnote ²⁹ Thus, we approve and respect a social order also due to its beauty and harmonic arrangement, in an analogous way as we evaluate well-composed music. This parallel provides a new element to explain why Smith emphasizes vanity and beauty as the main motivations for people attempting to better their condition. As the scholars Haakonsen (Reference Haakonssen1981, pp. 182–183) and Ryan Hanley (Reference Hanley2009, pp. 69–71) have stressed, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ passage on the invisible hand, Smith distances human motivation from pursuing material satisfaction. Indeed, the imagination, for Smith, would be looking for a pleasure more associated with following society’s rhythm and receiving the approval of others than with any material comfort.

The previous paragraphs might give the impression that Smith perceives society as inherently harmonical. However, he frequently recognizes the possibilities of dissonances and disorders (TMS, I.i.3). Even if humans enjoy a natural propensity to sociability associated with their desire to find patterns, establishing a common ground of morality and a cohesive society is not trivial. For example, the work of Michelle Schwarze and John Scott (Reference Schwarze and Scott2015, pp. 465–467) effectively explains that, in Smith’s moral theory, society faces a “psychological disharmony” when resentment prevails among its members. Indeed, resentment is, for Smith, one of the unsocial passions that are “harsh and discordant,” making “a strange entertainment which consisted altogether of the imitations of hatred and resentment” (TMS, I.ii.3.6). Since each individual passes through a particular set of experiences, they do not construct their ideal moral rhythm by always listening to the same notes and their proportion. In other words, it would be easier to find harmony when fewer musicians are playing. This analogy provides us with a new perspective to understand how Smith reasoned about what Fonna Forman-Barzilai (Reference Forman-Barzilai2010) called the “circles of sympathy,” that is, the increasing difficulty to sympathize and keep harmonical relationships as people become more numerous and distant.

To sum up, there is enough evidence to conclude that Smith had in mind the esthetic sensibility he described in “Of Imitative Arts” when he elaborated his moral theory. Based on the assumption that people feel pleasure when following a rhythm and a melody, he explains how social harmony emerges. While everyone is trying to keep the same rhythm as the others with the social pattern created through sympathy, a cohesive and harmonic social order arises, regardless of the intention of its members. This organization is not an intentional result; it occurs due to the interaction between individuals trying to keep time with one another. As mentioned before, dance and music coincide without the need for a preconceived arrangement, since the search for regularity in individuals works like an invisible hand; dancers and musicians will try to coincide with each other. In the same way that dance and music match their rhythm, society finds a harmonic order.