ABSTRACT
Samuel Fleischacker has introduced a distinction between a “minimalist” and a “maximalist” perception of Enlightenment.1 This distinction is very useful for understanding why the ideas and the attitudes of Scottish Enlightenment failed to find fertile soil in Modern Greece. Scottish Enlightenment, and Smith’s moral theory in particular, endeavors to
foster a common language fully conversant with an individual’s inherited common sense, as the condition for the moral development of the individuals forming a moral community within a perspective of openess. This pursuit for a common moral language can be traced to Smith’s treatment of sympathy as the par excellence mechanism of triggering and communicating moral sentiments. The classical loci of moral theory, such as assessment of motives and consequences of actions, merit or demerit, moral duty, customs and manners, virtue and vice and rules of justice are treated in terms of sympathy. Sympathy is not meant as a kind of innate moral sense (in Hutcheson’s way), but as a common human capacity to put oneself in the place of the other and to enter through imagination into the other’s sentiments. Moreover, to evaluate and judge such sentiments by means of conjecturing in what measure an imagined impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of them. The impartial spectator procedure provides a kind of moral standard, which is tantamount neither to a commitment to certain views nor a to an abstract a priori moral imperative. What is really enlightening is the public and open process of evaluation and judgment, resulting in common standards, by correcting and refining moral sentiments. For humans to be adequately engaged in such a process, allegiance to a common good or cause is not a prerequisite. What is needed is cultivation of the natural human capacity for sympathy, imagination and independent judgment. Seen in this light, sympathy binds together in moral community, individuals who are independent and equal. This communicating through sympathy can be understood in terms of an ongoing
cultivation, refinement, and scrutinizing of spontaneous and habitual sentimental reactions; in other words, as a process of becoming mature in one’s moral sentiments through enlightened self-scrutiny and perception of others. This focus on a morality rooted in sentiments, aspired, and in a considerable measure, resulted in transforming the inherited structure and norms by which people came by their moral sentiments. Far from endorsing a specific moral doctrine or maximalist vision of “enlightened” man, the Scottish Enlightenment asserted a fundamental trust in an individual’s capacity to arrive independently at moral maturity by means of cultivating and refining their moral sentiments Thus, eighteenth century Scotland bequeaths a perhaps “over-particular”, and
“parochial” even, rather than universal, but nevertheless an fundamental early contribution to a “minimalist” view of Enlightenment.
