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Every nation has its guilty pleasures – somewhat embarrassing, reprehensible, or even shameful pleasures. Russians drink brine; Lithuanians consider zeppelins, which look like silkworm mummies, edible. From the outside it looks like innocent foolishness, a domestic manifestation of the darker sides of human nature like pillow fighting or throwing condoms filled with water from the balcony. And only in England, even from the raised yard dust, a cult emerges, growing a turnover in the souvenir shops of the National Trust. There you can buy tons of useful things like folding bird-watching chairs and an impressive volume of “One Hundred Recipes with Ospreys.”
From the tome of recipes, you can learn how to eat skonas properly.
Answer: break with hands, never use a knife, spread first with whipped cream and then with jam, or vice versa – first with jam and then with cream. The first way is called the Devonshire way and the second way is called the Cornish way. The ways are equivalent, but Cornwall had Queen Elizabeth II on its side, so supporters of a constitutional monarchy have no choice. Neither do those who go to the nearest pub on Sundays for Sunday Roast, a ritual designed to bring neighbors together over the shared eating of a roasted fragment of a large animal, such as a bull. According to age-old tradition, the meat is roasted until the protein is reduced to a dry gray biomass, sliced into thin large slices, and steeped in a lake of thick garbage sauce with the romantic name of gravy.
Perhaps the widespread carelessness in the preparation of the Sunday roast is due to the fact that it does not play a major role in this unifying ritual at all. The main thing about it is not the meat, but the wood chaga mushroom-like Yorkshire pudding.
Strange that it was invented in Yorkshire rather than the City, as it is no different in meaning to the financial bubble there. This pudding is quite an imposing structure (10 years ago, the Royal Society of Chemistry conducted a special study involving the greatest minds and decided that a proper Yorkshire pudding should be at least 10 centimeters high). It has a thin, crispy crust on the outside and a perfect void inside with remnants of soft, unbaked dough. Here, of course, we could continue with City’s metaphor, but it is enough to simply specify the composition of the components of a proper pudding: one third of it consists of wheat flour, one third of liquid (water or milk) and another third of eggs. That is, it is a pancake that has been blown in all directions by the consciousness of its own importance.
Although the people of Yorkshire give their pudding the status of a national relic – something like the Magna Carta of Freemen, which recites itself every Sunday in all the country’s pubs – a documented history of the dish can only be traced back over the last three hundred years. In that amount of time, the lawn in Britain barely has time to sprout.
The first mention of Yorkshire pudding can be found in the book A Woman’s Duty. There, among other house regulations, there is a recipe for an appetizer, which is cooked in the fat dripping from under the meat roasted on a spit, having put a tray underneath. The principle of cooking in fat is still observed, although most often Yorkshire pudding is cooked not in the usual deep baking trays, but in muffin molds, previously well heated with a large amount of vegetable or animal fat poured into the well. The old tradition was to dip the resulting fried bubbles in the same fat mixed with meat juice. And it was a completely independent delicacy, a kind of digestif before the main course – a leg of ram or bull. Gradually, the appetizer mixed with the hot, and the Sunday Roast, which is known to anyone who has ever been to an English pub on a Sunday, emerged.
Virtually any foreigner experienced psychological trauma at the appearance of a plate, on which in addition to the food is placed something much larger in volume than meat, and it is absolutely unclear why it is needed. Many (I saw it with my own eyes dozens of times) with a grimace of disgust slid the pudding somewhere to the side like a big bug caught in a plate.
Trust me, in the process you’ll learn a lot more about the nation that discovered mustache combs and the World Wide Web than you will from most books. To understand England better, however, one must make an effort to sink one’s teeth into the crust, and more importantly, into the emptiness beneath the crust, to dip that crust and that emptiness in a sauce similar in color to the sludge in an autumn country rut, and to let it inside oneself.
But don’t be fooled. This is just one step in learning the essence of English. The next step is to try to like overcooked carrots and green beans. And that’s where almost everyone breaks down.
***
The birth of a nation, like trying to understand a nation, begins with humiliation.
The Serbs had to endure the salty bitterness of Kosovo Field, the British the defeat at Hastings. The modern German and Japanese nations were created by the catastrophe of WWII. Ireland emerged from centuries of religious stubbornness and slavery. What Roman splinter made the inhabitants of the dank plains around Cork and the people of Kilkenny cling so tightly to the Catholic faith, God knows. It was very easy for the Irish to stop worshipping trees and hearing the Druids, but the preaching of St. Patrick the Englishman seemed to lock further spiritual quests on the Isle of Eire to a barn lock. The Irish under English rule starved to death by the millions and sailed across the ocean, slaughtered by tens of thousands by regular British troops and spontaneous reprisal squads. In a thousand years they never seemed to have emerged either in comfort or development from the Dark Ages, and only a few of them dared to conform to London’s authority. No, of course they didn’t become Englishmen, who would have let them, but something like shtrekbreakers. In the eyes of the rest of the Irish, understandably.
Long ago, when the last manor house of the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus was still being dismantled for bricks in England, Ireland was one of the most educated countries in Europe. Her monasteries were university campuses where antiquity was preserved and new knowledge was created. The Irishman John Iriugena was Europe’s foremost thinker, and the skill of the artists would have been the envy of Giotto had he been born six hundred years earlier.
Later, by the eighteenth century, Ireland had become the sick and perpetually hungry people of Europe with a religion that was something like a morning pint of beer for the people and which, along with the strong beer, helped to somehow come to terms with the dole of sorrow. At the same time, there was a priest living in Derry, Ireland, who offered an even more radical way of coming to terms with reality. His name was George Berkeley, and he proved that reality does not exist. Not just Irish. Anybody. of reality in principle.
Berkeley went down in history as an Irish philosopher, but he was neither Irish nor even Catholic. He was English by birth, but not just English, but Anglo-Saxon. Contrary to the common anti-Western conspiracy view, no such ethnic group has existed for a long time. The Anglo-Saxons dissolved in the melting pot of the conquests of the late first and early second millennium. And all that remains of them is a couple of strange gadgets of Alfred the Great, the wooden wreckage of the residence of the Northumberland kings and a few noble families, which more or less reasonably raise their lineage to the Donorman nobility. Berkeley is one such family name.
Anglo-Saxon ancestry explains nothing in the fortunes or ideas of George Berkeley. Questions of blood, the divine right of kings, and the place in the world of their vassals did not interest him. He declared the key problem of the world to be matter, and from the age of twenty was engaged in the consistent debunking of this chimera.
Berkeley’s main opponents were Locke and Newton. The first because he made cognition dependent on the world of things, the second because he tried to prove the absoluteness of space and time with the help of mathematics.
Berkeley, like Swift, attended Dublin’s Holy Trinity College. The main subjects he studied were philosophy, mathematics, physics and theology. Quite early on he discovered that the role of God in his modern world was gradually diminishing due to the increasing influence of natural philosophy and the exact sciences. For Berkeley, a world without a god was a disaster, and he began to consistently reclaim the Creator’s place. He did it wittily, with a literary brilliance that even his most implacable opponents do not deny. By the age of twenty-five he had written all of his major philosophical works, the essence of which can be summarized roughly as follows:
1. The world external to man, which seems to us something permanent and reliable, something possessing subjectivity, is in fact the sum of individual sensations of the one who looks at this world.
2. Conventionally speaking, if we hold a paper cup of pumpkin latte in our hand, we can judge its warmth and/or coldness, we can conclude an opinion that the latte coffee has been over-roasted and is bitter, but the milk is sweet. But when we put the latte glass on the table and go into the next room to do yoga, we cease to be masters of this set of experiences, and the latte glass can afford to do anything, even start running a Telegram channel dedicated to the role of Anglo-Saxons in global politics, or just disappear as if it never happened. Because all the perceived qualities of this glass are not in objective reality, which simply doesn’t exist, but in our heads.
3. Time and space are relative. We can’t talk about absolute speed and absolute time, because a delivery man on a scooter passing down the street moves at different speeds relative to stationary buildings and a police car traveling in the next lane. And time can be perceived as something very long if it’s a Russian winter, and very short if it’s a vacation in Capri.
4. Matter is illusory. As opposed to god, which is objective reality. God’s role in the universe is that he, with the qualities of omniscience, can both perceive every thing in the world and keep the world in order the moment we went to the restroom or are asleep.
5. The reality of the dream from the point of view of cognition is no different from the world we foolishly habitually call the present, and it is high time we all woke up long ago to see God in his infinity and goodness.
Ronald Knox’s Limerick articulates Berkeley’s doctrine even more succinctly:
Once upon a time there was a young man who said:
“God must find it extremely amusing,
If he discovers that this tree
Continues to exist
Even when there’s no one in the yard.”
Response:
Dear sir,
Your surprise is strange:
I’m always in the yard,
And that’s why the tree
Will exist,
Observable
By your humble servant
God.”
Berkeley’s claims were in fact addressed not to matter as such, but to materialists. He did not deny the fact of the material presence of warm ale, toothache or the English Channel, he struggled with their status. A mechanistic theory of the universe based on a couple of equations pissed him off like a painter pisses off a customer who is only interested in the size of a painting. He did not accept a human existence reduced to a tiny time period and confined to a rib cage and six feet of grave depth. Did not believe in abstract Good, abstract Love and World Evil. All the lofty generalizations didn’t make sense to him. “People don’t think in abstractions,” Berkeley said. There can’t be an abstract Boly. Even when you imagine a geometric figure, you don’t think of it through the idea of a triangle. The triangle in your mind will either be equilateral or something else.
To most contemporaries unfamiliar with the similar teachings of Buddhism, it all sounded like nonsense, and it cannot be said that Berkeley’s philosophy carried much weight during his lifetime. Yes, he was appreciated by Swift, whom they met when young Berkeley was trying to make a career in London. Yes, he was apparently supported by one of Swift’s two main loves, Vanessa, who bequeathed much of her fortune to Berkeley (a fact that still perplexes all scholars of history and philosophy of the first half of the eighteenth century). After all, there is no serious evidence that Berkeley and Vanessa even knew each other, so where did this generosity come from? Perhaps they had met either in London or already in Ireland, and Vanessa appreciated the optimism of the young philosopher, who, unlike her Swift, was not a misanthrope and apparently believed in people.
But despite Vanessa’s money, Berkeley remained a failure. Swift introduced him into London society to help get funding for a massive project whose slogan sounded quite appealing: ‘The Empire must go further West’. Berkeley believed that Europe would inevitably slip into atheism and so it was necessary to carry the light of Christianity further, to new peoples in the Americas. For this purpose he envisioned establishing an academy in Bermuda, where Indians and colonists would be turned into shepherds and then sent to the mountains of California and the deserts of Nevada.
The money was promised, Berkeley invested all the funds he had received from Vanessa under the will in the venture, and set out to sow the word of God in the New World.
There he settled in Rhode Island, built a house and stared out at the ocean for three years, waiting for the promised investment tranches. But the tranches didn’t come. The inheritance money ran out, and the failed apostle Paul had to return home to Ireland, where he accepted the bishop’s office in Cloyne and spent practically the rest of his life in his diocese, researching the effects on the body of tar tincture, which he learned to make from the Rhode Island Indians.
It is customary to end a biography of George Berkeley with this instructive episode. This is what youthful dreams and attempts to seek God in an unsuitable world turn out to be. Somehow it is considered that Berkeley accepted his defeat, and naturally the code goes on that the grief-philosopher died in the circle of his neighbors over a cup of tea. Apoplectic stroke. Death was instantaneous.
Berkeley’s latest essay, “Seiris,” does feature that very tar tincture and strong recommendations for its use.
Berkeley wrote “Seiris” during the four-year plague epidemic in the British Isles: strict quarantine, plenty of free time, attempts to protect themselves from the disease by some improvised means. Plus, the tar tincture was apparently really helping him. “As for me, a sedentary life has long doomed me to a poor state of health, accompanied by various ailments, and especially nervous colic, which made my life a heavy burden; the situation was aggravated by the fact that my sufferings were aggravated when I worked. But since I began to use the tincture of tar, I feel, though not a complete cure of my old disease, but nevertheless a gradual return of health and peaceful sleep, and I consider this remedy the greatest of all worldly graces, and I am deeply convinced that I owe my life, except, of course, to Providence, to this remedy.”
According to Berkeley’s instructions, tar tincture is recommended for fevers, inflammation of the lungs, smallpox, gout, shortness of breath, and nervous disorders. But this is a minor part of the book, which is mostly devoted to a light and even entertaining presentation of a picture of the world in which God and Matter contest man’s right to primacy. In the thirty years that have elapsed since the publication of Berkeley’s first philosophical experiments, his doctrine has not changed a bit, and his views have not moved an inch. He is still fighting for man’s place in the world hierarchy and trying to pull him out of the clay and into the Shining Realm of Spirit.
True, unlike his philosophical system, this recommendation was much sought after by his contemporaries. Perhaps they thought that the mad obscurantist knew something about some sausage trimmings and had spent three years in the company of Indians for a reason.
During his three years on Long Island, Berkeley not only learned how to drink tar, but also seriously influenced Samuel Johnson, the founder of Columbia University. Johnson himself considered Berkeley to be the main source of his own ideas. Berkeley’s merit has also been seen on the west coast of the United States – the university center of California is called Berkeley.
Berkeley the philosopher was not appreciated until a hundred years later. His direct heirs include Schopenhauer, Einstein, Mach, Jung, and many others. The theory of relativity, the study of the subconscious mind, the world as will and representation – there is a part of it all from Berkeley, the man Who knew that the whole is always greater than the simple sum of its parts. Lenin, well versed in fashionable philosophical currents, said that there was nothing in all anti-materialist philosophy that had not already been written by a half-witted Irishman. He did not use the term “Anglo-Saxon” to stigmatize Berkeley, which as applied to the philosopher would have been not just an invective but also an ethnically accurate invective.
***
In Russian, millions of meanings and their shades can be conveyed with the help of syntactic nuances and a small set of words. In English, maybe because of the peculiarities of syntax, or maybe because of a larger vocabulary, precision is preferred. That is why in modern Russian language the majority of modern technical terms are of English origin. It’s not that it’s impossible to find your own analogues to leasing, acquiring and everything else, it’s just that the Russian language is malleable and very sensitive, and here even phonetics describes the essence of the matter better than all possible analogies. The Russian language is vague: one short three-letter word and hundreds of derivatives can describe opposite shades of feelings, states, past and future, good and bad, happiness and pain. Which is, of course, a mysterious contradiction of the theory about the structure of life here – according to the concepts. How to live by concepts with a loose, shimmering conceptual apparatus of all shades?
Of course, like any generalization, the above limps on both feet. But it was necessary to somehow bring up the idea that Russian is optional and roguish, while English tries to be extremely precise, even in food. In Russian kotleta – a very specific term meaning a very specific cut of meat on the bone – is a product of various shapes, most often made of minced meat, in English kotleta is a cutlet. Perhaps in the pursuit of this precision is the legacy of centuries of chicanery about love, the meaning of life, and property that has made language the joint product of poets, philosophers, and lawyers. We can only guess. However, it is a fact that the Russian language often lives by the principle of the anecdote: “On the fence *** is written, and there is wood”.
The collaboration of poets and lawyers in English gave birth, for example, to such a concept as the “protein bomb.” It is literally a dish with a hypertrophied animal or plant protein content. They’re peanut bars or wieners and roast beefs slathered in ground meat and wrapped in a hundred layers of bacon. It is a historical phenomenon from the Middle Ages, both a testament to the increased role played by proteins in a world organized in a very physiological way, with the need for a strong arm, and on the other hand, a paraphrase of the legend of the Porcupine’s needle, the essence of life hidden under a layer upon layer of multilayers, where you have to peel away layer after layer, like in an onion, to get to the essence.
There are tons of such dishes, but the most internationally popular can probably be considered Scotch eggs. In rough form, it’s a hard-boiled egg sealed in mincemeat and then baked or deep-fried. The stuffing can be either chickpeas or lentils, or it can be from all kinds of paired and unpaired ungulates, as well as feathered.
The perfect Scotch egg has a crispy crust, tender juicy mince and the egg itself with the yolk cooked in a pouch. If you’re looking for a culinary metaphor for Scottish Prosecco, this meat-covered egg is the perfect example of it. The beginning of life, encapsulated in the source of life.
***
Scotland’s fate is dramatic, but not to the point of tragic unbearability as Ireland’s history. The Scots successfully resisted most English invasions, and even ruled England for a hundred years. Through the divine right of the House of Stuart. But it was the Stuarts who proved to be the material through which England found for herself the possibilities of her own freedom and the levers to rule the world. It took two Scottish heads, Mary Stuart and Charles I, and also a union with the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707, when from two states with a common monarch they became one country. Along with other Celtic regions. But, mind you, there are no Irish or Welsh colors on the UK flag. Only the English St. George and the Scottish St. Andrew.
Edinburgh and Glasgow joined the world trade expansion where London, Bristol and Southampton were already swimming in money. The Empire, fulfilling the dictates of Bishop Berkeley, was taking its course to the West. The UK was getting richer, and Scotland was getting richer with it. There, the Bank of Scotland, the Bank of England’s counterpart, came into being. Industry grew there, like in some Guangzhou after Deng Xiaoping’s market decrees.
The University of St. Andrews began to compete on equal terms with Oxford and Cambridge, and in the technological sciences, and ahead of them (the competition is still going on, and at times St. Andrews beats Oxbridge in the ratings). Scotland had a high literacy rate by European standards – 75% of the population in the mid-eighteenth century could read. And the number of women with elementary education was incomparably greater than even in France, which blossomed academically under Louis XIV. Scotland was one of the first countries to introduce grammar education for women and almost the first to make all primary education free.
In Edinburgh a rather motley intellectual stratum began to form, if not in quantity, then in quality not inferior to that of London. Scientists huddled together in packs, meeting in clubs, analogs of the English Royal Scientific Societies and their own world stars of science appeared. Even against an overall high background, two stood out – David Yum and Adam Smith.
They both lost their fathers. Hume in early childhood and Smith while still in his mother’s womb. Fatherlessness for the British philosopher is an almost obligatory point, so those who wish to do so can build a lot of fascinating psychoanalytic schemes on it.
Both apparently had little interest in women (about Hume, one of his biographers explains this assumption that, unlike most of his male contemporaries, Hume never contracted syphilis). Hume had a two-year affair in Paris. She was a lady of the world and he was a rather fashionable Scottish wit in Parisian circles. Letters have been preserved where Hume writes quite chastely about his feelings and hints at a meeting ahead. However, the philosopher’s beloved preferred him to one of the court favorites. Although, as a consolation either to us or to the deceased, Hume’s biographers write that she retained a lifelong affection for him. Nothing is known about Smith’s alcove activities at all. No letters, not even chaste ones, have survived because his entire personal archive, according to his will after his death, was consigned to the fire. So there’s plenty of scope for psychoanalytic constructs here as well.
Both were interested in moral issues. Both have written papers on ethics. Although one of them was the father of radical philosophical skepticism and the other was the originator of positive economic science, it appears that if they did not agree in some respects, they certainly enjoyed arguing with each other. And were friends for over a quarter of a century, until death separated them.
Hume attended the University of Edinburgh but did not graduate because his family insisted that he be immediately employed in law. He did not make a lawyer out of him, he instantly, as they would write today, “burned out on the job”. Then he tried his hand at commerce, but quickly went bust. He tried to return to the university to work in one of the departments, but nothing came of that either. Then he began to look for work as a teacher in some aristocratic family, but the only one who hired him was Lord Annendel, who put Hume in charge of his son. But, since the son was mentally unwell and could hardly distinguish a spoon from a fork, Virgil and Cicero, which were going to feed him Hume, the student did not need.
Hume wrote a book on the theory of knowledge in which he outlined his understanding of the world order, which later made him famous, but no one noticed the book. There weren’t even scolding reviews, let alone complimentary ones. Having secured such a labor biography, Hume was about to despair, but an unexpected tiny inheritance – forty pounds of annual income, saved him from having to sign up as a sailor or soldier. He engaged in historical research and published a history of Great Britain in eight volumes, which in every way exalted the role of Scotland and skeptically interpreted the achievements of England. This essay was an unexpected commercial success, and Hume was never needed again.
The success of these and other books helped him to establish himself in Edinburgh society and to publish his Treatise on Knowledge again. And this time he produced in narrow, however, circles of well-meaning people the effect that Guy Fawkes must have envisioned when he laid gunpowder under the English Parliament.
Hume was accused of atheism, nihilism, all and sundry moral sins and moral ugliness. Adam Smith, studying at Oxford at the time, was caught with the Tractatus, and received a severe reprimand from the Dean. The book tried to be seized from stores and libraries. To be fair, Adam Smith was one of the few people interested in this work. But the instigators of the persecution may have foreseen the subsequent great destiny of Hume’s work, and wished to nip the flame in the bud. Looking ahead: they didn’t succeed. Hume as a philosopher was little known in his lifetime, but appreciated post mortem, death can really only be the beginning.
The main question that interested Hume was the relationship of subject and object. Man and Nature. Hume excluded God from this dynamic pair, probably to avoid turning philosophy into a love triangle. Hume had Newton’s example in front of him. He found a point from which to visualize the structure of the universe as a dynamic relation of bodies. Hume tried to do the same, but instead of physical points he operated with meanings.
Following his senior English empiricist colleagues, he recognized: the human mind is a blank slate, it contains no preset bugs or features. Everything he has at his disposal is acquired through experience. Experience fixes simple phenomena, such as a warm mother’s breast, and then, as more and more objects appear around it, it becomes accustomed to connecting simple facts into complex ones. Associate a warm mother’s breast with a particular woman, a woman with a family, and so on. In Newton’s world, individual bodies are connected to each other by gravity. Hume finds a similar force in the world of ideas, which we might call habit, the repetitiveness of experience. From objects in themselves, in the absence of experience, meanings are not extracted. Old Adam, seeing water for the first time, cannot logically conclude that it is possible to drown in that water. The force of habit gives birth to what might be called the effect of experienced expectation in man. Man drinks water from a stream and thereby satisfies his thirst. Sees smoke and has reason to say there must be a fire nearby.
The problem, however, is that in nature, in addition to obligatory causal relationships, there are also accidental ones. And so knowing the causes does not guarantee that the subject also knows the effects. Let’s say a certain tyrant starts a war in Europe in which millions die, the economy and traditional values collapse. But the combined forces of the tyrant’s opponents defeat him, judge him with a terrible trial, and restore order and morality.
A little more than half a century later, another tyrant unleashes a war in Europe, whose victims also number in the millions, albeit not all in a lethal sense, the economy crackles, and values of morality are again severely tested on a variety of fronts. The combined forces of the tyrant’s opponents on the basis of this await a new Nuremberg, the subsequent growth of the economy and the triumph of morality. But, unlike Newton’s universe, in the universe of reason the connections between cause and effect do not contain an element of obligation. And history doesn’t have to repeat itself simply because similar plots have been in it before – whether it’s five or five hundred times. Retribution is just one possibility among others. The people of Iraq and the people of Belgrade, for example, are aware of this, still expecting that someone will one day be held accountable for the bombing of their homes, but seem increasingly imbued with Hume’s ideas on ressentiment.
You need a God for inescapable punishment, but there is no room for God in A Treatise on Reason, as has already been said. Moreover, Hume goes further, and gradually leads us to the conclusion that the world does not exist, but only our idea of it. For someone the world is a planet inhabited by militant gays, for someone a global pharmaceutical company, and for someone it is enough to have a sprawling apartment in Sviblovo, through the window of which on a sunny day you can see the mysterious spear of the Ostankino TV tower, through which, as old people say in a half-voiced voice, the air is saturated with Zeitgeist vapors. But old people no longer have anything to expect from this life, and they can afford all sorts of things….
So, the world is our idea of it. But then, who are we, and more specifically, who am I? A Newtonian indivisible body or a slightly more complex mechanism? To find the human self, Hume begins to peel the human being from experience like an onion. If we remove all the layers, that is where our self, that grain of which the world mind is made up, will be. But, as in the case of the bulb, having reached the end, Hume discovers a void in the place of the Self. Man, his great mission and high status in nature are all fiction. And the universe of humans is a cyclopean movie theater that doesn’t sell a single ticket for a movie about the end or beginning of the world.
All facts, all ideas – simple or complex – are an illusion. Only the feelings are not illusory: you see your mother and feel love for her, but not because she fed her milk, but for no reason at all.
The world around us and ourselves is a figment of the imagination, a product of faith. Not the religious faith Faith, but simply Belief or Trust Belief or Trust Trust Trust. We believe in the habitual order of things, in its continuity and independence, just so we don’t go crazy. Faith is as much an affect as love, pride, pain, pleasure, something that cannot be defined, and freedom is nothing but chance.
Then on what does the so-called World hold, if it is only the sum of affects and illusions? On pain and pleasure above all, answers Hume. It is their antithesis, in combination with other affects, that forms moral and ethical principles. Reason and God have nothing to do with it. We recognize our enemy as bad because he hurts us, and we consider a friend good because he multiplies our pleasure. In the same way the best of us are able to combine feelings, such as recognizing an enemy as bad, to respect in him some of his qualities, courage or nobility, or how dashingly he sings while going on the attack. Similar interpretations of pain and pleasure, shared utility rather than blood or soil, make individuals into a shared civilization or nation.
Adam Smith, while sharing Hume’s skepticism about the possibilities of knowledge, was at the same time very optimistic about the moral part of the teachings of his mentor and friend. And especially in all that had to do with private and public benefit. He did not conceive of the universal scale on which Hume operated; he was interested in the economic relations into which the non-existent selves of a non-existent world enter with each other.
He built his political economic theory on the Humean idea of the natural sympathy and trust that people are capable of feeling. And which are the essential foundation of public utility, public happiness, and the wealth of the private individual and society.
His picture of the world seemed paradoxical. Smith considered the driving force of economics to be egoism and man’s desire for wealth and prosperity. But, in the absence of other forces suppressing these aspirations, such as government intervention, selfish aspirations begin to serve the common good. If it gets cold and there is a demand for woolen clothing, the scarf entrepreneur naturally develops the business of sheep herd owners, wool merchants, cloth factories, seamstresses, and all related trades, from wine merchants, whose wares are used to wash good deals, to furniture makers, whose chests of drawers adorn the houses built with the proceeds of woolen negociation. The bakers, greengrocers, shoe-makers and other small shopkeepers, in pursuit of their own enrichment, make the world comfortable and the people in it a little happier.
The model of the cosmos in Smith’s account was the marketplace, the place where goods, services, and money are transformed into public goods. Supply and demand in the market is regulated by the “invisible hand”. This concept from the realm of esotericism has become a key concept for proponents of liberal economic structure and unlimited competition. Smith was against prohibitive taxes, administrative price fixing, and in general any decisive role of the state in the economic mechanism. He was the first to pay serious attention to the relationship between labor and capital, to the phenomenon of money, which simplified the archaic system of exchanging commodity for commodity and started the wheel of circulation. On the paradox of pricing: there is nothing more useful than water, but it costs nothing, while diamonds are practically useless, but cost a colossal amount of money.
Smith’s book “On the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” met with great admiration from the public and was republished four times during the author’s lifetime alone. It was not a speculative construct or utopia: contemporaries saw much of what Smith was talking about firsthand, Britain was rapidly becoming richer, and the Industrial Revolution was just around the corner, which is not included in the book, but Smith is believed to have been one of the first to point out the importance of taming steam and using it in production. He was familiar with the founding fathers of the United States, and it is no coincidence that his work, along with Locke’s ideas, became the basis for revolutionary processes in these former American colonies.
In private life, however, nothing curious seemed to happen to Smith. Of course, he got a lot of regalia and positions. His annual income allowed him to exist without worrying about his current earnings. However, he worked for the Scottish Customs and gave himself to this business with all seriousness, apparently so as not to disturb the constructions of his own economic theory.
Smith died fourteen years after the publication of the major work of his life and fourteen years after the death of his lifelong friend, David Hume. Like Hume, Smith died of colon cancer. However, unlike Hume, he did not organize himself a Socratic death feast, which, incidentally, we know from the letter of Smith himself, who was present at this tribune. Hume and his friends feasted, read Roman novels and played whist while bantering about the afterlife. The publication of Smith’s report on this caused a terrible scandal in Edinburgh, and the police were forced for a long time to put guards at Hume’s tomb, so that the burial of the philosopher did not desecrate the numerous zealots of strict religious values.
Two hundred years later, Smith and Hume appeared on twenty-pound bills. The banknote with Smith was printed by the Bank of England and the banknote with Hume was printed by the Bank of Scotland.
