Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment by Christopher J. Berry

Author:Christopher J. Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

13

Hume and Superfluous Value (or the Problem with Epictetus’ Slippers)

Hume opens his essay ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ by stating that ‘luxury’ is a word of ‘uncertain signification’ (E-RA 287). He knows full well the position of, on the one hand, those ‘severe moralists’ (as he calls them – Sallust is named as an example) who berate ‘luxury’ as a vice and, on the other, those men of ‘libertine principles’ (Mandeville is his unnamed exemplar) who treat luxury as advantageous even when ‘vicious’. As is his wont, Hume states that this essay is designed to correct these opposed extremes. It is, however, clear, if only from the relative attention paid to it, that it is the former position that is principally in his sights. That focus is unsurprising because it is central to a particular animus within his political economy. It is this animus – his engagement with a distinctive but well-established and still well-entrenched moral stance – that concerns us here. While to look upon Hume from this perspective is not novel, its ramifications are more extensive than might be supposed. I here give an indication of this extent and limit the discussion to a key central argument. This argument I seek to capture in the notion (or conceit) of ‘superfluous value’.1

I

The late Stoic slave/philosopher Epictetus is recorded as saying that the measure for a slipper or sandal is the foot. ‘Measure’ (metron) here means not merely size 8 feet for size 8 slippers but, more significantly, that a slipper is for the purpose of foot protection. Once that appropriate measure is forsaken, there are no limits; there is nothing inappropriate about, successively, a gilded, a purple and an embroidered slipper (Epictetus 1928: para 39). The clear message is that these are superfluous refinements that should be eschewed. It follows, moreover, that there is no poverty in possessing ‘merely’ an unadorned sandal; indeed, the reverse is true.

The meaning of ‘poverty’ here needs unfolding. There is a long-standing discourse within which poverty has a positive moral connotation. Within this discourse two emphases can be identified. The first of these is exemplified by Epictetus’ Stoicism but is equally manifest in the ascetic tradition in Christianity. Here, like its contextual close relations, ‘simplicity’ and ‘austerity’ as well as ‘severity’, ‘poverty’ refers to the estimable practice of temperance and continence. To be severe in this sense is to be in control of oneself and thus of one’s actions; it is to know the true and proper value of things and be in a position of forswearing temptations, that is, things of illusory value or luxurious superfluities like embroidered slippers. The second emphasis is more civic and is embodied in Sparta and ‘ancient Rome’. Of the latter, Hume explicitly says that (according to the severe moralists) it combined its ‘poverty and rusticity’ with ‘virtue and public liberty’ (E-RA 275). This virtue is undermined once luxury goods for private consumption (like embroidered slippers) are available; in the words of the seventeenth-century civic moralist Algernon Sidney, poverty is ‘the mother and nurse of … virtue’ (1990: 254).

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