On Sociability and Solitude in Civilised Society: Christian Garve and the Reception of the Scottish Enlightenment

3.1 Sociability is necessary for the cultivation of understanding

As previously noted, the question of whether solitude is necessary for scholarship has existed since ancient Greece. According to Taylor, on this issue ‘Eighteenth-century opinion divided sharply; more sharply perhaps […] than in any previous period’.²³ In other words, solitude was praised on the one hand as a path leading to truth, whereas on the other it was regarded as a path towards irrationality, prejudice and fanaticism. In particular, the latter view was combined not only with pathological interpretations but also with the idea that solitude was something uncivilised, whereas the spread of sociability was considered as a form of civilisation.²⁴ Garve’s claim that sociability is necessary for the cultivation of understanding is grounded in this intellectual background. Why, then, is sociability necessary for the cultivation of understanding? According to Garve, self-knowledge requires a relationship to an object:

Admittedly, theoretical knowledge of human nature in general can be drawn from observations that the philosopher makes about himself; and its acquisition therefore appears possible even in the most complete solitude. Yet when one asserts this, one does not consider that self-observation is originally prompted—and at all times furthered—by our comparing ourselves with others. Human beings are made to live outside themselves before returning into themselves [außer sich zu leben, ehe er in sich selbst zurückkehrt]—first to observe the objects that surround them, and only then, through a light reflected back from these objects to contemplate themselves [ein von den Gegenständen auf ihn zurückgeworfenes Licht, sich selbst zu betrachten].²⁵

Here, self-knowledge does not refer so much to the recognition of the self in a literal sense as to the recognition of inner representations; in short, it refers to the cognition of experience in general. Garve had already emphasised the structure of human cognition ‘to live outside oneself before returning into oneself’ in his early work. In his translation of Adam Ferguson’s Institutes of Moral Philosophy, he called this structure interest.²⁶ This structure of cognition applies not only to mere objects but also to social phenomena. As long as sociability comprises the interaction of the self and others within a relationship of interest, knowledge concerning social cooperation is cultivated through sociability.²⁷

As noted above, the development of understanding through sociability occurs through the acquisition of empirical knowledge gained through social interactions. However, the significance of sociability for the development of understanding remains unclear. Garve pointed out that sociability contributes to the formation of opinions in two ways. First, our understanding develops by being instructed by others. In particular, association with the wise provides knowledge that cannot be found in books. Second, the very act of speaking before others is an opportunity to form opinions. Even if it were true that our thinking is cultivated in solitude, Garve argued that we are motivated to organise and generalise our thoughts only when we attempt to speak before others.²⁸

Thus, through sociability we (1) acquire a certain know-how concerning social activity, (2) are taught various kinds of knowledge, so to speak as second-hand knowledge, and (3) gain the motivation to organise our opinions to communicate them to others. According to Garve, studying and reflecting in a state of solitude has value only insofar as it presupposes the moment that we live in the world of sociability and are always prepared to return to it.

3.2 What philosophy and poetry ought to be

Garve’s claim itself may not appear particularly novel. What is important, however, is that Garve uses this argument as a critique of the poetry and philosophy of his own time. He points out that poetry and philosophy, now produced in seclusion like garrets, once existed within the sphere of sociability. With regard to poetry, he wrote the following:

Poetry and eloquence were, before the invention of writing, the only teachers of humankind; and they long remained the most eminent ones even after this art had been invented, though it had not yet spread widely. […] For the sake of society, for the entertainment of others, and with the intention of receiving from them admiration or reward, they gathered the tales of earlier times and adorned them with rhythm and song.²⁹

Regarding philosophy, he states as follows:

Even later, when science properly so called—or philosophy—emerged, it at first appeared only in the form of social conversation. […] The Greeks had no other name for reason than that of speech [Rede]; to conduct scholarly enquiries meant, for them, to converse about their subjects; and, in accordance with its oldest name, logic is nothing other than the art of learned conversation.³⁰

Such views were expressed considering modern transformation, whereby poetry and philosophy came to be written and read in seclusion—that is, in a state of solitude. Moreover, the view that reason and speech were the same in ancient Greek may be interpreted as an antithesis to modern reason, which turns away from the world and seeks to observe it from a transcendent standpoint, more specifically, as an antithesis to the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and their followers.

Nevertheless, Garve did not wish to argue that philosophy should entirely return to its ancient form. He also stated that scholars and poets must deliberately place themselves in solitude.³¹ However, he simultaneously also points out that remaining in solitude for long periods is dangerous. The advantage of solitude lies in the ability to pursue one’s ideas without being disturbed by the external world; yet it also opens the way to delusion and fanaticism.³² Therefore, as already noted, whether in philosophy or in poetry, insofar as they are intended to be communicated to others in some form, their authors must return to the sphere of sociability. A state of solitude, appropriate to philosophers and poets, is thus a place to cultivate the vitality required to return to the circle of human society.³³

3.3 On reading

In solitude, the scholar engages in reading. Garve considered books preferable for oral communication in the transmission of scholarly matters. However, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, reading became even more important as knowledge became increasingly specialised and systematised with the progress of learning. This applied not only to scholars but also to the public. With the growing complexity of society and progress in learning, it has become difficult to convey any kind of knowledge about society through sociability alone.³⁴

In addition to these circumstances, the emergence of a culture of silent reading should be noted.³⁵ Aside from specialised scholarly works, moral and didactic literature was often read aloud in households or salons, that is, in sociability. Such work gradually came to be consumed through silent reading in solitude. Garve assumes that reading takes place in a state of solitude, yet retains traces of the culture of reading aloud. Therefore, Garve understood reading as akin to conversation:

Books are those things that can best take the place of people for our instruction, and nothing has a greater resemblance to a […] conversation than reading. In books, too, people speak with us and communicate to us their ideas in full concerning the subjects that are treated in them.³⁶

Thus, good reading consists of reading in such a way that the author (or characters within the work) seem to speak vividly to us. In other words, careful listening is essential. Likewise, speaking is also important in reading, and we should actively speak to the author.³⁷ Only through such dialogue does reading become a form of quasi-sociability in solitude.³⁸

Now, if there are good readers, there are also bad readers. This includes those who do not possess the skill to engage properly in dialogue with books. However, another type of bad reader is the one who lacks concentration (Aufmerksamkeit). Garve seeks the cause of the lack of concentration in sociability: ‘Indeed, the attention is distracted in many ways in social life, whether people come together for conversation, for amusement, or for the conduct of their affairs’.³⁹ The decline in concentration, he suggests, is due to the various pleasures and passions produced by sociability:

Sometimes, when company is numerous, it is merely the noise; at other times it is the sensual pleasures that accompany social intercourse—the enjoyments of the table, of gaming, and of dancing; and finally it is the passions that so easily arise in human association—ambition, hatred, timidity, envy, or jealousy—which occupy our minds while we are assembled with others and render us incapable of attending to those objects, less sensual or less passionate, that might instruct us.⁴⁰

It is particularly in civilised society that passions such as ‘ambition, hatred, timidity, envy, or jealousy’ are excessively aroused. Indeed, the most remarkable feature of On Sociability and Solitude lies in its (moralist-style) critical depiction of the present condition of solitude and sociability in civilised society. This issue is examined in the following section.

4.1 The expansion of mechanical labour through the division of labour and the isolation of workers

According to Garve, people now live in an increasingly complex civilised society. One major cause of this complexity lies in the development of industrialisation and the division of labour, which gives rise to what Garve calls ‘a mechanical labour [eine mechanische Arbeit]’. This is characterised as a form of isolated labour in contrast to the craft labour of the apprenticeship system, which is carried out through oral communication and cooperative work.

This obstacle, which arises for the progress of the lower classes in knowledge and morality from the mechanical and unsocial character of their occupations, is increased rather than diminished by the growing prosperity of industry and commerce. For that very division of labour, which is indispensable for bringing manufactures to the highest possible perfection, confines each worker ever more narrowly to the mere repetition of simple operations, thereby enriching his mind with ever fewer kinds of knowledge and giving him ever less occasion for a lively exercise of his powers.⁴¹

The development of a civilised society inevitably deprives people of cooperative labour which is carried out in sociability and provides an opportunity for cultivating understanding, thereby making human beings more ignorant. By contrast, therefore, ‘a mechanical labour’ obstructs the cultivation of understanding. Consequently, people become less familiar with ‘social and political associations [gesellige und politische Verbindungen]’.⁴²

Garve noted that this deprivation occurred especially in England:

In England, where in certain manufactures this division has been carried the farthest, and where the perfection of the products has been brought to the highest degree, and in that very England, in which the greatest mass of insights and knowledge is to be found […], yet that very class of ordinary manufacturing workers, according to the testimony of well-informed writers, stands behind their counterparts in other countries, for example, in Germany, in enlightenment.⁴³

As noted above, Germany was not in as miserable a situation as England. Nevertheless, Garve believed that the establishment of Sunday schools, which spread in Germany during the same period, responded to the need to provide another place in which workers could acquire the know-how of social activity as compensation for the loss of sociability within labour.⁴⁴ In short, with the expansion of the division of labour, providing some opportunities of education for workers became necessary to promote the development of their understanding.

Now, guessing who are the ‘well-informed writers’ mentioned in the previous quotation is not difficult. Adam Smith is one of the greatest writers in this field. For in 5.1.3.2. in The Wealth of Nations, Smith states as follows:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But Understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his Understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. […] His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.⁴⁵

This view of Smith corresponds to the earlier statement that the ‘very division of labour […] confines each worker ever more narrowly to the mere repetition of simple operations, thereby enriching his mind with ever fewer kinds of knowledge and giving him ever less occasion for a lively exercise of his powers’.

As Hasek also argues, Garve might not accept Smith’s principles of political economy, nor did he regard them as decisive;⁴⁶ he was rather critical of doctrinaire approaches to political economy. For him, the universal principles of political economy must be limited by specific circumstances in practice. In a book published in 1785, he noted, ‘All universal maxims are suspicious in practical matters. The more we gather experiences, especially in the political economy and learn the exceptions that restrict the universality of these maxims […], the less universal they become’.⁴⁷ Garve, therefore, accepted Smith not as the father of political economy but as a social observer.⁴⁸ It also seems that Garve styled himself not as a ‘German Smith’ but as a ‘German Hume’, as Hume was more inclined to examine the particular and specific matters of civilised society without being preoccupied with deriving general principles.

However, this reception revealed the limitation of Garve’s social thought. He recognised the structural problem that a civilised society deprives community workers and leaves their understanding undeveloped. However, rather than seeking a structural solution to this problem, he turned to the moral improvement of individuals engaged in politics and the economy. One indication of this shift is that, after publishing his translation of The Wealth of Nations (1794–6), he undertook translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1798–1801) and Politics (1799–1802).

The recognition that social problems transcend the level of individual agency and therefore require social or structural solutions would have to await nineteenth-century thinkers, especially Friedrich List, Hegel and Marx. As noted above, Garve believed that Germany had not yet undergone industrialisation to the same extent as England. Conversely, this meant that there was still room for individuals to respond successfully to the problems of bürgerliche Gesellschaft—the term by which Garve consistently translated Smith’s ‘civilised society’ as bourgeois society.⁴⁹ This, I suggest, explains why, despite his reception of the Scottish Enlightenment and his sustained engagement with political and social themes, Garve never developed a theory of political and social thought proper, but remained within the framework of virtue theory, or more precisely, moral psychology.

4.2 Frivolous or business-orientated sociability in civilised society

Garve also points out that the sociability practised in a civilised society tends to hinder the development of people’s morality, not only through the isolation of workers caused by mechanical labour, but also through the excessive sociability of the middle and upper classes. Therefore, Garve claimed that the latter must withdraw from excessive sociability and seek an appropriate state of solitude, even if they are not scholars.⁵⁰

Sociability in a civilised society can be broadly divided into two types. The first is the pursuit of frivolous sociability in the form of diversion. It is ‘more a diversion than an occupation of the mind: it merely fills up time without our really applying it to any definite purpose’.⁵¹ In such a sociability, ‘the more numerous and the more splendid the circles become, the more insignificant the conversations become; and the fewer opportunities they offer for instructing oneself’.⁵²

The second is a form of sociability in which serious conversations occur. However, the central topics of such sociability are ‘only the objects of ambition or of self-interest that arouse this interest’.⁵³ More specifically:

It is always politics and commerce, or agriculture and household economy—it is the news or the amusements of the day that provide the material for these reflections. Through society one becomes ever more entangled in the affairs of the world.⁵⁴

Notably, politics is counted here among the objects of interest in sociability. It is commonly believed that sociability cultivates citizen’s political virtue.⁵⁵ Indeed, as we saw earlier, Garve also pointed out that, owing to the isolation produced by the division of labour, people become less familiar with ‘social and political associations’. The politics that Garve has in mind here, however, is politics only insofar as it is connected with ‘ambition’ or ‘self-interest’:

The present moment, the current conjuncture, a gain that now entices us or a loss that threatens us, an open office which we seek for ourselves or into which we wish to place one of our favourites—in short, the present, the sensible, the external: these are what occupy the excessively sociable people of the world without ceasing; they therefore acquire an ever greater power over their minds and ultimately rule them without restraint.⁵⁶

In this statement, Garve clearly understands the ‘ambition’ or ‘self-interest’ of people as the desire for wealth and social status:

Once we enter social life, we become all the more aware of what wealth and social status [Reichthum und Rang] mean and of the advantages they confer. The solitary person can do without them without experiencing very unpleasant feelings, provided only that he does not suffer a lack of what is necessary. But in intercourse with the world, there occur at every moment occasions on which the poorer and more humble person finds himself either deprived of certain comforts or exposed to certain humiliations.⁵⁷

Furthermore, the desire for wealth and status ultimately undermines our ‘gentler interest of morality [sanftere Interesse der Moralität]’. Garve states:

It is therefore no wonder that in society one learns to value wealth and power [Macht] even more; that the inclinations which these two goods naturally arouse are there inflamed into violent passions. Against such passions, the gentler interest of morality cannot sustain the struggle.⁵⁸

With the development of a civilised society, the desire for wealth and status or power increases, and topics in sociability become dominated by questions of how one’s wealth and power may be expanded or how one may succeed economically and politically. Thus, sociability becomes vulgar and no longer suited to the cultivation of moral character.

The frivolity and vulgarity of sociability in a civilised society give rise to a type of person who is lonely in the midst of sociability. Such individuals, Garve says, also act on the basis of ‘ambition’ and ‘self-interest’:

Others still love solitude out of a lower kind of ambition and lust for domination, because they would rather live under inferior company and with their servants and humble attendants than among free people and their equals, in a manner appropriate to that relation.⁵⁹

Such people are often found in large cities; yet they ‘live in the world as at a masquerade and enjoy in the former roughly the same pleasure that one seeks in the latter’.⁶⁰ They are often in coffeehouses and, while engaging in sociability, observe others to manoeuvre successfully themselves. They behave as ‘unnoticed spectators’.⁶¹ Even people with great talent, once they become inhabitants of such a masquerade, ultimately withdraw from sociability or are driven out of it. The reasons, Garve says, are ‘that they demand too much from their companions in society with regard to conversation, and require too much attention for themselves’.⁶² More precisely:

Both arise from a certain pride: the first because, however modest their language may be, they silently place themselves so far above others, that they do not consider those others worthy of their company; the second because they regard everything they say as so important that everyone ought to listen to them in silence.⁶³

4.3 Self-love as a pathology of civilised sociability

Moral corruption produced by civilised sociability is not limited to the pursuit of wealth and status. Garve also argues that this gives rise to an excessive form of self-love. Garve also points to the case ‘when men desire to be not merely esteemed but also deeply loved by all those with whom they associate’.⁶⁴ Such extreme self-love is, likewise, a cause of human solitude within the sociability of a civilised society. As a typical example of a person possessing such self-love, Garve cites Rousseau:

What then deprived Rousseau of all these friends? What gradually plunged him into such deep misanthropy that he first fled from people into solitude, and finally, in Paris, in a little attic room, wished to be forgotten by the whole world and turned everyone away from his door? Many causes came together here; but the following was certainly one of them. — As a man whose sensibility was as excessive as his ideas were often extravagant, he wished not merely to be admired by all with whom he associated—although even in this he carried his claims very far and believed that only a few valued him and his works according to their full worth—but he also wished to be deeply loved by everyone; and this demand is far greater and far more impossible to fulfil.⁶⁵

Garve examined the course of events by which Rousseau was expelled from Parisian society, was invited by Hume to move to England, and eventually even fell out with Hume. He generalised the lessons from this episode as follows:

What existed in Rousseau in the highest degree is found in many people to some extent. They were made to be esteemed and sought after by many, yet they make the absurd claim to be the intimate friend of just as many. This is naturally not granted to them; and thus they also renounce the happiness that arises from sociability.⁶⁶

He then continues: ‘To prevent this error, nothing is more useful than precisely Hume’s disposition and advice’.⁶⁷ In other words, ‘The Europeans, he says in his essay on polygamy, best understand how one may live happily in the world: one must have only one wife, few friends, and many good companions’.⁶⁸ For Garve, even the problem of self-love should not be solved politically but personally. Indeed, Garve also seems to regard excessive self-love as a product of the complexity of civilised society, and in particular, the frivolity and vulgarity of Parisian sociability. However, he does not generalise Rousseau’s experience as a pathology of modernity. Rather, he treated it as a matter of individual experience and sought its resolution within the sphere of personal relationships. Thus, even when Garve identified excessive self-love as a pathology generated by civilised society, he ultimately sought a remedy in the moral cultivation of individuals rather than social or political reform.