The Genre of Natural History of Man Through Stephen Gaukroger’s Lens: Intellectual Sentiments Within Stadial History: Giambattista Vico, the Encyclopédie, Adam Smith

In this paper I review the place of intellectual sentiments, that is, sentiments involved in the human effort to make sense of the world within stadial history through Stephen Gaukroger’s lens. More precisely I focus on curiosity, the early modern equivalent of ancient Greek θαυμάζειν. In various places within the encyclopedic project of Diderot and D’Alembert, the taste for the marvelous and the miraculous amounts to a passion for the novel and bizarre; as a result, curiosity matches the basic human need for mental awareness that requires education in order to transform pathological and sometimes cruel curiosity into benign, scientifically oriented desire for knowledge. In Vico’s complex project, simultaneously open to unprecedented forms of inquiry and depended on divine providence, curiosity is a desire of an inquisitive human nature craving for knowledge. In Vico’s thought, the hybrid status of curiosity, that can take the form of either a moderate or a Promethean, “hubristic” desire to inquiry, mobilizes scientific endeavors; but it can easily veer off course and generate the naïve, self-deceit of vulgar wisdom and scholarly arrogance. It is helpful to parallel this account with Adam Smith’s account of stadial history that apparently turns the emphasis on socio-economic factors and excludes providence. In splitting curiosity into unrefined and refined though, Adam Smith ascribes some autonomy to this intellectual sentiments alongside socio-economic factors within the same stage of human civilization.