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I. Sympathy in the 18th century 1) Three meanings of sympathy common in eighteenth-century philosophy. i. Mechanical communication of feelings and passions: contagio ii. Process of imagination, or of reason, by which we substitute ourselves for others: sensus communis iii. Our “delight in the happiness and sorrow in the misery of other people: other-directedness such as compassion, pity, and charity 2) Why sympathy became so ubiquitous in the eighteenth century? i. A shift from traditional and more intimate forms of community to new forms of social organization. ii. What holds s society of strangers together? self-interest, or Christian ideas of charity becoming less and less viable. iii. Sympathy as a new and creative philosophical response to the practical political problem of human connectedness in an increasingly disorienting world. iv. Sympathy, that is, emerged as an other-directed sentiment capable of sustaining the minimal social bonds needed to realize the new social order and indeed one capable of so doing without requiring acceptance of the theistic foundations of Christian conceptions of neighbor love. II. Spinoza's Conception of Sympathy 1) introducing three discrete elements of sympathy i. Epistemic associationism(part 3 of the Ethics): the claim that sympathy concerns identification of one individual with another via an associative process founded on resemblance, “if we imagine someone like ourselves to be affected by an emotion, this thought will express an affection of our own body similar to that emotion. So from the fact that we imagine a thing like ourselves to be affected by an emotion, we are affected by a similar emotion along with it." ii. An action-motivating sentiment: the claim that sympathy is action motivating and leads its possessor to seek to relieve the distress of others. “that which affects with pain a thing that we pity affects us too with similar pain...we shall endeavor to free from its distress the thing we pity.” iii. Self-interest and self-love: the claim that the grounds for such action is not an altruistic concern for others but principally a concern for the self and its pleasures and pains “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.” Love, for example, is redefined from the perspective of the self. love as a matter of sympathy and antipathy
2) sympathy both other-directed and selfish Sympathy leads us to relieve the distress of others; in this sense it serves other-directed purposes. At the same time, the motive behind our so doing is self-interest; we seek to relieve the pain of others because of the pain that we feel as a consequence of their distress. III. Sympathy, Self-Interest, and Others: "an action-motivating sentiment capable of serving to establish social bonds between individuals" Checks on self-interest 1) Joseph Butler: human beings, as “imperfect creatures,” necessarily always “depend upon each other.” Thus, compassion may not lead its possessor always to promote the happiness of others, yet it will “prevent him from doing evil” and at least sometimes “incline him to relieve the distressed.” 2) Rousseau: pitié as one of the two passions natural to men, and itself valuable not because it leads us to do positive good but because it compels us to be reticent to do harm by “moderating in every individual the activity of self-love” 3) Edmund Burke, Henry Home Lord Kames, Immanuel Kant, and Sophie de Grouchy 4) Kant: This perspective can even be found in the precritical Kant, for whom “sympathy and complaisance are grounds for beautiful actions that would perhaps all be suffocated by the preponderance of a cruder self-interest,” ...in the Metaphysics of Morals that even though we indeed are under no duty to “share the sufferings of others,” we yet indeed have “a duty to sympathize actively in their fate,” and thus have an “indirect duty” to cultivate our benevolent affections insofar as they can help to spur us to our genuine duty. Thus Kant too insists that it is “a duty not to avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic necessities are to be found but rather to seek them out,” and indeed ultimately counts sympathy as among “the impulses nature has implanted in us to do what the representations of duty alone might not accomplish.” 5) Sophie de Grouchy: "sympathy is the first cause of the feeling of humanity, the effects of which are so precious. It compensates for a portion of the evils issuing from personal interests in large societies, and it struggles against the coercive force that we encounter everywhere we go and that centuries of Enlightenment alone can destroy by attacking the vices that have produced it! Amid the shock of so many passions that oppress the weak or marginalize the unfortunate, from the bottom of its heart humanity secretly pleads the cause of sympathy and avenges it from the injustice of fate by arousing the sentiment of natural equality" 6) The reason why sympathy became so important in the 18th century: the insistence on sympathy’s capacity to check self-interest and to prompt other-regarding ethical action may owe at least in part to a general fear that self-interest was on the rise and benevolence on the wane. IV. Sympathy and Physiology: Yet to say that sympathy was principally conceived as a response to a practical problem begs another more fundamental question: why was sympathy per se the answer to this problem? 1) the principal extant alternative to sympathy was increasingly coming to be regarded as less viable as a solution. Love, that is, conceived as the charity that bound neighbors together, required epistemic commitments that eighteenth-century thinkers became increasingly less willing to make. Eighteenth-century epistemology tended to separate sympathy from theism, and indeed to present sympathy as a substitute for a caritas whose theistic foundations were increasingly regarded as epistemically unavailable; in this sense, sympathy sought to take us straight to neighbor love without becoming waylaid by the necessity of a lexically prior love of God. 2) Even as eighteenth century thinkers grew more skeptical toward the transcendent, they came ever more to embrace the immanent, and thus challenges to theism arose simultaneously with renewed interest in the nature of both human physiology and physical matter... The study of sensation stood at the forefront of several of the fields of inquiry focused on sympathy in the eighteenth century, including especially the medical and physiological researches...Scottish physicians regarded sympathy as “an extension of sensibility,” which enabled them to generate fruitful associations of the “action of sensation, the coordination of organs in the body, and the ‘social principle’ that allows ‘fellow-feeling’ to emerge in a society.” 3) the physiologist Pierre Cabanis: not only offers one of the century’s best developed accounts of the relationship between sympathy and immediate physical sensation but also goes on to suggest that the proper education and cultivation of such might in time engender a specifically “moral sympathy” of a type that he explicitly associates with both Francis Hutcheson and Smith and his sister-in-law de Grouchy. 4) de Grouchy: i. "sympathy" is “the disposition we have to feel as others do” ii. “reproduction of the general impression of pain on our organs depends on sensibility and above all on the imagination.” iii. “Of what great importance it is, therefore, to train the sensibility of children so that it may develop to its fullest capacity in them. Their sensibility needs to reach that point where it can no longer be dulled by things that in the course of life tend to lead it astray, to carry us far from nature and from ourselves, and to concentrate our sensibility in all the passions of egoism or vanity.” 5) the contemporary interest with the investigation of the connections that bound together seemingly discrete entities i. Bishop George Berkeley: "As the attractive power in bodies is the most universal principle which produceth innumerable effects, and is the key to explain the various phenomena of nature; so the corresponding social appetite in human souls is the great spring and source of moral actions. This it is that inclines each individual to an intercourse with his species, and models everyone to that behavior which best suits with common well-being." ii. Aberdeen philosopher George Turnbull: "A careful examiner will find, that all our affections and passions are not only well-suited to our external circumstances; but that they themselves, and all the laws or methods of exercising them, with their different consequences, have a very exact correspondence with, and analogy to the sensible world, and its laws. Is there not an obvious similarity between the principle of gravitation toward a common center, and universal benevolence, in their operation? . . .Homogeneous bodies more easily coalesce than others: and so is it with minds. For is not friendship a particular sympathy of minds analogous to that particular tendency we may observe in certain bodies to run together and mix or adhere? Compassion, or a disposition to relieve the distressed, is it not similar to that tendency we observe in nutritious particles of several kinds, to run to the supply of wants in bodies which they are respectively proper to supply." V. The End and The Means: "granting that sympathy offered a fitting answer to a specific question, and indeed a timely answer to this question, to what degree ought it be regarded as a good answer? In particular, was sympathy in fact capable of providing the check on self-interest and concomitant encouragement of other-directed feeling that it promised? 1) partisans of natural human sociability and the existence of a genuine capacity for benevolent concern for others: Shaftesbury and Hutcheson 2) those who reduced all ethical action to manifestations of self-interest or self-love: Hobbes and Mandeville 3) The original line of demarcation separating the two camps: Where Hobbes and Spinoza insisted that good and bad were to be judged by the standard afforded by the passions, their opponents, such as the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, argued that “no man’s private inclinations are the measures of good and evil,” for “the inclinations themselves are to be circumscribed by some principle which is superior to them.” 4) Adam Smith, "only a refinement of the selfish system"?: “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”
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