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| English Poetry Special Lecture I(2020) |
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1. Sympathy: a retrospect 1) Sympathy in the 18th century: Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Grouchy 2) Shaftesbury: "The moral sense is that which produces in us feelings of “like” or “dislike” for our own (first-order) affections. When the moral sense is operating properly, it produces positive feelings toward affections that promote the well-being of humanity and negative feelings toward affections that detract from the well-being of humanity. The second-order feelings that the moral sense produces can themselves motivate one to action. And people are virtuous if they act from those second-order feelings." * While, then, Shaftesbury’s philosophy is one that is heavily indebted to both ancient philosophy (combining Neo-Platonism and Stoicism), both constitutive elements of sympathy as a social principle as it will evolve in the course of the eighteenth century are already present - albeit without the word itself: first, sympathy, i.e., natural affection as a human faculty of sociability and benevolence, and second, the inner dialogic structure of self, or self-doubling. Shaftesbury thus sets the transformation of sympathy going towards an intersubjective and dialogic principle constituting the self. His fascinating anticipation of Adam Smith’s figure of the impartial spectator and inner dialogism is striking (as is indeed his anticipation of Hume’s notion of sympathy as an inadvertent, quasi-contagious communication of sentiments)(Helga Schwalm, "Transformations and Migrations of Sympathy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy and Poetics" 156). 3) Hutcheson: "Every human is “made uneasy” by the pain of others. And unless other factors intrude, we will try to relieve others’ pain when we see it, without any thought of whether it will benefit us. This is an automatic response, something our constitution compels us to immediately. When we witness another’s pain our distress “immediately appears in our Countenance” and we “mechanically send forth Shrieks and Groans” (Beauty and Virtue 238). Human nature must, then, include a “natural, kind Instinct” (Beauty and Virtue 239)(148)...we have a prior disinterested concern for others' well-being(149). 4) Hume: "sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature. We are also certain, that it has a great influence on our sense of beauty, when we regard external objects, as well as when we judge of morals. We find, that it has force sufficient to give us the strongest sentiments of approbation, when it operates alone, without the concurrence of any other principle; as in the cases of justice, allegiance, chastity, and good-manners. We may observe, that all the circumstances requisite for its operation are found in most of the virtues; which have, for the most part, a tendency to the good of society, or to that of the person possess’d of them. If we compare all these circumstances, we shall not doubt, that sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions; especially when we reflect, that no objection can be rais’d against this hypothesis in one case, which will not extend to all cases. Justice is certainly approv’d of for no other reason, than because it has a tendency to the public good: And the public good is indifferent to us, except so far as sympathy interests us in it. We may presume the like with regard to all the other virtues, which have a like tendency to the public good. They must derive all their merit from our sympathy with those, who reap any advantage from them: As the virtues, which have a tendency to the good of the person possess’d of them, derive their merit from our sympathy with him.
Most people will readily allow, that the useful qualities of the mind are virtuous, because of their utility. This way of thinking is so natural, and occurs on so many occasions, that few will make any scruple of admitting it. Now this being once admitted, the force of sympathy must necessarily be acknowledg’d. Virtue is consider’d as means to an end. Means to an end are only valu’d so far as the end is valu’d. But the happiness of strangers affects us by sympathy alone. To that principle, therefore, we are to ascribe the sentiment of approbation, which arises from the survey of all those virtues, that are useful to society, or to the person possess’d of them. These form the most considerable part of morality.
5) Smith: "As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation [ˇ] It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy [ˇ] By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments."
"The first [person] is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I proper!y call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator I was endeavouring to form some opinion. The first is the judge; the second the person judged of."
*Smith insists there is no spontaneous, immediate sympathetic communication; rather, understanding the situation of another is a necessary component of our sympathetic fellow-feeling. In a second pivotal move of transformation, he notoriously gives sympathy an inward bent to render it the foundation of our moral sense. This depends on a splitting of the self “ into two persons"(Helga 157-58)
6) Grouchy: "our moral sentiments originated in natural and unthinking sympathy for others’ suffering, that our moral thoughts originated in reflection...We cannot say, however, that morality is grounded in sentiment alone, as it is reason that teaches us what is just and unjust. But it is even less arguable that it be grounded solely in reason, as reason’s judgment is nearly always preceded by and followed by a sentiment that asserts and ratifies it. And it is even originally from sentiment that reason acquires moral ideas and derives principles."(125-26,Letter VI)
2. Lord Kames and the Poetics of Sympathy(from Helga 159-72)
1) "Sympathetic Emotion of Virtue": "The sympathetic emotion under consideration bestows upon good example the utmost influence, by prompting us to imitate what we admire...And every exercise of virtue, internal and external, leads to habit."
2) a sympathetic impact of reading: "The power of language to raise emotions, depends entirely on the raising of such lively and distinct images as are here described: the reader's passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, forgetting that he is reading, he conceives very incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-witness" --the power of texts and narration.
3) a striking (Pre-) Romantic dimension of Kames' theory of literature and reading: "our sympathy is not raised by description; we must first be lulled into a dream of reality, and every thing must appear as passing in our sight." --the pivotal turn towards a sympathetic aesthetic creativity.
3. Sensibility (Susan Manning)
The eighteenth-century study of sensibility was part of what Mackenzie described as ‘the science of manners’. As a literary mode it embodied an experimental approach to character based on Hume’s acceptance of the ubiquity of the passions as motivators to action: ‘Morality . . . is more properly felt than judg’d of’; sympathy is ‘the chief source of moral distinctions’.Where Descartes had reasoned on the basis of analytic separation of mind and body, Scottish Enlightenment writers attempting to realize a comprehensive ‘Science of Man’ realigned the moral and physical selves(82-83).
Hume’s Treatise had re-expressed sympathy and sensibility as principles of connection (p. 228)... The pleasures of Sensibility were linked to perception intensified in momentary sensation: iterative and indefinitely renewable, but not able to be subsumed within larger explanatory paradigms of connected narrative. Sensibility simultaneously subscribed to and resisted philosophical history, embodying in its characteristic forms loss and melancholy as the inevitable price of progress in the world of Civil Society. It exulted in the particularity of sympathy in local and particular relations, extolling connection, and embodying its rupture. Antiquarian collections, like fictions of Sensibility, were committed to a public narrative of connection, but their actual attraction lay more in sequence without development, private pleasures rather than public utility. The objects of family history promised connection with the past, but their contemplation invoked a sense of loss rather than progress; the activity was denigrated by its association with excess and solipsistic or miserly pleasures, and the figure of the antiquary gloating over his collection was familiar in caricature. Sensibility featured heroes who had been rendered morbidly misanthropic through excessive emotional investment, and who drew generic characteristics from the ‘humourists’ of Renaissance writing: Smollett’s Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), for example, or – more analytically – Godwin’s Fleetwood. The virtue of such figures was measured by their abhorrence of ‘the society of man in general’(Fleetwood, p. 59); they were impotent benevolists. Fleetwood makes clear that a career in business offers unique opportunity for ‘extensive . . . power of relieving distress, of exciting industry, of developing talents’ and ‘supplying means of improvement’ – all of which are denied to men in retirement (p. 194). From the 1770s the hero or heroine of Sensibility delighted in ‘Nature’ rather than in cities or in company. Apart, that is, from the yearning desire for perfect, untroubled sympathetic communication with a single soul-mate. In ironic acknowledgement of the vicissitudes of human interaction, the ‘affectionate friend’ (Fleetwood, p. 68) in the literature and art of Sensibility was commonly a dog(87-88). 4. The Poetry of Sensibility(Patricia Meyer Spacks) A sense of depression marks the poetry of sensibility, both in its angry and in its gentler aspects. Indeed, the circuit of anger and depression helps to define the special note of this poetry, to differentiate it from, for example, the conventional poetry of melancholy (most familiar in Milton’s Il Penseroso) that preceded it. Melancholy, in seventeenth-century and earlier eighteenth-century poetry, often figures as a pleasurable emotion, providing opportunity for fruitful isolation and meditation. The poetry of sensibility does not typically call attention to its own melancholy as a self-justifying and self-sufficient state. Charlotte Smith declares herself unhappy but eagerly provides causes for her misery. Gray directly announces his unhappiness only in the sonnet on West’s death, where the stimulus to unhappiness virtually overwhelms the poem. Cowper actively denies dejection, although he often conveys it. But all these poets evoke a time out of joint, as well as a conviction that the notion of setting it right must be at best a hopeful fantasy. The concern for other people, the belief in an ideal of “sympathy,” then, does not provide great reassurance for middle- and late-century poets. Theenterprise of sympathy can lead to derogatory comparison of self with others, as it does for Gray, or to a despairing sense of the hopelessness of many human situations, as it does for Goldsmith. It can cause one to understand that existing social arrangements foster injustice (e.g., Cowper) without helping toward solutions. It generates anger as well as tenderness, but provides no obvious outlet for anger. Translated into poetry, the notion of sympathy registered the unease of a culture wishing and not wishing to confront its own inequities, but also the discomfort of individuals both preoccupied with their own feelings and possessed of a sense of obligation to look outside themselves. John Mullan has urged the importance of recognizing, about sensibility as a concept, “that the elevation of sensibility is not a clear indication of ideological confidence – that at the heart of such ‘theory’ is disturbance and hesitation.”16 Just so with sensibility’s poetry. It reflects not the smugness of a society convinced that all was for the best but the anxiety of a community worrying about itself. Its power comes partly from its contradictions. Syndy McMillen Conger alludes to the “sometimes contradictory hopes and fears” clustering around the “occasionally incompatible values” of sensibility.Those hopes and fears emerge vividly in the poetry that, making its subject feeling and the consequences of feeling, demonstrates the social and individual meanings of sensibility in operation(267). |
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1. Sympathy: a retrospect 1) Sympathy in the 18th century: Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Grouchy 2) Shaftesbury: "The moral sense is that which produces in us feelings of “like” or “dislike” for our own (first-order) affections. When the moral sense is operating properly, it produces positive feelings toward affections that promote the well-being of humanity and negative feelings toward affections that detract from the well-being of humanity. The second-order feelings that the moral sense produces can themselves motivate one to action. And people are virtuous if they act from those second-order feelings." * While, then, Shaftesbury’s philosophy is one that is heavily indebted to both ancient philosophy (combining Neo-Platonism and Stoicism), both constitutive elements of sympathy as a social principle as it will evolve in the course of the eighteenth century are already present - albeit without the word itself: first, sympathy, i.e., natural affection as a human faculty of sociability and benevolence, and second, the inner dialogic structure of self, or self-doubling. Shaftesbury thus sets the transformation of sympathy going towards an intersubjective and dialogic principle constituting the self. His fascinating anticipation of Adam Smith’s figure of the impartial spectator and inner dialogism is striking (as is indeed his anticipation of Hume’s notion of sympathy as an inadvertent, quasi-contagious communication of sentiments)(Helga Schwalm, "Transformations and Migrations of Sympathy in Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy and Poetics" 156). 3) Hutcheson: "Every human is “made uneasy” by the pain of others. And unless other factors intrude, we will try to relieve others’ pain when we see it, without any thought of whether it will benefit us. This is an automatic response, something our constitution compels us to immediately. When we witness another’s pain our distress “immediately appears in our Countenance” and we “mechanically send forth Shrieks and Groans” (Beauty and Virtue 238). Human nature must, then, include a “natural, kind Instinct” (Beauty and Virtue 239)(148)...we have a prior disinterested concern for others' well-being(149). 4) Hume: "sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature. We are also certain, that it has a great influence on our sense of beauty, when we regard external objects, as well as when we judge of morals. We find, that it has force sufficient to give us the strongest sentiments of approbation, when it operates alone, without the concurrence of any other principle; as in the cases of justice, allegiance, chastity, and good-manners. We may observe, that all the circumstances requisite for its operation are found in most of the virtues; which have, for the most part, a tendency to the good of society, or to that of the person possess’d of them. If we compare all these circumstances, we shall not doubt, that sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions; especially when we reflect, that no objection can be rais’d against this hypothesis in one case, which will not extend to all cases. Justice is certainly approv’d of for no other reason, than because it has a tendency to the public good: And the public good is indifferent to us, except so far as sympathy interests us in it. We may presume the like with regard to all the other virtues, which have a like tendency to the public good. They must derive all their merit from our sympathy with those, who reap any advantage from them: As the virtues, which have a tendency to the good of the person possess’d of them, derive their merit from our sympathy with him.
Most people will readily allow, that the useful qualities of the mind are virtuous, because of their utility. This way of thinking is so natural, and occurs on so many occasions, that few will make any scruple of admitting it. Now this being once admitted, the force of sympathy must necessarily be acknowledg’d. Virtue is consider’d as means to an end. Means to an end are only valu’d so far as the end is valu’d. But the happiness of strangers affects us by sympathy alone. To that principle, therefore, we are to ascribe the sentiment of approbation, which arises from the survey of all those virtues, that are useful to society, or to the person possess’d of them. These form the most considerable part of morality.
5) Smith: "As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation [ˇ] It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy [ˇ] By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments."
"The first [person] is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I proper!y call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator I was endeavouring to form some opinion. The first is the judge; the second the person judged of."
*Smith insists there is no spontaneous, immediate sympathetic communication; rather, understanding the situation of another is a necessary component of our sympathetic fellow-feeling. In a second pivotal move of transformation, he notoriously gives sympathy an inward bent to render it the foundation of our moral sense. This depends on a splitting of the self “ into two persons"(Helga 157-58)
6) Grouchy: "our moral sentiments originated in natural and unthinking sympathy for others’ suffering, that our moral thoughts originated in reflection...We cannot say, however, that morality is grounded in sentiment alone, as it is reason that teaches us what is just and unjust. But it is even less arguable that it be grounded solely in reason, as reason’s judgment is nearly always preceded by and followed by a sentiment that asserts and ratifies it. And it is even originally from sentiment that reason acquires moral ideas and derives principles."(125-26,Letter VI)
2. Lord Kames and the Poetics of Sympathy(from Helga 159-72)
1) "Sympathetic Emotion of Virtue": "The sympathetic emotion under consideration bestows upon good example the utmost influence, by prompting us to imitate what we admire...And every exercise of virtue, internal and external, leads to habit."
2) a sympathetic impact of reading: "The power of language to raise emotions, depends entirely on the raising of such lively and distinct images as are here described: the reader's passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, forgetting that he is reading, he conceives very incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-witness" --the power of texts and narration.
3) a striking (Pre-) Romantic dimension of Kames' theory of literature and reading: "our sympathy is not raised by description; we must first be lulled into a dream of reality, and every thing must appear as passing in our sight." --the pivotal turn towards a sympathetic aesthetic creativity.
3. Sensibility (Susan Manning)
The eighteenth-century study of sensibility was part of what Mackenzie described as ‘the science of manners’. As a literary mode it embodied an experimental approach to character based on Hume’s acceptance of the ubiquity of the passions as motivators to action: ‘Morality . . . is more properly felt than judg’d of’; sympathy is ‘the chief source of moral distinctions’.Where Descartes had reasoned on the basis of analytic separation of mind and body, Scottish Enlightenment writers attempting to realize a comprehensive ‘Science of Man’ realigned the moral and physical selves(82-83).
Hume’s Treatise had re-expressed sympathy and sensibility as principles of connection (p. 228)... The pleasures of Sensibility were linked to perception intensified in momentary sensation: iterative and indefinitely renewable, but not able to be subsumed within larger explanatory paradigms of connected narrative. Sensibility simultaneously subscribed to and resisted philosophical history, embodying in its characteristic forms loss and melancholy as the inevitable price of progress in the world of Civil Society. It exulted in the particularity of sympathy in local and particular relations, extolling connection, and embodying its rupture. Antiquarian collections, like fictions of Sensibility, were committed to a public narrative of connection, but their actual attraction lay more in sequence without development, private pleasures rather than public utility. The objects of family history promised connection with the past, but their contemplation invoked a sense of loss rather than progress; the activity was denigrated by its association with excess and solipsistic or miserly pleasures, and the figure of the antiquary gloating over his collection was familiar in caricature. Sensibility featured heroes who had been rendered morbidly misanthropic through excessive emotional investment, and who drew generic characteristics from the ‘humourists’ of Renaissance writing: Smollett’s Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), for example, or – more analytically – Godwin’s Fleetwood. The virtue of such figures was measured by their abhorrence of ‘the society of man in general’(Fleetwood, p. 59); they were impotent benevolists. Fleetwood makes clear that a career in business offers unique opportunity for ‘extensive . . . power of relieving distress, of exciting industry, of developing talents’ and ‘supplying means of improvement’ – all of which are denied to men in retirement (p. 194). From the 1770s the hero or heroine of Sensibility delighted in ‘Nature’ rather than in cities or in company. Apart, that is, from the yearning desire for perfect, untroubled sympathetic communication with a single soul-mate. In ironic acknowledgement of the vicissitudes of human interaction, the ‘affectionate friend’ (Fleetwood, p. 68) in the literature and art of Sensibility was commonly a dog(87-88). 4. The Poetry of Sensibility(Patricia Meyer Spacks) A sense of depression marks the poetry of sensibility, both in its angry and in its gentler aspects. Indeed, the circuit of anger and depression helps to define the special note of this poetry, to differentiate it from, for example, the conventional poetry of melancholy (most familiar in Milton’s Il Penseroso) that preceded it. Melancholy, in seventeenth-century and earlier eighteenth-century poetry, often figures as a pleasurable emotion, providing opportunity for fruitful isolation and meditation. The poetry of sensibility does not typically call attention to its own melancholy as a self-justifying and self-sufficient state. Charlotte Smith declares herself unhappy but eagerly provides causes for her misery. Gray directly announces his unhappiness only in the sonnet on West’s death, where the stimulus to unhappiness virtually overwhelms the poem. Cowper actively denies dejection, although he often conveys it. But all these poets evoke a time out of joint, as well as a conviction that the notion of setting it right must be at best a hopeful fantasy. The concern for other people, the belief in an ideal of “sympathy,” then, does not provide great reassurance for middle- and late-century poets. Theenterprise of sympathy can lead to derogatory comparison of self with others, as it does for Gray, or to a despairing sense of the hopelessness of many human situations, as it does for Goldsmith. It can cause one to understand that existing social arrangements foster injustice (e.g., Cowper) without helping toward solutions. It generates anger as well as tenderness, but provides no obvious outlet for anger. Translated into poetry, the notion of sympathy registered the unease of a culture wishing and not wishing to confront its own inequities, but also the discomfort of individuals both preoccupied with their own feelings and possessed of a sense of obligation to look outside themselves. John Mullan has urged the importance of recognizing, about sensibility as a concept, “that the elevation of sensibility is not a clear indication of ideological confidence – that at the heart of such ‘theory’ is disturbance and hesitation.”16 Just so with sensibility’s poetry. It reflects not the smugness of a society convinced that all was for the best but the anxiety of a community worrying about itself. Its power comes partly from its contradictions. Syndy McMillen Conger alludes to the “sometimes contradictory hopes and fears” clustering around the “occasionally incompatible values” of sensibility.Those hopes and fears emerge vividly in the poetry that, making its subject feeling and the consequences of feeling, demonstrates the social and individual meanings of sensibility in operation(267).
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