Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Katja Haustein Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung. By Verena Olejniczak Lobsien. Paderborn: Brill and Fink. 2022. xvi+497 pp. €59. ISBN 978–3–7705–6706–5 (ebk 978–3–8467–6706–1). In recent years, sympathy and other relational feelings, such as empathy and compassion, have received a surge of scholarly attention (see e.g. Eric Schliesser, Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009) and Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017); Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Vintage, 2018); and Katherine Ibbett, Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)). But while sympathy tends to be discussed as a particular mode of intersubjective affection with certain social, ethical, and moral-philosophical implications, Verena Olejniczak Lobsien offers a timely and refreshing contribution to the debate by reminding us that sympathy has not always been understood in the sense of a 'fellow feeling' predominantly, if not solely, associated with humans (Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. [End Page 239] Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), s.v.). Focusing on the time period between 1200 and 1700, Lobsien reconstructs early modern conceptions of sympathy that do not restrict the term to human relations, but use it to describe the idea of a general connectivity between animated and (seemingly) inanimate nature, the human and the divine, the soul and the body. As natural sympathy the concept appears as a universal principle, understood as an 'alles mit allem verklammernder organischer Weltzusammenhang' (p. 207: 'organic interrelation that connects every aspect of the world'). Lobsien's study, which is the fruit of the interdisciplinary research project 'Transformationen der Antike: Sympathie. Zur Transformations- und Funktionsgeschichte des Mit-Fühlens zwischen 1600 und 1800', is carefully researched, impressively detailed, and comprehensive, offering an illuminating discussion of sympathy in early modern philosophy, literature, and music, reading less familiar European thinkers alongside canonical writers and composers, including Hildegard von Bingen, Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Marsilio Ficino, Anne Conway, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. The substantial bibliography contains a useful and wide-ranging overview of relevant research in English and German. (However, and this is especially unfortunate for a book of this weight and ambition, there is no subject index that would have helped the reader to navigate more comfortably the wealth of information provided.) Lobsien portrays the history of sympathy as the radical transformation from natural sympathy as a form of oneness with the world to sympathy as a predominantly social affair. In so doing, and in contrast to most of the scholars listed above, she does not critically dissect the concept, but rather embraces it as a particular mode of 'Allteilhabe' ('universal sharing') that we moderns have, if not entirely lost, at least temporarily forgotten. Consequently, the overall tone of the book is nostalgic, with Lobsien establishing a direct link between the loss of natural sympathy (roughly around the turn of the seventeenth century) and the current state of Western civilization, contemplating the Covid crisis and climate change as two outcomes of a process she describes as marked by a growing sense of alienation between us humans and the natural world. In this way, Lobsien's argument resonates with path-breaking accounts of the civilization process as a distancing process, exemplified by the works of Benjamin, Elias, Adorno, and, more recently, Albrecht Koschorke in Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999). But in contrast to her predecessors, Lobsien remains vague when it comes to identifying and explaining what may have caused this process. The question what exactly triggered the 'entscheidenden Einbruch' ('critical decline') in the history of sympathy (p. 68) in cultural and mental-historical terms remains largely unanswered, as does the question of how we might retrieve what we have lost (if this is what...