Sympathy across Eighteenth-Century Worlds: Proximity against Global Vision

Abstract

ABSTRACT Taking as its starting point eighteenth-century sympathy’s inclination towards local and familiar social relations, this chapter explores how the discourse on sympathy engages with and is transformed by imagining scenes well beyond the domain of proximity. The discursive negotiation of sympathy by Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, by Adam Smith in particular, displays a complex dynamic of relying on proximity and intersubjective presence on the one hand and reaching out by an act of the imagination on the other, thus bringing in a movement of spatial expansion and global vision. Smith’s version of ‘concentric circles’ (Forman-Barzilai) represents a potential global extension of his ethics as well as the limits of sympathy’s affective bonding. Contemporary literary reader-response poetics (Lord Kames) co-opts the Smithian concept of sympathetic imagination for fictional encounters with life beyond the reader’s own sphere: the sympathetic imagination serves to approximate vicarious experience. Rather than bring the world closer to home by such acts of the imagination, however, the popular literary writings on sympathy by Samuel Jackson Pratt are shown to thrive on sympathy’s geographical outward expansion, ultimately reinventing the operations of sympathy in terms of a pre-Enlightenment cosmological harmony with clear overtones of imperialism.