Sympathy and Empathy

Abstract

and refer to two distinct and complex psychological capacities that have quite distinct meanings. Nevertheless, philosophers and psychologists have had tremendous difficulty keeping the two concepts distinct. Since the classic works by Max Scheler on and by Edith Stein on empathy, theorists have been trying to define the terms by supposing empathy is merely a type of The current literature also illustrates this confused situation. In this essay I examine three such contemporary writers, Lauren Wispe, Nel Noddings, and Douglas Chismar, and show how each account is deficient or confused (or both), since they fail to characterize and accurately distinguish between and empathy. The larger purpose of this essay is to propose a characterization of sympathy and that clearly distinguishes between the two terms, but in such a way that there can be no question that they refer to two different psychological states. Sympathy typically arises at the pre-reflective level as an instance of feeling another individual's predicament, whether it is his/her sadness or joy, leading (using Scheler's terminology) to a type of emotional identification between two individuals. Empathy, on the other hand, consists of understanding another person's situation, which presupposes reflexivity. When empathy occurs, there is a distinct shift in intentionality from passive to active, and from pre-reflexive to reflexive. The empathizer becomes intensely conscious of the other person's situation. This is not a mere instance of reflective or selective attention (as in the case of sympathy); instead it is an instance of a distinct and different kind of conscious experience. In this way, it is possible, as well as necessary, to clearly differentiate between the two concepts. The Classical Accounts of Sympathy and Empathy In The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler distinguished between four distinct senses of sympathy. These senses were: (1) immediate community of feeling; (2) fellow-feeling about something or other; (3) emotional infection; and (4) emotional identification with the feelings or states of another.1 English does not have single terms, as does German, to express these distinctions of meaning within the word sympathy; the tendency, on the contrary is to submerge them under the one term sympathy, but with the result that the word in ordinary usage is quite ambiguous and vague. However Scheler does tend to associate and empathy, apparently under the consideration that his four distinctions adequately capture the central meaning of empathy (einfuhlung); alternatively, one might also say that Scheler does not find a specific need to distinguish between and empathy, and this despite the fact that einfuhlung is almost an exact transliteration of the original Greek word em-pathes. The exception would be the projective or mimetic empathy developed by Lipps and others which Scheler quite correctly dismisses as confused. do not first imagine the feelings associated with a blush and somehow project these on the other person. As Scheler insists: It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in laughter joy.2 The relation to the bodily states or feelings of the other is not a causal one: For the relation referred to here is a symbolic, not a causal one.3 In a footnote Scheler adds: We might also say that it is not the mere relation of the 'sign' to the presence of 'something' that is subsequently inferred; it refers to a genuine, irreducible property of the sign itself.4 Scheler's symbolic analysis of remains a benchmark, but his failure, or perhaps his refusal to distinguish between and empathy is a major defect in his theory of This defect was identified by Edith Stein in her study on the nature of empathy. Stein not only finds a clear distinction between and empathy, but she takes the position that empathy is categorically distinct and different from …