Notion Of Sympathy Research Articles

The origin of human morality: An evolutionary perspective on Mencius’s notion of sympathy

ABSTRACT This paper investigates Mencius’s notion of sympathy from the perspective of evolutionary biology. First, I point out that Mencius and evolutionary biologists concur that humans are endowed with a unique ability to sympathize with others beyond kin and friends. Subsequently, I offer an analytic account from an evolutionary perspective on how this ability emerged and developed as an innate human quality—especially referencing recent theories that state that cooperation is a crucial factor that helped foster such a quality. Further, this paper addresses in-group/out-group distinction in terms of the scope of sympathy. In particular, I respond to Donald Munro’s thesis that this distinction serves as a critical boundary for the workings of sympathy. Finally, I show that Mencius’s (and other Confucian thinkers’) thoughts on sympathy are not only compatible with modern evolutionary discourses but also contribute to the psychological mechanisms that may have enabled humans to regard others with sympathetic concern. Thus, this essay sheds light on the mechanisms of sympathy that Mencius and other Confucian thinkers illustrated as identifying oneself or one’s kin with others. I then surmise that such mechanisms most likely emerged as a fundamental psychological principle for humans initially reaching out to others.

Relational Knowledge as an Aspect of Local Knowledge

In this paper, I explore a heretofore undiscussed aspect of Hayekian local knowledge, which I call relational knowledge. I develop relational knowledge through the use of Smithian notions of sympathy. Then, I discuss how relational knowledge operates in competition and entrepreneurship. To demonstrate relational knowledge in action, I discuss two forms of interventionism which could disrupt the formation of relational knowledge: industrial planning and school choice.

MUSIC, MORALITY AND SYMPATHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH SERMON

ABSTRACTWhile the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

Human Connection in the Light of the Writings of Karl Marx and Amartya Sen

This article uses Karl Marx’s notions of alienation and antagonism to understand human connection, defined as the interrelationship between human beings that helps transcend self-interest and fosters the sense of solidarity. The Marxian notions are revisited using the works of Amartya Sen, particularly those on identity and violence. Sen’s critique of rationality is discussed, invoking his notions of sympathy, antipathy, and commitment. The article uses two texts, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Ekannoborti, as vantage points to understand the key concepts of Marx and Sen. It then discusses the backgrounds of the authors and the political interpretations of their work and shows how the overriding importance ascribed to a particular identity may convolute the literary motivation of an author.

Sympathie élocutoire, transparence du style et langage de la passion : la rhétorique selon Hume et Smith, prélude à la poétique du (pré)romantisme

Alors que se théorise une nouvelle rhétorique de communication, le concept de sympathie chez Hume et Smith réarticule l’équivoque entre expérience et pouvoir persuasif de la passion présente au sein du couple èthos-pathos depuis Aristote. La vis rhetorica de la sympathie humienne procède d’une esthétique réfléchissante aux effets moraux immotivés. Construisant un dispositif du moi projection du spectateur impartial, Smith objective sympathie et sentiments moraux. Il accentue le caractère linguistique de la communication et identifie le style dénué de figures à la transparence éthique de la sociabilité. La préface des Lyrical Ballads conjoint pathos et sympathie poétique. La simplicité de figures créatrices jaillit du langage idéal de la passion, à la différence de l’ enargeia performative du verbe blakien, parousie du logos où s’auto-réfléchit une sympathie absolue. Dans les odes de Gray et Collins, le poète en quête de sympathie affronte encore la personnification abstraite. Mais le pathème de l’écriture lyrique dans « The Mad Mother » et les deux « Nurse’s Song » atteste, outre la labilité de l’ èthos locutoire, une indétermination métrique et grammaticale des figures.

Language, Behaviour, and Empathy. G.H. Mead’s and W.V.O. Quine’s Naturalized Theories of Meaning

ABSTRACTThe paper compares Mead’s and Quine’s behaviouristic theories of meaning and language, focusing in particular on Mead’s notion of sympathy and Quine’s notion of empathy. On the one hand, Quine seems to resort to an explanation similar to Mead’s notion of sympathy, referring to ‘empathy’ in order to justify the human ability to project ourselves into the witness’s position; on the other hand, Quine’s reference to the notion of empathy paves the way to a more insightful comparison between Mead’s behaviourism and an explanation of the emergence of the linguistic from pre-linguistic communication based on empathic identification processes. However, Mead is less ambiguous than Quine in his use of the notion of sympathy finds a fecund parallel in the current neuroscientific and neuro-phenomenological hypothesis on ‘empathy’. The article contends that the ambiguity in Quine’s account of empathy is due to the exigency of trying to elucidate the link between the rules of language in a cultural context and the natural, that is ‘instinctive’, basis of the process of learning a language. This is the reason why his epistemological behaviourism is particularly close to the non-reductionist naturalism of Mead. The working hypothesis proposed in the conclusion deals with the core notions of ‘gesture’ and ‘behaviour’.

Fellowship beyond Kinship: Sympathy, Nature and Culture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially import ant aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley’s critical intervention in the term’s long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel’s central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley’s main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human viola tion of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative read ing in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

Ape imagination? A sentimentalist critique of Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality

This essay draws on Adam Smith’s moral sentimentalism to critique primatologist Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality. De Waal has spent his career arguing for continuity between primate behavior and human morality, proposing that empathy is a primary moral building block evident in primate behavior. Smith’s moral sentimentalism—with its emphasis on the role of sympathy in moral virtue—provides the philosophical framework for de Waal’s understanding of morality. Smith’s notion of sympathy and the imagination involved in sympathy is qualitatively different from animal sympathy. I argue that Smithian sympathy includes the ability to represent propositional attitudes and take into account multiple perspectives which are then synthesized into a singular impartial perspective. Furthermore, Smithian moral judgment requires the capacity for emotion regulation and moral self-cultivation, or the ability to shape and control one’s reactive attitudes. Taken together, these capacities far outstrip the capacities of animals, disrupting de Waal’s gradualism.

Adam Smith, the Impartial Spectator and Embodiment: Towards an Economics of Accountability and Dialogue

This article argues that Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and the impartial spectator in his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] connects the individual to society. In this work, Smith’s economics are far more complex than mere self-interest as a driver of commerce. Self-interest functions within a socio-ethical framework that limits excess and narcissism. However, morality was not based on normative assumptions for Smith and Hume. Morality was directly linked to social and cognitive processes in which the approbation of others was important. In other words, behaviour was based on the perceptions of others; therefore, action was to be adjusted to obtain sympathy. The impartial spectator refers to the cognitive process in which moral assessments are made. Therefore, the empiricism of Smith differs from determinism as related to physical causation because it operates through habituation and/or socialisation that can accommodate change and variation. Clearly, the socio-cultural presupposition of society directly influences the moral judgment of the individual. However, this deterministic tendency may result in an uncritical assessment of moral behaviour. To address this potential limitation of determinism, the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is explored as an alternative theory which attempts to move beyond a dualism rooted in materialism/idealism. This perspective may expand on Smith’s economics by adding a more inclusive assessment of behaviour. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeality provides a theory of behaviour that goes beyond a particular society’s perceptions of acceptable behaviour. This framework may provide the impartial spectator with a more encompassing perspective on moral assessment that may also be beneficial for sustainable commerce. It will be proposed that Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and the hyper-dialectic of the flesh highlights the role of accountability and dialogue in moral assessment that may contribute to responsible economics in the South African context.

Achieving Social and Economic Equality by Unifying Business and Ethics: Adam Smith as the Cause of and Cure for the Separation Thesis

AbstractAdam Smith's famous argument that self‐interested decisions will ultimately improve social welfare seems inconsistent with the social and economic inequality characterizing Smith's time and today. I contend that these inequalities are the result of Smith's failure to explicitly situate the economic man he describes in The Wealth of Nations within the broader social context he articulates in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, an omission which has since given rise to the separation thesis, which states that business decisions have no moral content and moral decisions have no business content. In response to this modern‐day Adam Smith problem, I integrate Smith's notions of sympathy, intimacy, and justice into a unification thesis that articulates how individuals might balance their self‐interested and benevolent motives. By reuniting the discourses of business and ethics, this research may inform contemporary theories of business ethics and provide normative guidance for managers.

Once more with feeling: the Scottish Enlightenment, sympathy, and social welfare

ABSTRACTThis article examines the concept of ‘sympathy’ that is prominent in the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume and Adam Smith, attempting to tease out some of its implications for issues of social welfare. After commenting on the rediscovery of the interest in ‘sentiment’ in recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment, I look more closely at the differences in the concept of sympathy as formulated by Hume and Smith. I contrast Hume’s more mechanistic with Smith’s more performative conceptualisation. However, Hume and Smith both argued that sympathy is biased towards those we are closest to, and towards the fortunate and powerful. Taken seriously, their notion of sympathy does not just advise benevolence and generosity, but points to one of the reasons why such sentiments are often skewed and not in themselves adequate to support ideals of social welfare. The limitations of sentiment suggest the necessity of more structural remedies to social exclusion.

Note sur antipathie et sympathie dans les Géoponiques

In this short article, the author tried to gather what in the Geoponica is supposed to be explained by the notions of sympathy and antipathy, that is to say the proximity or the distance that exists in nature between living beings, plants and animals. If the word sympathy is barely used, the concept that operates may be identified with the modern biocoenosis (living together). Antipathy however, frequently mentioned in the Geoponica, does not seem to match any current concept, and is often associated with magical practices. The purpose of this article is to show how this pair of concepts, sympathy and antipathy (which dates back to Plutarch), could be used to identify what we call biotopes. Moreover, this double concept plays a significant role in medicine ; more specifically, phytotherapy is the subject of many passages of this – mainly early Byzantine – book.

Rewriting Paterian Sympathy: Vernon Lee and Elitist Empathy

AbstractRenewed critical interest in the author and critic, Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget, 1856–1935) has tended to focus on the way she rewrites the aesthetic and moral values of literary art in terms which account for a broad readership. This essay challenges the view that Lee’s aesthetic theory accommodates a non‐specialist reader by reassessing her commitment to the concept of aesthetic empathy. It does so by arguing that Lee’s aesthetic empathy is a modified version of Walter Pater’s notion of aesthetic sympathy, which demands a specialist practitioner. Lee sought to articulate the terms of her aesthetic theory in a way which emphasized a sharper social conscience than that which we find in the works of Pater, but this does not mean that she ‘redirected her view toward the audience.’ Like Pater, for whom the literary artist must write specifically for ‘the scholar and the scholarly conscience,’‘those men of a finer thread,’ Lee demonstrates a concern for a reader with a specialist set of skills and proficiencies. Whilst Lee’s notion of aesthetic empathy originates from the German school of psychological aesthetics, her modification of Pater is apparent in the way both writers draw on contemporary British Associationist psychology. The fact that Pater and Lee share in the same kind of Associationist terminology is evidence of the similarity of their notions of sympathy and empathy. Overall, this essay shows how the concept of aesthetic empathy particularly appealed to Lee due to the way it accounted for the individuality of the perceiver with its emphasis on a muscular and sensuous responsiveness, but eliminated the selfish element of an individualism that threatened to remove the Paterian individual from public life.

« To see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness » : l’horizon moral dans les romans de George Eliot

In spite of her apostasy, George Eliot still believed in the moral and spiritual values of Christianity and it is hardly surprising she should have used the metaphor of the horizon to refer to this ideal notion of the essence of Christianity since the horizon is both unreachable and yet always visible, showing the direction one ought to follow. Her characters’ moral odyssey is about learning to see beyond the limits of their own self-centered experience; however, as Lydgate underlines in Middlemarch, « a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass. » We shall therefore focus not only on George Eliot’s insistence on the necessity « to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness » but also on the idea that a genuine moral horizon can only exist in her eyes if people develop the capacity to contemplate various horizons, not only the most distant ones but also those that are the closest to them so that they should not neglect the sufferings of individuals for the sake of abstract ideals. Sight and vision are clearly linked in George Eliot’s novels and so is the notion of sympathy since Lydgate compares the idea of the mind shrinking and expanding with that of « a systole and a diastole » thus implicitly referring to the beating of the heart.

The Music of Social Intercourse: Synchrony in Adam Smith

Adam Smith often used musical and synchronous figures of speech to convey the notion of sympathy, as when our sentiments “keep time together.” In this way Smith explored social cooperation or “harmony.” Smith’s emphasis on synchrony in treating the social ecology of moral sentiments provides a theoretical touchstone for recent psychology experiments showing that synchronous experience conduces to cooperation. In this paper we report the results of a word search on Smith’s use of synchronous figures in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and explore the important places that synchronous language holds in his works. We relate these matters to the issue of the relationship between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, and to solidarity and group selection in evolution. Meanwhile, we note that Smith was well aware of society’s inherent disharmonies.

PERMEABILITY AND ITS USES: AFFECT AND AUDIENCE IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S ELEGIAC SONNETS

This article argues that the physical language of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, informed by nineteenth-century medical notions of sympathy and cardiac permeability, worked to transmit affect to her readership, thus gaining their literary patronage. To support her claim, the author provides a brief background on the nineteenth-century medical notion of sympathy, a notion that involved “corpuscles” transferred between people. Like these corpuscles, feelings and emotions were, as Adela Pinch has argued, floating entities, but the author argues that they could also effect biological change. This biological concept, appropriated as literary metaphor, revolves around the heart, an organ that, in 1784, was shown permeable to infection. Smith's intensely physical images of heartache, crying, pain in the breast, or the fires of love elicited similar symptoms in the readers themselves. After discussing the bodily imagery of Smith's and her readers’ sonnets, the article ends by considering the effects of sympathetic transfer. While Smith's Elegiac Sonnets mainly utilize sympathy to increase reader loyalty, later poems would use the permeability of affect toward political ends.

“Caloipe,” “Mary Lovetruth,” and “A Female American”: Women Editorialists during the American Revolutionary Era

Articles signed with female pseudonyms and contributed to the newspaper The Massachusetts Spy (1770–1775) demonstrate that female editorialists warranted their public-sphere participation with a wide variety of rhetorical methods. Choice of topic, degree of assent or dissent from male writers, and manipulation of tone, especially humor, assisted in women's public-sphere participation during the Revolutionary period when conventions regarding writerly authority were in flux. In turn, male rhetors used religious and medical warrants to control female public sphere participation. Although women's disagreement about overtly political issues was not tolerated, subtle declarations of patriotic behavior more obviously connected with feminine topics and behavior allowed women authors to write publicly when they aligned their contributions with republican notions of sympathy and concern for the common good. In the end, republicanism rendered women's bodies contested ground, both warranting their public-sphere participation and increasing surveillance over them.

Blundering into Wisdom? The Missing Elements of Hayek's Spontaneous Order Liberalism

This paper discusses F. A. Hayek's theory of spontaneous order and cultural evolution. After briefly outlining the main elements of Hayek's approach, we review some of the criticisms addressed to his evolutionary theory. In particular, we discuss a number of paradoxes generated by his view of spontaneous cultural evolution. In our view, these paradoxes result from an insufficiently specified theoretical environment in which cultural and social evolution are taking place. Namely, Hayek does not spend much time discussing the precise nature of political markets that are nonetheless crucial for the persistence and the change of institutional outcomes. Likewise, Hayek places himself outside of his own theory of cultural evolution, for he lacks a model of how ideas and intellectuals affect the choice of one of the multiple evolutionary equilibria. We outline one such model, which uses the notion of sympathy as its main driving mechanism. Taken together, we claim that an explicit analysis of politics and a model of influence of ideas would have helped to resolve some of the key incongruities in Hayek's evolutionary work.

RETHINKING THE LEGITIMACY OF TRUTH COMMISSIONS: “I AM THE ENEMY YOU KILLED, MY FRIEND”

Abstract: The most contentious aspect of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concerned its amnesty‐granting powers. In return for perpetrators providing full disclosure about their crimes, the TRC was authorized to release them from both criminal responsibility and civil liability. This essay takes up the thorny question of how such a commission might be morally justified. Part 1 discusses the political circumstances that led to the creation of the TRC. Part 2 provides a critical survey of some previous attempts to justify the commission's work. Part 3 offers a new justification, grounded in Adam Smith's notion of sympathy; after outlining some of the benefits of sympathy for political reconciliation, I argue that the work of a South African–style truth commission can promote sympathy between former enemies.

Theodor Lipps and the shift from ?sympathy? to ?empathy?

In the course of extensive philosophical debates on aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany, Robert Vischer introduced the concept of Einfühlung in relation to art. Theodor Lipps subsequently extended it from art to visual illusions and interpersonal understanding. While Lipps had regarded Einfühlung as basically similar to the old notion of sympathy, Edward Titchener in America believed it had a different meaning. Hence, he coined the term empathy as its translation. This term came to be increasingly widely adopted, first in psychology and then more generally. But the lack of agreement about the supposed difference between these concepts suggests that Lipps had probably been right.