Sympathy's Philosophy
Once upon a time, man thought and therefore he was, but in the eighteenth century, he first and foremost felt. To live by purely letting your feelings guide you may sound like a spiritual utopia nowadays, but in the 1700s, this lifestyle was not only theorised, but also put into practice within what has come to be known as the culture of sensibility. Built around the philosophy of sympathy, this culture was a celebration of humane feelings and of the honest and spontaneous expression of those feelings; at its roots, it was the manifestation of a belief that emotion can be the glue to a harmonious society.
As such, “I feel therefore I am” is the phrase that came to dominate this period of time, tumultuous as it was, this century filled with revolutionary ideas and social changes.
Hannah Höch, Collage, 1930. Via No Brash Festivity.
In order to understand the full depth of this statement, one would have to go back to the main tenet of empiricism: experience, that is physical sensation and reflection upon that sensation, is the pathway to knowledge. In other words, ideas derive from sensibility, defined as openness to the world. But although people might experience the same material world, they will never perceive it in the same way because the encounter with sensation and the reflection upon it are private matters, unique to each individual. Simply put, reality is subjective.
Taking this as a starting point, the philosophy of sympathy attempted to open up this definition of experience and to socialize it, by theorizing the link between morality and emotion. Four big names are worth mentioning at this point: Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Starting with Shaftesbury, the founder of this school of thought, they all built a philosophy centered around the belief that men are naturally good, that they have a natural love for each other.
Each philosopher had a different name for this natural feeling. For Shaftesbury, this was the ‘inborn conscience,’ a sort of natural sociability or innate benevolence, that intuitively led people towards altruism and friendliness. For Hutcheson, it was called the ‘moral sense,’ defined as one’s innate ability to recognize and approve of whatever is virtuous, meaning whatever promotes the public good. Hume was the only one to take into consideration the fact that the range of human emotions also includes pride, something that has the capacity of standing in the way of any sort of harmonious social environment. Even so, his answer to this contradiction is the argument that human beings possess a natural instinct that will inevitably guide them towards good actions, despite the self-interestedness of pride. He calls this instinct ‘humanity.’
Adam Smith was the one to offer the philosophy of sympathy a more definite shape. For him, that human instinct was called sympathy. Sympathy took central place in Smith’s philosophy and it was conceived as the main factor contributing to the formation of moral judgments. He argued that it derives from an ‘imaginary spectator’ within, who allows us to change places with a sufferer and put his or her interests before our own; hence we act benevolently. Imaginary identification is thus conceived as a conscious act, which stands at the centre of human connections, of communication, and as the initial condition that must be checked if one is to act morally, benevolently.
Highly optimistic as it was, this philosophy failed when put into practice and the culture of sensibility caved in on itself in the end, culminating in the violence of the French Revolution. While the reasons for its fall are necessarily incredibly complex, they can be traced to the flaws noticeable in the philosophy behind it. The most obvious one is that, despite being aware of the relativity of meaning, not one of these philosophers stopped to consider the fact that ‘good’ may not mean the same thing to two different people. The culture of sensibility and its acclaimed love and consideration for the other can and did exist at the same time with extreme cruelty and suffering - one must not forget that this is the eighteenth century we are talking about, after all.
And still, this philosophy is incredibly modern in a way. This eighteenth-century school of thought already brought to light issues that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries still grapple with: objectivity is an illusion and truth is relative. It asked questions that still resonate in the current political climate: is feeling different from thinking?; is my perception of reality the truth? Or in other words, in a perhaps more modern phrasing: are feelings facts?
These eighteenth-century thinkers may have been mistaken in their judgment of human character, but even so, they were incredibly generous and their flaws do not destroy the positive values of their ideal. After all, it is better to sympathize with another person than suppress emotions which are, as they say, natural; better to take another’s rights and feelings into consideration than treat them with total indifference; better to be humane than only human.
I can’t help but imagine what implementing this philosophy of life would do for society as we know it today. Adopting this mindset would mean giving in to the natural pull towards society, towards community. It would enable the recognition of the other not as an Other, not as an entity that is definitely separate and radically different from oneself, but as a reflection of oneself. Bringing the philosophy of sympathy into and adapting it to the twenty-first century would perhaps help combat the loneliness and isolation that is such an inherent part of modern society at this point.
Now we rationalize our feelings, suppress emotions in the name of ‘protecting our peace’, focus on having instead of being. The hyper-individualism born under capitalism has made us forget that we are sociable creatures that need a community in order to thrive. True community can only be built through emotion and vulnerability, through mutual aid, genuine love, support, and care for one another, or as the philosophers of sympathy would put it, by letting our natural feelings guide us.
