Sympathy

SYMPATHY. - In a general sense, it indicates that phenomenon whereby a given modification in any being comes to be reproduced in another being, through a physical law of induction or a psychophysiological law of imitation. More properly, in psychology it is the spontaneous tendency to relive within oneself the affective states of another person, and to establish with that person various forms of communication.

In Greek philosophy, Empedocles already attributed the attraction between like things and the repulsion between unlike things, and therefore cosmic change, to feelings of love and hate immanent in individual things. Aristotle took up Empedocles' naturalistic theory, applying it to friendship (Eth. ad Nic., VIII, 1, 1155 b). But in Aristotle the term has the particular meaning of a conscious affective state, that is, feeling and loving oneself and at the same time feeling and loving others, according to the degree of similarity to oneself (ibid., IX, 4, 1166 a). With the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ips., IX, 9) and especially with the Neoplatonists (Plotinus, Enn., IV, 3, 8), s. came to signify the intimate reason for the harmonic unity of all material things: «odia amicitiaeque rerum surdarum ac sensu carentium... quod Graeci sympathiam appellavere» (Pliny, Nat. hist., XX, 1). In an analogous sense, Pico della Mirandola later summarized it, in the Renaissance renewal of Neoplatonism and naturalism: «Universi consensum, quem significantius Graeci συμπεδενν dicunt» (De hominis dignitate, 137, Florence 1942, p. 152). Hume (v.) and A. Smith (v.) take up the term in Aristotle's psychological sense and tend to make s. the very foundation of morality. For Hume, s. is the natural capacity to feel the good and evil of others as one's own (Treatise, II, 1, 11). From it derive directly the natural virtues of charity and beneficence. Justice, on the other hand, is an artificial virtue, arising from a rational calculation of utility and determining social life with a view to collective well-being; it produces a depersonalization of the subject through an emergent phenomenon of reflected s., whereby the individual person comes to live within himself the good or evil of the whole collectivity, and to take it as the evaluative motive of his actions above any particular interest of his own (ibid., III, 3, 1). A. Smith goes beyond Hume's position, in that he considers the essence of s. not only in consenting to another's affective state, but also in making one's own the very motives that determine others to action. The individual judgment of an action becomes, through s., a reflection of the very judgment that the individual feels in others and transmits to others; hence the moral principle: «always act in such a way that an impartial observer can sympathize with you» (Theory of moral sentiment, III, 1-3).

The morality of s., by denying the existence of an objective moral order, remains on a subjectivistic and relativistic plane, and fails to escape a fundamentally egoistic and utilitarian valuation. Some contemporary sociological currents (v. sociologia) take s. in a vitalistic and psychological sense in order to explain the root of the spontaneous and affective forms of associations: the most important is the one that goes back to Max Scheler (v.).

Koncewski, La sympathie comme fonction de progrès et de connaissance, ibid. 1951.

Tullio Pacentini