SYMPATHY. — In the general sense, this 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 referred the attraction between similar things and the repulsion between dissimilar things, and consequently cosmic change, to sentiments of love and hatred immanent in individual things. Aristotle took up Empedocles’ naturalistic theory, referring it to friendship (Eth. ad Nic., VIII, 1, 1155 b). In Aristotle, however, 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 their 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), sympathy came to signify the inner reason for the harmonious unity of all material things: «odia amicitiaeque rerum surdanum ac sensu carentium... quod Graeci sympathiam appellavere» (Pliny, Nat. hist., XX, 1). In an analogous sense, it was later taken up, during the Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism and naturalism, by Pico della Mirandola: «Universi consensum, quem significantius Graeci συμπεδενν dicunt» (De hominis dignitate, 137, Florence 1942, p. 152). Hume (v.) and A. SMITH, ADAM (v.) took up the term in Aristotle’s psychological sense and tended to make sympathy the very foundation of morality. For Hume, sympathy 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 sympathy, whereby the individual comes to live within himself the good or evil of the entire community and to take it as the evaluative motive of his actions above all his particular interests (ibid., III, 3, 1). A. Smith goes beyond Hume’s position, inasmuch as he considers the essence of sympathy to consist not only in agreeing with the affective state of others, but also in making one’s own the very motives that determine others to act. The individual judgment of an action becomes, through sympathy, a reflection of the judgment that the individual himself perceives in others and communicates to others; hence the moral principle: «always act in such a way that an impartial observer could sympathize with you» (Theory of moral sentiment, III, 1-3).
The morality of sympathy, by denying the existence of an objective moral order, remains on a subjectivist and relativist plane and fails to escape the fundamental egoistic and utilitarian evaluation. Some contemporary sociological currents (v. sociology) take sympathy in a vitalistic and psychological sense in order to explain the root of the spontaneous and affective forms of association: the most important is SCHELER, MAX (v.).