The Nature of Sympathy

Max Scheler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351478861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have argued that the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts. He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historical periods and in different social and religious environments, and concludes by outlining a theory of fellow-feeling as the primary source of our knowledge of one another.A prolific writer and a stimulating thinker, Max Scheler ranks second only to Husserl as a leading member of the German phenomenological school. Scheler's work lies mostly in the fields of ethics, politics, sociology, and religion. He looked to the emotions, believing them capable, in their own quality, of revealing the nature of the objects, and more especially the values, to which they are in principle directed.

Part One
Fellow-Feeling

Preface

I AM not going to begin with an analysis of love and hatred but shall start by enquiring into the processes which one may describe as 'rejoicing-with' and 'commiserating'; these being processes in which we seem to have an immediate 'understanding' of other people's experiences, while also 'participating' in them. I take this course because, in the history of Ethics, it is these attitudes rather than love and hate which have commonly been treated as more fundamental—notably in the 'Ethics of Sympathy' of the British moralists, and by Rousseau, Schopenhauer and others; whence it has been thought possible to regard love as a particular case or consequence of the attitude of fellow-feeling. It is of considerable importance for the present condition of ethical studies that these matters should be clarified. For the above-mentioned attitudes have lately been the subject of very diverse ethical estimates. Witness the theories of pity upheld by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and their verdicts upon it.

Chapter I
The 'Ethics of Sympathy'

BEFORE entering upon analysis, let me first briefly set out the reasons why an ethic which finds the highest moral value in fellow-feeling, and attempts to derive all morally valuable conduct from this, can never do justice to the facts of moral life.

(I) The ethics of sympathy does not attribute moral value primarily to the being and attitudes of persons as such, in respect of their character, action, volition, etc., but seeks to derive it from the attitude of the spectator (i.e. one who reacts emotionally to the experience and attitude of someone else); in this, however, it invariably pre-supposes what it is attempting to deduce. It is certainly not moral to sympathize with someone's pleasure in evil, his chagrin in contemplating goodness, or with his hatred, malice or spite. Can we really suppose that a fellow-feeling such as that of rejoicing with A's pleasure at B's misfortune is morally valuable? Clearly, the sharing of another's pleasure can only be moral when the latter is itself moral, and warranted by the value-situation which evokes it. This immediately indicates one of the essential differences between fellow-feeling and love. Loving another, we may often be constrained to regret that he should take pleasure in something, for instance, when he cruelly enjoys tormenting someone else; but mere fellow-feeling is, as such, quite regardless of the value of its objects. In acts of love and hate there is certainly an element of valuation present, positively or negatively (how, will be seen later); but mere fellow-feeling, in all its possible forms, is in principle blind to value.¹

(2) It would be quite wrong to suppose that an ethical judgement can only arise through the medium of fellow-feeling. There is, for one thing, the whole class of ethical judgements we pass upon ourselves. Is there any fellow-feeling to be found, for instance, in the 'pangs of conscience', in remorse, or in judgements of self-approval? Adam Smith thought this to be so, holding that no man on his own would ever immediately ascribe ethical value to his experience, volition, action or existence. Only by adopting the standpoint and attitude of an onlooker praising or blaming his conduct, and thus ultimately contemplating himself through the eyes of an 'impartial spectator', and by participating directly, through fellow-feeling, in the hatred, anger, indignation" and impulses of revenge which the latter directs towards him, does there arise in him also a tendency to self-judgement either positive or negative. Thus the 'pangs of conscience' for instance, are no more than an immediate participation in such detached acts of disapproval on the part of a spectator. As to this, we may observe that it is certainly true that in judging our own case we all too often succumb to the infection, as it were, which is transmitted by the attitude of other people towards us; their estimate of us seems to displace the immediately given value of our own self-appraisal and hides it from us. This used to happen, for instance, in the mediæval witch-trials, when many witches felt that they were indeed guilty of witchcraft and justly condemned to death. But is this more than just a delusion of conscience, due to the fact that its own counsels are overlaid by social suggestion? According to Adam Smith, a man unjustly condemned and universally considered to be guilty should also acknowledge his guilt himself. Indeed (apart from errors of fact), he really would be 'guilty'. This is certainly not so. Our conscience knows nothing of such an almighty social authority. On the other hand, if a man having no conscience at all, and therefore no sense of the vileness of his conduct, were to behave quite naïvely, exactly 'as though he hadn't done anything', then, given the necessary conviction for such effrontery, he might ultimately so infect others with his sense of innocence, that they too would hold him guiltless. From Adam Smith's point of view he ought then actually to be guiltless. But he certainly could not become so in such a fashion.

The ethics of sympathy is also found wanting in that it clashes from the outset with the self-evident law of preference,¹ whereby all positively valuable 'spontaneous' acts are to be preferred to merely 're-active' ones. But all fellow-feeling is essentially a reaction—as love, for instance, is not.

Nor is it only self-judgement which can be carried out without the intervention of acts of sympathy; judgement of others cannot possibly be effected through fellow-feeling either, as the following analyses will show.

¹ Fellow-feeling can itself have a value, independent of the value content which gives rise to joy or suffering in others; but then its value cannot be derived from the latter.

¹ For the nature of 'self-evident laws of preference', cf. my book, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik.

Chapter II
Classification of the Phenomena of Fellow-Feeling

WE must first distinguish from true fellow-feeling all such attitudes as merely contribute to our apprehending, understanding, and, in general, reproducing (emotionally) the experiences of others, including their states of feeling. Such acts have often, and quite mistakenly, been assimilated to fellow-feeling. This has come about chiefly through the theory of projective 'empathy' which attempted to explain both at the same time.

But it should be clear (before we even begin to consider this class of acts), that any kind of rejoicing or pity presupposes, in principle, some sort of knowledge of the fact, nature and quality of experience in other people, just as the possibility of such knowledge presupposes, as its condition, the existence of other conscious beings. It is not through pity in the first place that I learn of someone's being in pain, for the latter must already be given in some form, if I am to notice and then share it. One may look at the face of a yelling child as a merely physical object, or one may look at it (in the normal way) as an expression of pain, hunger, etc., though without therefore pitying the child; the two things are utterly different. Thus experiences of pity and fellow-feeling are always additional to an experience in the other which is already grasped and understood. The givenness of these experiences (and naturally, their value) is not based, in the first instance, on sympathy or fellow-feeling—still less is the existence of other selves so established (as W. K. Clifford held).¹ Nor does this apply merely to the knowledge given in the proposition: 'X is in pain' (for I can also be informed of this), nor to the factual judgement 'that X is suffering'—the other person's experience may also be completely realized in the peculiar form of 'reproduced' experience without any sort of fellow-feeling being entailed thereby. It is perfectly meaningful to say: 'I can quite visualize your feelings, but I have no pity for you.' Such 'visualized' feeling remains within the cognitive sphere, and is not a morally relevant act. The historian of motives, the novelist, the exponent of the dramatic arts, must all possess in high degree the gift of visualizing the feelings of others, but there is not the slightest need for them to share the feelings of their subjects and personages.

The reproduction of feeling or experience must therefore be sharply distinguished from fellow-feeling. It is indeed a case of feeling the other's feeling, not just knowing of it, nor judging that the other has it; but it is not the same as going through the experience itself. In reproduced feeling we sense the quality of the other's feeling, without it being transmitted to us, or evoking a similar real emotion in us.¹ The other's feeling is given exactly like a landscape which we 'see' subjectively in memory, or a melody which we 'hear' in similar fashion—a state of affairs quite different from the fact that we remember the landscape or the melody (possibly with an accompanying recollection of the fact 'that it was seen, or heard'). In the present case there is a real seeing or hearing, yet without the object seen or heard being perceived and accepted as really present; the past is simply 'represented'. Equally little does the reproduction of feeling or experience imply any sort of 'participation' in the other's experience. Throughout our visualizing of the experience we can remain quite indifferent to whatever has evoked it.

We shall not, at present, give any very detailed account of those acts which serve to establish the existence of other people and their experiences.² It only needs to be emphasized that this acceptance and understanding does not come about as the conclusion to an 'argument from analogy', nor by any projective 'empathy' or 'mimetic impulse' (Lipps).³ That we cannot be aware of an experience without being aware of a self is something which is directly based upon the intuitable intrinsic connection between individual and experience; there is no need of empathy on the part of the percipient. That is why we can also have it given to us that the other has an individual self distinct from our own, and that we can never fully comprehend this individual self, steeped as it is in its own psychic experience, but only our own view of it as an individual, conditioned as this is by our own individual nature. It is a corollary of this that the other person has—like ourselves—a sphere of absolute personal privacy, which can never be given to us. But that 'experiences' occur there is given for us in expressive phenomena—again, not by inference, but directly, as a sort of primary 'perception'. It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy. To say that 'our only initial datum is the body' is completely erroneous. This is true only for the doctor or the scientist, i.e. for man in so far as he abstracts artificially from the expressive phenomena, which have an altogether primary givenness. It is rather that the same basic sense-data which go to make up the body for outward perception, can also construe, for the act of insight, the expressive phenomena which then appear, so to speak, as the 'outcome' of experiences within. For the relation here referred to is a symbolic, not a causal one.¹ We can thus have insight into others, in so far as we treat their bodies as a field of expression for their experiences. In the sight of clasped hands, for example, the 'please' is given exactly as the physical object is— for the latter is assuredly given as an object (including the fact that it has a back and an inside), in the visual phenomenon. However, the qualities (i.e. the character) of expressive phenomena and those of experiences exhibit connections of a unique kind, which do not depend at all on previous acquaintance with real experiences of our own, plus the other's expressive phenomena, such that a tendency to imitate the movements of the gesture seen would first have to reproduce our own earlier experiences. On the contrary, imitation, even as a mere 'tendency', already presupposes some kind of acquaintance with the other's experience, and therefore cannot explain what it is here supposed to do. For instance, if we (involuntarily) imitate a gesture of fear or joy, the imitation is never called forth simply by the visual image of the gesture; the impulse to imitate only arises when we have already apprehended the gesture as an expression of fear or joy. If this apprehension itself were only made possible (as Theodor Lipps believes), by a tendency to imitate and by the reproduction, thus evoked, of a previously experienced joy or fear (plus an empathic projection of what is reproduced into the other person), we should obviously be moving in a circle. And this applies also to the 'involuntary' imitation of gestures. It already presupposes an imitation of the inner intention of action, which could be realized by quite different bodily movements.¹ We do not imitate the same or similar bodily movements in observed connections of the inorganic, e.g. in inanimate nature, where they cannot be phenomena expressive of psychic experience. Further evidence against Lipps' theory of imitation lies in the fact that we can understand the experience of animals, though even in 'tendency' we cannot imitate their manner of expression; for instance when a dog expresses its joy by barking and wagging its tail, or a bird by twittering. The relationships between expression and experience have a fundamental basis of connection, which is independent of our specifically human gestures of expression. We have here, as it were, a universal grammar, valid for all languages of expression, and the ultimate basis of understanding for all forms of mime and pantomime among living creatures. Only so are we able to perceive the inadequacy of a person's gesture to his experience, and even the contradiction between what the gesture expresses and what it is meant to express. But apart from all this, the imitation of another person's expressive gestures certainly cannot explain the act of understanding his inner life. The only way of explaining imitation, and the reproduction of a personal experience similar to that underlying a perceived expressive gesture, is that through this a genuine experience takes place in me, objectively similar to that which occurs in the other person whose expression I imitate. For such objective similarity of experience, however, there need be no present consciousness of the similarity, still less an intentionally directed act of 'understanding' or a reproduction of feeling or experience. For my having an experience similar to someone else's has nothing whatever to do with understanding him. Besides, such a reproduction in one's experience would require the 'understanding' of another's experience to be preceded in the participant, by a similar real experience (however brief); i.e. in the case of feelings, a reproduction of feeling, which would always be itself an actual feeling. But one who 'understands' the mortal terror of a drowning man has no need at all to undergo such terror, in a real, if weakened form. This theory therefore contradicts the observable fact that in the process of understanding the thing understood is in no way experienced as real.

It also seems clear that...