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The Impossibility of Sympathy
Sean Gaston
Brunei University
- Wordsworth1
At the time that Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin were warning of th
cal dangers of empathy ( Einfhlung ), the North American academy was e
ing the eighteenth century as a century of feeling, sensibility, and sym
In From Classic to Romantic (1946), Walter Jackson Bate had made the
the "age of feeling," and in the 1950s Northrop Frye introduced his inf
notion of the "age of sensibility" as a broad description of literature af
and before Wordsworth.3 More recently, G. J. Barker-Benfield has char
the eighteenth century as a period dominated by "the culture of sensib
or what he calls a "new psychoperceptual paradigm" which accounted
volatile relation between consciousness, gender, and consumerism.4 For
Benfield, such prominent critics of sensibility as Mary Wollstonecraft w
part of this wider "culture of sensibility."5 This suggests there was an e
of sensibility that included, and was sustained by, critiques of sensibility
Mullan, in his 1990 work, Sentiment and Sociability , describes this econ
sympathy as an ongoing tension between the limitations of an ideal pu
ciability and an increasingly fraught private sensibility.7 Whether celeb
charted by its political, economic, and social failings, since at least the
has been taken for granted in eighteenth-century studies that "sympat
ability to be affected by or to enter into the feelings of others, is the con
excellence of the eighteenth century.8
In The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (1996), Jero
Gann accounted for a recent interest in sensibility by noting the declin
modernist rejection of sensibility and sentiment.9 McGann offers a br
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 51, nos. 1-2 Copyright 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All righ
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130 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In his late work, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), Jacques Derrida explored
the legacy of Aristotle's On the Soul in an intricate reading of Nancy and the
French phenomenological tradition. For Derrida, thinking about being touched,
about all the discriminations and sensibilities of tact that make sympathy and
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 131
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 133
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134 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In the midst of the eighteenth century, Hume had insisted that there i
eral "social sympathy" or "fellow feeling with human happiness or mis
Smith in turn placed fellow feeling at the heart of The Theory of Mora
ments (1759). As Smith writes at the outset of his treatise: "Pity and c
sion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sor
others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the sam
now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our
feeling with any passion whatever."43 We can take the concept of fellow
as one possible example for beginning to re-think the status of symp
eighteenth-century studies.
While fellow feeling was ostensibly gaining the authority of a moder
moderating effusion of common moral sentiment after the Glorious Re
of 1688, the eighteenth century was also a century of reluctant tolerat
1714 there was a concerted attempt to reverse the 1689 Act of Toleratio
a partial and limited gesture of indulgence.44 As Julian Hoppit has ob
1689 also shattered "the faade of orthodoxy's hegemony," marking the
elusive Anglican ideal of a single religious sentiment in the English Ch
At the same time, John Milton's often pragmatic and sometimes strat
always deeply felt calls for the liberty of individual experience are ech
Locke's 1685 Epistola de Toleration.46 Locke gestures to the possibility o
ance between a stable and ordered commonwealth and respect for the d
of individual "reason and conscience" that "cannot be compelled by an
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 135
and the King. These movements culminated in the Clubmen risings in 1645. 50
However, it is more likely that Hobbes is highlighting a far more divisive and
volatile Puritan and Presbyterian use of the language of fellow feeling. As Don-
ald Kelley has pointed out, the rise of Puritanism in the sixteenth century was
marked by a war of words in which both sides evoked terms and counter terms
and created strategic neologisms. Hobbes's use of the phrase "fellow feeling"
can be seen as a reaction against the Presbyterian and Parliamentary rhetoric of
the Civil War, which had its origins in the polemical linguistic battles between
Puritans and Anglicans in the late sixteenth century.51 It is by turning briefly
back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that one can perhaps begin to
find a different genealogy for the economies of sympathy in eighteenth-century
studies and question the readings of sympathy founded on Hutcheson, Hume,
and Smith.
With the growing influence of Calvinism in the 1580s, the older tradition of
being a fellow heir and partaker of the body of Christ was treated as a sophis-
ticated articulation of the doctrine of election.52 One can see this in the rhetoric
that surrounded the Martin Marprelate controversy of 1588-89.53 As Peter Lake
has noted, with their calls for martyrdom and the shedding of blood, the Mar-
tin Marprelate tracts "marked the final abandonment of the claim to inclusion
within the magic circle of protestant responsibility."54 John Udall (c. 1560-92),
who was indirectly involved in the Marprelate controversy and died in prison
under a death sentence, offered one of the earliest uses of the phrase "fellow
feeling" in his 1584 work, Obedience to the Gospell :
Seing by the mercifull calling of God, we are members of one body, werof Iesus
Christ is the head, and linked together by one spirit, the fellowe feling of the
griefe of others, (if we be feling members in dede) constraineth vs to doo good
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136 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 137
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138 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 139
Pity, tho' it is the most gentle and the least mischievous of all of our Passions
yet as much a Frailty of our Nature, as Anger, Pride, or Fear. The weakest Min
have generally the greatest share of it, for which Reason none are more Comp
sionate than Women and Children. It must be own'd, that of all our Weaknesses
is the most amiable, and bears the greatest Resemblance to Virtue; nay, withou
considerable mixture of it the Society could hardly subsist: But as it is an impu
of Nature, that consults neither the publick Interest nor our own Reason, it m
produce Evil as well as Good.72
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140 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
passes through all of us whether we will or no, and has no history or dif-
ficult inheritance to trouble its work, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury was not
as sanguine about this untouchable automatic sympathy. In "A Letter Con-
cerning Enthusiasm to My Lord ****" (1708), Shaftesbury expresses his well-
known anxiety about the mechanical nature of sympathy: "One may with
good reason call every passion 'panic' which is raised in a multitude and
conveyed by aspect or, as it were, by contact or sympathy."78 As a "social and
communicative" affection, sympathy can be dangerous because it is neither
inherently natural nor virtuous - and because it is a concept with a history. At
the same time, in an almost Utopian attempt to outmaneuver Hobbes, Shaft-
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 141
The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand and, instead of
caustics, incisions and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with
a kind sympathy, entering into the concern of the people and taking, as it were,
their passion upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour,
by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it.79
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 143
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 145
Though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situ-
ations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not sup-
posed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person
with whom I sympathize. . . . My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account,
and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish. How can
that be regarded as a selfish passion, which does not arise even from the imagi-
nation of any thing that has befallen, or that relates to myself, in my own proper
person and character, but which is entirely occupied about what relates to you?108
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 147
NOTES
I would like to thank Peter Otto, Perry Gauci, Peter McCullough, and the kind and e
helpful staff of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian library. I am particularly grat
ful to David L. Clark for his generous comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 149
52. See John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton, Rei-
nolde Wolfe, and Richarde Harison (London, 1561), 85. See also Andrew Pettegree, "The
Spread of Calvin's Thought," The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K.
McKin (Cambridge, 2004), 207-224, 210; Guenther H. Haas, "Calvin's Ethics," The Cam-
bridge Companion to John Calvin, 93-105, 94-95, 102-3; Margo Todd, Christian Humanism
and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), 2, 158; Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion
in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace (London, 1998), 112-28; and John F. H.
New, Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of their Opposition (London, 1964), 40-45.
53. See William Pierce, ed., The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589 (London, 1911). See also
Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players
in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, 2002), 505-20.
54. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from
Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 84.
55. John Udall, Obedience to the Gospell. Two sermons conteining fruteful matter, both of
doctrine and exhortation (London, 1584), 15-16. See also Claire Cross, "John Udall," Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. . G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004),
55:849-50; and Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society
1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), 264-65.
56. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: or the description of theologie containing the order
of the causes of salvation and damnation (Cambridge, 1600), 505. See also Perkins, A com-
mentane or exposition, upon the true first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge,
1604), 463, 651. On Perkins, see Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and
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150 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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GASTON- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SYMPATHY 151
73. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason [1788], Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary
J. Gregor (Cambridge, 1999), 141.
74. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson [1791], ed. R. W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers
(Oxford, 1998), 712 (25 March 1776). See also Boswell, 309 (20 July 1763).
75. Mandeville [1714], 40.
76. This is perhaps more evident in the expanded second (1723) and third editions
(1728). See Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. . Kaye,
2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1988), 1:254-56, 260, 333; 11:7, 11-12, 20, 41, 118, 120.
77. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ; in
two Treatises: I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and
Evil, 4th ed. (London, 1738), 239-40.
78. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "A Letter Concerning Enthu-
siasm to My Lord ****" [1708], Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Law-
rence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 4-28, 10. See also John Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm,
and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003).
79. Shaftesbury, 10-11.
80. Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with
Illustrations on the Moral Sense [1742], ed. Paul McReynolds (Gainesville, 1969), 4. See also
Inquiry, 116.
81. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 134-35, 144.
82. See Emmanuel Lvinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Al-
phonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1996).
83. See Richard Tuck, "The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes," Political Discourse in
Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Philipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993),
120-138, 138. This is perhaps most apparent when Hobbes argues that sovereign author-
ity has a unique relation to equity (131, 187-91, 237-38).
84. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], ed. and intro. Nidditch
(Oxford, 1979), 106, 118-19, 163, 373, 564-65.
85. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 250-51, 258, 277. On Hutcheson
and Locke, see Daniela Gobetti, Private and Public Individuals, Households, and Body Poli-
tic in Locke and Hutcheson (New York, 1992); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennen-
house, "A Mind for Passion: Locke and Hutcheson on Desire," Politics and the Passions
1500-1850, ed. Kahn (Princeton, 2006), 131-50; and Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury,
and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006),
150-87.
86. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 84-85.
87. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 712, 82. See also James Tully, An
Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 189, 199, 224.
88. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 352, 357, 354. See Locke's quota-
tions from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and the Phillipics, 355-56. See also Wilbur Sam-
uel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 (New York, 1961); and John O'Malley,
Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (North Carolina, 1979).
89. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 718.
90. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 222.
91. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in cer-
tain Societies in London relative to that Event. In a Letter intended to have been sent to a Gentle-
man in Paris [1790], ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London, 1986), 171.
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152 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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