on sympathy feb 2009

[...]... Haviland-Jones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions (New York and London: Guilford Press, 2000), 91 5, at 98 34 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 1 35 Ibid 4 14 Understanding Sympathy oneself from the emotions However, her conception of the emotions ‘has its antecedents in the ancient Greek Stoics’, holding that emotions are appraisals of value judgments, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control... celebration of sympathy as a fundamental principle of radically intersubjective communication with a model of sympathy as distance, spectatorship, impartiality, control and subjective consolidation’.18 The important diVerences between Hume’s early idea of sympathy and the ideal that he and Smith later champion continue to resonate in debates about emotion The uncertainty as to whether sympathy ... nursery or a hospital’.50 A second problem with Nussbaum’s argument is not so much her support of sympathy and compassion as a virtue, as the way in which she deWnes it While Nussbaum’s conception of sympathy is dependent on eudaimonism, there is an alternative and less discussed perception of the idea, or ideal of sympathy, which dwells on its mystery Such characterization might be associated less with... to discussing the idea of sympathy She notes at two points that she will ‘qualify the eudaimonism of the account of her emotions’ with a discussion of the emotion of ‘wonder’ However, even in her discussion of ‘the least eudaimonistic emotion’, Nussbaum holds on to her object-based philosophy ‘[W]onder’, she notes, ‘may take a very general object (the moral law) or a highly concrete object (some instance... Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Times Books, 1983) 14 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 9 10 She quotes from Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed Dugald Stewart (London: Henry G Bohn, 1853), 4, 5 15 Armstrong, Scrutinies, 9 16 See Keen, Empathy 10 Understanding Sympathy to ‘understand’ an emotional state After all, ‘understanding’ is a... Lowe points out, ‘Smith’s conception of sympathy is something of a retreat within the sentimental tradition’, and a correction of the idea that Hume promoted in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739 40) In the Treatise, Hume’s ideal of sympathy was one through which one ‘receive[s] by communication’ the ‘inclinations and sentiments’ of another, ‘however diVerent from, or even contrary to our own’.17 As... Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks (London: Calder, 1993) Note on Short Titles, Texts, and Names OED Prose, i, ii SW T TRB W xi The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., ed J A Simpson and E C S Weiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, repr 1991) W H Auden, Prose, ed Edward Mendelson, i 1929 1938 (London: Faber, 1996); ii 1939 1948 (London: Faber, 2002) W H Auden, Secondary Worlds: The T S Eliot Memorial... coherence or congruity’.8 In this sense, the ambiguity of the phrase ‘double consciousness’ allows Latimer’s plight to hover between diagnoses By one turn, he is capable of participating in the minds of others The second opinion blights him with a delusion that this condition is possible In either case, Latimer’s request for sympathy is as contrary as his temperament He requires a sympathetic leap on the... ‘Einfuhlung’ by Vernon Lee.9 Used by Lee in 1904 to describe the experience of relating to a work of art, it has now come to ‘designate imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience’ For some, this reconstruction is seen to be ‘without any particular evaluation of that experience’.10 The second is the idea of ‘pity’, which was once related closely to the idea of sympathy or ‘compassion’, but which... is necessary for sympathy or compassion to be present, as well as the question of whether empathy or sympathy do, in fact, promote altruistic behaviour.16 Furthermore, while it is generally given that sympathy is imagined as a state in which one develops an understanding of the emotional states of others, such a deWnition begs the question of what it means 13 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English . impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ratcliffe, Sophie, 1975– On sympathy/ Sophie. Writings 1927 1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977) HII Samuel Beckett, How It Is (London: Calder, 1964) ISIS Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (London: Calder, 1982) Kintner, i, ii The. as with a complex understanding of a situation, challenges the common perception of the dramatic monologue as the location for the ‘tension between sympathy (which Langbaum deWnes variously as