Ethics

The Nature of Sympathy

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Max Scheler

1913

The Nature of Sympathy is Scheler's phenomenological investigation of the emotional and moral significance of our relatedness to others — a careful analysis of the different ways we can share in, be affected by, or understand the feelings of other people. Scheler distinguishes rigorously between sympathy proper (genuine fellow-feeling, in which I feel with another's joy or sorrow), emotional contagion (the unreflective spread of feeling, as in a mob), identification (the dissolution of self in another), and benevolence (a willed act of goodwill independent of feeling). He argues that genuine sympathy — and beyond it, genuine love — is the fundamental capacity that opens us to the values of other persons and constitutes the basis of ethical community. The book also contains Scheler's influential critique of the ethical tradition's treatment of empathy and its analysis of the place of love in human knowledge and practical life.