Sympathy and Fellow-Feeling

Genuine sympathy (Mitgefühl) is intentional: it is directed at the felt condition of the other person as the other person's condition, not as my own. When I sympathise with your grief, I feel with your grief — I am affected by it, it matters to me — but I do not feel the grief as mine. This distinguishes sympathy from emotional contagion (where your fear spreads to me and I feel my own fear without reference to you) and from identification (where I lose myself in your condition and my self temporarily disappears). Genuine sympathy requires a stable self that remains present to the other without being absorbed.

For Scheler, sympathy is not the highest form of moral relatedness to others. Sympathy is reactive — it responds to already-existing joy or sorrow. Love is creative: it moves toward the other's positive value, intends their good, and seeks their flourishing independent of how they currently feel. Love is also more stable than sympathy: sympathy fluctuates with the emotional states of others, but love endures. Scheler argues that the Christian agape — love of the neighbour as such, independent of their condition — represents a higher moral achievement than even the most refined sympathy, precisely because it does not depend on finding the other sympathetic.

Scheler subjects utilitarian benevolence — the impartial will to maximise happiness — to penetrating criticism. Bentham's ideal of the impartial moral calculator, moved by the sum of pleasures and pains across all persons equally, is not a high moral achievement but a form of emotional impoverishment: a person who is equally affected by the suffering of everyone can be genuinely moved by no one. The moral life is not arithmetic but attention — a specific quality of loving perception directed at particular persons in their particular situations. Abstract benevolence can motivate large-scale social reforms while remaining personally cold.

The Nature of Sympathy was first published as "Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle" in 1913 and expanded in 1923. Scheler's analysis influenced Emmanuel Levinas's account of the face of the Other and Edith Stein's phenomenology of empathy.