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ABSTRACT
Hume’s concept of sympathy is often discussed in isolation from the concept of comparison, which plays an important role in his social and moral philosophy. If both concepts are discussed at all in tandem, comparison is often seen as disruptive of sympathy, which is, in addition, treated as the more natural stance toward others. This article reverses this line of interpretation in presenting the comparative stance as equally fundamental as the sympathetic stance and as potentially outweighing it. Further, it analyzes the complex interplay of both psychological stances in either upholding or uprooting relations of inequality. In contrast to many positive readings of the moral role of sympathy, I argue that sympathy often obstructs the uptake of the comparative mode by fostering imaginary identification with positions of wealth and power. What I will label “comparisons from below” are thus transformed into non-comparative sympathy. At the same time, the socioeconomically privileged, through what I call “relational proximities of power,” do compare downward even if this implies overcoming large affectively stabilized socioeconomic distances. Since sympathy is responsible for producing the general esteem for wealth and privilege, I conclude that it mirrors structures of inequality as much as it helps to establish emotionally backed judgments that help to strengthen these structures.
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Notes
1. But see James, “Sympathy and Comparison.” Apart from James, the best account I am aware of is Postema, “Cemented with Diseased Qualities.” See also Árdall, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, chap. 3.
2. Hume, Treatise, 73. All page references to the Treatise are to the 1978 Selby-Bigge edition revised by Nidditch, and are hereafter cited in the text.
3. Rousseau, Second Discourse, 111–222.
4. For a much more recent attempt to situate sympathy in complex unequal social relations, see Kate Manne’s account of “himpathy” in Down Girl, 196–205.
5. Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” 82.
6. See Wallech, “Elements of Social Status in Hume’s Treatise,” 208, where Wallech suggests that Hume separates people “according to the emotions they feel in response to observations they make about themselves and other people.”
7. In Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, 2, Miller attributes a “secular and skeptical conservative political theory” to Hume; see Stanley, How Propaganda Works, 183–84, for a recent attempt to put Hume’s epistemology to critical use.
8. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume, V.
9. See Hartmann, “How a Critical Humean Naturalism is Possible,” for a similar argument.
10. The comparative element in sympathy is even more obvious in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. See Raphael’s version of Smith’s notion of sympathy in his The Impartial Spectator, 14: “The spectator’s judgement arises from imaginging himself in the agent’s place and comparing the motivating feeling of the agent with the feeling that he himself would have in the imagined situation.”
11. Finlay, Hume’s Social Philosophy, 107.
12. Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, 59.
13. Finlay, Hume’s Social Philosophy, 106–7.
14. James, “Sympathy and Comparison,” 120–21. See also Baier who calls sympathy the “natural response to knowing [about the other’s feelings] … unless we are so preoccupied with our own state that the principle of comparison kicks in.” In Baier and Waldow, “Conversation,” 66 (my emphasis). Finlay in Hume’s Social Philosophy, 107, treats love and esteem as “normal,” whereas malice and envy (as typically comparative) “occur only in special circumstances.” For various reasons, Finlay marginalizes the role of comparison (joining the camp of those commentators who think that Hume sees comparisons as mostly destructive). This is curious as Finlay is fully aware of the integrative force of upward-oriented sympathy with the rich.
15. Postema, “Cemented with Diseased Qualities,” 279 (my emphasis).
16. Ainslie, “Scepticism About Persons,” 472. See also Wallech, “Elements of Social Status in Hume’s Treatise,” 210.
17. Rousseau’s amour propre is often construed as a socially developed non-natural emotion. I follow Neuhouser, however, in treating Rousseau’s natural state as merely hypothetical. Real human beings are always driven by amour de soi and amour propre. See Neuhouser’s defense of an expanded conception of human nature in his Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality.
18. For Hume’s picture of society, see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 243. Neuhouser, in Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality, 67, tries to show that Rousseau’s amour propre is comparative but not structurally, and necessarily, inegalitarian; the esteem or standing, he says, “that amour propre strives for is always a positional good, where doing well for myself … consists in doing well in relation to others.” My interpretation of Hume requires not a “doing well in relation to others” but a doing better in relation to others. Incidentally, I think that would also be the right reading of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, but I cannot prove the point here. But see Carnevali, Romantisme et Reconnaissance, 30.
19. As Finlay says: “It is only through sympathizing with common and particular perceptions of the world of goods that we come to understand their meaning and hence their value” (Hume’s Social Philosophy, 109). See also Wallech, “Elements of Social Status in Hume’s Treatise,” 211: “Agreeable expectations based on association with the rich affect too few people to explain the general esteem everyone feels for the wealthy” (my emphases).
20. Brandom, “Structure of Desire and Recognition,” 137. For an attempt to mold the Humean model into the (Hegelian) model of recognition theory, see Honneth, Anerkennung, chap. 3.
21. Ainslie, “Scepticism About Persons,” 472.
22. For more on Hume’s concept of pride, see Rorty, “‘Pride Produces the Idea of Self’,” 255–69. As Rorty says, “the idea of the self produced by pride is that of the self as an agent, with a concern for its future, an agent who has reasons to weight the motivational force of her passions, to give them a ranked priority beyond previously experienced pleasurable intensity and duration” (258). Rorty is also aware of the comparative dimension of Hume’s account of the self: “Whatever is regarded by a person as peculiar to herself or nearly so, can be a cause of pride. Here in its modest beginning is the source of the idea … that the idea of comparisons enters into the formation of the very content of the idea of self” (261, original emphasis).
23. James, “Sympathy and Comparison,” 120.
24. Postema, “Cemented With Diseased Qualities,” 263–65.
25. Ibid., 265.
26. For Hume and Smith, see Fleischacker, “Sympathy in Hume and Smith,” 292; for Smith alone, see Schliesser, Adam Smith, 118–21.
27. James, “Sympathy and Comparison,” 121.
28. See Festinger’s “Theory of Social Comparison Processes” for an early influential formulation of the contemporary consensus in social psychology.
29. This is seen by Árdall, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, 60.
30. James (“Sympathy and Comparison,” 121) concentrates mostly on sympathy as a “more disinterested benevolence” that can, as such, outweigh comparison. While she is right about this, she should have said more about Hume’s frequent references to partial sympathy.
31. See Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics, 37.
32. In “Cemented With Diseased Qualities,” Postema calls Hume’s account “obscure” (270).
33. See Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, 91. Taylor attributes to Hume the “lack of a critical approach to certain power relations” but adds that “nevertheless, we should credit Hume’s interest in examining the effects that domination and subjection have on the passions, and especially on a person’s sense of himself and of his standing in relation to others.” Taylor applies this insight in her discussion of gender inequality (92–95).
34. See also Hume, Treatise, 315–16: “Comparison is in every case a sure method of augmenting our esteem of any thing. A rich man feels the felicity of his condition better by opposing it to that of a beggar.”
35. Contemporary research does indeed suggest that we sometimes actively seek upward comparisons; see Suls, Martin, and Wheeler, “Social Comparison,” 159–63. I discuss Hume’s naturalism in Hartmann “How a Critical Humean Naturalism is Possible.”
36. See Waldow in Baier and Waldow, “Conversation,” 69.
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Notes on contributors
Martin Hartmann
Martin Hartmann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. His publications include two monographs on trust in German (Die Praxis des Vertrauens, Suhrkamp, 2011; and Vertrauen. Die unsichtbare Macht, Fischer, 2020); How Inequality Feels (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); several peer-reviewed articles on Hume, Sartre, and Critical Theory, as well as various chapters in edited volumes.