Barriers to Sympathy

While reading Smith, I found myself constantly questioning what role, if any, Smith grants to personal experiences in affecting our ability to sympathize.

Introducing sympathy, Smith seems to deny the role of experience, stating "we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation" (3). From this quote, it seems that our ability to sympathize does not rely on our ability to have similar experiences. This seems consistent with Smith's argument for physical pain. Since we cannot feel the pain of another person directly, we cannot proportionately sympathize to the degree of pain the person is experiencing. Instead, it seems Smith would substitute our ability to reason what a person may feel through imagination. Smith directly acknowledges this integral role of reason when he states, "the compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel is he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgement" (6).

However, Smith's disregard for personal experience becomes less clear as he progresses. When encountering a person experiencing strong emotions, Smith notes that our inability to readily sympathize with this person is caused by our "unacquainte[nce] with his provocation, [and so] we cannot bring his case home to ourselves, nor conceive anything like the passions which it excites" (5). Here, it seems that Smith thinks we can better sympathize when we are more "acquainted," or more familiar with the experiences that have caused someone's strong emotions.

When considering this tension between personal experience and reason in our ability to sympathize, I feel convinced that experience must be considered. For example, in high school, I often found myself frustrated by my own inability to adequately comfort and relate to my friends whose parents were going through divorces. Since my parents were not divorced, I felt that was less able to help my friends than my friends whose parents had been through a divorce. Thus,  while I could certainly "reason" about what it might be like for my parents to be divorced, this never felt adequate to understanding my friends experiences. I felt that even applied to Smith, I think this experience could suggest that a certain amount of Smith's "reason" depends on personal experience or is even derived from personal experiences.

My belief in this relationship is strengthened when I think about an experience I recently had with a friend of mine and Melissa's friend from another school. When Melissa's friend visited a few weekends ago, she immediately bonded with one of our close friends because they had both had numerous medical experiences that were very serious. Even though they were merely acquaintances, they bonded over this shared experience better than Melissa or I had ever been able to sympathize with our friends individually. This seems to challenge Smith's assertion that we are less composed  around acquaintances than friends. He notes that "if we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of a mere acquaintance will really compose us, still more than that of a friend; and that of an assembly of strangers still more than that of acquaintance" (18). To me, it seems that personal experiences form an important exception Smith's ranking of personal relationships.

P.S. Sorry for all of the anecdotes!!