How do we relate to the love experienced by others? Smith holds that we do not sympathize directly with love itself, but rather the secondary passions it inspires—“All the secondary passions, if I may be allowed to call them so, which arise from the situation of love, become necessarily more furious and violent; and it is with these secondary passions only that we can properly be said to sympathize” (Smith 33). On one hand, this makes a good deal of sense. We relate to the euphoria and heartbreak that love inevitably spawns, but not to the love itself. We understand the desire for “serenity and quiet” derived from love, and we “enter into all the anxiety, and concern, and distress of the lover” (Smith 32). Yet, for Smith, love is a bit ridiculous. We tend to resent our friends enemies and esteem their benefactors, but “if [s]he is in love, though we may think [her] passion just as reasonable as any of the kind, yet we never think ourselves bound to conceive a passion of the same kind, and for the same person for whom he has conceived it” (Smith 31). Moreover, he holds that “all serious and strong expressions of [love] appear ridiculous to a third person” (Smith 31).
But do we not conceive of the specific love our friend has for another? Can we not step into her shoes, and imagine the connections we would create with certain traits of her partner? Is our sympathy (empathy?) limited to when our friend is either especially happy or sad, and not when she is experiencing love on a more quotidian basis? Indeed when a friend is particularly torn over a quarrel with a lover, do we not conceive of her love for the other as a sort of consolation?
Smith offers an account of sympathy for love that depicts us as especially responsive to manifestations of love’s extremities, but perhaps denies us a more profound respect for love itself. I would contend that we conceive of others’ love in a more holistic way, albeit lacking grounds for such a claim other than my intuition. I believe it is especially relevant today, though, as we continue to increase our usage of drones in war. War is nasty, and it is widely held—although there are certainly exceptions—that the majority of those who experience it would advocate against it. Killing fellow humans corrodes our mental health, as viewing the absence of life in a corpse causes a profound “dread of death.” While on a battlefield soldiers can’t help but see their enemies, in drone warfare the operator never needs to confront the carnage she creates. Why does this seem so profoundly troubling to us, then, if the only sympathy for love we are able to experience is on a generalized basis?
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