"Sympathy is the mechanism"

Question

"Our judgement of the propriety of any display of passion, Smith says, relates the passion back to the cause that elicited that passion. In Part ii of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, however, Smith turns to ‘another set of qualities ascribed to the actions and conduct of mankind’, which relates the passion to ‘the beneficial or hurtfull effects which the affection [i.e. passion] proposes or tends to produce’ – working forwards rather than backwards. This is our sense not of propriety and impropriety, but of merit and demerit, reward and punishment (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 67). Once again sympathy is the mechanism, although the picture is more complicated as we are usually confronted with at least two parties: the person who acts and the person who is acted upon – the person who is benefited or harmed by the person acting." (Jonathan Conlin, Critical Lives-Adam Smith)

The emphasized part makes no sense to me, isn't there something missing there?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

alibey1917The emphasized part makes no sense to me, isn't there something missing there?

He says "once again", which means that we are supposed to already know about the first one, and I don't. If you have a digitized book there, search on "sympathy" and see what you can come up with in the pages before this one. You should also read Part II of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. He seems to mean something specific by "sympathy" that is different from our everyday word.

AlpheccaStars · Answer

alibey1917The emphasized part makes no sense to me, isn't there something missing there?

No, there is nothing missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments#:~:text=%22Sympathy%22%20was%20the%20term%20Smith,with%20the%20passions%20of%20others.&text=As%20we%20have%20no%20immediate,feel%20in%20the%20like%20situation. was the term Smith used for the feeling of these moral sentiments. It was the feeling with the passions of others. It operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed the experience of the person he watches. Thus, it was, in his view, a mechanism.

As 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. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.

"Sympathy is the mechanism"

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