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Craig White's Literature Courses Sympathy + empathy also compassion, identification
Annie Murphy Paul,
“Reading
Literature |
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Oxford English Dictionary Sympathy 1.a. A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other.
b. Physiol. and Pathol. A relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other.
2. Agreement, accord, harmony, consonance, concord; agreement in qualities, likeness, conformity, correspondence.
3.a. Conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other; community of feeling; harmony of disposition.
b. The quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other; the fact or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings of another or others; fellow-feeling. Also, a feeling or frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external influence.
Michel Foucault,
The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
1970.
NY: Vintage, 1973: "Sympathy is an instance of the
Same so strong and so insistent that
it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the
dangerous power of
assimilating, of
rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their
individuality to disappear—and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were
before. Sympathy transforms. It alters, but in the direction of identity
Empathy. 2.a. Psychol. and Aesthetics. The quality or power of projecting one's personality into or mentally identifying oneself with an object of contemplation, and so fully understanding or appreciating it.
b. Psychol. The ability to understand and appreciate another person's feelings, experience, etc.
