The social and cognitive roles of sympathy
The social and cognitive roles of sympathy

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the role of sympathy and whether it can constitute what John Searle has so influentially labelled ‘intentionality’ on an inter-subjective level, namely a particular inter-directedness between individual members of a community, be it a political, a linguistic or any other type of community. If sympathy can be shown to provide the binding tissue of communities, then a sympathy-based and broader emotion-based social theory would be possible and plausible. Such a theory would be fundamentally methodologically different from a rationalistic approach that is prone to slipping into reductionism, be it the economic, functionalist or some other type of reduction that allows a neat ordering of principles. Sympathy contains something immediate, independent of a rational understanding, and thus, at least prima facie, could serve as a basis on which to build a systematic explanation of what seems to be the intuitive substance of social relations that can only secondarily be subsumed under rational theoretical categories. The article examines Max Scheller’s mature discussion of sympathy in his fifth, enlarged edition of The Nature of Sympathy and examines the applicability of sympathy in a social and moral theory of human action, as well as the nature of sympathy as a psychological category

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