Sympathy (Smith and de Grouchy)

Sympathy — in the 18th-century technical sense, better captured by the modern word empathy — is the foundational social emotion in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy: “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.” Smith opens The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) with it as a brute fact: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” — present even in “the greatest ruffian.” Thirty-nine years later, his French translator Sophie de Grouchy published the Letters on Sympathy (1798) as a critical appendix, complaining that Smith “contented himself with asserting its existence… [and] did not discover its first cause.” Her reconstruction of sympathy from infancy is the strongest early rival account, and the two together form a natural pair.¹²

Smith’s mechanism: changing places in fancy

Smith’s engine is the imagination. We have “no immediate experience of what other men feel” — the senses “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person” — so we conceive what we would feel in the other’s situation: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation… we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” His examples are chosen to show the mechanism’s involuntariness: the spectator winces at the blow about to fall on another’s arm; the crowd twists its body watching the slack-rope dancer; delicate people itch looking at beggars’ sores; “we sympathize even with the dead,” lodging “our own living souls in their inanimated bodies.” Sympathy arises from the situation, not the displayed passion — we blush for the shameless man because we imagine how we would feel acting so.³

Two load-bearing consequences:

• Mutual sympathy is intrinsically pleasurable — “nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast” — and its absence painful. The pleasure of shared feeling is the social glue; society runs on the continuous, mostly unconscious exchange of sympathetic alignment.
• Judgment is sympathy all the way down. To approve of another’s passions “is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathize with them.” Propriety = concord between the agent’s sentiment and the spectator’s; merit = the sentiment’s fit with gratitude or resentment in those affected. “I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear… I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.”

De Grouchy’s reconstruction: the first cause

De Grouchy accepts the phenomenon and rejects the postulate. Her account is naturalistic and physiological:

1. Physical pain produces a composite sensation — the local pain plus a general “painful impression in all our organs,” which persists in memory and can be renewed by the sight of another’s suffering or even the abstract idea of pain. That renewability is sympathy for physical pain.
2. The universal first bond is the infant’s dependence on the nurse: “This particular dependence on a few individuals begins in the crib; it is the first tie binding us to our fellow creatures… the breast that satisfied her first needs, made her experience her first sensations of pleasure.” Every human who survives to have sentiments has been fed by another human — the one universal experience available to seed fellow-feeling. (She pointedly does not say “mother”: the physical relationship, not the moral one, is the trigger — a deliberate break with Wollstonecraft and Manon Roland.)
3. Reflection extends the circle: from nurse to family, to those tied by utility or pleasure (personal sympathy), to friends, to — via “the most abstract idea of a physical pain, that of the possibility of a stranger’s suffering” — all humanity. “The sentiment of humanity… is like a seed placed deep in men’s hearts by nature, which will germinate and grow through reflection.”

The payoff is that sympathy, having a natural history, also has conditions of health: “The first thing we learn is not how to look after ourselves but, rather, how to be dependent on one another” (the editors’ summary of her position). Institutions that corrupt or stunt sympathy — inequality, domination, laws that outrage ordinary conscience — are not just unjust, they de-form the moral organ itself. This is what turns her moral psychology into politics: Letters VI–VIII derive property, punishment (certainty over severity — “extreme severity almost always results in impunity”), and republican non-domination from the sympathy account.⁴

The two accounts side by side

	Smith	de Grouchy
Origin	Postulated; vehicle is imagination	Derived; vehicle is the body’s composite pain/pleasure
First scene	The playground — being judged by others	The crib — being fed by another
Extension	Imagination + custom	Reflection + abstraction
Politics	Implicit (left “to Smith’s readers”)	Explicit (property, punishment, republic)
Failure mode	Custom “warps” the sentiments	Institutions stunt sympathy’s growth

They agree on the core: morality is sentimental at root, sympathy is the root, and reason’s job is to educate and extend it — not to replace it. The editors (Bergès & Schliesser) read de Grouchy as a proto-care-ethicist: the liberal fiction of the independent agent dissolves against the fact that every one of us spent years unable to survive without care.⁵

Cross-domain connections

• impartial-spectator — the internalized institution Smith builds on top of sympathy
• adam-smith / sophie-de-grouchy — the authors
• mutual-aid — Kropotkin’s cooperation instinct is sympathy’s evolutionary cousin: de Grouchy’s crib-to-humanity arc is a proto-developmental account of how the mutual-aid instinct gets built in each generation
• cooperation-and-defection — sympathy is the psychological substrate that makes cooperation equilibria feel binding rather than merely strategic
• paradise-christianity — Brock & Parker’s beauty-as-ethical-perception thesis is sympathy’s aesthetic twin: moral perception trained by practice, communal and embodied rather than rule-derived
• bullshit-jobs — Graeber’s “spiritual violence” is what happens when institutional design forces people to act daily against what sympathy reports

Sources

• 1759 — The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• 1798

Footnotes

1. 1759 — The Theory of Moral Sentiments ↩

2. 1798 ↩

3. 1759 — The Theory of Moral Sentiments ↩

4. 1798 ↩

5. 1798 ↩