So we start. Please participate with your remarks and comments etc.
We begin with Part 1: "Of the Propriety of Action."
The text I am following can be accessed online here at the Adam Smith Institute.
There is also a PDF file of the entire book from Metalibri here.
Straightaway, without any prelude or bothering with setting a stage, Smith directs his eyes on our way of being, i.e., on how we are, and immediately recognizes that there is something in our nature that make us always interested in the fortune of others. Not only that. We are not just merely "interested" in others, but their happiness is necessary for us. It's not that we are all well-wishers or anything, but we are nevertheless interested in the happiness of the others just for the "pleasure of seeing it."
What is this something? Smith doesn't exactly define what this something is, but offers "pity or compassion" as examples of this "something." Then he goes on to generalize and says that as all of us, even "the greatest ruffian," have this pity or compassion in us, we derive pleasure or sorrow from seeing other people's pleasure or sorrow. The title of this chapter is "Sympathy" and I can see what Smith is building up to here.
But exactly how all this happens? Where does this pleasure or sorrow which we feel come from? Next in paragraph 2 it gets interesting. Obviously we don't know how other people feel just by watching them or hearing them. We ourselves don't experience their experiences in this way. We can see, hear, or touch someone who is hurting or who is happy and we can surely tell that they are happy or sad or so on and so forth. But "our sense will never inform us of what he suffers."
Here the distinction is between what is within the capabilities of our senses and what is outside the capabilities of our senses: our senses can tell us about what's going on with the other person but the other person's experience is outside the capabilities of our senses.
So how come we are able to experience this pleasure or this sorrow? Imagination, says Smith, is that unique "faculty" which helps us in experiencing.
Even with imagination, we are not exactly experiencing the.exact.same.experience of the other person. But imagination is the one unique faculty which puts us in this other person's shoes and then triggers our own feelings as if we ourselves are going through the pain or sorrow of this other person.
So, with the sense we can comprehend but not experience. For experience and for feeling we use our imagination. I think I get it. It sounds so familiar, perhaps that's why I get it.
This imagination - which I like the way Smith let us into, because he didn't talk about imagination as this ability to think about multi-dimensions or some such abstract thinking - then is the "source of our fellow-feeling." (paragraph 3) The fellow-feeling arises out of this faculty of imagination that we all possess.
Paragraph 4 then goes onto expand the notion of this fellow-feeling.
When this fellow-feeling is triggered in us, not only that we are able
to feel this other person's suffering, but we also feel their fellow-feeling as well: "We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful
friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily
go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who
injured, abandoned, or deceived them."
In the next post I will conclude this Chapter 1 of Section 1.
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