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The Role Of Sympathy In Romanticism

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Sympathy is the combination of Latin and Greek words, syn. and pathos which give the meaning of companion feeling. Here syn. means together and pathos means feeling. It is taken as the awareness, thoughtful, and response to the distress or need of another human being. This empathic concern is taken by a change in viewpoint, from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need. This transition helps to being responsive to others’ feelings, emotions, and positions which lead to an accommodation of their perspective. This response, according to C. Taylor, is ”primitive” by which he means the “immediate and unthinking” reactions unexplainable ”in terms of some more fundamental feature of human nature” (Taylor, …show more content…

Even though some writers of the Romantic era, from Jane Austen to Byron, often tried to make distance from sensibility but they could not keep themselves protected from it because the powers of sweet sensibility were always close at hand. In England, the major Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats took up the revolutionary ideas through the speech of the common people which expresses sympathy with human beings. But the later Romantic poets, especially Keats, give focus on the powerful emotions and deep contradictions of human existence (Roe, …show more content…

He maintains that passions may be termed irrational either when they are “founded on the supposition of the existence of objects which really do not exist” or “when in exerting any passion in action, we choose means insufficient for the designed end and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects” (Frazer, The enlightenment of Sympathy, 2010, p. 42). Hume’s explanation of sympathy is that, the greater degree of similarity between two individuals or their passions, the easier and stronger is the communication of sentiments between them. Not only the contiguity in space and time but also the previous ties of blood or affection, can afford a greater sense of closeness to the candidate objects of sympathy. To wrap up, in the Humean notion of sympathy, the objects of one’s sympathy are distinct from the object of moral evaluation. The sympathetic response of a spectator engaged in moral evaluation is basic to human virtue. A Humean judge is likely to approve of an actor with benevolent, sympathetic

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