Ep. 364: Max Scheler on Sympathy (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On The Nature of Sympathy (1913, expanded 1922), Part I: "Fellow Feeling," Ch. 1-4.
What is it to feel sympathy (aka "fellow feeling") for another person? It is NOT to "identify" with that person; ethics requires that the person be irreducibly Other, not part of my (extended) ego.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. |
| 0:15.0 | Our question for episode 364 is something like, what is it to sympathize with other people? |
| 0:25.5 | And we read the first four chapters of Max Schallers, The Nature of Sympathy, first published in 1913 with a much expanded second edition that produced some of what we read in 1922. |
| 0:31.9 | For more information about the text on the podcast, please see PartiallySateman.com. |
| 0:35.6 | This is Mark Linson-Meyyer, vividly visualizing your feelings, |
| 0:38.7 | yet feeling no pity for you in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin experiencing before |
| 0:43.6 | understanding through vivid experience in Austin, Texas. This is Wes Allone, dissolving into a common |
| 0:49.8 | stockpot of misery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey, grasping my fellow feeling as like stubbing my toe and saying, |
| 0:59.2 | ouch. |
| 1:00.3 | All right. |
| 1:00.8 | So again, the reason we're doing this is I had discovered this Edith Stein book on the |
| 1:06.4 | problem of empathy, but then discovered this book, The Nature of Sympathy, from around the same time, |
| 1:12.6 | thought they might go well together. We decided to insert Brentano because that was mentioned |
| 1:17.5 | in the intro of the Shailer here, but the connection between those two is tangential at best. |
| 1:24.3 | I guess he had another book around the same time. Shailer did the formalistic |
| 1:28.7 | principle in ethics and the non-formal ethic of value, which maybe is a more direct jumping |
| 1:34.3 | off point from that, Brentano. I thought the whole point of reading this was to talk about |
| 1:39.2 | the foundations of ethics. Do we know it like Kant thinks because of just some rational thing? |
| 1:45.4 | Brentano kind of gave us an ethical intuitionism, which is not that different from rationalism. |
| 1:50.4 | We just, certain ethical things just strike us as, oh, that's just correct. |
| 1:55.3 | The other side seemed to be the empiricists like Hume, like Smith, where somehow because we have this feeling of sympathy |
| 2:03.2 | for other people, we somehow found ethics based on that. And the first chapter of this, |
... |
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