You're listening to the partially examined life a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 365 is something like, what is the relation between love and ethics.

We are continuing from episode 364 in reading Max Schiller's The Nature of Sympathy,

whose second and expanded edition was published in 1922.

We read the last two chapters of part one and all of part two.

More information about the text and the podcast, please see Partially Examined Life.com.

This is Mark Linsonmeyer, only able to love what is at the same time appropriate to my specific instincts and of importance to them in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, self-loving, but not egoistic in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Alwyn, a co-partner in common love in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Dylan Casey demonstrating what I value by what I love in Madison, Wisconsin.

All right, so this was supposed to give us more the picture of Scheller's take on ethics and its

relations to emotions. We talked about fellow feeling

last time. These last very short chapters of part one opened up the idea that fellow feeling

can be shallow or deeper. Surprisingly, this did not come up before, that if you just like

identify with somebody's circumstances,

I feel for, oh, you're in that situation, then that's a, you know, that's fellow feeling,

but it's not as deep as if you actually, your fellow feeling takes as its intentional object,

their personality, the center of their being, their innermost self. And for that to happen,

you really have to have love for them.

You have to have this connection. So love is going to be something absolutely primitive.

So it's actually, you can't really define it in terms of other things. You can just exhibit it,

he says. And we can say a lot about how it interacts with values, but it's not like we got from Brentano,

...