Feeling for the Future
Feeling for the Future
The Ends of Sympathy
This chapter first traces the terminological complexity of sympathy as it appears in several texts that helped establish its currency in eighteenth-century moral and aesthetic theory: David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Adam Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments. It then focuses on reading Shelley's Defence of Poetry and Prometheus Unbound as texts that reimagine traditional sympathy as a structure through which subjectivity is derealized by the “call” of an otherness it can neither anticipate nor adequately know. The chapter proposes a certain developmental trajectory for sympathy that will reach a nearly unique pitch in Shelley, for whom the “nothingness” of the relation between self and other, identity and agency, knowing and not knowing, is exposed and given new bearings.
Keywords: Shelley, moral theory, aesthetic theory, David Hume, Human Nature, Edmund Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, Prometheus Unbound
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