III.i.Sympathy, History and Writing
Adela Pinch argues that for most middle and late eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists, sympathy “described not only interpersonal relationships but also relations between persons and representations”(Pinch 29).Sympathetic sentiments are aroused through realistic objects or interpersonal relations, which can always move into aesthetic representations.One passage in David Hume’s Treatise’s discussion of compassion clearly suggests this:
A spectator of a tragedy passes thro’ a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections, which the poet represents in the persons he introduces.As many tragedies end happily, and no excellent one can be compos’d without some reverses of fortune, the spectator must sympathize with all these changes, and receive the fictitious joy as well as every other passion.(Hume 1978:369)
This relation between sympathy and aesthetic representations begins to be common in the eighteenth century.Highly influenced by Hume, Adam Smith makes sympathy a more universal experience through the imagination of the spectators upon the agents in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments(abbr.as TMS).For him, we “form some idea of his sensations”and even feel something “which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them,”and we do this by means of the imaginative experiment of placing ourselves in the agent’s circumstance:“[W]e enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him”(Smith 1984:9).It is noteworthy that Smith emphasizes the aspect of the adverbial quality of sympathy—to feel sympathetically[1], that is, while Hume’s stress is on the process that sentiment is fictitious and manufactured, which is the well-maneuvered process of “a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections”resulting most likely in a “joy.”In another passage on how sympathy is the “propensity”that we have “to receive by communication [others’] inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own”(Hume 1978:316), Hume writes on importance of processing representation in the economy of passions:
’Tis indeed evident, that when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others, these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact.’Tis also evident, that the ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent, and that the passions arise in conformity to the images we form of them.(Hume 1978:319)[2]
In this economy of sympathy, it is of significance to grasp the procedure between ideas, identifying, impressing and conforming, through which a strong sense of temporality is suggested.Sentiment is treated as “any other matter of fact.”It is not subjective, and requires intellectual effort rather than affective labor to realize.This might be identified as a part of the eighteenth-century civic humanism that is suggested through Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the first decade of the century, if not earlier.
In their writings, sympathy, and sociality are designated as the basis for “a new kind of virtue, which served national interests by promoting civility and, not incidentally, by strengthening Britain’s commerce with the rest of the trading world”(Poovey 152)[3].The subscribers to their journal The Spectator “were directors of the Bank of England ...goldsmiths, private bankers or moneylenders,”the largest group of which “included the ‘great body of secretaries, commissioners, clerks, and agents in the various branches of government, civil and military, required to carry on the war abroad and manage affairs at home’”(Nicholson 55).Thus it becomes their natural concern
to promote a polite and civilizing sense of participation in the new society being developed, acclimatizing its readers to market priorities and procedures and familiarizing them with codes and conventions of recognition and self-recognition appropriate to their place in a burgeoning world.(55)
What is of interest here, however, is to situate Hume in a history of emotions and history of the writing media.Hume’s writing on passion and his act of writing itself mean more than establishing a “polite culture”that mediates “as a validating and confidence-building network of relationships”(55).They require a social constituency of a readership as imagined through the act of reading and writing.They self-consciously involve the changing essence of representation with regard to emotional realities and selfhood.For Hume, writing is an experience of the newly popular print medium, which affects a historical understanding of empirical philosophy and identitarian mediation.
Indeed, Hume carefully distinguishes the way passions derived from literature feel from those derived from real life.For him, the “feelings of the passions”caused by poetical fictions are fainter than “what they are when they arise from belief and reality”:the passion “feels less firm and solid,”and it is but a “mere phantom”of the passion caused by reality(Hume 1978:631).The point is that absence of objects and circumstantial realities enhanced by increasing communication and information flow [4] becomes an issue of late eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, which “frequently pondered how an emotional response to an image of a thing should be like and unlike a response to the thing itself”(Pinch 114)[5].The issue becomes complicated in the Humean transposition of a representational work of self into the new forum of print medium through the work of writing.It is part of what Christensen detects “the significance of the printing press to Hume’s philosophical project”(136)—the relation of causation in both his epistemology of sense data and history:
When we infer effects from causes, we must establish the existence of these causes; which we have only two ways of doing, either by an immediate perception of our memory or senses, or by an inference from other causes; which causes again we must ascertain in the same manner, either by a present impression, or by an inference from their causes, and so on, till we arrive at some object, which we see or remember.It is impossible for us to carry on our inferences in infinitum; and the only thing, that can stop them, is an impression of the memory or senses, beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry.
For Hume, this “impression of the memory or the senses”exists merely in a procedural process.It is a means of mediation to something that, in another passage, is attributed to a remotely ancient historical past.Hume’s historical knowledge, unlike that of Burke, has a visual beginning:
Thus we believe that Caesar was kill’d in the senate-house on the ides of March; and that because this fact is establish’d on the unanimous testimony of historians, who agree to assign this precise time and place to that event.Here are certain characters and letterspresent either to our memory or senses; which characters we likewise remember to have been us’d as the signs of certain ideas; and these ideas were either in the minds of such as were immediately present at that action, and receiv’d the ideas directly from its existence; or they were deriv’d from the testimony of others, and that again from another testimony, by a visible gradation, ’till we arrive at those who were eye-witnesses and spectators of the event.(Hume 1978:82-83)(https://www.daowen.com)
The certainty of a historical knowledge is caused by a chain of narration, that is, a “visible gradation”to the original “eye-witnesses and spectators of the event.”Hume seems to suggest that there is no room for doubt or enquiry beyond that.The historical causation is manufactured into an establishment of a relational connection and continuity between units previously atomic and disparate.
This sympathetic epistemological and historical relation with “the original, indubitable testimony of an eyewitness to the historical event”(Christensen 1987:138) would gradate as the intermediary connections increase.It can be assured, nonetheless, through “the republic of letters”and “the art of printing”:“One edition passes into another, and that into a third, and so on, till we come to that volume we peruse at present.There is no variation in the steps.After we know one, we know all of them”(Hume 1978:146).Thus, “Europe is at present a copy, at large, of what Greece was formerly a pattern in miniature”(qtd.in Christensen 1987:140).Representations make not merely historical knowledge possible.History becomes loyally printed copies of what were before.The process of mediation takes predominance over what is mediated.The intermediary, as a consequence of the saturation of the print medium in the eighteenth century, occupies such a significant role of representation that what is supposed to be represented turns into it.The means overwhelms and thus becomes the end.The proliferation of the medium remediates what goes before and what comes after.It becomes more than a mere technical instrument through which the historical and sympathetic—or, sympathetically historical—causation is communicated.This strong sense of reliance upon the printing press for communicating an authentic historical knowledge exists in Hume’s epistemological, philosophical and affective project.For him, experience as reflected in empirical epistemology and philosophy is interwoven with an obsession with emotion and passion.Communicating an “authentic self”to “the republic of letters”through the print medium creates a specific sociality that could be identified as a “literary career”of the mid-century for him.The work of writing puts him “in a position where he can repeat himself over and over again”(Christensen 1987:142).A career, a historical knowledge and a proprietary selfhood converge through the possibility made by the print medium.Indeed, as the historian of print culture Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests, the life-long literary career as a modern writer is made possible through the saturating printing technology.It is the work of writing in a
duplicating process that made possible not only a sequence of improved editions but also a continuous accumulation of fixed records.For it seems to have been permanence that introduced progressive change.The preservation of the old, in brief, launched a tradition of the new.(Eisenstein 1979:124)
This sense of accumulation and progress is built into a social history of modern subjectivity in its proprietary as well as existential aspects.
This is specifically about the role of social sympathy—or sympathetic sociality—in Hume’s work of writing.An evil fanatic and the lord of a gloomy, gothic castle as regarded by more or less his contemporary James Beattie [6], Hume establishes an economy of sympathy, which is different from that of Wordsworth writing in the late eighteenth century.As “a communication of sentiments”(Hume 1978:324), sympathy is a necessary part of the property transference in sentimental sociality:
We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society.A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer.Every pleasure languishes when enjoyed apart from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable.Whatever other passions we may be actuated by; pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge or lust; the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor would they have any force, were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others.Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man; Let the sun rise and set at his command; The sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him; He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy.(Hume 1978:363)
Here communicated and shared emotions are that of property, the importance of which to a Humean selfhood is even more than a transcendental possession of the universe.Solitude means scarcity and poverty.Sympathetic companionship implements a pleasurable and animating social selfhood.It is a sentimental sociality through a process of abstraction, during which Hume initiates a necessity of writing to make a self possible by not being a self, and to make a medial empiricism through the print media as a literary property in Western Enlightenment.
A recent discussion suggests that the “event”of Enlightenment, one that conventionally occupies roughly a half-century between the 1730s—1740s and the 1780s, emerged “as an effect of”“proliferating mediations[7].”Hume’s writing and philosophy can be situated in this theoretical and historical light.It is similar to his accounts of taste, through which, as Hume puts it, “considering myself as a man in general, [I] forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances[8].”It is a creation of a public life, bios politikos, in the market place of a literary career, through deploying the pen, one of what Jürgen Habermas calls “public organs[9]”, a specific political economy of social and literary labor as an apparatus.In “the context of incipient consumerism in the eighteenth century[10],”labor in representing is not as production but as performance, a performance in the literary marketplace that “is nothing other than a theater”(Christensen 1987:118).Hume is aware of the danger of retreating(or advancing) “into a solitude(or a solidarity) that is either a solipsistic darkness or a violent method”(119), which would mean an absence of access to the public, and a loss of the ability of performing as a literary producer.With a fanatic, gloomy and gothic phobia upon such an obsession, he invests theatricality and performance as forms of literary and emotional labor through work of writing into the marketplace and theater of the printing press.Stephen Greenblatt observes that the new textual medium, indeed, presents a theater of performance through iterated function:
At the deepest level of the [theatrical] medium itself the motivation is the ...renewal of existence through repetition of the self-constituting act.The character repeats himself in order to continue to be the same character on the stage.Identity is a theatrical invention that must be reiterated if it is to endure.(Greenblatt 201)
In other words, the theatrical space of the textual medium provides the spatial and material base for the invention of an iterable identity that can be produced and reproduced through revising.Thus the Humean theatricality becomes therapeutic of the disease of solitude, and the social sentiment of sympathy provides the cure, which is materialized through act of writing.Historically, the concept of sympathy, as in the phrase “sympathetic nervous system,”belongs in Graeco-Roman physiology and medicine and in particular figured significantly in Stoic thought[11].Hume may well have been familiar with the medical concept of sympathy.It is illustrated in a tripartite classification of causes of disease in parts of the body by James Crawford(d.1732), a member of the Physiology Library to which Hume also belonged.Crawford was also a teacher of medicine at Edinburgh University where Hume was a student.He writes:
That a Part is affected by Protopathia, when it is essentially in itself lesed [=diseased], and owes not its Origin to any Communication from another Part.Or by Idiopathia, when tho’ it be essentially lesed, yet the hurt was at first propagated to it from some other Part.Or lastly, by Sympathy or Consent, when the Part in itself is yet whole and sound, and is only affected by the fault of some other Part ...Diseases by Consent are propagated from a Distance,(in which case only I shall consider them) either by long Muscles or Nerves[12].
This medical discourse of sympathy is frequently taken through the Scottish Enlightenment, and used “by physicians both in respect of physiology and physical sickness and also in respect of the psychology of physician/patient relations”(Broadie 161).Hume’s anxiety of solitary sympathetic nerves motivates an ad infinitum theatricality in print medium through the iterable act of writing to foster a fragmentary identitarian existence, which obtains a sense of causation and continuity.Writing, while creating and curing more sympathy, is both poison and medicine[13].