Feeling, cognition, and the eighteenth-century context of Kantian sympathy

Abstract

Recent Kant scholarship has argued that sympathetic feeling is necessary for the fulfilment of duty (e.g. Fahmy, Sherman, Guyer, and others). This view rests on an incorrect understanding of Kant and the historical context in which he wrote. In this paper, I compare Kant’s conception of sympathy with Hume's and Smith’s, arguing that Kant adapts central features of Smithian sympathy. I then examine Kant’s lectures on ethics and anthropology, arguing that in them we can distinguish between two types of sympathy: one that is instinctual or pre-reflective, which we might call empirical sympathy, and one that is reflective and properly moral, which we might call rational sympathy. On these grounds I reconstruct an account of Kantian sympathy as a cognitive virtue for which feeling may be useful but not necessary, since its primary purpose is to provide information about the well-being of others, leading to action which honours their worth.