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Sympathy between disciplines
Author(s) -
GurtonWachter Lily
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12443
Subject(s) - sympathy , antipathy , feeling , scholarship , natural (archaeology) , relation (database) , action (physics) , aesthetics , psychoanalysis , psychology , philosophy , social psychology , history , law , political science , politics , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , database , computer science
Abstract This essay surveys some of the recent scholarship about sympathy (as fellow feeling between people) and the natural sympathies (as physiological or occult affinities or attractions, known now as “action at a distance”) to reconsider the shifting relation between the two. Though Michael Foucault famously tells the story of an early modern conception of “space governed by sympathy and antipathy, which are ceaselessly drawing things together and holding them apart” (28) that ends abruptly with the seventeenth century, recent interdisciplinary research into early modern and eighteenth‐century histories of the natural sympathies and antipathies suggests that the shift from sympathy as a physical “principle of mobility” to an ethical attitude was neither as clear nor as decisive as it once may have seemed. For Romanticists, this revision prompts us to rethink the now familiar history of fellow feeling and start to take into account the forgotten relationship between the movement of both emotion and matter.