Sympathy and Authority in Seventeenth-century Poetry and Philosophy

When historians of the Renaissance talk about sympathy, they tend to focus on its “occult” associations. This project asks how such an occult concept could have become a key term for the rationalist discourse of eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy. The usual story is that sympathy reemerges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy as a way to explain mysterious phenomena like magnetism or electricity. Then gradually it migrates inward and becomes a psychological principle that governs human social and political relations. The assumption is that modern science leaves no room for mystical explanations of natural phenomena, and so sympathy loses its cosmic significance and becomes strictly emotional. Through readings of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, Katherine Philips’s friendship poetry, work by the Cambridge Platonists including Anne Conway, and commentaries by three prominent Scottish Calvinist divines, I offer two counterclaims. First, sympathy was always-already a psychological concept, even if it also bore associations with metaphysics, magic, and religion. The notion that sympathy just changes into a moral concept is too simple. Second, sympathy becomes a pillar of eighteenth-century moral philosophy precisely because it was understood to be both an internal and an external law of attraction. When moral philosophers like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, or Hume try to explain what ultimately binds free citizens together, they all invoke sympathy as a way to describe a type of political association that would be governed less by the state’s external laws and dictates than by the subject’s deepest, most natural desire to be connected with others. Sympathy’s odd status in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy as both an external force and a personal feeling made it the ideal foundation for a new form of political authority whose laws, as Rousseau said, would not be “graven on tablets of marble and brass, but on the hearts of citizens.” Defined both as a feeling in the bosom of nature that draws all things to their proper place, and as an impulse rooted in personal human desires, “sympathy” suggests that creatures are determined by the order of things, while allowing room for human freedom and creativity.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.