Brief Moments of Guilt and Compassion: A Reflection Through Adam Smith’s Eyes
A personal insight into how fear and guilt can deepen our understanding of empathy.
I experienced a striking instance of guilt and reflection.
Mama persistently urging me to rise early to drop her halfway to her office, often found my compliance lacking. However, this time, I managed to wake up early and accompany her.
As I waited in the car outside our house, a dog approached, and a sudden wave of fear gripped me. I have zoo phobia and canine phobia particularly, even worse🌝
I found myself imagining how terrified I would have been walking alone in the lane and encountering a dog.
In that moment, a deep sense of guilt washed over me. I recalled my mama’s patience and my frequent failure to meet her requests, and I felt a pang of remorse for not being more considerate about her.
This feeling of guilt connected intriguingly to my recent reading of Adam Smith’s ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ where he explores the nature of sympathy and compassion.
Smith contends that human beings are inherently self-centered. However there are certain aspects of our nature that drive us to take an interest in others’ well-being, despite we derive no direct benefit from their happiness, except for the pleasure of witnessing it😂
According to him the source of pity and compassion is the feeling of being terrified to experience the same thing as the other person. While we can never truly experience another’s pain, we can imagine it vividly.
“pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a lively manner.”
-Theory of Moral Sentiments
Thus, ‘true empathy is elusive.’ This follows that we cannot fully inhabit another’s suffering but can only simulate it through our imagination.
By placing ourselves in place or position of the other person and imagining their distress, we are able to only approximate their experiences🤧
“By imagination, we place ourselves in the other person’s situation; we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensations and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”
-Theory of Moral Sentiments
What are your thoughts on this?
