Page 9 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

Sympathy as a pulse, as a bond of all the elements of the cosmos, as a principle of the great organism of Nature, has been frequent in many philosophical schools including Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism and the German Romantic philosophers. Epitectus writes in his Diatribes1 how God’s gaze comprehends all things in that every reality is intimately united: every terrestrial phenomenon is influenced by celestial phenomena. Cicero in De Divinatione2 says that sympathy is a unity and a consensus of nature, adding to the conceptions of Posidonious, in his De Natura Deorum,3 that fire and heat are principles that unite and vivify all things. It can also be said that the cosmic idea of sympathy precedes the purely human notion of sympathy. According to Karl Reinhardt,4 the human concept would not exist without the cosmic concept.
This far-reaching cosmic notion of sympathy extends to Schopenhauer who considers that sympathy, as compassion, is the sentiment that expresses the vital unity of each being with the whole reality. Yet, these beliefs, grounded in a finite and eternal universe, Byron’s Hero rarely knows. For him, rifts and ruptures exist. For him, there are too many identities constantly
Epitectus. The Discourses. I, xiv, 1. Epitectus. The Discourses.
1 http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/discourses.1.one.html
2 Cicero. De Divinatione, II 34. Cicero. De Senectute. De Amicitia. De Divinatione. Trans. William Armsistead Falconer. Loeb Classical Library. London: Harvard University Press, 1923.
3 Cicero. De Natura Deorum II 24. Cicero. Natura Deorum.. Trans. William Armsistead Falconer. Loeb Classical Library. London: Harvard University Press, 1923.
4 Reinhardt, Karl. Kosmos und Sympathie. Germany: G. Olms, 1976. 183-184.
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