애덤 스미스와 칸트 공감론의 철학상담적 함의

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the implications of Adam Smith and Kant’s theory of sympathy in philosophical counseling. Present research on sympathy has transcended the boundaries of philosophy and moved toward the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience interprets sympathy as the activation of the mirror neuron system. However, this impersonal explanation is not sufficient in the understanding of complex mental activities of humans. Meanwhile, psychological counseling emphasizes the importance of and necessity for sympathy in relation to practical problems faced by people. Psychologists use sympathy as a tool for psychotherapy. However, they do not explain how this is possible. Unlike these fields, philosophy has long demonstrated that sympathy is determined in relation to people’s mental capability. Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant are two of the best-known philosophers who investigated this. While Smith analyzed sympathy from the perspective of empirical psychology, Kant examined it from a transcendental perspective. Smith emphasized the aspects of imaginative sympathy of the emotional entity, whereas Kant focused on moral sympathy of the rational entity. However, their sympathy theory has a limit that the judge can not escape from egocentrism. So Kant goes to the discussion of aesthetic sympathy and seeks the possibility of conveying emotions and the possibility of consent, and through this, he tries to correct the possibility of illusion of individual subjectivity. His sympathy theory can play an important role in the new path in psychological counseling today, that is, Rogers' empathy theory, which suggests human-centered counseling theory. Rogers tries to solve client's problem behavior based on client's empathic attitude rather than treating client's problem behavior based on diagnosis, evaluation and prescription. In relation to this Rogers attempt, Smith and Kant's sympathy can have the following philosophical implications. The concept of sympathy viewed philosophically explains its possible structure that psychological sympathy cannot explain. In this sense, the concept of sympathy can be used as the meta-theory of psychological empathy. Furthermore, Kant’s aesthetic sympathy can be meaningfully used to expand Roger’s passive psychological empathy to active self-empathy. In addition, Kant’s arguments regarding aesthetic sympathy can play an important role in the failure of sympathy, which was not considered in Roger’s psychological empathy. The failure of sympathy will contribute to preventing the excessively optimistic or skeptical viewpoints we may hold in relation to sympathy.