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Sympathetic Joy

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Abstract

Unlike Yiddish (fargin) and Sanskrit (muditā), English has no single word to describe the practice of sharing someone else’s joy at their success. Sympathetic joy has also escaped attention in philosophy. We are familiar with schadenfreude, begrudging, envy, jealousy, and other terms describing either (a) pleasure at someone else’s misfortune or (b) displeasure at someone else’s good fortune. But what, exactly, is sympathetic joy? I argue that it is a short-term or long-term feeling of great delight at another’s good fortune, requiring no more than minimal understanding of the relevant person and event. It is intensified relative to understanding, sharing, and positive disposal. It is importantly different from empathetic emotions and also from vicarious pride. It may be group-directed. Empirical research suggests it occurs fairly often, activates the brain in the same way as does sympathetic sadness, and may increase our well-being. It is primarily not a reactive attitude (an emotional reaction to good or bad will), but, rather, a sign of good will toward another.

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Notes

  1. For philosophical studies of envy, see for examples D’Arms & Jacobsen (2005), Farrell (1980, 1989), Protasi (2016), Smith (1991, 2008), and Taylor (2006).

  2. I see no reason to think sympathetic joy is any different from many other emotions such as joy and hate, in the following respect: it can occur short-term or long-term (Fischer et al. 2018, Ben Ze’ev, 2018). This is consistent with the plausible thought that, all else equal, sympathetic joy’s positive intensity is relative to the period in which experienced. For example, someone who experiences sympathetic joy for five decades might experience it with a significantly weaker intensity, on average throughout those five decades, than someone who experiences it for just five minutes. I say more about related distinctions, in the next section.

  3. It may be natural to conflate jealousy with envy, but see Purshouse (2004) for a helpful distinction between them. I will just refer to jealousy here, remaining neutral as to how to distinguish it from envy and related attitudes.

  4. It is interesting to consider whether sympathetic joy is exemplified in what philosophers call compersion, that is, “the positive feelings about their partner’s romantic intimacy with another person” (Brunning 2020: 225). For instructive clarifications of compersion, see for example Ben-Ze’ev (2019), Brunning (2020), De Sousa (2018), and Mogilski et al. (2019). One might argue that compersion is certainly an example of sympathetic joy, since the person experiencing compersion may experience joy at the good fortune of another, namely, their partner. But a person who experiences sympathetic joy may not feel glad “about the situation of everyone involved”, whereas compersion is normally characterized in such a way (ibid. 229). I would suggest that compersion is sometimes, though not always, an instance of sympathetic joy. But this discussion deserves a separate article, and I set this topic aside for present purposes.

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  1. Skidmore College, Saratoga, USA

    Daniel Coren

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Coren, D. Sympathetic Joy. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00677-4

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