Sympathy

Sympathy (sympatheia, συμπάθεια, “suffering-together”) is the Stoic and Neoplatonic doctrine that the cosmos is a single living being whose parts are joined by an affective-causal resonance — so that what happens in one part of the whole registers in the others by a kind of attunement, without the need for direct local causation.

The doctrine is attested most clearly in Chrysippus and Posidonius and elaborated by Plotinus in the [[enneads|Enneads]]: the anima mundi — the world-soul — is the medium through which sympathetic action runs. The Renaissance Hermeticism of Ficino, Paracelsus, and the Neoplatonic magicians inherited the doctrine as the metaphysical basis of magical practice: like affects like across distance because both participate in the common soul of the world. For depth psychology the doctrine is the ancestor of Jung’s synchronicity — the acausal connecting principle — which is the same structural thesis articulated in the idiom of twentieth-century physics and psychology. See anima-mundi and synchronicity.

Relationships

• anima-mundi
• synchronicity
• microcosm-macrocosm