Friedrich Nietzsche's and Oscar Wilde's Critique of Sympathy

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,9, University of Stuttgart, language: English, abstract: According to Aristotle sympathy is defined as a kind of pain induced by the suffering from another person. This suffering which the person has not deserved in this case could also happen to the person who is experiencing the sympathy in this situation. In the late nineteenth-century a new way of regarding sympathy came up. There were artists and scholars who did not support the thesis any more that sympathy is a part of humanity and functions as a base factor of our moral system. The following essay will introduce the reader to the two most famous proponents of the rejection of sympathy as a human necessity. One of them will represent the philosophical world, one of them the world of arts. As a conclusion there is the attempt of an explanation for the agreement of those two different proponents of the theory.