ABSTRACT
Rousseau underlines in the Second Discourse that pity (pitie) but not sociability (sociabilite) is one of the "two principles prior to reason" that define human nature, the other being self-preservation. This chapter concerns Smith's remarks about Rousseau and Mandeville in the Letter. It discusses the meaning of "pitie" and Rousseau's story about the emergence of sociability and amour propre. The chapter examines Smith's views about ground-level sociability, paying particular attention to his thought experiment about an asocial "human creature". It reconstructs what Rousseau might say in response to Smith, and then work out a few more steps of the dialectic. The chapter briefs the term "sympathy", and then two dimensions of sympathetic imagination: vision and narrative. A narrative understanding of a person's situation does not, simply because it is narrative, reduce understanding to confabulating. Yet narrative understanding does introduce important questions of perspective.
