Abstract

The paper discusses issues raised by Scheler's The Nature of Sympathy, investigating its phenomenology and social ontology: the individual's genesis from the social and parental background in which it is immersed as an historical-cultural invariant; the idea of pri- mary objectification and the child's progressive stepping back from «environmental lived experiences»; «sympathy» as a way of «being together»; «community of life» and «pa- rental accompaniment» as the ground for the constitution of persons and relationships; the life-world and the idea of estrangement in philosophy (Husserl, Wittgenstein) and in psychopathology (Blankenburg and Kimura); the «sense of one's self», living oneself as a subject, which requires the experience of - one's ability to «feel oneself» through - actions and emotions. Lived subjectivity, sensitivity, power and primary socialization concur tothe emergence of «primary individuation» - a form of subjectivation through which the human creature enters the sphere of its own life definable as «reason».