Pity

Pity means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and is used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy". Through insincere usage, it can also have a more unsympathetic connotation of feelings of superiority or condescension.

The word "pity" comes from the Latin word "Pietas".

The word is often used in the translations from ancient Greek into English of Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric. Aristotle argued (Rhetoric 2.8) that before a person can feel pity for another human, the person must first have experienced suffering of a similar type, and the person must also be somewhat distanced or removed from the sufferer. In Aristotle's Rhetoric he defines pity as follows: "Let pity, then, be a kind of pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm of one not deserving to encounter it, which one might expect oneself, or one of one's own, to suffer, and this when it seems near". Aristotle also pointed out that "people pity their acquaintances, provided that they are not exceedingly close in kinship; for concerning these they are disposed as they are concerning themselves...For what is terrible is different from what is pitiable, and is expulsive of pity". Thus, from Aristotle's perspective, in order to feel pity, a person must believe that the person who is suffering does not deserve their fate. Developing a traditional Greek view in his work on poetry, Aristotle also defines tragedy as a kind of imitative poetry that provokes pity and fear.

The religious concept of pity was reinforced in the West after the acceptance of Judeo-Christian concepts of God by the proposition of a deity which felt pity for all humanity. Consistent references to the concept of God's pity can be found in the older Jewish tradition. The Hebrew word "Hesed" translated in the LXX by "Eleos" carries the meaning roughly equivalent to pity in the sense of compassion, mercy and loving-kindness. (See The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, 698a.) By the nineteenth century, two different kinds of pity had come to be distinguished, which we might call "benevolent pity" and "contemptuous pity" (see Kimball). David Hume observed that pity which has in it a strong mixture of good-will, is nearly allied to contempt, which is a species of dislike, with a mixture of pride. It is an emotion that almost always results from an encounter with a real or perceived unfortunate, injured, or pathetic creature.

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