Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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humeur puerile et inhumaine, qui faict que nous desirons d’esmouvoir par nos maux la compassion et le deuil en nos amis” [“that childish and inhuman humor that makes us want to arouse compassion and mourning in our friends by our misfortunes”].6 Montaigne’s insides are not just pained by kidney stones, for even in the generous movements of compassion, he notes the sharp interior turn of a less pleasing and less definable emotion: “Au milieu de la compassion, nous sentons au dedans je ne sçay quelle aigre-douce poincte de volupté maligne à voir souffrir autruy.” [“In the midst of compassion we feel within us I know not what bittersweet pricking of malicious pleasure in seeing other suffer.”]7 Yet Montaigne puts his bittersweet interior into necessary consideration with the wider world. Jean Starobinski argues of “Des coches” that “it is Montaigne’s initial attention to his own bodily discomfort that prepares and makes possible the lively sympathy he feels with the suffering endured by other men, inhabitants of a remote corner of the earth.”8 Despite his sharp attention to the self, or rather because of it, Montaigne essays the space for a more supple and generous compassion, as we also saw in the previous chapter.
In contrast, seventeenth-century responses tend to demarcate more sharply the borders between responses to self and others. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero suggests that some people are prone to pity as others might have a proclivity to infirmity; seventeenth-century accounts eagerly subdivide and catalog the various causes of such proclivities, often attributing them to different social types or to different genders.9 The neo-Stoic Pierre Charron, usually a keen recycler of Montaigne, sets out these social variants neatly in one small chapter of De la sagesse which seems to draw on Aristotle and Cicero rather than Montaigne as reader of them:
Nous souspirons avec les affligez, compatissons à leur mal, ou pource que par un secret consentement nous participons au mal des uns des autres, ou bien que nous craignions en nous mesmes ce qui arrive aux autres.
Mais cecy se fait doublement, dont y a double misericorde: l’une fort bonne, qui est de volonté, et par effect secourir les affligez sans se troubler ou affliger soy-mesme, et sans se ramollir ou relascher de la Justice ou de la Divinité. C’est la vertu tant recommandée en la Religion, qui se trouve aux Saincts et aux Sages: l’autre est une passion d’ame foible, une sotte et feminine pitié qui vient de mollesse, trouble d’esprit, loge volontiers aux femmes, enfans.10
[We sigh with the afflicted and compassionate with their suffering either because through a secret consent we participate in the sufferings of others, or because we fear for ourselves what is happening to others.
But this is done doubly, so there is a double kind of mercy: one very good, which is willed, and assists the afflicted without being troubled or afflicted oneself, and without being softened or letting justice or divinity slide. This is the virtue so recommended in religion, which is found in saints and the wise; the other is the passion of the feeble soul, a foolish and feminine pity which comes from softness, a trouble of the mind, and easily resides in women and children.]
Compassion can be the sign of a willed (and secret) choice, or of a weak and womanly pliancy; this gendered distinction will be central to many subsequent separations of good from bad compassion. The Stoic response to compassion teaches us that we can assist but not “flechir et compatir” [“bend and compassionate”]; instead, like a doctor with his patient or a lawyer with his client we must show “diligence et industrie” [“diligence and industry”] without accepting the pain of the other. If woman is the rebuffed negative exemplar of compassion, the troubled weakling who responds too fully, the proper unfurling of compassion is defined through its masculine professionalism.11
Compassion’s Regulations: René Descartes
Descartes’s version of the Aristotelian formula for the relation between pity and fear is the most sustained of the period. In drawing on the theater as an example for discussions of moral life, he exemplifies the tightly bound relation between moral and dramatic theory. Descartes begins his account of pity in Les passions de l’âme by describing its status as a mingling of other passions that arises only in certain circumscribed situations: “La pitié est une espèce de tristesse mêlée d’amour ou de bonne volonté envers ceux à qui nous voyons souffrir quelque mal duquel nous les estimons indignes.” [“Pity is a sort of sadness mingled with love or good will towards those that we see suffer an ill of which we judge them unworthy.”]12 To Aristotle’s precision on judgment, Descartes adds the carefully parsed relation of each passion to another. Since pity is what he terms a mixed emotion, he divides out his articles in Les passions as if to parse out its varied possibilities. In the following article, Descartes draws on Aristotle to note that pity’s intrinsic fear for the self means that the emotion is a mark of weakness:
Ceux qui se sentent fort faibles et fort sujets aux adversités de la fortune semblent être plus enclins à cette passion que les autres, à cause qu’il se représentent le mal d’autrui comme leur pouvant arriver; et ainsi ils sont émus à la pitié plutôt par l’amour qu’il se portent à eux-mêmes que par celle qu’ils ont pour les autres.13
[Those who feel weak and subject to the adversities of fortune seem more inclined to this passion than others, since they imagine the sufferings of another as something that could happen to themselves; and they are thus moved to pity more through self-love than though love for others.]
With a modicum less disdain but also following Aristotle, the Christianizing Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche makes the same consignment of compassion to the weak (this time distinguishing women as likely compassionaters) in De la recherche de la vérité, as I discussed in the introduction. For Malebranche and his very bodily philosophy, feeling for a suffering other has most effect “dans les fibres d’un corps délicat” [“in the fibers of a delicate body”].14 This broadly Stoic position on pity imagines the emotion as a mark of moral or physical weakness, regarding an oversensibility to suffering as a block to rational reflection. For both Descartes and Malebranche, the problematic example of pity is part of a larger system of reflection on the place of the passions within rationality. In forming his general system, however, Descartes distinguishes between different forms of pity allowed to different social or moral types.
In the following article, Descartes goes on to propose a more redemptive vision of pity, for he distinguishes between two kinds of feeling or rather two kinds of feelers: whereas for the weak pity marks a fear for the self, stronger minds will feel for others in a more admirable way.
Mais néanmoins ceux qui sont les plus généreux et qui ont l’esprit le plus fort, en sorte qu’ils ne craignent aucun mal pour eux et se tiennent au-delà du pouvoir de la fortune, ne sont pas exempts de compassion lorsqu’ils voient l’infirmité des autres hommes et qu’ils entendent leurs plaintes. Car c’est une partie de la genérosité que d’avoir de la bonne volonté pour un chacun.15
[But nonetheless those who are the most noble (generous) and who have the strongest mind, so that they fear nothing for themselves and imagine themselves to be out of reach of fortune, are not exempt from compassion when they see the infirmity of other men and hear their woes. For it is a part of generosity to have good will for all.]
Descartes’s use of the term “généreux” allows for a particular social inflection of the structures of fellow-feeling. The “généreux,” in seventeenth-century French, is noble: he who acts without self-interest and without expectation of return, in a display of expenditure.16 For Descartes, only such a noble figure can imagine himself beyond fortune and thus take pleasure in a benevolent compassion. To describe the particularity of such pleasure, Descartes draws upon a literary structure, describing the way a spectator feels for the tragic events seen on stage:
Mais la tristesse de cette pitié n’est pas amère; et, comme celle que causent les actions funestes qu’on voit représenter sur un théâtre, elle est plus dans l’extérieur et dans le sens que dans l’intérieur de l’âme, laquelle a cependant la satisfaction de penser qu’elle fait ce qui est de son devoir, en ce qu’elle compatit avec des affligés. Et il y a en cela de la différence, qu’au lieu que le vulgaire a compassion de ceux qui se plaignent …