Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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the sadness of this pity is not bitter; and, like that brought about by the tragic actions we see on stage, it remains more in the exterior and in the senses than in the inside of the soul, which however has the satisfaction of thinking that it does its duty in feeling compassion for the afflicted. And therein lies the difference, that whereas the vulgar have compassion for those who bewail their sufferings, the principal object of the pity of the greatest men is the weakness of those whom they see thus complaining.]
Theater is the model for a better-regulated fellow-feeling, in which the “généreux” feels for the other with a certain degree of distance but never stoops to imagining a similarity between them.17 In drawing on this example, Descartes seems to rewrite Augustine, who in the Confessions critiques the pleasurable but illusory pity he felt in the theaters of his Carthaginian youth.18 In contrast, Descartes’s theatrical pleasure observes and maintains the distinction between suffering and its spectator; pity is redeemed through a particular model of the theater. The ideal compassion is not immediate but mediated through distance and detachment; this model of theater, likewise, insists on distance rather than on immediate likeness and emotional contagion.
Descartes sets out another example of such exteriorized pity in article 147, where in discussing the interior emotions generated by the soul (as opposed to the passions suffered) he suggests that the different movements of such emotions can become entangled, giving us the troubling example of a husband who weeps at his wife’s funeral even though he is glad she is dead: “Il se peut faire que quelques restes d’amour ou de pitié qui se présentent à son imagination tirent de véritables larmes de ses yeux, nonobstant qu’il sente cependant une joie secrète dans le plus intérieur de son âme.” [“It can happen that some remainder of love or pity which comes to his imagination pulls real tears from his eyes, even though he feels a secret joy in the depths of his soul.”]19
We have seen something like this mingled emotion in the histoires tragiques of Chapter 1, and we will see it again in the nouvelles historiques of Chapter 4. Descartes, though, turns to this snippet not as the seed of a narrative but as a way to account for intellectualized emotions, and the example he gives is again based on a literary structure, this time imagining someone both reading and seeing a play:
Et lorsque nous lisons des aventures étranges dans un livre, ou que nous les voyons représenter sur un théâtre, cela excite quelquefois en nous la tristesse, quelquefois la joie, ou l’amour, ou la haine … mais avec cela nous avons du plaisir de les sentir exciter en nous, et ce plaisir est une joie intellectuelle qui peut aussi bien naître de la tristesse que de toutes les autres passions.
[And when we read strange adventures in a book, or we see them represented on stage, sometimes that excites sadness in us, sometimes, joy, or love, or hatred … but along with that we are pleased to feel those passions excited in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy which can as well be born of sadness as of all the other passions.]
In this account, as Henry Phillips has suggested, there is no suggestion (as there will be from defenders of the theater) that drama could be a didactic force.20 Rather, the story serves as an example of an emotional exteriority. What we see at the theater, and the way we respond to it, cannot (and should not) affect our interior and secret emotion.21
For Descartes, this distancing theater serves as a model for how we should experience the world: our response to events in general should be more like our literary or theatrical response. In a letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia (May 18, 1645), he tells her how “les plus grandes âmes” [“the greatest souls”] are able to consider the events of fortune “comme nous faisons ceux des comédies” [“as we do those of comedies”].22 Watching “les histoires tristes et lamentables” [“sad and lamentable stories”] at the theater, Descartes notes, can make such people cry, but they also take satisfaction in them, just as seeing their friends suffer “elles compatissent à leur mal, et font tout leur possible pour les en délivrer” [“they compassionate with their suffering, and do all they can to alleviate it”].23 The pleasure they take in carrying out their duty has more effect on them than the first affliction of compassion.
In our modern distinction between the two notions, we might term Descartes’s superior model a distanced pity rather than compassion, although the distinction between those two terms is not yet fully determined in this period.24 Without venturing into such loaded descriptions, though, we can say that Descartes distinguishes between a narrow and a larger understanding of the emotion’s scope. Descartes casts the “généreux” as a Stoic who feels not for the material difficulty of the afflicted but rather for the smallness of mind that allows the afflicted to think of material loss as suffering, since Stoic objections to compassion imagined softheartedness for material conditions to obfuscate more truly important claims.25 This careful appraisal of and response to suffering displays a true mastery of the self.26 Compassion is a chosen reaction, applied neatly and precisely to the suffering object without contaminating the feeling subject.
Descartes particularly valued the proper exercise and taming of passions, and in this model the theater becomes a privileged model for imagining the proper emotional life, a rational emotional life. But this is not the theater of the distracting and illusory emotion described by Augustine; rather, the theatrical pity Descartes imagines is almost juridical, both regular and capable of regulating its object. In casting theater as the model for a regulation of compassion, Descartes imagines theater as a compassion machine which sorts and disposes self and suffering other in the appropriate fashion, insisting on a firm distinction between suffering and the spectator, he who is the object of compassion and he who experiences it. In this model of theater, the ideal spectator must never imagine any similarity between what he sees on stage and his own life. Descartes’s theatrical pity does not create a bond but rather works to police existing barriers.
Gender and Civility: Madeleine de Scudéry
Descartes does not gender his distinction between the généreux and the feeble compassionate in the way that Charron does when he assigns the latter role to women and children. The notion that women were easily and irrationally drawn to a feeble compassion was standard in contemporary writing on women. Du Bosc’s L’honnête femme (1632–36) insisted on the naturalness of women’s pity and suggests that their habitual leaning to “douceur,” “clémence,” or “tendresse” [sweetness, clemency, tenderness] stems from their weak nature.27 In contrast, Descartes’s scrupulous separation of the lofty from the ordinary allows for the existence of superior female virtues such as that of his correspondent Elisabeth of Bohemia.
Descartes’s distinction, turning on social rank rather than gender, would be recycled by a writer who abandoned Du Bosc’s understanding of tendresse as weakness to build instead one of her greatest texts around a new ethic of tendresse particularly available to women, though only certain women. In Clélie, Madeleine de Scudéry holds tenderness to be “une certaine sensibilité de cœur, qui ne se trouve presque jamais souverainement, qu’en des personnes qui ont l’âme noble, les inclinations vertueuses, et l’esprit bien tourné, et qui fait que, lorsqu’elles ont de l’amitié … elles sentent si vivement toutes les douleurs, et toutes les joies de ceux qu’elles aiment, qu’elles ne sentent pas tant leurs propres” [“a certain sensibility of the heart, which almost never rules except in persons with a noble soul, virtuous inclinations, and a well-turned wit, such that, when they are friends with someone, they feel all the pains and all the joys of those they love in so lively a fashion that they feel their own the less”].28 Scudéry clings to the notion of a social refinement that shapes emotional capacity. It is Clélie’s nobility, as well as her gender, that makes her exceptionally able to wield tenderness with the proper social competence, with “la civilité et l’exactitude” (117) [“the civility and exactitude”] demanded. The social homogeneity of the characters in Clélie means that compassion as a response to difference counts less than civility, an emotional capacity played out in exteriorized social acts. Like seventeenth-century compassion, civility implies