Compassion and Moral Guidance

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: What Is Compassion, and What Is It Not? 1. Robert C. Solomon describes compassion in similar terms (A Passion for Justice, 233), though my conception of compassion is very different from his. The linkage of feeling to action is not unique to compassion, of course. Vrinda Dalmiya says of care that “claims like ‘I care for you but I will not do anything’ are contradictory” (“Why Should a Knower Care?” 37). Further comparisons between compassion and the care of care ethics will be drawn in later chapters. 2. Max Scheler, Nature of Sympathy. (Hereafter cited in text as NS.) 3. In the English translation, the German Erbarmen is rendered as “compassion.” I will employ the original German in my discussion of Scheler because his understanding and usage of “compassion” differs significantly from my own. 4. Cf. Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics. 5. Germanisnottheonlylanguagetoidentifybothoftheseasseparatephenomena and to recognize the relationship between the two. Pāli does so as well, as observed by S. Tachibana: “According to the Buddhist psychology, as we have the feeling of Anukampā or commiseration, so we have the feeling of Anumodana or Mitfreude” (The Ethics of Buddhism, 273). Tachibana also notes the absence of a single English term capturing the idea of Mitfreude. 6. The divine origins of love and of compassion (which originates in love) are clear in The Nature of Sympathy. Cf. NS 142, “Love is an emotional gesture and a spiritual act,” and NS 39, “compassion, which is a heightened commiseration bestowed from above.” 7. Brown, “Compassion and Societal Well-Being,” 216. 8. Why Brown cites Politics 1252a24–1253b22 is unclear to me, since neither compassion nor anything closely resembling it is mentioned in those lines. 9. All citations from the Rhetoric are drawn from W. Rhys Roberts’ translation appearing in McKeon, Basic Works of Aristotle. 10. In fact, the two concepts have still more in common, for both Aristotle and Scheler speak of their respective concepts in the context of theatrical performance. Scheler’s projective empathy helps actors understand the feelings of the characters they play, and Aristotle’s eleos is what puts audience members in touch with tragedystricken characters on stage. 184 Notes to Pages 11–19 11. See chapter 3, “Defining Compassion,” for elaboration on this preference. 12. All quotations from the Nichomachean Ethics (NE) are drawn from the Hackett translation by Terence Irwin. 13. See NE 1166a27 and 1166a7–8. Cf. David Konstan, “Altruism”; “Ancient Pity”; “Pity and Self-Pity.” 14. Konstan argues that given this conception of pity, the Greeks did not have the notion of self-pity. However, there is a sense in which the Greeks could recognize one’s friendship with oneself: What was said earlier about friends could also apply to the self. See Konstan, “Pity and Self-Pity,” and also his Friendship in the Classical World, 77–78. Konstan admits that he is in the minority on this interpretation of Greek friendship. Cf. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness, 223. 15. It is important to note that this is just one of five possible “features” by which Aristotle says friendship can be defined. 16. Cf. NE 1158b12–1159a14, 1162a4–34, 1163a24–1163b30. 17. Cf. NE 1156a12–1156b6, 1157a4–1157b5, 1158a2–1158b12, 1162b1–1163a21. 18. Cf. NE 1156b7–32, 1157b5–1158a1, 1159b3–12, 1164a34–36. 19. Cf. NE 1168a27–1169a7. 20. Cf. NE 1156b25. 21. Respectively, II Corinthians 13:13, II Corinthians 14:1, and John 3:16. 22. For a comparison of agapē and erōs, see the Nygren book of that title (1953). For agapē and koinonia, see Post, A Theory of Agape, 13, 91ff. For agapē and “Medieval Caritas,” see AE 55, 609ff. For caritas and cupiditas, see Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, 17, 18ff., 77ff. Arendt recognizes the distinction between caritas, dilectio, and amor (and recognizes that Augustine himself sometimes elides them; cf. pp. 38– 39). In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis elucidates the differences between storge, philia, erōs, and “charity,” the latter of which is undoubtedly caritas or agapē. J. Bruce Long equates agapē and caritas with karunā (see Eliade, The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 9: 31), surely a mistake, for even if Augustine himself sometimes identifies amor and caritas, the Buddhist sense of karunā cannot have been available to early Christian thinkers. 23. Lewis, The Four Loves, 146. 24. Ibid. 25. Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, 19. Arendt says this is as true of caritas—that is, agapē—as it is of cupiditas. 26. À Kempis, The Imitation...