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 … le principal objet de la pitié des plus grands hommes est la faiblesse de ceux qu’ils voient à se plaindre. (art. 187, 233–34)
[But 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
