word choices work differently in different vernaculars. Marjorie Garber has shown how, in early modern English, compassion can imply a sharing of suffering or a feeling for the sufferer; only later, she suggests, did compassion take on the hierarchical feeling that I described above as pity, whereas sympathy retains fellow-feeling’s affinity or likeness.30 Compassion’s history is inseparable from a history of translation. Béatrice Delaurenti describes how medieval medical accounts drawing on Aristotle turned to the vocabulary of compassio rather than sympathia to describe an almost contagious physical response to the movements of another, so that subsequent scholastic inquiry drew together the terms of antiquity and Christian resonances.31 In Delaurenti’s account, medieval compassion is a response something more like what seventeenth-century France would term sympathy. In French, sympathy seems to retain its corporeal, material sense longer than it does in English. During the seventeenth century it refers chiefly to the complementary properties of two objects, before a further exploration in the eighteenth century sets it on a more familiar philosophical path.
If in early modern French the use of these terms—pity, compassion, commiseration, mercy, and so on—is often mixed, we can nonetheless distinguish between something like what I would call a pity function and a compassion function: a narrow and hierarchical response or a broader, more generous one. I use the terms “pity” and “compassion” interchangeably throughout this book, insisting on one term when it seems to me (as it will in Chapters 2 and 5) that there is something at stake for early moderns in the way they use it; by the end of the century, for example, in part owing to the texts I describe in Chapter 5, pity (and “pitoyable” along with it) has taken on the language of scornful hierarchy, along the lines of Mr. T’s famous “I pity the fool.” Compassion talk also has complicated bodily origins which sometimes signify politically. Early moderns spoke of the bowels of compassion, “les entrailles” from the Greek splagchnizomai, to be moved to one’s bowels, thought to be the seat of love; yet John Staines suggests that in England Protestants tended to avoid the term, indicating “the growing distrust of the visceral notion of compassion” that accompanied the rejection of Catholic Eucharistic forms. (In French, however, Protestants were seemingly less squeamish: the Bible de Genève gives “entrailles de compassion.”)32 If compassion itself is, in its best iterations, a form of translation—a movement across difference—it seems important to look both to its terminological particularity and its range across several conceptual positions.33
Some thinkers have depended on fierce distinctions between compassion and pity. Hannah Arendt, for example, distinguished between them, arguing that in attending to the singular or particular case, compassion is not generalizable, whereas pity reaches for a wider remit. In Arendt’s reading, stemming from an engagement with Rousseau, compassion “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse,” and this proximity erodes its ability to act politically: “Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence.”34 Compassion is “to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious” (75); pity, in contrast, shuns such touch, “keeps its sentimental distance” (79), and “can reach out to the multitude,” though Arendt contrasts pity chiefly with a solidarity able to establish a more effective “community of interest.” Arendt separates solidarity, compassion, and pity as different categories: “Terminologically speaking, solidarity is a principle that can inspire and guide action, compassion is one of the passions, and pity is a sentiment” (79).
Arendt’s distinctions have inspired many. They are central, for instance, to the arguments made by Luc Boltanski, who, drawing on eighteenth-century discussions of pity, inquires into the ethical implications of seeing suffering at a distance, on-screen, without the possibility of direct action.35 And something like Arendt’s contagious compassion—but this time more eagerly embraced—returns in Jean-Luc Nancy’s preface to his essay “Being Singular Plural,” where he makes a plea for compassion as a social force, specifying “but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.”36 For Nancy, compassion’s contagion makes it a powerful force for rethinking the social; his scorn for pity, on the other hand, looks something like the long-standing Stoic rebuff of such an emotion.37 Nancy’s sacramental language makes of compassion a kind of political theology.38
Compassion’s Histories
Of course, the philosophical battle over pity’s scope and value has a long history.39 Plato’s scorn for pity can be countered with Aristotle’s careful protection of its status by virtue of catharsis’s regulatory machinery.40 The Stoics dismissed pity’s femininity and its attachment to external effects. In De clementia Seneca contrasted pity, an emotion to be rejected, and clemency, a rational and helpful one: “Misericordia non causam, sed fortunam spectat; clementia rationi accedit.” [“Pity regards the plight, not the cause of it; mercy is combined with reason.”]41 As Staines notes, this distinction between looking at (spectat) and rationally considering is significant, for the history of compassion is entangled with concerns about spectatorship.42 Seneca further recommends that the merciful Stoic can relieve another’s tears but not add his own to them. This concern over spectatorship, alongside the dismissal of a gendered pity, became central to seventeenth-century debates, which put the Stoic rejection of pity in fraught relation with Christianity’s exhortation to charity.
The eighteenth century continued this anxious consideration of spectatorship, but a defense of pity became central to philosophical debate about the social bond.43 Increasingly in eighteenth-century usage the term “sympathy” gains ground; if compassion referred to a shared suffering of pain, this model of sympathy could involve the sharing of any kind of emotion. David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) thinks through a fellow-feeling built on affinity and relation: “We have a lively idea of everything related to us.”44 Hume’s exploration of sympathy’s structure is not limited to the sharing of one emotion but addresses rather the communicative contagion that takes place between different selves, asking how the contagion praised by Nancy and feared by Arendt comes about. Hume also introduces a nuance that takes us closer to the hierarchy we hear in the language of pity today, addressing a kind of pity close to dislike. Rousseau’s stance is mixed. Whereas in his Discourse on Inequality (1755) the naturalness of pity underwrites every social good, thus moderating our tendency to self-love, in his antitheatrical Letter to D’Alembert (1758) he fears that the pity felt by a theater audience might forestall any emotion leading to a real-world response to suffering.45 In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith praised compassion, placing the emotion as a crucial building block of what he calls the “immense machine” of human society. In Smith’s usage, pity and compassion are broadly interchangeable terms, whereas sympathy indicates the sharing of any emotion. Kant distinguished between an admirably free and rational sympathy, to be considered as a duty, and a less admirable communicable or contagious compassion, which he saw as potentially “an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence one has toward someone unworthy, called pity.”46 Not every subsequent reader welcomed the Enlightenment embrace of fellow-feeling. Nietzsche, no friend to Rousseau, brushed aside this exploration of pity’s social benefits, castigating pity (and his teacher Schopenhauer in so doing) as “the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister.”47
Despite Nietzsche’s best efforts, though, many theoretical discussions of emotion today draw squarely on eighteenth-century vocabularies and histories. The critical predominance of a secular eighteenth-century sympathy and
