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ROMANTIC INTIMACY
By NANCY YOUSEF Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8609-6
CHAPTER 1
FEELING FOR PHILOSOPHY
The Limits of Sentimental Certainty
We often feel the Pain of Compassion; but were our sole ultimate Intention or Desire the freeing ourselves from this Pain, would the Deity offer to us wholly to blot out all Memory of the person in Distress, to take away this Connection, so that we should be easy during the Misery of our friend ... [or] would relieve him from his Misery, we should be as ready to choose the former way as the latter; since either of them would free us from our Pain, which upon this Scheme is the sole End proposed by the compassionate Person—Don't we find in ourselves that our desire does not terminate upon the Removal of our Pain? Were this our sole Intention, we would run away, shut our Eyes, or divert our Thoughts from the miserable Object, as the readiest way of removing our pain: This we seldom do, nay, we crowd about such Objects, and voluntarily expose ourselves to this Pain.
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
The "ethical turn" in literary studies has been broadly characterized by a preoccupation with an emergent poststructuralist ethics where the dynamics of recognition is central and where the miscarriage of recognition is virtually unavoidable. The Levinasian face evinces an infinite responsibility that a fortiori confounds and shames mundane modes of attention and solicitude. Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer appears as the figure for an exclusion that vexes all forms of communal participation. If ethics has returned to literature by means of these theoretical approaches, then so has philosophy as a mode of cultural analysis that is not reducible to strictly ideological or psychoanalytic diagnoses of the dynamics of objectification. Nevertheless, renewed attention to ethics has only rarely extended to the written corpus of moral philosophy and to the long intellectual history within which the problem of recognition repeatedly arises. To bring ethical writing to the foreground of literary critical work on ethics is not to displace contemporary theoretical approaches but to recover some part of the history of our current sense of the impossible-yet-imperative dynamics of mutual recognition. This chapter offers an account of the rich contradictions between claims of knowledge and assertions of feeling in eighteenth-century ethics. This recurrent and vexing tension is crucial to an understanding of how responsiveness to and identification with others manifests itself as a specifically moral (rather than epistemological) challenge in the period. Indeed, the ethical aspirations and imperatives that emerge from undiminished and unsatisfied epistemic longings constitute a climactic fulfillment of a certain line of Enlightenment inquiry—a fragile victory wrought from failures and misgivings that are not overcome but left unresolved.
WE DO NOT FEEL THEIR SENSATIONS: LOVING OUR LIKE WITHOUT KNOWING OUR LIKENESS
In a late twentieth-century lecture hall, the philosopher Derek Parfit invited a show of hands in agreement with the proposition that individuals are fundamentally driven to avoid pain and pursue their own pleasure. Faced with a clear majority of students willing to concede that conviction, Parfit (characteristically) proposed a thought experiment designed to confound, and stretch to the point of absurdity, the very meanings of pleasure, pain, and the self subject to those sensations. Suppose yourself a parent magically transported to the heavenly halls of the omnipotent deity. You are seated before two levers. One ensures you a lifetime of contentment, free from all concern for the child you see thriving and bound for all good things, but upon your death that same child will suffer untold misfortunes and misery. The other lever dooms you to a lifetime of anxiety, weighed down with care for the child you see bound for trouble and pain, but upon your death that same child will come to enjoy great good fortune and fulfillment. You have a choice to make in this instant, about your life and the life of your child—a choice that will be permanently forgotten as soon as it is made. The same preponderance of students who moments before had pledged their belief in basically self-interested motivations now readily "chose" years of suffering and placed the welfare of their child over their own well-being. More remarkable than the result of this thought experiment was the obduracy with which many strove to reconcile this un-self-serving choice with the theory of fundamental self-interest, stretching and extending the boundaries of the self so as to encompass the child and to count the child's pleasures and pains as, in some sense, one's own—even, indeed, especially (given the terms of the experiment) after one's own death. The ensuing debate reproduced, in virtually the same terms, eighteenth-century defenses of self-interest derided by philosophers who insisted on the motivational force of sympathy in social experience. Here, for example, is Francis Hutcheson's exposure of the specious expansion of "self" necessary to turn love of others into a derivative of self-love:
An honest Farmer will tell you that he studies about the Preservation and Happiness of his Children, and loves them without any Design of Good to himself. But say some of our Philosophers, "The Happiness of their Children gives Parents Pleasure, and their Misery gives them Pain; and therefore to obtain the former, and to avoid the latter, they study, from Self-Love, the Good of their Children." ... Do the Child's Sensations give Pleasure or Pain to the Parent? Is the Parent hungry, thirsty, sick, when his Children are so? No; but he [is] ... affected with Joy or Sorrow from their Pleasures and Pains.... "No," say others, "Children are parts of ourselves, and in loving them, we but love ourselves in them." A very good Answer! Let us carry it as far as it will go. How are they Parts of ourselves? Not as a Leg or an Arm: we are not conscious of their Sensations. "But their Bodies were formed from Parts of ours." So is a Fly, or a Maggot, which may breed in any discharg'd Blood or Humour—Very dear Insects surely! there must be something else then which makes Children Parts of ourselves.... Love makes them Parts of ourselves....
Another Author thinks all this easily deducible from Self-Love. "Children are not only made of our Bodies but resemble us in Body and Mind; they are rational Agents as we are, and we only love our own Likeness in them." Very good all this. What is Likeness? ... There is Likeness between us and other Mens' Children, thus any Man is like any other.... Is there then a natural Disposition in every Man to love his Like, to wish well not only to his individual Self, but to any other like rational or sensitive Being? ... If all this is called by the Name Self-Love; be it so: The highest Mystic needs no more disinterested Principle; 'tis not confined to the Individual, but ... may extend to all, since each one some way resembles each other. Nothing can be better than this Self-Love, nothing more generous. (Inquiry, 160–162; original emphasis)
Here, as in Parfit's thought experiment, questions of intention and desire become inextricably entangled with questions of identity, identification, and the sensory and affective boundaries of the self. Hutcheson clearly insists on the irreducible difference, at the elemental level of sensation, between one person's pains and pleasures and another's: "Is the parent hungry, thirsty, sick, when his children are so?"; "we are not conscious of their sensations." At the same time, and in spite of this absolute difference between two separately embodied beings, Hutcheson proposes that love brings others into the ambit of the self's concerns. "Children are parts of ourselves," not because they are flesh of our flesh like the microbial creatures we unknowingly nurture on our bodies. In the somewhat macabre literalization of his imaginary interlocutor's claim, Hutcheson effectively exposes the fact of biological kinship to be, in this context, a metaphor for some other, ineffable ground of identification between one and another, concern of one for another. What is this ground if not a recognition of likeness, as another imaginary disputant proposes? If "we love our own likeness" in our children, and thereby love ourselves in loving them, then how many others must be comprehended in the circle of the self that loves those akin to it? The empire of self-interest, in Hutcheson's rendering, is really more a kingdom of ends where each "wish[es] well not only to his individual self, but to any other like rational or sensitive being."
As the context out of which, and against which, idealism and utilitarianism arose, eighteenth-century debates about sympathy and fellow feeling present an opportunity to reconsider the shared history of what came to be opposed views of ethical motivation and deliberation. Philosophers of moral sentiment—principally Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, David Hume, and Adam Smith—arrayed themselves against the influential formulations of Thomas Hobbes, emphasizing what Hutcheson called the "bright side of humane nature" against the dark view of men as "all injurious, proud, selfish, treacherous." Insofar as their works collectively constitute a powerful counter-tradition to Hobbesian views of human individuals as fundamentally self-interested creatures, the arguments of the sentimentalists might be seen as the necessary background for the constitutively moral recognition of others implicit in Kantian notions of dignity and respect. (Recall Hutcheson's demonstration that efforts to reduce all motivation to "self-love" amount to arguments for a radically "disinterested principle" of concern for all others.) More commonly, the sentimentalists' naturalistic approach to moral psychology, with its emphasis on the motivating role of emotions and affective attachments, has been viewed as a historically discarded alternative to the austere rationalism of Kant's ethics, but one ready for revival. (Recall Hutcheson's evocation of the "honest farmer's" uncomplicated love for his children.) Important as these revisionary interpretations are, philosophical study of eighteenth-century sentimentalism remains embedded within the context of contemporary Anglo-American ethical debates, too removed from the characteristic tensions and challenges specific to the era in which it arose and certainly more liable to be mined for the current relevance of its arguments than arrested by its rhetorical complexities.
Particularly unaccounted for in contemporary philosophical engagement with moral sentimentalism are the epistemological implications of its arguments, especially its vital and vexed struggle with proliferating and troubling analyses of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Consider, for example, Hutcheson's conclusion in the previous passage that what we mistakenly call "self love ... may extend to all, since each one some way resembles each other." The easily asserted resemblance of "one" and "each other" takes for granted a certainty about the grounds of identification that the passage's earlier insistence on the absolute separation and individuation of bodies countermands. Insofar as "we don't feel [the] sensations" of others, how can we know the degree and depth of our likeness? And if we don't feel the sensations of others, then precisely how are we affected in the presence of others? The scene described in the opening epigraph to this chapter presents—albeit inadvertently—the same difficulty. I am afflicted by the "Pain of Compassion" in proximity to a "person in Distress," presumably because I cannot fail to see the evidence of the other's misery. This pain of compassion is unquestionably mine in Hutcheson's rendering; it is not a vicarious experience of the other's distress; I do not feel the other's sensation. I could seek relief by fleeing this sensational occasion, running away, shutting my eyes, diverting my thoughts, but instead I stand transfixed before the "miserable Object," willingly suffering the pain. Hutcheson's argument here, as in his discussion of the parent's love for her child, is that our desires and intentions include concern for others and that this concern cannot be reduced to the narrowly selfish pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Were that the case, we would easily free ourselves from the "pain of compassion" by turning away from the person who arouses it. Whether or not we accede to the agreement presupposed by Hutcheson's rhetorical question ("Don't we find in ourselves that our desire does not terminate upon the Removal of our Pain?"), it would be a mistake to imagine that the feeling of and for the other that Hutcheson describes here involves a perception of resemblance or experience of identification that amounts to a (re)cognition of the other. Hutcheson's rhetoric seems to drift in altogether the opposite direction, turning the "person in Distress" into a "miserable Object" and, finally, into an undifferentiated example of many "such objects."
The strange cleavage between sympathetic feeling for others and recognition of others is a pervasive and recurrent problem in British eighteenth-century writing about the moral sentiments. It is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the writing of Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) has become the most common touchstone in literary scholarship on sympathy and sensibility in the period. In fact, among the sentimentalists, Smith is uncharacteristically explicit in articulating the contradictory presuppositions of empirical and moral psychology. The first paragraph of Moral Sentiments takes it "as a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it" that we "derive sorrow from the sorrow of others"; the second paragraph places this fact alongside the equally obvious truth that "we have no immediate experience of what other men feel," that "our senses ... never did, and never can, carry us beyond our person." As is well known, Smith will allow the imagination to do for us what the senses cannot, to "form some idea of [the other's] sensations" (11). Far from transporting us "beyond our own person," however, Smith's imagination transposes the feelings of one onto the other. "By changing places in fancy with the sufferer," the sympathetic "spectator" (in Smith's terms) considers only "what he himself would feel if he were reduced to the same unhappy situation," and, quite crucially, the feelings that arise by virtue of this projection might not and need not "be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer" (15). In being both explicit and explicitly untroubled about the radical limitations of our knowledge of others, Smith develops a theory of sympathy that is often more emphatic and eloquent in its articulation of emotional distance than emotional proximity between subjects. The affective disjunction between persons is poignantly articulated when Smith writes of the limits of our sympathy for even those friends and intimates with whom we feel some "correspondence of sentiments" (26). Even in such ideal cases, "the secret consciousness ... from which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary" (27) so that even as "we sit down by them ... [and] listen with gravity and attention," we cannot, as it were, reach our close companions because we cannot "keep" (or, let us say, share) time with them ("how far are the languid emotions of our hearts from keeping time to the transports of theirs"?) (52). Not surprisingly, in such moments, a friend might be "confounded by my violence and passion" while I grow "enraged at [her] cold insensibility and want of feeling" (26). Subsequent chapters will explore how romantic literature reshapes these epistemic and affective disjunctions as forms of intimacy that can neither be assimilated nor subordinated to a predetermined concept of fellow feeling. For the moment, it is simply worth noting that even though Smith is typically found at the core of arguments critiquing the factitious, self-absorbed, even narcissistic qualities of sympathy, it would be a mistake to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments as the definitive eighteenth-century text on the subject. The paradox with which Smith begins—the fact of compassion alongside the fact that we cannot know what others feel—is symptomatic, but his apparent comfort with the implications of that latter fact is exceptional. Indeed, the intellectual history and conceptual fate of sympathy in the period cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of just how troublesome it is to concede that "we have no immediate experience of what other men feel."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ROMANTIC INTIMACY by NANCY YOUSEF. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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