In Defense of Sentimentality (The Passionate Life)

In Defense of Sentimentality

ROBERT C. SOLOMON

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

In Defense of Sentimentality

the passionate life A Series on the Philosophy of Emotions by Robert C. Solomon Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice In Defense of Sentimentality

In Defense of

Sentimentality robert c. solomon

1

2004

1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright # 2004 by Robert C. Solomon Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Solomon, Robert C. In defense of sentimentality / Robert C. Solomon. p. cm.—(The passionate life) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-514550-X 1. Emotions (Philosophy) 2. Sentimentalism. I. Title. B105.E46S665 2004 2003061007 1280 .37—dc22

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for Kathleen and Kathryn Higgins

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Preface: Emotions and Sentimentality

Feeling is everything.—Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

Philosophy has as much to do with feelings as it does with thoughts and thinking. It requires sensitivity and devotion as well as curiosity about the world and a critical spirit. It is a fascination not only with abstract ideas and logically possible worlds but also with concrete and very real human concerns and engagements, ‘‘the human condition.’’ To be a philosopher is to be steadfastly attentive to what it means to be human, to the passions as well as to much-celebrated ‘‘rationality.’’ It is to be concerned with what it means to ‘‘exist,’’ with the satisfactions and worries and real-life joys and confusions that affect us all. That is why one of the canonical exhortations in philosophy, inherited from the Delphic Oracle via Socrates, has always been ‘‘know thyself,’’ for it is through unusually rigorous self-examination that we come to know not only ourselves but our Selves: our deepest feelings, fears, and hopes. Philosophy, accordingly, in its concern for feelings, requires not only emotional sensitivity but also an understanding of the emotions, not as curious but marginal psychological phenomena but as the very substance of life. And yet, philosophy and philosophers have much more often than not shunned the emotions and defined their profession and themselves strictly in terms of reason and rationality. I do not think that there is anything wrong with reason and rationality as such: let me be clear about that. But when being ‘‘reasonable’’ means repressing, ignoring, or denigrating feeling, then philosophy has gone too far and, so far as most people are concerned, rendered itself irrelevant. In the history of philosophy and—especially—in the academic machismo of the contemporary university, sensitivity is too often considered a vice rather than a virtue and dismissed as mere ‘‘sentimentality.’’ ‘‘Sensitivity to the issue’’ tends to refer only to scholarly focus and technical facility, not the emotional nature of the subject at hand. Take, for instance, many of the cold, logical, thrust-and-parry philosophical discussions of such emotionally charged issues as abortion and human rights. But ‘‘appeal to the emotions’’ is condemned in such debates, and in almost every introductory logic text and ethics book, as a fallacy (albeit ‘‘informal’’).

Sentiment and sentimentality are to be avoided, not at all costs, perhaps, but at least in philosophical discussions and (advisedly) in student term papers and refereed journals. Philosophy, accordingly, gets defined as the hardheaded formulation and criticism of arguments, the exclusive domain of reason. Philosophy might still be dutifully described as the ‘‘love’’ of wisdom, but this love is hardly the erotic enthusiasm with which Socrates, if not Plato, approached the subject. The great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously dismissed the sentiment of love as ‘‘pathological.’’ He may also have insisted that ‘‘nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm’’ (a comment usually attributed to Hegel), but it is clear that enthusiasm as such has very little place in his celebration of rational ‘‘critique’’ and the rigors of ‘‘the Categorical Imperative.’’ In most of the subsequent history of philosophy, enthusiasm, emotion, and the ‘‘sentiments’’ failed to hold their own against the onslaught of dispassionate reason, and thus are dismissed as mere sentimentality. In this book, in general, I will be concerned to defend sentimentality and the emotions—at least, some emotions—as essential to life. They are or can be virtues, features of the human condition without which civilized life would be unimaginable. And they are essential to philosophy, both as a topic of central concern and as motivation for our ideas. Foremost among those essential emotions (but by no means the lot of them) are those typically referred to as the sentiments of love and compassion. About the same time as Kant and just before, there were many philosophers in Germany and the rest of Europe (including Britain) who celebrated the ‘‘moral sentiments’’ in addition to (and sometimes instead of) reason in human life. The Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular, glorified the natural sentiments and opposed them to the artifices and ‘‘corruption’’ of society. More than anyone else, he came to be identified with the ‘‘sentimental’’ side of moral philosophy, despite his sometimes harsh political judgments and his enormous influence on the quite anti-sentimental Kant. In Scotland, such ‘‘moral sentiment theorists’’ as David Hume and Adam Smith were trying to restore ‘‘sympathy’’ and its kin to their rightful place in ethics and philosophy. But it is with Rousseau that the philosophical movement of Romanticism got its start, and even before the waning of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was already sweeping across Europe. Foremost in the vocabulary of the Romantics were such terms as ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘sentiment,’’ and reason was suddenly on the defensive. The German Romantics elevated feeling to something like divine status (the usual status of reason), and celebrated it in their poetry. To be sentimental was to be a truly excellent human being, perhaps even just a bit godly. The comeuppance of the Romantics, accordingly, naturally turned on their often uncritical emphasis on sentiment. By the mid-nineteenth century, to be [ viii ] Preface

called a ‘‘sentimentalist’’ had become an insult. Oscar Wilde enjoyed and employed the offensive term often. Sentimentality, mawkishness, ‘‘softmindedness,’’ ‘‘bleeding heart’’—these were, and still are, intended to be damning. One recent critic (Amitava Kumar, in The Nation, November 26, 2001) chastised Salman Rushdie’s book Fury for its ‘‘embarrassing sentimentality.’’ In many circles sentimentality is one of those offenses against which there is no defense. For hardheaded activists as for intellectuals in general, ‘‘sentimentality’’ is a dirty word, indicating bad taste, a paucity of arguments, sniveling morals, and an absence of backbone. To be sure, some expressions and provocations of the tender emotions are grander and more poignant than others, while some are just plain tacky. But what is being criticized or ridiculed as sentimentality is all too often neither an excess of emotion nor a lack of hardheaded rationality, but the very evidence of emotion as such (except, perhaps, tightly controlled rage and contempt, which are acceptable and even admired). But other than controlled anger and the disdainful emotions, emotion tends to imply weakness and becoming emotional means not being reasonable. Following one’s feelings is often—though not so often as a mere twenty or thirty years ago—identified with ‘‘femininity,’’ which, like ‘‘sentimentality,’’ is typically intended as a diminutive (like ‘‘cute’’) if not as an outright put-down (when applied to a man, as ‘‘effeminate’’). But beneath the attack on sentimentality, I believe, often lurks an attack on sentiment and most emotion, and this I find unacceptable. Whether or not life is reasonable, it is most certainly and essentially emotional. That is what this book is about: defending the sentiments and the emotions, and thus defending much-abused ‘‘sentimentality’’ as well. Not all of the sentiments are ‘‘sweet,’’ of course. Continuing the gustatory metaphor, some are bitter, others are sour, others are quite spicy and even ‘‘hot.’’ Some are sickening, poisonous, or even lethal, but together they make up the range of experiences that define and dominate human life. Accordingly, in the chapters that follow, I want to discuss not only such ‘‘moral sentiments’’ as sympathy and compassion but also grief, gratitude, love, horror, and even vengeance. All of these have suffered from considerable abuse, though from different quarters, but all of them play a central if not essential role in our experience and our lives. Grief, for example, is typically (if not officially) treated as an illness, a predictable malaise from which one hopes to recover. But grief is a far nobler emotion than this, and however painful it may be, it honors and lays bare the most important attachments of our lives. Gratitude, likewise, is often seen as a weakness, a slavish emotion that makes all too clear our inability to stand on our own and our need to depend on others. But gratitude, too, is thereby deeply misunderstood. We are mutually dependent creatures, however strong our individualism, and an Preface [ ix ]

inability to feel or express gratitude is not a sign of strength but a sure symptom of weakness, if not viciousness. Horror is an emotion of a very different kind, but again, the ability to be horrified is neither a weakness nor a liability; it is an essential aspect of the human condition. It does not much help that horror is often confused or conflated with fear, a very different emotion, or that the mention of horror first of all brings to mind some of the most ridiculous films ever made. And I have not yet said anything here about vengeance, one of the most allegedly despised emotions. The passion for revenge is, to be sure, one of the most dangerous passions, but that does not mean we do not need to appreciate its power and even its virtues. As Susan Jacobi argued some years ago, a society that represses its need for vengeance is as prone to neurosis as one that represses its sexual urges. Trying to obey Socrates’ Delphic Oracle, accordingly, I have made some attempts to understand and appreciate these various abused and neglected emotions, sentiments, and feelings. For in that direction lie not only selfknowledge but also perhaps even Socrates’ ultimate goal, wisdom.

all but one of these chapters have been published previously, but I have taken the liberty to rewrite them, in some cases just to bring them up to date, most of them much more extensively. Hegel once complained of his onetime friend Friedrich Schelling that ‘‘he educated himself in public.’’ (Schelling, five years younger, had published five books and become world famous before Hegel cranked out his first published article.) I have to admit that such is my own case. Over the years I have educated myself in public (and, I would like to think, sometimes with the public), in the sense that I rethink and rewrite my essays frequently, often after they have been published. Accordingly, many of the essays that make up this book have been through not only multiple drafts but also multiple published and publicly presented versions, usually resulting in longer, I hope better, pieces. Several of the chapters in this book represent such further thinking, elaborations, and extensions. The title essay, ‘‘In Defense of Sentimentality,’’ along with the follow-up essay, ‘‘On Kitsch and Sentimentality’’ (the last chapter in this volume) grew out of many conversations with Kathleen Higgins on the subject of kitsch. Both essays were helped along by the generous support of the American Society for Aesthetics, one of the most friendly and inspiring organizations of which I am a marginal member. These two articles frame my concerns in the book, the contempt that intellectuals and political activists show for sentimentality (with or without such adjectives as ‘‘mawkish’’ or ‘‘embarrassing’’). While I do not deny that I, too, feel a certain amount of disgust with the excessive emotionality surrounding a good deal of holiday cheer and more [ x ] Preface

melodramatic romances, I do think that the degree of that ‘‘excessiveness’’ is much of what is at issue. For too many people, any such emotion or overt sentiment is excessive. Such emotions are themselves embarrassing (and this embarrassment is in turn embarrassing, thus shifting the emotional stage from sentimentality to embarrassment to shame to rage). It is against such views and prejudices that my arguments here are intended. ‘‘Sympathy and Vengeance: The Role of Feelings in Justice’’ has a long history and has appeared in several quite different versions over the years. It began as a brief presentation to the International Society for Research on Emotions and at Oxford University in 1988. I then revised and expanded it considerably, first as a Memorial Lecture at the University of Massachusetts in Boston for my dear friend and I.S.R.E. colleague Shula Sommers after her tragic death in April 1989, then again, on a much happier note, on the occasion of Nico Frijda’s formal retirement at the University of Amsterdam. Among the many delights of that celebration was Nico’s own contribution on the same topic and his ample and always insightful advice on my presentation. ‘‘Care and Compassion’’ grew out of my interest in the emotional basis of ethics and political justice as well as out of my long engagement in the very practical field of business ethics. I have taken a very particular approach to that field, which is so often straitjacketed by strictly legal (‘‘compliance’’) considerations, general policy matters, and other large issues that are far beyond the powers of the people who actually work in the corporate world below the executive suites. I am interested, by contrast, in the virtues and vices of the ordinary employee and manager, and their motivation. This led me back to Adam Smith, one of the founders of modern business ethics as well as the father of free enterprise theory, and his Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759). The engine of business and the question posed to business ethics by Smith (as opposed to his more crass interpreters) is not the maximization of profit but the satisfaction of vital human interests, especially those expressed in the moral sentiments. ‘‘On Grief and Gratitude’’ grew first out of a technical worry about the nature of emotions in general, namely, the analysis of an emotion ( grief ) that apparently contained no coherent desires and served no apparent personal or evolutionary purpose, but rather seemed more like an emotional breakdown (and a breakdown in a person’s life) rather than an emotion as such. But it quickly developed into a much more general concern about the relationship between grief and love, the social role of grief, and the common observation that American society (as well as philosophers) seems to have a good deal of trouble with it. ( In working life, ‘‘two ‘personal days’ off for the funeral, and then back to work.’’ In philosophy, for the most part, not a word.) That concern dovetailed with a seemingly very different concern, prompted by the Preface [ xi ]

research of Shula Sommers, which suggested that American men, in particular, have a great deal of trouble with gratitude. Thus I started to think both about the importance of gratitude and about the neglect of both grief and gratitude in contemporary ethics. ‘‘Real Horror’’ emerged while I was thinking about rewriting an essay on horror movies and was interrupted by the very real horror of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. On that tragic Tuesday morning, my interest in ‘‘make believe’’ horror seemed nothing but frivolous and irrelevant, despite the fact that my interest in horror movies goes back to my childhood. My scholarly interest developed when I was asked to review Noe¨l Carroll’s delightful book, The Philosophy of Horror, for the journal Philosophy and Literature. The essay I was starting to write was for Daniel Shaw’s book on horror movies, but after September 11 I focused on the difference between real horror and ‘‘art-horror,’’ and this in turn returned me to my more general interest in the misunderstood emotions. ‘‘Comic Relief: In Appreciation of the Seven Deadly Sins,’’ by contrast, was an attempt to make light of the human condition. It kicked off a delightfully creative collection of essays, not by me but by roughly half a dozen or so (seven, to be exact) of my friends and colleagues, each of whom embraced his or her favorite sin for the occasion. Title credit (‘‘Comic Relief ’’) goes to Kathleen Higgins (from her Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]) and, of course, to the Williams– Crystal–Goldberg telethon for the homeless. ‘‘Spirituality as Sentimentality’’ is adapted from a book I wrote confessing my blithering ignorance of and contempt for that whole side of human experience often designated as ‘‘spiritual.’’ As I confessed in the introduction, I found that I had thrown out the baby with the bath toys, confusing sectarian rage and New Age pap with the real thing. I don’t yet have a grasp on the real thing, but I’m creeping up on it. ‘‘The Virtue of (Erotic) Love’’ grew out of two books on love and my growing interest in ‘‘virtue ethics.’’ Part of my concern was scholarly. Aristotle had argued vigorously for the virtues, but he also insisted that virtues were not passions but states of character. Kant, attempting a very different approach to ethics, had suggested that the passions played no essential role in ethics and had no ‘‘moral worth.’’ I was concerned to show that at least one passion—love—was itself a virtue and an important part of ethics. Aristotle, who had a keen appreciation of the importance of emotions in the good life, certainly appreciated this. But his definition of ‘‘virtue’’ and his conception of the emotions seemed to undermine it. Kant, a devout Christian, certainly appreciated the importance of love, at least in what he called the ‘‘practical’’ sense. But with this in mind, I wanted to argue both that love was a virtue and that erotic love was a virtue. The fact that this thesis [ xii ] Preface

seemed so outrageous has not only to do with our famous puritanical discomfort with sex but also with our discomfort with powerful emotions and the philosophical insistence (so evident in Kant) that ethics and philosophy must be strictly rational. So, once again, I found myself defending sentimentality, but in this case, as erotic sensibility construed as a virtue. ‘‘Reasons for Love’’ is a more recent piece. It was spurred by two Syracuse University philosophers, Michael Stocker and Laurence Thomas, quite separately. Stocker, in a now classic essay titled ‘‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,’’ directed a powerful accusation against not only modern ethical theories but also ‘‘cognitive’’ theories of emotion (such as mine) as well. Thomas wrote a nice piece for an anthology I put together with Kathleen Higgins (The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love), titled ‘‘The Reasons for Love.’’ That started me thinking about an essay which would both build on Thomas’s insights and respond to Stocker’s challenge. The idea is that we love for reasons, but as I got into the subject, it took me through all sorts of fascinating twists and turns. What it means to ‘‘love for reasons,’’ and what sorts of reasons those are, turned out to be a lot different from what I originally suspected. ‘‘A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse)’’ was written at the invitation of Hugh Silverman. I had admired Barthes’s work for many years, and I happily accepted the challenge of trying to (more or less) meet him on his own ground. Though the piece looks like a parody, it is intended as a true ‘‘reply,’’ taking very seriously the rather sad experiences of love Barthes reflects on and trying to counter with a much more upbeat conception (although, to be sure, based on a great many similarly disheartening experiences). For of all the passions and sentiments, surely love is the most profound, the most moving, the most inspiring, and the most difficult. And any adequate defense of sentimentality must therefore make the defense of love, even at its most pathetic and sentimental, its top priority. ‘‘On Kitsch and Sentimentality,’’ as I said, was written after many discussions and exchanges with Kathleen Higgins and extensive museum and gift-shop research. My thoughts on these matters have developed considerably in the past twenty years, and I am indebted to many sensitive people for their encouragement, suggestions, and their own writings on these subjects. In particular, let me mention, first of all, Kathleen Higgins, my beloved and wonderful life companion. (I can talk like that in a book defending sentimentality.) Her exceptional sense of compassion, her unfathomable deep feelings, and her own thoughts and writings on sentimentality and kindred topics have been an extremely important contribution not only to my own ideas but to my life as well. I have learned much, directly or indirectly, from Nico Frijda, Paul Woodruff, Frithjof Bergmann, Shula Sommers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Preface [xiii ]

Barthes, Noe¨l Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Janet McCracken, Betty Sue Flowers, Cheshire Calhoun, Clancy Martin, and many others. I have dedicated several of the chapters to a few of the people who have most influenced, helped, or taught me. I also want to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for a delightful stint at their Bellagio site, during which I worked on several of these chapters, and the University Research Institute at the University of Texas, which supported others. My thanks, too, to the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Auckland for their wonderful hospitality and collegiality over these many years. My special thanks to my editors Peter Ohlin and Lisa Stallings, and to Farrah Ghazi Zughni for her help with the index. The book as a whole is dedicated to two of the most wonderful sentimentalists I have known, Kathleen and Kathryn Higgins (1925–2003).

[ xiv ] Preface

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the following journals and publishers for their permission to reuse and revise this material: ‘‘In Defense of Sentimentality,’’ Philosophy and Literature, Fall 1990 Vol. 14, pp. 304–323. ‘‘Sympathy and Vengeance: The Feelings of Justice,’’ in ‘‘The Emotions of Justice,’’ Social Justice Research 3, no. 4 ( December 1989) and ‘‘Sympathy and Vengeance: The Role of the Emotions in Justice,’’ in Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory, Festschrift for Nico Frijda, Stephanie van Goozen, Nanne van de Poll, and Joe Sergeant, eds. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994) Part of it appeared in Solomon and M. Murphy, What is Justice? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 1999). ‘‘Care and Compassion’’ is based on ‘‘Competition, Care and Compassion: Toward a Non-Chauvinist View of the Corporation,’’ in Andrea L. Larson and R. Edward Freeman, eds., Women’s Studies and Business Ethics ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 144–173; ‘‘The Moral Psychology of Business: Care and Compassion in the Corporation,’’ Business Ethics Quarterly ( June 1998); and ‘‘Adam Smith’s Sympathy,’’ for the conference ‘‘Adam Smith as a Moral Philosopher’’ in Heidelberg, Germany, summer of 2003 (to be published in German). ‘‘Real Horror’’ first appeared in Daniel Shaw and Steven Jay Schneider, eds., Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror ( Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp. 230–259. ‘‘Comic Relief: In Appreciation of the Seven Deadly Sins’’ is adapted from my book Wicked Pleasures: Meditations on the Seven ‘‘Deadly’’ Sins ( Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 1–17. ‘‘Spirituality as Sentimentality’’ is adapted from my book Spirituality for the Skeptic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ‘‘The Virtue of ( Erotic) Love’’ first appeared as ‘‘The Virtue of Love’’ in Peter French, Theodore Uenling, Jr., and Howard Wettstein, eds., Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 12–31. ‘‘Reasons for Love’’ first appeared in Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32, no. 1 ( March 2002). pp. 1–28. ‘‘A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse)’’ first appeared in Hugh Silverman, ed., Philosophy and Desire ( New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 143–158. ‘‘On Kitsch and Sentimentality’’ first appeared in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49, no. 1 ( Winter 1991): 1–14.

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Contents

1. In Defense of Sentimentality 3 2. Sympathy and Vengeance: The Role of Feelings in Justice

20

3. Care and Compassion: Moral Sentiment Theory Revisited

43

4. On Grief and Gratitude

75

5. Real Horror 108 6. Comic Relief: In Appreciation of the Seven Deadly Sins 131 7. Spirituality as Sentimentality 148 8. The Virtue of (Erotic) Love

165

9. Reasons for Love 189 10. A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) 11. On Kitsch and Sentimentality 235 Notes 255 Bibliography Index 289

275

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In Defense of Sentimentality

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One In Defense of Sentimentality A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.—Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?’’ The title of Mark Jefferson’s article1 already indicates a great deal not only about the gist of his essay but also about a century-old prejudice that has been devastating to ethics and literature alike. According to that prejudice, it goes without saying that there is something wrong with sentimentality, even if it is difficult to put one’s finger on it. To be called ‘‘sentimental’’ is to be ridiculed or dismissed. Sentimentality is a weakness; it suggests hypocrisy. Or perhaps it is the fact that sentimental people are so . . . embarrassing. (How awkward it is to talk to or sit next to someone weeping or gushing, when one is dry-eyed or somber.) Or perhaps it is the well-confirmed fact that sentimentalists have such poor taste, and sentimental literature is, above all, literature that is tasteless, cheap, superficial, and manipulative—in other words, verbal kitsch. Such mawkish literature jerks tears from otherwise sensible readers, and sentimentalists are those who actually enjoy that humiliating experience. Perhaps that is why Oscar Wilde thought that sentimentalists were really cynics. (‘‘Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.’’)2 Or perhaps what bothers us is what once bothered Michael Tanner: that sentimental people indulge themselves in their feelings instead of doing what should be done.3 It is often said that the problem is that sentimentality and sentimental literature alike give us a false view of the world, distort our thinking, and substitute a ‘‘saccharine’’ portrait of the world for what we all know to be the horrible realities. Moreover, as Mark Jefferson and Milan Kundera more than suggest, the ‘‘simpleminded sympathies’’ of sentimentality might actually promote fascism and racism, if only by blunting any critical response. Mary Midgley similarly suggests that sentimentality leads to brutality.4 But even where sentimentality is a harmless diversion—a Daphne du Maurier novel on a sad Saturday afternoon—it seems to be all but agreed that sentimentality is no virtue even if it is not, like cruelty and hypocrisy, intrinsically vicious. Something is wrong with sentimentality; the only question is, What is it?

In this chapter, I want to argue that there is nothing wrong with sentimentality. Of course, like any quasi-ethical category, it admits of unwarranted excesses and hypocritical abuses, and is prone to various pathological distortions. But the prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and is an extension of that all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy. Our disdain for sentimentality is the rationalist’s discomfort with any display of emotion, warranted as well as unwarranted, appropriate as well as inappropriate. It is as if the very word ‘‘sentimentality’’ has been loaded with the connotations of ‘‘too much’’—too much feeling and too little common sense and rationality, as if these were opposed instead of mutually supportive. It is as if sentimentality and its sentiments are never warranted and always inappropriate. The word has come to be used as the name of a deficiency or a weakness if not, as some critics have written, a malaise. I take sentimentality to be nothing more nor less than the ‘‘appeal to tender feelings,’’ and though one can manipulate and abuse such feelings (including one’s own), and though they can on occasion be misdirected or excessive, there is nothing wrong with them as such and nothing (in that respect) wrong with literature that provokes us, that moves us to abstract affection or weeping. Sentimentality implies no deficiency in one’s rational faculties and does not imply any inappropriateness, unwillingness, or lack of readiness to act. Sentimentality does not involve any distortion of the world, and it does not impede, but rather prepares and motivates, our reacting in ‘‘the real world.’’ It is not an escape from reality or responsibility but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than being an obstacle to it. Or this is what I will argue here.

From Sentiment to Sentimentality Historically, I want to trace the fate of sentimentality to the parallel fates of the ‘‘sentiments’’ and their apparently doomed plea for ethical legitimacy in what was once called ‘‘moral sentiment theory.’’ My thesis is that the sentiments have had a bad time in Anglo-American moral and social philosophy for well over a century, and that sentimentality has been held in contempt for just about the same period of time. During at least some of the eighteenth century, morality was thought to be, first of all, a matter of the proper sentiments (whether ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘artificially’’ cultivated), and sentimentality, accordingly, was something of a virtue. But today, the ‘‘moral sentiment’’ theorists—David Hume and Adam Smith in particular—are studied only because of their many other ideas and insights. Despite some sophisticated efforts on the Continent to keep the tradition alive (e.g., in the work of Max [ 4] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Scheler), the moral sentiment tradition was all but dead in moral philosophy by the middle of the twentieth century.5 Kant did away with ‘‘melting compassion’’ as an ingredient in ethics once and for all before 1800, in a single sarcastic comment in the Groundwork (‘‘kindness done from duty . . . is practical, and not pathological . . . residing in the will and not in the propensions of feeling, in principles of action and not of melting compassion.’’)6 The other ‘‘inclinations’’ did not fare much better in his philosophy, except perhaps for respect, dignity, and faith, which, because of their importance, were not treated as mere ‘‘sentiments.’’ It need not be said that most of ethics since Kant has been wholly absorbed in the vicissitudes of reason and the priority of various rational principles, and quite suspicious of the sentiments. Rational principles are universal. Feelings are too often particular and personal. Rational principles are ‘‘objective’’ and admit of argument and demonstration. Mere feelings are wholly ‘‘subjective’’ (which is multiply ambiguous) and (supposedly) not vulnerable to logic. Rational principles are (unlike love) truly forever, while feelings are capricious and come and go. Rationality is by its nature unemotional and disinterested. The sentiments as emotions are not only interested but absorbed, caught up in the circumstances and incapable of unbiased judgment. The Humean humanist emphasis on the sentiments was replaced, accordingly, by the still current scholastic debates about deontic semantics, and doing right became much more a matter of acting on the right principles (though not necessarily Kantian or deontological principles) and much less a matter of feeling the right feelings. Worst of all, on this account of ethics, was to feel the feelings alone and not entertain, in some more or less self-understanding way, the principles upon which one was bound to act. Mere sentiment— even the most tender sentiments—became an ethical liability. It should not be surprising, therefore, that sentimentality had an even worse time of it and not only is excluded from most discussions of ethics but also, when discussed at all, is condemned as an ethical defect. To call someone a ‘‘sentimentalist’’ in ethics is to dismiss both the person and his or her views from serious consideration—adding, perhaps, a disdainful chortle and an implicit accusation of frivolousness. And in literature as in ethics, sentimentality is viewed as a serious defect. Sentimentality is kitsch. Sentimentality substitutes cheap manipulation of feeling for careful calculation of form or judicious development of character. But sentimentality as kitsch and sentimentality as an ethical defect are two very different charges, and part of the problem in the general condemnation of sentimentality is that it too readily identifies the two and treats them together. I abstain here from an opinion on kitsch, but I do want to defend sentimentality—and with it the role of emotions in ethics and literature—against the bad reputation it has recently acquired. (On kitsch, see chapter 11.) In Defense of Sentimentality [ 5]

It is worth noting that the offensive epithet ‘‘sentimentalist’’ has not long been a term of abuse: just two centuries ago, when Schiller referred to himself and his poetry as ‘‘sentimental’’ (as opposed to Goethe’s ‘‘naive’’ style, which Schiller much admired as the hallmark of true genius), he had in mind the elegance of emotion, not saccharine sweetness and the manipulation of mawkish passions.7 But in 1823, the poet Robert Southey dismissed Rousseau as a writer who ‘‘addressed himself to the sentimental classes, persons of ardent and morbid sensibility, who believe themselves to be composed of finer elements than the gross multitude.’’8 This charge of elitism was soon to be reversed: hitherto a sentimentalist would have distinctively inferior feelings. If Rousseau’s audience was objectionable early in the century because it believed itself to have ‘‘finer’’ feelings, the object of Oscar Wilde’s scorn (the young Lord Alfred Douglas) was attacked as a ‘‘sentimentalist’’ because his feelings were fraudulent and contemptible. By the end of the nineteenth century, ‘‘sentimentalist’’ was clearly a term of abuse or ridicule. I suggested that the status of ‘‘sentimentality’’ went into decline about the same time that the sentiments lost their status in moral philosophy, and that the key figure in this philosophical transformation was Immanuel Kant. But Kant’s unprecedented attack on sentiment and sentimentalism was at least in part a reaction, perhaps a visceral reaction, not only against the philosophical moral sentiment theorists (whom he at least admired), but also against the flood of popular women writers in Europe and America who were then turning out thousands of widely read potboilers and romances that did indeed equate virtue and goodness with gushing sentiment. It is no secret that the charge of sentimentalism has long had sexist implications as a weakness that is both more common (even ‘‘natural’’) and more forgivable in women than in men, and one might plausibly defend the thesis that the moralist’s attack on sentimentality cannot be separated from a more general Victorian campaign against the rising demand for sexual equality.9 But in the purportedly nonpolitical, genderless world of philosophy, sentimentalism was forced into a confrontation with logic and became the fallacy of appealing to emotion. In ethics, to be accused of sentimentalism meant that one had an unhealthy and most unphilosophical preference for heartfelt feeling over hardheaded reason. Meanwhile, sentimentalism more generally became a matter of moral bad taste, a weakness for easy emotion in place of the hard facts and ambiguities of human social life; and the literature that provoked and promoted such emotions became the object of moral—not only literary—condemnation. Not surprisingly, prime targets for such a charge were those same women’s novels—and the emotions they provoked—which were, and still are, dismissed as ‘‘trash’’ by the literary establishment.10 But though designated ‘‘sentimental rubbish’’ by their detractors, some of these novels achieved unprecedented [ 6] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

success, in terms not only of popularity but of moral and political influence as well. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s much demeaned Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first American novel to sell a million copies and perhaps the most politically influential book in postcolonial American history. Sentimentalism may have been dismissed as mere self-indulgence by its critics (including feminist critics),11 but it was in fact a sufficiently powerful moral influence to warrant its status as the target (if not the explicit object) of Kant’s renowned attack.

Sentimentality, Art, and Ethics The great philosopher Kant was moved to attack sentimental gush in both morality and art (though he was no great connoisseur), and the two—bad art and an overly emotional sense of morals—have been conflated ever since. Of course, good art and correct morals had been tied together through the moral sentiments before, notably in Denis Diderot’s deservedly famous criticism and in Schiller’s positive praise of sentimentality, but one of my main aims here is to disentangle them. Bad art is one thing and sentimentality is another, and while bad literature in particular may try to prove its redeeming value by evoking tender feelings, its sentimentality is neither the cause of its badness nor a species of immorality. Sentimentality in certain circumstances can be in bad taste, of course, but sentimentality as such is not always (or even usually) in bad taste and bad taste does not always (or even usually) reflect bad character. William James depicts a wealthy society matron who weeps at the plight of the characters on stage while her waiting servants freeze outside, and there is a story about Rudolf Hess weeping at the opera put on by condemned Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. Such stories do demonstrate that sentimentality divorced from life may reflect a particularly despicable or dangerous pathology. But it is not sentimentality as such that is at fault in these two famous cases. Exactly the same charge might be leveled against that use of reason (as in ‘‘thinking the unthinkable’’) which entertains the hypotheses of game theory while deliberating the fate of millions. It is not sentimentality (or rationality) that is troublesome, but rather its utter inappropriateness in the context in question. Sentimentality is rarely the symptom (much less the cause) of moral deficiency. We can agree that certain sentiments and sentimentality can be inappropriate and excessive without granting that sentiments and sentimentality are immoral or pathological as such, and we can similarly agree that sentimentality in literature can be inappropriate and excessive without granting that sentimentality marks a deficiency in literature or in the reader who responds to it. It is simply not true In Defense of Sentimentality [ 7]

that sentimentality betrays cynicism. It is rather that sentimentality betrays the cynic, for it is the cynic and not the sentimentalist who cannot abide honest emotion. The history of the moral sentiments in connection with art and literature made it almost inevitable that the turn against the sentiments would be both paralleled by and identified with a turn against sentimentality in the arts as well. Diderot insisted, in his review of one of Jacques-Louis David’s more provocative political paintings, that he wanted first of all, that art should ‘‘move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged.’’ One would be hard put to imagine a similar demand from an art critic today, but Diderot was very much a part of the moral sensibility that made up the moral sentiment movement. That link between emotions, art, and ethics, once forged, would not easily be broken. But whereas the evocation of emotions was once a great virtue in a novel, poem, or painting, it now became something of a vice, a reason not only to disparage the quality of the work but also to doubt the sincerity and the integrity of the writer or the artist. Superb technique could always be criticized as ‘‘manipulative’’ and the emotions evoked could always be said to be ‘‘false’’—for how could a work of fiction be expected to evoke a ‘‘true’’ emotion? Sentimental art and literature thus became ‘‘bad’’ art and literature, and this in turn reflected a moral as well as an aesthetic flaw in art and artist as well as in the audience. What this presupposes is that sentimentality itself is somehow blameworthy, cynical, or vicious. But if there is nothing essentially wrong with sentimentality (though of course there are pathological excesses and inappropriate objects), then there is nothing wrong with sentimentality in literature. On the contrary, sentimentality is essential to both ethics and literature. The real worry is those many moralists who think and don’t feel and, in literature, writers who sell and readers who buy pure narrative or entertainment devoid of tender feelings, as well as those avante-garde writers who plot the deconstruction of their own writing and leave us with nothing. The excessive manipulation of tender feelings is not the problem of sentimentality; the problem of sentimentality is the lack of tender feelings altogether. Sentimentality is variously conceived (1) in terms of the ‘‘tender’’ emotions (I call this the ‘‘minimal’’ definition), (2) in terms of emotional weakness or ‘‘excessive’’ emotion (the ‘‘loaded’’ definition), and (3) in terms of emotional self-indulgence (the ‘‘diagnostic’’ definition). Sometimes it is identified by the ‘‘epistemological’’ definition (4) in terms of its ‘‘false’’ or ‘‘fake’’ emotions, though one must then provide an account of what a ‘‘false’’ or a ‘‘fake’’ emotion (as opposed to a merely make-believe emotion) might be. Obviously the case that can be made for (or against) sentimentality depends upon the [ 8] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

neutrality or the bias of the definition. My main concern is the defense of sentimentality in terms of the minimal definition, as an expression of and appeal to the tender emotions. If the tender emotions (pity, sympathy, fondness, adoration, compassion) are thought to be not only ethically irrelevant but also ethically undesirable, then it is not sentimentality that should be called into question but the conception of ethics that would dictate such an inhuman response. My central argument, here and throughout this book, is that no conception of ethics can be adequate unless it takes into account such emotions, not as mere ‘‘inclinations’’ but as an essential part of the substance of ethics itself. It is thus that I want to defend sentimentality as an ethical virtue and suggest that sentimentality in literature might best be conceived as the cultivation and ‘‘practice’’ of our moral-emotional faculties. On the other hand, if sentimentality is defined or diagnosed as an ethical defect, as weakness or self-indulgence (though it is far from entirely clear that weakness and self-indulgence are as such ethical defects), that loads the issue against sentimentality and makes it hard to see how a defense of it would be possible. Indeed, the very pronunciation of the term ‘‘sentimentalist’’ and the characterization of ‘‘sentimentality’’ indicate deep disdain for emotions as intrusions and for emotionality as vulnerability. For instance, it is difficult to see how strong sentiments could constitute a weakness unless there is already operating some powerful metaphor that views our sentiments as alien and the integral self as a will which is supposed to contain or control them but fails to do so. So, too, sentimentality seems to be self-indulgence if a person is seen to indulge in his or her emotional weaknesses. One could thus view the reader as the willing victim of the emotionally manipulative author, just as an alcoholic is seen as the willing victim of that first drink. Sentimentality is ‘‘giving in,’’ and a preference for sentimentality suggests a perverse willingness to make oneself vulnerable. Thus, according to this unflattering picture, the reader indulges in sentiments that are not his or her own but are caused by a more or less skillful storyteller, and the moral flaw is the failure to control and contain these emotions. The author, on the other hand, is something of a seducer, though the fruits of a successful seduction may be only a tear or two. Sentimental literature violates the reader’s sense of self by provoking these unwelcome emotional intrusions at an intensity that cannot be controlled (except, perhaps, by firmly putting down the book in question). And if one adds to this any one of a familiar set of ideas about aesthetic ‘‘detachment’’ or ‘‘appreciation of form,’’ the ethical flaw becomes a failure in aesthetics as well. Whatever else literature is supposed to do to us, goes this account, it ought not to ‘‘manipulate’’ the reader’s emotions, interfering with both autonomy and aesthetic appreciation. Any normal reader will feel some emotion, to be sure, but this is as irrelevant to good literature as it is to doing the right thing in ethics. In Defense of Sentimentality [ 9]

Sentimentality and Self-Indulgence The unspoken premise in the attack on sentimentality is the unflattering nature of the sentiments, the emotions themselves. It is emotional engagement as such that is alien to the properly rational and ideally detached self, feeling and its expressions in place of ends–means calculation and reasondirected action. Our emotions, even in their mildest forms, are by their very nature self-involved and self-indulgent. That makes them too self-interested to allow for deliberate or reasoned judgment. Any emotion, on such accounts, is excessive, for an emotion or a sentiment as such is a disruption of the life of reason and an obstacle to ethical analysis and aesthetic appreciation rather than an essential part of them. ‘‘Excessive’’ sentimentality may indeed be a vice, but sentimentality and the sentiments are not as such excessive—unless, of course, one thinks that the emotions are necessarily self-interested intrusions in an otherwise rational life. But I reject this view of emotions in life, and I also reject the idea that emotions are by their very nature self-involved and self-indulgent. Although I question the starkness of his dichotomy and his ‘‘master–slave’’ metaphor, I tend to agree with David Hume that reason ought to serve the passions. And the idea that emotions are by their very nature self-involved (much less selfindulgent) is one more version of an ancient fallacy in moral psychology: that because an inclination is motivated, it must be self-motivated. For instance, because one has a desire, it must be a desire for oneself, and its satisfaction must be self-satisfaction. But one can passionately desire the good of another. One can passionately desire that some state of affairs (e.g., the outcome of an election) should become the case. So, too, in literature. One can passionately desire the positive resolution of a novel without any hint of self-interest. There need be no taint of self-interest in many emotions. Moreover, most of the critical literature against sentimentality does not in fact employ these charges and misunderstandings. Arguments by Jefferson, Tanner, and Midgley, for example (as well as those implicit in Oscar Wilde), do not take the word ‘‘sentimentality’’ to mean ‘‘too much,’’ but charge that the character of sentimentality, even conceived in the minimal sense, leads to self-indulgence and, consequently, ethical impropriety or inaction. These further arguments turn on the subtle nature and consequences of sentimentality, the alleged falseness of the component sentiments, the ‘‘distortions’’ that these impose on perception and judgment, and the dangers of what is argued to be the unrealistic simplicity of the sentimental worldview. But the charge of self-indulgence is a particularly serious one, quite apart from the misunderstanding about the supposed self-interest of all emotions as such and its subsequent consequences. It is also quite different from—and in some forms opposed to—the criticism of sentimentality as a weakness. [ 10] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

The positive insight behind the charge of self-indulgence is that we in fact enjoy having emotions, sometimes quite apart from what in particular that emotion is about. Thus one can enjoy a good piece of fiction despite the fact that the story is not, strictly speaking, ‘‘about’’ anything at all, for the characters do not exist (and have never existed) and the circumstances described are wholly fictitious. One can enjoy a good cry quite regardless of what initiates or triggers one’s tears; indeed, it may be preferable that the initiating stimulus is unimportant or inappropriate, a mawkish novel or a trivial accident, rather than a real-life tragedy that would fully justify such hysterics. So, too, it is far preferable for most of us to enjoy the thrills of high adventure, the horrors of nature run amok, and the suspense of a threatened murder quite detached from the circumstances in real life that would inspire such emotions. We enjoy the thrill, the horror, the suspense without ever being in any real danger ourselves. But is such behavior self-indulgent? Is it wrong to enjoy an emotion for its own sake? And isn’t it even worse to willfully provoke such feelings through the use of literature and the imagination, instead of paying attention to real-life tragedies and hardships that we can in fact do something about? I think that one mistake here is the idea that there is such a thing as ‘‘an emotion for its own sake.’’ Every emotion has its context, its implications, its place in our personality whether or not it has objects that are real or appropriate (as opposed to fictional or merely convenient). I do not want to argue that sentimentality (or emotions in general) is ‘‘good in itself.’’ Whether a particular emotion is ‘‘appropriate’’ depends upon the situation, including the object and the nature of the emotion in question, the identity and character of the person having the emotion, and the overall social context. So, too, whether sentimentality is appropriate, good or bad, morally uplifting or self-defeating or humiliating depends upon the situation, including the object and nature of the sentiment in question, the identity and character of the ‘‘sentimentalist,’’ and the overall social context. Weeping at an opera while Jews are being gassed at one’s command nearby is grotesque, but weeping at an opera ordinarily is not. We cultivate and enjoy as well as suffer emotions, but we do not do so wholly apart from context, minimally the context of our own selfconsciousness. We pride ourselves on our sensitivity, and we enjoy feelings of power as well as, on safe occasions, powerlessness. We may well speculate about why people voluntarily provoke fear and suspense in themselves (e.g., by reading semifictional accounts of impending doom or adventure thrillers that provide something more than Agatha Christie whodunit curiosity), but there seems to be little mystery why people would want to cultivate the tender emotions. Whatever else may be going on (and Nietzsche, for one, suggests that a great deal else is ‘‘going on’’), we feel good about ourselves when we In Defense of Sentimentality [ 11]

experience the tender emotions, and we feel even better when, reflectively, we perceive ourselves as the sort of people who feel such feelings. In a famous discussion of kitsch and sentimentality in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes: Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.12

But notice that this charge (a peculiar kind of ‘‘self-indulgence’’) does not suggest that tender emotions as such are somehow illegitimate; rather, we have tender emotions precisely in order to feel better about ourselves. We might now ask, What’s wrong with this (in contrast, for example, to the feeling of self-righteousness that may accompany doing one’s moral duty or moralizing in terms of this or that moral principle)? Kundera, of course, is concerned with a particular kind of political propaganda that intentionally eclipses harsh realities with emotion and uses sweet sentiments to preclude political criticism. To be sure, sentimentalizing fascism is one of the clearest possible examples of the ‘‘inappropriate’’ uses of sentimentality, but it does not follow that this is the true nature of sentimentality or that sentimentality is cynical or bad in itself. If the emotion were disgust or fear, would similar reflections (on the shared virtue of recognizing the world’s vulgarity or fearsomeness) be similarly sentimental? Why is it only the tender sentiments that come in for such criticism and abuse? More recently, Kundera has written, ‘‘Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.’’13 Here the charge is not self-indulgence at all, but rather our banal and unoriginal ideas. But why must an honest feeling claim originality, and why, again, are only the tender sentiments (as opposed, for example, to such vulgar negativities as fecal monism) subject to such a test? We can readily share Kundera’s concern for the use of kitsch as a cover for totalitarianism; but then it is not sentimentality that is at fault, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with our being moved by the children playing on the grass and then by our being moved by our being moved. Is the ‘‘second tear’’ self-indulgence or is it what, in philosophical circles, what would normally be called simply ‘‘reflection,’’ the precondition of the examined life? Why should reflection be tearless, unless we are wedded to an indefensible divorce between reason and the passions, the latter wholly self-absorbed and without reason, the former merely an ‘‘ideal spectator,’’ wholly dispassionate and wholly without feeling? [ 12] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Sentimentality, Inaction, and Falsity Michael Tanner raises a similar but more powerful objection against sentimentality. It is worth noting that he takes sentimentality in music as his paradigm (a starting point that threatens incoherence between the nonrepresentational nature of instrumental music and the intentionality of emotions. There may also be a problem where the enjoyment of music is purely aesthetic.) But despite his paradigm, Tanner is concerned only secondarily with sentimentality in art and comes out strongly against sentimentality as such. He echoes Wilde’s suggestion that the feelings which constitute sentimentality are ‘‘in some important way unearned, being had on the cheap, come by too easily. . . . to be sentimental is to be shallow.’’ But Tanner’s real objection to sentimentality is that it ‘‘doesn’t lead anywhere’’ ( p. 130). It is this gap between sentimentality and action that Tanner rejects. In ‘‘emotional generosity,’’ which Tanner contrasts directly with sentimentality, one ‘‘acts on [one’s] feelings without anxiety about the point and value of doing so . . . feeling and action become fairly closely linked.’’ Sentimental people, by contrast, ‘‘avoid following up their responses with appropriate actions, or if they do follow them up appropriately, it is adventitious’’ ( pp. 139 –140). If this objection could be sustained, much of what we are arguing here would be fatuous, namely, that sentiment is essential in ethics. But it seems to me that the manipulative sentimentality of a novel such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows quite conclusively that sentimentality is not nearly so ill-directed nor so ineffective as Tanner suggests. On the contrary, being deeply moved by some specific (even if fictional) circumstance (for example, the death of little Eva— which Jane Tompkins calls ‘‘the epitome of Victorian sentimentalism’’) would seem to be a much more reliable prod or at least conduit to action (e.g., in raising an outcry against slavery) than a well-rationalized set of categorical imperatives. It is true, of course, that one can do very little about political situations in a foreign country that arouse our indignation or sympathy (in neither instance a case of what is usually called ‘‘sentimentality’’), but that does not make the emotion ‘‘cheap’’ or ‘‘easy to come by.’’ Direct action may be rather costly, though one can always write a letter or send a check. ( There is the existentialist impulse. You have to do something!) Does the sentimentalist act (if and when he or she acts) only with anxiety about doing so? Granted there is always room for hypocrisy, self-deception, and incontinence, but is there any greater danger here than elsewhere in the realm of human behavior? And where the object is fictitious, what sort of action would be appropriate and what would be adventitious? ( It is worth noting that some critics of sentimental kitsch—Karsten Harries, for instance14—object to sentimentality because it lacks that distance to which Tanner objects.) There are people, of course, who become so caught up in In Defense of Sentimentality [ 13]

their own emotional reactions that they block their access or attention to action, and there are people who are sentimental all of the time, inappropriately responding to situations as ‘‘moving’’ or ‘‘sweet’’ when they would be better viewed as disgusting or dangerous. But such pathological sentimentalists are hardly fair examples of sentimentality as such. The supposed gap between emotion and action is not an objection against sentimentality. The most common charge against sentimentality is that it involves false emotion. But what is it for an emotion to be false? It is not, as I have argued elsewhere,15 for the emotion to be ‘‘vicarious.’’ The fact that an emotion is vicarious (in some sense ‘‘secondhand’’) does not mean that it is not a real emotion or that it is not an emotion of the morally appropriate type. Sympathy for a fictional character in a novel is nevertheless genuine sympathy. Horror provoked by the grisly view of an apparently decapitated cat on a movie screen is real horror, perhaps accompanied by real disgust and real nausea, no matter that the viewer knows it to be another one of Hollywood’s many tricks and the special effects man to be a cat lover. Indignation about the maltreatment of blacks in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is rightful indignation, whether or not the character evoking sympathy and the situation provoking indignation are actual or modeled after an actual character and situation. Nor is an emotion ‘‘false’’ if it is divorced from action. It is the nature of some emotions (e.g., grief ) to be cut off entirely from effective action and open only to ‘‘adventitious’’ expression. Self-indulgence in an emotion may make it ‘‘false’’ in the sense that one exaggerates either its importance or its effects, but it is not the emotion itself that is false. So, too, excessive selfconsciousness of one’s emotions may well lead to the suspicion that an emotion is overly controlled or ‘‘faked,’’ but as I pointed out (with reference to Kundera), emotional self-consciousness is not itself fraudulent but rather an important philosophical virtue, and a thoroughly righteous emotion (such as indignation) may well be self-conscious without in the least undermining its claims to legitimacy. One prominent suggestion is that sentimentality yields ‘‘fake’’ emotions because the object of the emotion is not what it claims to be. It is displaced. A sentimentalist only pretends to be moved by the plight of another; he or she is really reacting to a much more personal plight. A sentimentalist sobs his or her way through a tearjerker novel, but he or she is really weeping for a lost lover, a dying aunt, a recent humiliation at work. One can imagine Milan Kundera claiming that even the first tear is fake because it is not really about the children but about oneself. We should note that this is different from the charge that the emotions involved in sentimentality are vicarious, that is, based on fictional situations or situations which (though real) are not one’s own. Vicarious emotions have (in some complex sense) unreal objects, but the [ 14] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

emotion is nevertheless directed toward those objects. Displaced emotions only seem to be directed toward their putative objects but in fact are directed elsewhere. Thus there is a suggestion of hypocrisy in the displacement charge which is not at all evident in the claim that sentimentality is vicarious. But many emotions are displaced. (Indeed, some Freudians and symbolists would claim that all are.) Displacement has nothing special to do with sentimentality, and does not generically make an emotion false. A man, angry with his boss at work, comes home and yells at his misbehaving kids. His anger is displaced, but it is nevertheless not the case that ‘‘he isn’t really angry at his kids,’’ even if it is true that, in a more mellow mood, he would tolerate their screaming without such explosive irritation. Another man is shattered when his lover leaves, but the very next week he falls madly in love with a woman who looks remarkably like the one who just made her exit. ‘‘Love on the rebound’’ is a form of displacement but, again, one cannot hastily conclude that it is therefore false. What is presupposed in such discussions is a kind of quantitative zero-sum or qualitative unidirectional assumption such that an emotion can ‘‘really’’ have one and only one object. If the man is really angry at his boss, he cannot also be angry at his kids, and if the other man is still in love with the first woman, he cannot also be in love with the second. But there is no reason to accept such monotopical restrictions on our emotional life, and if sentimentality is to a considerable extent a phenomenon of displacement (why else would we respond to some of those novels and movies?), then it should be credited with enriching and enlarging our emotional lives. It would be a nightmare, not a matter of integrity, if we could direct our emotions only at their primary objects, if we could not express and satisfy ourselves with secondary, derivative, and fictional objects as well. One long-standing argument is that sentimentality is objectionable and its emotions false because it is distorting. Mary Midgley, for instance, argues that ‘‘the central offence lies in self-deception, in distorting reality to get a pretext for indulging in any feeling.’’ Returning to the much-discussed example of the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (which Wilde insisted could not be read without laughing), she claims: Dickens created in little Nell and various other female characters a figure who could not exist and was the product of wish-fulfilment—a subservient, devoted, totally understanding mixture of child and lover, with no wishes of her own. This figure was well-designed to provoke a delicious sense of pity and mastery, and to set up further fantasies where this feeling could continue. One trouble about this apparently harmless pursuit is that it distorts various expectations; it can make people unable to deal with the real world, and particularly with real girls. Another is that it can so absorb them that they cannot react to what is genuinely pitiful in the world around them.16 In Defense of Sentimentality [ 15]

Sentimentality, Midgley argues, centers around the ‘‘flight from, and contempt for, real people.’’ In literature, kitsch characters—Dickens’s Nell or Stowe’s Eva—are one-dimensional, inspiring an excessive purity of emotion. These girls don’t do any of the nasty things that little children do. They don’t whine. They don’t tease the cat. They don’t hit other children. They don’t have any blemishes on their perfect cuteness. They are, accordingly, false characters and our feelings are distorted. So, too, Mark Jefferson argues that ‘‘sentimentality involves attachment to a distorted series of beliefs.’’17 But the reply to this objection is, first of all, that all emotions are distorting in the sense intended. Anger looks only at the offense and fails to take account of the virtue of the antagonist; jealousy is aware only of the threat and not of the wit and charms of the rival; love celebrates the virtues and is not appreciative of the vices of the beloved; envy seeks only the coveted object and remains indifferent to questions of general utility and the fairness of the desired redistribution. But why call this ‘‘distortion’’ rather than ‘‘focus’’ or ‘‘concern’’? And what is the alternative—omniscience? always attending to everything that one knows or remembers about a subject? (reviewing the history of Denmark as well as the literature on stepchild relations before one allows oneself to be moved by Hamlet )? never having a nice thought without a nasty one as well? What is wrong with sentimentality is not a matter of distortion of reality for the sake of emotion, for all emotions construct a perspective of reality that is specifically suited to their natures. There are, of course, ways of carving up the world, ways of selecting the sweet from the surrounding circumstances, that are indeed falsifying, distorting, and dangerous. We can sentimentalize the situation of the Southern plantation slaves before the Civil War, the patriotic motives of the ‘‘freedom fighters’’ in Nicaragua. We can sentimentalize mischievous children who are bound for reform school (or worse), or all mammals that are on farms or in zoos, circuses, or experimental laboratories. Gwynne Dyer warns us, in his terrifying study of war, against the temptation to ‘‘sentimentalize war.’’18 It is obvious that in such cases we are already in ethical territory, but what is at stake here is the mode of categorization, not sentimentality. One might (and many do) reach the same results through the affectless application of rational or ideological principles. It is not the nature of the feelings that characterize such problematic cases of ‘‘sentimentality,’’ but rather the inappropriate or even dangerous way of misperceiving an ethically loaded situation. This is how we should react to the example of the Jewish prisoners’ opera. It was not Hess’s weeping that is damnable but his evil ability to block out reality that ought to inspire horror and revulsion in any civilized human being. Mark Jefferson has one example—and I think that it is a very telling example—of how sentimentality can become a danger to morality. In [ 16] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

E. M. Forster’s Passage to India the English fiance´e ( Miss Quested) becomes sentimentalized as the symbol of ‘‘the purity, bravery and vulnerability of English womanhood.’’19 Her alleged attacker ( Dr. Aziz) is complementarily cast as ‘‘lust-ridden and perfidious’’ (along with his people). But I would argue that the point has much more to do with chauvinism and racism than with sentimentality, and it has little of that innocence of feeling which constitutes sentimentality. There is some confusion between the alleged innocence of Miss Quested and the innocence of the emotions the reader feels about her. There is also an ambivalence about the relationship of sentimentality and action, for while Tanner and others tend to indict sentimentality for its ‘‘distance’’ from action, here is Jefferson complaining that sentimentality provokes actions of the most violent kind. But it is not sentimentality that provokes (directly or indirectly) the vilification of Aziz and his people, and the ‘‘simple-minded sympathies’’ bestowed upon Quested are hardly an example of sentimentality. Here, again, I think we see the danger of that zero-sum sense of emotion, in this case manifested in a confusion between idealization on the one hand and a dichotomizing conflict on the other. One need not, in celebrating the virtues of an Englishwoman, imply or conclude anything unflattering about the non-English. Competitive winners may entail the possibility of losers and praise may entail the possibility of blame, but there are many forms of idealization that do not entail such contrasts. So, too, Jefferson’s examples of World War I propaganda—of Germans (‘‘Huns’’) bayoneting Belgian babies—do not tell us anything about the dangers of sentimentality. They do tell us something about war paranoia and they do presuppose the tender sentiments we all have for babies that make such depictions loathsome. (cf. the ‘‘dead baby’’ jokes that are popular among teenagers, which intentionally play on this assumption.) But these sentiments will be degraded as ‘‘sentimental’’ only if they are perversely demeaned or grotesquely misunderstood. If caring about babies is sentimentality, then why would Jefferson wonder ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?’’ This is neither ‘‘malaise’’ nor ‘‘a distortion of the way things are,’’ nor is it a ‘‘fiction’’ to be ‘‘associated with brutality.’’ Caring about babies is one of those sentiments that can rightly be assumed in any civilized human being. The abuse of babies rightly provokes an emotional reaction. There is nothing distorting about that, or about stories that capitalize on that. Nevertheless, such stories (e.g., Germans bayoneting babies) may be false.

Sentimentality and Self-Deception What becomes more and more evident, as one pursues the objections to sentimentality, is that the real objection to sentimentality is the rejection (or In Defense of Sentimentality [ 17]

fear) of emotion, and a certain kind of emotion or sentiment in particular, variously designated as ‘‘tender’’ or ‘‘sweet’’ or ‘‘nostalgic’’ (Harries: ‘‘cloying sweetness,’’ ‘‘sugary stickiness’’). We find relatively few objections in either art or ethics, we might note, to one-dimensional cynicism, to that gloomy view of the world which commonly co-opts the name ‘‘realism.’’ Karsten Harries warns us: ‘‘How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it.’’20 Mary Midgley points out that ‘‘thrillers’’ have much in common with sentimentality, although they distort reality and manipulate emotion to a very different end: ‘‘to let the reader feel pleasingly tough and ruthless.’’ But in practice the charge of sentimentality is almost always aimed at some common tender human sentiment—our reactions to the laughter of a child or to the death of an infant, for example. It is true that such matters, especially if presently baldly, unambiguously, and without subtlety, are virtually guaranteed to arouse emotion, and they therefore provide a facile vehicle for second- or third-rate painters and novelists. But if such incidents are cliche´d, it is because they are such a common and virtually universal concern, and the fact that this may make for some very bad art and literature should not be used to encourage our embarrassment at experiencing these quite natural sentiments or to discourage those sentiments themselves. Telephone advertisements pressing us to ‘‘reach out’’ to a grandmother or a grandson or a long-absent friend may be annoying because they are so crassly commercial, but it is not the strong, tender feelings evoked that ought to be the target of our disdain. Somewhat similar public service announcements for Save the Children and CARE provoke similar feelings without the accompanying disdain, and it seems perfectly right and proper for them to do so. How else should one appeal for donations to feed a starving family or inoculate a stricken village against the ravages of disease? By appealing to our Kantian sense of duty? Nostalgia is a form of sentimentality, and given the unfortunate fact that most of our experiences are at least tinged with unpleasantness, nostalgia requires considerable effort in selecting, editing, and presenting memories. But, as I argued earlier, this does not necessarily mean that the memories are false or falsified, although that may sometimes be the case. To remember grandpa on what may have been his one healthy and happy day in a decade is not to have a false memory. Nostalgia as sentimentality is the ability to focus on or remember something pleasant in the midst of what may have in fact been tragedy and horror. To take an extreme example, old soldiers fondly remember the camaraderie of a campaign and try hard to forget the terror, bloodshed, and death that surrounded them. But unless such nostalgia is used as a dubious defense of the ‘‘glory’’ of war, why should this be cause for indignation? One can ‘‘sentimentalize war,’’ of course, and there the problem is neither sentimentality nor distorted memory but a much more serious [ 18] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

ethical offense. But that is not the usual purpose of such selective memories, and a preemptive general strike hardly seems called for. What I am suggesting is that the attack on sentimentality is wrongheaded and, possibly worse, a matter of self-deception or serious self-denial. ( That, of course, is just what the critics say about sentimentality.) The usual attack on sentimentality is, I am convinced, too often an attack on innocence and the innocent enjoyment of one’s own tender and therefore ‘‘soft’’ emotions. Mark Jefferson makes this point quite convincingly, though he then goes on to join in the attack himself. He argues that sentimentality distorts reality and is ‘‘ill-formed,’’ but then he wisely concludes that ‘‘it is true that we misrepresent the world in order to indulge in many types of emotion—‘soft’ and ‘hard’—but it is not true that every sort of emotional indulgence is equally objectionable.’’21 And yet Jefferson resists extending this concession to sentimentality as such. As it turns out, it is almost always the soft emotions that come most under fire. Jefferson goes on to catalog a number of such ‘‘dishonest or self-deceptive appraisals of the world,’’ including ‘‘thrill seekers’’ and people who are by cultivation melodramatic and disdainful. At the end of his list (not all of its items seem to me to be either ‘‘dishonest or selfdeceptive’’) comes the sentimentalist, whose ‘‘trick is to misrepresent the world in order to feel unconditionally warm-hearted about bits of it.’’ But it is not at all clear to me that the usual examples (Little Nell in Dickens, Little Eva in Stowe) ‘‘distort’’ reality in anything like the damnable sense that Jefferson, supporting Midgley, suggests. Allowing oneself to become teary-eyed about the tragic death of an impossibly idealized girl does not ‘‘make us unable to deal with the real world’’; rather, it activates our sensitivity to lesser as well as equal actual tragedies. There is always the aberrant case of the parents who go misty-eyed over the child they physically abuse, but again, it is a grotesque mistake to conflate such inappropriate and ( pathologically) inconsistent sentimentality with the brutality that goes with it. The sum-total vision of our emotional economy, according to which we have only so much sympathy to spend, seems to me to be a particularly illconsidered and corrupting doctrine (as it has seemed to several other authors, such as Jerome Neu and Ronald de Sousa).22 It is true that a single trauma can exhaust our emotional resources, but it is unlikely that reading about Little Nell or Little Eva and experiencing ‘‘melting compassion’’ will do that to us. Indeed, that is precisely the virtue of sentimentality: that it stimulates and exercises our sympathies without straining or exhausting them. So considered ( perhaps as a sort of spiritual exercise), sentimentality is not an emotional vice but a virtue.

In Defense of Sentimentality [ 19]

Two Sympathy and Vengeance The Role of Feelings in Justice FOR NICO FRIJDA AND SHULA SOMMERS

Shula Sommers’s psychological investigations were, for her and for those who knew her, a political philosophy. Emotions were not for her epiphenomena in our mental lives, merely curious intrusions that escaped the usual cognitive and motivation categories. Passions were a way of living, the very essence of a life well lived—to love, to hate, to feel about life and not just to study it. For Shula Sommers, the concern for justice was first of all a passion, which emphatically did not imply that it was uninformed or ineffective. Her work and her life were an expression of the intimate linkage between emotions and justice. This essay, in her memory, is an attempt to further pursue the essential role of emotions in justice, a project I have long shared with my old friend and esteemed colleague, Nico Frijda, to whom another version of this essay was dedicated on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Amsterdam.

Is the hatred of evil a ‘‘negative’’ emotion?—Shula Sommers Harmful acts should not be conducted with impunity; they should not go by unpaid for. As I said, this sounds like an elementary sense of justice, and I think that is indeed what it is. This sense, however, need not be present in ideological or abstract form, nor is it, I think, a specific cultural acquisition. Desires to get even, that is, to achieve balances between people, are frequent, widespread and varied in human interaction. Children age three understand fairness and unfairness; they protest when another child gets a larger piece of cake. When free to divide a given sum of money between oneself and someone else, most people divide not too far off from fifty-fifty. . . . Our elementary sense of justice, in other words, may well be based on the emotional gain of social order, just as injustice is emotionally upsetting because the social order is upset. —Nico Frijda

‘‘What Is Justice?’’ Theories and Feelings ‘‘What is justice?’’ Socrates asked that question twenty-five centuries ago, and it has been, ever since, one of the leading questions of Western thinking. But from Plato to contemporary theories, philosophical discussions of justice have emphasized the supremacy of reason and rationality, and there has been little talk about feelings. Plato does insist on ‘‘harmony’’ between passions and reason, but he also warns us—often—against the unbridled emotions.1 The late Harvard philosopher John Rawls devotes a section or two of his classic Theory of Justice to ‘‘the moral sentiments,’’ but by these he seems to mean dispositions to act on rational principles.2 Many lesser authors, of course, have simply dismissed all sentiments as mere ‘‘sentimentality’’ and insisted that the emotions only confuse and distort the rational deliberations of justice. My thesis in this chapter, as in my book A Passion for Justice, is that there can be no adequate understanding of our sense of justice without an appreciation and understanding of the emotions.3 This includes not only those benign ‘‘moral sentiments’’ such as sympathy, care and compassion, and other ‘‘fellow-feelings’’ that are presupposed by justice, but also the nastier emotions of envy, jealousy, resentment, and, especially, vengeance. Justice, we are reminded again and again and again, is a matter of rational principles, and if those principles or their consequences should turn out to be ‘‘callous’’—as Robert Nozick (Rawls’s late Harvard colleague) declares in his preface to Anarchy, State and Utopia—so much the worse for our feelings. It is this utter dismissal of the passions that I want to reject.4 Again, I do not suggest that we in turn dismiss reason from the proceedings; rather, I argue that the distinction between reason and the passions is itself overblown and the source of much mischief. Indeed, much of what is called ‘‘reason’’ in philosophy is actually callousness, insensitivity, distrust of our own (or others’) sensibilities, or pigheadedness in the pursuit of a proof of the obvious. The impersonality and detachment with which we philosophers so often identify and on which we so pride ourselves may, in the instance of social philosophy, in particular, be exaggerated if not misplaced. What is essential to justice, I want to argue, is our supposedly unphilosophical sense of compassion and various other passions, too long swept under the carpet laid down by Kant and so many other sarcastic critics of ‘‘melting compassion’’ and the ‘‘inclinations.’’ And perhaps even more controversial, I want to argue that ‘‘negative’’ emotions such as indignation and vengeance are part and parcel of our human nature and equally essential to justice, not just character flaws or human weaknesses. Justice is typically kept apart from the emotions. On the one hand, it is often said that a life ruled by the passions, as opposed to justice and reason, is dangerous. I would like to suggest, in response, that it is the dissociated Sympathy and Vengeance [ 21]

ideal of rational justice that is dangerous. It encourages authoritarianism and the forced imposition of systems without regard for the real feelings of real people. Alternatively, it justifies passivity, mere judgment, and not action. It leaves us unmotivated, uninvolved in the world, as if justice is merely to be hoped for from some higher power and not a personal virtue to be cultivated and exercised. Of course, emotions can also be strangely detached or ‘‘dissociated,’’ too, as in William James’s account (in the preceding chapter) of the Russian countess who weeps at an opera as her servants freeze to death outside. There is a particularly loathsome political ‘‘liberal’’ who is full of feeling but gives or does nothing, and the indignant conservative whose passions are pathologically disconnected from the obvious realities of a brutal society. But those are not the feelings I am talking about here, and they should not be taken as examples of the moral emotions. An emotion is, by its very nature, the powerful urge to engage in the world. But emotion is not, in itself, dangerous. The question is, rather; Which emotions are we talking about, and in what context? Which emotions are appropriate? And, ultimately, what is the right thing to do? Perhaps it is the very word ‘‘justice’’ that tends to awe us, transfix us, mislead us. It seems to refer to something superhuman and awesome, perhaps even divine. It is always at a distance, something ‘‘other,’’ a state to be hoped for, prayed for, or perhaps desperately worked for—but not as such something already ‘‘in us,’’ something very much our own. Justice is typically an abstract belief, what Melvin Lerner (1980) has called ‘‘the belief in a just world,’’ but it is out of our hands—a matter of personal concern, perhaps, but not a matter of individual responsibility. The problem with such lofty philosophical conceptions is that they seem to descend upon us from nowhere (literally, ‘‘u-topia’’), ‘‘out of thin air.’’ Our obsessive need to ‘‘ground’’ our claims may have something to do with this. Meanwhile, we ignore the very down-to-earth and human emotional foundations of justice, and neglect those passions which make justice both necessary and possible. Justice is not, first of all, a set of principles or policies; it is, first of all, a set of personal feelings, a way of participating in the world. Without the cultivation of those feelings—and some of them are by no means attractive—the principles of justice are nothing but abstract ‘‘ideals.’’

Emotions and Rationality ‘‘What Is an Emotion?’’ asked William James at the end of the nineteenth century.5 But philosophers have been concerned and often worried about the nature of emotion since Socrates and the Pre-Socratics who preceded him. Although the discipline has grown up (reputedly because of Socrates) as the [ 22] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

pursuit of reason, the emotions have always lurked in the background as a threat to reason, as a danger to philosophy and philosophers, as just plain unreasonable. Perhaps that is why one of the most enduring metaphors of reason and emotion has been the metaphor of master and slave, with the wisdom of reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channeled, or, ideally, in harmony with reason. But nowhere has the unruly and threatening power of the emotions been more at odds with what has often been called ‘‘reason’’ than in the realm of justice, where both compassion and its vicious ‘‘negative’’ counterpart, vengefulness, have been condemned as disruptive, irrelevant and, at worst, downright dangerous. The arguments tend to focus on the alleged ‘‘capriciousness’’ and ‘‘prejudice’’ of emotions, although, alternatively, they are attacked for their ‘‘intractability’’ and their stupidity. On the one hand, conservatives love nothing more than to lambaste the ‘‘do-gooders’’ and ‘‘bleeding hearts,’’ those who express their feelings rather than stick by some abstract and often ruthless, but in any case ‘‘hardheaded,’’ ideology. On the other hand, there is the ageold insistence on ‘‘the rule of law,’’ shared by both liberals and conservatives, which insists on not returning evil for evil and, accordingly, the forswearing and condemnation of revenge. (That said, liberals and conservatives then go on to have very different ideas about the aims and arguments for punishment.) But compassion and revenge are two sides of the same coin, and against the wisdom that goes back to Plato, I would call that coin ‘‘justice.’’ Reason is not the master here, nor should it be. (Nor, of course, should it be the slave.) What must be shown is that the emotions do not and should not play an inferior role in deliberations about justice, and that it is false that emotions are more primitive, less intelligent, more bestial, less dependable, and more dangerous than reason. Reason and emotion are not two conflicting and antagonistic aspects of the soul. Rational emotions constitute justice, which is neither dispassionate nor merely emotional. The conjunction of emotions, reason, and justice would make little sense if emotions were only that which they have often been said to be: mere shortterm, disruptive physiological disturbances. Plato seemed so to treat them, at least in his more ethereal discourses on reason (e.g., in his early dialogue, Crito, in which Socrates reprimands Crito for appealing to emotions and the opinions of hoi polloi ).6 James treated them as such in his famous ‘‘What Is an Emotion?’’ essay and, with C. G. Lange, in a book that was published later.7 But recent work on emotion has shown that what was once called a ‘‘passion’’ is neither so unintelligent nor so opposed to reason as is often supposed. Nico Frijda, for one, has highlighted and analyzed the ‘‘cognitive’’ ingredients and preconditions of emotion and the purposes they serve.8 Emotions are ways of coping, products of assessment and evaluation, modes of rational action. In his presidential address to the International Society for Research on Sympathy and Vengeance [ 23]

Emotions in 1990, Frijda emphasized the very important and often neglected point that many emotions have and require duration, and should not be considered (as they typically are) in terms of merely episodic, short-term responses.9 This is nowhere more important than in the emotions of justice, where the sense of justice (and injustice), as well as more particular feelings such as caring and vengefulness, are by their very nature not merely immediate but emotional commitments for the long haul. The sense of justice (and injustice) is not an ‘‘episode.’’ It is often, for better or for worse, a way of life. My own argument, briefly summarized here, is that emotions already ‘‘contain’’ reason and practical reason is circumscribed and defined by emotion.10 (Nietzsche: ‘‘As if every passion didn’t contain its quantum of reason!’’) Our emotions situate us in the world, and thus provide not the motive for rationality, much less its opposition, but rather its very framework. Every emotion involves what Robert Gordon designates a conceptual ‘‘structure’’ of judgments that can be well-wrought or foolish, warranted or unwarranted, correct or incorrect. Anger involves judgments of blame; jealousy includes judgments about a potential threat or loss. Love involves evaluative judgments, typically overblown, but so does hatred. Grief involves recognition of a loss, and vengeance—often maligned in philosophy— already involves a small-scale theory of justice, an ‘‘eye for an eye,’’ or what Kant less violently but more ambiguously called ‘‘equality.’’ In all of these examples, one can readily recognize what can go wrong in the emotion—and consequently what is required for it to go right. In anger one can be confused about the facts. He or she is still angry, but wrongfully so. And if one leaped to conclusions or did not examine the readily available evidence, he or she is foolishly so. One can be right about the facts but wrong about the harm done or the blameworthiness of the person with whom one is angry. ( The intensity of anger, I want to suggest, has much more to do with the harshness of such evaluations than with the intensity of the physiological accompaniments of the emotion.) One can be right about the facts and justified about the warrant for anger yet go wrong in its expression, misdirecting it (a common problem with vengeance) or overdoing it. ( The irrationality of an emotion may be a fault in performance or timing rather than a mistaken emotion as such.) The fault may be the aim or purpose of the emotion, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls its finalite´. But Sartre then goes on to accuse all emotions of escapism, of being strategies for avoiding difficult circumstances. Similar analyses are available for love and grief and every other emotion, even the seemingly simplest of them. Fear, for example, is not just a rush of adrenalin but the recognition of a danger, and one can be wrong about the danger, its imminence or its seriousness. Fear can be irrational, which means that it is composed of and subject to the [ 24] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

judgments of rationality. It can therefore be rational as well. So, too, the sense of compassion, the desire for revenge, the sting of injustice, and the generalized sense of justice. To say that these can go wrong and be irrational is just to suggest that, properly exercised, they can be rational as well. What is more striking and more provocative in this analysis is that the concepts and judgments which are constitutive of our emotions are in turn constitutive of the criteria for rationality as well. If an offense is worthy of anger, it thus becomes rational (that is, warranted) to be angry about it; and if one argues that it is even more rational (for example, more effective in terms of self-esteem or common prudence) not to get angry, that only shows, I want to suggest, how firmly entangled are the life of the emotions and the various meanings of rationality. Indeed, rationality begins to look more and more like emotional prudence—presupposing some notion of the right emotions. My point, then, is not just to defend the rationality of the emotions, a now well-established and much-mulled-over thesis, but also to establish what one might call the emotional grounding of rationality. What I want to reject here is the now-prevalent idea that rational criteria are simply the presuppositions of right emotion or the external standards by which emotions and their appropriateness may be judged. That would leave standing the idea of a rational framework within which the emotions may be appropriate or inappropriate, warranted or unwarranted, wise or foolish. I want to suggest, rather, that emotions constitute the framework (or frameworks) of rationality itself. Of course, a single emotion does not do this, any more than a single correct calculation makes a student intelligent. A single emotion (or an entire sequence of emotions) may be dictated by character, the circumstances, and the overall cultural context, but altogether our emotions (appropriate to the general circumstances) dictate that context (as well as character). Our sense of justice, as well as the grand theories that are constructed in expression of that sense of justice, is thus not a single emotion but a systematic totality of emotions, appropriate to our culture and our character. What I have in mind here is a holistic conception of the personality in which the entire field of one’s (or one’s culture’s) experience is defined and framed by his or her engagements and attachments, in which truly ‘‘dispassionate’’ judgment is more often pathological than rational and detachment more likely signals alienation than objectivity. Martin Heidegger’s punlike conception of mood (Stimmung ) as our mode of ‘‘being tuned’’ (bestimmen) to the world is instructive here, both because of its welcome shift in emphasis from detached knowing to holistic personal caring (Sorge) but also because of the not insubstantial fact that he emphasizes moods—which are general, diffuse, and devoid of any determinate object—rather than, for example, love, an emotion whose character is marked first of all by its particularity and attachment. But what is important about both moods and emotions is Sympathy and Vengeance [ 25]

the fact that they thoroughly permeate our experience and they are not, as several honorable ancient views would have it, interruptions, intrusions, or brief bouts of madness that get in the way of the otherwise calm and cool transparency of rational objectivity. The idea that emotions as such are not rational thus begins with a basic misunderstanding of both the nature of emotions and the nature of rationality, and the idea that emotions as such are irrational is a confusion of certain sorts of specialized procedures—appropriate, perhaps, to the seminar room and the negotiating table—with rationality as such. But even in the seminar and at the negotiating table, it is caring that counts first of all, and as a matter of strategy, it is obvious that even as a negotiating tool emotion is often appropriate and, well used, effective. Love is sometimes said to be irrational because it overvalues the beloved. But here, as always, we should be very suspicious: Is the enthusiastic idealization of someone about whom one cares a great deal a falsification, and thereby irrational, or is it part and parcel of any intimate connection, recognizing another as more important than others (‘‘to me’’)? It is a question of being engaged in life rather than a merely disinterested, dispassionate spectator. So, too, with almost all of the emotions, including many of those which have typically been dubbed ‘‘negative,’’ even ‘‘sins.’’ One must be very careful about dismissing their admittedly biased vision of the world as merely ‘‘subjective’’ or ‘‘irrational,’’ for what is the alternative—not caring at all (apatheia)? No affections or offenses whatever? No commitments or attachments—the dubiously ‘‘rational’’ approach to a life without loss suggested by various ascetics and religious thinkers (e.g., the Arab philosopher al-Kindi in the ninth century)?11 These are the targets of Nietzsche’s renowned attack on the hypocrisy of asceticism in part III of his On the Genealogy of Morals, where he claims that ascetics (like everyone) seek power and self-assertion but obtain it, as it were, backward, by stealth and self-denial.12 Caring about the right things—one’s friends and family, one’s compatriots and neighbors, one’s culture and environment and, ultimately, the world—is what defines rationality. It is not reason (as opposed to emotion) that allows us to extend our reach to the universal but rather the expansive scope of the emotions themselves. What one cares about is defined by one’s conception of the world, but one’s conception of the world is itself defined by the scope and objects of one’s emotional cares and concern.13 Not only is every emotion structured by concepts and judgments, most of them learned (at least in their details and applications), but every emotion is also engaged in a strategy of psychological as well as physical selfpreservation. Thus it is readily understandable that emotions should first of all emerge as self-interested, even selfish, then concerned with kin and kinship rather than a larger sense of community, chauvinistic rather than cosmic. But [ 26] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

part of cultivation, or ‘‘civilization,’’ is internalizing the larger concepts of history, humanity, and religion, conceptions of morality and ethics that go beyond provincial self-interests. But this is not to say that the emotional nature of these concerns is replaced by something more abstract and impersonal; the emotions and the personal themselves become more expansive. Emotions are not just ‘‘reactions,’’ and although they undoubtedly have an evolutionary history that precedes the arrival of the human species by hundreds of millions of years, they have evolved not only along with but also hand in hand with the evolution of reason and rationality, which means in part an awareness of the larger human and global context in which all of our fates are engaged and our interests involved. There is, however, nothing particularly human about emotion as such (a dog or a horse can be as rightfully angry or sad as a person), although there are particularly human emotions—for instance, romantic love and moral indignation. Indeed, some of those particularly human emotions—for instance, religious passion and scientific curiosity—are precisely the passions that are typically designated as proof of our rationality. So, too, our passion for justice. One might, of course, object to any and all philosophical theories of emotion as mere armchair speculation, devoid of the empirical support supplied by psychologists and other social scientists, but this objection ignores the fact that most philosophers, contrary to their self-styled reputations as men and women of pure reason, have emotions. As Descartes insisted, in his introduction to The Passions of the Soul, ‘‘Everyone has experience of the passions within himself, and there is no necessity to borrow one’s observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature.’’14 No one who has been in a philosophy department tenure meeting could possibly doubt the propensity of these practitioners of pure reason to compassion and vindictiveness (though rarely both in the same professor at the same time). Extensive experience does not always require an experiment, and ultimately, there is no need for the century-old feud between philosophy and psychology. Both one’s own experience and the experience of others, as the subject of reflection, can serve the purpose of understanding the role of emotion in our affairs. And when the topic is as large as justice, we need all the varied experience and reflection we can get.

The Caring Face of Justice: The Moral Sentiments No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the sufferings of others. . . . Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling in a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow Sympathy and Vengeance [ 27]

villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of shame is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of courtesy and modesty is not human, and whoever is devoid of the heart of right and wrong is not human.—Mencius (The Mind of Mencius)

The awareness of the importance of emotions that is emerging in psychology is a welcome antidote to a dangerous obsession with abstract reason in philosophy. But philosophy has not always been so abstract and emotionally alienated. The ancient Greeks, for all of their emphasis on reason, never excluded the emotions and in fact discussed their importance at considerable length. But much more recently, in the eighteenth century, philosophers in Scotland and France, in particular, developed an elaborate theory of the emotions’ important place in ethics and social philosophy. The Scottish moralists included David Hume and Adam Smith, who made his reputation with his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the proceeds from which allowed him the time to write his bible for capitalism, The Wealth of Nations.15 Hume and Smith argued that the basis of all morality had to be emotion, not reason, and that we were all endowed by nature (if not by our Creator) with the all-important natural sentiment of sympathy. Hume famously argued that reason itself cannot move us to action; only passion can do that, and so ‘‘reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.’’ It was an extreme statement, problematic in part because it reinforces (rather than challenges) the strict separation of the two, but it had the virtue of shifting the emphasis onto the ‘‘natural’’ aspects of human nature rather than the ‘‘artificial’’ constructions of reason and society. Hume and Smith put an enormous emphasis on the notion of personal ‘‘character’’ and devoted a good portion of their works to developing theories of the virtues and accounts of those emotions which should be cultivated to bring up a virtuous person in a just society. If one felt compelled to point to an emblematic figure who, by reputation at least, is responsible for the philosophical obsession with ‘‘reason’’ and rational principles, and abuse of the passions, it would be Immanuel Kant, although Kant himself was not nearly so one-sided as many of his followers.16 It was Kant who argued so fervently against reliance on the ‘‘inclinations’’ in moral matters, insisting instead that all evaluations of ‘‘moral worth’’ should rely on obedience to principles and practical reason rather than having the right feelings or displaying a proper character. Emotions, according to Kant, were too capricious, too easily shifted, too readily influenced by other people. Emotions, unlike reason, differed from culture to culture, even from person to person. They were, for the most part, concerned with particular situations, particular attachments to particular people, and often ‘‘blind’’ to larger [ 28] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

considerations. This is true even of the sentiment of compassion, which Kant elsewhere calls ‘‘beautiful.’’17 Morality and justice, by contrast, were rational ideals that had to remain constant, even eternal. Morality consisted of universal principles, applicable everywhere and equally to everyone. Kant was reacting, in part, to the tradition that preceded him, the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish moralists, and he was concerned to provide a view of morals and justice that did not depend on the vicissitudes of emotion and the peculiarities of individual character, though he did not, again, deny the importance of either emotions or character. It is worth noting that Kant was answered by that cranky but always perceptive post-Kantian, Arthur Schopenhauer, that compassion is the basis of morality.18 And it was the moral sentiment theorist Hume who, on other matters, had ‘‘awakened [Kant] from his dogmatic slumbers.’’19 But Kant’s emphasis on ‘‘practical reason’’ won out over both the generation that preceded and the century that succeeded him in philosophy, and today’s largely uncritical acceptance of the Kantian paradigm— especially in the realm of social philosophy—should be juxtaposed against the healthy tradition that Kant was rejecting. There is no justice without feeling, and without sympathy in particular, and I think that Schopenhauer hit the Kantian nail right on the head when he pointed out that Kant’s theory of morality had left out the very basis of morals.20 The emphasis on emotions in ethics, the ‘‘theory of the moral sentiments,’’ in a broad sense goes back to Aristotle, although Aristotle did not so sharply separate the emotions that prompted action from the action itself and from rational considerations that preceded it.21 But he did recognize that the right emotions were essential to right action, and insisted that a just man was moved by just feelings as well as just thoughts. Saint Augustine and many other Christian thinkers placed a special premium on the emotions, not just faith and love but on all of those sentiments which defined the various virtues (and, of course, those deadly passions which constituted the worst vices).22 I already said that moral sentiment theory came of age in the eighteenth century in Scotland, with the idea of an ‘‘innate moral sense’’ in the work of Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson did more than just recognize the importance of feeling in the appreciation of values; he developed a detailed taxonomy and account of these feelings and their relation to different kinds of values. But, it should be noted, what Hutcheson presented is not so much a sentiment theory as it is a moral sense theory. Pleasure and pain, the primary ingredients in his taxonomy, are treated more like perceptions than like emotions. Although he had much to say about feeling, he did not mean by this that genuine feelings or emotions play a part in our value appreciation.23 It was Hume who picked up Hutcheson’s theory and converted it into a theory of Sympathy and Vengeance [ 29]

moral sentiments. For this, he needed a theory of genuine feelings or emotions, and a way of distinguishing those peculiarly moral feelings. Hume retained Hutcheson’s account of value-feelings as painful or pleasant sensations, and this remains the primary defect in his theory. Pleasure and pain (and with them, the derivative notion of positive and negative emotions) are too simplistic—like most such dualisms—to capture the enormous richness of our emotional life and the extent of our engagement in the world. Ironically, it was Kant who started correcting this aspect of Hume’s philosophy (though he did not use the results to undermine his own overly rationalistic view of morality). The primary breakthrough (in fact harking back to Aristotle and later Greek philosophers) was the recognition of a distinctively conceptual component in emotion, anticipated by Hume but retarded by his ‘‘pleasure and pain’’ view of the passions. Later European philosophers would develop this ‘‘cognitive’’ theory of emotion even further. We should mention in particular the work of Franz Brentano, who ably combined conceptual and empirical research in his ‘‘psychognosy’’ and supplied his thesis of the intentionality of emotion as the source of a fundamental axiology of social values. There was also Max Scheler, who brought to bear the new research in phenomenology on an updated theory of sympathy as the core of our social experience. But my concern here is not the history and development of moral sentiment theory but rather its results. And those results, if taken as theory, tend to undermine the favorite prejudice of contemporary Anglo-American moral and social theory, namely, that morality and justice are first of all a priori functions of reason rather than matters of emotion. Justice is not just to be found or looked for in the world, whether as reality or as potential; justice must be, first of all, ‘‘in us,’’ in our attitudes toward each other and our expectations of the world. But which attitudes? Certainly among the most important are those clustered around what Hume, Smith, and later Scheler called ‘‘sympathy.’’ I will have much more to say about sympathy and its sentimental brethren in chapter 3, but a few brief comments might be in order here. ‘‘Sympathy’’ (like ‘‘compassion’’) literally means, and is often meant to mean, ‘‘feeling with,’’ which in turn is interpreted as ‘‘shared feeling.’’ It is, in other words, what we now call empathy. This is pretty clearly what Adam Smith means by the term. But what is it to ‘‘share’’ a feeling—individuation problems aside (i.e., can one and the same feeling be literally shared by two people, or must each person have his own, and only his own, feeling?)? Insofar as sympathy involves actually sharing feelings, it is clear that the suffering one shares with the sufferer is, for the most part, pretty limp stuff and not nearly adequate to motivate ethical behavior. I may in fact feel slightly ill because you have just [ 30] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

broken your leg in three places, but it would be absurd to compare my feelings to yours, much less to say that I am ‘‘sharing’’ your suffering. Indeed, it seems absurd to talk at all about ‘‘sharing’’ feelings in most such cases. I may feel upset to hear that your grandfather has just died, that you have been called for a general audit by the Internal Revenue Service, or that you have been fired from your job. But the fact that I, too, have negative feelings (sadness, fear, indignation) because of you and even for you hardly adds up to a sufficiently equal measure of mutual emotion to call this ‘‘shared feelings.’’ Of course, if indeed we share the situation, if it is our grandfather who died, our partnership that is to be audited, or both of us who are to be fired, it is perfectly plausible to say that we share the appropriate feelings. But this would not be a matter of ‘‘sympathy,’’ for the whole idea behind moral sentiment theory is that I can and do feel for you on the basis of your suffering and not my own. I may have a fairly mild sense of pathos caused by and in my concern about your rather awful suffering, and it makes little sense to compare the two, much less to talk about them as ‘‘shared.’’ It is for this reason that Smith, in particular, suggests that a sense of justice is needed to supplement sympathy, which by itself is not nearly powerful enough to counter the inevitably self-serving motives of most people. Justice, for Smith, is an internalized sense of fair play, and it is justice, not sympathy, that provides the main ‘‘pillar’’ which supports the whole society. Justice, unlike sympathy, is a passion with a determined content, albeit a negative one; justice is the sense that one should not cause harm to one’s neighbor. Sympathy and justice, together with a sense of benevolence, provide Smith with a portrait of human nature in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1880) that is very different from the usual Hobbesian interpretations of his later work, The Wealth of Nations (1948), in which the wheels of capitalism are (wrongly) said to be moved by individual greed alone. Sympathy is ‘‘fellow-feeling,’’ feeling not so much for as with one’s fellow citizens, whatever their particular passions happen to be. Our sense of justice moves us to avoid harming one another, and between the two, the Hobbesian picture of human life as ‘‘a war of all against all’’ and as ‘‘nasty, brutish and short’’ is replaced by the much more flattering portrait of a society of citizens who care about, feel for, and naturally avoid harming one another. Sympathy, empathy, care, and compassion together constitute the sentimental core of justice. Without that sentimentality, not even the clearest notion of rationality can get a hold on us. Hume may have overstated the case when he declared that ‘‘reason is and ought to be slave of the passions’’ (actually, ‘‘of the sentiments’’), but he was surely right that reason without passion gives us ultimately no reasons at all. Sympathy and Vengeance [ 31]

Hume Versus Smith on Justice, and All Against Hobbes Smith, and before him David Hume and the other moral sentiment theorists, whatever their differences, made an all-important point against the reigning cynicism of Hobbes and Mandeville: the idea that people are essentially selfinterested if not selfish, and no other motives could explain human behavior. Whether it was moral sense or moral sentiments, or merely primal man’s ‘‘inner goodness,’’ the case was put forward that human behavior had springs other than self-interest. Accordingly, sympathy was sometimes discussed as if it were no more than a generalized sense of altruism, a concern for others with no thought of benefit to oneself. But altruism, like benevolence, doesn’t involve any sharing of feelings, as sympathy does, and altruism doesn’t yet capture the central thesis of Smith’s virtue ethics, which is that the distinction between self-interest and altruism breaks down. This is a point that goes back to Socrates, though Aristotle probably explained it better. Socrates suggested that his virtuous behavior was in fact quite self-interested because it was ‘‘for the good of his soul,’’ and what could be more self-interested than that? Aristotle explained that a criterion for virtue was the enjoyment of its exercise, that a virtue should be ‘‘second nature.’’ In other words, the postpagan model of the battle between temptation and righteousness was not considered moral and was by no means the mark of the virtuous man. It is noteworthy that Kant needed to add the notions of the ‘‘holy will’’ and the ‘‘supererogatory’’ to explain the harmony of inclinations and rational will in special cases (e.g., the cases of Jesus, saints and heroes), but it is clear that such cases are the exception and not the rule. In virtue ethics the right course of action is motivating just because it is pleasant and self-fulfilling to the virtuous person. Hume, if not Smith, quite proudly referred to himself as a pagan. His own postpagan model of ethics harked back to Aristotle and the ancients, and his ethics was a virtue ethics in this sense in particular: that the sign of ‘‘good character’’ was not inner struggle but inner harmony. For Smith, too, though he was too much a Christian to pride himself a pagan, ethics was first of all virtue ethics and a concern for good character and inner harmony. His claim that sympathy was a natural human sentiment was not so much a plea for altruism as it was a denial of total selfishness and the insistence that virtuous human behavior need not be one or the other. Smith’s particularly brilliant emphasis on the natural need for others’ approval has just this outcome: most of even our most ‘‘selfish’’ motives have as their objects the desire for camaraderie and communal agreement. What I want for myself is your approval, and to get it, I will most likely do what you think I should do. No basic tension between what I want for myself and what I should want to do is much in evidence, and the cynic will have a hard time getting his cynicism in here. [ 32] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Hume’s earlier theory of sympathy and justice, which greatly influenced Smith, is somewhat different from this, as Smith sharply insisted, and to make matters more difficult, it is clear that Hume changed his mind between the writing of his early masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, and his later Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. In the early work, Hume treats sympathy rather casually, commenting that it is usually a weak emotion compared with most of the motives of self-interest. In the later work, Hume defends sympathy as a universal sentiment that is sufficiently powerful to overcome self-interest in a great many cases. In the Inquiry, in particular, Hume takes sympathy to be a form of benevolence, a feeling for one’s fellow citizens, and a concern for their well-being. But for Hume as for Smith, sympathy is too often countered and overwhelmed by selfishness and, for this reason, a sense of justice is required. But whereas Smith takes the sense of justice to be a natural revulsion at the harming of one’s fellows, Hume takes justice to be an ‘‘artificial’’ virtue that is constructed by reason for our mutual well-being. (It is important not to read ‘‘artificial’’ as ‘‘arbitrary.’’ Artificial virtues can be precise and readily justifiable.) Justice for Hume is an advantageous conventional ‘‘scheme’’ rather than a natural sentiment as such. Thus for Hume sympathy is a genuine moral sentiment and justice is not. Even so, Hume admitted that justice was so beneficial that it became inseparably associated with the moral sentiments, for what could be more basic to these sentiments than our sense of the general good for everyone, ‘‘a feeling for the happiness of mankind and a resentment of their misery’’ ( p. 235). He writes: No virtue is more esteemed than justice, and no vice more detested than injustice; nor are there any qualities, which go farther to the fixing of character, either as amiable or odious. Now justice is a moral virtue, merely because it has that tendency to the good of mankind; and, indeed, is nothing but an artificial invention to that purpose. ... The whole scheme, however, of law and justice is advantageous to the society; and ’twas with a view to this advantage, that men, by their voluntary conventions, establish’d it. . . . Once established, it is naturally attended with a strong sentiment of morals. (Hume, Treatise, pp. 577, 579)

Hume does not go so far as to say that justice itself is a matter of sentiment, but he insists that the moral sentiments in general, and sympathy for others in particular, are so essential to morals that there can be no ethics without them. Both Hume and Smith are so dead set against the Hobbesian view that they are adamant about the ‘‘naturalness’’ of distinctive ‘‘social passions.’’ Indeed, the core of their argument is, in Smith’s terms, that ‘‘nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original Sympathy and Vengeance [ 33]

aversion to offend his brethren.’’24 Moreover, ‘‘nature endowed him not only with a desire for being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of, or of being what he himself approves of in other men.’’25 It is not just sympathy but a whole complex of mutually perceiving and reciprocal passions that ties us together. Thus it does not take much tinkering with Scottish moral sentiment theory to incorporate justice along with sympathy under its auspices, and take the whole as a welcome alternative to both the ‘‘man is essentially selfish’’ thesis and the overly intellectual ‘‘morality is rationality’’ view of Kant and most current justice theorists. Part of the problem, for both Smith and Hume, is that there is an essential tension between sympathy and justice, and they resolve this in rather different ways. Hume, as just mentioned, distinguishes between sympathy as a natural emotion that is variable according to proximity, and justice as an artificial virtue depending on transpersonal conventions and institutions. Smith, by contrast, depends on his so-called impartial spectator who thereby transcends the particular preferences of personal proximity. I find both devices plausible, but in tandem and mutually complementary. Justice is, as Rawls argues, the primary virtue of institutions, but it is also, as in Plato and Aristotle, a personal virtue, and the complex relationship between the institutional and the personal is partially captured but also greatly oversimplified in Hume’s distinction. It is the personal that gets institutionalized, not top-down from Rawlsian-type theories but bottom-up from the personal to the communal to the institutional. So, too, with Smith’s imaginary impartial spectator, whom I imagine as a metaphor for a gradual and learned expansion from one’s immediate experience with friends and family to the dimly imagined probable experience of others at a considerable distance. Thus I find the hypostatization of the impartial spectator, treating [ him] as a hypothetical person to whom one might ‘‘appeal,’’ a terrible misunderstanding of Smith’s conception, which rightly urges us to transcend our own perspectives and biases but makes no sense cut off from all perspectives. To be sure, Smith himself admits this and thus supplements his still partial impartial spectator with a truly impartial spectator: God. But here I would join Hume and Nietzsche and urge that we reject the idea of any such perspectiveless perspective or God’s-eye view, a ‘‘view from nowhere.’’ Justice, like sympathy, is always a view from somewhere and is always partial. What both Hume and Smith were concerned to point out, against Hobbes, is that we genuinely and ‘‘naturally’’ care about other people, and we are moved by injustices without necessary reference to ourselves. It is a mistake, or at least unfair, to attack Hume on the grounds that he is really an unreconstructed Hobbesian individualist who brings in ‘‘sympathy’’ only as a desperate measure to explain the noncoercive validity of morals, just as it [ 34] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

is a mistake to identify Smith as the apostle of self-interest on the basis of his Wealth of Nations alone.26 Whatever their ambiguities and differences, Smith and Hume provide a united front against both Hobbes and the egoists and the Kantian hordes to come.

The Vindictive Face of Justice: Vengeance and the ‘‘Negative’’ Emotions There is no denying the aesthetic satisfaction, the sense of poetic justice, that pleasures us when evil-doers get the comeuppance they deserve. The impulse to punish is primarily an impulse to even the score. . . . That satisfaction is heightened when it becomes possible to measure out punishment in exact proportion to the size and shape of the wrong that has been done . . . mida k’neged mida—measure for measure, lex talionis. —Arthur Lelyveld (‘‘Punishment: For and Against’’)

My argument is that justice is a passion to be cultivated, not an abstract set of principles to be formulated and imposed upon society (whether or not this is ‘‘for our own good’’ or in accordance with our presocietal inherent ‘‘natures’’). Justice begins not with Socratic insights but with the promptings of some basic, possibly even inborn, emotions, foremost among them such ‘‘negative’’ emotions as envy, jealousy, and resentment; a keen sense of having been personally cheated or neglected; and the desire to ‘‘get even.’’27 This is not the usual list of ‘‘moral sentiments,’’ to be sure. In Smith, in Hume, and across the English channel and a border or two in Rousseau, we hear a great deal about fellow feeling, compassion, and sympathy. Of course these are essential, but the problem is that they are only a small piece—albeit an absolutely essential piece—of the picture. It might be worth noting, with some sense of irony, that sympathy and the other undeniably positive passions (‘‘pity’’ may be a problem here) are often not just neglected but actually denied, for example, by those who don’t even think of denying the existence of the antipathetic passions—envy and resentment in particular. But could one have sympathy, much less empathy, for one’s fellows if one did not know what it was to be envious, humiliated, or embittered? Could one be resentful without at least the capacity to be sympathetic as well? What both conceptual analysis and empirical research will show, I anticipate, is that the emotions of justice essentially come in a package. Just as one cannot feel love without the potential for grief and one cannot feel pride without the capacity for shame, one cannot have or develop a passion for supra-personal justice without some sense of personal injustice.28 (That sense of injustice, however, may be empathetic rather than literally personal.) The emotions of justice must Sympathy and Vengeance [ 35]

be particular as well as general, and when we speak of a ‘‘sense of justice’’ it cannot be just a universal sensibility, a Platonic love of the good, that we have in mind.29 The sense of justice includes not just the noble or sympathetic emotions but the often nasty, even hateful, antipathetic emotions as well. The usual set of altruistic, or what Rescher calls ‘‘vicarious,’’ passions is too limited to account for justice.30 The antipathetic emotions are as essential as the sympathetic passions to our sense of justice. Envy and jealousy have as much to do with the origins and development of justice as do pity and compassion. At the very beginning of our historical sense of justice (antedating our own rather ethnocentric notion of ‘‘distributive justice’’ by several millennia) is the sense of justice as revenge and outrage. ( Whatever the cynic’s doubts about such emotions as pity or compassion, he or she will probably have few doubts about the reality of the all-too-human passion for revenge. Nietzsche is obviously a case in point.) It is too easily assumed that a fully developed sense of justice, because it is such a noble sense, must be derived only from equally noble (though perhaps more primitive) emotions. I think that this is wrong. Our sense of justice emerges as a generalization and a rationalization (not in the bad Freudian sense but in the good Hegelian sense) of a personal sense of injustice. Our sense of injustice isn’t a general sense of outrage—that comes later and already involves a number of grand generalizations. That sense of injustice begins with a personal slight, a perceived inequity, probably at a very young age, perhaps even in infancy. But the ‘‘negative’’ emotions are not all that negative after all. It has been argued, for instance, that envy is itself an important emotion, an engine of capitalism and the consumer society that encourages us to want more and be more competitive.31 Nietzsche famously argued at length that resentment is the main ingredient in much of what we call morality, and Dostoesvsky (or one of his most perverse characters) maintained that spite is the very essence of the free and autonomous self. The argument that I want to suggest, if not pursue, is that our sense of justice cannot ignore, and to some extent even develops out of, these rather vile emotions. This is not to deny that justice requires and presupposes compassion, respect, and a sense of duty as well, but justice also involves the often despised and dismissed emotion of vengeance, which may, in fact, be ( both historically and psychologically) the seed from which the plant of justice has grown. Vengeance is the original passion for justice. The word ‘‘justice’’ in the Old Testament virtually always refers to revenge. In Kant and Hegel the word Gerechtigkeit refers to retribution, and throughout most of history the concept of justice has been far more concerned with the punishment of crimes and the balancing of wrongs than it has been with the fair distribution of goods and services. ‘‘Getting even’’ is and always has been one of the most basic metaphors of our moral vocabulary, and the frightening emotion of [ 36] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

righteous, wrathful anger has been the emotional basis for justice just as much as benign compassion. ‘‘Don’t get mad, get even’’—whether or not it is prudent advice—is conceptually confused. Getting even is just an effective way of being mad, and getting mad already includes a generous portion of revenge. The pleasure, the aesthetic satisfaction referred to by Lelyveld—an extremely important concept to which the ‘‘measure’’ of vengeance is often appealed—indicates the depth of the passion, and the need for ‘‘proportion’’ already indicates the intelligence involved in this supposedly most irrational and uncontrollable emotion. Our response to the many revenge novels and films is an indication not only of our deep-seated sense of vengeance but also of the concept of fairness that is built therein. (Consider the uncomfortable response one has to Woody Allen’s black humorous movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, where such justice is denied us.) This is not to say, of course, that the motive of revenge is therefore legitimate or the action of revenge always justified. Sometimes vengeance is wholly called for, even obligatory, and revenge is both legitimate and justified. Sometimes it is not, notably when one is mistaken about the offender or the offense. But to seek vengeance for a grievous wrong, to revenge oneself against evil—that seems to lie at the very foundation of our sense of justice, indeed, of our very sense of ourselves, our dignity, and our sense of right and wrong. Even the sentimentalist Adam Smith writes, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘‘The violation of justice is injury . . . it is, therefore, the proper object of resentment, and of punishment, which is the natural consequence of resentment.’’32 We are not mere observers of the moral life, and the desire for vengeance seems to be an integral aspect of our recognition of evil. But it also contains—or can be cultivated to contain—the elements of its own control, a sense of its limits, a sense of balance. Thus the Old Testament instructs us that revenge should be limited to ‘‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe’’ (lex talionis; Exodus 21:24–25). It was such ‘‘equality’’ that Kant took to be an absolute rational principle in his Philosophy of Law; and, in more modern, jovial guise, there is Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado: ‘‘an object all sublime/make the punishment fit the crime.’’ The New Testament demands even more restraint: the abstention from revenge oneself and the patience to entrust it to God. Both the Old and New Testaments (more the latter than the former) encourage ‘‘forgiveness,’’ but there can be no forgiveness if there is not first the desire (and the warrant) for revenge. Vengeance is not just punishment, no matter how harsh. It is a matter of emotion—often delayed, protracted, or frustrated emotion—and like punishment, it is always for some offense, not just hurting for its own sake (even if, in some other sense, it is deserved). Vengeance, then, always has Sympathy and Vengeance [ 37]

its reasons (though, to be sure, these can be mistaken, irrelevant, out of proportion, or otherwise bad reasons). Vengeance is no longer a matter of obligation, and it certainly can’t claim to be rational as such; but neither is it opposed to a sense of obligation (e.g., in matters of family honor) or rationality (insofar as rationality is to be found in every emotion, even this one). Vengeance is the emotion of ‘‘getting even,’’ putting the world back in balance, and this simple phrase already embodies a whole philosophy of justice, even if (as yet) unarticulated and unjustified. Philosophers have been much too quick to attribute this sense of balance or retribution to reason, but I would want to argue that it is rather a function of emotion—cultivated, passionate cognition, not calm and cool reason. (And yet we know, nevertheless, that ‘‘vengeance is a dish that is best served cold.’’) Kant, as usual, opts for calm, cool reason, dismissing passion altogether. Vengeance, he suggests, is purely subjective, wholly irrational, undependable, and unjustifiable. It is wholly without measure or reason, devoid of any sense of balance or justice. So, too, R. S. Gerstein writes: Vengefulness is an emotional response to injuries done to us by others: we feel a desire to injure those who have injured us. Retributivism is not the idea that it is good to have and satisfy this emotion. It is rather the view that there are good arguments for including the kernel of rationality to be found in the passion for vengeance as a part of any just system of laws.’’33

But I want to suggest that vengeance is just that sense of measure or balance which Kant (and so many other philosophers) attribute to reason alone. But it is ultimately the same old dichotomy that is most at fault here, the supposed antagonism between reason on the one side and passions on the other. Where would our reasoning about punishment begin if not for our emotional sense of the need for retaliation and retribution? (We should stress here that retaliation and retribution should not be confused with reparation and mere compensation, which may in some cases ‘‘undo’’ the damage but in no case by themselves count as punishment.) And what would our emotion be if it was not already informed and cultivated by a keen sense of its object and its target, as well as the mores and morals of the community in which the offense in question is deserving of revenge? Indeed, one might surmise that all vengeance has a single object: the undoing or payback for humiliation. And though humiliation may sometimes be without measure, more often than not its antidote comes in carefully measured, knowing dosages. Perhaps nowhere is the denial of what is most human about us (that is, our passions) more evident than in the various debates and concerns that surround the problems of punishment in criminal justice. The ongoing dispute between the ‘‘utilitarians’’ (who tend to believe in a ‘‘deterrence’’ theory of punishment) and the ‘‘retributivists’’ (who believe that punishment is necessary in [ 38] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

order to satisfy the demands of justice as such) not only neglects but explicitly dismisses any mention of that passion which alone would seem to give some fuel to the notion of punishment: the emotion of vengeance. This is not to say that punishment should serve only to revenge, but it is to say that punishment is in part the satisfaction of the need for vengeance and punishment makes no sense without this. Susan Jacoby argues that our denial of the desire for vengeance is analogous to the Victorian denial of sexual desire, and we are paying a similar psychological price for it in all sorts of displaced destructive behaviors and anxieties.34 As with our hunger for sex, we do not succeed very well in suppressing our thirst for revenge. How did our passion for retribution—our need for vengeance—come about? I think that evolutionary speculations can go a long way in answering this question. Earlier in this chapter, I stressed the accounts of the moral sentiment theorists as an important insight into ‘‘human nature,’’ but I hope that I was sufficiently careful not to give the impression that we are naturally ‘‘nice’’ in any ridiculous sense. Evolutionary theory, if not common experience, has shown—conclusively, I think—that there is demonstrable advantage for groups and species, if not always for individuals, in the evolution of cooperation. But cooperation has two sides—the willingness to cooperate, first of all, and the resentment and punishment of those who do not cooperate. ( This includes the expectation that one will be punished if one does not cooperate.) One cannot imagine the evolution of cooperation without the evolution of punishment, and R. M. Axelrod’s now-classic ‘‘tit-for-tat’’ model of the latter explains the former as well. In a repetitive ‘‘prisoner’s dilemma’’ type of situation, or in any ongoing situation in which one person frequently has the ability to cheat the other(s), an optimum strategy for discouraging such cheating is to respond, dependably, with retribution. A creature endowed only with compassion, who would ‘‘understand’’ the motives of the criminal in every case, would be just as much of an evolutionary failure as a creature who did nothing but watch out for his or her own advantage and cheated every time. Swift and dependable retaliation is thus in the nature of social animals as well as the lesson of game theory. Vengeance is not the antagonist to rationality but its natural manifestation. To breed a social animal who has ‘‘the right to make promises’’ is to understand the evolution of a creature who has the natural urge to punish as well as natural sympathy and a sense of social solidarity. Perhaps the point was overstated in the majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia (1976): The instinct for retribution is part of the nature of man, and channeling that instinct in the administration of criminal justice serves an important purpose in promoting the stability of a society governed by law. When people begin to Sympathy and Vengeance [ 39]

believe that organized society is unwilling or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they ‘‘deserve’’, then there are sown the seeds of anarchy—of self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law.

But at least the emotion of vengeance was taken seriously and not merely sacrificed to the dispassionate authority of the law. Retributive justice, however rationalized, is not as such a purely rational matter—but neither is it thereby ‘‘irrational.’’ Most of the arguments that have been advanced against vengeance—for example, the charge that ‘‘all punishment is the return of evil for evil’’—could with only slight modifications be applied to the standard notions of retributive justice as well. This is not surprising if vengeance and retributive justice are in the end identical. But in the end, it is perhaps not just a question of whether revenge is rational or not, but whether it is—at the bottom of our hearts as well as off the top of our heads—an undeniable aspect of the way we react to the world, not as an instinct but as such a basic part of our worldview and our moral sense of ourselves that it is, in that sense, unavoidable. Vengeance is assumed to be wholly without measure or reason, devoid of any sense of balance or justice. Vengeance, unlike justice, is said to be blind, although it is worth reminding ourselves which of the two is depicted in established mythology as blindfolded. Vengeance, on the other hand, is assumed to be wholly without measure or reason, devoid of any sense of balance or justice. Vengeance, it is said, knows no end. But the imbalance corrected may well be righted—and in the opinion of both (or all) parties, in which case it does have an end. Vengeance is always violent, we are told, but reciprocating a snub, refusing an invitation to a party, or having a forbidden sexual encounter can be vengeance just as surely as a Clint Eastwood finale. Not all revenge is a matter of killing. Of course, we can agree that there is danger in vengeance. It can become increasingly violent, further disrupting the present order of things in an often mistaken attempt to get back to a prior order that has been disrupted. Such an impossibility breeds frustration, and violence—even justified as vengeance (if, indeed, this is possible)—typically leads to more violence. An act of revenge results in a new offense to be righted. And when the act is perpetrated not against the person who committed the offense but against another who is part of the same family, tribe, or social group (the logic of vendetta), the possibilities for escalation are endless. Accordingly, the limitation of revenge through institutionalization is necessary. But it does not follow that vengeance itself is illegitimate or without measure or of no importance in considerations of punishment. To the dangers of vengeance unlimited it must be added that if punishment no longer satisfies vengeance, if it ignores not only the rights but also the emotional needs of the victims of crime, then punishment no longer serves its [ 40] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

primary purpose, even if it were to succeed in rehabilitating the criminal and deterring other crime (which it evidently, in general, does not). The restriction of vengeance by law is entirely understandable, but the wholesale denial of vengeance as a legitimate motive may be as much of a psychological disaster as its unlimited exercise is dangerous. Just to be clear, I have not tried to defend vengeance as such, but my claim is that vengeance deserves its central place in any theory of justice; and, whatever else we are to say about punishment, the desire for revenge must enter into our deliberations along with such emotions as compassion, caring, and love. Any system of legal principles that does not take such emotions into account, that does not motivate itself on their behalf, is not—whatever else it may be—a system of justice. Vengeance as such, I do not deny, is in any case dangerous. As the Chinese used to say (and no doubt still do), ‘‘If you seek vengeance, dig two graves.’’ But I think that the dangers and destructiveness of vengeance are often overblown and its importance for one’s sense of the inviolability of self are underestimated. Many people believe that vengeance is the primary cause of the world’s troubles today: unending feuds and vendettas and ethnic rivalries that block every rational effort at resolution and peace. But vengeance is not the same as vendetta, and it is not a legitimate cover for cultivated group hatred. I would argue that many of the passionate hostilities in the world that are supposedly fueled by revenge are only secondarily so, and in many cases are caused or at any rate aggravated by the passions of humiliation and deprivation.

Conclusion: The Need to Believe in a Just World The indigestible truth is this: we do not live in a just world. On this virtually every thinker, including those who believe that God will in this world or some other make things come out right, has agreed. To be sure, there are and always will be those who, like the great early nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel, try to get us reconciled to the world (‘‘the actual is rational and the rational is actual’’). But the importance of justice is not thereby diminished; on the contrary, it becomes all the more urgent to (re)define, once again, the meaning of that honorific term. My suggestion here is that we shift our focus from large theories to personal and suprapersonal feelings, from the awesome awareness of global injustice to our own actions and attitudes. Such a shift brings edification as well as understanding, and it helps avoid what Melvin J. Lerner called the ‘‘fundamental delusion’’ of a belief in a just world.35 Lerner shows, in distressing detail, how we tend to misperceive or misinterpret recipients of rewards and victims of injustice in order to maintain this belief, and how far we will go to do so. But Sympathy and Vengeance [ 41]

he also demonstrates the extent to which this belief in a just world is a deeply emotional matter, a question of deep personal investment, heavily tied up with self-esteem and other questions of self-worth, rather than an abstract philosophical belief. One is reminded of Albert Camus, who argues in his Myth of Sisyphus for what he calls ‘‘the Absurd,’’ that devastating sense of disappointment and outrage that any adult and aware human being experiences on discovering that the world is not, and cannot be, fair. What Camus then defends as ‘‘keeping the Absurd alive,’’ I suggest, is a dramatic and mockheroic emphasis on seeing through Lerner’s ‘‘delusion’’ as a prerequisite of becoming a just person. The idea of justice as a personal virtue rather than an ideal state of society, and therefore a matter of emotion rather than the basis of an all-embracing theory, is a very old idea. Socrates took justice as a virtue in The Republic, and Aristotle agreed that justice is a state of character. Of course, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle wanted it both ways—justice as a virtue and justice as the ideal state—but, nevertheless, the former was as important as the latter, an idea too easily lost sight of in the modern philosophical world of contracts and rights. There cannot be a ‘‘value-free’’ theory of justice (or of the emotions), and one cannot develop a theory of justice without a substantial grounding and engagement in the empirical knowledge of how people actually feel and behave, and without some sense of moral integrity. Philosophy needs psychology; indeed, an adequate theory of justice cannot but be both. We need more philosopher–psychologist–activists like Nico Frijda who will move beyond the self-defeating belief that justice is a delusion and close the gap between the world they envision and the world they live in. Depressing realism and abstract idealism cannot be the only alternatives. Justice is neither in the heavens nor merely in the mud of self-deception. It is, as Socrates and Aristotle argued, to be found in our selves, as a virtuous state of character based on the appropriate emotions. The danger is that, like country singers looking for love, we are looking for justice in all the wrong places.

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Three Care and Compassion Moral Sentiment Theory Revisited

No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the sufferings of others . . . whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human.—Mencius It was Midge Decter who declared that ‘‘compassion’’ is a term she cannot abide. The pages of The Public Interest are full of articles by young technocrats who may well be able to abide the emotion but who insist that it would cost too much.—Norman Birnbaum (The Nation, April 23, 1988)

It has been an essential part of almost every philosophy, every ethics, every religion, every society, and every culture, from ancient Greece and China to contemporary liberalism, conservatism, and feminism. Simply stated, it is the belief that caring about others is a good thing to do. Having compassion for those in dire straits is a minimal requirement for someone to be a decent person. But beyond these platitudes, the status of care and compassion in contemporary moral philosophy is anything but obvious. The great German moral philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that compassion was ‘‘beautiful’’ but nevertheless had no ‘‘moral worth.’’ His many followers continue to give compassion short shrift, adding, as often as not, a slight sneer of condescension. And in contemporary politics, compassion is an endangered and often ridiculed sentiment. Hardheaded ‘‘social realism’’ has taken its place. Good liberals refuse (and encourage others to refuse) to give to beggars, on the grounds that this perpetuates ‘‘the system.’’ Conservatives, with only an ideological twist, agree. We see in our times a wholesale attack on government largesse and social compassion, despite the familiarity of the always oxymoronic and increasingly hypocritical catchphrase ‘‘compassionate conservatism.’’ Care and compassion are all but excluded by most traditional ethical theories, relegated to the margins of moral discourse or simply assumed as elementary but not much worth talking about. On the other hand, care and compassion have been moved to center stage by a few theorists who are antagonistic to the mainstream tradition in ethics: by Schopenhauer in his 1841 attack on Kant; by Lawrence Blum, Laurence Thomas, and Annette

Baier in now classic attacks on the Kantian tradition; and by Nel Noddings, Cheshire Calhoun, and many other feminists in their effort to provide a substitute for the whole of male-dominated, principle-mongering morality.1 What remains unclear is how care and compassion fit into ethics and moral philosophy, and even how they are to be understood. Even if they are not systematically excluded from a Kantian account of morality, neither are they obviously at home in the most prominent alternatives to that account. They have at best a dubious place in utilitarianism (and virtually none in the vulgar cost/benefit analysis that often passes for utilitarian thinking). Care and compassion hardly seem adequate (even to their staunchest defenders) to ground an ethics by themselves, and as ‘‘sentiments’’ they do not seem to be the right sort of thing to count as virtues, although what is now called ‘‘virtue ethics’’ would seem to be the most promising framework for understanding their importance. In this chapter, I would like to evaluate and defend the status of care and compassion as virtues, from their appearance as ‘‘sympathy’’ in the work of the eighteenth-century moral sentiment theorists to their central role in several very different philosophies today. My thesis, put simply, is that care and compassion are, as Schopenhauer insisted, the basis (though I would argue not the sole basis) of ethics, and that empathy, the ability to feel with (as well as for) others, lies at the very foundation of our emotional lives.

Care and Compassion: Sentiments or Virtues? Since things that are found in the soul are of three kinds—passions, faculties, states of character—virtue must be one of these. . . . [But] neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our passions, and . . . we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions. Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. For these reasons also they are not faculties, for we are neither called good or bad, or praised or blamed, for the simple capacity of feeling the passions. . . . If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor faculties, all that remains is that they should be states of character.—Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics Bk II, sect. 5)

In the recent rush to virtue ethics, it has remained notoriously unclear what is to count as a virtue. Indeed, the definition of virtue has itself become one of the two central sources of controversy, the other being the alleged superiority of an ethics of virtue over traditional ‘‘Kantian’’ and utilitarian approaches to ethics. There is considerable question whether virtue ethics is supposed to replace or merely to complement those more traditional approaches, bound up as they are with abstract and impersonal rational principles.2 This of course [ 44] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

depends in part on what counts as a virtue. If a virtue were no more than a personal instantiation of an abstract principle—the disposition to do one’s duty or to act for the greatest good for the greatest number, for example— then questions of good character and rational principles would presumably converge. But one of the more hotly debated features of virtue ethics is the demand that the virtues not be construed in terms of such instantiation, whether or not they are as individual and spontaneous as some authors (notably Nietzsche) would make them out to be. At least some virtues are, on most accounts, personal traits or dispositions of character that do not depend on any abstract principle, whether or not they might be described as if they followed some general rule or principle (as if being generous were construed as a disposition to follow the rule ‘‘Be generous’’). We can make sense of a general exhortation such as ‘‘Be compassionate!’’ but that can hardly be construed as a moral principle. The virtues cannot be construed as matters of obedience, although obedience may itself be a virtue, depending upon the situation, the context, and the imperative in question. The virtues are ‘‘natural,’’ whether or not they come to us via nature (evolution and genetics, for example). Rather, the virtues are ‘‘natural’’ in the sense that they are ‘‘second nature,’’ matters of repetition, practice, even habit. Whether or not care and compassion are cultivated or are in some more basic sense natural, the imperative ‘‘Be compassionate’’ is not one that can easily be obeyed, and if it is obeyed as an imperative, one may well question whether the result is compassion (as opposed, say, to behaving as if one felt compassion). But the emphasis on the particular context and, in compassion, the particular situation, is itself essential to virtue ethics, along with the emphasis on personal character. But that makes the definition of a virtue all the more difficult, since its manifestations may differ from context to context and have very different significance from person to person (e.g., the meaning of courage in a soldier and in a statesman). A virtue in one context may well be a vice in another, such as generosity (Aristotle’s ‘‘liberality’’) with regard to a needy person or a spoiled child. Compassion in one case may be foolishness and gullibility in another. There is no general principle that deals with these differences. What, then, is to count as a virtue, and can compassion be a virtue? There is some agreement that Hume’s characterization of the virtues as ‘‘traits agreeable to oneself and to others’’ is inadequate, while Aristotle’s ‘‘mean between the extremes’’ is too confusing and confused to do the job. There seems to be general agreement that ‘‘being compassionate,’’ as a stable and enduring character trait, is a virtue. But what about individual episodes of compassion—can they constitute such a trait? (Consider someone like Oscar Schindler, who was compassionate when it really counted, but a ruthless businessman the rest of his life.) Care and Compassion [ 45]

The standard, noncontroversial examples of the virtues remain a selection from Aristotle and Aquinas, such as courage and courtesy, ‘‘states of character’’ that may be exemplified in overt behavior, preferably without undue deliberation and with some regularity. (Courage notoriously presents a bit of a problem in this regard, for situations demanding or inviting courage— especially Aristotle’s paradigm of courage on the battlefield—are relatively rare.) Edmund Pincoffs (with credit to Robert Audi) lists over 200 such virtues3 whose nature is (he argues) extremely varied and not to be reduced to any single characteristic (though he then develops a hierarchy of five categories of ‘‘instrumental’’ and ‘‘non-instrumental’’ virtues and seven subcategories under ‘‘aesthetic,’’ ‘‘meliorating’’ and ‘‘moral’’). Virtually all of these are what we would call ‘‘character traits’’ (e.g., gentleness, vivaciousness, dignity, cheerfulness, modesty, honesty, sensitivity, courage, and cooperativeness), and none are themselves names of emotions or sentiments, although many virtuous traits have to do with control of the passions [nonvengefulness, serenity, even-temperedness] or having pleasant passions [e.g., cheerfulness]).4 But must a virtue be a ‘‘state of character,’’ or might it be, contra Aristotle, a passion? Aristotle explicitly excludes passions as candidates for virtues as such, favoring states of character. He considers anger and shame in this regard, but it is control and appropriateness of the former that he praises rather than simply the emotion itself, and shame is only a ‘‘quasi-virtue’’ (in the Ross translation), a sign of virtuousness but not as such a virtue at all. Are the moral sentiments, as defended by David Hume and Adam Smith, virtues? Hume defines virtues as traits so that it is not clear that an individual act of compassion should be included. Yet he seems to defend sympathy as a virtue, assuming, I think, that it is not a sentiment that can be merely episodic. But it seems to me that expecting the virtues to endure, come what may, is out of line with a good deal of contemporary research and experience.5 It has been argued that human behavior is much more influenced by circumstances than by character, and if this is so, perhaps we should lower our expectations about what should count as a virtue. I want to defend sentiments as virtues, not just the capacity or disposition to have them but the actual having of them—that is, as ‘‘calm’’ (as opposed to ‘‘violent’’) passions and not as ‘‘faculties’’ or ‘‘states of character.’’ Being compassionate is a virtue, but having compassion, even in a single instance, may be as well. I do not want to thereby suggest that such sentiments are always good or good in themselves. The moral sentiments are perhaps, as Hume insists, ‘‘useful’’ as well as pleasing, but this not sufficient to make them virtues. ( This is Nietzsche’s critique of ‘‘English moralists’’ at the beginning of his On the Genealogy of Morals.)6 But we need to ask whether virtues that are only feelings (and dispositions to have feelings) rather than any [ 46] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

particular type of action or abstention from action as such (e.g., courage, temperance, honesty) are indeed virtues. In this chapter, I want to try to get clear about sympathy and compassion, first going back to David Hume and Adam Smith and what they called ‘‘sympathy,’’ and then I want to look at care and compassion, kindred emotions that are typically misunderstood and misinterpreted. Worse, they have recently become weapons in a kind of gender war, guaranteeing their abuse and distortion by both sides.

Compassion Versus Justice? Justice [in Plato’s Republic] has emerged in its true colors as a property, not primarily of actions or political institutions, but of psyches. —C. D. C. Reeves (Philosopher Kings)

Aristotle lists as one of his basic virtues—indeed, he sometimes suggests (as did Plato) that it is the basic virtue—the personal virtue of justice. Of course, this virtue has its institutional counterparts, and those whose role in society it is to pass judgment carry with them a quite ‘‘special,’’ explicitly formulated notion of justice (judges and magistrates, of course, but teachers giving grades and traffic officers giving out parking tickets, too). But as I argued in chapter 2, justice as such is first of all a personal virtue, a certain sense of proportion and appropriateness and a feeling of fairness, and only secondarily an institutionally defined virtue. This analysis, needless to say, has been roundly abused by almost every social philosopher today, and it has been explicitly identified as a kind of ‘‘category-mistake’’ by Bernard Williams (whose moral philosophy has, ironically, most in common with the view that justice is a personal virtue).7 Justice, John Rawls begins by telling us, is ‘‘the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.’’8 Liberal and anti-liberal theories of justice pour out of the presses by the dozens, utilizing the latest in social choice theory and census matrices but saying very little if anything about the character of the person who does the choosing. (Rawls, almost alone, devotes an entire section of his book, albeit rather late in the game and explicitly secondarily, to a quasi-Aristotelian model of the good life and, by implication, at least, ‘‘the good person.’’) Justice, in liberal thinking, is defined and constituted first of all by abstract principles of ‘‘equality’’ and of ‘‘merit,’’ or by the supposed wisdom of the market. Virtue ethics would seem to be wholly out of place here, as would both the virtues and the personal moral sentiments. It has recently been argued, with some vehemence, that what is missing from the standard analyses and theories of justice is an adequate sense of care and compassion. This is, I believe, true and important. Even so pivotal Care and Compassion [ 47]

a figure as John Rawls, whose liberal credentials and sense of compassion were never in question, found it necessary to dress his sentiments in the formal costume of an impersonal deduction of rational principles, and most of the literature that has followed him has shown far more enthusiasm for his form than for his feelings. Perhaps that is why so much of social philosophy today resembles a debate in game theory rather than an expression of concern for human suffering, even if ‘‘the needy’’ and ‘‘the least advantaged’’ often appear (abstractly) as players. I would argue that justice, for Rawls and even for many other seemingly more hardheaded philosophers,9 is first of all a sense of compassion. Reason comes in to ‘‘rationalize’’ that feeling. Unfortunately, this important point has been politicized and polemicized as a difference between ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ and ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ approaches to ethics. Nel Noddings, for example, uses the division between ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ ethics as something of Maginot Line, ‘‘the great chasm’’ in the war between the sexes. Men of principle have been wrecking the world; caring women could save it. One of the saddest features of this picture of violence [in the world today] is that the deeds are so often done in the name of principle. . . . This approach through law and principle is not, I suggest, the approach of the mother. It is the approach of the detached one, of the other. The view to be expressed here is a feminine view. . . . It is feminine in the deep classical sense—rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness. . . . Our ethics of caring will not permit [self-righteousness and the devaluing of the other] to happen.10

Instead of insisting that any adequate sense of justice presupposes care and compassion, these recent authors oppose the (supposedly male) concept of justice to (female) caring and compassion. But this is no Kierkegaardian ‘‘either/or,’’ impersonal justice or personal concern. Care is neither a woman’s emotion nor a mother’s emotion, and it is not an emotion that by itself can save the world. The kindly sentiments represented by care and compassion cannot by themselves explain the enormous range or the profound depth of the passions that constitute our sense of justice, including our often vehement and not at all kindly sense of injustice. Sentiments alone cannot solve or account for the large policy issues that are (or should be) the ultimate concern of those theories of justice, but any decent policy must begin with caring—about ourselves, our reputations, and our belongings; about those whom we love and live with, feel akin to or responsible for; about the way the world is and the fate of the sentient creatures in it. Without that care and concern, there can be no sense of justice. Why else would any of this matter to us—the distribution of goods in the world, fair and equal treatment, just rewards and the felt need to punish, even questions of life and death? Justice begins with and presupposes our emotional engagement [ 48] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

in the world, not in philosophical detachment or in any merely hypothetical situation. This is not a gender difference. It is essential that this debate not be overplayed, so that justice and compassion end up on opposite sides of a nasty intellectual or gender war. The seeming Kantian exile of the kindly sentiments and the ‘‘inclinations’’ in general from moral philosophy is overstated. I noted that Kant himself called compassion ‘‘beautiful’’ in his early work, even if he had difficulty later incorporating it into his technical sense of ‘‘moral worth.’’ John Rawls doesn’t dismiss the sentiments but often mentions them, even if they all too often appear to be no more than spontaneous instantiations of abstract rational principles. And despite Rawls’s occasional protest, I would read the ‘‘intuitions’’ in his celebrated ‘‘reflective equilibrium’’ as an insistence on the importance of our feelings in deliberations of justice. It is always worth remembering how closely both Kant and Rawls claim to follow on the heels of Rousseau, one of the great defenders of the natural inclinations. The moral sentiment theorists also insisted that the basis of morality and justice is to be found in our natural disposition to have other-directed emotions. This did not mean that morality is not, in part, a function of reason or, above all, a matter of ‘‘doing the right thing.’’ But the right things don’t usually get done for the wrong reasons, and we don’t usually think of ourselves or of others as just or moral if the right thing gets done for the wrong reasons or if the wrong thing gets done for the right reasons. But surely among the ‘‘right reasons’’ are the sympathetic emotions. Contrary to the more extreme versions of the Kantian tradition, a good reason for being moral and just by helping another person in need is ‘‘I feel sorry for him.’’ Indeed, one is hard put to think of any other reason that is so impervious to argument (which is not to say that it is indefeasible). One can understand why so many philosophers have been attracted to the logical precision of reason instead of the vicissitudes of emotion. Such sentiments as ‘‘I feel sorry for him’’ are sure to be undependable, unpredictable, and somewhat limited in their intelligence. Sentiment is surely not enough to construct wise policies, and what is often called ‘‘sentimentality’’ would sometimes seem to be the very opposite of wisdom. Rationality encourages debate, precision, and hardheadedness, while sentimentality seems to encourage ad hominem argument and some notoriously ‘‘soft’’ thinking. It is often suggested and sometimes claimed outright (e.g., by Nel Noddings) that caring is always kindly, that it is ‘‘unconditional’’—notably in motherhood. So, too, compassion is presented as a ‘‘sharing’’ of suffering and presented as if it is always virtuous, always praiseworthy (e.g., by Milton Mayeroff).11 And again, care and compassion are contrasted with the sense of justice instead of analyzed as an essential part of justice. It is suggested (e.g., by several New Age feminist thinkers) that care and compassion are Care and Compassion [ 49]

alone sufficient to provide a foundation for social order and decency, if not to save the planet.12 I believe that many such claims are bogus, and I would like to defend qualified conceptions of sympathy, care, and compassion that will stand up to critical scrutiny as well as be ethically edifying.

The Nature of Sympathy: Adam Smith and David Hume How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others. . . . The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.—Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments)

Traditionally, moral sentiment theory was concerned with a family of ‘‘natural’’ emotions, including benevolence, sympathy, compassion, and pity. (Care and caring, instructively, were not part of the standard list.) These were often lumped together and not infrequently treated as identical (for example, by Hume). In the standard account of moral sentiment thinking, Francis Hutcheson’s ‘‘moral sense’’ theory is usually included as a moral sentiment theory, despite the fact that Hutcheson explicitly denied any special moral role to the sentiments. Rousseau is often not included as a moral sentiment theorist, though he was obviously one with them. With his Scottish colleagues he attacked the ‘‘selfishness’’ theories of Hobbes and Mandeville and argued for the naturalness of pity, an emotion closely kindred to compassion. But as developed by Hume and Smith, in particular, the exemplary moral sentiment was sympathy. This sentiment, I have suggested, is an awkward amalgam of several emotional states and dispositions, including compassion and what we call ‘‘care.’’ It also includes, especially for Smith, our contemporary notion of empathy. There is considerable confusion about the meaning of ‘‘sympathy,’’ both in the writings of the moral sentiment theorists and in our own conversations. In common parlance, sympathy means ‘‘feeling sorry for’’ someone, while for many philosophers (notably Hume) it is conflated with benevolence. (Smith tries to keep these distinct.) ‘‘Feeling sorry for’’ can be a sign of caring, but surely a minimal one, since we can feel sorry for strangers and even our enemies. Benevolence has much in common with the more activist concept of ‘‘caring for,’’ but benevolence has much greater scope than sympathy as such. We can feel benevolence in the abstract (without any particular object) and benevolence for those whose feelings are utterly malicious or indifferent to us (e.g., in being merciful to a condemned and still hateful wrongdoer, perhaps [ 50] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

as an expression of our own largesse but out of benevolence nevertheless). We often use ‘‘sympathy’’ or the verb ‘‘sympathize’’ to register agreement or approval, although none of these qualify as an adequate philosophical conception or a correct dictionary definition of the term. Technically, sympathy (literally, ‘‘feeling with,’’ like ‘‘com/passion’’) is the sharing of feeling or, as a disposition, the ability to share the feelings of others. Or, if one wants to insist that the emotions can be individuated only according to the persons who have them and thus cannot be shared, one might say that sympathy is an ‘‘agreement of feelings’’ (Random House Dictionary), in the sense of ‘‘having the same [type of ] emotion.’’ One of course, need not ‘‘agree with’’ in the sense of ‘‘approve of ’’ the feeling in question, any more than one must always enjoy, like, or approve of one’s own emotions. The feelings may agree but we need not; sharing a feeling is one thing and accepting or approving of the feeling is something quite different. In B movies, we might well share the offended hero’s rather fascist sense of revenge while berating ourselves for that feeling. We might find ourselves sympathizing with someone envious or hateful, and nevertheless criticize ourselves for doing so, thus sharing but not at all accepting or approving of the envy or the hatred. Adam Smith uses the term in this technical way, as ‘‘agreement of emotion,’’ but he does not thereby imply the agreement of any particular emotion or kind of emotion. Thus there is a serious ambiguity between sympathy as a specific sentiment and sympathy as a disposition to share sentiments (whatever sentiments) with others. Sympathy so conceived is thus not actually a sentiment at all but rather a vehicle for understanding other people’s sentiments, ‘‘a fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.’’13 But then Smith goes on to qualify this by insisting that sympathy is not an actual sharing of sentiments (in the sense of ‘‘having the same feeling’’). It is, rather, an act of imagination by which one can appreciate the feelings of another person by ‘‘putting oneself in his place,’’ ‘‘a principle which interests him in the fortunes of others.’’14 This provides Smith with a way of accounting for how it can be that people are not essentially selfish or self-interested, but it raises the question whether sympathy can be the sort of motivating factor in our behavior that moral sentiment theory seeks to defend. Moral sentiment theory makes a serious claim here (most obvious in the more polemical writings of Hume). It is that sympathy motivates moral behavior. (Hume is not always consistent in this regarding sympathy, but his famous claim that ‘‘reason is and ought to be slave of the passions’’ makes his overall strategy very clear.) In retrospect, this claim about motivation is the most dramatic difference between Kant and the Scots: whether practical reason can itself be motivating (Hume, famously, thinks not) or whether the motivation must come from the inclinations. But on Smith’s ‘‘fellow feeling’’ Care and Compassion [ 51]

interpretation of sympathy, it is not clear either that sympathy is an inclination and (therefore) can be motivating, nor is it clear that it can act in effective opposition to the equally natural (and often more powerful) sentiment of selfinterest and in contrast to the similarly selfless but also passionless dictates of reason. (‘‘The approbation of moral qualities most certainly is not deriv’d from reason, or any comparison of ideas; but proceeds entirely from a moral taste, and from certain sentiments of pleasure and disgust, which arise upon the contemplation and view of particular qualities or characters.’’)15 Sympathy, according to Smith’s definition as ‘‘fellow feeling,’’ however, seems to be more concerned with comprehension than with feeling as such, and comprehension is too close to the ‘‘comparison of ideas’’ to provide the ‘‘sentiments of pleasure and disgust’’ to play the role that sympathy is called to play in morals.16 (‘‘As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can have no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.’’)17 Sympathy cannot mean merely ‘‘comprehension’’ but, on the other hand, sympathy as truly shared feeling (my suffering or envy is the mirror image of your suffering or envy) is too implausible.18 But bringing in the (then as now) commonsense understanding of sympathy as ‘‘feeling sorry for’’ provides the bridge between mere comprehension and true fellow feeling. Feeling sorry for another presumes, at least in some minimal sense, understanding the other’s plight. But it also requires, in some minimal sense, feeling on one’s own part, though certainly much less than the mirror image of the other’s suffering.19 I do not mean to limit sympathy to an emotional reaction to another person’s suffering, although this is (I think) how the term is most often employed. One might also share another’s joy or pride, and I think that we do sometimes use the word ‘‘sympathy’’ (if not ‘‘sympathize’’) in such cases. But I do want to argue that Smith’s use of the term is healthily complex, not quite to say inconsistent. On the one hand, he wants a mechanism for ‘‘fellow feeling’’; on the other, a motive for morals. As fellow feeling, it is not at all clear that he can have both, but if we assume that Smith does not mean what he says when he casts out the ‘‘feeling sorry for’’ interpretation, and instead take him to be saying (correctly) that this alone does not even begin to capture the rich meaning of sympathy, then he can maintain both sympathy’s fellow feeling and its motivating power.

A Family of Fine Sentiments: Sympathy, Empathy, Benevolence, Compassion, Care, and Pity Hume and Smith celebrate sympathy as a ‘‘natural’’ emotion or sentiment and as the basis for all morality, although their notion of ‘‘sympathy’’ is both [ 52] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

ambiguous (between sympathy, empathy, and benevolence, for instance) and overambitious (it is sometimes called upon to do all of the moral work). Sympathy is often equated with compassion or what the Germans call Mitleid, and the root meanings are, to be sure, the same (‘‘feeling with’’), but the two terms have a very different connotation. Sympathy is sometimes equated with care, in the obvious sense that to sympathize with someone is to care about him, to see his pain or suffering as mattering. But ‘‘care’’ is also multiply ambiguous—for example, between caring about and caring for, the latter implying some sort of behavior and the former, not. Moreover, there is pity (a common translation of Mitleid ) but, again, pity carries with it a note of condescension, and while having compassion for someone is usually most welcome, having pity for them is not. Perhaps one might expand the family by including charity, even though it is obvious that charity is not, as such, a sentiment. But Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that ‘‘the new conception of the virtue of benevolence . . . in the eighteenth century is assigned very much the scope which the Christian scheme of the virtues assigned to charity. But, unlike charity, benevolence as a virtue became a license for almost any kind of manipulative intervention in the affairs of others.’’20 So, too, one might deny that benevolence is an emotion. It is, perhaps, rather a motive or a broad category of desire. But the shift from the ‘‘outer’’ to the ‘‘inner,’’ from virtues to feelings and what historian Lawrence Stone called ‘‘affective individualism’’ is typical of the eighteenth century. This is an important clue to any analysis of the moral sentiments, and an important contrast with the virtue philosophies of the ancient and medieval worlds. Ancient thought focused on behavior (without being in the least behaviorist). Much of modern thought about the emotions (what used to be called ‘‘passions’’ and ‘‘affects’’) tends to focus on feelings rather than behavior. Thus, according to the thinking we have inherited from the eighteenth-century empiricists, a sentiment is essentially an inner feeling, and its connection to behavior (and even to character) is contingent rather than definitive. Thus we can understand the complex relationship between sympathy and benevolence and why equating the two would be so attractive to Hume. True, both names suffer from an excess of scope and vagueness that makes their relative terrain difficult to map and identify. But what leads the moral sense theorists so to identify sympathy and benevolence is precisely the latter’s apparent motivational powers, whereas sympathy too readily remains nothing but a ‘‘feeling with’’ or ‘‘feeling for.’’ Benevolence is indeed a much broader concept than sympathy, and though benevolence need not lead to action (e.g., ‘‘wishing well’’ rather than ‘‘making well’’), it often does. But sympathy too often appears in a mere spectator role, divorced from any plan of action. But then again, benevolence need have nothing to do with ‘‘feeling Care and Compassion [ 53]

with’’ or even ‘‘for.’’ It may be a matter of personal policy or habit. One may be kindly or generous ‘‘out of pity,’’ but though pity may motivate, it readily remains a feeling unto itself—one of the reasons why Nietzsche launched such a relentless attack against it. ‘‘Feeling sorry for’’ isn’t exactly sympathy either, even in the vernacular, for one can feel sorry for someone who is suffering without feeling anything at all, whereas we tend to think of sympathy, again in Smith’s words, as something like a sharing of feeling. It is one thing to say that one shares feelings and something else—a much weaker claim—to say that one appreciates or ‘‘understands’’ the plight of another. Pity is even more problematic, for it includes within its structure an unmistakable sense of ‘‘looking down’’ at its object and, at least on Nietzsche’s account, it also tends to be hypocritical, pretending care and concern but exemplifying scorn. Even on a more benign account than Nietzsche’s, pity cannot be conceived of as an unalloyed kindly sentiment, which sympathy is supposed to be. What is it to ‘‘share’’ a feeling, as empathy seems to require? One might well argue that it is a matter of logic that each person can have his and only his own feeling. Two people can share the same kind of feeling—indeed, the same kind of feeling about the same object or situation at the same time. But here research and experience lead us in different directions. There is what contemporary psychologists refer to as ‘‘emotional contagion,’’ a not altogether happy way of referring to the fact that people ‘‘pick up’’ emotions from others nearby. The angry mood of a crowd is an unfortunately familiar example. What is most striking about this phenomenon is how ‘‘noncognitive’’ it is. Indeed, such ‘‘contagion’’ may often appear to be ‘‘objectless,’’ as when one enters a party filled with good humor. There is nothing in particular that one feels good about; one simply shares the good feeling with the others in the room. But this would seem to be too noncognitive, too unfocused, to do the moral work Hume and Smith need it to do.21 So, too, contemporary ‘‘empathy’’ admits of a range of interpretations, from the highly cognitive (such as actively imagining oneself in the other person’s position) to the minimally cognitive and basically ‘‘affective’’ (notably, finding oneself extremely uncomfortable in the presence of someone in pain). Smith seems to waver between these two extremes, but I think that although he puts a good deal of weight on the former (notably, with his ‘‘impartial spectator’’), much of the virtue of his theory lies in the latter. But Smith is also clear that it is not enough for me to feel upset at the same time that you feel upset. I have to feel upset because you feel upset. Again, the whole idea behind moral sentiment theory is that I can and do feel for you on the basis of your suffering and not of my own. MacIntyre has charged that sympathy is an emotion which was largely invented by Hume.22 He is primarily concerned with the tendency of the [ 54] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Enlightenment philosophers—Hume in particular—to project their own narrow English property-owning ideology as a ‘‘universal’’ sense of morals, and he charges that Hume’s presumed universal sentiment presupposed a very specific normative standard, ‘‘in fact a highly conservative normative standard.’’23 MacIntyre explicitly denies that sympathy could ‘‘supply the defects of an argument from [ long-term self-] interest and utility,’’ and suggests that the invention of an emotion called ‘‘sympathy’’ was Hume’s attempt to ‘‘bridge the gap between any set of reasons for action which could support unconditional adherence to general and unconditional rules and any set of reasons for action or judgment which could derive from our particular, fluctuating, circumstance-governed desires, emotions and interests.’’MacIntyre adds, ‘‘Later on Adam Smith was to invoke sympathy for precisely the same purpose. But the gap of course, is logically unbridgeable, and ‘sympathy’ as used by Hume and Smith is the name of a philosophical fiction.’’24 I think that this analysis is unfair to both Hume and Smith, although it does betray a critical weakness in most prominent interpretations of these two great theorists, if not in their works themselves. The tendency to split the passions into a ‘‘selfish’’ set of sentiments and an ‘‘other-regarding’’ set, such as sympathy and compassion, raises deep problems about how such internal warfare can ever produce a coherent individual life, much less a coherent and harmonious society. But I think that the soul-wrenching individualism that MacIntyre and many other commentators attribute to Hume and Smith is not the essence of their theories, and the sentiment of sympathy—however ambiguously defined—deserves recognition as a very real, indispensable, and probably ‘‘natural’’ ingredient in our moral sensibilities. Both Smith and Hume were ‘‘classical liberals’’ (in other words, conservatives), and their individualism was always tempered by their sense of tradition and social unity. Thus I think that both Hume and Smith were struggling to formulate a more sociable sense of human nature, one in which mutual affection and approval are more important than self-interest as such, one in which shared emotions and feelings for others are more important than acquisitive desires. Their mistake, which they seemed to pick up from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson,25 was to polarize the passions and characterize a few of them as ‘‘moral’’ or ‘‘social’’ and others ‘‘selfish’’ or ‘‘asocial,’’ when in fact almost all passions and sentiments of any complexity pour across these artificial boundaries like clouds over state lines. Sympathy, in particular, is no simple sentiment, and does indeed involve competitive and ‘‘self-interested’’ components as well as pure altruism and concern for the other. Accordingly, we should expect considerable strain in these theories, as Hume goes on to defend the British propertied classes and as Smith goes on to defend what has since been dubbed the ‘‘magic’’ of free-market capitalism. But the central and undeniable truth of moral sentiment theory, I believe, is that we are Care and Compassion [ 55]

essentially and ‘‘naturally’’ social creatures with fellow feeling, care, and compassion for others, and not concerned only with our own interests and ambitions in life.

Care and Caring Human caring and the memory of caring and being cared for, which I shall argue form the foundation of ethical response, have not received attention except as outcomes of ethical behavior.—Nel Noddings (Caring )

Care is perhaps the most general of all emotions. In a broad sense, to have any emotion presupposes that one cares, that one is engaged, that one has interests, that one ‘‘takes something personally.’’ Care thus embraces the hostile and vindictive emotions as well as the considerate and kindly sentiments. We should not forget, in our rush to sensitivity, that care (die Sorge) is introduced in Goethe’s Faust as a burden, not a blessing, and it is because we care about someone or something that we become possessive, defensive, and vengeful as well as nurturing and supportive. Caring is not an unmixed benefit, and to think of care as only a kindly, nurturing affection is to get less than half of the story. Most of the violence as well as the kindness in the world begins with care.26 So I could not disagree more with Nel Noddings when she writes: When we look clear-eyed at the world today, we see it wracked with fighting, killing, vandalism, and psychic pain of all sorts. One of the saddest features of this picture of violence is that the deeds are so often done in the name of principle. When we establish a principle forbidding killing, we also establish principles describing the exceptions to the first principle. Supposing, then, that we are moral. . . . We may tear into others whose beliefs or behaviors differ from ours with the promise of ultimate vindication. This approach through law and principle is not, I suggest the approach of the mother. . . . The view to be expressed here is the feminine view. [ Predictable caveat:] This does not mean that all women will accept it or that men will reject it [ but] it is feminine in the deep, classical sense—rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness . . . an alternative to present views.27

Care encompasses almost all emotions, insofar as one must care about the world in order to feel anything else about it. We can restrict our characterization of care, however, to include just a certain set of ‘‘positive’’ feelings about another being (or any number of other beings) such that one ‘‘wishes them well’’ and is moved to act (where possible) on their behalf. But note that ‘‘being moved’’ is not the same as acting, and we often care for or about someone whose fate is quite out of our hands (caring about what happens to [ 56] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a soldier on duty overseas; caring what happens to one’s five-year-old child as she starts her first day at kindergarten). Such ‘‘positive’’ feelings about a person are no guarantee of continued ‘‘niceness’’; caring always sets up the possibility of ingratitude and betrayal, and though the limits of tolerance may sometimes be stretched remarkably thin (notably between parents and their young children), that possibility is always there. Indeed, one might hypothesize that the more intense the care and the more the limits of tolerance are stretched, the more violent the reaction should those limits be violated. Of course, for some parents, those limits might be reached by a simple act of disobedience or a particularly cantankerous Saturday morning. For others, it may take a wholesale, humiliating act of rejection, the sort that Arthur Miller and Sam Shepherd and, of course, Shakespeare portray in some of their writings. But Regan and Goneril are not your average daughters, and Lear is not your average father, and in most families the elasticity of mutual care and affection is never broken (between parents and children, that is). Furthermore, caring about anyone or anything sets up a zone of dangers and threats that promote aggressive defensiveness and hostility. One would not long think that a father loved his little son if he made no effort to save him from the abuse of a stranger, or if he harbored no ill feelings toward such an abusive stranger. To care for is also to be prepared to fight for, and against the sweet image of women caring for the world in the way mothers have always cared for their children should be juxtaposed the not-so-sweet image of a mother defending her children against the dangers of the outside world. Every hunter, hiker, and female-cat owner knows that there is little more vicious or dangerous in nature than a female protecting her young. Caring for someone also prompts feelings of jealousy. And the desire for vengeance. If we care for someone who is intentionally injured, caring provokes the desire for revenge (or, more precisely, the desire to avenge). A good ( liberal feminist) friend once told me that she not only came to accept the idea of a death penalty but realized that she would readily kill with her own hands any creep who tried to injure her children. Care, if it is care at all, has its hostile, even violent, consequences. Nel Noddings too often identifies caring as ‘‘the ethics of the mother,’’ as if this indicated only a sweet, selfless joy, devoid of competitiveness and violence. But this is a one-dimensional image of the experience of motherhood. To think of this as the essence of caring is to render the concept of care ethically useless. So while I want to put care at the very heart of justice, we should not, and ultimately cannot, take caring to be an unqualified blessing, much less as another saintly ideal that few mortals (and no men) can ever hope to achieve. Designating care as essentially ‘‘selfless’’ does just this, for virtually everything that we care about does not abandon, but rather engages, the self. Care Care and Compassion [ 57]

idealized as an affection becomes just as much of a problem as the abstract and idealized rational principles it was meant to replace.

Compassion Compassion is more specific than care, and so it may be much easier to define and delimit and examine as a critical ingredient in justice. The most obvious specifying feature of compassion (‘‘suffering with’’) is that the object of one’s concern is somehow in pain. One does not feel compassion for a friend who has just won the local lottery (except, of course, in a very unusual set of circumstances). One might well feel compassion for a friend who is getting divorced, but it would be inappropriate, except in an unusual and unfortunate case, to feel compassion for a friend who was getting married. It is often supposed (as the prefix might suggest) that in compassion one suffers with the other, but one need not actually feel his or her pain; indeed, compassion suggests that one somehow stands safely ‘‘above’’ the misery of the other, affording one the luxury of commiseration. A student who has just flunked his exams does not feel compassion toward a fellow student who has also flunked his exams. They just feel miserable together. It is the student who has passed her exams with flying colors who is in a position to feel compassion for the other two, though the giddiness of her own success may make it difficult to do so. It is compassion, this ability to feel for those less fortunate than oneself (and in that sense like sympathy, not empathy), that I would argue forms one of the cornerstone passions of our sense of justice. Compassion, on the other hand, has larger scope than care. One need not be intimately acquainted with a person or a creature in order to feel compassion for him, her, or it. One can feel compassion for millions of people at once, and one can feel compassion for complete strangers. On the other hand, one cannot be completely ignorant of them. I have often wondered about the fact that murder doesn’t seem to mean anything or move us if we don’t know anything about the person (e.g., in Agatha Christie’s novels). In the stage play and movie Arsenic and Old Lace, characters are dispatched whom we only very briefly or never meet. Their murders are much more puzzles to be solved than tragedies to be lamented. I am not convinced that it is just the fictional status of these characters which explains our lack of compassion for them. Public responses to news headlines are often equally unfeeling. Compassion is, perhaps, not so much ‘‘feeling with’’ as ‘‘feeling for’’ someone who is suffering. This does not mean, as the moral sentiment theorists seemed to argue regarding sympathy, that we actually have to feel the same or share the suffering, albeit with somewhat diminished intensity. Hume, for instance, suggests that sympathy and compassion are identified by [ 58] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

such shared feelings, so that when a friend is suffering from a gouty toe or a migraine headache, we feel at least a twinge of the same. If a friend is going through a nasty divorce, we relive (in shadow form) a similar experience of our own. But however such a picture may appeal to our sense of camaraderie, it is not an adequate portrait of compassion. One can have compassion for a friend in pain without having any semblance, no matter how faint, of his or her affliction. I am reminded of a friend in graduate school who, though fully compassionate with friends who had headaches, confessed that he had never had one and could not imagine what one would be like. And I had a teacher who had never suffered from insomnia and could not imagine it, until jet lag following a trip from the Far East briefly treated him to an experience that most of his friends had enjoyed for decades. It makes sense, but it can be deeply misleading, to say that compassion is a ‘‘feeling.’’ It is indeed an aspect of consciousness and not an action or an activity, but it is also an engagement with the world, an instance of involving, if not identifying, oneself with the circumstances and sufferings of other beings. They are not simply self-enclosed sensations like a headache or a gouty toe that focus our attention within ourselves and distract us from the world. The feeling of compassion may be elegantly articulate, as in some of the best socially conscious poetry and journalistic prose, but it can also be ‘‘dumb’’ and only felt. Indeed, I have no reservations about ascribing compassion to nontalking animals and very young children, although they may often be confused or have no way of knowing exactly what is going on (what the victim is suffering from) or what they could possibly do. What I do not want to allow is for compassion (and related emotions) either to be dismissed as ‘‘mere feelings’’ or to be co-opted by an overly intellectualistic account such that they become nothing more than applied abstract beliefs. To say that they are feelings makes them vulnerable to the first danger but clearly saves them from the second. But so long as we keep in mind a healthy cognitive picture of the sentiments and other emotions, we should not feel tempted to minimize the significance of our feelings. Compassion and its kindred emotions focus our attention on the world, on the person or creature who is suffering, and move us to do something. Compassion and its kin are above all else motives : they move us to act (whether or not it is evident exactly what we should do). But if compassion is not just a feeling, it does not yet necessitate behavior. Being moved to do something is not yet to do something, and it is a matter of considerable debate whether one truly has compassion if he or she is ‘‘moved’’ yet is not moved to do something when what to do is obvious and readily doable. One does not have compassion for the poor if one is not moved to give to charity. ( The ‘‘compassionate conservatism’’ that only encourages the poor to lift themselves out of their plight is in no meaningful sense compassionate, Care and Compassion [ 59]

only self-righteous.) But the question of how much one must do in order to be compassionate is by no means an easy question. It has to be enough to ‘‘count,’’ but it does not follow that it must be so much that it counts as a ‘‘sacrifice.’’ Compassion is a response to another’s suffering that motivates ready-at-hand behavior, but exactly what this means is the topic of another kind of book, not this one. In his classic essay ‘‘Compassion,’’ Lawrence Blum provides us with a very general sense of compassion as felt concern for another who is in some serious or grave condition. Compassion is not appropriate, for example, for a driver who merely suffers some inconvenience on the way to visit a friend. Blum notes how complex compassion can be: one can feel compassion for a blind man who has managed to get a rewarding job, marry well, and be happy, whereas pity, for instance, would be inappropriate. Blum analyzes compassion as an emotion (‘‘or an emotional attitude’’) as a moral phenomenon with particular moral value. He, too, is anxious to provide an alternative to the overbearing ‘‘Kantian’’ interpretation of morality, and (a bit like Kant), he argues that the feeling of compassion is ‘‘good in itself,’’ a virtue even in the absence of beneficent action. ‘‘That compassion is often appropriate when there is a little or no scope for the subject’s disposition to beneficence shows that compassion’s sole significance does not lie in its role as motive to beneficence. . . . The compassionate person’s expression of concern and shared sorrow can be valuable to the sufferer for its own sake, independently of its instrumental value in improving his condition.’’28 I would argue that this gives away too much, that we do indeed appreciate a compassionate person’s expression of concern and shared sorrow if there is nothing to be done, but as soon as there is anything that can be done, no mere expression of concern and shared sorrow is sufficient. Blum also points out that compassion should not be thought of as a Kantian ‘‘inclination,’’ for being compassionate is quite distinct from ‘‘doing what one is in the mood to do or feels like doing.’’ Indeed, ‘‘compassionate acts often involve acting very much contrary to one’s moods and inclinations. Compassion is fundamentally other-regarding rather than self-regarding: its affective status in no way detracts from this.’’ Nevertheless, I think it is a Kantian ‘‘inclination,’’ and it is ‘‘doing what one is in the mood to do or feels like doing.’’ But I take it that Blum’s good point is rather that compassion is not merely feeling in yet another sense, that it has to do with the ‘‘objective’’ question of what is appropriate to do and not just what one ‘‘feels like doing.’’ I think that this is extremely important, first because it rightly rejects the tendency to treat all acts based on emotions (and the emotions themselves) as ‘‘self-interested’’ in an ethically damning sense, and second because it is important to recognize the moral significance of the moral sentiments. This means recognizing their significance independently of (though not entirely [ 60] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

separated from) the actions to which they typically give rise. If a person frequently expressed compassion but never demonstrated willingness to help, we would certainly reject his or her claims to be compassionate, but it would be a serious misunderstanding to insist that a person feels compassion only when he or she acts or volunteers to help. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out the independent virtue of eunoia—wishing another well but not ‘‘putting oneself out for it’’; but of course this is not to be praised to the exclusion of helping others. The first virtue of our moral feelings is that we have them, that they represent a certain way of engaging with and ‘‘being in’’ the world. Their secondary virtue is that they often prompt kindly and considerate actions and make the world more just. It may seem odd or even masochistic to insist that pain can be a virtue, but in compassion we can see how this may be so. An executive who is forced to fire workers or a military commander who has to order men to their death may well feel, and ought to feel, distress because, while doing his duty, he also feels compassion. At such times, it is good to feel bad, and to avoid the pain is, in some sense, immoral. Thus, when the executive pleads that ‘‘it’s just a business decision’’ or the commander insists that ‘‘it’s nothing personal,’’ we can recognize in their detachment a kind of moral ‘‘bad faith.’’ So much for the ‘‘wisdom’’ that says ‘‘you shouldn’t take it personally.’’ Taking it personally is what converts an immoral or at any rate distasteful action into a moral one. ( This is not to say that any immoral act can be made moral if one feels guilty or compassionate enough about it. The rapist who feels sorry for his victims is not much—if any—better than his cold-blooded colleague.) But it is in this sense, at least, that the ‘‘negative’’ and painful emotions are essential to a sense of justice. One certainly has no such sense if he or she does not feel guilt as the result of being unjust or does not feel ashamed about betraying a trust. Thus Aristotle, with some discomfort, insists that shame is one of the virtues, a ‘‘quasi-virtue,’’ not because it is good to be ashamed but because it is wicked not to feel shame when one ought to. Painful emotions in such circumstances are good and desirable, and it is only an utterly amoral hedonist who would deny their virtue. It is one of the more disturbing features of the popular social philosophy of our time that there is a pervasive, confident contempt for do-gooders. What could possibly be wrong with a kind emotion and the actions that go along with it, whose only aim is to help other people? The problem is that compassion, by itself, is often ill-informed, even stupid, and vaguely directed. It may even be self-serving (though it pretends to be the very opposite). It is true that compassion typically prompts kindly action. It also inspires the search for ways of helping where none were evident before. But compassion often prompts precipitous action or makes more difficult the sort of cold, professional behavior that may be necessary (e.g., in a medical emergency). Care and Compassion [ 61]

Blum points out that compassion may make worse an already hopeless situation and may hurt its recipients by concentrating too much on their plight. It can be ‘‘misguided, grounded in a superficial understanding of the situation.’’29 Indeed, we all can think of examples where being too ‘‘caught up’’ in a tragedy makes us less, rather than more, capable of coping with it. Other examples of ‘‘superficial understanding’’ of someone else’s plight lead us to intrude where we are not welcome, intervene where we are not competent, interfere where we are not needed or wanted. But this is not to give too much to the cynical critics. The limitations of compassion hardly undermine its virtue or the overall utility of compassionate actions. Blum rightly concludes that ‘‘because compassion involves an active and objective interest in another’s welfare, it is characteristically a spur to deeper understanding than rationality alone could insure. A person who is compassionate by character is in principle committed to as rational and as intelligent a course of action as possible.’’30 Compassion without intelligence is no virtue, and intelligence without compassion is not justice. My aim is to put the passions in general and the moral sentiments in particular back where they belong, as the core of our sense of morality and justice. But it is not my thesis—it is the very opposite of my thesis—that passions and the moral sentiments should be opposed to or starkly distinguished from reason. The significance of compassion is that it provides the heart to rationality itself.

The Limits of Compassion: Subjects, Objects, and Reciprocity This raises the question, however, of how much ability and intelligence ( how much cognition) it requires to feel these emotions. It also raises the complementary question of how much information and insight must be involved in the choice of the object of compassion and its kin. What sorts of beings can we feel compassion for? How much must we know about them, and how much must we have in common with them? We readily feel compassion for a member of our own family or a best friend who is in trouble. Do we, can we, feel compassion for a person who is very different from us, who not only speaks a different language but lives a very different kind of life? Can we, do we, properly feel compassion for an animal (a dog, a cat, or a horse, for example) that has no (or little) language and lives a very different life indeed? Can we, do we, properly feel compassion for an animal about which we know very little and which lives a life that is all but unthinkable to us—a fish or an insect, for instance, or a wriggling worm? Can we feel compassion for a houseplant? ( What would we have to believe to do so?) [ 62] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

These questions get much trickier than they first seem, and it is for that reason understandable ( but not therefore excusable) that so many philosophers, psychologists, and social thinkers have simply limited their concerns to human beings—indeed, often just within their community (whatever its scope, often just implied), and ignored the rest of nature. It would be much easier if moral concerns and considerations of justice concerned only sophisticated creatures such as us, or if our concerns were restricted just to those beings who participated or in theory could participate in ‘‘the social contract.’’ But what is required for a creature to be the object of compassion is only that he, she, or it has interests, can feel pain, can suffer. A creature need not have to negotiate for our concern with an offer of reciprocity, nor need it be capable of the emotional repertoire (much less the rationality and abilities) that ‘‘make us human.’’ Indeed, what makes us human, one might suggest (along the line of Peter Singer), is precisely the fact that we can and do and should care about creatures other than and very different from ourselves. ( The very word ‘‘humane’’ implies this.) But to what extent do we or can we understand another creature’s interests? It is not always evident when a creature is suffering, and our ability to ‘‘empathize’’ with members of other species can be as misleading or as wrongheaded as it is compassionate. Animal rights activists once complained loudly that chickens were being kept in cages with wire bottoms, presumably for the convenience of their keepers. We can easily imagine how uncomfortable it would be for us, with our sensitive soles (not ‘‘souls’’), to walk on thin wire netting. But it turned out, on investigation, that chickens actually prefer wire netting floors to wooden or linoleum or plush carpeted floors, and our well-intended concern turned out to be wrong.31 Similarly, dog owners overinfatuated with the kindly wisdom of Summerhill or a misplaced romanticism may think (or rationalize—if the underlying cause is laziness) that their animals are much happier without the discipline and conditioning of training. Projecting on them our own discomfort with the ideas of ‘‘brainwashing’’ and unquestioning obedience, we assume that a free dog is a happier dog, and to be trained is to be unfree. But such dog owners should be told that an untrained dog is usually a confused and unhappy dog, unsure of his or her owner’s desires and expectations. An even moderately well-trained dog is not only a joy to the owner (and treated accordingly in return) but a happier dog just by virtue of the satisfaction of satisfying its owner. What animals need or want and what makes them suffer is not always (or even usually) self-evident to us. Compassion with animals, as with humans, requires knowledge as well as feeling. Uninformed compassion is useless and no virtue, no matter how heartily felt. What is much less of a mystery is the suffering caused by physical pain. Animal behaviorists may argue over the appropriateness of describing a dog Care and Compassion [ 63]

or a cat as ‘‘depressed’’ when its owner is ill or away, but it takes a particularly stubborn sort of philistine to insist, whether on the ground of scientific hardheadedness or philosophical perversity, that animals do not feel pain. The otherwise great philosopher Descartes argued that dogs were nothing but ‘‘machines’’ as he vivisected them for the sake of his anatomical education, and second-rate behaviorists have for years delighted in outraging their audiences with truly mindless pronouncements about the mindlessness of animals. It is true that one cannot ‘‘prove’’ that a dog with a broken leg, having just been hit by a car and now twisting around in the street whimpering, is in pain. But then, one cannot prove—in the same ridiculous sense—that one’s little brother, having just fallen off the jungle gym and broken his leg, is in pain. The fact that one’s little brother ‘‘reports’’ (between screams and tears) that ‘‘it hurts’’ is hardly more proof than the dog’s whimpering. Although empathy has it limits and can be misleading, the argument by analogy from what one expects to feel oneself in similar circumstances to what the other certainly seems to be feeling is as much of a ‘‘proof ’’ as anyone (other than a philosopher or a behavorist) would seem to require in such situations. But then, we are often surprised when we do actually find ourselves in similar circumstances. (‘‘It didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would.’’) That hardly undermines the obviousness of the form of the analogy. It would be a rare (and memorable) occasion on which an expected pain turns out to be a pleasure or (unfortunately not so rare) vice versa. Pain behavior usually indicates pain, however (given the anatomy and physiology of a creature) it is expressed. Wriggling and writhing are common pain behaviors throughout the animal kingdom. Even grimacing can be recognized in a surprising variety of mammalian species. Birds (because of their beaks) cannot grimace, but most people (and many animals) easily recognize their stress and pain behavior. Skeptics might argue that the quarter-squashed worm cannot be known by us to feel pain because its anatomy and physiology are so very different from ours. But it seems to me to be downright dense to deny that such analogous behavior as frenzied wriggling in physical circumstances that for us would surely be very painful signifies pain. Would the skeptic be satisfied if the worm could scream? Or perhaps if it could describe its pain? ( If it were that sophisticated, how would we know whether the worm was ‘‘faking’’ it?) Compassion has its limits, but those limits are usually drawn by the understanding. There is charm if not always rigor in that understanding of the world archaically known as animism, the idea that everything has a ‘‘soul,’’ however minimal. It is an idea that has long been part of many cultures and philosophies around the world, not all of them ‘‘primitive.’’ It has been advanced by at least one sophisticated contemporary analytic philosopher, [ 64] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

David Chalmers.32 But as with any number of enduring and charming cosmological ideas, this one should be taken with a large measure of salt and then treated as a regulatory rather than a substantive or constitutive idea. In plain English, the benefit of the doubt, where there is reasonable doubt, should be given to the being or creature who seems to be suffering or in pain. I do not find it objectionable when a romantic environmentalist decries the suffering of a desecrated rain forest or a ransacked mountain, or for that matter, of the Earth as such, although I would not defend it as metaphysics. The upsetting thing is, of course, that as we become more receptive to suffering in the world, the more of it we find. But that is no reason to reject compassion, and all the more reason to encourage it and act on it.

Interlude: Nietzsche’s Attack on Mitleid Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.—Nietzsche (Human All-Too-Human) Whether it be God’s pity or man’s—pity offends the sense of shame. To be unwilling to help can be nobler than that virtue which jumps to help. —Nietzsche (Zarathustra IV [‘‘The Ugliest Man’’])

Even a qualified praise of compassion and pity must confront the devastating attack on all such emotions by Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that pity was nothing but a false front for an insecure sense of superiority, a form of contempt rather than care and consideration. It is worth noting that the same word, the German word Mitleid, can be translated as either ‘‘compassion’’ or ‘‘pity,’’ but it is usually translated as the first in Schopenhauer, who gives it high praise, and the second way in Nietzsche, who excoriates it. In one sense, it is true that almost every case of Mitleid involves a sense of superiority by virtue of the fact that the person suffering has an unwanted affliction that the person feeling compassion does not have. I am ‘‘superior’’ to the beggar to whom I give money if only because I have money and he does not. So, too, I am ‘‘superior’’ to (in this case, just ‘‘luckier’’ than) my friend because he had the heart attack and I did not. But it is clear that this limited sense of superiority—the superiority of good fortune by virtue of which one person suffers a tragedy that the other does not—is not enough to make the harsh case that Nietzsche wants to prosecute. In the second case, in particular, it is not because I am a superior person that my friend had the heart attack and I did not. It may be true that I take better care of myself than he does, but the very opposite could also be true. Even in the first case, one cannot simply argue that I am superior to the beggar because I have money and he does not: he may very likely be a hardworking family man caught in hard times while Care and Compassion [ 65]

I am a prodigal (even if generous) heir. In an instance of pure chance—you are injured in the leg by the terrorist’s stray bullet rather than I—it is quite clear that the built-in sense of superiority here does not take us any distance at all; it means only that you are suffering and I am not. And it certainly does not follow from this that I am feeling compassionate in order to feel superior. Quite the contrary: in all three cases I will mostly likely feel embarrassed (if not more) about my comparative well-being. And yet, we can all think of those cases in which a grand display of compassion is self-serving and apparently designed precisely to demonstrate as well as to feel one’s own superiority. One manufactures pity as a means to appear and feel oneself to be not only a good person but a person with great merit. One is virtuous for feeling this grand emotion and recognizing the plight of this poor unfortunate, and one is virtuous because one is not the sort of person who is prone to such misfortune. One might note that this sometimes obnoxious but often quite ordinary display of supposedly selfless emotion is the professional liability of liberals, for whom the self-aggrandizement of pity is always a temptation. Indeed, one can (or should) easily understand the conservative criticism and the accompanying accusations of hypocrisy when ‘‘limousine liberals’’ and well-heeled liberal professors build careers out of compassion but make no personal sacrifices whatever. It becomes even worse when they accuse those who resist paying for their plans (usually the middle and working classes) of selfishness and lack of public-spiritedness. But, as always, one must be cautious about taking such examples as illustrative instead of cautionary, and what they show about pity and compassion is not necessarily the self-serving nature of these sentiments. One might argue, for example, that if compassion were to require the purity of selfless motivation, there would indeed be few instances of it. But, first, examples of ‘‘pure’’ motivation of any kind (selfish as well as selfless) are hard if not impossible to come by, and even harder or more impossible to prove. Second, there is no good reason to deny compassion when it is mixed with (though not entirely composed of ) ulterior motives, just as we do not (or should not) deny that one person loves another when the relationship also offers obvious material advantages (e.g., wealth, access to power). One might apply a kind of counterfactual test: ‘‘If those other motives were not satisfied, would you still feel compassion?’’ (‘‘If those other motives were not satisfied, would you still feel love?’’) But a negative answer to that question might only indicate that the weight of compassion by itself is not sufficient to counterbalance the disadvantages that otherwise present themselves. It does not prove the lack of compassion (or love). As so often, our demand for absolutes blinds us to the fact that these passions—like all human passions— are usually cast in roles and parts, and have to share the psychological stage with a chorus of other emotions, moods, and motivations. [ 66] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

In Daybreak, Nietzsche tells us that pity is ‘‘benevolent revenge.’’33 That summarizes the main thrust of his attack. Like love, pity is first of all a strategy. It is not selfless but selfish. It feigns concern but in fact gloats. It is a strategy for self-righteousness, first of all the self-righteousness of ‘‘bad things happen to them, not to me,’’ and second, the feeling of self-righteousness because one recognizes in oneself the virtuous sentiment of compassion. Thus Nietzsche insists that the feeling of pity is steeped in a strategy of emotional manipulation and thus is guilty of self-deception as well. And, to be sure, sometimes this is so. But all too often, Nietzsche’s attack on pity is just part of his general attack on weakness, and the grounds are predominantly aesthetic. For instance, ‘‘Today that is called virtue itself among the little people—pity. They have no respect for great misfortune, for great ugliness, for great failure.’’34 The phrase ‘‘the little people’’ betrays Nietzsche’s misanthropy here, albeit in the name of ‘‘greatness.’’ His aesthetic presumption harks back to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and his view that what made the Greeks ‘‘so beautiful’’ was their capacity for great suffering. Thus Nietzsche contrasts pity regarding the relatively small misfortunes in life (or what we might call ‘‘tragedies’’) to the unspeakable and overwhelming numbness of real tragedy, the sort of thing depicted by the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles. But making such a distinction should not in itself lead to the dismissal of nonheroic tragedies or to lack of compassion for those who suffer them as symptomatic of weakness. Pity may not be a grand passion, but it does not follow that it is petty or degrading. What lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s inconsistent attacks on Mitleid, I think, is his own mixture of contempt and helplessness in the face of both suffering and compassion. The philosopher, who is said to have collapsed while embracing a dumb animal to keep it from being beaten, was deeply troubled by suffering in the world. Thus there is an ad hominem explanation of Nietzsche’s harsh rejection of pity. His pronouncements come from a man (and before that a boy) who was personally overwhelmed with the cruelty of the world and with the tragedies that befall human beings. As a child, he had to cope (at the age of four) with the death of his father. And he was, by virtually all accounts (including his own), a hypersensitive, compassionate soul, making the cruelty and tragedy he witnessed and read about all the more intolerable. But unlike those he criticizes—Christians in general, for example—Nietzsche refused to turn away from or deny the awfulness of the world. Nor was he willing to give in to pessimism, like his mentor Schopenhauer, and embrace the conclusion that ‘‘life is no good.’’ Thus a kind of dual optic defines Nietzsche’s philosophy from his earliest writings on: the recognition of the world’s awfulness, on the one hand, and the affirmation of life, on the other. It is with this in mind that Nietzsche keeps hammering at us not to have pity Care and Compassion [ 67]

(especially on ourselves!) and to embrace what he calls amor fati, the recognition that success in life is always (at least in part) an accident, a gift, the product of contingencies over which one has no conceivable control—and so, too, are tragedies. But I think that the attack on pity is not an essential aspect of that campaign, and reflects far more personal denial than any persistent philosophical argument about fate and suffering. In all of Nietzsche’s arguments, pity is not merely a ‘‘feeling’’ or an ‘‘expression’’ or even a ‘‘reaction’’ so much as it is a strategy. Both on the part of the supposedly compassionate and on the part of the pitied, pity is (or can be) manipulative, contemptuous, and self-justifying. Note that the contempt and self-justification are not confined to the person who has pity. The pitied are in a position to feel ‘‘upward contempt,’’ and thus they have ideological justification in confronting their benefactors.35 So in both positions, what pretends to be a concern for human well-being turns out instead to be a contest of wills, a struggle for psychological power and advantage. It is this hidden contest, I think, that so deeply and personally offended Nietzsche. It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s attack on pity is really an attempt at the ‘‘self-containment’’ and invulnerability to the misfortunes of life (on one’s own part and for others) defended by the Stoics.36 This ties together some important threads from Nietzsche’s philological inheritance, but it underestimates the vehemence of his defensiveness. Nietzsche sees pity as a strategic way of dealing with the world, as opposed to the ‘‘natural’’ and benign sentiment that other philosophers see it to be. And, sometimes, it is just this. But Nietzsche’s overall condemnation of Mitleid is not warranted. It would be callous to accept his perspective as the whole story about pity, but it would be foolish as well to dismiss it as nothing but ‘‘heartless.’’ What he argues, to excess, is the folly of overidealizing respectable and important human sentiments. As Smith and Hume rightly argued, the moral sentiments lie at the very heart of ethics, but it will not do to oversentimentalize them.

Sympathy and Empathy Reconsidered As we have seen, Smith and Hume celebrate sympathy as a ‘‘natural’’ emotion or sentiment and as the basis for all morality, although their notion of ‘‘sympathy’’ is both ambiguous and, perhaps, overambitious. But contemporary philosophy and psychology have both clarified and confirmed much of what they had to say, and it is worth reviewing some of that research in their honor. To begin with, however, there is a general problem in Smith and Hume that haunts empiricist accounts of emotion from Locke to (famously) William [ 68] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

James. It is the idea that an emotion is some sort of ‘‘inner’’ perception, the perception of something going on in the mind (and, in James, especially, the body). Hume’s elaborate theory of the passions in the Treatise makes this quite clear, as does John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding before him. Hume defines a passion as an ‘‘impression’’ (a ‘‘secondary’’ or ‘‘reflective’’ sensation), which trips him up enormously when he goes about trying to analyze particular passions. In his treatment of pride, for instance, he founders between the required empiricist analysis of the emotion as a pleasant sensation and the much more illuminating idea that pride, like all emotions, is intentional. It is about the world, not ( just) about the body or the mind. In the Treatise Hume tries to reconcile his empiricist interpretation of pride with intentionality by suggesting a ‘‘monstrous heap of ideas’’—about the self and so forth—but the result is ( by his own admission) an incoherent mess. Neither Smith nor Hume subjects sympathy to an extensive analysis, but it is clear that the empiricist framework looms in the background and, I would argue, no emotion or sentiment—including especially sympathy—is intelligible in its terms. Sympathy is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant feeling. Sympathy is about the other person, a role that no sensation can play.37 Correcting this mistake (no longer much of an issue since behaviorism ridiculed and wiped out the entire vocabulary of the ‘‘inner’’), we can simply say, as Smith and Hume could not, that sympathy is about other people and their emotions. But I also suggest that Smith has an ambiguous understanding of sympathy, one that he needs for the sentiment to do all of the work he wants it to do for him. Thus I suggested that Smith’s sense of ‘‘sympathy’’ is importantly ambiguous between sympathy and empathy, between being upset about or having kindly feelings toward a fellow creature (usually in pain) and in some sense actually ‘‘sharing’’ the suffering or the emotions of others. Thus sympathy can mean either feeling sorry for someone or feeling with them, and these are not the same. (Again, I want to leave room for sympathizing with the ‘‘positive’’ emotions of others but I will focus—as is usual—on sympathizing with suffering.) The word ‘‘empathy’’ is more recent in origin and so was not available to the Scottish moral sentiment theorists, but the contemporary distinction between sympathy and empathy is of considerable importance and will be a great help to us in our interpretation. It can be argued—I suggested this above—that empathy (Smith’s own favorite use of ‘‘sympathy’’) is not as such an emotion. Rather, it refers to the sharing of emotion (any emotion). Sympathy, by contrast, is an emotion, a quite particular though rather suffuse and contextually defined emotion. It is therefore sympathy that does the motivational work which Smith requires, but that in turn requires empathy, the capacity to ‘‘read’’ and to some extent share other people’s emotions. Thus he needs to incorporate both sympathy and empathy into his account of ‘‘sympathy,’’ the former to account for Care and Compassion [ 69]

motivation and the latter to account for ‘‘fellow feeling.’’ Smith is right, I think, to suggest that sympathy (as empathy) is the foundation of our being human, but he is also right that it is particularly in sympathy (as sympathy for) that this human capacity is played out in ethics. While the word ‘‘empathy’’ is recent in origin, there are antecedents (for instance, the German Verstehen, [emotional] ‘‘understanding’’) that clearly anticipate some of its meaning. Empathy, in contemporary psychology, is defined as ‘‘an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, and that is identical or very similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel.’’38 Nancy Eisenberg, in the authoritative Handbook of Emotions, gives as an example: ‘‘If a woman sees or hears about a person who is sad and feels sad in response she is experiencing empathy.’’39 She traces the term back to the early twentieth century and notes that early use of the term was heavily cognitive and involved imaginatively ‘‘taking the role of the other,’’ very much like the German concept of Verstehen. Indeed, Eisenberg emphasizes the ‘‘affective’’ aspect of empathy and notes that it need not involve thinking at all. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish empathy from just being upset or ‘‘personally distressed,’’ and it minimally requires the ‘‘cognitive’’ separation of self and other. Infants, accordingly, cannot feel empathy although they can get very upset when their mothers are upset. Getting upset because someone else is, may be wholly self-involved and aversive (for instance, getting uncomfortable when someone regales you with their tale of woe and wanting to leave the room). This is not empathy. Nor is empathy ‘‘picking up’’ others’ emotion by way of what psychologists now call ‘‘emotional contagion.’’ Thus, it is not just affective. Empathy is cognitive, and in that regard very much a kind of ‘‘understanding.’’ There is much to say about this distinction between the affective and the cognitive. Suffice it to say here that I find the distinction overdone. Thus the idea that empathy (and sympathy) are ‘‘affective responses’’ is in no way incompatible with their also being cognitive, involving concepts and ways of construing the world.40 But this does not mean that empathy (or sympathy) needs to involve thinking or imagining oneself ‘‘in the other person’s shoes.’’ Understanding may be minimal and merely tacit, not articulate. And it need not involve projection at all. There is a good distinction to be made following Nel Noddings. In writing about what she calls ‘‘the one-caring,’’ she notes: We might want to call this relationship ‘‘empathy,’’ but we should think about what we mean by this term. The Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as ‘‘The power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of contemplation.’’ This is, perhaps, a peculiarly rational, western, masculine way of looking at ‘‘feeling with.’’41 [ 70] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Much as there is to disagree with in both the Oxford English Dictionary definition and Noddings’s rather global dismissal of it, we should take very seriously her juxtaposition of being receptive to the feelings of others as opposed to projection and contemplation (‘‘putting myself in the other’s shoes’’). Empathy is not always needing to ask, ‘‘How would I feel in such a situation?’’ Thus I would argue that it is a mistake to think that empathy is just one kind of emotional sharing rather than several (or many). It ranges in cognitive sophistication from the mere fellow feeling of ‘‘emotional contagion’’— simply ‘‘picking up’’ another person’s distress (or perhaps joy) by virtue of mere proximity—to the ‘‘higher cognitive’’ sharing of emotion through imaginatively and quite self-consciously ‘‘putting oneself in the other’s place.’’ At the ‘‘low’’ end of the range, ‘‘emotional contagion’’ involves only minimal intentionality, some vague sense of shared discomfort or merriment, and it is by no means necessary or even likely that the subject of such an emotion would be able to say clearly what it is ‘‘about,’’ much less what it portends or what it means. The question ‘‘Why are you feeling this?’’ gets only a causal answer—for instance, ‘‘because I’m with her, and she’s upset.’’ It is not necessarily about anything in particular. Considerably more sophisticated is Nel Noddings’s ‘‘receptivity.’’ Intentionality may still be minimal, but whereas ‘‘emotional contagion’’ happens to one by virtue of mere proximity, one must ‘‘open oneself up’’ to be receptive, one ‘‘lets it happen’’ (often hidden behind the observation that such emotional empathy is ‘‘spontaneous’’). This involves a decision of sorts (although the crucial decision may have been made many years ago—for instance, to have a child or to foster a friendship). More cognitively complex are those experiences of empathy which involve the imagination. (I think Noddings is right not to invoke any sophisticated act of imagination in her account of receptivity.) But imagination takes many forms. There is that basal form of imagination which is basic to all perception, which requires no effort or self-consciousness but is activated automatically as part of our awareness of the world. So, too, one might argue that there is some basal form of imagination which is basic to our awareness of other people, which also requires no effort or self-consciousness. But whether or not this is so, the more obvious employment of the imagination is in the ‘‘comprehension’’ that Adam Smith refers to, which does require some effort, some attempt ‘‘to imagine’’ a situation or perspective not one’s own at the moment. But, again, the range of cognitive sophistication is considerable. I sit watching the James Bond movie Goldfinger in a theater. The bad guy’s bodyguard grasps Bond in a death grip, and Bond responds by ( how to put this politely?) kicking him in the groin. There is a collective ‘‘ungh!’’ from the men in the audience. ( There is no such response correlative to any of the other punching, gouging, slamming, etc.) I take it that Care and Compassion [ 71]

this is a straightforward if crude example of imaginative empathy. To say the obvious, no one in the audience suffered at that moment from an actual pain in the groin, and yet the response (including the predicable self-protective gesture) was quite specific, as was the stimulus (the bodyguard’s presumed pain). There is nothing vague or complex about the intentionality here. Moving up in gentility, as well as in cognitive sophistication, I remember sitting through any number of romantic films in which I ‘‘felt for’’ the hero or the heroine. I find myself quite freely ‘‘identifying with’’ the character as I watch him or her on the screen.42 But it is worth noting the quite dramatic difference between empathy with characters on the screen and empathy with characters in novels (and, of course, in nonfiction biographies and such). It is often said that part of the effort of reading is ‘‘filling in’’ the details, fleshing out the skeleton provided by the verbal descriptions through use of the imagination, adding colors (whether or not they are described in the book) and all sorts of details. What is less often noted is the extent to which one can ‘‘identify’’ with the characters in a novel or biography by adding one’s own details, including one’s own emotional reactions (again, whether or not they are so described in the book). At the top of the empathic range (which is in no way to praise it as somehow ‘‘better’’) is the conscientious effort to ‘‘put oneself in the other’s shoes’’ by conscientiously imagining the particular circumstances in which the other person finds himself or herself. This may require actual research— for instances, re-creating the historical circumstances in which a character or an individual lived. It may require extravagant imaginative effort. I try to imagine, for instance, Joan of Arc’s feelings as she first approached Robert de Baudricourt to offer her services to Charles VII. I am not a young woman (I am no longer young); I am not religious (I have never, to my knowledge, been spoken to by God or any other ethereal spirit); and I do not live in the Middle Ages (and know much less about it than I do other periods of Western history). And yet, with considerable effort, I can empathize with young Joan’s feelings by comparing them, with considerable trepidation, to my own experiences (of youthful enthusiasm, of self-righteousness, of intimidation by authorities, of aggressive ambition). Or, closer to home, I just finished writing a book about Nietzsche, one of my favorite philosophers. One of the challenges of the book (and of understanding Nietzsche) was to ‘‘get inside his head,’’ to understand why he said many of the rude and blasphemous things he said. Part of the explanation, I concluded, was his personal resentment against his Christian upbringing and against his lonely and sickly life. Another part was the mental condition that we today would call bipolar syndrome. Well, I am also a philosopher (as opposed to an illiterate medieval girl saint). I know something of the nineteenth century, and I’ve visited the sites where Nietzsche [ 72] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

often stayed. I’ve been lonely and occasionally sickly myself. I’ve suffered mild depressions and periods of great enthusiasm. I’ve found more than enough in my life to be resentful about (although, like Nietzsche, I despise my own resentment, giving rise to a tangle of conflicting emotions). And so, with effort, I understand Nietzsche. I empathize with him. But all of this takes work: making the links, getting past my own reactions of frustration or exasperation with Nietzsche’s texts and attitudes. It is empathy, to be sure, but it is anything but ‘‘spontaneous.’’ Sympathy, in contrast to empathy, is defined by Nancy Eisenberg as ‘‘an affective response that consists of feeling sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy other (rather than the same emotion as the other person).’’43 By this definition, it is clear that what Smith means by ‘‘sympathy’’ is not sympathy but empathy. Philosophically, sympathy is a much less interesting emotion than empathy. One might question whether empathy is an emotion rather than a capacity to have any number of emotions depending on the emotions of others, but sympathy is a straightforward emotion. It is an emotion dependent on the emotions of others, to be sure, but it is only a response to them, not in any sense an imitation or reproduction of them. Indeed, one might sympathize with another person and get his or her emotional situation completely wrong. Empathy, by contrast, seems to require that one does indeed (in some sense) replicate the emotions of the other person. Sympathy is an emotion, argues Peter Goldie, because it characteristically involves a distinctive emotional experience as well as characteristic emotional expression (though this can usually be read as such only in context), and it tends to motivate action (namely, helping or at least nurturing behavior).44 Because he is concerned with showing that sympathy is a ‘‘basic emotion,’’ Goldie worries at length about its status as an ‘‘affect program,’’ the current scientific conception of basic emotion.45 His attention to sympathy’s facial expression is particularly significant, since Paul Ekman and others who have defined the notion of a ‘‘basic emotion’’ have been particularly attentive to the universality of certain facial expressions of emotion as demonstrative of hardwired neurological programming. The problem that Goldie faces, in trying to show that sympathy is a basic emotion, is that affect program theorists like Ekman tend to eschew context in their accounts (facial expressions are supposed to be invariable, irrespective of context).46 But expressions of sympathy are unintelligible with this restriction, indiscernible from mere sadness or distress. But to this Goldie responds by amending Ekman’s restrictive criteria rather than giving up on showing that sympathy is a basic emotion. Thus Goldie, too, is trying to stress the ‘‘naturalness’’ of sympathy, with a very contemporary argument. Here ‘‘natural’’ means inborn and neurological, a product of evolution rather than a cultural convention or the result of learning. But it also means ‘‘precognitive,’’ in the current Care and Compassion [ 73]

lexicon. Thus it is worth noting that Goldie sharply distinguishes his view from Hume’s view of sympathy (which he calls ‘‘compassion’’ in the published version of his essay), because he takes Hume to be emphasizing ‘‘imaginative identification’’ rather than sympathy in this more primitive sense. I take the idea that sympathy is a ‘‘natural’’ sentiment to be of enormous importance in understanding our emotional lives, this ‘‘hardwired’’ ability to respond to the emotions of others without the intermediary of a rich empathic imagination. Our emotional lives are largely imitative ( learned in what Ronald de Sousa characterizes as ‘‘paradigm scenarios’’).47 We learn about the emotions of others long before we are capable of thinking ourselves into their shoes. We learn from them when an emotion is appropriate. We learn from them when one ought to (and ought not to) have an emotion. We learn from them what it’s like to have an emotion. The Golden Rule is a powerful and arguably universal moral guideline, but following such a rule is by no means the basis of morality. Both sympathy and empathy are far more basic than the sophisticated thought process ‘‘How would I like it if . . .?’’ or ‘‘What would that be like if . . .?’’ To be sure, we do think that way, and we can thus come to a very sophisticated understanding of another’s feelings. But before we can understand ‘‘why?’’ we have to learn to recognize what emotion the other is having, and that the other is having an emotion. First and foremost, perhaps, we have to learn that the other is ‘‘upset,’’ and this, I suggest, is not something that one can learn by reasoning. (Autistic people do this, perhaps, but that is all the more reason to see reasoning as something added to sympathy and not essential to it.) We do not have just our own interests. We share interests and we are interested in other people and their well-being. Empathy is neither altruistic nor self-interested. Rather, it demonstrates the inadequacy of overindividualizing human nature. We are both social and emotional creatures for whom mutual understanding—that is, the mutual understanding of one another’s emotions—is essential. Without that understanding, it is not just as if each of us would be a closed emotional system, rich within ourselves but oblivious to the needs and interests of others. We would be thoroughly autistic, empty, devoid of even the most basic emotions, subject to fits and frustration but none of the drama and complexity that come with living in a shared emotional world.

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Four On Grief and Gratitude Illnesses are characterized by the discomfort and the disturbance of function that they produce. Grief may not produce physical pain but it is very unpleasant and it usually disturbs function. Thus a newly bereaved person is often treated by society in much the same way as a sick person. On the whole, grief resembles a physical injury more closely than any other type of illness. The loss may be spoken of as a ‘‘blow.’’ As in the case of physical injury the ‘‘wound’’ gradually heals, or it usually does. —Colin Murray Parkes (‘‘The Cost of Commitment,’’ in his Bereavement) ‘‘Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It’s a good feeling.’’ ‘‘In what f**king way?’’ he said harshly. ‘‘Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost.’’ —Philip K. Dick, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said So after every case, you have to go up to somebody and say ‘‘Thank you’’? What a f**king nightmare.—Joe Pesci (My Cousin Vinnie)

This chapter concerns two much-neglected emotions, grief and gratitude. They are neglected not because they are unimportant but because, perhaps, they are so unavoidable in life. They force themselves upon us: grief when we suffer a serious loss, gratitude when we gain an undeserved or unexpected benefit. It is easy enough to see why we should think of grief as a ‘‘negative’’ and undesirable emotion. Its very presence means that we have suffered (which, I will argue, is not to be confused with the claim that we have suffered from grief ). But grief, I want to argue, is not just a form of suffering, nor merely a response to a devastating loss. Grief is a moral emotion, in ways that I will try to spell out here. It is for this reason that grief is not only expected, as the appropriate reaction to the loss of a loved one, but also in a strong sense is obligatory, and much more. Other cultures, it would seem, are much more explicit about this. Grief is expressed communally in mourning

and is required of all members of the community. The loss—and therefore the grief—is both shared and treated as an inevitable part of life and a loss to the entire community, not just the immediate family. The neglect of gratitude is interesting in a somewhat different way. Unlike grief, it involves a gain, a benefit. And yet, many people seem to think of gratitude as a ‘‘negative’’ emotion, or rather as an embarrassing or even a humiliating emotion. Why should we be loath to feel indebtedness to someone who is our benefactor and has helped us in some way? But that way of describing the emotion is already a clue. We (in this society) do not like to think of ourselves as indebted (unless, of course, we use debt as a form of financial or emotional leverage). We would rather see our good fortune as all our own doing (whereas the losses and sufferings, of course, are not our fault). Thus we tend to neglect gratitude, which would or should seem to most people to lie at the very heart of ethics. It is more basic, perhaps, than even duty and obligation, although, like grief, it carries with it its own sense of appropriate expectation and something very much like obligation. It, too, is a moral emotion, for it involves an admission of our vulnerability and our dependence on other people, and a culture that resists or refuses to recognize this is a culture that will most likely feel uncomfortable with gratitude.

On Grief Queen. Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. ... King. ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father, But you must know that your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow. But to persevere In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled.—Hamlet, act I, scene ii [ 76] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

‘‘Unmanly grief ’’—that says it all. Grief is a refusal to accept the inevitable, an ‘‘impious stubbornness.’’ To be sure, Claudius acknowledges the propriety of a brief bit of grieving, ‘‘obsequious sorrow . . . ,’’ but he is quick to add that real men don’t grieve for long (and in this age of gender equality, real women don’t either). So how should we understand this ‘‘simple and unschooled’’ emotion, charged with being out of touch with reality? Does it show ‘‘a will most incorrect to heaven,’’ or does it indicate something really manly (as well as womanly), the capacity to love? There are two limitations to this chapter that I would like to point out from the outset. The first is that it is for the most part, monocultural, because my focus has been the peculiarity of grief in American culture. But what if in the United States, as in New Zealand Maori culture, a funeral were to last three or more days rather than merely an hour, and if it were tightly communal and the grief were really shared, not merely sympathized with? What if it were not considered an interruption of a life but rather the continuation of the rhythm of life? The logic of grief is entangled with the social structure of mourning, and the peculiarity of grief as I will describe it is that the mourning is minimal. The other limitation is that I will be talking about only one paradigm of grief, that which follows the more or less sudden loss of a loved one. There are others: the woman who mourns for the children she never had (or conceived), the lost soul who grieves for the life he might have had, the (definitively) abandoned lover who grieves for his beloved who is now happily married and living in Seattle, the lingering illness that allows grievingin-process over the final months or years of a loved one’s life, or the death of a 104-year-old woman whose end has been expected for some time. But I will ignore such examples in this chapter. Grief would seem to be a paradigm of emotion, and it is often listed (typically as sadness) as one of the ‘‘basic’’ emotions.1 So long as we form attachments, we are vulnerable to loss. Grief would seem to be unavoidable in the human condition, no matter how resolute our understanding of mortality, and so it would seem to invite, if not demand, philosophical understanding. But because grief is such a painful emotion to experience, and because of the tint of the ‘‘unmanly,’’ talking about it tends to be melodramatic, sentimental, and painful, prompting feelings or memories of our own grief. Or the discussion gets clinical, cold, and out of touch with the emotion altogether. There is little on the topic in the analytic philosophy literature other than a single essay by Donald Gustafson and the personal anecdote that sets the stage for Martha Nussbaum’s gigantic tome on emotion, Upheavals of Thought.2 There is a great deal, of course, on the process of grieving in the psychoanalytic literature and in the ‘‘Continental’’ tradition, although the focus is often on the more dramatic emotions or moods of despair, angst, and ennui (e.g., in Heidegger’s Being and Time) and on the more On Grief and Gratitude [ 77]

ordinary emotion of sadness (e.g., in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness).3 This can be easily explained: the often morbid preoccupations that dominate much of modern European philosophy and Freud’s legacy make an interest in the nature and psychological causes of grief and kindred emotions all but unavoidable. Anglo-American philosophy, by contrast, avoids subjects that are sentimental, ‘‘unmanly,’’ and not obviously conducive to logical analysis. But grief is much more than mere sentimentality; it is essential to sensitivity, and its resistance to logical analysis in the usual sense has much to do with the broad contours of its emotional reach. Let’s begin with this: a person who does not grieve or does not grieve sufficiently at the death of a loved one is subject to the most severe moral censure. His or her character is thought to be deficient if not depraved. Consider Camus’s character Meursault, in The Stranger, who is condemned as ‘‘inhuman’’ because he fails to grieve for his dead mother at her funeral. If grief were simply a negative reaction to a loss, or even a physical condition that (it has often been pointed out) fits the definition of a mental disorder, a medical illness, this would be incomprehensible.4 A person who did not grieve would be considered fortunate, like an athlete who has a high threshold of pain, or a risk taker who remains unafraid in circumstances that would scare the wits out of most normal people. But grief is not merely ‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘natural,’’ nor is it only customary or ‘‘appropriate.’’ It is morally obligatory, whether or not, as an ‘‘inclination,’’ it would pass the test for a ‘‘duty’’ in the Kantian scheme of things. Some feelings are obligatory, and this is because they are woven deeply into the fabric of our moral lives. But this moral context is easily lost sight of or denied. The inclusion of sadness as a ‘‘basic emotion’’ in recent psychology—that is, an emotion whose structure is primarily physiological rather than ‘‘cognitive’’—offers one reason why philosophers and psychologists might not think the emotion worthy of analysis. William James, at the turn of the twentieth century, argued for the primarily physiological nature of emotions, resulting in sensations caused directly by the physiological upset. And today, neurologist Antonio Damasio writes similarly of emotions as ‘‘the feeling of what happens,’’ but of what happens in the brain and not (as in James) in the body more generally. Yet if emotions in general and grief in particular are nothing but primitive physiological reactions and their accompanying sensations, then there would be little by way of analysis to be done. We might talk about emotions and grief as we discuss physical pain and illness, but the only point of any ethical significance is the fact that we do not like pain or grief. There is no significance (except, perhaps, as a symptom) of the sensations themselves. One of the main aims of Donald Gustafson’s essay, by contrast, is to prove that grief is ‘‘cognitively penetrable’’ and understandable in terms of the ‘‘beliefs and goals of its host.’’5 I think that there is good reason to doubt [ 78] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

that grief can be so understood in terms of beliefs and goals, but this is not to gainsay Gustafson’s important insistence that it is cognitively penetrable and to some extent available not only to logical but also to moral analysis. It is, in other words, much more than a spontaneous physiological reaction to loss. But grief is much more than a ‘‘cognitive’’ response, if by this we mean only the recognition of a serious loss. For many years, I labored under this misconception of grief. Much of what I have to say here, accordingly, was prompted and unexpectedly anticipated by my old friend and colleague Janet McCracken in her superb article ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly: Reflections on the Special Character of Grief,’’ which I had the pleasure and benefit of reading only years after the initial drafts of this chapter had been sitting on a shelf, waiting for that bolt of insight which would animate the still lifeless, sewn-together, merely cognitive parts.6 Even if one interprets ‘‘cognition’’ as evaluative, as I did, and includes what psychologists call ‘‘appraisal’’ under its auspices, grief is still much more than just cognitive. Janet’s point was reinforced by a number of seminar papers from my students. ( Worth special mention are those of Beth Snyder, Cheryl Farmer, and Tija Carey.) Together, they moved me from a still too cold conceptual analysis to much more sympathetic understanding of the sentimentality of grief. For grief is the emotion, much more than Heidegger’s celebrated angst, that puts us in touch with our mortality.7 It also puts us in closer touch with love.

The Phenomenology of Grief I wept uncontrollably, while the nurses brought me glasses of water. An hour later I was on my way to the hotel, carrying her red overnight bag, with her clothes and the books I had given her to read in the hospital—strange relics that seemed to me not to belong to this world any more, as if they should have vanished with her life.—Martha Nussbaum (Upheaveals of Thought) Maman died today, or was it yesterday?—Meursault (Albert Camus, The Stranger)

I once argued that grief thus might be viewed as a kind of degenerate emotion, a breakdown of emotion rather than an emotion itself.8 So, too, Gustafson argued that emotions are typically ‘‘rationally assessable’’ and produce ‘‘motives, goals, immediate intentions and, then, actions,’’ which poses a problem for grief, for it seems to include a straightforwardly irrational desire (wanting the deceased to come back to life) and therefore produces no intelligible goal or intention, and no action.9 Grief, unlike most emotions, seemed to entail no actions, but rather withdrawal and an inability to do much of anything at all. Thus I thought of grief as a loss of intimacy On Grief and Gratitude [ 79]

and the rupture of an intense emotional dependency; so perhaps the phenomenology of grief would be better understood not as an emotional outlook but as the sudden destruction of an emotional outlook, a degenerate emotion, a breakdown. But I have come to think that this underestimates the value and significance of grief, and provides an inadequate and unimaginative analysis of both the emotion and the process of grieving. It is obvious that grief is suffering brought about by the recognition of a loss. Grief is not just a feeling or a Jamesian sensation caused by neurological or physiological changes in the body (although, to be sure, there always are such changes) but an engagement with the world, the recognition of a real loss in one’s world; and it consists, accordingly, of perspectives and ideas (that is, thoughts, perceptions, and memories). The ‘‘sinking feeling’’ that was described in such detail by the early Stoics is, to be sure, a typical part of the emotion, but to restrict the phenomenology of grief to bodily feelings is to miss the emotion almost entirely. Grief is dominated by the idea that someone, the beloved, is no longer there. He or she is missing. Grief is noticing, painfully, that he or she is not there. Such perceptions of absence are important, if neglected, in philosophy, as Sartre so precisely insists in his ‘‘Pierre is not in the cafe´’’ discussion of ‘‘nothingness’’ (as a negatite´ ) in Being and Nothingness.10 An absence can be more poignant, more noticeable, more obsessive, than any presence. Thus the phenomenology of grief is almost inconceivable without a phenomenology of memory, because, to say the obvious, grief refers the present to the past, the past remembered. One remembers, perhaps obsessively, times together with the dear departed. Indeed, one of the paradoxical pains associated with grief is the realization that one cannot remember as much as one would like to, or that one’s memory of the lost one is diminishing with time. This is both frustrating and, to some extent, itself a cause for further grief and guilt. Thus what is an essential part of the ‘‘recovery’’ from grief is also an aspect of the suffering of grief. There is some confusion about what the suffering of grief consists in. To be sure, we suffer when we grieve, but it does not follow that we suffer from grief. What we suffer from is the loss, what the grief is about. That grief is a painful and undesirable emotion is obvious, but then it is not as if the feelings of grief are themselves painful. ( They are more often described as ‘‘a great emptiness.’’) Thus we should be careful about thinking of grief as a ‘‘negative’’ emotion. It occurs in our lives in unwanted circumstances, and its very presence means that we have suffered a serious loss. But the value of an emotion is not measured only by the circumstances that prompt it, and it might just be that grief is the most desirable, and in that sense ‘‘positive,’’ emotion in a tragic situation. Fear, for instance, is an emotion that similarly is evoked in negative (dangerous) circumstances, but it may nevertheless be the most functional and valuable emotion in those circumstances. Being [ 80] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

‘‘fearless’’ is more likely to increase rather than diminish the amount of real pain in our lives. And I will argue that grief is ‘‘positive’’ in another, more straightforward sense as well, a sense in which it is a continuation rather than a cessation of love. Seneca famously counseled a woman in grief and applied the usual Stoic ‘‘cognitive–emotive therapy’’ to her case, convincing her that she should not grieve—noting that she was neglecting her grandchildren, and other such practical advice. (Even the Stoics did not think that grief could be ‘‘cured’’ from the outset. Chrysippus recommended waiting a year, and Seneca’s advice above began almost three years after the death of her friend.) But among the many arguments Seneca advanced was the familiar one that, after all, the bereaved had not in fact seen or spent time with the lost friend in some considerable amount of time, and therefore the grief was either hypocritical and melodramatic or at any rate unwarranted. His accusation is insensitive, to say the least (a common charge against the Stoics). Part of the grieving process (and the phenomenology of the grieving process) is that it consists in large part of regret—namely, the regret that one did not spend as much time, did not delve as deeply as one might have, did not get to know the departed as well or as intimately as one might have (even in the case of a parent, a longtime spouse, or a lover). However, the regret does not undermine or compromise the grief, but reinforces and further empowers it. Yet, again, regret has entirely to do with the past, and it supplements memory with imagination. ‘‘What if . . .’’ and ‘‘If only . . .’’ are common expressions of regret and grief together, for grief is not just about a loss. It is also about imagination and lost possibilities. The loss for which one grieves has much to do with the emotional significance of the personal relationship. One would expect to grieve more for an old friend than for a recent acquaintance, and one would expect to grieve more for the family dog than for a goldfish. The degree of obligation follows these expectations. But this obvious claim carries with it some suggestion about the proper nature of the object of grief. It cannot be just a symbolic loss or a legalistic matter of ‘‘ownership.’’ One might be tempted to say that the intensity of grief will depend on the degree of intimacy of the prior relationship, but this may depend on what one means both by intensity and by intimacy. Intensity cannot be just the force of the feeling of the emotion; it depends on the kind of relationship it was: how mutually dependent, how much camaraderie was involved, and so on. And regarding intimacy, on the one hand, intimacy as vulnerability becomes almost tautological, because the ultimate vulnerability of any relationship is the possibility of loss and grief. On the other hand, intimacy as closeness, the complexity and mutual dependency of the prior relationship, would suggest something profound about the nature of the loss. What one loses, in an On Grief and Gratitude [ 81]

important sense, is part of one’s self. The self is not an atom that coexists with other atoms and on occasion forms a readily fissionable molecule. The self is a web of relationships, and foremost among these are the relationships formed by love. Thus grief is a personal loss not only in the minimal sense that the loss is personal but also in the profound sense that it constitutes something of a loss of personal identity. It follows that one might not have the right to grieve if one does not have this kind of intimacy with the deceased (grieving lamentations for Elvis and Princess Di, for example). On the other hand, having such intimacy seems not so much to entail grief as to make it obligatory. I have not been talking about the grief that one might feel for a treasured object, but it is easy to see how such a discussion would be relevant here. In general, the loss of objects does not cause grief. Sadness or regret, possibly, but not grief. But there are treasured objects. A person who loses a treasured object suffers a serious personal loss, but ‘‘grief ’’ seems to be appropriate only when that object signifies something more than mere ‘‘treasure,’’ that is, material value. A lost family heirloom prompts grief not because of its economic value (or lack of adequate insurance) but because of its personal significance, its role in defining one’s self. Sam Malone (of Cheers) might seriously grieve at the loss of his Corvette, but only because that car has come to represent so much of what he thinks of himself. The loss of a wedding ring might well provoke grief, but obviously the grief is about much more than the ring itself or its market value. It is, Freud might say, an anticipation of a real loss to come. But the experience of grief is not just one of suffering, missing someone, and reference to the past. It is also a longing, desiring what one can no longer have. In this sense, it is a very active and present experience, not just the perception of a previous loss. This experience is often eclipsed by the obvious fact that there is nothing one can do about one’s loss, or at least nothing effective that one can do (where effective action would be the actual recovery of the lost one). Thus Gustafson comments that grief involves a kind of paradox: that it wants what is impossible, the resurrection of the deceased. One cannot be motivated by an impossible desire, so many writers on emotion have noted that grief, unlike most emotions, involves no ‘‘action tendencies.’’11 Of course, one may be motivated to act in all sorts of peripheral ways: reckless driving, repeating rituals one shared with the deceased, hiring a ‘‘medium,’’ creative expression (in poetry, music), acting out the grief itself (wailing, moaning, beating one’s head, etc).12 But one might well argue that these are, to invoke a problematic distinction, expressions of grief but not actions motivated by grief. Even if this distinction does not hold, we can gingerly distinguish between effective action motivated by emotion and ineffective ‘‘acting out.’’ The only effective action that would be motivated by [ 82] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

grief would result in the satisfaction of the desire to have the lost one back again. But, by the nature of the case, this is impossible.

Grief, Sadness, Sorrow, Depression Alice, grieving for her father, will seriously desire that her father not have died, and so will be in turmoil because her desire cannot be satisfied. Her friend, Zachary, who is sorry about the loss, on the other hand, will merely wish for Alice’s sake that Alice’s father were still alive. Zachary’s sorrow does not put him in turmoil, because his wish is not frustrated by being impossible to satisfy. —Janet McCracken (‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly’’)

How does grief differ from mere sadness, with which it is often conflated? It would seem to differ first of all in its intensity but, moreover, in its specificity. One can be sad ‘‘about’’ something, of course, but one can also be sad ‘‘in general’’ and not about any particular event or loss. Indeed, sadness is an emotion that can be so profuse and indifferent to its object that it is the primary example of emotion in music. The sadness of a melody can be discussed and analyzed at great length in the absence of any subject matter, in the absence of libretto, plot, and context. Moreover, the sadness of a melody can be discussed in the absence of any feature of the psychology of the composer, the performer, or the listener. Music is sad not because of what it is about (a requiem may or may not be about anyone or anything in particular), nor is it because of its emotional intent (on the part of the composer or performer), nor because of its effects on any particular listener. In some sense (beyond our scope here), the sadness is in the music itself.13 This might suggest—what is certainly the wrong conclusion—that sadness as such isn’t really an emotion or is just physiological. It is, rather, an ‘‘expression,’’ but not an expression of emotion, that can be ascribed not only to music but also to the faces of certain dogs, Saint Bernards and bassett hounds in particular.14 But I think that it is the aesthetic theory which carries the burden here, not the straightforward idea that sadness is an emotion. It could be argued, with some reason, that sadness without a specific object is a mood rather than an emotion. Thus waking up in the morning ‘‘feeling sad’’ describes a mood, not an emotion. It doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular. It is, rather, just a temporary mode of being. The distinction between moods and emotions has to do with the specificity of the object. (It is sometimes argued that moods differ from emotions in their duration, although it is telling that the argument tends to go both ways: moods are brief and transient, while emotions are more stable, and emotions are shortterm reactions, whereas moods tend to be of longer duration. The plausible On Grief and Gratitude [ 83]

conclusion, however, is that duration has nothing to do with whether a given affect is a mood or an emotion.) To say that sadness is an emotion is to say that whatever else might be going on (neurologically or in terms of visceral feelings, such as ‘‘feeling low’’), it is also about something more or less specific, a more or less specific loss. It might be the loss of a favored object, or a loss of face or prestige, or disappointment about one’s life or the world situation. Moods, by contrast, are not so specific. But it does not follow that sadness as a mood lacks any object at all. It only lacks a specific object. Thus disappointment about the world situation might be the emotion of being disappointed that one’s president refused to sign an important international treaty, or it might be the much more general sense that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket. That more general sense might readily slip into malaise about the state of everything: personal, political, and cosmic. It thus becomes a mood, but it is nevertheless about something—namely, everything. Moods are not just internal ‘‘mental weather.’’ They also are about the world (that is, the whole world, the world of one’s immediate experience). Thus the difference between moods and emotions is a matter of degree of specificity, not typology, and sadness is an emotion of enormously variable scope, focus, and intensity. Grief, by contrast, is always very specific. What grief is specific about is the personal suffering of a serious loss. That loss, of course, might not be singular. One can, after a horrible tragedy, find oneself grieving the loss of several members of one’s family at once, but the grief and the object(s) of grief are nevertheless quite specific. One grieves over the thousands of dead in a recent tragedy (e.g., the attack on the World Trade Center or some ‘‘act of God,’’ such as an earthquake in a populous area) or even millions after a terrible war. Nor need grief be strictly personal in the sense that each person necessarily grieves alone. One might join with thousands or millions of others, for instance, to collectively mourn a beloved slain leader. One year after the 9=11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the New York Times published a special edition, titled ‘‘A Year of Grief,’’ in which it is said (unkindly) that ‘‘Americans have finally discovered death.’’ The idea of collective grief for a more or less anonymous multitude of people (an anonymity only partially corrected by the personal portraits that graced that Times edition) is one that we all understand. Nevertheless, grief is always personal and specific even if multiple or collective, and it is never merely abstract and impersonal. But grief is, I suggested, much more than the recognition of a serious loss. It also involves a paradoxical desire. The desire is that the lost loved one not be lost, that he or she should appear, perhaps walk through the door in the next few minutes, despite the belief that he or she is dead. (If that belief is not secure, but still hovers in the realm of fear and uncertainty, the emotion [ 84] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

is not yet grief.) In its desire so contrary to belief, grief is akin to those literary emotions which seem to be genuine even though the subject knows the object of the emotion to be fictional or make-believe—for instance, fear and pity at the theater while watching a performance of Medea.15 The role of this paradoxical desire in grief is complex and perhaps not what it seems, but on the face of it, it allows us to make a distinction between grief and another seemingly similar emotion, sorrow. Donald Gustafson argues that grief necessarily includes a desire contrary to the belief that the lost beloved not be lost, while sorrow involves only a wishing and no such desire.16 Wishes are by their very nature contrary to what is the case, and so no paradox issues from any wish that things were other than they are. One might wish that someone had not died, and feel sorrow for the loss, but grief involves the turmoil of an impossible desire, an inability to accept the loss, and the persistent demand that it not be so. The process of grieving is the process of coping with that impossible desire and that intolerable loss. One might suggest that insofar as the death of a loved one (or the loss of a world)17 prompts abstract thoughts, reflections on human mortality in general or inspires an interest in the phenomenology of grief, it would seem to be that much less grieving. True, it is the particular person who is important and now lost forever, and so grief tends to prompt very particular memories and attention to detail, perhaps even to details long forgotten or ignored. But I would not exclude abstract thoughts and reflections from this process. The combination of memory and paradoxical desire takes on an occult aspect, as if those memories and details might be used to ‘‘conjure up’’ the lost one, as in a se´ance or an invocation. (Indeed, it is easy to understand se´ances and invocations as natural if slightly gullible expressions of that impossible desire.) In the case of a lost treasured object, for instance, one might replay the memory of the last time one saw it, perhaps even the moment of loss, in a frustrated effort to move backward in time and thus to prevent the loss before it happens. So, too, perhaps, with the death of a loved one. The seriousness of the loss, coupled with the impossibility of satisfying the paradoxical desire, suggests what is also evident: that grief tends to last a substantial amount of time. ( Thus even the Stoics, in their recommendation that we should overcome our grief, allow for a period during which this may be humanly impossible.) If someone tells us that he grieved just for a day, we seriously doubt whether that brief emotion was grief at all. How much time is appropriate may, of course, be much in dispute. In American business culture, it is limited to a few ‘‘personal’’ days. In some Mediterranean cultures, it is expected to last a lifetime. Moreover, grief is always intense, again the product of the seriousness of the loss coupled with the impossibility of the desire. But this, too, may be much in dispute, deciding at what point On Grief and Gratitude [ 85]

overpowering grief becomes sheer pathology. The wailing characteristic of mourning in some cultures is considered quite inappropriate in those which are more emotionally restrained. The self deprivation suffered by grievers in some societies will be utterly unacceptable in others. If someone’s grief seems to be nothing more than mild regret or sorrow that a person has died, we question whether this deserves to be called grief. But if someone is so grief-stricken that he or she becomes completely immobilized, on the verge of catatonia, this seems not to be grief either. Like all emotions (and even passions), grief has its measure, as Aristotle argued, its excess and its deficiency. The right amount of grief speaks well of a person and his or her caring about others. Too little or too much grief points to a less than virtuous personality, either callous and uncaring or hysterical and overly dependent. (In either extreme case, narcissism is often a plausible candidate as an explanation.) Thus we might say, as Aristotle did not, that grief is a genuine virtue, but a virtue that becomes evident, unfortunately, only in times of tragedy. (Except in his Poetics, Aristotle tended to ignore the tragic side of life.)18 So, finally, grief is not depression. Depression goes beyond grief; it is an excess of grief (although one should note that it is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from grief ). Depression is a mental illness (or, at least, a temporary mental disability). Grief is not (as such) an illness, however painful and overwhelming it may be. Even Freud insists on this. He notes that ‘‘in grief the world becomes poor and empty’’ [but] ‘‘it never occurs to us to regard [grief ] as a morbid condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment.’’19 Grief is a normal and necessary part of life. Depression is neither normal nor necessary.20 Depression may be related to both sadness and grief, but it is not to be expected as a response to the inevitable contingencies of life. Sadness becomes pathology (at which point it usually constitutes depression) when it is both profuse and devastating, but it is a melodramatic colloquialism when ordinary sadness is called ‘‘depression.’’ Extreme grief, when it goes on too long and gets too self-destructive, may also become depression. But grief as such is not depression, and depression is not grief, for depression is without an object (although it may have an identifiable trigger and a contingent focus), whereas grief is always about something, something specific. Grief sometimes causes or goes along with depression. But whereas depression at least invites, if not demands, a physiological explanation (whether or not this is the whole story) and treatment as an illness, grief does not. To be sure, grief has its physiology, as do all emotions, and after an appropriate amount of time, or if it becomes too unendurable, grief may require treatment. But grief does not constitute something wrong with the griever. Typically, it is something he or she ought to go through. This, above all else, [ 86] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

should tell us that there is something special about grief, that grief is not just a form of suffering or illness, and that neither depression nor sadness nor sorrow alone constitutes grief. Grief has a moral dimension. As Janet McCracken points out, ‘‘We want a world in which grief is valued.’’

The Object of Grief Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. . . . You go as far as you can go. —Philip K. Dick (Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said)

Both the idea that grief is a specific form of sadness and the idea that grief is a mild but focused form of depression are thrown into question when we move beyond grief as an emotion to consider social, and consequently moral, attitudes toward grief. I began by pointing out that grief is neglected in the analytic literature, but in the popular literature, the problem can be argued to be very much the opposite. Janet McCracken insists that we ‘‘romanticize’’ grief by focusing on it as ‘‘a psychological state whose depth we ought not to plumb, because it is somehow larger, more beautiful, more ‘true’ than either the person who feels it or the person who studies it.’’21 Thus, however painful grief may be, many people (including the one who grieves) tend to protect it, even prize it, as proof of their own virtue and love. But, McCracken says, this has an odd consequence. ‘‘It is so easy to consider the grieving subject—unlike the subject in love or the subject enraged—without taking seriously the thing for which she grieves. The object of grief being put out of the picture, theorists tend to bracket it off from their study of the griever.’’22 So instead of conceiving of grief as a kind of relationship ( between the griever and the person lost), it becomes primarily or even solely a psychological feature of the person grieving. But, ironically, this may in turn open the way for an ‘‘overly clinical attitude towards grief which advocates ‘recovery.’ ’’ Alternatively, McCracken says, the romanticized grief may lead to a mystical attitude toward the dead beloved.23 Thus the psychology of grief is pushed in two quite opposite directions: toward the clinical picture of a person in distress (without much attention to the lost love or the relationship) and toward the mystical vision of a ghostly but palpable presence, with consequently less focus on the suffering of the grieving person. In our understanding and analysis of grief, it is important, I think, to give proper due to the relationship—that is, both the interrupted and presumably reciprocal relationship and the ongoing, unreciprocated relationship represented by the memory of the loved one (or the loved one as remembered). This is to reject the reduction of grief to the clinical picture of the suffering of On Grief and Gratitude [ 87]

the griever, but to reject as well the overly mystical vision of a ghostly presence. What remains present is the strong residue of the relationship. But the familiar concept of intentionality in the analysis of emotion—the idea that an emotion must be directed toward something, in this case the loss of a beloved person—too easily gets confused with the simplistic paradigm of looking (emoting) at an object, such as another person. ( The paradigm here is perception.) But even leaving aside some perplexing philosophical problems,24 there is a straightforward problem in the reduction of the ‘‘object’’ of an emotion to the other person. I used to claim, accordingly, that the other person is not the object of grief any more than he or she is the object of love. The proper object of the emotion is the relationship. But now I think that this, too, misses the point. The ‘‘object’’ of an emotion is by no means so clearly identified as philosophers seem to suppose. (Is the object of anger the other person, the other person’s behavior, the specific act, the act in this context, the loss of face to oneself, or the other person’s causing the loss of face? And so on. Sometimes this is specified in the description of the emotion, but often not. [‘‘I’m so angry at you!’’]) Thus the other person is the object of grief as well as the beloved, but I think the point is that it is the relationship which grounds the emotion. Had there been no such relationship, the other person would not have been even a candidate for grief. Thus I suspect that many of us found the grieving lamentations for Elvis and Princess Diana inappropriate, if not downright embarrassing, just because there was no prior relationship (despite the indignant denials of the aggrieved). The shared tragedy of a likable young man or woman cut down in the prime of life prompts grief only insofar as the relationship with the griever is something more than vicarious voyeurism. Neither is the object of grief just the memory of the beloved. One does not miss the memory. One misses the beloved. When I insist that grief is about a relationship, I do not want to mystify the issue but rather to point out that grief (like many emotions) is a complex emotion which is neither ‘‘about’’ only the lost beloved (grief is not ‘‘selfless’’ ) nor about oneself (which, again, tends to narcissism and self-pity, not to genuine grief ). Consider love, by way of comparison. Love is not just about the beloved. It is a much more complex emotion that is also about one’s self (and who one is vis-a`-vis the beloved); about the beloved insofar as he or she is a reflection, a projection, and to some extent a creation of the lover; and about the relationship itself, which is not the same thing as just the coupling of the ‘‘subject’’ and the ‘‘object.’’ As Martha Nussbaum puts it: . . . the external object or person as an important part, not of the world from some detached and impersonal standpoint, but of the world from the viewpoint of the agent’s own goals and projects. The beloved person, and the relationship of love [ 88] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

with the person, may enter into my conception of flourishing not merely as means to my own states but as constitutive parts of flourishing . . . without this person or relationship my own life is not complete.25

Nor, contrary to some of the great pundits on the subject, is love first of all self-love. Love is not selfless, to be sure, but neither is it selfish in any sense. One need not love oneself in order to love another. Selfishness is the antithesis of love. So, too, it is the antithesis of grief. As love is the usual precondition of grief, we might insist that grief, too, is not just about the now lost beloved but a more complex emotion that is both about one’s self (and one’s loss) and about the relationship lost, but that nevertheless continues in one’s missing and longing for the lost beloved. But the lost beloved isn’t a mysterious presence. He or she is a painful absence, and it is an overimaginative metaphysics and an insufficiently critical ontology that insists otherwise. What one misses, what one longs and grieves for, is the lost relationship, perhaps even more than the beloved as such, who may, in fact, not have been much present in recent years. ( Thus Camus’s character Meursault offers us his unconvincing rationalization for not grieving for his mother: ‘‘We hadn’t had much to say to each other.’’)26 Nevertheless, my student Beth Snyder writes, ‘‘In grief one wants to get out of oneself, to get to the beloved. Yet, one cannot. That is the devastation of grief. If anything, grief is tragically egoistic; one is left only with oneself, and oneself as a stranger.’’27 I think the phenomenology is right here, but the charge of ‘‘egoism’’ is somewhat misleading. Grief is indeed ‘‘tragically egoistic’’ in the sense that one finds oneself utterly alone, without the one person who (at the time) might be the recipient of one’s altruism. (One of the most common thoughts following the death of a loved one is what kind deed has been left undone, or what kind deed might now be done, if only the person were not gone.) But I hesitate to identify this profound loneliness with anything like selfishness, although it is, by default, self-involved. But the self-involvement, I want to argue, is self-involvement in the relationship, frustrated by the fact that one now has to handle the relationship alone. ( Thus the fanciful thinking and memory that often accompany grief. How many philandering or even abusive husbands, how many faithless and abused wives, have benefited from this retrospective creativity?) Søren Kierkegaard, always a voice of exaggeration in such matters, insists that the love of the dead allows one to notice, as one never did before, the solitary moves of the beloved, as (he suggests) when one watches shadowboxing or a person dancing alone, free of the encumbrance of the relationship. After the loss, Kierkegaard tells us, love can be both more faithful and more free. But this is dubious compensation if one has suffered a real loss instead of rhapsodizing about a merely imaginary one. On Grief and Gratitude [ 89]

Grief is often described as a consequence of love, its downside. ( It is this painful downside that the Stoics wanted to eliminate, even at the cost of abandoning all loving attachments.) But the thesis I am arguing here, following Janet McCracken, is that grief is the continuation of love, and it shares its object with love. This is what makes it not only painful but personally obligatory as well, for the obligations of grief are the obligations of love.

The ‘‘Objectivity’’ of Love, and Grief as a Project Here I also want to follow McCracken in her observation of two central elements in grief that are almost always ignored in the analysis of grief as loss. The first is that the loss is not merely ‘‘subjective,’’ as is usually supposed. The second is that grief consists in part of a project, and this, as opposed to the paradoxical desire pointed to earlier, is the definitive and not at all paradoxical desire in grief. The ‘‘objectivity’’ of love refers to the Aristotelian distinction between the merely subjective sense of how one feels about his or her well-being and the nonsubjective notion of eudaimonia, usually translated as ‘‘flourishing’’ or ‘‘doing well.’’ The first refers to momentary impressions, whereas the second takes into account one’s life as a whole, something one can do only with difficulty and incompletely while he or she is alive. Aristotle writes: Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives? . . . for both good and evil are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g., honors and dishonors and the good and bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants. . . . it would be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.28

This has two important implications for the analysis of grief. The first is that it is the nature of happiness (eudaimonia) that it does not depend solely on the awareness of the living. This is also true of the satisfaction of a person’s desires and wishes. The second is that it is, in some sense, the life of the deceased that is the object of grief and not just the loss of a few features (such as traveling or going to the movies together, or the deceased’s sense of humor). The first point has to do with happiness as the satisfaction of desire (not that this is the whole of happiness, but it is surely a part of it). It is odd for us to think of the satisfaction of someone’s desires after they are dead only insofar as we conflate satisfaction with the experience of satisfaction, but if I desire that someone will still read my books fifty years after I am dead, then the satisfaction of that desire can happen only fifty years after I am dead. Thus in grief, wanting to satisfy the desires and wishes of the deceased is by [ 90] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

no means irrational or unreasonable, and, in fact, it seems to be part of the grief itself. Thus the desires that in part constitute grief are by no means limited to the impossible desire to have the dead come back again, and the actions that are expressive of grief are (in part) those actions which aim to satisfy the deceased’s desires. On the second point, McCracken writes (after quoting Aristotle): In the case of grief the more Aristotelian, apparently objective assessment of the life of the deceased becomes salient for the grieving person. In grief, one feels oneself to be grieving for the loss of the whole life of the lost person, not, for instance, for some misfortune that befell the deceased when she was fifteen, nor for the current absence of a pleasant dinner one had with her the previous year. . . . The whole of her life is larger, in this sense, than the sum of its parts, the fleeting moments of her life. Indeed, in a sense it extends beyond the confines of her body and her time on earth, into the lives of her descendants, her loved ones, and those upon whom her life had an effect.29

I think that this is right, but I would not take uncritically the insistence on the whole of one’s life. I have hope that my wife will remember me fondly, and that what she will remember about me will be a bottomless trove of quirks, habits, accomplishments, foibles, and shared experiences. But I also have no doubt that the life she will remember will not include the years before her which I spent with another woman, and this will not be just for lack of access to those memories. When we love, and when we grieve, it is an edited life that we encounter. This is not to deny that it is a holistic view of the life, but only that it is an all-inclusive one. McCracken adds: It is on account of the apparent objectivity of grief, on account of the griever’s refocus on the whole life of the deceased, that grieving tends to be a time for reflection. While commentators often note that grief is associated with social withdrawal or depression, they rarely discuss its reflective tone. But people in grief regularly experience a very reflective time, investing their time in thought about the deceased, about the meaning of life and death, about the passage of time, etc. This reflection is linked to the social withdrawal characteristic of grief. In grief, one feels as if one is separated from the ordinary daily life of the social world, somehow on a different plane. The socially distant, withdrawn attitude of grief is precisely the griever’s step back from her own fleeting, subjective experiences of her interactions with others to a reflective distance from which she considers her own and others’ lives as objectively whole entities.30

This important point suggests that, contrary to the common view, grief is not just pain, and that the ‘‘action tendencies’’ associated with grief are not, as On Grief and Gratitude [ 91]

so often supposed, merely an expression of pain. Grief, like Heidegger’s angst, prompts reflection, and this is the purpose of the withdrawal (Heidegger’s ‘‘being ontological’’). The idea that grief has no action tendencies (which I used to hold) further ignores this obvious feature of grief, although to be sure withdrawal and reflection are not exactly ‘‘vigorous’’ actions on a par with punching an offender in the nose in anger or running for one’s life in fear. (It was William James who insisted that ‘‘an urge to vigorous action’’ is what distinguishes emotions from cold rationality. But he was thinking of anger and fear, not grief.) The idea that grief involves only one paradoxical desire—the desire that the loved one not be dead—ignores one of the most dramatic features of grief. Grief also includes a strong desire to commemorate and honor the lost person, to satisfy, presumably, some of his or her most basic (though not necessarily spoken) desires and wishes. Thus McCracken writes of the ‘‘dedicatory’’ nature of grief: The dedicatory quality of grief’s relation to the dead is reflected in some of the things we commonly say about the deceased, such as ‘‘she would have wanted it this way,’’ ‘‘let’s win this game for her,’’ ‘‘she’s turning over in her grave about this,’’ etc. Obviously, these sorts of phrases idealize grief and its objects, and indeed, I think it is largely the dedicatory aspect of grief that makes grief particularly easy to romanticize. When someone we love has died, we desire to do honor to, to show appreciation for, that life as a whole, differently from and more importantly than the honors or rewards she may have received for particular accomplishments during her life.31

It might seem odd to some that we dedicate our books to the dead or name stadiums and schools after them, for ‘‘after all, they aren’t here to appreciate it.’’ But someone who did not understand this ‘‘dedicatory’’ urge would be judged insensitive (at best) and might very likely be incapable of grieving (though fully capable of sadness and sorrow). Moreover, as Aristotle made very clear, the satisfaction of a desire is something quite different from the feeling of satisfaction. Only the latter is impossible for the deceased. But the satisfaction of desire (and, for that matter, the satisfaction of his or her wishes) can happen at any time, even long after the person who had those desires is no longer around to remember them. Moreover, the grief itself could be construed as dedicated to the lost loved one. In this sense, grief is honoring the deceased and, perhaps, satisfying his or her wishes, one of which is almost certainly ‘‘to be missed when I am gone.’’ Again, there will be insensitive souls who may question what the point of such a display could be, given that the dead are unable to appreciate our suffering, but, again, I think they thereby fail to appreciate the nature of [ 92] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

the satisfaction of desire, which does not have to be experienced to be satisfied, and also the essential nature of grief, which is not just an experience of loss but the continuation of a relationship. McCracken rightly alludes to that famous section in Hegel’s Phenomenology (also in the Philosophy of Right) in which he cites Antigone as the representation of ‘‘the Divine Law’’ and Antigone’s grief as an expression of an ‘‘ethical substance’’ that transcends individuals.32 Her fatal act of civil disobedience, burying her rebellious brother against Creon’s orders, is the ultimate example of the dedicatory impulse in grief.

The Grieving Process What’s the point of grieving, if there’s no one there to see you do it?! —Edina (Absolutely Fabulous)

I have been talking in the usual way about grief as an emotion, but I have also insisted that it is a process. This should not be perplexing. Grief is both an emotion and a process. In this it is not alone among the emotions. Jealousy, for instance, is sometimes evident in certain ‘‘pangs’’ and passing suspicions, but it also displays a rather dramatic narrative elaboration, as is evident in so many stories of romance and tragedy. Anger, too, is sometimes an abrupt and short-lived emotion, but it also displays itself as a protracted process, going through more or less distinctive stages and involving many other emotions (e.g., resentment, vengefulness, schadenfreude) as well. Psychologists who defend the concept of ‘‘basic’’ emotions (Paul Ekman, for instance) might say that all emotions are short-term in nature and that longer-term processes (for example, jealousy) are not emotions at all.33 But some emotions are only processes. They necessarily unfold over time. Love, notably, is a process. Although there may be various periods of feeling and attachment that might be called ‘‘episodes’’ (or feelings) of love, these count as episodes or feelings of love only within the context of the larger process. I think grief is like this, too. To be sure, we can describe the phenomenology of grief (as of love) in (more or less) a single moment, or at any rate over a very limited amount of time. But that phenomenology makes sense as grief (or as love) only in terms of the larger process. There are limits to this, of course. A person may grieve profoundly upon hearing that his or her beloved is dead, only to find out an hour or so later that he or she is alive. So, too, Romeo loved Juliet for all of three days (surely not long enough to be treated as love for most fourteen-year-olds), and then they were dead. But we would not say that Romeo loved Juliet if he had dropped her after a few days (as he did Rosalinde) for no reason at all. So, too, grief may be ( happily) On Grief and Gratitude [ 93]

interrupted by good news, but it would not be grief if it would not go on in the absence of such news. Grief is both an emotion and a process, but it is the former only in context of the latter. But to say that grief is a process is to say, as I said about anger above, that it is not just a development of that one emotion, grief, but a process that may involve and engage a number of diverse emotions. Just as love may at one time or another involve jealousy, longing, loneliness, anger, betrayal, and eventually grief, so grief over time involves a sequence of by now very well documented emotions. The sequence is now commonly associated with Elizabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, who identified it many years ago. The basic sequence is shock or denial–agitation–yearning–depression–anger–guilt–recovery, although each person displays his or her individual sequence in which these stages overlap and return in all sorts of ways.34 It would seem that this complex sequence would admit of considerable cultural variation as well. Whether or not grief can ever be a brief and simple emotion, it is clear that the process of grieving involves so many cultural customs and artifacts and so much interpersonal and social interaction that local and regional differences would be inevitable. And yet, a psychiatrist–philosopher commented to me recently how universal and cross-cultural some such sequence seems to be.35 The cultural variations, significant as they may be, seem to flesh themselves out on the skeleton of a more or less fixed human process. I would suggest that this is an exemplary instance of what has sometimes been called ‘‘the logic of affect.’’36 It is easy enough to appreciate the ‘‘logic’’ of such a process, the ways in which one emotion sets the stage for and gives way to another. After years or even decades of getting used to a relationship, perhaps even (to some extent) taking the presence of the other for granted, the shock of an absence is incomprehensible. Then the discomfort of routines disrupted, the most ordinary and everyday expectations frustrated at every moment. Then the unyielding experience of missing the other, now a more reflective matter, and the deep sadness, possibly depression, that comes of that. Anger is perhaps the most dissonant moment of the process, but it, too, follows quite naturally from the grief that has preceded it, as the question ‘‘why?!’’ starts creeping into one’s reflection. Guilt, too, poisons reflection, sometimes blending into but just as often eclipsing the grief as one’s attention shifts from the loss of the other to oneself. But as anger and guilt are slowly put in their proper place (usually understood as irrational or at any rate as unwarranted), and as grief is replaced with new hopes and a new sense of self, recovery begins. The world opens up again, and with it one’s willingness to engage in it. ‘‘Getting over’’ grief is, no doubt, the most important part of the grieving process. But how does this come about? Beth Snyder suggests that ‘‘grief ignites and extinguishes itself through pain,’’ and this ‘‘burning out’’ metaphor can be found in a great many treatises on emotion. Anger, notably, [ 94] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

burns itself out (as Burke wrote of the rage that ‘‘fueled’’ the French Revolution). Ambition and desire, unfortunately, tend to burn out, too. Resentment and envy, also unfortunately, tend to simmer and stew, thus preventing burning out but inhibiting satisfying expression as well. However, I think that we should pause before taking this metaphor too literally ( like the related mechanical hydraulic metaphor of pressure and release). I think that the ‘‘logic’’ metaphor renders the physics metaphors problematic, for what happens in grief (and many other emotions) isn’t just consumption or relief but satisfaction, that is, the fulfillment of the desires that constitute the emotion—and, I would add, the fulfillment of the emotion itself. Take, for example, anger. Anger expressed, whether in a nasty note or in a letter to the editor or in a bit of brutality, tends to be satisfied. (This is ignoring, of course, the probable countermeasures that such actions invite.) On the one hand, the constituent desires—to tell the offender off or put him in his place, to punish him quite directly—are satisfied by the action. But, on the other hand, the anger itself has a purpose, to reinstate one’s status in the world, and this is something other than any of the particular desires that are in or follow from one’s anger. But the anger might thus be relieved via a different process, the process of gaining new information, a new perspective. Once one has learned that the supposed cause of anger was based in misinformation, the anger disappears. Or once one comes to see the offensiveness of one’s own provocative behavior and to appreciate the validity of the other person’s response, the anger may also disappear. It would be extremely misleading in such cases to say that it was ‘‘extinguished.’’ So, too, fear and its desires are satisfied when one gets away from the feared object or, more interestingly, when the fear is ‘‘refuted’’ by the awareness that ‘‘there is nothing to be afraid of.’’ The logic of emotion is just that—logic. It has to do not with causality but with inferences. The presuppositions of an emotion, its cognitive structure, are such that their refutation directly constitutes an end to the emotion (although a certain physiological and phenomenological ‘‘hangover,’’ such as the shaking that follows anger and fear, might briefly persist). As the Stoics saw so clearly, change your perspective, and you alter your emotion. With regard to grief, this suggests that ‘‘extinguishing’’ is the wrong way to understand it. Martha Nussbaum suggests that the cessation of grief comes about when one reconstructs oneself without the beloved. I think that this is basically right. The fictional example that Janet McCracken uses, Minghella’s film Truly, Madly, Deeply, uses the literary conceit of obnoxious ghosts in order to force the heroine to reconsider her ongoing attachment to her deceased lover and reconstitute herself to live on without him. So, too, does the phenomenon of time passing work to allow us to reconstitute ourselves in grief. Once again, the withdrawal of grief is not just withdrawal in pain but On Grief and Gratitude [ 95]

withdrawal in order to accomplish a critical existential task. The time spent grieving is time spent reflecting, both commemorating and imaginatively resurrecting the lost one but also editing and revising one’s memories such that the ties to the loved one are no longer so definitive. This may be painful in an unexpected sense, insofar as one succeeds in doing this. Thus McCracken quotes Robert Romanyshyn’s The Soul in Grief : ‘‘When my wife died, not only did our future die, but also our past. I do not mean that my memories of her and our past disappeared, rather, I mean that without the future that we imagined and dreamed together, the past that we did share changed.’’37 The variations in this process depend on such all-important matters as the nature of the relationship ( brief, lifelong, intimate, more casual), the nature and suddenness of death (after a long illness, utterly unexpected in a tragic accident), whether the beloved contributed to his or her own death (through irresponsibility, excess risk-taking, or—the worst—by suicide), the anticipation of death (versus sudden ‘‘disappearance,’’ for example), and whether the bereaved has some reason (rational or not) to ‘‘blame’’ himself or herself for the death. In cases of suicide in an intimate relationship, the grieving may be much more immune to recovery because of both anger and guilt, while in cases of long, wasting illnesses there may be seemingly little grief and noticeably little by way of process, if only because the process is so drawn out during the person’s last months or years that the various elements and their logic weave through time like the twisted fibers of a frayed rope, eventually petering out to mere threads at the end. But to say that grieving is a process is to say that this emotion, like so many others, cannot be construed as one of those little atoms of emotional experience that ‘‘affect program’’ theorists are so fond of identifying. This does not mean that all of these various emotions should be identified with grief or taken to be components of grief (any more than occasional outrage and jealousy, for instance, should be taken to be constitutive of love), but neither should we try to sharply distinguish the emotion of grief from the process of grieving and the process of ‘‘getting over it.’’ Grief is a distinctive emotion, but, like all emotions (even the most ‘‘basic’’), it has systematic interconnections with all sorts of other emotions and attitudes. Grief also has its complex interpersonal, social, and ethical dimensions. It is not just an ‘‘inner feeling,’’ no matter that one characteristically tries in grief to withdraw from the world. William James had it half right when he suggested that ‘‘a woman is sad because she weeps, she does not weep because she is sad.’’ That is, the outward ‘‘expression’’ of grief is not just a projection or a ‘‘pressing out’’ of an inward feeling. Grief essentially incorporates its characteristic behavior, which includes the tendency to withdraw from company and the temptation to nostalgia and reminiscences. [ 96] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

In this sense, it may seem antisocial, but—not to be too paradoxical—this antisocial behavior is a distinctive form of social behavior. But whether the behavior is manifested as withdrawal or as verbose reminiscences, it is not a mere ‘‘instance’’ of behavior, like a facial expression, a gesture, or the utterance of an expletive. It is an ongoing sequence of behaviors, following the sequence of emotions that make up the particular process of grieving, and the logic of this sequence is to a large extent determined by the reaction and responses of those surrounding the bereaved, whether supportive or helping or avoiding, and what they say ( by way of condolences, rationalizations, condemnations, accusations, and so forth). Thus it is not only a mistake to think of grief as an emotion rather than as a process. It is also a mistake to think of grief as strictly personal and cut off from one’s interpersonal and social relationships. It is in the interpersonal context, not just in the emotional experience of the bereaved, that the moral obligations of grief become most evident. It is here that we come to appreciate the peculiarity of the American treatment of grief.

The Moral Status of Grief : Mourning One is obliged to grieve. One is only rarely obliged—morally obliged—to have emotions, perhaps moral indignation in the face of cruel or extremely unjust behavior, perhaps love in certain circumstances, paradigmatically when one has children, presumably when one gets married in a ‘‘romantic’’ society. (It is worth noting the second-order moral indignation that applies to those who fail to become morally indignant in the appropriate circumstances.) It is obligatory to feel shame when appropriate (although what causes shame may differ radically from culture to culture), and thus Aristotle lists it as a ‘‘quasi virtue.’’ In other words, acting badly and feeling ashamed is better than acting badly without shame. (An Ethiopian proverb: ‘‘A man without shame is a man without honor.’’) Pity and compassion, in the right measure, are obligatory in the face of suffering, and those who show no sympathy not only are condemned as ‘‘insensitive’’ but also as immoral. Grief is like this, too. Not to feel grief when one has lost a loved one is to be not only insensitive but also inhuman, inviting moral censure. Many emotions are prudential. (Some ‘‘functionalists’’ would argue that all are, at least at some point in their evolutionary history.)38 Prudence, of course, includes the preservation of one’s group or species (or, in the language of our time, one’s genotype), and the more altruistic emotions might thus be understood as conducive to group coherence and survival. Grief has been so interpreted (e.g., by James Averill).39 Although of no obvious benefit to the bereaved, it has the virtue of enforcing group solidarity and cohesion. Thus it On Grief and Gratitude [ 97]

is ‘‘natural’’ to grieve, and it is also natural to insist that others grieve when appropriate. Thus it has been argued that the moral emotions—shame, guilt, pride, indignation, (moral) disgust, and the like—are evolutionarily explicable. I think that there is a fair amount of make-believe in such explanations, but the point is that we can understand, whether or not from the viewpoint of evolution, the functionality of emotions such as grief, and therefore why they should be obligatory as opposed to merely predictable or expected, like fear in the face of danger or jealousy on discovering a serious rival. But whether or not grief is natural and in any way beneficial, there is no denying either the felt imposition of grief or the social pressure to grieve. Indeed, it is hard not to think that social instruction has a great deal to do with the felt obligation of grief and with perhaps the feelings themselves. The condemnation of those who fail to grieve appropriately is ruthless. Think of Meursault at his mother’s funeral, distracted by the heat and his own discomfort, not bothering to put on the ‘‘show’’ of bereavement that a good son’s loss of his mother commands. Imagine yourself at the funeral of someone close to you, but you’re in an unusually good mood, the sun is shining ( but not so hot that you suffer like poor Meursault), and you just don’t feel anything like grief at all. The absence of grief most likely makes you feel guilty, and the guilt, perhaps, will lead to grief. (It is often noted that the ‘‘negative’’ emotions tend to reinforce and lead into one another, as do, with far more qualifications, the ‘‘positive’’ ones.40 ) But the fact that you feel guilty attests to the force of social expectation. Unlike Meursault, you wouldn’t think of showing your lack of grief on such an occasion. Grief and its public expression merge into that general pattern of behavior which is usually called mourning. Mourning is usually thought of as a ritual, and indeed it is. But whether or not the ritual is an expression of grief depends upon the emotions of those who grieve. It is obviously possible to mourn, to go through the ritual, without grieving, and it is possible to grieve without going through the ritual of mourning. One can ‘‘go through the motions’’ without really feeling anything, and one can grieve a great deal without having the opportunity to mourn. It is worth drawing the connection to religious rituals, whether Hindu, Confucian, Jewish, or Christian, in which it is assumed that any ritual is filled with feeling and that the meaning of the ritual is the feeling that is thus expressed. What is most important about mourning rituals, however, is the fact that they are public, or at any rate social (even if privately contained, say, within a small group or family). New Guinea tribesmen orchestrate communal weeping into an elaborate musical form, and here, in particular, we want to say that it is both expression and elaborated action ‘‘out of ’’ emotion.41 Mourning is thus an invitation to others to share and express their feelings, and grief then becomes [ 98] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a thoroughly interactive emotion, thereby confronting the ‘‘natural’’ tendency of grief to express itself in withdrawal and isolation. Maori funerals in New Zealand subject the grieving to three or more days of round-the-clock speech-making, singing, and entertaining, making withdrawal virtually impossible. The efficacy of such rituals (which should by no means be limited to a funeral ceremony) and their ongoing contribution to recovery are well-known and well-documented, and their mechanisms are far beyond my scope or knowledge. But my conclusion here is that grief as mourning is not only a process but also an interpersonal process, and that makes it about as far as it can be from a ‘‘basic’’ or ‘‘simple and unschooled’’ emotion. The emotion and the process of grief are furthered by way of community ritual, and, as James suggested, the behavior excites the emotion.42 But the emotion and the process are also worked through by way of community ritual, and though it may be true that ‘‘time heals [some] wounds,’’ there is nothing like the sympathy of interpersonal dynamics to help time along. Mourning is a ritual and it is also an expression of the emotion of grief. What is the connection between the ritual and the expression? One inadequate ( but far-reaching) response is that ritual consists of actions, many of them deliberate, customary, and socially learned, while expression is necessarily ‘‘spontaneous.’’ Peter Goldie distinguishes between expression of emotion and action ‘‘out of ’’ emotion, where expression is constitutive (an aspect of the emotion) but action ‘‘out of ’’ emotion is merely caused by the emotion.43 I do not accept the distinction, as I have argued elsewhere,44 but I think that it causes special problems here because of the peculiarly reflective nature of grief. (This is not to say that dogs, whales and elephants cannot grieve, but the notion of ‘‘reflection’’ would have to be understood quite broadly.) Virtually all of the behavior associated with grief looks as if it is action ‘‘out of ’’ emotion. But we would not want to say that therefore the behavior is not expressive. Moreover, the moral significance of grief and grieving behavior is such that it would be a mistake to view expression as only the externalization of internal feeling. It is also ‘‘socially constructed’’ and socially tutored, and not merely a ‘‘natural’’ expression in any case. Wailing and self-flagellation may seem more natural than say, reading a prayer or dedicating a statue, but, again, I think the distinction falters. Wailing and self-flagellation are themselves socially encouraged or discouraged, and if one wants to isolate some primitive behavior that is molded thereby, one can also see reading prayers and dedicating statues as expressions of similarly primitive rituals. In virtually every case, mourning is expressive of the emotion but socially meaningful as well. My friend Robert Nola has suggested to me that, on the basis of evidence from the Balkans, grief is an emotion that one can pay other people to On Grief and Gratitude [ 99]

express, instead of expressing it oneself. This raises tantalizing questions. For instance, can you hire another person to express your lust, to satisfy your lust? It does seem that you can hire someone to express and satisfy your anger. Tony Soprano does this routinely. But if paying another to express your grief (as a way of ‘‘getting on with your life’’) can be not only in sympathy with, but also instead of, your own expression of grief, that makes me wonder to what extent mourning is an expression of grief rather than a display of grief. Public displays can be handed on; the expression of emotion, seemingly, cannot. A display of grief might fulfill the social obligation (at least in the Balkans), but it is not at all clear to what extent or how it helps express or relieve the grief. ( To what extent is the expression for the sake of relief, and to what extent can relief be ‘‘bought’’ without expression?) One suggestion is that insofar as mourning is based in part on what I have called honoring or ‘‘dedicating’’ to the dead, a public display, whether a personal expression or not, would seem to satisfy that demand. There is no reason why one’s efforts to honor the deceased cannot depend on or be based on others’ activities and actions. But let us return to Donald Gustafson’s ‘‘irrational desire’’ and his claim that there are no action tendencies in grief. True, grief does not, and cannot, satisfy its ultimate desire, the resurrection of the deceased, and the recovery from grief consists in converting this impossible desire to a mere wish. Beth Snyder suggests that while the desire is ‘‘robust,’’ the wish is merely ‘‘anemic’’; and though one might well spend the rest of his or her life with a certain amount of sorrow, the reconstitution of the self puts the grieving to an end. But grief also includes an elaborate sequence of cultivated desires aimed at the well-being of both the deceased and the living, and to ignore these by fixating on the impossible desire is to ignore not only the constructive nature of grief but also some of the most important means of recovery from—or should we say the satisfaction of ?—grief. The desire to honor the dead is one such desire, and the labor of commemoration may well bring grieving to an end. Consider, too, the injunction not to speak ill of the dead. The rationale for this is supposed to be that the dead are not here to defend themselves, but I think that this only hints at a much more interesting reason. One way to home in on it is to consider the brouhaha that followed the funeral of Richard Nixon, the disgraced president of Watergate notoriety. President Clinton and numerous political dignitaries lined up to heap praise on the fallen leader, and many of the commentators were incensed. Why was nothing said of the man’s ignominious abuses of his office and the Constitution? Why was there no attack on the man’s character? To be sure, Nixon had many defenders, and he had been cautiously silent on these matters for several years, so whether or not the dead man was there to defend himself, there [ 100] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

were many around to do so. But grief is incompatible with such recriminations, which only suggest that there is no real loss (except, perhaps, as regards justice or revenge—but that is a very different story.) I think that the larger insight comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play about the dead (looking down [or up] at the living, who are gossiping about them). Sartre was not bothered by moral niceties, and he was very clear about the definitive nature of posthumous gossip in the solidification of a person’s character—and, a` la Aristotle, his or her ultimate eudaimonia. We should be careful what we say of the dead, because what we say ‘‘sets them in stone,’’ so to speak. So, too, when we speak well of the dead, we ‘‘save’’ them, not in any eschatological sense but in the straightforward earthly sense that we salvage their reputations and thus serve what we may usually presume to be their most fervent desire: to be thought well of. Again, it is instructive when this turns out not to be the case. Meursault, at the end of The Stranger, famously hopes that at his execution he will be greeted by ‘‘howls of execration.’’ This is at the end of a tragically short life, we might note, in which he has had (shall we say) an identity problem all along. He does not know who or what he is (though the trial brings him closer to a solution). Thus, at the end of his life, any identity is better than none, and being an object of hate is better than being lost in oblivion. But here, too, one expects that Meursault will get what he desires, and thus be perversely honored in death. One of the most striking things about American culture (insofar as this can be distinguished from the many ethnic subcultures that make it up) is its almost total absence of established mourning rituals. Within a few days or even a few hours after a funeral, it is perfectly appropriate for the mourners to go back to their ordinary lives, and within a few weeks or at most one or two months, it is expected that they will ‘‘get over it.’’45 In other cultures, by contrast, mourning is expected to last for years, if not a lifetime, at least for those closest to the deceased. There, the idea of ‘‘getting over it’’ is considered utterly offensive, not only to the lost loved one but also to the honor of the entire community. Thus the problem of grief is that on the one hand it is vital to human community and our own larger well-being, but at the same time it seems to interfere with our ongoing lives and projects, and thus to be ineffective if not ‘‘unmanly.’’ What I have tried to argue, by contrast, is that grief has positive value in that it gives us good cause for reflection and a new sense of what needs to be done, not for ourselves but for the memory of those we have lost. The loss suffered in grief may be enormous and irredeemable, but the further loss suffered by ignoring or denying the importance of the grieving process only amplifies, it does not ease, the suffering. The denial of grief, as the Stoics saw so clearly, first requires the denial of love, and that is a price most of us are unwilling to pay. On Grief and Gratitude [ 101]

On Gratitude Truly grateful people don’t make lists of things to be grateful for, any more than happy people make lists of things to be happy about. —Richard Russo (Straight Man)

Gratitude is one of the most neglected emotions and one of the most underestimated of the virtues. In most accounts of the emotions, it receives nary a mention. Even in broader surveys of the ‘‘attitudes,’’ it is often ignored. And in the most prominent lists of the virtues, notably Aristotle’s, it is not included. Gratitude is often included, of course, in Christian treatises on the virtues, but then it is usually directed only toward a single if exceptional object: God the Almighty. And yet gratitude is one of those responses which seems essential to and among civilized human beings, and perhaps it is even significant among some social animals, as Frans de Waal and others have persuasively shown. The neglect of gratitude is in itself interesting. Why does it not come to mind immediately when the social emotions and virtues are in question? Why should we hesitate to admit that we feel, and should feel, indebtedness to someone who is our benefactor and has helped us when in need? But this way of describing the emotion already suggests that we do not like to think of ourselves as indebted. Thus the neglect of gratitude. Like the emotion of trust (to which it is closely akin), it underscores our vulnerability and our dependence. Thus gratitude lies at the very heart of ethics and human society. It is more basic, perhaps, than even duty and obligation and it often forms their basis. The neglect of gratitude as an emotion might be partially explained by the fact that it is obviously what Hume called a ‘‘calm passion,’’ with none of the vehemence and drama of the ‘‘violent’’ passions. There is ‘‘gushing’’ gratitude, to be sure, but such behavior is hardly the norm, even in cases where the boon is enormous and one’s gratitude is appropriately expansive. Usually, even when one is grateful to someone for saving his or her life, gratitude is better expressed through a quiet ‘‘thanks’’ and an appreciative silence, followed (usually after a decent interval) by an appropriate gift or return favor. A big display of gratitude, by contrast, is often suspicious. Gratitude is a poor candidate for a ‘‘basic emotion’’ or ‘‘affect program’’ of the sort that has been prominently defended by many recent psychologists ( Paul Ekman) and some philosophers ( Paul Griffiths). It displays no regular or recognizable facial expression, leads to no single sort of ‘‘hardwired’’ behavioral response, and cannot plausibly be traced, much less reduced, to any particular neurological processes. Also, gratitude endures. It is not, as Carroll Izard defines ‘‘emotion,’’ a ‘‘brief . . . response.’’ If it is just a fleeting feeling, it [ 102] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

hardly counts as gratitude. And gratitude, unlike ‘‘hardwired’’ behavioral responses, can be appropriate or inappropriate, and it must also be sincere. Perhaps, on occasion, gratitude may ‘‘feel good,’’ and we do speak of ‘‘heartfelt’’ gratitude, but I think the more usual feeling is one of slight discomfort (for reasons suggested above) or, often, nothing at all. We may say we ‘‘feel grateful’’ in describing or expressing our gratitude, but this is not usually a phenomenological report of a unique kind of experience. ( Most emotions, I would argue, lack any specific ‘‘feeling’’ in this sense. Our phenomenological reports more likely consist of various perspectival and value-laden descriptions of the situation and objects of our emotion.) Some theorists (e.g., Paul Griffiths) might include gratitude among our ‘‘higher cognitive emotions,’’ if it were to count as an emotion at all. But ‘‘emotion’’ is a varied and expansive category in which all sorts of ‘‘feelings’’ are included, and it seems to me that excluding gratitude too readily suggests that gratitude isn’t ‘‘felt’’ at all. But to say this is to suggest that gratitude is just a social performance, like unthinkingly saying ‘‘thank you’’ when the waiter brings some extra pats of butter to the table. As for the virtues, gratitude is neither as active as most (courage and generosity, for instance) nor is it an ongoing disposition to behave in a socially responsible or congenial manner (temperance and truthfulness, for example). We do not usually think of it as being cultivated as a habit (although some of its superficial trappings, such as saying ‘‘thank you,’’ obviously are), and ( like many virtues) its status as a virtue, as opposed to an emotion, is in much dispute. (Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, opposed the virtues, which he insisted were ‘‘states of character,’’ to the passions, which he considered merely episodic. Many philosophers have followed him in this, notably Bernard Williams in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.) But it is not always easy to distinguish between a dispositional state of character and a recurring passion, and (as Aristotle clearly argued) it is as necessary to cultivate the right passions as it is to cultivate the right habits and states of character. Both are essential to virtue. Indeed, they are often identical. Cultivating courage, for example, is cultivating the right amount of fear and the right attitude toward fear, and cultivating generosity is cultivating the right amount of the desire to give and the right amount of sympathy or compassion. It may be the case that when we speak of a grateful person (or a grateful nation) we are more often referring to a particular episode rather than a consistent state of character, but it does not follow that gratitude cannot be cultivated or that it has nothing to do with character. Indeed, a single feeling of gratitude—for example, to one’s parents or to an influential teacher or guru or to someone who has seriously changed or even saved one’s life—may come to define a good deal of one’s character and one’s sense of one’s own life. On Grief and Gratitude [ 103]

By contrast, being ‘‘ungrateful’’ is clearly the mark of a vice, whether in a single instance or as a long-term defect of character. Where gratitude is appropriate, even mandatory, being ungrateful is a sign or symptom of lack of socialization, an inability to appreciate what others have done for you or, worse, the grudging resentment of one’s own vulnerability and the refusal to admit one’s debt to others. Gratitude directed to God may not be demeaning. After all, it is He who created us. But gratitude toward other people may be more of a problem. A decade or so ago, the late social psychologist Shula Sommers studied attitudes toward gratitude (and other emotions) in American and Israeli society. She found that Americans in general ranked gratitude comparatively low on a scale of comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, and American men, in general, found gratitude to be a humiliating emotion.46 But uncomfortable though it may be, we recognize that none of us is wholly self-sufficient and without the need of help from others. To deny that obvious truth is not just to be philosophically mistaken. It is to be a person of poor character, whatever one’s other virtues. This is not to say that gratitude is good ‘‘in itself,’’ as philosophers say. As Aristotle said of all of the passions, it is appropriateness that counts: the right passion, in the right circumstance, with the right target, to the right degree. Thus Aristotle talks about ‘‘perception’’ as the key to ethics, the practiced ability to ‘‘see’’ in a situation the appropriateness (or the inappropriateness) not only of gratitude but also of its specific expression. There are occasions in which gratitude is inappropriate despite the benefit. (I have heard people say that gratitude is inappropriate if someone is ‘‘just doing his or her job,’’ although I suspect that this is just an excuse not to thank the person.) There are occasions in which gratitude is appropriate even though the benefit in question is slight indeed. (I would argue that the waiter bringing the butter is one modest example.) Sometimes the best expression of gratitude is a slight nod of the head. Sometimes nothing less than pledging one’s life will do. But the matter of appropriateness is one that escapes the confines of philosophical psychology and moves to manners and ethics.47 The only point that I would like to make here is the general one: that the question of whether or not and when to be grateful is not only a matter of manners but also a profound topic for moral deliberation. I would argue that being capable of and expressing gratitude is not only a virtue but also part and parcel of the good life. It is not just an acknowledgment of debt and an expression of humility but a way to improve one’s life. One can take his or her life and its advantages for granted, but how much better it is to acknowledge not only these advantages but also one’s gratitude for them. Thus Barbara Fredericks rightly argues that gratitude ‘‘broadens and builds.’’48 It is not just a ‘‘positive’’ view of life but a way of putting one’s life in perspective. Ultimately, as Nietzsche exclaimed in one of [ 104] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

his most heartfelt aphorisms, one should be grateful for one’s life as such (‘‘How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?’’ Ecce Homo, ‘‘Why I Am So Clever,’’ x10.) A person who feels such cosmic gratitude, even if just on occasion, is both a better person and a happier one. But one of the questions that has always intrigued me about such cosmic gratitude, and it certainly bothered Nietzsche as well, is to whom one should feel this gratitude. As an emotion (as opposed to a mood or a mere trait of character) gratitude is defined, at least in part, by its ‘‘object.’’ But the object (in this case one’s whole life) seems to be incomplete. If a good friend gives me a book, I am not just grateful for the book. I am grateful to him for giving me the book. This acknowledgment of the other’s agency seems essential to the emotion. But if one does not believe in God, then how can one be grateful for one’s life and all of its blessings? Nietzsche talks rather obscurely about ‘‘affirming one’s life,’’ but this seems to beg the question. To whom should one be grateful for one’s life? The Christian philosopher Robert C. Roberts has no problem with this question, nor do most Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims. But I do, as do some Buddhists, who may well share the problem with atheists. Being grateful ‘‘to the universe’’ is a limp way out of this quandary. But personifying the universe solves the God problem only by displacing it. Thus Camus, another atheist, populates his hero Sisyphus’s world with gods and goddesses who are maliciously enjoying his fate (at whom he can rail in ‘‘scorn and defiance’’). But this literary ploy is part and parcel of Camus’s own recognition that the universe cannot be, as he so often claims, merely ‘‘indifferent.’’ (Indeed, he gives the game away when he has his antihero Meursault ‘‘open his heart to the benign indifference of the universe’’ at the end of The Stranger.) But does it make sense to be grateful to the universe? I can imagine Professor Roberts saying, ‘‘Isn’t this really being grateful to God without admitting it?’’ Perhaps one can avoid God by claiming to be thankful ‘‘to chance,’’ or perhaps ‘‘to luck,’’ as one might be thankful to roulette or the state lottery (one is surely not thankful to the casino or the state). But, again, the effort seems limp. The to whom question gets begged again, even if ‘‘Lady Luck’’ is a convenient evasion of philosophical responsibility. Manufacturing an evasive impersonal agent to whom to be grateful seems even less convincing. But, then, are atheists stuck with being ungrateful about the single gift that for most of us matters most? I think the ‘‘to whom?’’ question is misplaced here. The easy move from gratitude as an interpersonal social emotion to cosmic gratitude for one’s whole life is unwarranted. It may make good sense for a theist, for whom there is something akin to an interpersonal relationship with God ( but even the most powerful author on this, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, On Grief and Gratitude [ 105]

expresses deep anxiety about the peculiar one-sidedness of this particular interpersonal relationship). And one can, of course, personify the universe as Camus does, but it is instructive that Camus feels compelled to belittle science (and the scientific worldview) at the same time, thus adopting a purely aesthetic worldview. ( These are by no means incompatible.) I think that there is another solution, more radical in that it severs gratitude for one’s life from the interpersonal emotions. It is, I think, still gratitude, but it shines a light on what even interpersonal gratitude is all about, which is not merely being thankful to someone for some boon or gift. Gratitude need not be conceived just in terms of a particular relationship. Gratitude is a philosophical emotion. It is, in a phrase, seeing the bigger picture. In relationships, it is seeing a particular act or transaction as part of a larger and ongoing relationship. The limiting case, where one is briefly grateful to a stranger one will ( probably) never see again, underscores the nature of the more usual case in which we expect that we will see the other person again. The bigger picture in such a case is not the ‘‘one-off ’’ nature of the episode but the frequency of such episodes and one’s need to be grateful to any number of strangers, of whom this one is a single instance. Thus Blanche Dubois’s classic statement that she has ‘‘always depended on the kindness of strangers’’ expresses an astute philosophy, not just a piece of personal biography. So viewed, ‘‘opening one’s heart to the universe’’ is not so much personifying the universe as opening one’s heart—that is, expanding one’s perspective. And so viewed, being grateful for one’s whole life is not a ‘‘to whom?’’ question so much as it is matter of being aware, being aware of one’s whole life, being reflective in a way that most of us are not, most of the time. And when one is reflective and aware of one’s whole life, one recognizes how much of one’s life is out of one’s hands, how many of our advantages we owe to other people, how indebted we are or should be to our parents, our friends, and our teachers and how lucky we are. Such general recognition takes the sting out of acknowledging our vulnerability in more particular instances. If we are always vulnerable and dependent beings, then acknowledging our vulnerability and dependency and being grateful in any particular instance should not be so much of a problem. It is gratitude and humility, not gratitude and humiliation, that form the natural pair. To be sure, such gratitude typically involves a to whom as part of its structure, but this is not essential. Like many moods, gratitude expands beyond the focus on a particular object to take in the world as a whole. Thus Barbara Fredericks rightly recognizes gratitude in terms of ‘‘broadening and building,’’ not only in terms of its effect and expression, but by virtue of its internal structure as well. One thus could look at gratitude as one of the essential but usually neglected emotions of justice. To be a bit shocking, it is a positive counterpart [ 106] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

to vengeance. Whereas vengeance is characterized ( by Socrates, for instance) as the return of evil for evil, gratitude is the return of good for good. They both share Plato’s view of justice as ‘‘giving one [his] due.’’ But whereas vengeance leads to a deadly downward spiral of escalation and destruction, gratitude often results in a mutually supportive positive dialectic in which our world opens up with new possibilities. The same is true, I have elsewhere argued, with trust. Moreover, it is pretty clear why gratitude and vengeance, though agreeing in their basic ‘‘theory’’ of justice, are likely to prove mutually incompatible. Those who feel gratitude are less likely to be vengeful, and vice versa. Thus gratitude and forgiveness are also related, and given the existential choice between living a life based on gratitude and forgiveness and living a life based on resentment and vengeance, the choice to be made should be obvious. Nietzsche, for all of his personal venom, saw this quite clearly. So, too, do others of us who do not share the sensibilities of someone who enjoys a personal relationship with the Almighty. Gratitude (and, I would argue, trust and forgiveness) are essential emotions of the good as well as the virtuous life.

On Grief and Gratitude [ 107]

Five Real Horror F O R S A L L Y A N D N O E¨ L

Since September 11, 2001, there is no forgetting or avoiding the awful visions we all shared. It was just before nine in the morning that a plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. On CNN, a few minutes later, we watched as United Airlines Flight 175 plowed into the second (south) tower, followed by that awful ball of flame. My wife and I were watching, horrified and helplessly, from 1,300 miles away. But for a glitch in our travel plans, we might have been in New York that morning, watching even more horrified and helplessly from a short distance away. In any case, we spend a lot of time in New York. I have spent hours in the upper floors of the WTC. We’ve had drinks at Windows on the World. It took no leap of imagination for me to think of our being there, in the midst of the horror. Compared to that haunting vision, other examples of horror, especially artbased horror, pale by contrast. Witticisms aside, art imitates life, not the other way around. Plato was right at least about this: our imitations are poor copies of reality, whatever their other virtues. Horror is, first of all, a very real emotional experience, whether or not it is provoked by very real horrors. But I will argue that pretend horror, or what Noe¨l Carroll nicely calls ‘‘art horror,’’ is derivative.1 And the horror films that provoke laughter and make-believe screams, including horror films about horror films (Young Frankenstein, the Scream movies, etc.) are quite literally imitations of imitations. (So, too, we might construe Carroll’s suggestion that movie viewers’ horror mimics the horror of the characters in the story being mimicked by the actors.) Regarding such movies (and theater and novels), it is all well and good to ask what pleasure people find in the fear or horror that otherwise would seem to be a most unpleasant emotion (‘‘the paradox of horror pleasure’’). But it makes no sense at all, or else it takes a very sick sense, to ask such a question of real-life horror. To be sure, the image of that second jetliner crashing into the tower is awesome, and one might argue that awe carries with it a certain horrified pleasure. But in this case, the overwhelming emotion is horror, not pleasure. With this in mind, I would like to analyze the emotion of horror.2 But I want to depart from the voluminous literature on horror in books and

movies (sometimes in paintings and poems) by focusing first of all on real horror—that is, horror in real life—and only then considering the nature of art horror, horror provoked by the make-believe. Sometimes prominent authors on horror allude to real-life horror. (Cynthia Freeland has a nice essay titled ‘‘Realist Horror,’’ and in The Naked and the Undead she at least refers to ‘‘real life kind of horror.’’3 Daniel Shaw talks about ‘‘realistic horror’’ in his Dead Ringers.4 But Noe¨l Carroll interestingly dismisses all such films from his consideration.) But real horror more often than not seems to be the Platonic form in which all horror movies, books, and such only ‘‘participate,’’ but which (according to Plato) is not grasped directly and would be too overwhelming if so experienced. But as the Socratic moviegoer who emerges from the dark of the theater and leaves the protected reflections on the screen for the harsh sunlight of the street, I want first to get some appreciation and understanding of real life horror, leaving the analysis of ‘‘art horror’’ as a secondary concern. Now I want you to notice the following about my all-too-real example of real-life horror: 1. The experience was in no way pleasurable, delightful, or enjoyable. There was nothing fun or funny about it. 2. It did not involve any distinctive narrative (although there is an enormous amount of background knowledge that was required to experience the horror as a horror).5 3. It did not involve any monsters ( leaving aside the metaphors by which the terrorists would soon be described).6 4. It did not involve epistemic uncertainty or suspense.7 ( There was not much question what was happening. There were a few moments of uncertainty after the first attack—Was it an accident? Could it be terrorism?—but these questions were quickly answered with the second attack.) 5. The experience was not essentially metaphorical (with apologies to George Lakoff, who thinks, with good reason, that metaphors ‘‘go all the way down’’). Analysis in terms of metaphor too easily cheapens and denies the horror rather than clarifies it. (‘‘We have witnessed a visual metaphor for an impossible act of procreation: the silver phallus penetrating the petrified sphincter; an anal orgasm’’ [Ben Halligan, ‘‘Terror, Disaster, Cinema and Reality,’’ a symposium on the World Trade Center disaster].8) 6. There were no sexual overtones or implications, no reference to gender, no picking on females, no relation to incest or more modest forms of illicit sex.9 7. Disgust played no role in the experience (however much disgust may have come to dominate the scene of carnage afterward). 8. The dominant emotion, for those of us watching from a safe distance, was not fear. It was horror. To be sure, we experienced fear and uncertainty regarding Real Horror [ 109]

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

the possibility of subsequent attacks, and for those at ground zero the dominant emotion was terror. There were no doubt paranoids watching in Austin and Omaha who feared that their cities (in fact, their very homes) were next, but their most appropriate emotion, I would argue, was horror. Everyone watching was powerless to do anything.10 (The experience of those in the buildings lucky enough to escape was otherwise. It was all they could do to get out and/or help others do so. Their dominant emotion, as opposed to ours, was indeed fear. But for those of us who watched, as for those who found themselves trapped, the experience was helplessness and horror.) Watching the horror was not just a matter of passivity or ‘‘Darwinian emotions.’’ It took quite an active imagination to ‘‘digest’’ what was happening.11 The fact that we were transfixed by what we saw had nothing to do with satisfying our curiosity about anything (not even the sick curiosity that wondered what would happen if a fully loaded jetliner were to hit the World Trade Center).12 There was no ‘‘aesthetic form’’ to be appreciated13 (although a grudging awe at the ingeniousness of the plot was unavoidable). It did not leave us with the thought that life is meaningless. (If anything, the overwhelming recognition was the preciousness of life.)

Such considerations have dominated discussions of art horror, especially the ‘‘paradoxical’’ observation that horror can be pleasurable. Well, in books and films, perhaps. There we choose to be horrified. (On some interpretations, we not only choose to read or to watch but we also choose to engage in a game of ‘‘make-believe,’’ which is obviously not the case in real-life horror.14) In real life, horror forces itself upon us, unbidden. And that plain fact undermines most of the aesthetic accounts of horror as a more or less pleasurable emotion. Noe¨l Carroll argues persuasively that art horror involves a narrative about a monster. Well, sometimes it does. But the literary sense of narrative as plot need play no role in real-life horror, and the ‘‘interstitial’’ or ‘‘uncanny’’ experiences provoked by monsters only occasionally account for real-life horror (and then for often trivial varieties, such as looking at your reflection in a mirror just after a slightly disfiguring accident or after a bad haircut). Steven Schneider suggests that we might have some such ‘‘uncanny’’ experience walking home after seeing a horror movie, but unless one is addicted to the genre, this will not be a routine occurrence, and real horror needs no preparation. (On the contrary . . . ). Horror may involve suspense, but it certainly need not do so, and often it is knowing what has happened, and not epistemic uncertainty or curiosity, that defines the moment of horror. Real-life horror comes in many varieties. Some are intermingled with fear and disgust. Some involve shock and surprise. ‘‘Pure’’ horror, unmingled [ 110] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

with other emotions, is probably hard to come by. But an all-too-familiar example is an automobile crash, not the horrendous yearly statistics but a particular accident with particular victims, lying maimed and bleeding on the highway. It is one of the perplexities of the subject that we often go out of our way to experience horror, no matter how upsetting it may be. That explains, in part, why we would choose to go to horror films, though I would not leap from that to the conclusion that one therefore gets pleasure out of it. But the urge to ‘‘gawk’’ is so evident in such situations that the attraction of horror must surely count as one of its most tantalizing aspects. (This is not to deny that we would absolutely prefer that the horrible incident not occur. But if it has occurred, we would rather see than not see.) But horror need not be so tantalizing. For some people, seeing a dead rat in the driveway or a squashed cockroach in the bathtub inspires horror. Think of a half-eaten worm in the just-bitten apple. Or looking with some amazement at the remaining stub of one’s bloody little finger after an accident with a sharp implement. Imagine a shocked family watching a loved one, totally ‘‘out of character,’’ stage a psychotic tantrum or fly into a drunken rage. But real horror need not be viewed firsthand. It suffices that the horror is real (and one knows or at least believes that it is real). Watching the World Trade Center attack on television is an instance of real horror. I also felt real horror looking at the filmed scene (and the book photographs) of male lions killing the suckling cubs of other males in David Attenborough’s Trials of Life. Real horror is real. It is impossible to imagine enjoying any such experiences, although to be sure we may derive perverse enjoyment from other people’s experiences of horror so long as we do not share in them ourselves. When it is fictionalized, what we enjoy in horror is other people’s horror, including the characters on the screen or in the book (and this is the very contrary of empathy with them, as Noe¨l Carroll suggests). We can enjoy our own horror one step removed. We laugh at ourselves after we have screamed at the appearance of the man in the rubber Godzilla suit. Perhaps we can even laugh at ourselves as we scream at the appearance of the man in the rubber Godzilla suit, if we also distance ourselves from ourselves through reflection. Insofar as we do seem to enjoy horror, I would argue that it is not the horror as such that is enjoyed. When we laugh at ourselves as we scream at Godzilla, it is not horror we feel but, echoing Kendall Walton, something very much like ‘‘make-believe’’ horror, which I will argue is not any kind of horror at all.15 To state the matter by way of a simple hypothesis, in order to throw into question the basic presumption of the ‘‘pleasure–horror paradox’’ that is so much a part of the literature: if art horror is or can be quite entertaining, it is precisely because it is not horror. Horror and entertainment are mutually exclusive, both logically and psychologically. Art horror can give pleasure, Real Horror [ 111]

but real horror blocks the very possibility of pleasure. Thus there is a paradox of horror–pleasure only if we suppose that horror is the same in both art and reality and that it is the horror which is pleasurable rather than something else. Of course, there are always cases of ‘‘mixed emotions,’’ like mixed envy and pleasure when a friend wins the prize that you have worked so hard for, or joy and despair when your long-lost dog comes running across your freshly paved sidewalk; but horror and pleasure seem not to be any such possible mix.16 Horror is wholly absorbing. If in art we seek out horror and we find pleasure, it is because such an experience of art horror (and the anticipation of horror) is somehow pleasurable, but not horror itself. When Orson Welles broadcast H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds in 1938, causing a nationwide panic, those who were panicking were in no way amused, and afterward, of course, they were for the most part furious. Looking back, it is hard to say why Welles or anyone else thought that people would be entertained. And yet, it is well-known that public taste for art horror increases with real horror in the background. There was an explosion of horror films during World War II. Interest dropped when the war ended, and by the 1950s the genre had momentarily dried up. The Vietnam war period spawned Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Again the number dropped radically after the war’s end. The biggest box-office movie in the weeks following September 11 was From Hell. This suggests (to many authors) that art horror is some kind of compensation for or ‘‘release’’ from real-life horror. And that, in turn, is the source of its pleasure. Chip off the old bloody block Bela Lugosi, Jr., is quoted as saying (in USA Today, October 25, 2001), ‘‘Imaginary horror is a way to escape real horror. It’s a safe haven from real horror and takes your mind off of it.’’ But art is not life, and art horror is not real-life horror.

Delineating Horror (and Art Horror) What is horror? And what kind of emotion is it? Again, there is some room for the challenge that horror is not an emotion at all, in the same way, perhaps, that vengeance is said not to be an emotion. That is, it does not name a discrete emotion but at best an emotion-related phenomenon (horror as the cause of certain emotions, vengeance as a consequence of certain emotions). Perhaps we could finesse the question by calling horror an ‘‘emotional phenomenon,’’ but, as I have noted, I think the boundaries of the category of ‘‘emotion’’ are sufficiently indistinct so as to make this not a very significant qualification. It may, in fact, be nothing but a matter of vocabulary. But what is obvious is that horror involves emotion, indeed very [ 112] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

powerful emotion. It has often been argued (with reference to art horror in particular) that horror involves many emotions although it is not itself a distinct emotion. (This is an argument I have often heard regarding love as an emotion as well, and we saw it with reference to grief in chapter 4.) But again, while I think that this assumes a discreteness that is inapplicable in the analysis of emotions, and even if horror (like love) might also be manifested in any number of other emotions, it nevertheless deserves at least an attempt at analysis on its own terms. As the reader will no doubt anticipate, my analysis will be predominantly (but not entirely) ‘‘cognitive’’ in nature.17 First, perhaps, we should distinguish horror from disgust, for, not surprisingly, they are often found in tandem. Disgust is often cited as a ‘‘basic emotion’’ in the sense that it is (at least in part) a more or less automatic (or, more accurately, autonomic) reaction with ‘‘hardwired’’ manifestations in expression (for instance, wrinkling the nose and the extrusion of the tongue).18 On the other hand, disgust has been argued to be too primitive to be a proper emotion, precisely because it is so automatic and inflexible.19 Moral conceptions of disgust are accordingly designated as secondary and derivative uses of the word.20 One can find roughly similar treatments of horror, notably in some of Jerrold Levinson’s work.21 Levinson questions the strong cognitivist approach to horror, noting that Carroll (and Kendall Walton) neglect the significance of nonintellectual, perceptually based, cognitively impenetrable quasi-beliefs. I think that Levinson is right and horror can be like this. In fact, I would argue that horror is also a candidate for a ‘‘basic’’ emotion in that it has its origins in infantile helplessness and also displays characteristic, ‘‘hardwired’’ facial expressions (eyes wide open, mouth open as in a scream).22 But I would not take infantile horror as exemplary of horror, as I would take physical disgust as exemplary of disgust. The important point is that in art horror we may tap into and reactivate real emotions that are not themselves based on art at all, as Levinson argues. It would follow that real horror, by contrast, consists of real emotions, that is, nonintellectual, perceptually based, cognitively impenetrable quasi (or what he calls ‘‘Darwinian’’) emotions. Thus construed, horror might also be deemed ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘basic,’’ and intellectualized horror (much of art horror) might be deemed secondary and derivative. I believe that there is much to support such an analysis but, first, I would argue that horror is no less cognitive for all of that. (Cognition and intellect should be distinguished: while the intellect requires a high degree of linguistic articulation and ability, cognition in general does not.) Second, horror is nevertheless distinct and quite different from disgust in its allegedly ‘‘basic’’ status. Neurological studies (going back to seminal work by William James) place perception and ‘‘hardwired’’ (autonomic) reactions at the heart of emotion. Recent studies show quite clearly that basic emotional response (fear is Real Horror [ 113]

usually the emotion in question) is so quick and automatic that there is no time for involvement of the ‘‘higher’’ cerebral centers of the brain—in other words (as it is frequently stated these days), ‘‘emotion precedes intellect.’’23 So, perhaps, there are such emotions. But, as I suggested above, cognition is not intellect, and the most primitive perception, if it is to count as perception at all, involves recognition (which is not to say that this involves anything like the recognition of a thing’s full significance or attaching any sort of name or description to the object in question). In horror, the recognition might be as crude and nonspecific as ‘‘something horrible has happened (or is happening),’’ or it might be as fully specific as ‘‘My sister, who used to be such a beautiful person, has turned into a hideous, affectless, murderous pod person, one of those aliens from another planet’’ (with reference to one of my favorites, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers).24 In other words, horror is through and through cognitive, if only in that it recognizes something as horrible, whether or not it also involves (or requires) higher intellectual faculties. This suggests at least one point of tension with disgust.25 Disgust is indeed often very primitive, so primitive that it can be argued not to require recognition at all. But this depends at what point we identify the reaction in question. When a rotten-tasting morsel is put in a baby’s mouth, he or she shows the typical expression of disgust. When an adult sees blood and gore or smells decaying flesh, he or she experiences disgust (perhaps in the form of nausea), whether or not clearly displaying the stereotypical facial expressions. It could be argued that this does not or need not involve any recognition except in the utterly minimal sense of a physiological ‘‘registering’’ of some noxious stimulus. Horror, by contrast, depends on a much more sophisticated sense of significance—for instance, a comparison between what something is expected to be and the way it appears to be. The object might (in a straightforward ontological sense) be the same as the object of disgust, such as the same dead and decomposing body. But for the purposes of disgust, it does not matter whose or what body it is. It is just disgusting. In horror, by contrast, it matters very much what or whose body it is. One can imagine seeing a dead and decomposing body and then recognizing in horror that it is the body of one’s professor or neighbor. This is not to deny that a sensitive person might be horrified (as well as disgusted) by any dead and decomposing body, but for horror it is nevertheless the differential between what one might have expected (e.g., that the person is still alive) and its present status that makes for horror. In the case of art horror, I think the distinction between horror and disgust is particularly important because it is so often violated. Many socalled horror films might much better be designated disgust films, or what Carroll calls ‘‘splatter films,’’ movies whose primary and sometimes sole distinction is the gruesome special effects depicting bodies being mutilated in [ 114] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

any number of ways. It doesn’t take a talented director or scriptwriter to disgust an audience with gore (although to do so with subtlety takes considerable skill). Horror, as opposed to disgust, usually involves some plot development, some sense of suspense, however formulaic this may have become in the long tradition of horror films. Critics of Carroll are correct, however, in noting that not all art horror involves plot development or narrative.26 There are moments in horror films that are horrible quite apart from any plot development or narrative. (These are the source of many of the stills that fill books on horror films.) There are also paintings that represent frozen moments in time which depict the horrible and provoke horror in those who look at them. (Consider works by Breugel and Bosch, and some of those ceremonial demon masks from Bali.) Some thoughts seem to be intrinsically horrible and horror-provoking, particularly those with distinctively personal significance. But in any case, it is the significance of the object (whether in film, painting, or thought) that provokes horror, not just a stimulus, and mere disgust is not enough to be horror. Nevertheless, what is horrible is often also disgusting, and what is disgusting may also be horrible, especially when the disgust is not merely of the ‘‘visceral’’ kind. Moral disgust and moral horror are much akin. In fact, one way to understand the phenomenon of moral disgust is to interpret it not as a secondary or derivative version of disgust but rather as a species of horror. ( If disgust is limited to visceral feelings, as many have argued, horror is not so limited. One can be horrified by a companion’s immoral behavior without being nauseated by it. But then again, some authors, such as Levinson, might insist on a similarly ‘‘visceral’’ conception of horror.) But horror and disgust, both in the case of real horror and in the case of art horror, should be kept distinct. Horror has to do with significance, and this requires a complex kind of recognition. That is why disgust is a protective mechanism which is found fairly far down the phylogenetic ladder, while horror can be ascribed only to the most intelligent animals (apes, elephants, dolphins, dogs, and horses).27 It is also how horror makes art horror possible, because it can be artful in a way that disgust cannot be. In the same way, we should distinguish horror from mere shock or what in psychology is called the startle reaction.28 Carroll sometimes suggests that the horror experience typically involves shock, but he wisely catches himself and warns that shock alone is not an emotion and not sufficient to characterize the horror experience.29 Again, third-rate directors may well get a sharp physiological reaction out of an audience by having a creature (or almost anyone or anything) suddenly leap in front of the camera and into the faces of the unprepared audience, or startle them with a sudden loud noise. But this has nothing to do with horror. Surprise is a bit more intriguing, for it is a fully cognitive emotion (whereas being shocked or startled is not an Real Horror [ 115]

emotion at all). (Being startled is a straightforward physiological reaction without any cognitive dimension. Being shocked is more complex, ranging from a straightforward medical condition, a partial collapse of circulatory function following trauma, to something that is emotionally disruptive—but without itself being an emotion. Hearing that one’s father has just died is a shock, but the emotions [grief, dismay, etc.] follow.) Surprise (like horror) involves a contrast between expectations and what appears. Some emotion theorists (e.g., Keith Oatley) have insisted that all emotions depend on such a contrasting change in our experience, but I think that this is wrong. As Martha Nussbaum has argued, it badly distorts such emotions as love, joy, and depression.30 But clearly an emotion cannot be surprise if it is fully expected (and expected at that time and of that intensity). One is surprised by the surprise party given by one’s friends, but only if one has not been forewarned. (How difficult it can be to feign surprise under such conditions!) So, too, horror involves a contrast, but it is not just a contrast between what is expected and what is experienced in anything like the same sense. The contrast is rather between what is ‘‘normal’’ and what is monstrous. (Thus many authors, notably Noe¨l Carroll and Steven Jay Schneider, take ‘‘the monster’’ to be at the heart of horror.) Thus one can be both surprised and horrified by the same occurrence, but these are not the same. (Surprise also shares with horror its passivity—we are surprised, we are horrified.) The World Trade Center tragedy caught the country by surprise, and the horror may have been heightened by this. But the surprise was not necessary to the experience of horror, and in the awful prospect of continuing terrorist attacks there is no reason to suppose that the horror—as opposed to the surprise—will diminish. Further along the line of cognitive sophistication we have surprise as wonder, which Descartes lists as one of his six ‘‘primitive’’ emotions. (‘‘Wonder is a surprise if the soul which causes it to apply itself to consider with attention the objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.’’)31 But here we begin to approach the notion of the sublime and with it the proper domain of aesthetics (though not necessarily of art horror). The point is that while horror may also be shocking or a surprise, and even startle us, horror is not shock or surprise or startle although it does share with surprise (as Descartes’s wonder) at least an implicit recognition of the extraordinary. Horror should most importantly be distinguished from fear. This is a point of considerable contention in the literature on art horror. Kendall Walton, for instance, in his very well-known article ‘‘Fearing Fictions’’ and in his book Mimesis as Make-Believe, talks almost entirely about fear (and makebelieve fear), and hardly about horror at all (although he is writing about horror films). Noe¨l Carroll, by contrast, writes almost entirely of horror, not fear, but that fact that he strictly limits his attention to art horror is of [ 116] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

considerable significance here. There is an intricate debate about whether the emotion evoked by art horror is genuine emotion or not. (There is no such debate, of course, about whether the emotion evoked by real horror is genuine emotion or not.) But I think that before we enter into this debate, we ought to determine what the emotion in question is. If the emotion in question is fear, then paradoxical concerns arise immediately. If fear is (at least in part) the strong urge to avoid or get away from danger ( presupposing the belief that there is danger), then the question hits hard how we can have any such emotion when we know that there is no such danger. The H. G. Wells/Orson Welles case is illustrative: the audience did not know that the invasion from Mars was wholly fictional, but believed that it was in fact happening. There is no paradox of make-believe fear there. It was fear, pure and simple. And for those who knew what Welles was doing, there was no fear at all, only entertainment (or, perhaps, intellectual disdain). But horror should not be analyzed in terms of immediate or proximate danger. One can be horrified by that which poses no threat at all—for instance, by the dead body of one’s cat who disappeared months ago. Thus we can appreciate what Stanley Cavell means when he notes that ‘‘terror is of violence, of the violence I might do or that might be done me. I can be terrified of thunder, but not horrified by it.’’32 My fourteen-year-old dogs, who have survived more than a hundred thunderstorms, nevertheless cower and whimper with each new one. The thunder is fearsome, but it is not in any sense ghastly. One can also be horrified by that which one learns secondhand, for example, on the news or in conversation, although it suggests no threat whatever to oneself or to anyone one knows. Nor do we have to retreat to the merely physiological (the goosebumps that give ‘‘horror’’ its name: the word ‘‘horror’’ comes from the Latin horrere and the French horror—to bristle or to shudder). It may well be that such physiological symptoms of both fear and horror may be produced by fictional representations (even when one knows that they are fictional), but such symptoms alone are not any emotion at all. (Thus the attempt to split emotion from cognition fails as a solution to the paradox.) Nor need we retreat to ‘‘quasi-fear responses’’ in which there is no inclination to act (to flee or call the police, for example). In horror, there is no inherent urge to flee (in fact, the ‘‘gawking’’ impulse would suggest the very opposite). No ‘‘as if ’’ behavior counts as any part of the emotion, and the absence of any urge to flee does not in any way undermine the claim that the emotion is real. Again, however, there are few instances of ‘‘pure’’ horror, and fear is often intermingled. In this dimension, perhaps, the horror movie is as close as one comes to ‘‘pure’’ horror, but then, of course, it is mixed with entertainment and any number of other ‘‘impurities.’’ In horror, one stands (or sits) aghast, frozen in place or glued to one’s seat. Of course, one can be frozen (or paralyzed) by fear, but that is when Real Horror [ 117]

fear becomes horror. Horror involves a helplessness that fear evades. The evasive activities of fear may be pointless, even self-defeating, but they are activities nonetheless, activities that can be feigned. Horror is a spectator’s emotion, and thus it is especially well suited for the cinema and the visual arts. Horror does not include any ‘‘action readiness,’’ in-Nico Frijda’s terms, unless we suppose that freezing and screaming are full-blown actions and not mere expressions of horror. Daniel Shaw, by contrast, thinks that horror, art horror, at least, is inspired by a vicarious fascination with power. He proposes ‘‘a genre analysis that posits a catharsis theory of horror-pleasure.’’33 He appeals to one of my favorite authors and mentors, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy of the will to power suggests that power motivates all human (and nonhuman) behavior (although it is not always clear whether it is the acquisition of power, the feeling of power, or the discharge of power that serves as this ultimate motivation). Shaw argues that the pleasure we glean from horror films comes from our dual identification with both the threatening antagonists and human protagonists in such works. The astounding feats of the monster or human psychotic are what most attracts us to them, for they exhibit powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. It is precisely for this reason that we revel in their penchant for wreaking immeasurable havoc. Vicariously sharing in their superhuman acts, we are exhilarated and alarmed by our enjoyment of the forbidden.34

Perhaps, but thinking of the World Trade Center catastrophe, however awesome the spectacle and however diabolically clever the plan, what horrifies us is not the power of the forces or the intelligence displayed, but the sheer awfulness of what happened and the fact that we were utterly powerless to do anything about it. One can, perhaps, imagine an al-Qaeda operative watching his brethren’s handiwork from a safe distance and getting considerable pleasure out of it as he takes in the awesome power of the forces unleashed. But, of course, he is not horrified at all. He identifies with the antagonists (or are they, for him, the protagonists?) and their awesome display of power, and that may be a source of pleasure. But it is not horror. So, too, in a horror film we may well identify with the protagonist and (as in a Freudian dream) identify as well with all of the other characters, and this may give us considerable pleasure. But insofar as we do so, I would argue that we are not horrified. Shaw’s account may indeed explain at least some of our response to at least part of the genre of art horror, but I find it quite misleading if it is extended to real horror as well. The distinction between fear and horror applies as well to the distinction between terror and horror. Terror is an extreme form of fear (and I would argue that it, like horror, necessarily excludes pleasure). Terror, too, requires [ 118] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a real danger (or the belief that danger is real). When Stanley Cavell insisted that ‘‘I can be terrified of thunder, but not horrified by it,’’ he assumed that I (like my dogs) believe that it constitutes a real danger to me. (One might wonder how much of the emotional impact of thunder lies in the mere fact of surprise, however. Contrast the startling effect of a sudden ‘‘boom!’’ with the marauding presence of ‘‘rolling thunder.’’) Terror may sometimes result in panic, but panic and terror are still quite different (as are panic and fear). Panic is essentially a physiological reaction, an almost ‘‘mindless’’ urge to flee (which, in the absence of restraints, results in fleeing). Patricia Churchland assures me that panic can be electrically stimulated (in a cat, for instance) even in the absence of any perceived danger. Thus one might suggest that panic differs from fear in that it lacks not only belief but also an object, although this, I think, is going one step too far. Terror often results in panic insofar as it is rarely reflective and often obsessive. Horror, by contrast, may be overwhelming but there is no reason to panic if only because there is nowhere to flee. So, too, we should distinguish horror from such emotions as anxiety and dread. Anxiety has been argued to lack a proper object, notably by Freud, who defined ‘‘free-floating anxiety’’ in exactly that way. (The claim that the object—or the connection between the object and the anxiety—remained ‘‘unconscious’’ somewhat undermined the idea that the anxiety lacks an object). In any case, anxiety has an ‘‘obscure’’ object but horror, by contrast, has a quite striking and specific object. So, too, with dread, another emotion whose object remains at a distance. (Thus Kierkegaard took this concept to refer to ‘‘the unknown’’ in an unusually profound way.) Dread shares with fear a sense of imminent danger, and it shares with anxiety the obscurity of its object. So again it differs from horror in two important ways: no imminent danger and no specific object. So what is horror? It can indeed be a ‘‘primitive’’ emotion, one that is barely articulable and in that sense noncognitive (or cognitively impenetrable, in the latest jargon). But it nevertheless consists of a horrified recognition that things are not as they ought to be, which in turn requires an implicit comparison (if only as ‘‘seeing as’’) and an evaluative judgment or appraisal.35 The object of horror is concrete as opposed to abstract (although we may secondarily employ such phrases as ‘‘I am horrified by the idea that . . .’’), specific rather than nonspecific. Thus one might dread the unknown or be generally anxious, but one is properly horrified by a particular and more or less immediate event or object of perception. Horror is detached or at least distanced from action (thus distinguishing it from fear). Thus horror evokes no ‘‘action readiness,’’ although one might react to the horror (as opposed to from fear), for example, by turning away or by screaming. In this sense I called it a spectator emotion (even in real life), and it thereby seems Real Horror [ 119]

appropriate to talk without paradox about horror in the face of fictional events and objects—for example, in films and in art in general. The complex state of mind involved in being moved by that which one knows to be makebelieve is not a paradox.

From Horror to Art Horror Art horror is a historical phenomenon, and it has a long history that preceded the advent of cinema and the first film depiction of The Golem shortly before World War I by hundreds or thousands of years. Real horror may to some extent depend on the time and the place (what horrifies depends on what is expected and what is believed, and what might be horrible in one circumstance might be routine in another), but art horror is complicated by the added dimension of genre. Noe¨l Carroll traces art horror back to the gothic novels of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, but before them there were real Gothic horror stories of all sorts, which Carroll too readily dismisses because people actually believed them.36 I think that Carroll is wrong—or too much in a hurry to get to his preferred subject of movies— when he insists that the horror genre began during and as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Before the explicitly depicted horrors of Hell and damnation there was Petronius’s Satyricon and the many monsters of the Odyssey, not to mention the horrifying manifestations of Shiva and Kali, the malevolent goddesses of the Solomon Islands and the devils of Bali, the monster Grendel in Beowulf, and later the perversities of Merlin in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. In every human society, there has always been art horror as well as horror—that is, depictions of and/or stories about what is horrible, and inevitably these depictions took on a life of their own, evoking art horror in place of horror, whether or not people continued to believe them. I also think that Carroll is mistaken in limiting his analysis to the peculiar contemporary experience of sitting in a theater or in front of a television set watching one of a large but carefully delimited set of mostly inferior, often silly, and culturally pointless films. There is something to be said for his casual suggestion that horror novels depicting the ‘‘unnatural’’ presupposed the Enlightenment conception of an orderly nature, and I agree with him that the usual Manichaean account of horror and much of Romanticism as the ‘‘dark side’’ of the Enlightenment depend on an image that is both inaccurate and obscure. But what Romanticism really represented does not seem to be of any interest to him, including its proclivity for original Gothic (i.e., medieval) and ancient pagan mysteries and monsters. What happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is but part of a story that goes back to prebiblical times, no doubt beginning when a few rather clever cavemen [ 120] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

(or, more likely, cavewomen) scared the pelts off some of the youngsters by invoking the possible presence of monsters that were by no means fictional at the time. Stoking the emotions with (more or less) make-believe horror on the basis of honest-to-goodness real horror seems to be one of those perennial but often neglected bits of human nature that make our species both much more interesting and more perverse than it would be if we limited ourselves to real horror. Within the genre of horror movies, which for obvious technological reasons did not begin before the twentieth century, there is a multifaceted history that deserves some attention. It is not insignificant that the genre and all of the early classics began in Germany, despite the fact that the technology was developed in the United States and France. It is not coincidental that America followed the (defeated) Germans into the genre only several years after World War I, and then with a spoof rather than horror. Whereas the Germans sought to stoke (or restoke) horror, the Americans evidently liked their horror buffered and limited—one step removed, so to speak. It is also worth noting how ‘‘celebrity-bound’’ the American pictures and their never-ending sequels became, such that Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi became so identified with the parts they played that a viewing of The Mummy or Frankenstein or Dracula (or any of their many variations) became much like spending a few hours with an obnoxious but entertaining relative. It was hardly subjecting oneself to horror. It is also a significant fact that so many of the films made today are splatter films. Our timidity about horror seems to have led to a propensity for the disgusting, for disgust is a much easier emotion to handle and get over than horror. Disgust, unlike horror, has little lasting significance. Seeking a definition of art horror (as Carroll does) is an admirable enterprise, but it depends on how we circumscribe the scope of our examples. I think that Carroll makes some overly refined and historically misleading divisions between horror and fantasy, thrillers and monster pictures as such, and we lose a good deal of material that way. It matters a great deal, for example, whether one takes Jaws, King Kong, The Blob, Night of the Living Dead, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast or (Carroll’s own apparent favorite) The Exorcist as a paradigm. I join many critics in finding Carroll’s exclusion of Psycho lamentable, and how about Robert Mitchum’s Night of the Hunter? There may be no monsters, but there are plenty of tingles and sleepless nights following. (How many people still had qualms about closing the shower curtain years after first seeing Psycho?) Then there is Kendall Walton’s green slime, which fits Carroll’s definition, whereas the biologically more plausible monster (or rather monstrous) shark in Jaws does not. ( That is, unless one interprets that particular shark as unnatural, impossibly huge, unusually intelligent, and malicious, even sadistic. But I think that misses the central point of the movie, which is to present the shark as perfectly plausible. Real Horror [ 121]

Its size is by no means unknown in nature, and I would guess that its vicious behavior is not particularly exaggerated.) If we are temporarily entertained ( hardly horrified) by the blob of green slime, there were certainly many people who continued to express and exhibit horror after Peter Benchley’s remarkably well-timed shark attack novel and movie. On the other hand, the sentimental if somewhat chauvinist giant ape film King Kong began as horror and evolved into soap opera, as did any number of other lovable monster movies (including, one could argue, the original [Mary Shelley’s] and Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein).37 I do not want to take a stand on the issue of defining art horror here, but I do want to highlight one particular kind of horror film (and literature) that seems to me most emotionally poignant. It is that sense of inner horror which The Exorcist badly mangles but is much better represented in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Ron Rosenbaum caught nicely in his 1979 Harper’s piece ‘‘Gooseflesh.’’ His is a quasi-religious analysis of horror, but I do not think religion is essential to it. A secular paradigm would be the ideologically loaded ‘‘cold war’’ threats of mind control such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the blatant propaganda has been excised from the movie). Or Claude Rains’s brilliant performance in the The Invisible Man, in which his invisibility soon gives way to megalomania and psychosis. More recently, there are Altered States and Alien. These are all, in one way or another, stories of possession. They may feature what is (currently) scientifically implausible (for instance, a formula to make a person invisible), but the subject of the film is ultimately a fundamental human fear, the fear of oneself. For possession need not come from the outside, as an invasion or a peculiar pharmaceutical. More horrifying, because more palpably real, is possession by our own powers. ( Thus Sartre, in particular, distinguishes anguish or anxiety (angoisse) from fear. In anxiety, we are afraid of ourselves, although Sartre’s conception of agency would not easily lend itself to the possession story.) We can trace a history of narratives warning against the abuse of one’s powers (whether magical, mythical, or alchemical) back to the medieval and Oriental enchanters and enchantresses who became caught up in their own wizardry and forward to the modern genre of science fiction horror. Frankenstein, for instance, coincides with the beginning of the revolution in medical technology, and the horror films of the 1950s coincide with the fears and horrors of the nuclear age. One can also note the contemporary significance of the ancient horror tale of King Midas, which certainly ought to have significance in the world of Wall Street and in the wake of bankrupt Enron today. Indeed, what the Midas story underscores is the significance of those horror stories without monsters at all, that is, without the sort of ‘‘unnatural’’ or ‘‘split’’ monsters discussed by Carroll. ( In this sense one might consider Wall Street a horror film as well as a cautionary tale.) [ 122] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

But such examples and the paradigm in general suggest that we should not flat-footedly declare that the difference between art horror and real horror is that art horror’s objects are fictional. They not only may be ‘‘realistic’’ and even ‘‘based on a true story’’; they may be very real indeed. What makes art horror art instead of just horror is the fact that it is presented or packaged for impact. Thus there is real merit in Levinson’s suggestion that art horror depends on real horror for its impact and its significance, but I would amend his thesis in two ways. First, art horror may not only depend on real horror for its impact and significance; its object may in fact be the object of a real horror. Second, not all art horror has to be based on real horror, if by ‘‘real horror’’ we mean only those nonintellectual, perceptually based, cognitively impenetrable quasi-belief-based emotions. But sometimes the real horror on which art horror is based is fully articulate and thoughtful, which makes it readily available for packaging and artful presentation as art horror.

So Whence the Pleasure in (Art) Horror? I said that horror is by its very nature a spectator emotion, but I did not mean to imply by this that it is an detached or disinterested emotion, free from care or concern. To the contrary, horror is necessarily an overwhelming emotional response to what is horrible. But the fact that horror is overwhelming, I hypothesized, also means that it is not one of those emotions which can be ‘‘mixed,’’ and, in particular, it does not mix with pleasure. While fear and pleasure combine in various ways, horror, by contrast, does not. The conditions under which fear and pleasure combine may be complex. (They need not include the belief that there is not really any cause for fear. On the contrary, the fear enjoyed by most daredevils depends on the danger being very real.) But although horror does not combine with pleasure, it may be followed by pleasure—for instance, when one is relieved to discover that the horrifying object or event was not as it seemed (for instance, when the apparently dead body of one’s elderly but mischievous grandparent suddenly springs to life with a hearty laugh). Moreover, the anticipation of such pleasure may itself be pleasurable. But what is not pleasurable is the horror. It can be argued that the response evoked or provoked by art horror is first and foremost a response to the art, not to the horror. This would explain how we can appreciate art horror rather than just being horrified, and that is why we can even enjoy it. It has often been argued that in art horror we appreciate the skill of the presentation rather than the subject matter. This difference in focus at least diminishes or minimizes the paradox of the pleasure–horror of art horror because it is not the horror but the art we are enjoying. Of course, a purely fictional work may evoke horrific memories of Real Horror [ 123]

real horror (as Levinson argues is always the case), in which case the focus shifts back to the object of horror and away from the art, and pleasure becomes impossible. Thus Noe¨l Carroll ( having rejected religious, Freudian, and ideological accounts) retreats to a purely aesthetic account. Carroll says that what we really find is pleasure in the plot, on which he spends considerable time showing us its structures. We enjoy ‘‘the rhetorical framing of horror, and its narrative form.’’38 Art horror is ‘‘an aesthetic contrivance,’’ and monsters are simply ‘‘natural subjects for curiosity.’’39 In many so-called horror stories and films, the horror is merely alluded to. The book or film in question is actually a comedy. Indeed, I would venture that the bulk of American horror films are clearly intended in just this way. I think that one problem with Carroll’s book (corrected by him since) was his separation of art horror from humor.40 In terms of my earlier hypothesis (that humor and horror are incompatible), I thoroughly agree that they should be separated. But that is quite compatible with saying that most horror films do not involve horror at all, and what they do involve, mere reference to horror, can be quite humorous. Thus despite its predictably more somber origins in Germany, the horror film in America has almost always been tied up with comedy. The first Hollywood horror film was a spoof (Paul Leni’s Cat and the Canary), and it was not long before Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges were sharing the screen with Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and Lon Chaney, Jr. Roger Corman made his reputation with a sequence of films that were much more ludicrous than they were frightening (notably, the original version of Little Shop of Horrors, recently remade as a Lower East Side play in New York and then a trendy film with Rick Moranis and Steve Martin). King Kong is comic as well as cosmic, and Donald Sutherland carries echoes of M.A.S.H. into the podland with him. The (sub)genre of ‘‘schlock horror’’ has continued to be one of lower Hollywood’s most prolific productions, and many (if not most) of the horror films produced since the 1960s obviously have been intended as laughable rather than terrifying (e.g., Scream, Scream II, Scream III, etc.). And this is to say nothing of the rubber-suited Japanese monsters or the truly gifted horror–comedies of Tim Dalton (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands), Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers, or George Hamilton as an implausibly suntanned Dracula in Love at First Bite. If art horror involves mixed emotions, then in accordance with our earlier hypothesis we should insist that the object of pleasant emotions is something other than the object of horror—for instance, the skills required for the effectiveness of the presentation, the techniques displayed, the intertextual references to other works of the same genre, the little jokes that punctuate even the ‘‘scariest’’ horror films. I do not want to make this an a priori claim, however, and I do not want to ignore questions about the status of intentional [ 124] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

objects of emotion. On the contrary, the question of what the intentional object of horror (and art horror) is will be crucial to understanding, among other things, those cases of art horror in which we want both to insist and to deny that the object is the same in both the real case and the fictitious case. But I do not want to address that complex issue here. What I want to suggest is only that the object of horror (art horror) is not the object or source of pleasure. Thus, in accordance with our hypothesis, we might suggest that people don’t go to horror films (read horror books, etc.) to enjoy them but for other reasons: to prove their mettle or to prepare themselves for some future potential horror or to satisfy their curiosity, and this they might enjoy. Teenage males go to horror films to prove their bravado and insensitivity. ( The promotions challenge: ‘‘If you are brave enough to watch!’’) Their semiwilling girlfriends go along today for the same reason, though a decade or so ago they went along as an excuse to engage in the submissive helpless behavior that modern feminism has now bred out of them.41 Tenured professors (male and female alike) may sit up late at night, watching once again one of so many mummies stagger back to the vault, but I doubt that the reason is to enjoy (much less to experience) the horror. More likely, it is in order to study this curious popular phenomenon (though the question ‘‘Why choose this phenomenon?’’ cannot be ignored). Viewers may watch horror films to continue an adolescent ritual. They may view them to appreciate the art (but the proportion of films that reward such an interest is notoriously small). It could even be to regain a youthful machismo or live those years again or, perhaps, to identify vicariously with power and evil ( Daniel Shaw’s Nietzschean interpretation). But sometimes a cigar is just a smoke, and the purpose may be nothing deeper than the desire to while away a slow Saturday night and enjoy a beer or two or a glass of wine. Then there is the more controversial theory that people use ‘‘makebelieve’’ horror to compensate for the real-life horrors like the ones they witnessed in New York. (We should note that ‘‘compensation’’ is backwardlooking in law, an attempt to right a previous wrong. But what is often intended in this context is forward-looking, as if experiencing fictional horror will lessen future real horror.) The mechanism for this ‘‘compensation’’ is by no means clear, nor is the similarity between the real horror and the pretend variety. But in what sense (if any) can the fiction or fantasy of unspeakable horror lessen the horror of something painfully real? It is a common supposition that exposure to horror (fiction or not) ‘‘desensitizes’’ people, especially children, to real horror (an argument that is most often made with reference to violence). To be sure, there is something to the habituation argument (repeated exposure to A lessens the shock of a new instance of A), but shock is not all there is to horror, and habituation Real Horror [ 125]

need not diminish horror but rather solidifies it; and, in any case, it is not clear that any fiction serves to ‘‘compensate’’ for or lessen any real horror. Two instances of real horror may have such an effect on one another, but there is not much evidence that art horror has much of an effect on the horror of real horror. (With reference to violence, there is another, more troublesome set of considerations that are often confused with the question of ‘‘compensation.’’ Suggestible people, especially children, may well imitate violent behavior, even the relatively innocent antics of the Three Stooges, causing considerable harm. But this is a matter of doing, and as I have argued, horror is not a matter of doing anything, so imitation is not relevant to the question of compensation.) It has often been argued that the object of art horror must at least be a real possibility or at least associated with an object of real horror. But art horror cannot be too real. The scheduled release of ‘‘action’’ movies was seriously disrupted after September 11. The reasoning was straightforward: depictions of plane crashes are rarely screened on airplanes, and not just because to do so would be a flagrant violation of taste. (A recent exception was Tom Hanks’s Cast Away on transoceanic flights, despite the harrowing enactment of an airplane crash early in the film.) The depiction of an airplane crash too readily evokes the idea of a real airplane crash. To say the obvious, it is not the case that watching a movie about airline crashes, no matter how fictionalized, immunizes a nervous flyer before his or her upcoming trip. So, too, in the weeks following the attack on the World Trade Center, Hollywood editors were busily editing out shots of the twin towers and even canceling new releases because they were ‘‘just too real’’ and evocative of the real-life horror. Thus one consideration for art horror may be that its object must be close to a real object, but another is that for there to be any pleasure at all, art horror must remain at a safe distance. Getting these two demands in balance is the (rarely met) challenge of horror film producers. One source of pleasure lies in the fact that we choose to watch horror films and read books whose subject matter horrifies us. In control, there is pleasure. Just as it is the self-infliction of pain that brings with it the pleasure of control (though we do not thereby enjoy the pain), it is through the selfinfliction of horror that we enjoy a certain amount of control (though we do not thereby enjoy the horror). Thus there is something suggestive but also sanctimonious about the common complaint that the most effective horror films are ‘‘manipulative.’’ For example, Jaws (I) was so accused, even by some of the best reviewers in the business. But, of course, what you were paying three dollars for (back in 1975) was precisely to be skillfully manipulated and appropriately horrified. But, by the same token, making it too obvious how you are being manipulated (as in overly tearjerker movies) undermines the effects of the manipulation. We are ‘‘willing,’’ in Coleridge’s phrase, whether [ 126] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

or not we willingly suspend our disbelief. And our willingness itself is conducive to a certain pleasure. (The angry reactions of an unwitting friend who accompanies you to Carrie or Silence of the Lambs, in the belief that the movie will be a romance, provides a telling contrast.) But, again, it does not follow that it is the horror itself that we find pleasurable. What we find enjoyable is only our ability to choose to watch or to turn away. Given that art horror is by definition horror ‘‘mixed’’ and compromised, if only by being packaged and intentionally presented, several further suggestions present themselves. First, the pleasure lies in precisely the fact that it is make-believe, that it is not real.42 The pleasure is thus not in the horror but in the absence of the horror. (What we make of the status of make-believe objects or make-believe horror is not essential to this point.) Second, the pleasure comes from the fact that the horror is orchestrated, whether well or badly, such that one can (through identification with the hero or heroes) get some sense of power or control over the horror, which is what is so obviously absent in real-life horror.43 I think that this point is independent of the many concerns over the nature of empathy and ‘‘identification’’ with fictional characters in fiction. Third, one can satisfy one’s curiosity about a certain source of horror, knowing full well that it is only make-believe.44 Again, the pleasure is not in the horror but in the absence of (or safe distance from) the horror, now mixed with a certain sense of familiarity (and in that sense mastery) of it. Fourth, what is uncertain and mysterious is resolved and clarified in the course of the narration.45 But once again, the pleasure is in the narrative satisfaction, not the horror. Richard Gilmore tries to explain the pleasure obtained in art horror with an utterly implausible evolutionary hypothesis, according to which horror is a feeling that originated—and had adaptive value—in children who watched with horror as their parents were killed by marauding beasts or unfriendly neighbors.46 Thus the pleasure in horror, he says, is the pleasure of surviving. This, I think, is an unbelievable stretch, first in attributing pleasure of any kind to the children whose parents are being slaughtered and who are obviously threatened themselves as well, and second in trying to derive the giddy amusement that often accompanies art horror from something so horrible in real life. But the mistake here is not so much the utterly implausible evolutionary hypothesis as it is the much more common insistence that art horror, as such, gives pleasure. Why else, the argument goes, would people voluntarily and sometimes frequently subject themselves to this? There is a much more plausible analysis than this desperate and dubious search for a source of pleasure and it has much to do with the need for ‘‘compensation.’’ Horror is traumatic. Trauma demands repetition. This is not to say that a traumatized person wants the traumatic event itself to be repeated, of course. But James Pennebaker and other trauma psychologists Real Horror [ 127]

have made much of the need for those who have suffered trauma to relive, revisualize, speak, or write about the trauma, and they have shown that writing or talking about one’s experiences allows one to ‘‘work through’’ the trauma.47 As a consequence, not only do memories of the trauma become less painful but there are all sorts of health benefits: reduced stress, stronger immune system, and so on.48 So here is the alternative hypothesis: people benefit (but do not get pleasure) from repetitive but make-believe horror experiences because by repeatedly confronting something resembling the object of their (real) horror, they work through the original trauma and learn to deal with it. They thus gain a kind of satisfaction, perhaps, but not pleasure. There are some obvious but difficult questions about whether choosing to experience art horror that is reminiscent of real horror leads to anything so constructive as the results of writing or talking about it. Then there are all of those questions about what the actual or original object of horror might be (whether it is some specific trauma or trauma type, or whether it is a general working through trauma as such). What is the traumatic event that is being replayed and worked through in this way? But it is at least a plausible hypothesis that willingly exposing oneself to repeated fictional depictions of what once was real horror may have some salutary effects. But, again, a decrease in pain and trauma, or the satisfaction of a pathological need, should not be confused with pleasure. In September 2001, people around the world stayed glued to their television sets as CNN and other stations repeated the same gruesome scenes over and over and over. This was not just an attempt to get more information (although, to be sure, the networks abused their viewer’s hunger for information by imposing those repetitive images on them). Art horror is a good way to reiterate trauma in a safe and less upsetting way, if only because it (unlike the real horrors in the background) is obviously not real. By contrast, real horror repeated (like the continuous repetition of the television images on September 11) can contribute to and even cause mental illness. (It can seem to cause numbness, but trauma specialists would quickly point out that this is usually an illusion, a mask for very real and persistent trauma.) With this delicate balance between therapy and trauma in mind, we might better appreciate director Roman Polanski’s translation of his own real-life childhood trauma into some of the most brilliant horror films ever made (Repulsion, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Rosemary’s Baby). But our pleasure, again, is not in the horror. It is in the brilliance with which the art horror is depicted and the real horror is sublimated. But here is yet another kind of explanation of the supposed pleasure associated with art horror (and, perhaps, with horror too). Arousal can be pleasurable (especially in the young).49 This is not to say that all arousal is pleasurable, and being aroused by horror should not be pleasurable at all. [ 128] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

But arousal is indiscriminate, without an essential object, and so it can be redirected from the object that initially provokes it (something horrible) to something else. Thus Ovid (in his treatise on love) suggests taking ladies to the gladiatorial arena, where they will be sufficiently aroused (though horrified) that their arousal can readily be redirected to sexual passion, transferring that excitement from disgust to lust. ( Just in case you wondered why taking dates to horror movies remains a favorite ritual among adolescents.) But Ovid’s thesis has gained considerable empirical (that is, scientific) support in recent years (not to mention the testimonials of any number of seducers from the ancient world to the modern). But because arousal as such can be pleasurable, one might suppose that horror (as a species of arousal) can be pleasurable. But not all arousal is pleasurable and arousal by horror is, I submit, never pleasurable. Sometimes, one might argue, the objects of real-life horror really do give pleasure. I hope we can agree that when this happens, it is morally repugnant, and the moral repugnance lies precisely in the fact that those who enjoy the horrible no longer find that the horrible provokes horror. The Romans had their circuses, in which gladiators disemboweled one another and wild animals devoured innocent and often unarmed religious martyrs. The people cheered, delighted by the ‘‘performances.’’ They became sufficiently desensitized to suffering that blood and gore and even screams and tears could be viewed without compassion. Sadistic dictators in Chile and Argentina during their dark decades also displayed an inhuman insensitivity to their torturers’ victims, enjoying and being amused rather than horrified by the horrors. There is some concern that art horror may have this effect, too, desensitizing viewers to suffering and allowing them to view real horror as if it were merely pretend, special effects. The evidence for this proposition (like the evidence for the thesis that watching violence prompts violence) remains inconclusive, but the pathology of enjoying what ought to provoke horror seems to me undebatable. In short, when people do take pleasure in horror, this should not be a question in aesthetics. It is a question in psychopathology, which, certain trendy movements aside, is not the same thing.

Conclusion So what is horror? Horror is an extremely unpleasant and even traumatizing emotional experience that renders the subject (victim) helpless and violates his or her most rudimentary expectations about the world. This way of thinking about horror renders utterly inappropriate any question of enjoying or getting pleasure from horror. There is no ‘‘paradox of horror pleasure.’’ Horror is not pleasurable. Aristotle, arguing against Plato, defended the Real Horror [ 129]

theater, and tragedy in particular, as preparatory for the emotions and for life. That is why, he argued, we get pleasure from experiences that are not at all pleasurable, from depicted horrible events that evoke fear and pity. But the source of pleasure is not the horror (e.g., the self-mutilation of Oedipus). It is the excellence of the presentation itself (in accordance with the outlines that Aristotle so carefully laid out). Moreover, there is some satisfaction to be gained from the overall experience of having opened ourselves up to the horrors of life. By confronting the extremes of life on the page and in the theater, we open ourselves to the contingencies of life, and we may feel a certain satisfaction, but hardly pleasure, at having done so. But when it comes to real horror, there can be no satisfaction, much less any pleasure. Real horror is, without exception, horrible. It is an emotional liability that we bear for the blessing of living, those of us who are so lucky, in a world in which real horror is sufficiently rare that we seek out its mere titillation.

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Six Comic Relief In Appreciation of the Seven Deadly Sins

The term ‘‘sin’’—like the names of the some of the sins (for instance, ‘‘greed’’)—is heavily loaded with negative connotations. To label a bit of behavior as sinful is utterly to condemn it. But it was Friedrich Nietzsche who pointed out that our sins are often the flip side of our virtues, and vice versa. He also urged us to think ‘‘beyond good and evil,’’ with the same thesis in mind. There is a good deal of behavior that is bad for us, to be sure, but this is very different from condemning it as evil. Following Nietzsche, I want to go beyond moral judgment and simply appreciate (which is emphatically not to say admire) the so-called seven deadly sins. My aim, accordingly, is to put a good chunk of contemporary ethics in perspective. Since the 1980s, I have often defended what is now called, with frightening rigidity, ‘‘virtue ethics.’’1 I don’t so much mind being pigeonholed ( I’m also known as an existentialist), and it has helped me stake out something of a position in business ethics, in particular. But I am bothered by the designation, for at least two reasons. First, the word ‘‘virtue’’ has been hijacked by the right wing in America, notably by Mr. Virtue himself, William Bennett, and I am anxious to divorce my concept of virtue and the virtues from his. (Again, to quote Nietzsche, who got the goods on Bennett over a century ago: ‘‘There are those who consider it a virtue to say, ‘virtue is necessary,’ but at bottom they believe only that the police are necessary.’’2) Second, the notion of virtue has a Goody Two-shoes aura around it. Many of the books under the rubric ‘‘virtue ethics’’ read like sermons, and because they focus on personal character rather than abstract rules and their justification, their ad hominem nagging quality is particularly cloying. That is why ( like my New Zealand colleague Christine Swanton) I tend to gravitate toward Nietzsche rather than Aristotle in my elaboration and defense of virtue ethics. No one would consider Nietzsche ( his philosophy, that is) as Goody Two-Shoes. From a Nietzschean perspective, I would like to reconsider the seven sins or, rather, some vices, the ones pointedly recognized and cataloged by the Christian church and popular morality. Again, this is not a defense of them, but rather, through a general exploration, an attempt to

lighten things up. Are these vices ‘‘deadly’’? Goodness no. They are not even sins. The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and morality plays and plots for nearly fifteen hundred years. The sins themselves have always been popular and pervasive, of course, but the number seven and that dubious ‘‘deadly’’ have long invited speculation as well. The classic heptalogue was instituted by Pope Gregory I, also known as ‘‘the Great,’’ who in a more charming mood was responsible for the liturgical chanting still associated with his name. His list of seven was confirmed and reasserted by Saint Thomas Aquinas, and it has been reproduced, whether in sermons or in games of Trivial Pursuit, ever since. The list survived the Reformation, the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, tent evangelism, secular humanism, quantum theory, postmodernism, the Nixon and Clinton administrations, the writings of innumerable rabbis and Christian moralists, two series in the NewYork Times, and many bad movies. I have no doubt that the list—not to mention the sins themselves—will survive this somewhat skeptical meditation as well.

Virtues Trampling Vices Around the north portal of the great cathedral in Strasbourg, France, ten contorted, grimacing trolls, representing the vices, lie crushed under the weight (and the formidable weapons) of an equal number of full-standing, quite lovely young women, fully armed and presumably virgins, representing the virtues. Such is the traditional iconography of vice and virtue, the latter trampling the former. The vices are represented as diminutive and pathetic, barely human, while the virtues are almost invariably portrayed in terms of unblemished (and untouchable) human perfection. Our vices render us less than fully human, while our virtues make us more than human, even saintly. The vices have always had a bad rap, especially when they are reclassified as ‘‘sins,’’ that is, as offenses not only against taste, personal dignity, and social propriety but also against God Himself. But then again, isn’t it obvious that these ‘‘sins’’ are in fact the very stuff of life—the hot, puffy, humiliating, pathetic, but essential ingredients in that human comedy which began with the expulsion from Eden? The virtues, by contrast, all too often tend to be humorless, self-righteous, cool, even cold, like their statuesque counterparts on Strasbourg’s north portal. Even such virtues as congeniality, wittiness, and charm sometimes betray the chilly smoothness of habits too polished, too practiced, too impersonal to be fully convincing. The most congenial virtues, we might dare suggest, may be the most civilized vices—hardly sins, much less ‘‘deadly.’’ [ 132] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

The Human Circus ‘‘The seven deadly sins.’’ Seven is an odd and arbitrary number—despite a long numerological and mystical literature celebrating the supposed magic of seven, and this particular seven is an unusual collection of human foibles: sloth, greed, gluttony, anger, lust, envy, and pride. None of them is particularly hateful or vicious. They are far more the stuff of gossip and sitcoms than the target of moral philosophy. They are a very mixed bunch: the first of them, sloth, is marked by a deficiency (of ambition, of energy, of lust for life); the last, pride, by an exaggeration (of self-worth). Anger suggests loss of control but, more important, self-righteousness and dangerous vengefulness. Envy embellishes invidious comparison with frustration of desire. The other three—greed, gluttony, and lust—might be characterized as straightforward excesses of desire. They are all intimately familiar to us. They are not rare violations or breakdowns of civility, much less the undoing of a perverse species, but rather routine and mundane features of human behavior, ‘‘human-all-too-human,’’ Nietzsche would say. That is my thesis here. Nietzsche found vices galore in the human circus, some of them truly fatal, but the ‘‘deadly’’ seven were not among them. Indeed, real human viciousness and brutality—cruelty, savagery, indifference to human suffering, tyranny, ethnic hatred, religious persecution, and racial bigotry—don’t make the list. Nor do lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, drunkenness, or even murder. ( Why is drinking—and intoxication in general—not among the seven? Perhaps it is not irrelevant that Aquinas himself loved a nip, not to mention Jesus Himself at the Last Supper. Noah’s drunkenness replenished the species, after all, and some of the best beers, wines, and brandies have long provided the main source of income for monasteries in Europe.) To be sure, murder violates one of the most holy commandments of the JudeoChristian tradition. But yet, to say the obvious, the absence of hatred from the list of the ‘‘deadly’’ is conspicuous. Among the many man-made evils in the world, the ‘‘deadly’’ seven barely jiggle the scales of justice, and it is hard to imagine why God would bother to raise a celestial eyebrow about them—in other words, why they would rate as ‘‘sins’’ at all. A clever theologian might argue that the sin is an offense against God’s cosmic order rather than an offense against God personally, but our raised-eyebrow query remains the same: Why would such trivial and ordinary behavior disturb either God’s order or God? Leave aside the big question: Why did He create sinners, knowing that they were going to sin (even assuming that sins are acts of free will)? We are still left with the odd portrait of a God of infinite concerns and capacities being at all bothered by a bloke who can’t get out of bed, or takes one too many peeks at a naughty Playboy pictorial, or scarfs down three extra jelly doughnuts, or has a nasty thought Comic Relief [ 133]

about his shapely neighbor. And yet, the very meaning of ‘‘deadly’’— linguistic slippage, possibly, from the less lethal word ‘‘mortal’’—refers to the loss of one’s soul, condemnation to Hell. Other sins—a simple lie, for instance—may simply be ‘‘venial,’’ a step on the path, but not a slip on the slope, to damnation. The deadly seven sins, however merely human or humorous they may appear, are therefore not funny, nor foibles, nor mere human flaws, but apparently among the very worst of our numerous human burdens. If the seven sins are ‘‘deadly’’ in any sense, perhaps it is because of their apparent innocuousness, their insidious subversiveness, their undeniable ordinariness. They may have their origins in minor lapses, untempered impulses, unchecked childhood habits. They thus slip in, like a parasite that lies in wait for years and does its damage slowly, cumulatively, until somewhere around middle age—what we rather dubiously call ‘‘maturity.’’ Then sin appears, as if born full-blown, betraying the unsightly symptoms of a lifetime gone somewhat to seed. It is sin that gives us each ‘‘the face that we deserve’’—the grimace of envy, the scowl of anger, the leer of lust, the puffy arrogance of pride, the droopiness of sloth, the hungry eyes and slight drool of greed and gluttony. It was Schopenhauer, followed by Twain and possibly anticipated by Confucius, who noted that by the age of forty we each have the face we deserve. With reference to virtue ethics, we might surmise that at twenty-five one has a personality, but by fifty one has character or, rather, one is a character. The so-called sins are more embarrassing than deadly, more self-frustrating than lethal. But they may seem to be deadly insofar as, once established, they are all but impossible to get rid of. Libido may diminish with age but lust continues, even more unseemly as lechery. Or the sin may metamorphose into envy or anger, two emotions whose habit it is to feed on themselves, growing more obsessive even as they prove to be less effective. Lust can be ‘‘sublimated’’ into gluttony, where satisfaction is easier to come by, and of course it can transformed into greed, where ‘‘more’’ has no logical terminus. ‘‘Better than sex,’’ boasts a Wall Street trader in the midst of a boom, ‘‘and no end in sight!’’ (But this was in 1999, before divine retribution burst the bubble and emasculated the Dow.)

Why Seven? Why seven? Why not ten, or perhaps only two? This, too, is instructive. Seven is an ancient magical number that retained tremendous symbolic significance throughout the Middle Ages. One gets the impression that identity of the specific sins is almost arbitrary, ad hoc, so long as that sacred quota is filled. [ 134] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Before Gregory there was a list of eight, and there has always been some interplay with the Ten Commandments. Throughout history, there have been any number of attempts to reduce all of the sins to one: pride, for example, or gluttony. There have been ferocious debates on the matter. But the magic of the number 7 has dominated. It is the perfect number, according to Pythagoras (the sum of 3 and 4, both lucky numbers, too). There are seven hills of Rome, seven was the number of the planets (even Hegel, in the nineteenth century, thought this a natural necessity), seven senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, speech, and understanding), seven notes on the lyre of Hermes (and thus seven notes in the Pythagorean musical scale), and, of course, seven days of the week, seven days of creation (counting the Sabbath), seven bodies in alchemy, seven trumpets at Jericho, seven altars of Balaam, seven week long feasts, the dance of the seven veils, the seventh son of the seventh son, and the seven-year itch. The Muslims and Dante, too, had seven heavens, T. E. Lawrence rediscovered seven pillars of wisdom, and Christ had seven last things to say. If God Himself were to enumerate sins, He would surely make their number equal to the number of days and planets or, more to the point, make the number of vices equal the number of virtues. Of the latter there were seven as well: the Greek and Roman (‘‘cardinal’’) virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperence, and justice, combined with the three Christian (‘‘theological’’) virtues of faith hope, and charity. One surmises that human psychology played a relatively small role in this enumeration. No matter how varied our foibles, numerology was definitive: hebdomania, the obsession with the number seven. The precise number and hierarchy of sins aside, the attempt to catalog and rank the sins bespeaks a certain legalism that has characterized our efforts to come to terms with and contain human frailties, misdemeanors, and crimes. Accounts of character give way to moral accounting.

The Doctrine of the Mean Understandably, but all too often, the sins are characterized—or caricatured— by their most vulgar and humiliating excesses. Late medieval artists went out of their way to portray the sins as monstrous and repulsive, hardly human. And, of course, we can always see the great crimes and evils of history as an elaboration of vice: the wrath of Attila or Ghengis Khan, the megalomanic pride of Hitler or Stalin, the greed of the suburban developer, the real life Lolita-lust of a non– Nabokovian Humbert. But, even short of crime and evil, the vices are rarely given their due. Gluttony, for example, is not usually depicted in terms of an elegant but outrageously opulent Michelin three-star menu du soir dinner. ( The French term gourmand has much to recommend it, in this regard.) Gluttony is, Comic Relief [ 135]

rather, depicted in porcine fashion. The glutton is almost inevitably fat and badly dressed, shirttails draping a bulging belly, and his (more rarely hers) table manners not even fit for a pig (sauces dripping down multiple chins, fistfuls of food traffic-jammed into the hippopotamus-sized mouth, interrupted only by the occasional gasp for breath or pungent eruption of gas). Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life is exemplary. So, too, lust is almost always depicted as wild-eyed and drooling, hopelessly priapic (in the male incarnation), vaginally voracious and insatiable (in the female version). That lovely lust which so often accompanies love in its Aristophanic sense, sweet and sensitive as well as exquisitely insatiable, is quite conscientiously omitted from this obscene eroticism. (‘‘If it’s love, it’s not lust; if it’s lust, it’s not love,’’ goes the simpleminded argument.) Sloth, according to the same excessive stereotypes, cannot even get out of bed. And anger is depicted red-faced, out of control, hateful, unreasonable. But righteous anger, not anger that is self-righteous but anger that is right, warranted, justified—outrage at an egregious injustice, for example—doesn’t fit the stereotype of the explosive petty tyrant who either is out of control or uses his or her anger to intimidate or manipulate (or both). But excesses do not define the vices. They are, we might say, only the potential vices of the vices. And vices are not only excesses (or excesses of excesses); they are also deficiencies. Thus Aristotle defended that doctrine which is usually called ‘‘the doctrine of the mean.’’ The idea, which he intended as something of a definition or criterion of virtue, centered on the idea that the virtues were neither deficiencies nor excesses (courage as neither recklessness nor cowardice, for example). That would mean that seven virtues (although Aristotle kept no neat list of his roughly a dozen virtues) would imply fourteen vices. But this would be numerologically unacceptable, and so the standard view remains the less insightful one: that the virtues and vices are opposites, one vice for every virtue. David Hume, for instance, suggests such a polarity by reducing virtues to qualities ‘‘pleasing and useful to ourselves and others’’ and vice, accordingly, as not so. As his prime examples, Hume considers pride, one of the supposed seven sins, which he defends as a virtue, as opposed to humility, which he calls (ironically) ‘‘a monkish virtue’’—in other words, a vice. Hume is brilliant and cunning in his conceptual somersaults (most famously, his twisting around of reason’s dominance over the passions: ‘‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions’’) but, in this instance, we have to insist that vice is not simply absence of virtue (nor is virtue simply lack of vice). There are, to be sure, parallels and oppositions to be discovered (or invented) between sloth, greed, gluttony, anger, lust, envy, and pride, on the one hand, and prudence, fortitude, temperence, justice, faith, hope, and charity, on the other. But the two lists of seven display an appalling lack of symmetry, and the supposed ‘‘oppositions,’’ an obvious lack [ 136] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

of rigor. The two neat lists of seven are every bit as ad hoc as Aristotle’s dirty dozen. Human virtue and vice do not form a binary system, but rather an organic complex of interlocking habits, emotions, conceptions, compulsions, sensitivities, and behavior. The virtues that make someone admirable may be the vices that make them annoying, and the vices that make someone ‘‘interesting’’ thus become their virtues. Nietzsche was, as so often, insightful about this. Our virtues may also be our fatalities. Could one defend a ‘‘doctrine of the mean’’ regarding the seven sins, or vices? Lust in excess, inappropriate sexual craving, eroticism that forgets its manners, may be repulsive; but isn’t there also something pathetic about the absence or loss of libido, frigidity, and impotence? A healthy lust, on the other hand, may be nothing less than love, even a ‘‘lust for life.’’ So, too, scarfing down a greasy meal fit for a slob may be disgusting, but a selfrighteous dieter or health-food fanatic without appetite or taste, who looks disapprovingly at the delicacies enjoyed by others, is also a poor choice for a dinner companion. Two cheers, at least, for the appetites, which allow our potential for enjoyment ever to renew itself. Why must philosophers degrade them as vices, much less count them as sins? Triangulated between sloth, envy, and greed lies healthy aspiration, wanting to make the most of oneself, to ‘‘make a contribution,’’ the mean among three extremes. The wholesale absence of pride may not be modesty or humility but something loathsome and self-destructive, and the inability to get angry makes one not a saint but, as Aristotle pointedly insisted, a ‘‘dolt.’’ The absence of vice may itself be vice, and appropriate vice may be nothing less than virtue. Sloth, we might note, is subject to serious misunderstanding. Today, we tend to think of it as physical laziness, the lack of ambition and ‘‘get up and go.’’ This is not its traditional meaning. For Saint Augustine, for example, it meant (as acedia) intellectual and spiritual indifference, and it was physical only in some of its more obvious public manifestations. Thus, in Aristotle’s terms, we might look at sloth as a vice of deficiency, whether of physical energy or of aspiration. But sloth in this latter sense can be as innocent as intellectual and spiritual laziness, or it can be as serious and life-denying as utter cynicism and total lack of joy in life. Robertson Davies argues, for instance, that acedia is nothing less than the loss of all feeling and sensibility, losing touch even with oneself.3 It is the inability to feel joy or satisfaction, a dimming of the spirit that eventually kills it. Davies quotes Anatole France, who warned against confusing the atrophy of feeling with wisdom, conflating the inability to feel anything deeply with the sense of proportion that actually does constitute the learning which comes with growing older. His description reminds me of one of my colleagues, who is sometimes admired by students and junior faculty for his sophistication but in fact is diagnosable with chronic bitterness and accompanying schadenfreude. But I would not want to confuse what Comic Relief [ 137]

Nietzsche, too, would diagnose as the hatred of life with the much less harmful indifference that tempers ambition and overreaching aspiration. And although Augustine may have considered anything less than wholesale enthusiasm toward God to be sinful, my own sense of spirituality is much more modest and undemanding, and thus more of a mean than the extreme of utter deficiency. Wholesale enthusiasm toward God, by contrast, fills me with horror. There are no limits to self-righteousness in those who presume reciprocal love with God. Aristotle also defended a doctrine called ‘‘the unity of the virtues.’’ That idea, which admits of some absurd interpretations, is that the virtues tend to reinforce each another, so that if one has one virtue, one is more likely to have others and the virtuous person most likely has them all. But so, too, with the vices, as moralists have often pointed out. Whether or not the precise enumeration of the deadly sins is arbitrary, it must be admitted that they often make good company for one another. Greed, lust, and gluttony provide easy if not admirable companionship for each another. Anger and envy often walk hand in hand, sometimes accompanied by pride and sloth, which otherwise tend to be loners. But, then again, Nietzsche countered Aristotle with the equally plausible thesis that we might call ‘‘the dis-unity of the virtues,’’ easily extended to the vices as well. Each virtue or vice, Nietzsche says, has a desire for dominance, its own ‘‘will to power.’’ Honesty, like lust, tends to shoulder aside competing demands from other virtues. Anger, for instance, tends to steamroller over the other vices. And even more tempting: sometimes virtue forms an effective partnership with vice such that their unity tends to obscure the distinction altogether. When anger, envy, and justice join forces, watch out! Or greed and hope, lust and charity.

It’s the Thought That Counts Saint Thomas Aquinas was on to something big when—original sin notwithstanding—he insisted that every sin must be a doing, not an affliction or a mere personal flaw. To be sure, the doing in question might be little more than a thought, but thoughts can be entertained and encouraged. Thoughts can be provoked into intentions and prodded into expressions, gestures, words, and actions. There is the expressive punch that is provoked by anger, or at least the clenched fist and the red-faced glare. There is the clandestine visit to the nearest motel room that consumates lust, the self-serving but ill-considered boast that proclaims one’s pride, the Faustian land deal that manifests greed. Where there are no such consequences or manifestations, at the very least a facial expression or a gesture, we are rightly hestitant to talk of vice at all, although, God being everywhere and all-knowing, He may spy sin nevertheless. [ 138] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

The role of God is not irrelevant here, even if we thoroughly secularize the sins. Sins are sins, regardless of their overt manifestations. The notion of sin, though not of vice, is that it is an offense in the eyes of God, Who sees everything, and not just in the eyes of men and women, who do not. Thus the shift from pagan (secular) vices to (Christian) sins involves a serious change in the moral rules. Vices are vices only to the extent that they have public manifestations, however subtle and self-contained. The nature of sin, by contrast, is that it is the thought that counts. Of course intention and action aggravate the charge: a leering look is worse than a lustful fantasy, and an inappropriate caress or fondle much worse than either. Yet, to think lustful thoughts, as Jimmy Carter confessed prior to the 1976 presidential election, is already to ‘‘have sinned in one’s heart.’’ Sin is of the soul, and only secondarily a matter of expression and behavior. A thought, Thomas Aquinas tells us, is an act, so the thought leads us to motive, which can yield to intention, which is productive of action. It is all a function of the will, and thus blameworthy. Nevertheless, today we readily ignore such confessions as Carter’s—we even view them as quaint. Rather, we focus on full-blooded actions. We want our sins to be robust, not mere thoughts. Thus, understandably, without God’s X-ray vision, we focus on manifestations and consequences, what is witnessed not only by God but also by the paparazzi and captured in the tabloids. And the wages of sin, we have come to learn, can add up to seven figures. The notion of sin as doing, and vice as akin to action, is a thesis worth pursuing far beyond what I can afford to do here. The concern is parallel, presumably, to Aristotle’s concern about voluntary acts and their relation to the virtues. On the one hand, vices, like virtues, are said to be states of character (although one might well wonder, for several of the virtues as well as the majority of the deadly seven, whether they might better or at least also be called passions). As states of character, they are not willful as such: one cannot will oneself lustful any more than one can will oneself trustworthy, and yet we rightly hold people responsible for their vices at least as much as we do for their virtues: I think here Nietzsche is on the wrong side of the argument, stating that we should not hold people responsible for mere thought and feelings. Both Nietzsche and Aristotle are clear about the need to cultivate the virtues: and so, too, one cultivates the vices, and for this one is responsible, whether or not there is any single action that is both definitive and voluntary. (In the case of the vices, there would seem to be such actions, those which fit the metaphor of ‘‘letting go’’ or ‘‘opening the floodgates.’’) This is why thinking of the sins in terms of motivation is misleading, since it is by way of actions—and not necessarily highly motivated actions—that we cultivate them, and what we cultivate is not just motivation but, as Aristotle tells us, a sense of self and an orientation to the world. Take envy, for instance, the least enviable of the sins: one may cultivate envy by way of Comic Relief [ 139]

a number of actions—such as putting oneself into competitions one cannot possibly win—but more likely one cultivates envy by entertaining and then obsessing about certain kinds of thoughts of the ‘‘why him and not me?’’ variety. It is not just moralism that prompts us to blame (and not just dislike and distrust) people who are filled with envy. It is the fact that our moral awareness is driven far more by narrative than it is by abstract principles, as many philosophers seem to suggest. If this is one of the virtues of virtue ethics, it is also one of the virtues of thinking about ethics in terms of the vices, whether our aim is to blame or not. What do we do to ourselves to become the people we become?—an existential twist on Nietzsche’s pervasive ‘‘Become who you are!’’ (a quote from Pindar.) The virtues and vices are often said to be good or bad (respectively) ‘‘in themselves,’’ not in terms of their consequences or their potential embarrassments. It is simply wrong to feel lust, to be greedy, to envy, to nourish undeserved pride. What theological doctrine adds to the insight that sin is simply thought is the omnipresent if beneficent judge who sees thoughts as well as actions. Nevertheless, none of the seven sins seems sufficiently serious to attract God’s attention, no matter that He has infinite capacity for detail. (Nietzsche declares ‘‘God is dead,’’ in part, to capture the tedium and banality of such a conception.) Of course the various sins and vices attract our attention, if only because we share them, or at least recognize in ourselves their potential. How much of our gossip about others’ vices is a strategy of taking the offensive, to hide and protect, to justify or excuse, our own? How much of our gossip is a matter of compensation, of rationalization, of ressentiment? (Is gossip a vice?) How much of our condemnation of lust and greed, for instance, is envy? How much of our condemnation of sloth is a tacit defense of greed, and vice versa? (With reference to Bill Gates: ‘‘Why would anyone want to work so hard? How can he even find time to spend the money?’’) One might guess that other people’s sins are so important to us only because of our own sins, and what motivates our interest, as H. L. Mencken famously observed, is ‘‘the worry that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.’’

Ethics for Losers Against the deadly seven, but without going back to real evil, let’s juxtapose a real vice. Gambling—that is a vice. (Why not a sin as well? Because gamblers refuse to see the world as merely a product of chance, and frequently appeal to divine guidance, if not divine intervention, on their route to secular Hell?) As a gambler, almost inevitably, you lose all of your money, you lose your home, but first and foremost you lose your reason, your pride, your common [ 140] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

sense, and eventually your humanity. You deprive, and then cheat and probably steal from, your family, your friends, your employer. Despite the odds—which always seem to be in your favor—you deny the obvious. You become self-deceptive, pathologically compulsive, convinced that, eventually, you must win. Gambling destroys your life, and not your life alone. It distorts your mind, demolishes your values, makes you a pariah to all but your fellow addicts. That is the nature of vice, real vice. And compared to that, what is sloth other than a sometimes charming lack of get-up-and-go? To be sure, sloth may be a career liability in this hustle-and-bustle age, but the couch potato is less often the object of scorn than he or she is the target of any number of hopeful advertisers. There are gadgets to implement rather than correct the so-called vice (remote control television, in particular, comes to mind). Especially in these overscheduled times, sloth more often qualifies as ‘‘laid back,’’ a virtue rather than a vice. Homer Simpson amuses rather than offends us. But even as a career impediment, sloth hardly counts as a sin, an offense against God. Of course, Saint Thomas Aquinas thought of sloth as laxness of faith, but there is very little reason to think that God would mind. And it is not as if His churches so consistently condemn the vices. Rather, in their practices, they now often encourage the vices even as they preach against them. Sloth has even become an aspiration. It is generally recognized that we Americans, in particular, work too hard. (On bumper stickers and desks across the United States we read, ‘‘I’d rather be fishin.’ ’’) Thus sloth becomes a corrective. So, too, greed became the all-American and now global emotion (back in the 1980s) before it was replaced by 1990s rage (not mere anger) as the national (and now global) temperament. Today, lust is sold as an elixir to the middle class (though it has always been a profitable commodity among the better-off classes) not only in the form of Viagra but by way of relentlessly sexual advertising. Excessive, uncritical, often pointless pride is marketed in the schools (at least in California) as ‘‘self-esteem.’’ Then there is squinty, green-eyed envy. On the one hand, envy is essential to the consumer economy and, consequently, to our somewhat confused conception of the social. Helmut Schoeck, in a perverse tome several decades ago, defended envy as the key to a healthy society. In advertising, ‘‘keeping up with the Joneses’’ represents the consumerist creed. It is motivated, undeniably, by envy. (In the new global economy, the scope of envy is enormously expanded, but the basic motive remains the same: ‘‘If they have it, we want it, too.’’) But, on the other hand, compare envy to resentment, a much more vicious and vindictive emotion, and therefore much more dangerous, Or compare it to spite, which is by its very nature more violent and selfdestructive. The truth is that envy, in the register of ‘‘negative’’ emotions, is pathetic. It is a loser’s emotion. It is hardly a vice or a sin. True, in Shakespeare’s Comic Relief [ 141]

Iago it can lead to great mischief and even murder, but the pathetic truth about envy is that it isn’t usually even clever or capable. Indeed, that’s why it’s envy: because it is an impotent longing, without rights or entitlement, without power, without a clue. (It is the utter lack of entitlement that distinguishes envy from jealousy.) According to Catholic tradition, envy leads first to sadness, then to gossip, then to schadenfreude, then to hatred (New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 642). Instead, I would argue that envy tends to simmer in its own juices, a danger to no one but oneself. It is the one sin, contra Schoeck, not worth having at all.

Heaven as Health Club Why, in this sunny, secular, often vulgar, selfish, ‘‘greed is good’’ society would the sins still be taken seriously? Here is a hypothesis fit for the day. What are (archaically) called the ‘‘deadly sins’’ have nothing to do with damnation or degeneracy, but rather with poor health. They lead to a reduced life span, an unappealing appearance, the inability to attract a mate at the health club. What is deadly about the deadly sins is that, literally, they shorten our lives. Thus gluttony is really a code name for calories and high cholesterol. Lust is short for overdoing it, endangering one’s health, wasting one’s ‘‘precious bodily fluids.’’ For the less adventurous or simply unsuccessful, there is excessive masturbation, long high on the list of physiological dangers to both body and soul. Sloth now means not getting enough exercise. Greed is taking on more than you can handle, inducing dangerous stress. Pride becomes an excuse not to exercise, and envy is just another excuse not to try. Of course, health isn’t everything, but that seems to be a fact which surpasses current popular understanding. In any case, it seems to be an easy, contemporary, and totally secular way of appreciating what Aquinas and all of those other church fathers were on about. The seven deadlies are not sins (except in the sense that triple fudge cake is a sin), not vices (except in the sense that smoking is a vice), not offenses against God but against yourself—not your soul but your body, and thus, perhaps, an offense against your doctor. But with our new managed health plans, we can rest assured that he or she, too, cares mainly about the cost. But health worries are often disguises for spiritual concerns. What is promulgated as good for the body is often in fact a denial of the body, an attack on the body, and the attack on the seven sins is, more to the metaphysical point, an attack on the human body. It is the body itself that is sinful, as Adam and Eve revealed with those miserable fig leaves. Not the genitals but biology as such is the source of our embarrassment, our sinfulness before God. Indeed, what is surprising, from this point of view, is how few sins there are. Why not salivating, and certainly spitting, farting, belching, bad breath, [ 142] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

uncontrolled dandruff, and sweating, all of which are proscribed by the media and cured by readily available pharmaceuticals, where mere self-control does not suffice? And then there is eating in general and swallowing in particular, not to mention what follows. Of course, you say, eating is necessary to keep us alive, but what is really necessary is nutrition, not eating. What limited, unspiritual, impious imaginations we have to think that nutrition requires an activity so disgusting, so fraught with secretions and the excitation of the senses, that is so easily pleasurable, that requires so much preparation and planning, that has as its side effects mucus and feces and bad smells. Surely these could be minimized. The ultimate sin, on this account, is gluttony, and gluttony, if unavoidable, means any eating at all. (Anorexia thus emerges a virtue, as it has often, if pathologically, been perceived to be, but bulimia, we should note, is doubly a vice.) All vices could thus be viewed as extensions of breast-feeding, the original sin, followed in due course by snacking, feasting, and dining. It has often been noted (though there is room for much personal disagreement here) that the excesses of the dinner table prompt the excesses of love, as they do of sloth. A full belly gives a man pride—think of all of those potbellied portraits hanging in the galleries—while a more delicious-looking entree on the plate of one’s dinner companion evokes envy. Greed first appears at the nipple, pigs out over Big Macs and generous bowls of mashed potatoes, and ends up playing the commodities futures markets, with relish. Health as virtue, vice as unhealthy, this is perhaps more metaphor than medicine but both the celebration and the denial of the body are much more relevant to our ethics than philosophers would usually allow. Sin is not just thought and will but body as well, which is not to denigrate the body but to remind us of its importance.

On Human Nature But this rejection of the body is getting old in the first years of the twenty-first century, and a more durable claim, leaving aside the theology of sinfulness, is that the seven deadly sins or, better, seven daily vices, are simply ordinary human weaknesses. This is to say that they are nothing more (nor less) than human nature, human frailty, human finitude. This would distinguish them from the more vicious vices, whose intentions are more blameworthy, whose consequences are more severe, whose victims are more badly battered. It would also throw into question Aquinas’s insistence that the sins are voluntary, of the will, rather than afflictions insofar as they are part of our human make-up. But the adjective ‘‘human’’ is important, and suggests why the will cannot be completely excluded. Dogs are certainly gluttons (in fact, they make Comic Relief [ 143]

pigs of themselves), but we do not (usually) think it sensible to chastise a dog for gluttony. Dogs want but, in the Thomist sense, they do not will. Rabbits and other rodents are primed to reproduce, but we do not bother to call them ‘‘lustful’’ or ‘‘lascivious.’’ Our nearest and most endangered kin, the great apes, display many human excesses, particularly those which have to do with politics, but the language of sin and vice seems inappropriate to them. It is human weakness that concerns us—human because we are human, human because we will, human because we expect something more of ourselves, human because we think we are more than mere nature. ‘‘Nature,’’ insists a very virtuous Kate Hepburn to a vice-ridden Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, ‘‘is what we are put on this earth to rise above.’’ The very possibility of vice and virtue lies in this belief that we are better than the animals, closer to God or, at least, more akin to the angels. We can rise above nature. But isn’t this itself the sin of pride, what the Greeks used to call hubris? To turn the tables, perhaps we should interrupt our gossiping and, instead of looking so disparagingly at vice, we should look at our conceptions of ourselves, our expectations of ourselves, our arrogant insistence on being better than or above nature, our belief that we are essentially spiritual beings, not in the unassailable sense that we have spiritual needs but in the dubious metaphysical sense that we can distinguish our selves from our bodies, master the latter, and deny it its due. For what we call human weakness may just be being human, and virtue and vice represent not the spirit versus the flesh but spirited flesh looking out for itself, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly, sometimes selfishly, but always as flesh. This is not to defend vice, nor to deny that we can and should strive for ideals that challenge or sublimate our natural drives. We can, and we do, choose to view vice as a challenge, sin as a test (like that original apple in the Garden); and it is one of our undeniable virtues that we do interrogate and cross-examine Mother Nature. But is it so clear that the vices are natural, the product of nature and not of society? It is nature that dictates the desire for sex and the need for food, but they are not yet lust and gluttony. In any society that makes sex a relatively scarce but prestigious commodity, lust will always outstrip any natural desire, and where food (not to mention fat) takes on all sorts of symbolic forms, gluttony is hardly ‘‘natural.’’ It is the nature of human society, not nature, that dictates the vices, not only what is to count as vice but also the motivation of the vices themselves. Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributed the majority of the seven sins to the artifices and ‘‘corruption’’ of society. He was even willing to argue that human nature was basically good, which is to say without vice. It is through the artifices of society that we learn not only the possibilities of but also the need for vice. Where would lust be if—as the Swiss libertine lustily imagined—we mated casually in the woods, on demand (as it were), and went merrily on our [ 144] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

way? (This is, to be sure, a distinctively male fantasy, but it has had its ‘‘zipless’’ female proponents.) Where would gluttony, greed, and envy be if there were no private property, if there were only the sweet, lush vegetation of the forests of Saint-Germain? What is pride but almost unnatural concern with one’s standing in court, or in college, or in the corporate hierarchy? What is anger but our pride thwarted—passed over for promotion or snubbed by the dean or the queen? Of course, Rousseau was opposed by most of the great thinkers of the preceding centuries. Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, for instance, who held the more sociable view that all vice was rooted in natural selfishness, and it remained for the great Scottish ‘‘worldly’’ philosopher Adam Smith to pull the ultimate rabbit out of the theoretical hat and show that out of selfishness could come prosperity, if not virtue. But that, of course, is another story, though one that would quickly lead us back to greed. According to some of our recent business pundits, fictionally but accurately represented by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, greed has become the most ‘‘natural’’ as well as most beneficial of sins, encompassing all of the rest (except, perhaps, for sloth). But is there any question here that Wall Street is not an expression but the distortion of Nature, and no longer, as Aristotle argued, simply ‘‘unnatural’’ and parasitic?

On Moderation The claim that vice is a weakness has its obvious attractions. It reintroduces a victim mentality, allowing if not encouraging the excuses and rationalizations that are themselves among our most human vices. ‘‘I can’t help it’’ is the routine complaint of the sinner, and the possibility of grace and absolution only reinforces this conceit. But the idea that vice is a weakness also suggests that avoiding vice, overcoming vice, requires strength. This may be illusory, even self-congratulatory, as Nietzsche, a man of few vices, pointed out. Against ‘‘the moralists’ mania which demands not the control but the extirpation of the passions,’’ he argued, ‘‘Their conclusion is ever: only the emasculated man is the good man’’ (Antichrist, x47). A man without lust may be impotent, and a man who will not get angry, who ‘‘turns the other cheek,’’ may be a coward or, as Aristotle insisted, a fool. A modest eater may not like food (as Kafka ironically argues in his story ‘‘The Hunger Artist’’), and a person without pride may simply recognize that he or she has nothing to be proud of. There is no cause for virtuousness or self-righteousness here, and to pretend otherwise is the worst sort of false pride, not to mention a frequent cover for envy and impotence. The idea of virtue as victorious over vice looms large in medieval cathedrals and accounts of the virtues, but the modern pretense that virtue requires Comic Relief [ 145]

strength may be just the same self-deception or, worse, self-righteousness based on the false supposition that not doing is more difficult than doing (the case of sloth obviously excepted). There is much to be said in favor of ‘‘discipline,’’ but mediocrity, banality, and impotence should not be confused with the discipline of self-control. This is what Nietzsche called ‘‘slave morality,’’ turning the tables on those who enjoy themselves by declaring those pleasures sinful (or ‘‘Evil’’) and holding their own abstemious selves up for praise as the very model of the Good. Never mind that they themselves secretly lust for those same pleasures but know full well that they are in no position to compete for them. If vice is said to be weakness, then let us not confuse weakness with virtue. Insofar as vices are matters of excess, the best way to overcome them would seem to be ‘‘moderation.’’ Of course, Oscar Wilde turned the tables on Aristotle when he variously declared that nothing succeeds like excess, and that the only way to get over a temptation is to give in to it. What Wilde was objecting to, however, was not so much moderation as the sleazy moralist’s trick of not so subtly speeding up the argument such that one races from excess past moderation to abstinence. Thus, lust is bad, because it is an excess of sexual desire; but then we are too quickly urged to conclude that sexual desire must be bad as well. Thus Saint Paul contrives his hateful lesson on marriage (‘‘better than to burn’’), and Augustine assures us that Adam, before his exile, managed to ‘‘get it up’’ by sheer will, like a modern porn star, without any desire or libido whatsoever. Gluttony is bad because it is an excess of appetite, but we are now urged to see appetite itself as bestial, lowly, humiliating, and best satisfied by as little as possible. Pride, once a virtue, is a vice because it bespeaks excess of ego and lack of humility, but then ego itself is put under suspicion and modesty becomes self-negation, a curious if cloying charm. Thus, again, Nietzsche’s suspicion that ‘‘only the emasculated man is the good man.’’ Indeed, the pervasive problem with talking about sin and vice is that it opens the door to the petty moralist and gives him a foothold in his easy climb to the holy balcony above us, from whence he declares even our moderation to be vicious, if only by virtue of that infamous ‘‘slippery slope’’ down which even the righteous slide unwittingly from innocence into vice.

Letting Go Nietzsche praised self-discipline, but he also talked about the love of fate, the Dionysian ideal of total abandonment. The link between the two— self-mastery and letting go—he characterized as style, the cultivation of one’s character, something beyond the sometimes phony distinction between [ 146] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

virtue and vice, ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil.’’ ‘‘Give style to your character,’’ Nietzsche writes in his Gay Science. Control is not in itself a virtue and self-abandonment is not in itself a vice. It all depends, one might say, what is being controlled and who is doing the abandoning. The worst sin, perhaps, is neglecting or denying one’s own talents (and that bit of wisdom comes not from Nietzsche the Antichrist but from Mr. Supermoralist, Immanuel Kant). But, Kant to the contrary, this marks a dramatic shift from the realm of moral failings to the realm of aesthetic flaws, a blight on the idea of a life well lived but not, therefore, any notion of committing evil or wrongs before God. Except insofar as God, too, is an aesthetician and is concerned with style. This notion of style, and with it a combination of mastery and ‘‘letting go,’’ it seems to me to be crucial to our secular, nonmoral understanding of the seven sins. I need not defend the absurd claim that the famous seven are good in themselves or even OK in themselves in order to pluck the moral sting out of the idea of sin, nor need I join the ranks of the moralists when I ultimately agree that there is something degrading or compromising about them. They indicate a lack of style, a certain weakness of character, and one would do well, accordingly, not to encourage them. But this is a far cry from calling them moral or damnable names, calling them ‘‘evil’’ or ‘‘an offense against God,’’ or, for that matter, a moral offense to anyone. The seven so-called deadly so-called sins play an essential role in the human comedy, and one need not retreat to that old-time religion to point out that, whatever else they may be, these vices mark us as distinctively human, perhaps ‘‘all too human.’’ God, too, if He in any sense loves us, should be nothing other than amused. To forgive is divine. So is having a healthy sense of humor.

Comic Relief [ 147]

Seven Spirituality as Sentimentality . . . the insipid muddlehead Carlyle, who tried to conceal behind passionate grimaces what he knew of himself—namely, what was lacking in Carlyle: real power of spirituality, real profundity of spiritual perception; in brief, philosophy. —Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 252)

Like most readers of Nietzsche, I long took him to be the most vitriolic and hostile critic of all things religious, of Christianity in particular but by no means exclusively. That, plus the fact that he often uses the terms ‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘spirituality’’ in a drippingly sarcastic way (as, one notes, he uses most honorific terms at some place or other), led me to think—or, rather, to assume—that he was as dismissive of spirituality as he was of religion. But after many years, and several years of working on Nietzsche with my wife, Kathleen Higgins, I became convinced that Nietzsche should not be read that way. ‘‘Spirituality’’ remained for him, as it had been for his onetime equally anti-Christian predecessor Hegel, a kind of ideal. But spirituality, for him, had to be a muscular, thoughtful, and secular spirituality, not the ‘‘otherworldly’’ mawkishness and sentimentality that he found so objectionable in the Protestant ‘‘spirit’’ that surrounded him and determined his childhood. Thus my interest in Nietzsche, and my interests in sentimentality and emotions more generally, came together in a new-found interest in spirituality. Must spirituality be mawkish and uncritical? Or is there the muscular spirituality that Nietzsche celebrated? Or, more to the point here, can spirituality be both sentimental and tough-minded, ‘‘profound’’? What is spirituality? Many people, including many scientists, reject spirituality as being the epitome of sentimentality, out of step with modern thinking, stupidly opposed to science and the scientific method. Much of this, no doubt, is the result of the overly saccharine and utterly uncritical notions of spirituality that have been promulgated and popularized by New Age gurus, some of whom have quite pointedly attacked science (conflating it with scientism) as a ‘‘disenchantment of the world.’’ I have no doubt that much of both the antagonism toward spirituality and the fascination with New Age alternatives goes hand in hand with the suspicion and rejection of organized and sectarian religion in this increasingly dangerous and divided world. But in

rejecting organized and sectarian religion, too many people reject spirituality as well. It used to be the case, largely due to the efforts of the sectarians themselves, that the two were considered the same, as if the sectarians’ particular and often peculiar brand of religion constituted the One True Path to the spiritual. But those of us who rejected the self-righteousness and intolerance, not to mention the sheer irrationality, of such religions unfortunately tended to reject spirituality as well, which is neither sectarian nor intolerant, and need not be either self-righteous or, I will argue, irrational. Spirituality is often conflated with mysticism. To be sure, many mystics have been extraordinarily spiritual people, and even ordinary and naturalized spirituality may involve a sense of the ineffable and the infinite. But ineffability—the inability to submit an experience to analysis—is hardly an adequate excuse for some of the banal vacuities that pass as spiritual wisdom these days. Furthermore, we should distinguish carefully between the mystical insight that we are ‘‘one’’ with God or the world and the fallacious follow-through that we are therefore incapable of understanding or analyzing what this means. Thus Hegel attacked the Romantics and ‘‘intuitionists’’ of his day for reducing Spirit to vacuous monism (making a famous crack against his Romantic friend Schelling: ‘‘the night in which all cows are black’’). And Nietzsche lampooned the Romantics of his day ( half a century later), noting that ‘‘they muddy the waters to make them look deep.’’ One can accept mysticism wholeheartedly (whether or not one has had a mystical experience oneself ) but nevertheless deny that ‘‘ineffability’’ is the first and last word in the search for spirituality. (It is the last word only in the sense that it signals a refusal to think any further about it.) Spirituality is not the same as religion, and it is certainly not to be confused with sectarian religion. In fact, spirituality and sectarian religion are diametrically opposed. I would like to think of sectarian religion as being very on the defensive, as evidenced by its horrendous insistence on violence and apocalypse around the world. Spirituality, by contrast, is coming back into favor, in all sorts of places, in an increasingly secularized world.1 I attribute this general culture change to two shifts in cultural awareness in particular. First, since the 1960s, there has been an exponential increase in awareness of and appreciation on the part of Americans and other Western peoples for other cultures, their food and their music, their philosophies and their religions. There may be a few cities in the country still without a Thai restaurant and at least a passing acquaintance with Buddhism or at least Hare Krishna, but they are getting to be few and far between. Second, and closely related, there is the rise of New Age philosophy and thinking, which has promoted the idea of ‘‘spirituality’’ from an exotic import to a term that now threatens to be so popular it is losing its meaning and distinction. To be sure, there are many aspects of New Age thinking with which I would take issue, most generally its Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 149]

virtual absence of critical thinking, and with that its gullibility. And then there is the frequent slippage into the same sort of self-righteousness that led to the rejection of organized (as well as disorganized) and sectarian religion in the first place. But there are many important and promising ideas to be found there, when digested by thought and subjected to critical scrutiny. Its emphasis on the importance of spirituality is one of them. Insofar as spirituality is identified with sentimentality, we confront two familiar objections. First, there is the criticism of sentimentality that is akin to the blanket rejection of, or at any rate distancing oneself from, ‘‘unrealistic,’’ sensitive, and ‘‘sweet’’ emotions. Second, there is the sometimes valid criticism of sentimentality as something cheap and second-rate, manipulative and not appealing to the better part of us. I have already dealt with the first in some detail in chapter 1. There is nothing wrong with the ‘‘sweet’’ sentiments as such, and it is only the suspicious fear of sentiment as such and the exaggerated resistance to ‘‘manipulation’’ that suggest so. But, to be sure, the overuse and flagrant abuse of ‘‘spirit,’’ ‘‘heart,’’ and ‘‘soul’’ references, especially by some of our more ruthless politicians and corrupt religious demagogues, should give any sensible soul considerable pause. And those who appeal to spirituality as a way of avoiding any political involvement or involvement in matters of worldly injustice are no less blameworthy than those who more transparently abuse spirituality as an excuse for self-indulgence. But spirituality as such need not be manipulative or hypocritical, and it certainly need not be self-indulgent or selfish. To further confuse the issue, I define spirituality as a sense of a larger self, something that extends beyond the boundaries of the individual self and its personal interests to embrace others and the world, rendering the distinction between selfishness and selflessness rather meaningless. But if I defend spirituality as a secular rather than an otherworldly form of sentimentality, this is not to deny that spirituality may also be at home in organized religion. But it is not the exclusive province of religion, any more than it is the exclusive province of New Age gurus. As Nietzsche insisted, spirituality is a matter of personal transcendence, individual enlightenment, even if it is also a matter of communal sharing. Both the Holy Spirit of Christianity and the individualized faith of the Christian Reformation might be cited as the germs of the new spirituality in Western philosophy and religion. We should also appreciate the relevance and the influence of such Eastern philosophies as Buddhism and Taoism, where philosophy is not easily distinguished from religion. This leads to both charming and eccentric cross-cultural fertilization. But it also makes spirituality more susceptible to sentimentality and exotic kitsch. It is shallow learning rather than excess of emotion that is most responsible for the more embarrassing expressions of sentimentality and of spirituality as well. [ 150] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Spirituality, Nature, Scientism, and Science I want to defend a secular or ‘‘naturalized’’ spirituality, and the most obvious focus for secular or ‘‘naturalized’’ spirituality, given its rejection of any fantasy of the otherworldly, is Nature. If spirituality is at its essence an enlarged sense of self, then the ‘‘taking in’’ of Nature is an excellent example of how the self can incorporate the impersonal and make it personal, ‘‘enchanting’’ it, in the language that is often used today. It would be a colossal misunderstanding of this process—or a psychotic abuse of it—to confuse it with self-aggrandizement or some form of cosmic narcissism (a charge sometimes levied at Hegel, and even more so at his predecessor Fichte). But such ‘‘enchantment’’ also makes clear how akin to spirituality is that aesthetic sense of Nature which takes ‘‘the beautiful’’ and ‘‘the sublime’’ as its essential categories. But as opposed to aesthetic ‘‘detachment’’ and ‘‘distance,’’ the spiritual appreciation of nature incorporates nature into one’s own sense of self—or, rather, one ‘‘loses oneself’’ in the all-embracing context of Nature. Just as Nietzsche criticized the (Kant–Schopenhauer) view of the aesthetic perspective as detached and creating distance, so we should insist that the aesthetic perspective is impassioned engagement. So, too, the sublime is not just an abstract spectator notion. It is something experienced with ‘‘fear and trembling.’’ Thus Nature retains its vitality, and spirituality gains some of that muscle which Nietzsche was looking for. There is a danger, of course, that one can too easily sentimentalize Nature, depict it not as Darwin and Kipling saw it (‘‘red in tooth and claw’’ ) but rather as the Disney version would have it. When ‘‘True-life Adventures’’ let the hero-prey rabbit or adorable prairie dog escape to live another day (and leave the coyote or sidewinder without a meal), one can and should complain that this is not Nature but kitsch. The violence of nature is exactly what can and must be embraced by spirituality. Nature is violent. Rabbits and prairie dogs get eaten, and whole civilizations disappear into rubble as a result of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, not to mention what they do to themselves and to each other. Aesthetics captures this violence and power in the guise of ‘‘the sublime,’’ where it is the awesomeness and terror, rather than the beauty and exquisiteness, of Nature that is the focus of our attention. Traditional religions try to capture the awesomeness and subdue the terror with their sense of ‘‘fate,’’ as did Nietzsche. We should not deny that such notions are naturalistic just because they are also religious. At the culmination of his career, Nietzsche celebrated ‘‘the love of fate’’ as the ‘‘Dionysian’’ explanation of the spirituality of his Greek heroes and as the highest and most difficult achievement for a modern man. The ideal is to see beyond personal tragedy and accept Nature whatever it does, however tragic (for us) its consequences. Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 151]

The Christian conception of Nature, by contrast, has a conflicted history. The Church, for instance, clearly adopted many of the ideas of pagan fatalism in its concept of ‘‘God’s will,’’ but it refused to attribute fate to Nature and (with considerable sleight of hand) distinguished sharply between the two. More generally, the Church artfully distinguished between the ‘‘natural’’ and the ‘‘unnatural’’ in His name, and on the basis of Scripture (rather than anything resembling empirical research) declared certain human activities unnatural and condemned them. The natural was equated with the rational (on the basis of the claim that it was God’s law), and Christianity famously defended the natural while going to war with Nature. In its distinction between the flesh and the spirit, Christianity set up a fatal antagonism between Nature and Spirit that survives into modern philosophy most obviously in Descartes’s philosophy and in Hegel’s desperate (but, I think, unsuccessful) attempts to reconcile them in his ‘‘dialectic.’’ At its best, the Church promoted science by elevating the study of Nature to the most exalted appreciation of the miracle of God’s work. But the Church also famously used its doctrines as an excuse to persecute and occasionally kill creative scientists (Galileo, Giordano Bruno). The aesthetic appreciation of Nature was also relegated to derivative status as the appreciation of God’s work, and it was the work, not Nature itself, that was deemed so beautiful. We see the continuation of this antagonism today in the debate between evolutionary scientists and ‘‘creationists’’ (or worse, ‘‘creation science’’), as if, again, Nature and Spirit are necessarily at odds. The former is nothing but mindless cause and effect, albeit created by God. The latter includes all things otherworldly and beyond natural causation (free will, in the case of humans, miracles and God’s will in the case of God). Nature may be the ‘‘creation’’ of an otherworldly God, but its existence—and consequently its existence as the world it is—is not to be explained in secular or scientific terms. Even Wittgenstein, whose religious beliefs and spiritual status are rather obscure, insisted that what is miraculous is not the way the world is but that it is. But New Age spirituality too readily joins hands with the worst of traditional religion when it pursues its campaign against science. We need to defuse the now familiar New Age diatribe against science. While New Age literature is all for Nature, it betrays a rage against science as a violation rather than an appreciation of Nature. Thomas More refers to it as a ‘‘disenchantment’’ with the natural world, to which spirituality offers ‘‘reenchantment.’’2 William Paley’s eighteenth-century argument for the existence of God is common currency in New Age thinking, omitting only the overly specific theological conclusion. It is Nature itself, the creation, not only God the Creator that is intelligent. (The obvious similarity to the current ‘‘intelligent design’’ ploy carried on by the covert creationist crowd should make us pause here. I consider that set of arguments to be no more than [ 152] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a obscurantist device to slip religion under the wall that supposedly separates church and state in public education.)3 With the exception of the logical positivists, most modern scientists and philosophers have been amenable to the idea that causal explanations and purposive (teleological) explanations are complementary rather than antagonistic (even if they go on to insist that the latter can eventually be reduced or explained in terms of the former). This is obvious in the biological sciences, but it need not be totally denied in the physical sciences. And, as many secular scientists will happily affirm, the existence of life on Earth, and the existence of life as it is on Earth, is nothing less than a miracle (meaning that it will not yield an ultimate explanation). To look at nature through the eyes of science is in no way to demean it or deny its enchantment. To deny science is, in the most obvious way, to stop looking, to retreat to Scripture (i.e., two-thousand-year-old bad science) or the testimony of the unaided, uneducated, disinterested, if not discredited senses. But whether one sees Nature as God’s creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no conflict between appreciating and understanding, between spirituality and science. Science does not deny the beauty and the majesty of mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests. It just insists on looking more closely, and thus appreciating even more. At this point, no doubt, someone will object that it is necessary to distinguish among science, scientism, and technology. Science may be all that I have said, at least at its best and most sensitive, but what has been called ‘‘scientism’’ is a very different matter. Advocates of scientism will not allow the peaceful coexistence of alternative perspectives, those which are not scientific—such as religious or aesthetic or moral perspectives. Like the old logical positivists (at least in their more polemical declarations),4 they would insist that any knowledge other than scientific knowledge is nothing but superstition and nonsense. Science is not just one way of knowing; it is the only way of knowing. Such attitudes are not unknown among scientists and, especially, among science students. But they do more to discredit science than to discredit spirituality. A less polemical, because less conscious, form of scientism is prevalent in what Thomas Kuhn called ‘‘normal science,’’ the practical, day-to-day laboratory and calculating work that pays attention exclusively to the experiment or technical problem at hand with not even an upward glance at the phenomenon ultimately under investigation, much less at its beauty or sublimity. But such eviscerated science is spiritually bankrupt even in its own terms. It is doubtful whether it even deserves the name of science, in the sense in which that term has earned our respect for its openmindedness, curiosity, and daring experimentalism. And technology, most urgently, is by no means the appreciation of Nature. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger, who emphasized (though in very evasive terms) the wonder and Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 153]

appreciation of Nature, utterly condemned the sort of thinking that recognized nature only as a ‘‘resource.’’ There is much to say here, but suffice it to say that in defending the complementarity of science and spirituality, I am not thinking primarily of technology. When I was young, before I discovered philosophy, I was a gung-ho biology student. ( To date my studies: this was back in the days when the genome project was science fiction.) What I discovered, even then, was that what I loved about science was nature. It was not the quest for ultimate truth and the Frankensteinish power that Francis Bacon promised, nor was it the detective sense of ‘‘cracking nature’s secrets’’ that moved me. I was bored rather than challenged by the increasingly technical problems that I was required to solve. Needless to say, looking back, my future in science was already pretty dim. But through my fascination with bugs and critters and microbes and plants of all sorts, I found, as Schopenhauer found in music, a way to get ‘‘out of myself,’’ a way to escape from my insecurities and my often painful self-consciousness. Science—or, rather, my fascination with Nature—transported me into a larger universe. Perhaps it also forged a global community with fellow naturalists, but that was by no means my focus. The relationship was between me and Nature, and those who knew me as a child often noted that I seemed to like animals better than people. I like to think I’ve outgrown that particular set of antisocial insecurities, but I also hope I have not lost that fascination with and appreciation for Nature as such, and for the science, amateurish as it may be. It is through science, not in spite of it, that I have developed any sense of spirituality.

Spirituality and Religion: The Role of Belief Spirituality and religion are neither opposites nor antagonists, but they are sometimes at odds, as in the petty sectarian demonizing that is all too visible in some contemporary religious circles. The conflation of spirituality and religion sometimes turns on the mistaken idea that both consist primarily of beliefs. But spirituality, at least, is not primarily a matter of beliefs (although it certainly involves beliefs). It is, rather, a way (or a great many ways) of experiencing the world, of living, of interacting with other people and with Nature. It involves a set of practices and rituals, not necessarily prayer or church services or meditation or prescribed rituals of purification, but any number of ways, whether individual or collective, of thinking, looking, talking, feeling, moving, and acting. Religion, by contrast, is primarily belonging, not belief. This is not, of course, the usual characterization of religion, embedded in constitutional law as well as common sense, that religion is a matter of belief, and that the [ 154] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

identity of each religion is a function of its particular beliefs (and how those differ, however slightly, from the others). I would argue that for the most part beliefs are secondary, at best. I think it is safe to say that many adherents of the major religions of the world do not even vaguely understand the beliefs of their particular religion, its ‘‘theology’’ or its metaphysics. Nor do I think that such understanding is necessary to either religion or spirituality. Indeed, it has often been argued (and not just by critics of religion) that the beliefs of various major religions are unintelligible. For instance, the existentialist Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that the central beliefs of Christianity were ‘‘paradoxes’’ and literal nonsense, but that was no obstacle to a committed Christian. Quite the contrary—it was the paradoxical nature of Christian beliefs that was their essential nature, their meaning. What made a person a Christian, according to Kierkegaard, was faith, ‘‘passionate inwardness’’ in the face of paradox, and not belief as such. Moreover, the acceptance of religious beliefs is based on group membership (or the desire for group membership), not the other way around. Understanding many religious beliefs would be utterly beyond most people. Many of them are abstract metaphysical claims that would daunt even the most speculative philosopher. But even those scholars who do understand the woolliest theological doctrines are well aware of the enormous gap between the doctrines and the faith of the ‘‘believers.’’ For this reason religious belief is often distinguished as ‘‘belief in’’ rather than ‘‘belief that,’’ and Kierkegaard insists on the philosophically problematic notion of ‘‘subjective [as opposed to ‘‘objective’’] truth.’’ That is what is so very impoverished in those ‘‘philosophies of religion’’ which would reduce faith to beliefs, propositions to be ‘‘proven’’ (or at the very least, rendered ‘‘indefeasible’’). While I do not doubt that most philosophers who practice this sophisticated craft are as devout as they claim to be, I sense a severe disjunction between their theological efforts and their devotion. Most religious beliefs are more like club passwords or code words than propositions that can be explicated or defended. And the difference between the beliefs of one sect and another, or even between one major religion and another, may be all but indistinguishable to a neutral observer. The perennial and welcome attempts at ecumenism typically emphasize the similarities between different faiths, even insisting that God (or gods) are identical, simply referred to by different names (Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, the Godhead). Thus belonging is expanded from sect and faith to humanity and cosmos, and that is where religion meets up with and joins spirituality.5 One reason for deemphasizing the role of belief in spirituality and religion is to undermine the unnecessary battle between science and religion. Science, to be sure, is largely about belief, backed by the evidence of the senses. If religion is also defined primarily in terms of belief, there will be a clash Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 155]

between religion and science, whether on the most general level (whether the origin of the world and of life can be adequately explained by science) or on the more particular level (why there are so many species of beetles, how such miracles as the human eyeball or immune system could have come about). Most scientists and theologians are willing to call a truce regarding the general questions, since their final solutions always seem to recede with each new discovery or breakthrough. Few scientists deny that there will always be some open, ultimate questions. Very few (though very well publicized) religious fanatics insist that the hard evidence of science simply be dismissed. In history, the advance of science has often been the stepchild of theology, for if the world is God’s creation, it is out of respect for God that one seeks to know its intricate workings. But if we do not identify religion and spirituality as first of all matters of belief, then such issues as the possibility of ultimate explanations recedes into the background. Religion and spirituality do not primarily provide explanations of the world. They provide us with edification, meaning, and significance, religion through belonging, spirituality by way of a passionate engagement with the world.

Being and Doing: Spirituality, Society, and Ritual A further reason for deemphasizing belief is that belief suggests an impoverished version of both religion and spirituality that relegates social life and social rituals to the realm of the inessential. Thus Immanuel Kant (a pious Christian) and other philosophers who have tried to ‘‘naturalize’’ religion (which for them is really to rationalize religion) by reducing it to a small set of essential beliefs and eliminating what they disdainfully called ‘‘superstition’’ on the one side, and ‘‘mere rituals’’ on the other, impoverish religion more than they improve it. What Kant failed to appreciate, at least in his philosophy, was the extent to which religion is first of all a social phenomenon, not a matter of belief. And insofar as religion is a social phenomenon, its practices and rituals are of primary, and not merely secondary, importance. Here again, we should note the differences between just ‘‘going through the motions’’ and those ‘‘heartfelt’’ routines whose virtue is their familiarity and intimate association with the most spiritual passions. The Chinese concept of li defines this notion of ritual very well. Ritual is not merely something one does (that is, ‘‘just going through the motions’’) but something one lives, and it involves everyday actions, not only special services and sacraments. Spirituality is perhaps, a philosophical oddity in that it requires action as part of its very essence. It is a doing as well as a mode of being, thinking, and feeling. It requires understanding, but this is not the same as (nor is it opposed to) the understanding that comes through science by way of belief. [ 156] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

It is the ritualistic element in spirituality that makes it most vulnerable to accusations of sentimentality. The Confucian notion of li, for instance, is often described in terms of the feelings that accompany the ritual. But rituals are often, if not typically, behaviors of little practicality. They are not the usual means–ends behavior well-defined in terms of motives, intentions, and aims. This tends to reflect on the feelings involved as well. These are not passions, powerful motivational forces that are useful to overcome obstacles and assure perseverance. These are hardly even emotions, if by ‘‘emotion’’ we mean those psychic phenomena which are often characterized in terms of ‘‘action tendencies’’ and motivating ‘‘appraisals.’’ They are, indeed, sentiments, rather diffuse feelings that focus on actions which are pointless in themselves and carry with them an often vague sense of expansive significance. Weddings, funerals, religious services, pilgrimages, and prayer furnish a variety of examples, ranging from life-changing experiences to rather mundane ‘‘time off’’ activities. Even a wedding is of little significance in itself, apart from the powerful institution of marriage that lies behind it and the love that it supposedly culminates. The behaviors that constitute the ritual (saying ‘‘I do,’’ breaking a glass, giving a ring, sharing a kiss) also are of little significance in themselves. Thus one might well consider the sentiments that accompany ritual to be sentimental, and thus spirituality as sentimental as well, meaning that they are defined neither by strong and sometimes violent passions nor by motivating emotions, but by those ‘‘sweet’’ feelings which might well make people uncomfortable. Guests cry at weddings and, of course, at funerals. And from an outsider’s viewpoint, such sentimentality may indeed appear unseemly. But here we are reminded of Kierkegaard’s observation that, to a third party, two people making love is an absurd performance. Ritual serves a purpose, of course, but its purpose is precisely to establish and deepen the sentiments that give it meaning. Like scientific understanding, spiritual ‘‘enlightenment’’ does not come all at once. It requires attention, work, development, and time. Even being ‘‘born again’’ is not so much an instant transformation as the beginning of a long, involved process. Ritual and practice are not only the expression of spirituality but also the means to its realization, through repetition and familiarity. Even the platitudinous wisdom of such simple slogans as ‘‘Take time to smell the flowers’’ and such simple routines as taking a walk in the woods suggest such a sense of ritual and repetition. So do the standard rituals of romance: a quiet dinner alone, the repetition of pet names, the giving of small gifts. To insist that spiritual rituals must be established religious rituals or to deny the importance of ritual altogether is to ignore both the reality of spiritual development and the significance of individual inventiveness and ingenuity. But the best of religion is spirituality, and the heart of spirituality is heartfelt activity filled with intelligent feeling, action, reason, and passion together. Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 157]

One of the many forced distinctions between spirituality and religion, which works greatly in favor of religion, involves the idea that religion is available to everybody, while spirituality is something rare and special— limited, perhaps, to a few saints and gurus. But spirituality naturalized is not just for the chosen few. It is nothing less than the realization of what is best in all of us (although what this is may vary considerably from culture to culture and even from person to person). One reason for supposing that spirituality is so rare is thinking that it requires extraordinary, even superhuman sacrifices. But spirituality should not be confused with the renunciation of the material, sensual, and social joys of life. It does not require becoming a hermit, an eccentric, or an ascetic. It does not require the refusal of comforts, luxuries, and erotic delights. And it does not mean solitude. Solitude may be necessary—in small doses—for spirituality, but spirituality is ultimately not solitudinous but social. Søren Kierkegaard proved himself not only an eccentric but also dangerously misguided when he put all of his emphasis on ‘‘the individual’’ and dismissed with utter disdain both the social dimension and the rituals of religious worship. Not only is spirituality not restricted to the very few. It is spirituality, and not just religion, that calls on us to embrace others and ‘‘love our neighbors as ourselves.’’ And that means not only ‘‘as we do ourselves’’ but, literally, as ourselves—that is, as Spirit. Of all of the rituals that have defined the pursuit of spirituality, the one that I find most central is philosophy. Philosophy, we often have to remind ourselves, is a social practice. It is not (as the cartoon version would have it) an isolated sage sitting on some unidentified mountaintop, confronting the universe in thought. Socrates was surely deceiving himself when he fantasized his soul, contemplating unencumbered by others, throughout eternity. He, more than any other philosopher, demonstrated the social nature of philosophy and those rituals of conversation called ‘‘dialectic.’’ I have even come to think that spirituality may be the ultimate goal of philosophy, as ‘‘truth’’ comes increasingly under fire and consequently becomes more trivialized. (Compare, for example, the rich conceptions of ‘‘philosophical truth’’ that dominated Plato’s and Hegel’s philosophies with the deflationist accounts that have for the most part ruled twentieth-century Anglo–American philosophy.) Identifying philosophy with spirituality is, I admit, reactionary. But it is very much a return to all of those earlier wisdom-oriented conceptions of philosophy that dominated the discipline from the ancient Indian Vedas through the religious philosophies of the late Middle Ages and much of modern philosophy as well. But since the Western Enlightenment (a movement that was strangely homonymous with the religious ‘‘enlightenment’’ celebrated in the East), not only religion but also spirituality has been on the defensive. Since then, spirituality and philosophy have so often [ 158] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

been thought of as antagonists, at least in the West, that mentioning them in the same breath shocks and outrages many philosophers. I know I would have been shocked and outraged until recently. Spirituality, like sentimentality and superstition, is too often something sham, something cheap, something with enormous pretensions devoid of content. Philosophy, meanwhile, has become untranslatably technical and ‘‘scientific.’’6 And between the well-heeled spiritual pundits on the media circuit and the brilliant technocrats locked away in philosophy seminar rooms, the throngs of humanity who are searching for that Big Picture find themselves with a pretty poor set of choices. Thus even the most wacky New Age religions get to fill many hearts that might much better find their own fulfillment, if only they were encouraged to do so by the discipline that was once the mother of all disciplines, and of spirituality as well. But when spirituality is deprived of serious thought, sentimentality emerges as its manifestation. It is a natural consequence of inaccessible philosophy.

Self-Actualizing Spirituality: What This Means At the risk of being paradoxical, I want to suggest that spirituality is selfactualizing, that is, it comes into being by being ‘‘believed in.’’ This is, of course, the claim of a great many established religions—not only that one becomes a believer by believing (that is a tautology) but also that (in some sense) the belief becomes true by the fact that it is believed in. This is not the patent nonsense that the harshest critics would make it out to be, nor is it the miraculous revelation that less scrupulous evangelists would suggest. Nor is it simply a version of Kierkegaard’s celebrated ‘‘objective uncertainty,’’ in which we are free to impose our subjective truths, if only because there is no possibility of our being shown to be wrong. Spirituality as self-actualizing is to be understood, rather, as a version of the psychologically familiar self-fulfilling prophecies (although the word ‘‘prophecies’’ may be unfortunate in this context). ‘‘Thinking positively,’’ ‘‘having confidence in oneself,’’ and ‘‘believing you can do it’’ are all examples of this familiar phenomenon. (I still remember one of my favorite childhood books, The Little Engine That Could.7 The onomatopoetic refrain ‘‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can’’ has carried me through a good deal of my adult life.) It is not so much that thinking makes it so. It is, rather, that adopting a stance which eschews the most debilitating doubts and discouragement makes success at least more likely (assuming, that is, that one has the skills or talents or possibilities to begin with.) Spirituality may not be an achievement or a success in the sense that winning a track meet, doing well on an exam, surviving an ordeal, or getting Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 159]

over a mountain is an achievement or a success. It is adopting a framework or a positive attitude in which all sorts of possibilities open up that may not have been so evident before. In a sense, one does not literally ‘‘make anything true.’’ The facts of the world remain pretty much as they were before, but in an obvious sense, everything changes. The world is born anew. But this is not to say that we are in the realm of mere wishful thinking, much less of self-delusion. In religion, it has often been argued that one gains faith by having faith. This is not to say that God suddenly exists, nor even to make the weaker (and still dubious) claim that God comes to exist for you. It is important to hold on to the commonsense distinction between something’s being true and simply believing or having faith in something. Thinking that one is in love is not the same as being in love, and believing that one has selfconfidence is not the same as having self-confidence. And, needless to say, thinking that one has an aptitude for mathematics, or scholarship, or deep thoughts is by no means the same as having any such aptitude. But being in love changes the world, or at least one distinctive aspect of the world, and if we do not generally think of love as an achievement (more often as a matter of ‘‘falling’’), perhaps that is one of the first things to reconsider on the way to spirituality. Hegel tells us that Spirit is self-reflection and comes to be in the conceiving of Spirit. Again this is not a matter of ‘‘belief’’ but a way of ‘‘constituting’’ the world in a certain way, experiencing it (and oneself) as spiritual. Consider a now classic account of the origins of consciousness by the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes.8 Consciousness, he tells us, comes into being through our becoming conscious of ourselves as conscious. This is not to say (what would be absurd) that we become conscious beings—that is, we are alive and perceptive and capable of feeling pains, sensations, and the like—just because we believe that we are. But consciousness is something more than mere perception and sensation—and, for that matter, something more than reasoning, too, if by that we mean only the solving of problems, all of which can and does go on without becoming conscious in the critical sense. To be conscious is to fulfill some fairly complex conceptual conditions, including having a concept of ‘‘mind,’’ a concept of the ‘‘I,’’ and a narrative ability to tell certain sorts of stories. One need not accept all of Jaynes’s conditions, nor need we explain them here in order to acknowledge the important point that self-reflection in some sense is not something added to consciousness but is its very precondition. Or, to put it differently, certain concepts are necessary not only to describe consciousness but also as antecedent conditions for there even to be consciousness.9 Consciousness exists, one might say, just insofar as conscious creatures have a concept of consciousness—that is, have a conception of themselves as conscious, a conception of an ‘‘inner life.’’ In other words, believing that one is conscious [ 160] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

(as Descartes famously discovered) is to this extent a self-fulfilling prophecy (although Descartes made the mistake of thinking that we thus discovered our self-consciousness rather than constituting it). So, too, achieving spirituality requires, as its precondition, gaining (constituting) some sense of oneself as spiritual. Jaynes’s emphasis on ‘‘narrativity’’ in consciousness is particularly important, and once again we find Hegel, 170 years earlier, making much the same point. To be conscious is not just to be conscious of the present moment. It is to have something of a sense of time, the passing of time, a sense of backward and forward, a history. But history, too, comes into being only with its realization in thought, that is, the thinking of it. This was a central aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, the realization that adopting a sense of history in some sense created the history that one was adopting. (‘‘The only thought that philosophy brings to history [is] the thought that Reason rules the world, and that world history has therefore been rational in its course.’’ )10 It has often been said, though it is something of a wild exaggeration, that Hegel brought history to philosophy, or even that Hegel invented history. Of course, philosophy already had a long history, long before Hegel ever came on the scene. But history, too, is one of those self-creating concepts such that thinking it makes it so. (One might challenge the common equation of spirituality and eternity by noting that it is only because we have a sense of history and change that we have any sense of spirituality at all.) The link among consciousness, spirituality, and history might be furthered by an analogy. Daniel Dennett points out that lions and zebras have a history in that they have been around for a long, long time.11 But lions and zebras surely do not have a history in the sense that humans have a history. They may have memory (perhaps even collective memory, in some sense), but they do not have a history both because they do not know that they have a history (they keep no records) and thus do not have one (they have no traditions, and they have no vision of their species’ own development). So, too, we might deny that lions and zebras lack both consciousness and spirituality (no matter how ‘‘spiritual’’ your cat seems to be as he or she stares contentedly into space), not because they are not intelligent or sensitive creatures but because they do not have a language adequate to self-conception, a language adequate to self-consciousness, and the enlarged and enriched consciousness required for spirituality. History, consciousness, and spirituality are all self-actualizing concepts. To have spirituality, therefore, is to adopt a spiritual stance, a certain attitude, and a set of emotions and concepts that are both conducive to and constitutive of spirituality. In a strict sense, to do so is not to make anything true or new in the world, except for the fact that you have adopted a spiritual stance. But the perspective from which one perceives and conceives of the Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 161]

world and everything in it may nevertheless transform the world in what Jean-Paul Sartre calls a ‘‘magical’’ way. This makes an enormous difference in how one lives and how one behaves, not to mention how one feels, even if the concepts that constitute our spirituality are already available to us and perfectly ‘‘natural.’’

Spirituality and the Good Life Spirituality is a larger sense of life. But what this means need not be taken in any sense that diminishes the significance of life. Like Hegel and Nietzsche, I think that the ultimate value in both philosophy and religion—and the essence of spirituality—is the value of life. This is not to advance any particular moral or political agenda, much less to weigh in dogmatically on some hotly emotional sectarian debates. Nor is it to say very much of concrete value in settling ethical issues in general. But it is a way, a kind of philosophical beacon, to remind us of what it is that really counts: not fidelity to any God or gods but living well. Of course, fidelity to one’s ideals is a part of living well, and living well cannot without violence be separated from ‘‘doing good’’ in life. Yet ‘‘living well’’ can be too easily vulgarized into ‘‘living luxuriously’’ or simply ‘‘enjoying oneself.’’ This is why that otherwise admirable philosophy, utilitarianism, has always gotten such bad press. (German philosophers since Hegel have always found it ‘‘vulgar’’ and devoid of spirituality. John Stuart Mill, its most famous advocate, thus felt compelled to defend his thesis against ‘‘vulgar interpretations.’’) ‘‘Living well’’ is not about comfort and luxury, although it certainly need not exclude them. Nor is it just about enjoying oneself, although to be sure (as Aristotle argued) one could not easily be said to be living well if his or her life was devoid of pleasure and enjoyment. But living well is also more than just ‘‘doing the right thing,’’ as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich came to understand. It is not just taking pleasure but (as Mill argued) taking pleasure in the right kinds of things. ‘‘Better a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,’’ he famously comments in Utilitarianism. Life is dissatisfaction and suffering as well as joys and accomplishments. Living well means living a rich life, and a rich life is by its very nature more than just comforts, luxuries, and enjoyment. To put this emphasis on life in another way, one might say that the meaning of life is life itself. Life’s purpose is not the pursuit of some further life (and if this were so, what would that life have as its purpose?). Nor is life the meaningless struggle for survival and existence lamented by particularly sourpuss Darwinians and pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer. Life’s significance is not to be measured by something outside of life, but by how one lives and [ 162] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

appreciates one’s life in its own terms. But those terms include one’s place in and identity with the larger world, not the solipsistic or selfish promptings of narcissism or selfishness. Both Hegel and Nietzsche took life to be defined by some larger purpose, but not some purpose to be found beyond life. In Hegel’s case, this purpose was the realization of Spirit in its fullest, the recognition of ourselves as an integral part of a cosmic whole. For Nietzsche, this purpose was the transcendence (‘‘self-overcoming’’) of the individual in the realization of ‘‘higher’’ goals and ideals. In place of the dubious purpose of transcending life, let us defend the ideal of transcending ourselves in life. Not just any larger view of life will count as spirituality. Pettiness and envy are enemies of spirituality, even if they are expanded into world views or ideologies (or religious doctrines). Patriotism is a larger view of life, and indeed patriotism undoubtedly has—or can have—a spiritual dimension. Unfortunately, this is ruthlessly exploited by the worst kind of demagogues and tyrants, from the conquerors of the Old Testament to Mussolini and Milosevic, and what begins as Spirit ends up as Fascism (which, not coincidentally, was defined by Mussolini—a failed philosopher—in precisely these Hegelian terms). But insofar as patriotism embraces all of humanity, as a concrete form of humanism, it may indeed coincide with the spiritual. Indeed, politics at its best represents spirituality, perhaps not in its nitty-gritty down-to-earthness but in its social sensibility, the idea that we are ‘‘all in this together’’ and that in order to live well together, we need to think of ourselves as doing something more than merely co-existing together. Politics, like religion, becomes spiritual just to the extent that it embraces this nonsectarian vision of the world. One might argue that sectarianism by its very nature embraces a larger sense of ‘‘us,’’ except that the ‘‘us’’ is always defined in contrast and often in conflict with a ‘‘them,’’ and this exclusivity is what makes it not spiritual. Spirituality has no boundaries. It is not exclusive (except in the sense that it may take hard work and many years to get there). It does not allow for an ‘‘us versus them.’’ It defies comparison. (Some of my Buddhist friends delight in regaling me with stories about the ‘‘more spiritual than thou’’ politics of their peers, which resemble nothing so much as the mutually defensive ego grandstanding of an academic department.) So let me say it again, sectarianism is the antithesis of spirituality, but spirituality nevertheless embraces a larger sense of ‘‘us,’’ not only all of humanity but ultimately the world as well. In the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner, spirituality need not involve any belief in God, but committing one’s life to the possibility of a world of love, generosity, kindness, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, joyous celebration of the Unity of All

Spirituality as Sentimentality [ 163]

Being, and a deep recognition that the universe is created in such a way as to make possible higher and higher levels of consciousness, cooperation and love.12

This is not ‘‘mere’’ sentimentality. It is a commitment not only to certain feelings but also to fostering and honoring those feelings, and to making sure that spirituality serves not only the purpose of living a good life oneself but also of working for a good life for all.

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Eight The Virtue of (Erotic) Love In a famous—or infamous—passage, Immanuel Kant offhandedly dismisses one of the most essential elements in ethics: Love out of inclination cannot be commanded; but kindness done from duty— although no inclination impels us, and even although natural and unconquerable disinclination stands in our way—is Practical, and not Pathological love, residing in the will and not of melting compassion (schmelzender Theilnehmung ).1

Kant’s phrase, translated here as ‘‘melting compassion,’’ suggests irony, which suggests in turn that despite his devotion to Christian morality, Kant didn’t think much of ‘‘pathological love’’ even in its most benign versions (e.g., agape´, which he elsewhere calls ‘‘beautiful’’), not to mention what he thought of the erotic or sexual manifestations of that emotion (eros). In the Symposium, by contrast, Phaedrus offers us one of many comments by Plato in honor of eros: ‘‘That is why I say eros is the eldest of the gods and most honored and the most powerful for acquiring virtue and blessedness, for men both living and dead.’’ This chapter has two aims: to understand love—and I mean erotic (romantic, ‘‘pathological’’) love—as a virtue, and to broaden our view of ethics.

Cynicism, Love, and Ethics It [love] does not hesitate to intrude with its trash. . . . It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts. Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships and breaks the strongest bonds. . . . Why all this noise and fuss? . . . It is merely a question of every Jack finding his Jill. (The gracious reader should translate this phrase into precise Aristophanic language.) Why should such a trifle play so important a role?2

Love as a virtue? Well, hardly. Motherly love, certainly; patriotism, perhaps. The love of humanity, to be sure. But romantic love? Erotic love? The passion that makes fools of us all and led to the demise of Anthony,

Cleopatra, young Romeo, Juliet, and King Kong? Love is nice, but it is not a virtue. Maybe it is not even nice. Hesiod in the Theogony warned against eros as a force contrary and antagonistic to reason. Sophocles and Euripides both denounced eros, in Antigone and Hippolytus, respectively, and even Virgil had his doubts. The great poet Sappho likened eros to illness, even to madness. Schopenhauer, much more recently, thought all love to be sexual and damnable, and today we are much more likely to invoke the cynical wit of Oscar Wilde or Kingsley Amis or certain ‘‘punk’’ rockers than the saccharine pronouncements of our latter-day love pundits. Indeed, one cannot but be struck by the ambivalence surrounding this central and celebrated concept running through the history of ideas in the West. It is cursed as irrational and destructive, and praised as the origin of just about everything. Eros is famous for its foolishness, and at the same time elevated and venerated as a god, albeit at first a rather minor one but by the time of early Christianity, nothing less than God as such. Today, we find ourselves torn between such mundane considerations as dependency and autonomy, security and the dubious freedom to remain ‘‘uncommitted.’’ It is hard to remind ourselves, therefore, that the history of love is intellectual warfare between bestiality on one side and divinity on the other. The word ‘‘love’’ has so often functioned as a synonym for lust that it is hard to take it seriously as a virtue. It has just as long been raised to cosmological status, by Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plotinus, for example, that it therefore seems somewhat small-minded to reduce it to a mere source of human relationships. Most modern philosophers have, accordingly, ignored it, Schopenhauer here as elsewhere being a bit eccentric, while moralists have had a field day playing the one side (lust) against the other (divine grace, piety, and contempt for all bodily functions, but particularly those which are best when shared). In any discussion of love as a virtue, it is necessary, if by now routine, to mention different ‘‘kinds’’ of love. (The notion of ‘‘kinds’’ may already be question-begging here, for the more difficult issue may be what links, rather than distinguishes, friendship, sexual love, and parental affection.) In particular, it is essential that we distinguish eros and agape´, the former usually translated as sexual love; the latter, as selfless and certainly sexless love of humanity. The distinction is often drawn crudely. For instance, eros is taken to be purely erotic and reduced to sexual desire. Agape´ is characterized as selfless giving, opposed by eros, which thus becomes selfish taking (or ‘‘craving’’). Agape´ is idealized to the point where it becomes an attitude possible only to God, thus rendering it virtually inapplicable to merely human fellow feelings. Eros, by contrast, is degraded to the profanely secular and denied any hint of spirituality. To think of love as a virtue, therefore, is first of all to expand (once again) the domain of eros. (Romantic love, I am [ 166] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

presuming, is one historical variant of eros.) One need not deny the desirability (or the possibility) of altruistic agape´ to insist that erotic eros shares at least some of its virtues. Eros, and what we now call ‘‘romantic love,’’ should also be distinguished (carefully) from other forms of particular affection—for example, motherly, fatherly, brotherly, or sisterly love and friendship. I think that Schopenhauer was partly right when he suggested (with Freud following him) that all love is to some extent sexual. But to make this point one obviously needs a generously enlarged conception of sex and sexual desire, and I often fear that this insight is motivated as much by its titillating implications as by the impulse to clarify the nature of human bonding. A more modest thesis is that eros (not sex) permeates virtually all intimate, personal affections. What characterizes eros in general, accordingly, is an intense quasi-physical, even ‘‘grasping,’’ affection for a particular person, an ‘‘urge to hug,’’ if you will. (Plato often uses such desire-defined language in talking about eros, even when he is reaching for the Forms.) In romantic love, sexual desire is undeniably a part of this affection, though it is not at all clear to what extent this is the source of the affection or, rather, its vehicle. Eros differs from agape´ in the prevalence of self-interested desire, but it is not thereby selfish and the desire is not just sexual. It also includes a much more general physical desire to ‘‘be with,’’ such personal desires as ‘‘to be appreciated’’ and ‘‘to be happy together,’’ such inspirational desires as ‘‘to be the best for you,’’ and such ‘‘altruistic’’ desires as ‘‘to do anything I can for you.’’ As La Rochefoucauld once put it, ‘‘in the soul . . . a thirst for mastery; in the mind sympathy; in the body, nothing but a delicately hidden desire to possess, after many mysteries.’’3 It is a common mistake to think of the other person in a sexual relationship as a mere ‘‘object’’ of desire, which leads to the idea that eros, too, is degrading and seeks only its own satisfaction. Consider Kant on the matter: Because sexuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another, it is a principle of the degradation of human nature, in that it gives rise to the preference of one sex to the other, and to the dishonoring of that sex through the satisfaction of desire.4

But surely the question (as Plato raised it 2300 years earlier) is what one desires when one sexually desires another person. In the Symposium, Aristophanes suggests that one desires not sex but permanent (re)unification with the other; Socrates insists that one really wants the heavenly Forms. Even if we consider such goals too fantastic for eros, it is clear that the Greeks following Plato—as opposed to Kant and many moderns—saw that sexual desire was much, much more than desire for sex and not at all opposed to virtuous desire. At the very least, it is clear that sexual desire is some sort of powerful desire for the other person through sex. The question is: A desire The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 167]

for what? And by no means should we assume from the outset that the answer to this question has anything to do with sexual objects. Indeed, taking our cue from Hegel and Sartre, we might suggest, rather, that it has everything to do with sexual subjects, and subjects by their very nature cannot be wholly sexual. The most obvious difference between erotic (romantic) and other particular forms of love is the centrality of sexual (do not read ‘‘genital’’) desire, but there are two other differences that, philosophically, are much more illuminating. The first, though quite controversial, is the prerequisite of equality between lovers. This may seem odd in light of modern accusations against love as a vehicle for the degradation and oppression of women (Shulamith Firestone, Marilyn French), but in historical perspective it becomes clear that—however far we may be from real equality—romantic love emerges only with the relative liberation of women from traditional subservient social and economic roles. Romantic love emerges only when women begin to have more of a choice about their lives—and about their lovers and husbands in particular. One thinks of John Milton’s Adam, created early in the era of romantic love, who specifically requests from God not a mere playmate or companion or mirror image of himself but an equal, for ‘‘among unequals what society/Can sort, what harmony or true delight?’’5 Or, paraphrasing Stendhal, we might say that love tends to create equals even where it does not find them, for equality is as essential to romantic love as authority is to parenthood—whether or not this is adequately acknowledged or acted upon. The other difference between eros and other loves is that romantic love, unlike familial love, for example, is unprescribed and often spontaneous. Critical to erotic, romantic love is the sense of choice. Family love, in this sense, is always prescribed. The love between husband and wife, or what such authors as Denis de Rougemont call ‘‘conjugal love,’’ might be considered to be prescribed in this sense, too, once they are ‘‘bound’’ by marriage. This is emphatically not to say that married love cannot be romantic, or that romantic love is characterized only by its novelty or by the excitement and anxiety consequent to that novelty. It is a common mistake to take the exhilaration of love as love—without asking what that exhilaration is about. Love and marriage may begin together even if they do not always remain together, and to separate them is just to say that love can be unhitched just as horses can, while carriages sit unmoving. What could be virtuous about eros? One might rationalize sexual love as the slippery slope to marriage, but this faint praise only reinforces our image of romantic love as something in itself childish, foolish, and a kind of conspiracy of nature and society to trick self-consciously rebellious adolescents into maturity. One might celebrate eros as the often unrecognized source of many of our most beautiful creations, from Dante’s poetry to the [ 168] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Taj Mahal, but this, too, is to demean love as a virtue and see it merely as a means, as Freud once saw anal retentiveness and sublimation as means to great art. But it seems to me that eros is not usually considered a virtue for three general sorts of reasons. First, eros is reduced to mere sexuality, and philosophers, insofar as they deign to dirty their minds with sex at all (qua philosophers, of course), tend to see sexuality as vulgar and not even a candidate for virtue. Part of this is the common perception of sex as either a form of recreation or a means to procreation, but in any case a set of desires constrained by ethics but hardly of ethical value in themselves. Second, love is an emotion, and emotions are thought to be irrational, beyond our control, merely episodic instead of an essential aspect of character, products of ‘‘instinct’’ and intractable in the face of all evidence and objective consideration. Even Aristotle, one of the better friends of the passions in the history of philosophy, insisted that only states of character, not passions, can count as virtues. Third, eros, even insofar as it is not just sexual, is self-love and the selfindulgence of desire, while an essential characteristic of the virtues is, in Hume’s phrase, their utility, their being pleasing to others and based on such sentiments as compassion and sympathy. Romantic love, far from being ‘‘pleasing to others,’’ tends to be embarrassing and sometimes harmful to others and self-destructive. It tends to be possessive, jealous, obsessive, antisocial, even ‘‘mad.’’ Such drama is not the stuff of which virtue is made. I obviously believe that each of these objections to erotic love as a virtue is just plain wrong, but it will take most of this chapter to spell out an alternative view. Simply, for now, let me state that these objections demean and misunderstand the nature of sexuality, the nature of emotions, and the nature of love in particular. So that I do not appear overly irrationalist and romantic here, let me draw Plato to my side. He clearly saw eros as a virtue, and every one of the speakers in the Symposium agrees with this. Even Socrates, by far the most effete of the speakers, celebrates eros not as the disinterested appreciation of beauty and wisdom (as many Oxford commentaries would make it seem) but rather as a ‘‘grasping’’ sensuality, perhaps of the mind rather than the body, but erotic nonetheless. In Plato’s thinking, eros is a virtue just because it is (in part) a passion, filled with desire and—in that peculiarly noble Socratic sense—self-obsessed as well.

Ethics and Subjectivity One more word against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense; any other kind of virtue is The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 169]

a danger. . . . ‘‘Virtue,’’ ‘‘duty,’’ the ‘‘good in itself,’’ the good which is impersonal and universally valid —chimeras and expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life.6

A single paradigm of rationality has retained hegemony in ethics since the Enlightenment. In the shadow of this paradigm, there is less difference than similarity between Kant and the utilitarians: moral philosophy is nothing if not objective, rational, based on principles, and exclusive of particular selfreference and mere personal perspectives. What is shocking is what the paradigm leaves out: most emotions and love in particular (except insofar as these might motivate duty—as ‘‘practical’’—or serve ‘‘the greatest good for the greatest number’’). The elegant observations of Hume and Rousseau on the moral sentiments are shunted aside in favor of philosophical policy decisions. The neglect of personal inclinations in favor of legalistic universal principles leaves out the substance of the ethical, which is not principles but feelings. Bernard Williams points out that it would be ‘‘insane’’ to prefer an act of kindness born of principle to one born of personal affection, as Kant recommends.7 One thinks of the myriad delights, affections, and felt obligations in love. Kant’s line quoted earlier from the Groundwork about ‘‘pathological love,’’ even on the most generous interpretation (as ‘‘pathos’’ rather than ‘‘sick’’), dismisses affection and compassion as irrelevant to moral worth. This eliminates most of what we—and most of Kant’s Romantic colleagues—take to be the very heart of morality. Nothing is more important to our evaluation of a person’s moral character than his or her feelings, and not just because of our reasonable expectation that actions generally follow feelings. The worth of one’s feelings is not parasitic on the desirability of one’s actions. In love, the worthiness of one’s actions depends on the feelings they express. Generous and even heroic actions may follow from love, but the virtue of love stands quite on its own, even without such consequences (Socrates’ criticism of Phaedrus in the Symposium). We may think Othello foolish and tragic, but we still admire his love, while literature is filled with Kantian gentlemen acting on their principles who are utterly repulsive (for instance, Mr. Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). Not only is it desirable to love, but those who have not loved (if not lost), or fear they cannot, rightly worry not only about their character but also about their completeness as human beings—quite apart from any questions about action or performance. Love itself is admirable, quite apart from its effects and consequences. Why is the tradition so opposed to love and other feelings as essential, even primary, ingredients in morality? The opposition is all the more surprising given the heavy emphasis on love (though as agape´ ) as the supreme virtue in the New Testament—and it is just this oddity that Kant is trying to [ 170] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

explain away in the passage quoted. There seem to be several reasons for Kant’s antagonism to feelings in moral evaluation. First and foremost, he seems to believe that only what can be ‘‘commanded’’ is morally obligatory, and love as a passion cannot be commanded. This particular claim has been admirably disputed in Edward Sankowski’s paper ‘‘Love and Moral Obligation,’’ where, in particular, he argues that we at least hold people responsible for fostering or evading the conditions that breed love.8 One might challenge as well the claim that only what can be commanded is moral; much of what goes into ‘‘good character,’’ while it can be cultivated, cannot be commanded. One might also argue—as I often have—that the emotions are far more our responsibility and under our control than we normally believe, and not just in the sense that we can foster or avoid the conditions in which they typically emerge. This is not to say that an emotion such as love can simply be produced, by an act of will or volition, as one might now produce a thought or a movement of one’s finger. There may be, in (Arthur) Dantoesque phrase, no ‘‘basic action’’ where love is concerned. But there are lots of intentional actions of both mind and body that are not basic, and to insist that love can be produced ex nihilo by a volition is surely to place an unreasonable demand on its moral virtue. Second, on the Kantian paradigm, it is always the universal that is in question, never the particular. Here Kant is once again in agreement with New Testament ethics, for agape´ could be argued to be universal (or, one might also say, indiscriminate) love, and not love for any particular person. (It is worth noting that Christian psychology did hold people responsible for their feelings; did believe that love could be commanded; and, in just the phrase disputed by Kant, demanded it.) But on many interpretations Christian love, as love, is emphatically the love of particulars—even if of every particular and not just of the universal (God, humanity) as such. Love—especially erotic or romantic love—is wholly particular. It is the elevation of one otherwise ordinary person to extraordinary heights with extraordinary privileges. The idea of a categorical imperative in such instances is laughable. On the Kantian model, the particularity of love would seem to be a form of irrationality—comparable to our tendency to make ‘‘exceptions’’ of ourselves, and in this case to make exceptions of persons close to us.9 In love the particular is everything. The virtue of love is and ought to be entirely preferential and personal. The lover who gives special preference to his love (though not, of course, in a bureaucratic or departmental position) is virtuous. A lover who insisted on treating everyone, including his or her lover, the same would strike us as utterly repulsive. Third, because morality is a matter of reason, the supposed irrationality of the emotions (in general) would seem to be good enough reason not to make The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 171]

them central to ethics. The alleged irrationality of emotions is something more than their supposed involuntariness and particularity. Kant thinks that emotions are irrational, Bernard Williams suggests, because they are capricious. One might add that they also seem to be intrusive, disruptive, stubborn, stupid, and pointless. These are very different accusations, but they are often levied together against emotions in general and love in particular. As ‘‘feelings,’’ it is often said that emotions are nonrational (not even smart enough to be irrational). Or, granting emotions a modicum of aims and intelligence, it is insisted that emotions (sui generis) have limited ends and (at best) inefficient means. Against the ‘‘disruptive’’ view of emotions it should be argued that they do not always intrude into or disrupt life, but often define it and define the ultimate ends of rationality as well.10 Against the view that emotions are stupid, one could argue at length how emotional ‘‘intuition’’ is often more insightful and certainly more strategic than many of the ratiocinations of abstract moralizing; and against the view that emotions are aimless, it should be said that all emotions have their aims, even if rather odd and sometimes limited. On the other hand, it should be commented that some emotions—among them love—have the most grandiose aims, far grander than the surely limited desire to be ‘‘reasonable.’’ Consider Hegel: ‘‘Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all . . . love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers life itself without any further defect.’’11 The most common accusation against the emotions, and love in particular, is that they confuse or distort our experience (Leibniz and Spinoza were not alone in calling them ‘‘confused perceptions’’12). What is in question here is the infamous resistance of emotions to canons of consistency and evident facts; their alleged lack of ‘‘common sense’’ and tendency to bias perception and judgment; their apparent tolerance of contradiction (which Freud made one of the hallmarks of ‘‘the Unconscious’’); their refusal to conform to obvious considerations of objectivity. In love, this is embarrassingly obvious. A homely lover looks longingly at his equally plain love and declares, ‘‘You are the most beautiful woman in the world.’’ How are we to understand this? Self-deception? Insanity? Surely not ‘‘blindness,’’ for the problem is not that he cannot see. Indeed, he might well claim to see much more than we do, or more deeply. Impolitely pressed, our enraptured lover may grudgingly concede the point, perhaps doing a phenomenological retreat to ‘‘Well, she’s the most beautiful woman in the world to me!’’ But we know how such qualifications are treated in philosophy—with proper epistemological disdain. In love one makes a claim, and it is a claim that is demonstrably false. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, perhaps, but is this an argument against love? [ 172] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Consider in the same light the accusation of ‘‘intractability’’ that is thrown at the emotions, supposedly separating them from reason and rationality. (Ame´lie Rorty, for example, develops this charge at length in her ‘‘Explaining Emotions.’’ )13 It is worth noting that Kant rejected the emotions not because they were stubborn but because they were capricious, even though such a suggestion goes against the obvious—that emotions can be durable and devoted, even stubborn and intractable. In love, in particular, it is notoriously difficult, when one has been in love, to purge that emotion, even though it now has become an intolerable source of pain and not at all a source of pleasure. But is this an accusation against the emotions, or is it part of their virtue? It is passing fancy that we criticize, not unmovable devotion. It is sudden anger that we call irrational, not long-motivated and well-reasoned animosity (which is not to say, of course, that sudden anger is always improper or inappropriate, or that long-term outrage is not sometimes irrational and even insane). It is true that the emotions are stubborn and intractable, but this—as opposed to much less dependable action in accordance with principle—is what makes them so essential to ethics. Principles can easily be rationalized and reinterpreted. At least in the short term, one trusts a person fighting in accordance with his passions far more than one fighting for abstract principles. (It is remarkable how principles admit convenient exceptions and emendations.) Intractability is a virtue of the emotions as rationalization is to reason a vice. Sometimes the ‘‘truth’’ of emotions is their intractability, their resistance to every attempt to change them. Objectively, what love sees and thinks is mostly nonsense, and what it values is quite contrary to everything that philosophical ethics likes to emphasize—objectivity, impersonality, disinterestedness, universality, respect for evidence and arguments, and so on. And yet, it seems to me that such ‘‘irrationality’’ is among our most important and charming features. We care about each other prior to any evidence or arguments that we ought to. We find each other beautiful, charming, and desirable, seemingly without reference to common standards.14 We think less of a lover if his or her love alters when it alteration finds, or if one bends to the opinions of disapproving friends. Love ought to be intractable, we believe, even if this stubbornness causes considerable pain once the love is over. ‘‘Just get over it’’ is cruel and insensitive advice to a heartbroken friend, and not just because it is so difficult to do. Rather, it violates the very idea of love: that it is not something just to be gotten over, even in those cases where one loves someone totally undeserving. Love itself is the virtue, a virtue so important that rationality pales in importance. Ultimately, the charge against the emotions—and against love in particular— is that of ‘‘subjectivity.’’ Subjectivity is a notoriously slippery notion in philosophy that is often opposed to and contrasted with tidy concepts of The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 173]

rationality and objectivity. The charge of ‘‘subjectivity’’ typically turns into an accusation of bias and unreasonableness. But, on the other hand, there is a complementary charge against objectivity, against impersonal, merely abstract ratiocination. There is that sense of ‘‘objectivity’’ pursued by Camus and Thomas Nagel, for example—in which we are all infinitesimal specks in the galaxy, our lives no more significant than the lives of trees or sea polyps, our bodies nothing but the stuff of physiology, our sex a dubious advancement on the reproduction of bacteria, our speech nothing but making noises, our lives meaningless. It is what Nagel calls ‘‘the view from nowhere,’’ and in its extreme forms it is as undesirable as it is impossible. Such a viewpoint tends to dominate ethics and value theory as well, if in a more humane or anthropocentric domain. Most of contemporary ethics is still framed not as personal but as policy—to be applied, one suspects, by some imagined philosopher-king.15 The emphasis is not on being a ‘‘good person’’ but rather a just and fair administrator (being a good person is presumably the same). The model, thinly disguised by the evasive logic of ‘‘universalizability,’’ is the bureaucrat, who treats everyone the same and has no relevant personality of his or her own. Love is thus unethical, for against all principles of ethics it has the audacity to view one other person as someone very special and does not, as Mill insisted, count ‘‘everyone as one and only one’’ at all.

On Love’s Virtues: Plato’s Symposium Revisited It is, in fact, just a love story. . . . Alcibiades, asked to speak about eros, cannot describe the passion or its object in general terms, because his experience of love is an experience that happened to him only once, and in connection with an individual who is seen by him to be like nobody else in the world. —Martha Nussbaum (‘‘The Speech of Alcibiades’’)

The classical text on the virtue(s) of erotic love is, of course, Plato’s Symposium, and Plato (not Socrates) provides us with a portrait of eros as a virtue that is quite appropriate to our modern concept of romantic love. Let us begin by saying very quickly that the concept of eros there discussed is not the same as our concept of romantic love. Romantic love presumes a good many modern ideas, including ideas about the nature of individuality, the equality of the sexes, and the nature of marriage. Greek love is asymmetrical love between man and youth rather than our symmetrical romance between man and woman. And Plato is doing much more in that dialogue that is by no means evident or easily comprehensible to the modern nonclassicist reader. [ 174] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

That said, we can remind ourselves that the subject of the dialogue is the nature and the virtues of love. Each of the various speeches can be interpreted as a theory of love. It is worth noting that Socrates objects to Phaedrus’s speech, in particular, because he stresses only the virtues of love—we might say love’s good social consequences—instead of the emotion itself; and he complains that Aristophanes only gives us an account of the nature of love without providing an adequate account of its virtues. I think that Socrates is right on both counts: virtues are not virtues just by way of their consequences (against Hume, for example), and an analysis of love that does not tell us how important it is—not just why we are obsessed with it—is inadequate.16 But we might also note that the usual characterization of the dialogue is extremely misleading, that is, as a ladder of relatively forgettable speeches leading up to a culmination—the speech by Socrates that tells us exactly what love is. The usual assumption that Socrates acts here as the spokesman for Plato’s own view is unsupportable. In this dialogue, even the minor speeches portray essential aspects of love. For example, the banal speech of the physician Eryximachus clumsily captures today’s obsession with love as a mainly medical phenomenon with health as its virtue. Most important, however, is the fact that in this dialogue, Socrates does not have the last or the best word. Martha Nussbaum, Michael Gagarin, and others have shown—convincingly, I believe—that Alcibiades’ tragicomic description of Socrates at the end of the dialogue is essential, if not the key, to the Symposium.17 Indeed, one might even make the case that Plato is partially opposed to Socrates and employs Alcibiades as a counterexample, showing (rather than arguing) the flaw in Socrates’ position. Socrates’ speech makes love virtuous, but only by ignoring or denying its most essential features—its sexual passion, its interpersonality, its particularity, and its apparent irrationality. Eros, in short, becomes excitement about philosophy. It is impersonal, indifferent to any particular person, ‘‘above’’ bodily desire. In contrast, Alcibiades emphasizes the very personal, passionate, irrational, physical aspect of love, the intractable and unreasonable love for a particular, incomparable human being, not a desexed universal.18 A similar foil for Socrates is the delightful story by Aristophanes, once he has gotten over his hiccups, in which we are all imagined to be the offspring of perfect (spherical) ancestral beings, split in two by Zeus and now desperately looking for our other halves. This explains the ‘‘infinite longing’’ that every lover knows, which includes the longing for sexual union ( but by no means can one be satisfied just with that). Aristophanes tries to defend his story after Socrates (as Diotima) has given his lengthy speech, but he is interrupted by Alcibiades, wholly drunk, who launches into his paean for Socrates, contradicting (in his very demeanor) everything Socrates has just been arguing. Socrates, sandwiched between the two beautiful young men The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 175]

Agathon and Alcibiades, remains aloof and painfully unsympathetic to their pleas for his attention. What Plato is showing, undermining Socrates’ fine speech, is the impersonality of his approach to love. Here, I think, is Plato’s own voice, not just as Socrates as Diotima, but also through Alcibiades presenting love as it is against the perhaps admirable but overambitious and too ethereal efforts of Socrates to say what it should be. I think that this is important for our concern here, because the problem with understanding love as a virtue is not just its undervaluation as sex and emotion: it is also its excessive idealization as something more than—or completely different from—sexuality and personal passion. If we think that the virtue of love is nothing less than the virtues of divinity itself, then love may be virtuous but it will have little to do with us and our petty particular affections. If love is a virtue in the sense that I want to defend here, it must apply to Aristophanes and even Alcibiades as well as Socrates. Socrates gives us a noble sense of the idealization that is part and parcel of eros, but I think we can safely say that he goes too far in abandoning the eroticism of the particular.

The History of Love Having said all this, we may now agree that the Western concept of love (in its heterosexual and humanistic aspects) was—if not ‘‘invented’’ or ‘‘discovered’’ at least developed in the twelfth century as never before. Only at that late date was man able to begin thinking consecutively about ways of harmonizing sexual impulses with idealistic motives, of justifying amorous intimacy not as a means of preserving the race, or glorifying God, or attaining some ulterior metaphysical object but rather as an end in itself that made life worth living. —Irving Singer (The Nature of Love)

The virtues, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, are functional and historical. They perform different functions in different societies, and one would not expect the virtues of a warrior in Homeric Greece to be similar to those of a gentleman in Jane Austen’s England. Love as a virtue is also functional and historical. Sexuality ‘‘fits’’ into different societies in different ways, and conceptions of love and marriage vary accordingly. However ‘‘obvious’’ the universal function of heterosexual intercourse may be in the preservation of every society, sexual desire is virtually never limited to this end, and the myriad courtship rituals, mores, and emotions invented by human cultures attest to the variety of ends to which this basic ur-lust can be employed. The virtues of love, accordingly, are the intrinsic ends that eros serves, one of which may be, as Stendhal used to argue, its existence for its own sake. [ 176] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Sexual desire may seem like something of a constant through history, but the objects of desire (obviously) and the source, nature, and vicissitudes of that desire vary as much as societies and their philosophies. Love is defined not primarily by sex or the libido but by ideas; and romantic love, which is a very modern (eighteenth-century) concept, involves certain specific ideas about sex, gender, marriage, and the meaning of life, as well as the significance and functions of the perennial promptings of biology. Strictly speaking, there is nothing in the Symposium (or anywhere else before the seventeenth century) about romantic love. Romantic love is part and parcel of Romanticism, a distinctively modern movement. It presupposes an unusually strong conception of privacy and individual autonomy, a relatively novel celebration of the emotions for their own sake, and a dramatic metaphysics of unity—of which sexual unity in love is but one particularly exciting and tangible example. (Compare Hegel: ‘‘In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate,’’ or the Romantic poet Shelley: ‘‘one soul of interwoven flame.’’) The speakers in Plato’s Symposium praise courage, education, and wisdom as the virtues of love, but they have little to say of the virtues of heterosexuality (apart, of course, from its function of producing more Athenians). Charity, devotion, and chastity were praised as virtues of Christian love, but there was little to say about the joys of sexuality. Romantic love has among its virtues the metaphysical legitimation of sexual desire, the motivation for marriage, and the equalization of the sexes, surely no part of Greek love and doubtful in traditional Christian love. (Contemporary Christian concepts of love, of course, have adopted and incorporated much of the romantic ideology.) Romantic love has as its virtue the expansion of the self to include another, hardly necessary in societies in which community or tribal membership provided all of the shared identity one could possibly desire. Romantic love has as a virtue its expression of what we opaquely call ‘‘the inner self,’’ again not a virtue that would have been understood in less psychological and more socially minded societies. To put the matter bluntly (and without argument), romantic love came of age only when newly industrialized and increasingly anonymous societies fostered the economically independent and socially shrunken (nuclear) family; when women as well as men were permitted considerable personal choice in their marriage partners; when romantic love novels spread the gospel to the multitude of women of the middle class (whereas courtly love had been the privilege of a few aristocratic heroines); and, philosophically most important, when the now many-centuries-old contrast between sacred and profane love had broken down and been synthesized in a secular mode (like so many ideas in the Enlightenment). Romantic love depended on what historian Lawrence Stone has called ‘‘affective individualism,’’ an attitude to The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 177]

the individual and the importance of his or her emotions that did not arise, and could not have arisen, until modern times. It is essential that we keep the historical character of love in mind so that we are not seduced by an idea that might well be prompted by the seeming timelessness of the Symposium or the always familiar cynical view that love is nothing but hormonal agitation coupled with the uncertainties and frustrations of courtship—or, as Freud put it, ‘‘lust plus the ordeal of civility.’’ This idea is that love is itself something timeless and universal, a singular phenomenon which varies only in its enculturation and interpretation but is otherwise universally the same. In fact, even the Symposium provides us with no fewer than half a dozen conceptions of love, and it is not clear to what extent these are disagreements about the true nature of eros or different kinds of eros. Socrates, in particular, is certainly giving us a new conception, a ‘‘persuasive definition.’’ Historically, we find these variations played out on a grand scale, with Socrates setting the stage for an ethereal concept of love that would come of age with Christian theology, Alcibiades displaying the ‘‘languor’’ and its imagery that would come to characterize late medieval courtly love, and Aristophanes anticipating modern romantic love. But paganism, even in Plato, cannot begin to capture the range and complexity of romantic conceptions of love in modern times. To understand erotic love as we know it, it is necessary to appreciate the power of the long, if often antagonistic, history of Christian conceptions of love. The history of erotic love has been determined not only by the fact that Christian thought demeaned sexual love as such but also by the Christian emphasis on the ‘‘inner’’ individual soul and the importance of such emotions as faith and devotion. The genius of Christianity was that it co-opted erotic love and turned it into something else: still the love of one’s fellow man and perhaps even the love of one’s wife or husband, but no longer particularly sexual, no longer personal, no longer merely human. In its positive presentation, love became a form of idealization, even worship, an attempt to transcend not only oneself and one’s self-interests but also the limited self-interests of an ´egoı¨sme a` deux. It did not have to deny the sexual or the personal so much because the Christian conception of love aimed always ‘‘higher,’’ toward not just virtue or happiness but perfection itself. On the negative side, it must be said (and often has been) that the Christian conception of love was also brutal and inhuman, denying not only our ‘‘natural’’ impulses but even the conception of a loving marriage as such. Saint Paul’s advice, ‘‘Better to marry than to burn,’’ was one of the more generous sentiments governing this revised concept of love. Tertullian was not alone in insisting that even to look on one’s wife with lust was a sin. Aristophanes’ thesis that lovers experience that ‘‘infinite longing’’ which manifests and only momentarily satisfies itself in sex is lost in the Christian conception of purely [ 178] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

spiritual love. Indeed, all such desires become antithetical to love, not an expression of it. To Nietzsche’s observation that Christianity is Platonism for the masses we might add that because of Christian psychology, we now have psychoanalysis. Christian theology may have encouraged and revered love above all else, but it was not erotic love that flourished. Alternative names for love—caritas and agape´—may have clarified the scholarship but not the phenomenology of the emotion. When one looked lovingly at another, who could say whether the feeling was divine caritas or nasty eros, except that one knew that one should feel the former and should feel ashamed at the latter. An entire literature grew up, from which some of our favorite first-date dialogues are derived, distinguishing love from sexual desire as if these not only were always distinguishable but also were opposed. By the fourteenth century, this confusion had become canonized as Platonic love, for which Plato (or at least Socrates) is indeed to blame. Platonic love dispensed with Agathon, Aristophanes, and the others; took Diotima (whose name means ‘‘honor the god’’) at her word; and substituted Christian faith for pagan wisdom. Love had become even more idealized than Socrates had urged, but what had been gained in spirituality was more than lost in the denial of the erotic passions and the importance of happy human relationships for their own sake. It was in reaction to this insensitivity to human desires and affections that courtly love was invented in the twelfth century. Romantic love is often identified historically with courtly love—which is rightly recognized as its significant late medieval predecessor. But the two are quite distinct, as Irving Singer has argued in his Nature of Love. The two are often conflated (e.g., by Denis de Rougemont in his celebrated but dubious study of the subject19 ). Courtly love, in particular, is often reduced to the ridiculous image of the frustrated, ‘‘longing’’ troubadour singing pathetically before the (very tall) tower of some inevitably fair but unavailable lady. The name ‘‘courtly love,’’ it should be noted, was not employed by the participants themselves but was applied much later—in the Romantic period—by Gaston Paris, who used it to refer to Lancelot and Guinevere, who were hardly the most obvious example of a sexually frustrated or tragically separated couple. Indeed, the paradigm of courtly love began not as chaste and frustrated (if poetic) desire but as secret, adulterous, and all-embracing illicit love. (C. S. Lewis has defended this paradigm of illicit love in his famous Four Loves.)20 Socially, courtly love was a plaything of the upper class. It was as much talk as action and, perhaps most important, it was wholly distinct from, even opposed to, marriage. It is not surprising that the texts and theories of the male troubadours—Andreas Capellanus, especially—were typically drawn from the adulterous advice of Ovid. But their female counterparts—Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example—did not take the link between love and marriage The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 179]

any more seriously, in part because they were almost always already married. What is often said of courtly love—that it rarely resulted in consummation— is not true. Indeed, if anything, one might say that courtly love was more obsessed with sex than contemporary romantic love. The fact that consummation came slowly and after considerable effort does not eclipse the fact that consummation was the explicit and sometimes definitive end of the endeavor. Much of the history of our changing conceptions of love has to do with the effort to bring together and synthesize the idealization suggested by Plato and Christian love with the very real demands and desires of a couple in love. The virtue of ‘‘courtly love’’ was its effort to carry out this synthesis and at the same time introduce some sexual and aesthetic satisfaction into a world of arranged marriages based wholly on social, political, and economic considerations (thus the separation—if not opposition—between courtly love and marriage). It was courtly love that introduced the essential romantic conception of erotic love as good in itself, a conception that one does not find in the teleology of the Symposium and certainly does not find in Christian concepts of love. In his now classic study, Irving Singer formulates five general features of love that characterize the courtly: (1) that sexual love between men and women is itself an ideal worth striving for; (2) that love ennobles both lover and beloved; (3) that sexual love cannot be reduced to mere libidinal impulse; (4) that love has to do with courtship but not (necessarily) with marriage; and (5) that love involves a ‘‘holy oneness’’ between man and woman.21 It should be clear, as Singer goes on to argue in great detail, how courtly love constituted an attempt to synthesize pagan and Christian conceptions of love, incorporating both ethical ideals and sexual desire. The first feature (sexual love as an ideal worth striving for) signals a radical challenge to the traditional Christian view of love, while the third (sexual love is not mere libidinal impulse) is a rebuke of the vulgar view that love is nothing but sexual desire. It is worth noting that the last feature (the ‘‘holy oneness’’) is very much in tune with much of Christian theology, and indeed, the Aristophanic notion of love as a ‘‘union’’ would continue to be one of the central but most difficult (and therefore often ‘‘magical’’ or ‘‘mystical’’) themes of love through the Romantic period. I shall try to develop this idea more literally in the following section. The distinction between love and marriage is of particular interest in the history of love, and it is worth noting that these have not always been linked so essentially as ‘‘horse and carriage,’’ as one popular song would have it. In Plato, for obvious reasons, the question of marriage did not even arise in considerations of eros (at least, for that form of eros which was worthy of philosophical consideration). Ovid considered love and marriage as opposites, [ 180] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

although the marriage of one’s intended did provide a challenging obstacle to continued seduction, and thereby an additional source of excitement. The long history of marriage as a sacrament has little to say about sexual love and sometimes has much to say against it, and by the time of courtly love, courtship typically provided an alternative to loveless marriage rather than a prelude to marriage or—almost unheard of—the content of marriage itself. Gaston Paris and C. S. Lewis’s paradigm of Lancelot and Guinevere may have represented excessive antagonism between love and all social and religious institutions and obligations, especially marriage, but courtly love could not be conceived—whatever else it may have been—as essentially a prelude to or a legitimate reason for marriage. Indeed, the idea that marriage is the culmination of love became popular only in the seventeenth century or so, as exemplified in Shakespeare’s plays, especially in his comedies. And compared to the rigid ethos of Jane Austen’s novels, for example, it must be said that our current understanding of love and marriage is quite in flux and confused. Romantic love, we may now say, is the historical result of a long and painful synthesis of erotic pagan love and idealistic Christian love or, ahistorically, between Aristophanes and Alcibiades on the one hand, and Socrates on the other. It is not just sexual, or even primarily sexual, but an idealistic updating of the pagan virtues of cultivation and sensuousness and Christian devotion and fidelity in the modern context of individual privacy, autonomy, and affectivity. To think that romantic love is without virtue is to grossly mistake romance for sexual recreation or unrealistic idealization, and to ignore the whole historical development that lies behind even the most ordinary love affair. But it is time to say something more about the nature of romantic love as such.

What Is Romantic Love? Love is the expression of an ancient need, that human desire was originally one and we were whole, and the desire and the pursuit of the whole is called love.—Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium)

Romantic love, we may need to remind ourselves, is an emotion—an ordinary and very common emotion, even if it is experienced by most of us but once or twice in a lifetime. It is not a ‘‘force’’ or a ‘‘mystery.’’ Like all emotions, it is largely learned (albeit on a basis already present in hereditary behavior patterns). It can be obsessive, peculiar to certain kinds of cultures with certain brands of philosophy. I will not here rehearse once again my analysis of emotion as a complex of judgments, desires, and values. Let me just claim, without argument, the weaker thesis that every emotion The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 181]

presupposes, even if it is not composed of, a set of specifiable concepts (e.g., anger as offense, sadness as loss, jealousy as the threat of loss) and more or less specific desires and values, such as revenge in anger, the value of what has been lost in sadness, the value of what is threatened in jealousy. Love, accordingly, can and must be analyzed in terms of such a set of concepts and desires, some of which are obvious, the more interesting ones perhaps not so. It is evident enough that one set of desires in romantic love is the desire to be with, the desire to touch, the desire to caress; and here we are immediately reminded of Aristophanes’ lesson: that which manifests itself as a sexual urge in love is actually something much more, a desire to be reunited with, to be one with, one’s love. From this, I want to suggest what I take to be the dominant conceptual ingredient in romantic love, which is just this urge for shared identity, a kind of ontological dependency.22 The challenge, however, is to get beyond this familiar idea (and its kindred characterizations as a ‘‘union,’’ ‘‘a merger of souls,’’ etc.) and explain exactly what ‘‘identity’’ could possibly mean in this context. Aristophanes’ wonderful metaphor is still a metaphor. Whether or not we would want Hephaestus to weld the two of us together, body and soul, as Aristophanes suggests, the fusion metaphor is still a metaphor and does not do our understanding much good. Aristophanes claims that we want the impossible—indeed, the unimaginable; he does not give us any indication of how we might in fact share an identity, over and above brief and not always well-coordinated unifications of the flesh. Who, after all, would be our original ‘‘other half’’? More to the point, one might well quote Cathy’s climactic revelation in Wuthering Heights: ‘‘I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, anymore than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being.’’ Here we have more than a hint of what is involved in shared identity: not a mystical union nor a frustrated physicality but a sense of presence, always ‘‘in mind,’’ defining one’s sense of self to one’s self. Love is just this shared identity, and the desires of love—including especially the desire for sexual intercourse (quite apart from physiological need)—can best be understood with reference to this strange but not at all unfamiliar concept. I cannot do justice to this challenge here, but let me at least present the thesis: shared identity is the intention of love, and the virtues of love are essentially the virtues of this intended identity.23 To say that shared identity is the intention of love is not to deny or neglect sex but to give it a context. Nor does this give away too much to marriage (which is a legal identity), but it does explain how romantic love and marriage have come to be so associated, the latter now considered to be the culmination of the former. Before we say anything more, however, let me express a Socratic caveat: I think that it is necessary to display love as it is by itself, without confusing it with all of the other Good Things we would like and [ 182] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

expect to go with it—companionship, great sex, friendship, someone to travel with, someone who really cares, and the benefits of a good marriage. Of course we want these things, and preferably all in the same package, but love can and must be understood apart from all of them. Without being depressing, let us remind ourselves that love often goes wrong; that love can be unrequited; that love does not assure satisfying sex; that love and friendship are sometimes opposed; that love can be very lonely; that love can be not only obsessive but also insane. Not that love must be or often is any of these, but it can be; and so let us look at the virtues of love itself, as Socrates insisted, not in terms of its consequences or its most desirable embellishments. The nature of identity in love, briefly described, is this. (I acknowledge an obvious debt to Hegel and Sartre in what follows.) We define ourselves not just in our own terms (as adolescent existentialists and pop psychologists may argue) but in terms of each other. The virtues, in a society such as Aristotle’s, are defined and assigned communally; the idea of ‘‘private’’ virtues would be incomprehensible. But we distinguish public and private with a vengeance, and we typically value our private, personal character more highly than our public persona, which is sometimes thought to be superficial, impersonal, ‘‘plastic,’’ and merely manipulative, instrumental. A person’s character is best determined by those who ‘‘really know him,’’ and it is not odd to us that a person generally known as a bastard might be thought to be a good person just on the testimony of a wife, a husband, or a close friend. (‘‘But if you knew Johnny as I do, you would see that . . . .’’) In a fragmented world so built on intimate privacies, love, even more than family and friendship, determines selfhood. Love is this determining of selfhood. When we talk about ‘‘the real self’’ or ‘‘being true to ourselves,’’ what we often mean is being true to the image of ourselves that we share with those we love most. We say, and are expected to say, that the self we display in public performance, the self we present on the job, the self we show to acquaintances, is not the real self or, at least, not the whole self. We sometimes take great pains to prove that the self we share with our family (a historical kind of love) is no longer the self that we accept as real. Nor is it any surprise that the self we would like to think of as most real is the self that emerges in intimacy, and its virtues are the typically private virtues of honesty in feeling and expression, interpersonal passion, tenderness, and sensitivity. The idea of an Aristophanic union—the reunification of two halves that already belong together—is charming and suggestive, but it is clearly a myth, and even then tells only half of the story. The other half starts with the fact of our differences and our stubbornness, and how we may ill fit together even after years of compromise and cohabitation. The freedom of choice that allows us virtually unrestricted range for our romantic intentions also The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 183]

raises the possibility—which was one of the suppositions of courtly love as well—that our choice will often be difficult, if not socially prohibited. (Who was the one girl in Verona whom young Romeo should not have chosen? And the one woman wholly forbidden to Lancelot?) Love is a process, a building and a weaving together of two lives into one, two selves into one—or, rather, into two interdependent selves who understand themselves through each other. Love is thus quite literally a process of unification, but we do not need Aristophanes’ mythology to tell us how this is so. The process of mutual self-identification runs into conflict with one of its own presuppositions, the ideal of autonomous individualism. The selves that are to merge do not have the advantage of having adjusted to and complemented each other when the self was still flexible and only partially formed—as in societies where families arrange marriages between children who have grown up together. And whatever the nostalgic popularity of ‘‘first love’’ and the Romeo and Juliet paradigm, the truth is that most of us fall in love well advanced in our development, even into old age, when the self is fully formed and complementarity is more often an exercise in compromise. The development of love is consequently defined by a dialectic, often tender but sometimes ontologically vicious, in which each lover struggles for control over shared and reciprocal self-images, resists them, revises them, rejects them.24 For this reason, love—unlike many other emotions—takes time. It does not make sense to say of love, as it does of anger, that one was in love for fifteen minutes but then calmed down. But to insist that love is shared and reciprocal is not to say that there is no such thing as unrequited love, or that unrequited love is not love, for the dialectic, complete with resistance and conflict, can go on just as well in one soul as in two. Granted, the drama may be a bit impoverished, but as Stendhal often argued, the imagination may be enriched thereby. Or, as the great Goethe once said, ‘‘If I love you, what business is that of yours?’’

The Virtues of (Erotic) Love (Conclusion) True love, whatever is said of it, will always be honored by men; for although its transports lead us astray, although it does not exclude odious qualities from the heart that feels it—and even produces them—it nevertheless always presupposes estimable qualities without which one would not be in a condition to feel it.—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile)

Love, briefly summarized, is a dialectical process of (mutually) reconceived selfhood with a long and varied history. As such, it is much more than a feeling and it need not be at all capricious or unintelligent or disruptive. But the idea [ 184] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

that love is concerned with selfhood might suggest that love is essentially self-love, casting it in the role of a vice rather than a virtue. And the suggestion that love is essentially the reconception and redetermination of oneself through another looks dangerously similar to some familiar definitions of narcissism. But self-reference entails neither cynicism nor narcissism. Although one does see oneself through the other on this analysis and although, as in narcissism, the idea of ‘‘separation of subject and object’’ is greatly obscured, love as mutual self-defining reflection does not encourage either vicious or clinical conclusions. Unlike narcissism, love takes the other as its standard, not just as its mirror, which is why the courtly lovers called it ‘‘devotion’’ (as in devoting oneself to God) and why Stendhal—himself an accomplished narcissist—called ‘‘passion-love’’ the one wholly unselfish experience. Love is not selfless, but it is nevertheless the antithesis of selfishness. It embodies an expansion of self, modest, perhaps, but what it lacks in scope, it more than makes up for in motivation. The virtues of love can be understood in terms of this limited but passionate self-expansion. In a fragmented and mobile society, romantic love allows us to forge intense ties to others, even to strangers. There is much talk in ethics of ‘‘communitarian’’ as opposed to individualistic frameworks, but the fact is that a passionately united community larger than a small circle of carefully chosen friends strikes most of us as oppressive if not dangerous. One may well lament the lack of public virtues or the priority of private virtues, but the fact is that the primacy of privacy is where we must now begin. Nor should one, in Kantian enthusiasm for the universal, ignore the dramatic importance of the modest move from caring only about oneself to caring about someone else. The expansion of selfhood in love may be modest, but in today’s climate of personal greed and ‘‘self fulfillment,’’ it is for many successful citizens one of the last virtues left standing. Romantic love is a powerful ally—far better than communal indignation and shared resentment—in breaking down the isolating individualism that has become the dubious heir of some of our favorite traditional values. But we remain staunch individualists, and the extent to which we will allow our virtues to be publicly determined remains limited indeed. But too many authors in recent years have simply dismissed such intimacies as love as not virtuous at all, when a less ideological judgment would seem to be that love is a particularly appropriate virtue in a society such as ours. With this it is essential to revise our concept of virtue. Some important virtues are not public, so we can no longer use Aristotle, nor even Hume, as our guide. Being virtuous does not primarily mean for us ‘‘fitting into’’ the community; good character is, rather, privately determined by loving and being loved. Our presumption is that a good person is not necessarily a public figure but a private one. This does not mean that a person who is loving in The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 185]

private will be a good person in public, too, but a person who is incapable of loving or being faithful to love lacks one of the core virtues of our society. There are other virtues of love beyond this minimal self-expansion. We might, for instance, mention the sense of self-awareness that goes along with this dramatization of self and the often-described sense of self-improvement that is its consequence, something argued by the early speakers in the Symposium and often propounded by some of the courtly troubadours. Love enhances and encourages the other virtues. Phaedrus (in the Symposium) insists that a man in love will be all the more courageous in the presence of his lover. The troubadours perfected their poetic craft for the sake of their beloved. To love is to be intensely conscious of one’s own ‘‘worthiness’’ and thus greatly concerned with one’s virtues (not only charms). Being in love is already a definitive step in the teleology of self-realization. (‘‘I want you to love me as I am!’’ is not an expression or an instruction of love, but rather a defensive reaction.) We examine and correct our faults because we want to be perfect (or at least passable) in the eyes of our love. We might mention, too, the healthy and positive outlook on the world that often accompanies love, a form of generalized idealization. This might not take on the cosmic form suggested by Hegel in his early writings or by Plato in his, but it nonetheless counters the cynicism and suspicion that have become the marks of wisdom in our society. So, too, we might mention the fact that love is a remarkably inspirational and creative emotion—though one might somewhat cynically speculate that envy and resentment may be its betters in this regard. (It was not just Iago’s intelligence that made him more than a match for Othello; he had his envy to motivate him.) The inspirational qualities of love and its impulse to creativity do not refer, of course, only to those who are particularly gifted, for we find attempts at poetic selfexpression in even the most semi-literate lovers. Regardless of the quality of the products of such inspiration, one might argue—following Stendhal—that the exhilaration and inspiration of love are themselves its greatest virtue, a virtue that is often ignored in the age-old overappreciation for philosophical apatheia. I would also want to argue that romantic love is a virtue because it is exciting, and in the best of loves remains so for decades. One rarely finds philosophers taking enthusiasm as a virtue (Nietzsche being the most obvious exception; Ralph Waldo Emerson, too), but I think many of us do in fact take energy, vitality, being ‘‘turned on’’ as admirable, whatever the results. I think we ought to wonder about the frequent if implicit emphasis on dullness and self-righteousness as a prominent feature of current philosophical and political discussions of the virtues. [ 186] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

So, too, we might note the low esteem of sexuality in discussions of virtue in which sexual virtue is abstemiousness and little else. Romantic love is sexual love, and here, too, we can appreciate the resistance of traditionally modest moral philosophers. Non-procreative sex, in the history of ethics, has been treated as a mere biological urge, a dangerous force (often an inhuman force) to be controlled. So treated, it is hard to see any virtue in it. Thus the ethical questions about sex tend to focus almost exclusively on its restriction, and sexual love is offered as a legitimation of sex at best though hardly as a virtue. But we should vehemently reject that picture of sex, evidently held by chaste Kant, which takes intercourse to be either a biological function (reproduction or, sanctioned by God, ‘‘procreation’’) or mere recreation—what Kant considered mutual masturbation. Either way, sex loses any status in ethics and, worse, loses its connection with love. This is not to conflate sex and love, but it is not to portray them as opposites either. The foregoing points would be greatly misunderstood if they were taken to suggest that erotic love is some sort of ‘‘trump’’ virtue, more important than any others. Virtues can conflict, and any one virtue may be but a notable exception in an otherwise wholly flawed or pathological character. To pretend that the private joys and obsessions of love raise no questions in terms of public engagement, to move from the objection that love has been neglected in ethics to the insistence that such personal emotions should take the place of political participation in policy decisions in the public sphere, would be irresponsible. But the example of love makes it evident that the traditional objections to subjectivity in ethics, including the complaint that appeal to emotions is whimsical and the insistence that the emotions are not subject to criticism, will not bear scrutiny. And against much of recent ‘‘virtue ethics,’’ love seems to show that virtues should not be understood only as traits (for no matter how ‘‘loving’’ one may be, the only virtue in love is actually loving). Nor are all virtues instantiations of universal principles, as William Frankena, for example, has argued.25 It has too long been claimed without sufficient attention that subjectivity and emotion in ethics lead to prejudice, chaos, violence, and destruction, but the truth is that love, as bleeding-heart pacifists have always argued, contradicts and sometimes overcomes hate. Against the obsessive emphasis on objectivity and impersonal equality in ethics, the aim of love is to make a single person examine and reinvent himself or herself in terms of values that one shares with another. (Thus, in the Phaedrus Plato defends a more reason-based version of Socratic love in which two people share their fascination with the Forms.)26 It is thus a realworld vehicle for virtue ethics, less the pretense of individual bootstrapping. None of this is to deny that love can go wrong. It can destroy as well as The Virtue of (Erotic) Love [ 187]

conjoin relationships, and it can ruin as well as enhance lives. Love can be dangerous. But we have too readily accepted the idea that the virtuous life is simple and uncomplicated rather than, as Pausanias insists in Plato’s Symposium, ‘‘like everything else, complex.’’ But life, too, is complex and dangerous. Why shouldn’t our virtues be the same?

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Nine Reasons for Love Since 1975, I have been pursuing the idea that the ancient opposition between reason and the passions is an insidious one. It is an idea that is now widely accepted in both philosophy and psychology, whether in broad terms as a claim about reasons and reasoning or in more specific conceptions about the ‘‘cognitive’’ constituents of emotions. But I have found that the coupling of ‘‘reasons’’ and emotion hits a brick wall, however, when our romantic sensibilities are threatened. In particular, there is stubborn resistance to the idea that love is based on reason and reasons. And that is what this chapter is about.

How Do I Love Thee? ( Reasons for Love) Imagine proposing to (or being proposed to by) your1 beloved in the following terms: It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy of your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections with the [appropriate] family, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favor; and you should take it into further consideration, that in spite of manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made to you.

So says Mr. Collins, trying to persuade Elizabeth to accept his proposal of marriage, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I think that I would not be radically misrepresenting the most common reaction (and the one intended by the author) as repulsion or, at the very least, the sense that such an alternately pompous, threatening, and insulting proposal lacks any semblance of charm and romance. Pressed to explain why, many people would be tempted by the response, ‘‘because you don’t love someone for reasons. You just love them, or you don’t.’’ A particularly vulgar expression of this view, rendered with a rhetorical flourish, was published by the ‘‘person with the highest measured I.Q. in the world,’’ Marilyn Vos Savant.2 She wrote, ‘‘Can you imagine falling in love with someone for no reason at all? Of course you can!’’ The

rhetorical emphasis at the end makes it clear that she considers the point selfevident. I expect that most philosophers are less thoughtlessly romantic, so they might simply say, ‘‘not for those reasons.’’ But then, I myself wrote, ‘‘Love goes wrong, but it would be a mark of perversity or cynicism to insist that love must therefore be prepared to defend itself with reasons.’’3 I would still maintain that a demand for justification may be perverse or cynical, but I no longer doubt the relevance of reasons in and for love, including a modest notion of justification (minimally, as ‘‘making intelligible’’). Perhaps we should not talk about love at all in such contexts, and rather talk about conjugal partnerships or something of that sort. But this, I want to suggest, is a bit too quick. In the romantic climate of the times, evidently not much appreciated by Mr. Collins, it would not be too much of a reach to suggest that in order to best secure the acceptance he seeks, he intends that Elizabeth should indeed take these as reasons for love. In this chapter, I would like to explore this notion of reasons for love, that is, loving someone for a reason or for reasons. While it is not my aim to evaluate or rank such reasons (nor to say what is ‘‘really’’ or ‘‘true’’ love and what is not), it will be clear in what I say that some sorts of reasons (and some sorts of love) are in several senses ‘‘better’’ than others. In particular, I would like to suggest that the most appropriate reasons for love, what I will call Aristophanic reasons, are very different from what most people might think of as reasons for love.4 Philosophers have often talked about love, if more often the love of wisdom than erotic or romantic love. But Plato conflated the two, so that the love of wisdom became a version of erotic love. Kant, by contrast, dismissed love as a sentiment as merely ‘‘pathological’’ and juxtaposed it to ‘‘practical’’ love that was defined by reasons. Arthur Schopenhauer, although he differed from Kant about both love and morality, thought that love (as so much else) was but the irrational striving of the will to live. Jean-Paul Sartre, never to be outdone in terms of perversity, argued that love was just another stratagem for manipulating ‘‘the Other.’’ But despite these great thinkers, love seems to be a widely avoided topic for contemporary philosophers. Nevertheless, love has undeniable attractions for philosophers, both because of its very special if often neglected place in ethics and the good life and because it is, at least in the popular romantic imagination, so delightfully unreasonable. That, of course, is what interests me here. ‘‘The love that defies all reason’’ is a staple of our literature. The very notion of ‘‘reasons for love’’ strikes many people as unintelligible. ‘‘If one loves for reasons, one does not really love at all’’ might be a simple way to put the objection. But love without reason, love without reasons, is an unintelligibility, too—of a different kind, one suggesting psychotic obsession; blind, blithering, helpless attachment; or mere frivolousness. To be sure, love is often misdirected, with damage to the lover and consternation, concern, or amusement for the lover’s friends and [ 190] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

family. But even misdirected love and love gone wrong must have their reasons, even if, all things considered, these reasons may be unreasonable. Perhaps Mr. Collins was giving reasons why Elizabeth should accept his proposal of marriage and not reasons for her loving him. But what nevertheless rubs our romantic fur in the wrong direction is the kinds of reasons advanced by Mr. Collins and others like him. Loving someone for his or her money, or connections, or status—or, for that matter, even for his or her looks—seems like love for the wrong reasons. Or, rather, it usually turns out that one doesn’t love the other person at all; one just loves the money and puts up with the person, or covets the connections or status and is willing to be not only tolerant but even affectionate in order to share them. It thus indeed looks as if love for reasons is not love at all but rather a strategy, a sham, a bit of hypocrisy. Of course, part of the question, as so often with sham and hypocrisy, is who is fooling whom. A supposed lover who ‘‘happens’’ to love a very rich man or woman probably will never admit to himself or herself, even in moments of deep self-scrutiny, the true object of his or her affection. More likely, the supposed lover will avow and report, in all sincerity, that he or she is indeed in love or, at any rate, loves. (I have discussed the dynamic of this impoverished language of affection elsewhere, the hairsplitting struggle between ‘‘loving’’ and being ‘‘in love’’ just one of the more obvious manifestations of this.5) This doesn’t jeopardize the idea of love for reasons, but it introduces a serious complication into the discussion. Must a reason for love be conscious or available for ready articulation? Or might self-deception be a common complication in loving for reasons? It might be argued to be, along something like the following lines. One may ‘‘love’’ for reasons. Indeed, as self-interested creatures, it may be impossible for us not to love for reasons. But love is understood as not about reasons at all, and so the lover must fool himself or herself into believing that he or she just loves the beloved, that the reasons are peripheral or ultimately irrelevant. This is often captured in the plaintive lament, ‘‘I want you to love me for myself !’’ and its requisite if unconvincing rebuttal: ‘‘I don’t care about the money, I love you.’’ But is such a lament reasonable? Or (if not) is such assurance unnecessary?

‘‘Because You’re Beautiful’’: Loving Someone for His or Her Looks Is anything a more inviting reason for love than the fact that the beloved is beautiful? But loving someone for his or her looks is a difficult case insofar as one cannot readily separate a person from his or her looks as one can with some ease separate a romantic fool and his money. But do I love you because Reasons for Love [ 191]

you are beautiful? Or are you beautiful (to me) because I love you? That’s an awkward set of questions, to be sure. A phenomenologist might challenge both questions by insisting that (from the first-person point of view) there is no distinguishing how I experience you and how you ‘‘really’’ are. A more hardheaded philosopher might insist that beauty involves objective standards or, at least, requires a third-person or intersubjective perspective. All of this is or should be irrelevant to the lover for whom ‘‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’’ But is your beauty a reason for loving you? On the first interpretation (‘‘I love you because you are beautiful’’), that seems to be exactly what it is. But if so (so the argument goes), do I really love you? Wittgenstein famously noted that the best (and only) picture we have of the human soul is the human body. It follows that the best picture we have of the soul of the person we love—that is, the person himself or herself, is his or her physical appearance. To love the person is to love the face, the shape, the body. On the second interpretation (‘‘you are beautiful because I love you’’), the answer is more confusing. Yes, I love you because you are beautiful, but it is by virtue of my love that I view you as beautiful. Or, following Irving Singer, one might say that I bestow you with beauty.6 But then it seems odd to say that I love you because you are beautiful (i.e., that your beauty is a reason for my loving you). Your beauty is constituted through my loving. Yet loving someone for his or her looks seems to most of us to be an exemplary case of loving for reasons, both because we are indeed such visual and beauty-bound creatures and because a person’s looks are (as Wittgenstein noted) so inseparable from our conception of him or her. But what makes loving someone for his or her looks philosophically intriguing is both the complexity described above—whether beauty is a reason for love or love is the explanation for seeing someone as beautiful—and the now cliche´d notion that ‘‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’’ But what both the complexity and the cliche´ suggest is that beauty is not so much a property of the person but a feature of the relationship (even if it is an unrequited relationship) rather than simply a feature of the beloved. Philosophers have often tried to capture this phenomenon, from the ancient and medieval debates about ‘‘intentionality’’ to twentieth-century phenomenology and Simon Blackburn’s contemporary notion of ‘‘quasi realism.’’ The usual way of putting the point is to say that such properties are in some sense ‘‘subjective,’’ dependent on the perspective of the perceiver (the lover). What I want to suggest instead is that virtually all reasons for love are best understood as features of the relationship and not as simply properties of the beloved. They are dependent not only on the lover’s perspective but also on the complex bonds between the lover and the beloved. One of the standard arguments against beauty as a reason for love has much to do with the idea that love ought to be ‘‘eternal,’’ and so its reasons [ 192] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

should be timeless as well. I think that this is misconceived. Quite the contrary of timelessness, love is a process that develops over time. ‘‘Eternity’’ may be a poetic way of capturing a magic moment, but the very idea of our love’s being ‘‘outside of time’’ is ultimately unintelligible. Reasons for love typically refer to temporal or even transient features of the beloved or the relationship. This is not in itself an argument against them, but I would argue that the problem with beauty does have to do with time. It is not that beauty is not eternal. The problem is that beauty, physical beauty at least, is not historical. It makes no reference to its history or origins. It makes no reference to the future (although some of its enthusiasts will quickly point out that it suggests immediate promise—of pleasure, for example.) We should reject the ideas that a passion is true only if it does not alter and cannot end, and that a good reason for love is one that remains true over time. True, constancy is a virtue in love, and true, beauty may fade. But it does not follow that beauty cannot be at some point a reason for love though not at another. One might well fall in love for the sole reason that the beloved is beautiful, but after several years find that beauty is among the lesser charms of the beloved (or, more complex, that the very conception of what is beautiful about the beloved has radically changed). It may be only a matter of time until ‘‘the violet past prime, And sable curls are silvered o’er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves. . . . Then of thy beauty do I question make’’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet XII). But it does not follow that I thereby question my love, nor does it follow that thy beauty was not indeed a reason, if not the reason, for my love. There is another, harsher complaint against beauty as a reason for love, and that is, to put it in its usual form, that it is ‘‘superficial.’’ True, beauty is only ‘‘skin deep’’ (though not even a surgeon would be much motivated to see quite literally beneath his or her lover’s skin). But it does not follow that beauty is ‘‘superficial.’’ Of course, the superficiality in question might be not that of the beloved’s beauty but rather that of the lover who has only such a ‘‘shallow’’ reason. But I am not arguing for the dubious thesis that the beauty of the beloved is by itself a good reason for loving. I am only considering that far more plausible thesis that the beauty of the beloved is a good reason for loving. One would hope that all sorts of other reasons lie in wait. Indeed, finding one’s beloved beautiful is rarely a matter of physical looks alone (an attitude that is better called ‘‘fetishism’’ than love). It is common wisdom ( promoted, for instance, by both Schopenhauer and Mark Twain) that by a modest age (say, forty), ‘‘one has the face one deserves.’’ That is, a person’s beauty is not just a matter of physical attributes but of the personality and character that ‘‘shine through.’’ A face and a body reflect experience and grace (or the lack thereof ) learned through a certain style of life. So one could argue that the problem with beauty is not that it fades nor that it is superficial, Reasons for Love [ 193]

but that we too easily misunderstand what beauty really is. What comes to be beautiful in a relationship is no longer ‘‘looks’’ as such, but a far more encompassing vision of a personality and a life together. ( This, of course, is a plausible interpretation of what Socrates has in mind in his expansion of eros in Plato’s Symposium.) So none of this is to dismiss beauty or attractiveness as a reason for love. Even in an era of e-mail and chat room romances, how a person looks is the initial bridge to a relationship and love. And even in the maturity of a successful marriage or partnership, looks remain an essential part of the romantic package, even if only in the eye of the beholder. So, is it okay to love someone for his or her looks? Yes, so long as beauty is richly understood as all-encompassing and having as much to do with the nature of the relationship as it does with the properties of the beloved. Unfortunately, it is too often the case that loving someone’s looks gets coupled with overt neglect or covert contempt for a good deal else of the person’s intelligence and personality. This is not only a tragedy for both people involved in such a one-dimensional, ‘‘superficial’’ relationship. It is also a philosophical misfortune, for it supports the antagonism between mere looks and, as the word ‘‘superficial’’ suggests, some ‘‘deeper’’ aspects of the person.

Plato’s Problem Which brings us to Plato’s problem. Plato’s problem gives rise to the sort of paradox that too often leads philosophers happily away from the subject at hand—that is, love with all of its messiness and sentimentality—to technical questions of logical analysis and ontology.7 Plato’s problem emerges from Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, where Socrates suggests, crudely stated, that one beloved is ultimately no different from any other beloved; that they all share a property in common, and that is beauty. We can ignore Socrates’ rather outrageous conclusion, that the property shared is in fact an ontologically distinctive and independently existing Form and that the true lover is the lover of Forms (i.e., the philosopher; e.g., Socrates). But the argument itself raises some interesting questions about the nature of reasons for love. The argument is that one loves for reasons, where the reasons are properties of the person loved. Thus one loves S because of properties a, b, c, d, and so on, and one would not love S if any or all of these properties did not obtain. The paradox is that if one loved S because of some finite set of reasons a, b, c, and d, but then met T, who also had a, b, c, and d—or, to make it more dramatic, had more of a, b, c, and d—then logic would dictate that one would have no reason to prefer S over T (in the first case) or every [ 194] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

reason to prefer T over S (in the second). This, of course, is nonsense. It is an argument that may work for computers, toasters, rental cars, and business hotel suites, but it does not work for love. The object of love—the beloved—is (to use a familiar legal term) nonfungible. No substitutions are allowed. But Plato’s problem is that substitutability seems inescapable, even for such seemingly good reasons as ‘‘because he/she is a terrific person.’’ One must still raise the question ‘‘Why this terrific person rather than any other?’’ (Granted that the world does not have a surplus of them.) However we decide to resolve Plato’s problem—by insisting (obscurely) that it is the person as such that one loves and not his or her properties; by arguing that some properties are such that they could not plausibly be shared with another (for example, a history of time spent together); or by appealing to the Forms or to God and conceding that the particularities of love are secondary—it is clear that our conclusion, at least once we step out of our self-made philosophical trap, must be that the love of a lover cannot be logically tied merely to properties of the sort considered here. But we should not thereby conclude that love is not of properties or that love has no reasons. Nor need one conclude that love is, as Alcibiades suggests to Socrates, merely an obsession in which the goodness of properties is of no real relevance whatever. In Plato’s problem the notion of reasons for love degenerates into a dubious dilemma: either one does love for reasons, such as ‘‘because she is beautiful,’’ or one does not. On the first view, reasons turn out to be properties, and the properties most relevant to love seem to be only contingently true of the beloved or of the beloved alone. On the second view, one loves the person independently of any such properties, any of which (or all of which) might well be altered without altering love. Thus Shakespeare writes, ‘‘Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds.’’8 Much-quoted, perhaps, but (as I earlier hinted) its truth is rather doubtful. Love, as a process, changes, and it is not love when it is inattentive and indifferent to change. When love endures, it is because it continues to find reasons (though, as I noted, these reasons may change over time), and the love itself may ‘‘alter’’ accordingly. The second view is psychologically if not ontologically dubious. What is ‘‘the person,’’ apart from all of his or her properties? A naked soul? Can one, in any erotic (as opposed to agapic) sense, love an ontologically naked, propertyless soul? Or a soul given any set of properties whatever? If you turn into a frog, not a Walt Disney cutesy talking frog but a regular Rana catesbeiana, need I still love you? Can I still love you? Granted, I may try to provide you with a luxurious lily pad and a generous assortment of dragonflies and keep you safe from predators, but I doubt my ‘‘love’’ will even Reasons for Love [ 195]

begin to approach the intimate affection that I have for my mammalian pets, much less the love I used to have for you. In line with the same romantic nonsense, we often talk about love being ‘‘unconditional.’’ But if ‘‘unconditional’’ means ‘‘no matter what conditions,’’ including ‘‘no matter what properties,’’ then human love is rarely unconditional. (It may be more common in the love of children than of lovers, no matter how often it is held up as a false promise, as bait, to the latter.) A lover may stay with his beloved after she loses her youthful looks, perhaps even (for a while) after she has been turned by a witch into a duck. But to say that he loves her ‘‘no matter what’’ is surely a stretch. The question of reasons, and even the question of properties, is far more subtle than the simpleminded dichotomy properties or die Geliebte an sich would suggest.

Reasons and Rationalizations There are several different senses in which one may have a reason for love. We can start with a crude distinction between reasons that actually explain or justify love, on the one hand, and reasons that are mere rationalizations of love, on the other. As starters, reasons that explain love are true—that is, the facts they cite are true or, at least, the beliefs they embody are believed to be true. Rationalizations need not be true nor even really believed. (The role of self-deception here is a topic for a different study.) Reasons that justify love are both true and persuasive. (Minimally, they make other people appreciate the point of one’s love.) Rationalizations tend to be hollow and unpersuasive. It would make a mockery of my thesis here, that love has its reasons, to dismiss all reasons as nothing but rationalizations—that is, reasons (or excuses) mustered up after the fact, as if to make sense of one’s love. I would also reject the ‘‘romantic’’ thesis that love is ineffable and reasons are nothing but rationalizations created after the fact to make one’s love seem rational. My thesis is that love has its reasons, by which I mean not only that it can be described and explained but also that it is defensible and in a modest sense can be justified. One may be fully aware of the reason why he or she loves someone. One may state a reason (for instance, by way of self-justification) while knowing that it is not ‘‘really’’ the reason one loves someone. And then there are reasons for loving someone that may be operative but may not be conscious or articulate at all. As Pascal so famously said, ‘‘Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas’’ (the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know’’). Contrary to most philosophers, I would insist that reasons need not be articulated nor even articulable, nor is this to say that they are only explanations (i.e., third-person accounts of first-person preferences and [ 196] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

affections). There are circumstances when one feels forced to articulate reasons for loving someone, such as deciding to get (or stay) married, facing up to an existential crisis (‘‘Should I make the move to Boston with you, or keep my job here?’’), having to choose between two love relationships, or defending one’s life to skeptical friends or suspicious family members. Under such circumstances, however, it is by no means evident that one is simply articulating his or her own reasons for loving rather than manufacturing persuasive reasons in order to convince oneself or others. It is by no means obvious that a good reason for loving someone is one’s actual reason for loving someone. A proposed reason for loving someone might be a mere rationalization, an attempt to justify that does not really explain one’s love. By contrast, one’s actual reasons may be both inarticulate and subconscious. ( These are not the same. A reason might be articulable but unconscious, that is, not presently articulable by the lover. And a reason might be quite conscious but difficult to articulate—for instance, ‘‘the feeling of affectionate familiarity I have when I am with you’’ or ‘‘the subtle anxiety I feel whenever I think of you.’’) I would argue that love (and all emotions) are developed through a lifetime of forgotten experiences, bad memories, cultivated and accidental habits. Waxing Heideggerian, one might say that love is always created against a background of emotional practices.9 These include the half-digested stories and movies and gossip of the culture, and primal examples (one’s parents, most obviously), and they determine not only the ability to love and the prototypes of love but also the very structure of love. Consequently, they also circumscribe the intelligible reasons for love, which in one culture might be an experience so inchoate that it resembles a passing mania while in another it can be understood only in terms of the most exquisite poetic inspiration. But the fact that such reasons (as comfort and discomfort, anxiety and excitement) may be unconscious (that is, their exact nature and perhaps even their ‘‘object’’ are inarticulable) does not in the least imply that these are not reasons. It is just that the recognition and articulation of such reasons depend on an understanding of the larger cultural and psychological situation, and do not at all yield the ‘‘privileged access’’ of some more straightforward psychic states. Indeed, some of these reasons might well be bodily, but this thesis would take us too far afield in this chapter.10 Nor need reasons be rational. Bad reasons, inappropriate reasons, wrongheaded reasons are still reasons—they are one’s reason for loving— but they are not reasons that will stand up to rational scrutiny. Again, these are rationalizations and not good reasons. But what is a good reason? We should distinguish between a reason that is explanatory (i.e., an actual ‘‘cause’’ of one’s love) and a reason that is a good way of understanding one’s love. There are also good reasons that are nevertheless only rationalizations. A bad reason may be an accurate description of a cause of love (‘‘I love her Reasons for Love [ 197]

because she’s more perverse than I am’’), and a good reason for love (when it is a mere rationalization) may not be one’s reason for loving at all. The relation between good reasons, reasons as rationalizations, and truly explanatory reasons is complex and intricate, and among other things harks back to the vibrant discussions in the late 1960s about reasons versus causes and (explanatory) reasons versus a person’s stated reasons. (As formulated by R. S. Peters many years ago in his Concept of Motivation,11 the latter indicates a difference between ‘‘a reason’’ and ‘‘his [or her] reason.’’) The relation of reasons to causes and the distinction between reasons and causes is of particular significance here. In an article I published in 1974,12 I supported Donald Davidson’s then much-heralded argument that (contra one influential interpretation of Wittgenstein) reasons are causes and thus function in lawlike causal explanations. Nevertheless, reasons obviously constitute a special case of causes. They necessarily refer to the perspective of the subject. But there is a very complex question about the extent to which this perspective must be comprehended or reflectively understood by the subject, whether he or she is capable of articulating or otherwise expressing this perspective, and the extent to which such a perspective may be apparent only by way of the explanation of behavior but not ‘‘known’’ as such to the subject at all. ( I take it that virtually all nonprimate animal behavior is like this.) When a reason (not necessarily provided by the subject) successfully explains one’s loving behavior, I have no objection to calling it a ‘‘cause’’ of love. But the range of reasons is much broader than that, since reasons can function as attempted justifications and ways of ‘‘spelling out’’ one’s feelings as well as causal explanations. But we should be very careful about the notion of justification here. A reason for love presented as a justification does not imply that the reason is an attempt to get anyone else to endorse that reason, much less to get anyone else to love the person in question. A journal referee suggested the following exchange: ‘‘Suppose someone gave reasons for loving Jill to an auditor, and the auditor said, ‘O.K.; you’re right, I love her, too.’ ’’ One can readily imagine a seemingly parallel conversation: Someone invests in regional airline stocks, giving as reasons that the large airlines are in trouble, that local demand is more or less constant, and that the smaller airlines will benefit from this. His interlocutor responds, ‘‘O.K.; you’re right, I will invest, too.’’ But what, then, does ‘‘justification’’ mean in the context of reasons for love? It cannot be of the form ‘‘I feel this, you should feel it, too.’’ What it does mean is more like ‘‘I think that this is a good reason for my feeling [that is, my loving so-and-so]; you should think so, too.’’ But a good reason for me might not be a good reason for you, and what I think is a good reason might not seem like a good reason to you. What I am trying to do by stating my [ 198] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

reasons is to justify my loving so-and-so, but this is ‘‘justification’’ in a modest sense indeed. It makes sense of my love but it says little about what anyone else ought to do or feel (although a good reason for my loving her might be a good reason for someone else to think well or better of her). There are, of course, straightforwardly bad reasons for love. One’s reasons for love may be bad in the obvious sense that they rest on false information, such as one’s (false) beliefs that one’s beloved has been sexually faithful, or has not spent time in prison, or is not a compulsive liar. They may also rest on false expectations, for instance, the expectation that the beloved, though lovable, can nevertheless be molded and reshaped by the lover, or that he or she will make a good parent. But falsehood is not a reason not to ascribe a reason, so long as it is believed (and, again, not necessarily consciously believed) by the lover. That is to say, a false belief may nevertheless be the cause of a person’s affection whether or not it would serve as a justification. Moreover, reasons for love may be irrational because they are unwarranted even if not exactly false. Varieties of inappropriate love (e.g., erotic love for a child or a younger sibling) would be based on reasons that are irrational even if they involve no false beliefs or expectations. They are perverse. Thus, again, the reasons might cite the cause of a person’s affection but not serve as any justification whatever. Some reasons for love seem to be bad reasons although they are neither false nor unreasonable nor obviously perverse. Loving someone for his or her money may in fact be one’s reason for loving, but it is usually a bad reason. (As my ex-mother-in-law used to say, ‘‘Marrying for money is getting it the hard way.’’) It is a bad reason both because marrying for money is a very emotionally expensive way of getting money and because marrying for money is an extremely unromantic reason for loving. In other words, even if it serves as an accurate explanation of why one loves the rich person one does, it is in no sense a justification of one’s love. It is an irrational reason both in the sense that it is (arguably) self-defeating and in the sense that it is not a good reason for love, whether or not it might be deemed a good reason for marrying or forming some other kind of partnership. But I admit that as an example of a bad reason, loving someone for money is to open to debate. As I shall argue below, it all depends on how we construe loving someone for money as a reason, and how we construe reasons for love.

Love as a Reason for Love It is sometimes suggested that loving itself is a reason for love. That is, the fact that one already loves someone provides the reasons for loving that Reasons for Love [ 199]

person. Leaving aside the obvious paradoxes that might be derived from this suggestion, the idea itself has a certain sort of appeal. It is by now a trite movie scene where the protagonist writes down in one column fifty reasons why he should leave his lover, and then in another column simply writes ‘‘I love her!’’—and that clinches the decision. ( I remember doing this myself, toward the tail end of a hopeless youthful romance.) The idea that love is its own reason or reason enough in itself is subject to several different construals. One reasonable interpretation is that already loving someone is a good reason to keep on loving him or her, all things considered. Another is that loving someone already provides any number of reasons ( by way of the bestowal of beauty, for example, as discussed above). A more general construal would be the idea that love is a valued emotion that should be accepted and respected so long as there are not good reasons against it. Love may be a prima facie good, but it is nevertheless defeasible in the face of more persuasive reasons. In such a case, by hypothesis, there are good reasons, and presumably substantial reasons, against loving, and thus the question becomes how to weigh these against reasons for love. I am by no means arguing (what those who think that love is ‘‘intrinsically good’’ might mistakenly argue) that any reason for love is a good reason. I am only arguing that love has its reasons. That means, first of all, that love can be explained in terms of the lover’s perspective. But it also means that love (on reflection) invites justification, and thus the reasons one may be challenged to produce in defense of his or her love may turn out to be good, bad, uninteresting, and so on. Indeed, one might even press the cynical thesis that most reasons for love are self-deceptive, delusive, and therefore irrational. If that were so, then love would most often be irrational, too. Thus the question of reasons for love might be divided in two: (1) our reasons for thinking that love as such is a good and (2) our reasons for loving someone in particular. To be sure, the first set of reasons will supply something of a framework as well as provide some support for the second sort of reasons. If one’s love for a particular person is to have any reason(s) at all (that is, reasons as purported justifications), there must be some virtue to being in love. But it is not the case that to have a good reason for loving someone, it is also necessary to be able to produce good reasons for love. ( Most people, even most philosophers, are quite incoherent, if not speechless, about producing good reasons for love. Quite a few of the speeches in Plato’s great Symposium tend to such incoherence.) For that matter, most people are quite incoherent, if not speechless, about producing reasons for loving a particular person. But the reasons for love (in general) are not my focus here, although the nature of some such reasons will become evident as I explore the idea of reasons for (one’s particular) love. And just to offset one possible pretension, finding good reasons for love (in general) will not provide a sufficient set of [ 200] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

reasons for loving anyone in particular. ( Those who are ‘‘in love with love’’ tend to ignore this point.) One might argue that one’s love of a particular person can have good reasons only if love in general can be justified. Thus a person can never be cruel for good reasons because cruelty in general cannot be justified. And thus one might argue that if the love of a particular person is to be justified, love in general must be justifiable. But consider this: I would argue that there is never a good reason for being envious because there is no justification for envy. But surely one can have reasons for being envious, and envy is unimaginable without them. ( The reasons might include the perceived value of the object of envy, the person envied, the relationship between the subject and the object, the relationship between the subject and the person envied, and the more general circumstances in which the envy emerges.) The example of envy gives some indication, I think, of the complex relationship between reasons and justification. It is important to keep these apart, although it is also important to see how they fit together. To have reasons is not necessarily to justify one’s emotion, even if to justify one’s emotion one must give reasons. And the justification of the emotion itself, in general, is not irrelevant to the justification of some particular instance of the emotion. To provide reasons for love, in particular, may be to justify one’s emotion (for example, when challenged by friends), but the demand for reasons is nevertheless something less than the demand for justification. One might well protest, ‘‘Why should I have to justify my feelings!?’’ but, of course, it is not just a matter of justification. It is also a matter of making sense of one’s emotion, whether to oneself or to others. Thus the question: A reason for whom? We have already alluded to this in our brief mention of R. S. Peters’s distinction between ‘‘his [or her] reason’’ and ‘‘the reason.’’ There is a difference between there being a reason to think someone is lovable and my having a reason for me to love that person. There may be a hundred reasons why you are lovable, but nevertheless I am not in love with you. They are not my reasons. Moreover, I have suggested that the issue of reasons for love stands in a complicated relation with questions regarding justification. Reasons for love may well be presented as an attempt at justification, but they certainly need not be. The quest for justification is, in general, a much stronger demand than the quest for reasons (thus the absurd confusion between reasons for loving so-and-so and reasons for investing in a certain stock). Reasons for love may also be (in the mind or mouth of the lover, secondarily for someone else) a further description of the love, a way of ‘‘spelling out’’ one’s love, a clarification of what one feels and why. In this sense, following a distinction put forward by Peter Goldie,13 we might say that reasons for love render the emotion intelligible rather than rational, though I think that one can find many examples of both in people’s Reasons for Love [ 201]

presentations of their reasons for love. Spelling out one’s love by giving reasons for love can be an important source of clarification, but it can also be a confirmation of the rightness of one’s affection, both for oneself (to smooth over doubts) and to convince others. In other words, giving reasons may ( but need not) involve legitimating love, demonstrating that it is rational, perhaps even suggesting some sense of ought. But it would be utterly mistaken to think that this is what all reasons for love try to do. Usually, it is enough that one makes his or her love intelligible, and with sufficient self-doubt or skeptical friends, this may be more than reason enough. Illicit love, irrational love, all sorts of love that ought not to be nevertheless involve reasons, which is ultimately only to say that it can be further described and explained. It is virtually never the case either that ‘‘I simply love her’’ or ‘‘I simply love her.’’ We have noted that reasons for love may also be (from the view of someone else, secondarily in the opinion of the lover) a kind of explanation—for instance, by way of the causal etiology or source of the emotion (‘‘because she looks and acts like his mother,’’ ‘‘because he satisfies her need for feeling helpless’’). This is one way ( but by no means the only way) of understanding Peters’s distinction between ‘‘the reason’’ and ‘‘his reason.’’ But it should be evident that not all kinds of (the) reason explanations are relevant to us here. For example, there is the kind of explanation that is offered by biology, and by evolutionary biology and sociobiology in particular. Such explanations point to the evolution of certain behavior patterns and, presumably, the neurological structures and processes that cause them and the ‘‘feelings’’ that accompany them. Such explanations apply to people in general and do not specify individuals, and so it is more of a generic explanation of love (narrowly considered as a biological phenomenon) than anything like a personal reason for one’s particular love. (One persuasive reason for love consists of one’s citing the intense feelings of attraction and affection that are triggered by the mere sight of the other person. But it is not evolution or, for that matter, neurology that is thus cited.) Such explanations are clearly examples of ‘‘the reason’’ rather than ‘‘his reason’’ explanations, and they can be defended quite apart from any beliefs or self-consciousness on the part of the lover (the ‘‘subject’’), whether conscious or unconscious. Such accounts have often been abused and sensationalized, of course, not to mention their recruitment for all sorts of dubious political and social agendas.14 I would not for a moment deny that our biological makeup has a great deal to do with our feelings and behavior, but biological explanations have little to do with the sort of reasons that interest me here. And, I would add, it is by no means evident that biological imperatives give us any insight about love, as opposed to any number of possessive and protective (even affectionate) impulses. In the excitement over the new neuropsychology what is sometimes lost is the [ 202] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

old idea that some ‘‘mental processes’’ make sense only because of the reasons we attach to them, not because of their neurological bases. I would similarly exclude theological explanations of the sort ‘‘God created us as sexual, loving creatures,’’ for just the same reasons that we exclude evolutionary explanations of sexual and romantic behavior—that is, insofar as these are simply accounts of ‘‘how we are, and came to be that way’’ without reference to our beliefs and feelings. But insofar as such doctrines enter into lovers’ beliefs and feelings, they might very well be the basis of reasons for love (although I can’t make much sense out of a similar claim in the case of evolution). A person or a couple who believe that God is love and sex is God’s gift, and that romance and marriage are their proper realization may have a host of reasons for love ( both in general and in this particular relationship) which are quite distinctive. But I will not be discussing such reasons for love here. Another sort of explanation that I will not be considering has to do with all of those accounts of our phenomenology and behavior which properly belong in the realm of culture, or what these days is generally referred to as the ‘‘social construction’’ of (social) reality. There is little doubt that our enthusiasm about romantic love—as opposed to our drive to reproduce and our general sociability—is foisted on us over a lifetime of propaganda through literature, gossip, movies, peer pressure, and love ballads. But here, as opposed to evolutionary explanations, there is some assurance that reflection and conscientious phenomenological and social criticism will disclose the structures of such social constructions and render these as full-fledged reasons—or as reasons for rebellion—as well as behind-the-scenes explanations. I say this because I want to be very clear that I am not, in this discussion, in any way denying the social and cultural determination of our concepts, and consequently those sources of our reasons and rationale for love. They are just not themselves reasons for love, whatever powerful explanations of our behavior they may provide.

Beyond Properties-of-the-Person Reasons for Love I think that much of the confusion surrounding discussions of love and its reasons has to do with a narrow focus on one particular kind of reason and a failure to appreciate the various kinds of reasons. All too often, the list of reasons is restricted to properties of the person, and quite a limited range of properties of the person at that. The question ‘‘Why do you love her?’’ typically is answered with ‘‘because she is beautiful,’’ or ‘‘because of his sense of humor,’’ or ‘‘because of her wit and charm.’’ And among these are the even more vulgar materialist answers (in Madonna’s sense, not as meant by Reasons for Love [ 203]

philosophers) ‘‘I love him because of his car’’ or ‘‘because his father’s got enough money to buy Switzerland.’’ Right from the start, we might want to contrast such vulgar materialist reasons with virtuous reasons, such as ‘‘I love him for his courage’’ or ‘‘I love her for her love of knowledge,’’15 and lament the fact that, in most discussions, the selection of reasons tends to be mostly limited to materialist and other more vulgar than virtuous properties. But what I want to argue takes both vulgar and virtuous reasons as reasons of essentially the same kind, namely, reasons that cite properties-of-the-beloved. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that there is a very different kind of reason—what I will call an Aristophanic reason, and that, furthermore, properties-of-the-beloved-type reasons are best construed as Aristophanic reasons. But first, I want to argue that what seems wrong with many such reasons—both vulgar and virtuous—is that they are covertly aimed at benefits and advantages for the lover.

Properties-of-the-Person-Type Reasons for Love When They Are Self-Interested Properties-of-the-beloved-type reasons for love are thought to be problematic, as in Plato’s problem, because they tend to be fungible (or ‘‘repeatable’’) properties. These are rightly suspect for not being unique to the person, but I think that there is an underlying objection to many such purported properties which is far more serious. Such reasons typically betray an ulterior motive: to satisfy the often selfish interests of the lover—‘‘because she buys me all sorts of presents,’’ ‘‘because she helps me with my homework.’’ Such reasons are ‘‘self-interested’’ insofar as they involve some personal advantage for the lover rather than a virtue or admirable feature of the beloved. Thus I think that many of the objections to the very idea of ‘‘reasons for love’’ is based on the erroneous idea that all reasons for love are self-interested, that is, they cite some advantage for the lover and are therefore inconsistent with one of the most basic ideas about love: that in love one cares about the other person and considers his or her interests as important as one’s own. (I think that this is an understatement, but it will suffice here. I would rather say that in love, one takes the other’s interests as one’s own.) So I think that the real objection to such reasons is not that they are fungible but that they are selfish. The reason for loving someone who is wealthy ( because he or she is wealthy, that is) is most likely due to one’s expectations that one will get to share the wealth, or at any rate enjoy its benefits. This hardly needs to be said directly, although, if it is, the reason seems all the more offensive. Thus the fact that there is no hidden motive in such reasons as ‘‘because she buys [ 204] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

me all sorts of presents’’ and ‘‘because she helps me with my homework’’ makes the reason not less but rather more dubious as a reason for love. One doubts their validity as reasons for love precisely because they are so explicitly selfinterested, with little or no reference or regard to the interests of the other person. Of course, such reasons might be modified in some such way—for example, ‘‘because we enjoy doing our homework together and motivate each other’’ or ‘‘because we enjoy shopping together’’—but such reasons are still thought to be tangential to love at best and suspect, hypocritical, or devious at worst. Loving for one’s own advantage seems to us not really loving at all. But then again, many a mother has advised her daughter, ‘‘It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one,’’ and many people do not think her particularly crass or unromantic for doing so. Nor is it the case that wealth has nothing to do with ‘‘the real person,’’ something one has rather than is. It is said that money has nothing to do with personality or character, but it is obvious that making money presupposes some virtues which are germane to love (perseverance, knowing what one wants, a bit of cleverness, a bit of luck), and having money often provides a rich basis for such romantic virtues as a sense of elegance, a taste for the finer things, a good education, and an ability to express oneself. But even where there is no plausible causal account of the link between money and virtue, there is an obvious temptation to exaggerate personal charm in the presence of wealth. As Humphrey Bogart reminds us in one of his lesser movies, ‘‘a man can look pretty good with his pockets on.’’ If (as I shall argue) a good reason for love is one that ties two people together in a mutually inspiring, supportive, and enjoyable relationship, then I’m forced to admit that wealth might count as a good reason for love in a consumer society where most couples spend far more time shopping together than they do making love. The reasons for loving someone who is beautiful may be considerably more subtle. To repeat what I argued earlier, beauty is attractive in its own right (indeed, that near tautology has often been used as a philosophical definition of beauty, e.g., in Plato). In that sense, a reason for love—‘‘she is so beautiful’’—is not apparently self-interested. Quite to the contrary, the reason for loving a beautiful person might just be, as Plato says, our natural love for beauty as such. The objection is, rather, that beauty is a fungible feature, and in that sense impersonal. (Indeed, this is precisely Plato’s point, that beauty is a universal and not just a feature of this particular person.) But, against Plato, we might well want to protest that the beauty of a particular person is not a fungible feature and that beauty is not an objective property. Even if a person is considered beautiful by the standards of the culture— indeed, even if he or she is considered beautiful by everyone—it is the lover’s finding him or her beautiful that is the relevant reason for love. In other Reasons for Love [ 205]

words, beauty does not specify so much a property of the person as it exemplifies a feature constituted in the relationship. The reasons for loving someone who is beautiful may be subtle, but they, too, can be selfish as well as quite vulgar and superficial. Insofar as one loves one’s beautiful partner because one loves being seen with such a person and how that reflects on oneself—the ‘‘trophy wife’’ is an offensive example— such a reason is clearly self-interested and may have very little to do with any care or concern for the other person. (‘‘ You make me proud of myself,’’ says Dolly Parton’s date in the worse than mediocre movie Straight Talk.) Insofar as one’s concern is one’s own status in public appearances, one might argue that loving the beloved because he or she is beautiful hardly counts as a reason for love at all. But few people, I hope, are quite so gauche. While being seen with beauty often does benefit one’s social status (although one must at least consider the problem of contrasts: ‘‘How can someone as beautiful as she is be seen in public with a little toad like him?’’), being with someone beautiful enhances one’s self-esteem, quite apart from any public considerations. Here in particular the distinction between self-interested and un-self-interested ( hardly disinterested) reasons is extremely evasive, and the whole range of motives for our enjoyment is obscure and perhaps unknowable. We enjoy beauty. And insofar as we enjoy the beauty of a person, that does indeed seem like a reason for loving, if not in itself a sufficient reason.16 But to what extent is our appreciation less than aesthetic and something other than the sheer enjoyment of being in the proximity of beauty a good deal of the time? To what extent do notions of ‘‘possession’’ and public display enter into our reasons, and are they, too, reasons for love? Is sexual attraction a reason for love? Sexual attraction, of course, depends on physical cues, and insofar as we might simplify the description by calling this ‘‘finding someone attractive,’’ we can understand how attractiveness is conducive to sexual desire and satisfaction, and this in turn is a reason for love. Or is it? Sexual desire and satisfaction play a complex role in romantic motivation. If we are to believe Jean-Paul Sartre on the matter, sexual desire and satisfaction are intrinsically selfish and manipulative. ( Then, again, so is love, according to him.) But it is by no means clear that sexual desire is in itself selfish, despite the fact that one wants, by the very nature of the desire, to be satisfied. Nor is it so obvious that sexual satisfaction is only a matter of one’s own satisfaction. Leaving aside the rather elaborate accounts of sexuality in terms of evolution or ‘‘nature’s’’ or ‘‘God’s purpose,’’ we may say that nevertheless what is desired is not just one’s own satisfaction but mutual satisfaction, and what satisfies is not to be understood only in terms of one’s sexual desires. Thus to say the obvious sex can be a good reason for love. [ 206] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

If the argument against a good many reasons for love is their selfinterestedness, this objection gets confused with the claim that such reasons concern properties which are inessential, extraneous to the person, detachable, fungible. This is obviously true of money, power, and certain sorts of benefits. It is not so obviously true of looks and personality (although one is more likely to lose the former than the latter). Nevertheless, we can make good sense of the idea that someone would continue to love a once beautiful person long after his or her looks have faded. We also make good sense of the idea that someone would continue to love someone whose personality has disintegrated through Alzheimer’s or some similar disease or trauma. On the other hand, one can probably get presents or help with one’s homework from any number of people with whom one is not romantically involved. While one might well enjoy presents or academic help in a loving relationship, that is a very different matter than loving because one receives such benefits. Such self-interested reasons are subject to criticism not because they are readily detachable from the beloved but because they point primarily to the advantages of the lover. But not all reasons for love are self-interested. What about what we called ‘‘virtuous’’ reasons? Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, famously discusses three types of friendship, the first of which is clearly self-interested in the straightforward sense that it is a friendship of mutual advantage and benefits. But the second type of friendship discussed by Aristotle, the friendship of mutual enjoyment, is also self-interested in this sense. Thus, ‘‘because I enjoy her company’’ or (mutually) ‘‘because we enjoy each other’s company’’ is a quite respectable reason for love. ( The first might be considered self-interested, but the latter is more along the lines of the Aristophanic reasons for love that I want to endorse, which are neither selfish nor selfless but point to an essential aspect of the relationship.) Finally, however, Aristotle introduces his third type of friendship, which might be stated as mutually inspiring one another. Now mutually inspiring one another might seem merely utilitarian, but it is no longer vulgar or by any means merely self-interested. Thus an excellent reason for love is ‘‘because we inspire one another.’’ Again, this is neither selfish nor selfless but an aspect of the relationship. ‘‘Because she inspires me’’ doesn’t have quite the ring to it, but neither is it selfish. It is, again, neither selfish nor selfless, and it seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable reason for love, despite the fact that it is, in one sense, a matter of my benefit. I might also love a person because I inspire her and I find it very rewarding to do so, but it is only a deep cynic or a philosopher with an ax to grind who would insist that such a reason is selfish or self-interested. It is in this light that I want to consider ‘‘virtuous’’ reasons for love, for instance, ‘‘because he is courageous.’’ Martha Nussbaum argues that such Reasons for Love [ 207]

properties are what Plato has in mind as reasons for love or, at any rate, for the best sort of love, the love exemplified by Socrates.17 Her analysis ( based on the Phaedrus) is that ‘‘the best view of love bases it on a view of the individual as essentially constituted by values and aspirations.’’18 This way of putting the issue makes it quite clear that love is ‘‘best’’ based on properties-ofthe-beloved-type reasons. Nussbaum expresses a number of reservations and objections to this analysis, including a suspicion that shared interests, aspirations, and values must somewhere come into the account, but she replies to these in Plato’s name, leaving the basic claim pretty much intact. Now some of these virtues, of course, suggest an obvious benefit for the lover (e.g., generosity, wit, and charm). Others, however, do not. But what I find problematic is not that such reasons sometimes tend to be covertly selfinterested but that they tend to be reasons for admiration rather than love. Although Nussbaum provides Plato with a vigorous defense, I find it both unconvincing and unappealing, reinforcing my suspicion that Socrates, at least, remains something of a narcissist when it comes to love. To be sure, we admire people with virtuous qualities, and Socrates holds himself up as moral exemplar precisely because he exemplifies such qualities. But insofar as we love someone, his or her virtues are not merely to be admired. They are, in an essential sense, to be shared. This means that the values embedded in the virtues not only must be shared, as Nussbaum argues, but it is the mutual effect of the virtues on the lover and the beloved that makes them reasons for love. In other words, it is not the virtues as properties of the beloved but their inspiring influence on the lover that matters. Otherwise, what we have is mere admiration, or perhaps worship, but not love. But notice again that we are quickly moving away from properties of the beloved and moving toward the nature of the relationship as the source of reasons for love, which is precisely where I want to shift our focus. To restate my main point bluntly, what most people find objectionable about reasons for love is that they tend to focus on a particularly narrow set of more or less selfinterested reasons. But, again, not all reasons are self-interested or selfish, nor are they restricted to mere properties of the person.

Aristophanic Reasons for Love The second set of reasons I call ‘‘Aristophanic,’’ after the playwright who has such a dramatic role in Plato’s Symposium. It is Aristophanes who presents the classic myth about human beings as double creatures, cleft in half by Zeus and left to wander the Earth ‘‘looking for their other halves.’’ A reason for love, then, has to do with the way two people ‘‘fit’’ together, not with the features either of them might have nor even with features they might share. [ 208] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Of course, shared values and aspirations may make it much more likely that two people will fit together, but it is not the sharing of the values and aspirations that provides the Aristophanic reason for love. Moreover, it does not matter (as Socrates complains, as Alcibiades suggests) whether the features that ‘‘fit’’ are virtues or vices. One might call them ‘‘relational’’ in that they explicitly have to do with the relationship rather than just the person loved. It may make us uncomfortable to think that evil aspirations shared may provide a good reason for love, but I think that it is important to refrain from ‘‘moralizing’’ love, as Socrates does. The first question is whether two people love one another, and why. It is a secondary question, though perhaps more important, whether their love is a good thing or whether the two of them together are at all admirable, enviable, or a ‘‘role model’’ of a couple. As I have argued, even self-interested reasons that look like properties-ofthe-person reasons often turn out to be Aristophanic reasons. Paradoxically, I think that this is also what the critics of reasons for love complain about when they insist on ‘‘loving a person for himself or herself.’’ What looks like a problematic ontological claim is in fact a plea for a broader, not an ontologically more precious, set of considerations. Rather, the sense in which we love a person ‘‘for himself or herself ’’ refers us to the special role of the beloved in the relationship, not to a naked soul. Loving a person for himself or herself is badly misconstrued as appealing to some sort of personal essence, whereas it most often refers to something essential about the relationship and the unique role of the beloved in that relationship. By explicitly talking about the relationship, we break through the troublesome distinction between the person, on the one hand, and his or her properties, on the other. We thus avoid Plato’s problem (and the problematic metaphysics that goes along with it) by appealing to Aristophanes in the same dialogue.19 At the same time, however, I have a deeper aim. I am trying to break down another bit of misguided ontology that wreaks havoc in discussions of love. The misguided ontology is that the object of love is the beloved and his or her properties, while love is the attitude or emotion the lover has toward the beloved. Thus Plato often employs the metaphor of attraction, but even in Plato, the paradigm of one person attracted to another encourages us to think in terms of the relationship between the two. This may not be apparent in Socrates’ discussion of eros, but it is clearly the key to the story told by Aristophanes. The relevant properties of each person are defined only in relation to the other. There is no mention of the impersonal Form of Beauty. The beloved is defined in terms of his or her properties only insofar as these are identified in terms of their ‘‘fit.’’20 To think about love in terms of Aristophanic reasons is not to deny that Aristophanic reasons can be trivial. As I have already indicated, I do not Reasons for Love [ 209]

want to distinguish self-interested and Aristophanic reasons on the basis of the former’s selfish vulgarity or superficiality and the latter’s virtuousness and profundity. In Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon’s screenplay Adam’s Rib, a would-be lover proclaims to the character played by Katharine Hepburn: ‘‘Do you know why I love you, Mrs. Bonner? Because you live right across the hall. You are mightily attractive in every single way—but I would probably love anybody just so long as they lived across the hall.’’ That is a good, solid, Aristophanic reason for falling in love with Mrs. Bonner, but it is laughably inferior to ‘‘because you are attractive’’ or ‘‘because you are so witty’’ or ‘‘because you inspire me to do great things.’’ Some Aristophanic reasons can also be cryptic. They seem to be property-of-the-person references, but they are in fact quite otherwise. For instance, a wife says (with a hearty laugh) of her husband—who just put his coat on inside out or walked out of the house with his face covered in shaving cream—‘‘that’s what I love about him.’’ Such endearments hardly count as a reason for love at face value, but they are clearly suggestive of a loving relationship and a larger perspective of affection and tender amusement, and thus they are good reasons indeed. The most obvious and important example of a Aristophanic reason for love that is not a property (or a pair of properties) of either of the two people but of the relationship is those which have to do with the history of the relationship. The very fact of time together, to say the obvious, is not fungible. It cannot be replaced by anything else. One might spend equal time with someone else, at a different time or (with some logistical difficulty) over the same period of time, but in an important and obvious sense, time together is unique to the relationship and can be a good reason for loving someone. I say ‘‘can be’’ because it might also be a good reason for not loving someone, as in ‘‘familiarity breeds contempt,’’ or because time together can also result in a loss of novelty, a loss of interest, a restlessness for something or someone new. But this is only to say that any reason for love, even one that is unique to the couple, must be understood contextually and in terms of the particular dynamics of the relationship. Yet time together, even if it is not sufficient to yield a relationship with ‘‘depth’’ of feeling, is arguably a necessary condition for love (early love and love at first sight notwithstanding), and thus a good reason for love, whether or not it appears as an obvious candidate for such a reason.21 There is, of course, a philosopher’s trick. Suppose we came together just last week, or even five minutes ago, but with all of the same depth of feeling and extensive mutual knowledge that we have obtained over the last fifteen years. Wouldn’t the reason for loving still be the depth of feeling and the mutual knowledge? Wouldn’t the time together drop out as superfluous? Well, no. Love is a process, not a state, and it necessarily involves a narrative, [ 210] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a narrative of love. Love is not just the outcome but the whole process, and our reasons for love are bound up with that process. In the philosophers trick, that narrative and process is still implied even if (really stretching the notion of ‘‘ logical possibility ’’) it is not actual. Here, too, is the place to deal with the objection ‘‘What about love at first sight?’’ But love at first sight does not dispense with the process either. It anticipates it. What makes it love at first sight (as opposed to simple attraction, a ‘‘crush,’’ or infatuation) is the fact that the relationship matures into love, and in retrospect it can be said that ‘‘we loved each other from the very beginning.’’ Love, by its very nature, takes time. Love at first sight is possible, but it has to prove itself as love—over time. Reasons for love can also be located in the future, in fantasies and possibilities, in future plans and projections. A good reason for loving someone is the anticipation of what the beloved or the relationship will make of the lover. This can go awry—for instance, in those men and women who see in their partner only what they would like to change. But Pygmalion, after all, does point to a familiar complex in love, and the fact that some people approach the beloved with the attitude of a housing contractor facing a ‘‘fixer-upper’’ bespeaks a variety of neuroses in love but does not undermine its reasons. (Having children, though not necessarily part of romantic love, is obviously love that projects its reasons into the future.) Love is a forwardlooking and not just a backward-looking narrative. So, too, our love may be part of a much larger theological, social, or political narrative, part of God’s plan, playing a role in social transformation or in the revolution. Among couples who have been at the forefront of social change, it may well be that one of the main reasons for love is their joint role in that larger narrative. The most important kind of Aristophanic reason for love, however, is one that cuts deep into the very nature of love itself, at least as I have come to understand it over the years. Referring back to the Aristophanes myth, ‘‘two halves of one complete whole,’’ I have analyzed love in terms of what I call ‘‘shared identity.’’ This is not at all a poetic or mystical notion. It refers to the way that lovers and spouses reconceive of themselves and redraw the boundaries of their identity and their interests with and through the other person. It is in this sense that I say a lover takes the interests of the beloved as his or her own. To say that he or she takes the interests of the beloved to be as important as or even as more important than his or her own is a much weaker claim. It is hard to put such reasons into words, since the ‘‘properties’’ or ‘‘features’’ of the relationship, the couple, or either person are not what are usually considered properties or features. Thus Cathy in Wuthering Heights comes pretty close to the mark when she declares, somewhat hysterically, ‘‘I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being.’’ Such are the ultimate reasons for love, I would argue. They do not Reasons for Love [ 211]

mention properties of the beloved nor benefits to the lover nor even history together—which, after all, might just as well be a sitcom or a war story as a love story, or (most of the time, I reckon) a mix of all three. The focus is shared identity, misleadingly expressed in the declaration ‘‘I couldn’t live without you.’’ ( This should not be understood as a statement of physical or emotional dependency, much less ‘‘codependency.’’) Insofar as romantic love is a search for self-identity, the best reasons for love are those which highlight and consolidate self-identity. Repulsive traits and vices tend to work against this identity, while attractions and virtues tend to work for it, but what makes a good reason for love as such is not any feature or characteristic of the other person. The question is rather how a trait or property fits into the relationship. Thus a person’s vice can sometimes be a reason for love, tying two people together as firmly as any virtue. Plato’s Symposium speakers make a special effort to decry such attachments, insisting that love is necessarily love only of virtue, but Alcibiades gives them a proper rebuke. Even repulsive features can provide reasons for love, if the lover finds them suitably endearing, amusing, or self-gratifying. What’s more, shared wealth can provide a sense of shared identity just as much as shared intellectual curiosity, shared moral virtues, shared sexual enthusiasm, shared humor, or shared political opinions, whether or not (from some more objective standpoint) the identity in question may be dubious indeed. In light of what I said earlier in this discussion, two objections present themselves. The first has to do with Plato’s problem. The objection is that I have only shifted and not resolved the problem. Second, there appears to be a vicious circularity in the sorts of reasons I am now defending. I earlier cast doubt on the idea that love is an intrinsic good or ‘‘its own reason,’’ but now it seems that I have adopted some such position.22 The Plato’s problem objection is that one might love for Aristophanic reasons, where these reasons refer to properties of the relationship rather than properties of the beloved. But aren’t these properties fungible as well? However, I do not see the force of this objection. The reason for rejecting Socrates’ formulation of reasons was that they did not take account of the fact that properties of the beloved were reasons for love only insofar as they played a suitable role in the relationship. The question now is, But might not another relationship ‘‘fit’’ together just as well, or better? Well, yes. And people do in fact move from one marriage to another. When a person is widowed, he or she faces the daunting prospect of either living alone or settling for a relationship that could not possibly have all the features of ‘‘fit’’ that he or she enjoyed all of those years. But people do find new partners and form new relationships on the basis of quite different features of fit. It is not as if one relationship has fungibly replaced the other, but rather that one romantic relationship has followed another, and both of them have [ 212] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

their harmonies and their virtues. (One can imagine the logistically complex but nevertheless possible coexistence of two such relationships, but here we run into deep problems about the constitution and unity of the self.) The fact that two very different relationships share the common property of ‘‘fitting together’’ does not say very much at all about the nature of the relationship— or about the reasons for love. But, then, isn’t there a vicious circularity in the notion of Aristophanic reasons, namely, that the best reason for loving a particular person now becomes something embarrassingly close to ‘‘because I love him’’? Well, yes again, in the sense that the reasons for loving this particular person do refer to the loving relationship in which these reasons earn their significance. But this is a far cry from the mystification of taking love as an intrinsic good or claiming that love is ‘‘its own reason.’’ The reasons for loving a particular person presuppose that there are good reasons for love. But once we have accepted the idea that love is (usually) a good thing, then the reason ‘‘because I love him,’’ though trite and misleading, does indeed point us to the many more informative reasons that are significant both because of the nature of love and within the domain of the ongoing particular relationship. Thus the ultimate reasons for love are concerned with the fact that we now share our selves, that my life is no longer imaginable without you, that there is a sense in which it is by way of your eyes and ears that I see and hear, in terms of your tastes and preferences that I gauge my own. That is love, and that is the ultimate reason for love. To say that our shared identity is a reason for love is, in this sense, a tautology; we love because we love. It is in this sense that we can understand how love might be its own reason after all, but we need not talk of ‘‘intrinsic goods’’ here. The shared identity of love can in some cases turn out to be a hateful, destructive, demeaning identity, and in such cases one would be hard pressed to say that love is a good at all. Nevertheless, in the preponderance of happy cases, already loving is a good reason for love—in fact, it may be the best reason of all.

Some Dubious and Downright Perverse Reasons for Love I would not want to leave this discussion without bringing in some truly dubious or downright perverse reasons for love. They include an odd assortment of motives and concerns that are typified by a certain unsavoriness, but the charge is often graver than the self-interest charge levied against some of the more vulgar self-interested reasons (e.g., loving someone for his or her money). Typically, such reasons lay some claim on the relationship, but they also involve a generous dose of self-deception, although they need Reasons for Love [ 213]

not do so, and when they not self-deceived, they are even more perverse. Many of them are neurotic. They are all dubious as reasons, at least as reasons for love. Spurred by the belief that we should limit our reasons to undeniably virtuous or at least desirable aspects of the other, we tend to ignore or deny many of the darker reasons that are operative in love. For example, it is not unknown for a young woman to fall in love, not once but in an unmistakable pattern, with married men who will not abandon their wives and families. One (certainly not the only) reason for love in such cases—it eventually becomes evident—is the safety of such a relationship, the fact that it has built-in limits in terms of time and commitment. An unusually experienced and insightful woman might recognize this in herself as an operative reason for love, but this would be rare indeed. So, too, the recognition that the beloved satisfies one’s more neurotic needs—the need to be punished or martyred, the desire to take care of a truly pathetic human being, the need to play God with someone; these are some of the darker reasons for love that might be quite effective without ever being acknowledged. These might not be good reasons, but even a sick relationship is not without its reasons. Then there is love that arises out of jealousy. This is its reason and, in the truly perverse cases, its sole reason. In the standard case, A has no interest in B until C shows an interest in B. As the rivalry heats up, it, and not anything that has to do with B or the promise of a relationship with B, is the dominant or even sole motivation. But I want to be cautious here. It is a staple of sitcom romances that a little bit of jealousy (usually based on an easily resolvable misunderstanding) is good for a relationship. It reminds one of the contingency of this (or any) relationship. There is nothing perverse about that. A little bit of jealousy may also remind a lover of the virtues and attractions of the beloved, refocusing attention in a constructive and healthy way. There may be nothing perverse about that either. But both of these examples assume that the relationship already has its sufficient reasons, that the jealousy only serves to remind or redirect attention to reasons that are already operative. This is very different from loving someone (if that is the word) because someone else, perhaps someone who is already a rival, takes an interest. A complex variation on love based on jealousy is what Jon Elster, borrowing from Stendhal, calls amour par pique:23 ‘‘Jealousy desires the death of the rival it fears. A man suffering from pique, on the other hand, wants his enemy to live and above all witness his triumph.’’ The rivalry predates the love, if it is love at all, which provides the means of getting back at the rival. It is the sine qua non of amour par pique that it lasts only as long as the rivalry lasts, and not a moment more. The relationship with the rival is complex. Elster describes it in terms of ‘‘A’s belief about B’s belief about B’s counterfactual victory over A.’’ The supposed beloved, the object of the contest, does not appear in the formula at all. [ 214] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

There is also love out of fear. Stendhal writes, ‘‘The pleasures of love are always in proportion to fear,’’ and La Rochefoucauld notes that ‘‘Love ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or fear.’’ Hope, not necessarily. There is hopeless love that is nevertheless true. But why fear? The simple case is love out of the fear of leaving or being left alone. All other reasons for love may have faded, but the thought of being single again, or the thought of dating, or the thought of having to look for another apartment in a tight rental market is sufficient to hold the relationship together. I think, again, we can seriously doubt whether such a relationship deserves to be called love. A more complicated but more interesting set of cases involves the fear of breaking up, the fear of resultant hostility, or the fear of hurting the other’s feelings. Such considerations are clearly more relevant to the relationship than fear of dating or having to look for another apartment. One could argue that the fear of hurting the other’s feelings cannot be separated from affection and caring, whether or not we would say that such considerations necessitate love. But the question is whether love can be motivated solely or mainly by such fears. By contrast, the fear of hostility, and in the worst cases fear of physical harm, are even more problematic. Unfortunately, the psychopathology of abusive relationships seems to suggest that such fears can be confused with love—indeed, perhaps even give rise to love. I do not personally understand how this can be, but I think you will agree that it is a perverse (and horribly self-deceptive) reason for loving someone. What is not so perverse, but may become so, is love born out of uncertainty and suspense. The passion that begins a relationship is certainly bound up with this (although here one might want to talk about the cause of the passion rather than its reason). One should not conflate uncertainty with fear, although the two obviously may support one another. It is said that ‘‘satisfaction is the death of desire.’’ Whether or not this is always so (and I would argue that it is true only for a limited set of desires), it had better not be true of love. ( Thus the naughty ambiguity of Juliet’s lament to Romeo, ‘‘what satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’’) Thus the continued provocation of love through jealousy, which is perhaps the most vicious ( because so manipulative and humiliating) form of competitive uncertainty, may be innocent enough at the beginning of a relationship, when mutual expectations are so unsettled. But as love goes on, it is rightly seen as an impediment, if not as sabotage. There is more than enough suspense in the inescapable uncertainty that is always the companion to passion, in the knowledge that we can never really get to know our beloved, her hidden dreams and fears and secrets, in the knowledge that all love is contingent and never ‘‘unconditional.’’ But this isn’t perverse. To the contrary, it is wisdom. A different kind of dubious reason for love is is love out of obligation, although (again) there are traces of this in most good relationships. Love out Reasons for Love [ 215]

of obligation is loving someone because one is bound to do so. This one is tricky. Marriage, whatever else it may be—an expression of love, an excuse to have nonfornicating sex, the legitimation of children, a way to cut insurance costs—is a set of commitments and obligations. And I, for one, would certainly not say that marriage in any way compromises love. In my own experience, it provides love with fertile soil and room to grow. (I’ve also had other experiences, but let’s not talk about those.) There are also arranged marriages, where the bonds of obligation precede any possibility of love. I have no reason to question such marriages as fertile ground for the development of love. ( The original arranged marriage, at least in the Western tradition, was Adam and Eve. Trusting the wisdom of the arranger, whether it’s God or parents or the village matchmaker, may itself be a good reason for love.) But the sort of perversity I have in mind is the more extreme case in which not only marriage but love itself is conceived of solely in terms of obligation. Possibly there once was love, and now what remains is only obligation. Possibly one confuses obligation with love. ( We can easily imagine Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins doing this, as perhaps does Kant, in his infamous passage about ‘‘practical’’ love.)24 All of this is complicated further by the fact that the standard marriage vow includes the phrase ‘‘promise to love, honor and obey.’’ The promise to obey can be objected to on other grounds, while the promise to honor sounds okay, if by ‘‘honor’’ we mean ‘‘respect.’’ But as for the promise to love, that seems to embody a number of philosophical confusions. Even if you embrace the idea of choosing your emotions (as I do, as most of my colleagues do not), the idea of promising to love seems incoherent. One can promise to abstain from activities that will endanger love. One can more positively promise to nurture conditions that are conducive to love. One can even promise to adopt or strive for attitudes and perspectives that are constitutive of love. But a promise to love, while it should open our minds to the possibility of ‘‘choosing love,’’ is as such implausible, and feeling obliged to love is a very different matter than loving. Love can be a mask for other, less affectionate emotions. Hatred, for example. Hatred shares many features with love, including the intimacy that I described as ‘‘shared identity.’’ We have all seen people so consumed with hate that their lives turn on the activities and attitudes of their nemesis. It is a commonplace in romance novels that hatred may be a mask for love, although it is less commonly argued that love may be a mask for hatred, though the argument would be much the same. So, too, love may be a mask for envy, or resentment, or even contempt. The intricate and decidedly pathological tie between men and women who loathe women and men (respectively) but therefore insist on ‘‘loving’’ them is a familiar case in point. The question of whether or not one who uses love to mask such emotions [ 216] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

can be said to actually love, depends on the extent and the nature of the selfdeception and whether there are other ( possibly sufficient) reasons for loving. The idea that love and hatred, for instance, can sit side by side in the same soul (regarding the same beloved/foe) strikes most philosophers as something of an absurdity, except for the disconcerting fact that it actually happens. ‘‘Mixed feelings’’ may present us with a terrible personal quandary, but they raise no particular philosophical paradoxes. So, too, self-deception, against which many philosophers have raised apparently devastating objections, remains a regular part of all of our lives and, especially, in love. The idea that reasons for love might be unconscious and go unacknowledged opens up a vast territory of mysteries and accusations. Once it is allowed that one might not be aware of, and even deny, the reasons for loving someone, the way is cleared for all sorts of anxiety-inspiring theories about loving for revenge, loving because of infantile neuroses and unresolved Oedipal reasons, loving out of perversity and self-destructiveness. The theory of female ‘‘masochism’’ continues to enjoy dangerous currency, suggesting that women ‘‘really want’’ to be hurt and put down instead of looking for the reasons why many women’s romantic situations are untenable or their images of love self-destructive in consequence rather than design. And too often, we dismiss the obvious in favor of the kinky, the mysterious, or the degrading. A man or woman who is completely enamored with a young and beautiful face is diagnosed in the most dreadful clinical and moral terms. But sometimes, Freud himself insisted, a cigar is just a smoke, and so, too, the reasons for love may be just what they seem to be. Nevertheless, the most significant reasons may be the hardest to identify or to acknowledge. These dubious reasons for love fail in many different ways, but at the core of them all is something like the complaint that they fail to take love as the love of a person and in a relationship. Now I have already cast doubt on the idea that we love a person as such, the whole person or (in accordance with a familiar romantic declaration) everything about a person. Nevertheless, love’s focus can be overly limited, and then it gives rise to that (usually benign) pathology called fetishism—loving someone for his or her wit or ability to do modal logic as well as the more celebrated sexual cases of foot fetishism, breast fetishism, and penis envy. Even if one never loves ‘‘the whole person’’ in the grand holistic sense, nevertheless in order to enjoy wit or intelligence or feet or breasts or penis, one should appreciate the person who has them. If not, such dubious reasons, like most properties-of-the-person-type reasons, latch onto one limited and perhaps tangential aspect of the beloved or the relationship. It is for this reason that one might insist that a good reason for love is one that fits into an ever expanding and as all encompassing as possible Aristophanic conception of both the beloved and the relationship. Reasons for Love [ 217]

Conclusion ‘‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,’’ writes Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But the ‘‘how’’ turns out to be a ‘‘why?’’ and the ways turn out to be reasons. When I first started writing about reasons for love, I thought that it would be a simple business, explaining why loving someone for his or her money is frowned upon, why loving someone for his or her looks ( but not only for his or her looks) deserves more respect than it usually gets, defending the importance of historical and other nonfungible features of the relationship as reasons for love. But it turned out to be much more complicated and intriguing. And this is even without getting into some of the deep phenomenological problems surrounding the ‘‘subjectivity’’ of love and the vicissitudes of self-deception. Nevertheless I hope I have persuaded you that we do love for reasons, and that the best of those reasons are not of the sort usually noted as reasons for love. Then again, to be convinced that there are reasons for love is not yet to insist that when in love, we should flat-footedly say what they are. As George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, ‘‘We must not inquire too closely into motives . . . they are apt to become feeble in the utterance.’’ And as Nietzsche rather sexistly suggests at the beginning of his Gay Science, ‘‘Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons’’ ( p. 38). There are, to be sure, reasons for love, but there is good reason for us philosophers to abstain from overanalyzing them and rendering overly rational an emotion whose charm consists at least in part in the illusion that it cannot be explained by reasons.

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Ten A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.—Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

It is often said, and it is undoubtedly true, that all writers on love betray themselves. Much of the best philosophical writing on love, accordingly, is quasiconfessional—Stendhal’s romantic travelogue-memoirs (On Love), Rousseau’s ´ mile, New Heloise), Shakespeare’s sonnets Reveries and various romantic pleas (E and several dramatic speeches, the letters between Heloise and Abelard, Sappho’s poetic fragments. Typically, too, the philosophy of love gets semifictionalized, as in D. H. Lawrence’s several analytic novels (notably Women in Love); more problematically, in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liasons; and in many feminist novels, such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. Some texts present themselves as fun: Ovid’s Art of Love and Loves and, more recently, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer. Some are both serious and self-undermining, for example, Andreas Capellanus’s courtly revival of Ovidic seduction lessons in a Christian context that plainly forbids them. There are texts that are obviously polemical (e.g., Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World and C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves), using love as a ramrod to break through the impious pretensions of the twentieth century in pursuit of a larger agenda. And then, of course, there is the philosophy of love. But as philosophy, the very personal nature of love uneasily clashes with the ‘‘objective’’ stance that philosophy likes to presume, and appropriate treatment of the subject becomes more problematic. How does one theorize about love without losing hold of the fragmentary, very personal nature of an emotion that may mean (as it is usually overstated) something quite different to virtually everyone? (Indeed, an emotion that seems to mean something very different to the same person at different times—or even at one and the same time.) Which of the several very different speakers in Plato’s Symposium represents the truth about love—or the views of the author? Is it Socrates? ( There are good arguments to think perhaps not). All of the symposiasts?

None of them? So, too, Kierkegaard: How are we to take his ‘‘pseudonymous’’ writings (such as ‘‘Diary of a Seducer’’, in Either/Or ), which so obviously betray forbidden desires and a half hearted misogyny that they do not at all conceal the (real) author’s loneliness, romantic resentment, or suppressed sentimentality. In someone such as Spinoza, on the other hand, the personal and the sentimental ooze out at us through the hard geometrical struts that frame his philosophy. So, too, contemporary ‘‘analytic’’ treatments of love betray what seems to be a basic incomprehension or perhaps an unadmitted fear of love, readily visible through the barbed wire prose of ‘‘suppose that S loves P’’ and endless dickering about the nature of intentionality and the proper ‘‘object’’ of love. (‘‘Do we love the qualities of a person, or the person as such?’’ Is this a real question, or a basic misunderstanding of the problem?) Of course, such authors begin by flatly denying that their analysis betrays anything of themselves, confusing the confession of mere details with the revelation of a whole personality. One current strategy for so denying the subjective and personally revealing nature of love is to focus solely on the language of love (an obsession no longer exclusive to philosophy) and ignore the emotion. And yet, love will out—or, rather, love outs; love expresses itself in philosophy as philosophy expresses itself in love—even when (especially when) it pretends not to be a personal confession. It is in the rich and varied context of this long-evolving literature of love that I want to reread Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.1 There are Barthes fans who would object to this reading, of course, on the grounds that he is in fact rejecting this entire tradition and is utterly sui generis. I doubt the intelligibility as well as the intelligence of this insistence, however, and at the very least I want to see Barthes as confronting this long tradition even as (or if ) he deviates from it. But the similarities, I want to argue and then show, are as striking as the differences, not to mention, whatever postmodernist sophistries might indicate to the contrary, the ultimate sameness of a certain basic biology of human affections. To begin with, the genesis and presentation of Barthes’s book will strike many a familiar chord to readers of Publisher’s Weekly. Like many of the texts mentioned above, it was written primarily as a popular book (and immediately achieved best-seller status). Like the best of the books above, it was written in an irreducibly personal almost sentimental mode, almost by way of confession despite its dictionary/encyclopedic format. And like so many modern works on love, it begins by denying its personal status and focuses its attention not on love—that is, the feeling of love—but rather on the language of love, the ‘‘discourse’’ of love, the way we describe ourselves and express ourselves when we are, as we say, ‘‘in love.’’ This is [ 220] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

not to say that love is nothing but language, of course, but it is to give considerable credibility to La Rochefoucauld’s wisdom-filled wisecrack on love, ‘‘There are many who would never have been in love, had they never heard love spoken of.’’ Of course, this does not mean that there is no ‘‘phenomenon’’ which the discourse describes, and the emphasis on ‘‘discourse’’ in the Discourse need not be mistaken for any excessive claims about ontologically unbridgeable distances or the ultimate meaninglessness of words or the utter incomprehensibility of the love experience. By examining the discourse and not the feelings of love, Barthes quite falsely proclaims his work to be impersonal (‘‘there is no question here of a history’’), and his dictionary/encyclopedic format, he insists, yields ‘‘no order,’’ only a wholly ‘‘arbitrary’’ list of love words and phrases. But, of course, any editor has ample choice—which words are to be included, which synonymic variation is to be represented, whether ‘‘to suffer’’ (suffrir) belongs with or should be used instead of the word for ‘‘despair’’ (desespoir), whether ‘‘pleasure’’ ( plaisir) belongs with ‘‘joy’’ ( jouissance) or vice versa, or whether any word should be excluded as derivative or secondary. Indeed, such seemingly lexical decisions are far from arbitrary; they embody an entire philosophy. It has often been said, by Andreas Capellanus and Arthur Schopenhauer, to name but two, that love is suffering and that there is no love without suffering. It has also been said, by Spinoza, to name but one, that love is joy, that joy does not result from love so much as it defines it. (It is worth noting that none of these terms appear in Barthes’s lexicon as such, although the topic of suffering permeates the text. On page 22, for example, ‘‘affirmation’’ is expressed in the language of suffering, duty, doom, and suicide. The telltale text that dominates Barthes’s references is Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.) And, of course, a choice between two synonyms, one beginning with ‘‘a’’ and the other with ‘‘s,’’ may make an enormous difference in terms of the shape and (one uses this term cautiously) narrative of the book. The structure of A Lover’s Discourse is not arbitrary, and its initial editing as well as its seductive and brilliant writing are revealing—as they should be. But when Barthes joins so many other authors and insists that ‘‘there is no question here of a history’’ and, more eccentrically, that there is ‘‘no author or subject, just discourse produced,’’ we should take this, too, as part of the writerly lover’s discourse, one of those proclamations which has become for Barthes de rigueur, like his effort to ‘‘discourage the temptation to meaning,’’ his insistence on arbitrary order, and his denial—also by now routine—that what he is offering us is not ‘‘a philosophy of love’’ but only ‘‘fragments.’’ How does one deal with such a text and such an author? Does one deconstruct it or analyze him? Either seems most inappropriate. Does one A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 221]

give full scholarly treatment to a book that is so self-consciously unscholarly (despite the neat little references to other authors, though rarely the sources, in the margins)? That would miss the spirit (if not also the point) of the book. One could just write one’s own discourse on love, but that would dismiss Barthes’s book, using it just as a source or a foil. One could, of course, evade the topic altogether, and launch into a general discourse on Barthes’s rather spectacular intellectual odyssey, his various theories of the ‘‘sign’’ and the now-tedious Saussurean duality of signifier–signified. Predictably, Barthes declares that love is ‘‘nothing but signs’’ ( p. 68) and, rather insensitively, insists that even the most tender caress ‘‘touch[es] nothing but a sign’’ ( p. 73). But this fetishism of the sign (or ‘‘the sign’’) is not sufficient for an understanding of love, and Barthes, to his credit, abandons it. One could also treat love as a Barthean myth (e.g., ‘‘Love is objectively good, and at the same time, the goodness of love is a myth’’ and ‘‘to believe in love is a coercive collective act’’; Mythologies, 75; p. 246), but to dismiss love merely as myth would again be contrary to Barthes’s own intentions. Alternatively, one could violate the author’s warnings and his privacy by delving behind the text to dig up those inevitable ‘‘dirty little secrets’’ that no doubt are betrayed on page after page of Barthes’s (not just ‘‘A’’) Lover’s Discourse, but it is far better that we should bypass the biography and respect the writer and his ironies along with his insistence on distance and disguise. (One of the most imaginative chapters of the book is appropriately titled ‘‘Dark Glasses’’—the paradox of public hiding [cacher].) Why should we suspect that the author’s own love life, like his discourse, was fragmented? Why should we think that he might have been the sort of lover who kept a list—alphabetized—of lovers? Why should we worry about whether he in fact suffered as much as his book suggests, or enjoyed love only rarely? Would any of this make any difference to our own understanding of love, or for that matter our understanding of Barthes’s text—or would it, too, be just another distraction? ‘‘No author or subject, just discourse produced,’’ Barthes tells us, but the author has made himself the beloved (‘‘love me for myself, not my writing,’’ p. 100), has brought an ‘‘inexpressible’’ subject back into public (even ‘‘objective’’) discourse, and through his own discourse has made it so obviously the case that love is not just discourse but rather the raw emotion that the discourse expresses. The important La Rochefoucauldian insight, that love is defined and possibly even created through language, does not yield the unsentimental conclusion that love itself is language, nothing but discourse, nothing but signs. And so I offer a brief reply, in the spirit though not the letter nor the language of Barthes’s very personal text. I offer it in alphabetical format (in English), not by way of parody so much as in appreciation, but also to make [ 222] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

the point that no such order is arbitrary and that what is included (excluded) already circumscribes a ‘‘philosophy.’’ A focus on language must be by its very nature a perspective on much else besides, and it dictates if not an order, then an emphasis. From an ‘‘arbitrary’’ list of items there emerges a portrait, a perspective, a confession. True, what charms and fascinates the reader of Barthes’s Discourse is its richness of irrelevancies—clouds, ribbons, gossip, dark glasses, mementos, suicide, an orange, a slice of cake, a quote from the Tao Te Ching, an observation by Goethe or Blanchot. (It is a book largely written in parentheses, italics, and margins.) But it is nevertheless (or perhaps thereby) a book that provides us with a portrait of love, and it is not altogether a satisfying one. In what follows, I do want to emphasize one problematic point (what some might call a ‘‘critique,’’ but I intend it rather as a ‘‘complement’’) regarding Barthes’s Discourse, and that is that it is not a discourse on love. What I mean by this will emerge in the following pages, but the core of my ‘‘argument’’ is that love—even love unrequited—is essentially a relationship, a participation and not just a longing. It is the ‘‘affirmative’’ act of identifying and entangling oneself in the life of another—or, rather, defining one’s own life according to the terms of the he or she whom Barthes misleadingly insists on calling ‘‘the other.’’ Of course, this emphasis on shared identity is not in any sense a denial of the differences that keep us apart, just as in Aristophanes’ allegory (in Plato’s Symposium), the suggestion of an original unity is not a denial but rather a tragic reminder of the differences that now separate us. Barthes is keenly aware of the projective/introjective aspect of love (his very first entry is s’abriner, ‘‘to be engulfed’’), but throughout his Discourse he dwells instead on the languor, the waiting, the distance, the suffering of love. To be sure, I have no desire to replay the ‘‘myth’’ of ‘‘the goodness of love’’ and insist (as has been so often insisted from Plato to the Beatles) that love is always good (and ‘‘All you need is . . .’’). But neither do I buy the morbid insistence that has been the favorite theme of cynics and pessimists for almost as long: that love is suffering, that the joy of love is fraud, that despair is the norm if not the definition of love, that ‘‘love and death’’ go hand in hand. What Barthes captures so brilliantly is the experience (not just the discourse) of despair, but he fails to represent the experience of love, which is a bonding and a rapture, a long dialectical process but not just a ‘‘waiting,’’ an ongoing fascination but also an engagement and not ‘‘hypnosis.’’ Perhaps it is because the discourse of despair is so rich and expressive, while the discourse of love is so vacuous, that Barthes is so attracted to the former and negligent of the latter, though this would seem to be like the moth flitting to the shadow instead of to the flame. True, ‘‘I love you’’ is one of the least imaginative ( but most significant) phrases in our language, except perhaps for the prescribed and required reply. True, ‘‘adorable’’ may be A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 223]

insufficient to describe our fascination with the beloved, but it is not thereby ‘‘a failure of language.’’ Such pathetic phrases are emblematic of love’s experience, which is sometimes so dazzling and so visceral that not even the most brilliant verbal expression could do it justice. (But why should language be able to ‘‘capture’’ an experience or fully express it?) Barthes himself is brilliant on the vicissitudes of lovers’ frustrations, for example, on what he calls ‘‘the tip of the nose’’ (the familiar flip-flop of love to despair, even contempt), and in his diagnosis of the unimaginative public nature of love (‘‘show me whom to desire,’’ p. 136). It is true, as anyone who has briefly explored the semantics or the thesaurus of emotion has discovered, that our vocabulary for the ‘‘positive’’ emotions is embarrassingly underpopulated, but it does not follow that love is as impoverished as its language. Indeed, Barthes early on admits that laments are more readily expressed than fulfillments (‘‘Fulfillments: They are not spoken—so that, erroneously, the amorous relation seems reduced to a long complaint’’; p. 55), but he nevertheless too readily identifies mitleid (compassion) with mitsein ( being with) ( p. 57), and dependency and mutuality with humiliation ( p. 82). Like his more prosaic but not much more pessimistic predecessor Schopenhauer, he thereby fails to get at the emotion he seeks in his Discourse. What he gives us so artfully is a portrait of the pathos of love, not eros. One might insist that such a portrait is essential to the new image of love and relationships demanded by the fragmented philosophies that constitute postmodernism and its more recent kin—then so much the worse, I would say, for postmodernism. But this is not an argument against Barthes, who gets trivialized in such bland current categories, and what follows is an effort to see his discourse through to a happier conclusion. Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but a playful impersonation may be more conducive to real appreciation. With this in mind, and with real reverence for Barthes’s feelings as well as his efforts, I therefore offer my own version of a lover’s discourse, not in isolation or at a distance, not even as a ‘‘reply’’ so much as in conversation with Barthes, as if in his presence. In this conversation, which is also in lexicological form, I want to confront the late Mr. Barthes with some of his own admissions (and omissions), as a way of understanding him. Of course, one should not mistake this discourse alone for love. absence ( p. 13): ‘‘An episode of language.’’ A Lover’s Discourse’s obsessive theme, evocative of many passions, none of them of the ‘‘makes the heart grow fonder’’ variety. Rather, absence appears as the essence of love, a mode of despair, a distance essentially present to love, as love. Love is [ 224] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

waiting ( pp. 37, 41, 101, 106, 155, 210, 216). Desire in love becomes longing (see languor). So, not surprisingly, love engages the ultimate absence; we are ‘‘in love with death’’ ( p. 13). Barthes here joins a long line of theorists, most notably and recently De Rougemont, who conflate tragedy (even if only a domesticated, private tragedy) into the essence of love. But though tragedy makes for good theater and absence provides personal pathos, it is not as such love, only a symptom of love, perhaps an impression of love, as a face leaves an impression in the pillow when one’s lover has paraded happily off to the office. The emphasis on absence mistakes the bond for its (temporary) breach, the relationship for its disruption, and confuses this with love. (Some recent theories of language encourage this, of course, the word always severed from its supposed ‘‘object.’’) But absence presupposes presence, at the very least in desire. It is the traditional ideal of togetherness that prompts the pained awareness of absence. The metaphysical alternative? ‘‘Emotions which are aroused or spring from reason, if we take account of time, are stronger than those which are attributable to particular objects that we regard as absent’’ (Spinoza, Ethics, bk. V, prop. vii). affect (emotion): Love is emotion, not discourse. There can be love without words, without thoughts, without laments or negotiations. The love of (and for) an animal. The love for (perhaps of) an infant. The love for and of a lover, which is not created by discourse but encapsulated, encrusted by language (Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris: ‘‘no words’’). But emotions (like discourse) have structures of their own. In love, that structure (successful or not) is called (banally) a relationship. affection: ‘‘No one is interested in the problems of sentimentality’’ (as opposed to sexuality) (p. 178). Where is affection in the lover’s ‘‘discourse’’— a mere implication, a presupposition, an absence? Where is the shared ‘‘sweetness’’ that so embarrasses intellectuals but remains the hallmark of greeting cards and alone warrants love (even if in fleeting instants between instances of abuse)? Where is the consolation (this is already giving in to pathos) that justifies and prolongs the desperation? See also ‘‘tenderness’’ (p. 224): ‘‘bliss, but also a disturbing evaluation of the loved object’s tender gestures’’ (a very short chapter!). In the torrent of longing and resentment, needing, touching, and hoping, where is simple affection? Could one have a true lover’s discourse—or a lover’s true discourse— without it? (See engulfed.) anxiety ( p. 29): ‘‘If there is such a figure as ‘Anxiety,’ it is because the subject sometimes exclaims (without any concern for the clinical sense of the word): ‘Je suis angoisse´. ’ ’’ Anxiety, too, is a discourse. But see William James: ‘‘Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 225]

other at right angles, and moving too and fro.’’ That is the experience of anxiety. ‘‘Discourse’’ only follows, and to no avail. (See also Jean-Paul Sartre, who rightly points out that anxiety is, first of all, my own relation to myself; p. 12.) beauty: Curiously subdued, buried in various references to Plato (the Symposium) and odd figures of fascination, hypnosis, enchantment. But the philosophy of beauty (as in Plato) pours through the text, the emphasis on ‘‘attraction’’ (fixation), the idea that love is a reaching out, a longing for (‘‘intentionality’’), not participation (even Platonic). But love is to beauty not fascination but engagement, a way of seeing, not something found or longed for. It is not recognized but created in love. (See Barthes, Mythologies, ‘‘Plastic: More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation;’’ p. 97). Where in Barthes (cf. Socrates) is beauty enjoyed ? See Paul Valery: ‘‘The definition of beauty? That’s easy. Beauty is that which makes us despair.’’ being with (mitsein): The essence of love, as opposed to absence, as opposed to ‘‘the other.’’ (One is not merely ‘‘with the other.’’) Even in frustrated, unrequited love, one is (even if only in one’s thoughts and desires) together with one’s lover, a twosome—one of two (the Aristophanic element of the Symposium that Barthes brushes so quickly past). Barthes takes being with to be an illusion, in any case a disappointment; every instance of ‘‘being with’’ converts into a shattering ‘‘being without.’’ For instance, consider ‘‘com/passion’’: ‘‘At the same time that I ‘sincerely’ identify myself with the other’s misery, what I read in this misery is that it occurs without me . . . the other abandons me’’ ( p. 57). blind ( p. 229): ‘‘Love is blind: the proverb is false. Love opens his eyes . . . produces clear sightedness.’’ But what does one see? Vision is from a distance, the being-with already broken. What does one see when one looks face-to-face at one’s lover, not his/ her eyes, but into the eyes. And what does one see there? One does not ‘‘see’’ at all. body: See skin. castration ( p. 230): ‘‘The lover botches his castration? Out of failure, he persists in making a value.’’ choice ( p. 62): ‘‘What is to be done?’’ The question is not How is love to be expressed? It is, rather, the ‘‘futile problems of behavior’’ ( p. 62). ( In Barthes, see embarrassment ( geˆne), ‘‘monstrous.’’). Barthes resists the temptation to consider the possibility that we choose to love, choose whom to love, and choose how to love. He notes, rather, that ‘‘I choose not to choose,’’ a familiar phrase indeed; it already suggests—if not entails—‘‘bad faith.’’ Jean-Paul Sartre permeates A Lover’s Discourse, only sometimes by name. (He remained thoroughly nameless in Barthes’s notorious first [ 226] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

book about him. Is this an elevation or a demotion ( just another ‘‘author’’)?) commitment: Barthes occasionally employs commercial images (e.g., p. 84), but rarely such quasi-legal metaphors. It is refreshing, therefore, to read an entire lover’s discourse that does not hammer ( like any good red-blooded American magazine) on the joys and importance of ‘‘commitment,’’ a contractual notion more appropriate to institutions (e.g., marriage) than to ‘‘affairs of the heart.’’ But the dangers of ‘‘discourse’’ include the temptation to commitment, of meaning if not of contract. Barthes, of course, resists this ‘‘temptation.’’ Happily, much of this language doesn’t mean anything at all ( however fraught with meanings the signs to which it responds may be). See Mythologies (on wrestling): it ‘‘abolishes all motives and all consequences’’ ( p. 15). death: See absence. desire: Oddly second-rate. (Competing French thinkers obtained an earlier copyright.) Desire is desperation and design, not pleasure. ‘‘Fulfillment’’ ( predictably one of the shortest chapters) mentions it only by way of a put-down (‘‘delight exceeds the possibilities envisioned by desire’’). Desire counts in love only inosfar as it is transformed into something else: ‘‘Desire is everywhere, but in the amorous state it becomes something very special: languor’’ ( p. 155). Alternative: ‘‘The Satyr says: I want my desire to be satisfied immediately.’’ Subtlety versus vulgarity. See Descartes: ‘‘An agitation of the soul caused by spirits which dispose it to wish for the future of things which represents itself as agreeable’’ (Les Passions de l’aˆme, art. LXXXVI). embrace ( p. 104): A ‘‘motionless cradling,’’ but ‘‘within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears.’’ engulfed ( p. 10; also 24, as s’abıˆmer, the first entry): Helplessness in the face (mouth?) of love. Not a decision. Not willingly. ‘‘I fall, I flow, I melt. . . . This is exactly what gentleness is’’ ( p. 10). ‘‘The gentleness of the abyss . . . I have no responsibility here’’ ( p. 11). ‘‘In love with death? An exaggeration . . .’’ ( p. 11). falsification: ‘‘Passionate love (the lover’s discourse) keeps succumbing to falsification’’. ( p. 118; see also blind). Does Barthes ( like so many other writers) confuse illusion with idealization? Illusion indeed falsifies; idealization glorifies. If I find Barthes’s prose (or your nose) ‘‘exactly right,’’ I need not falsify my standards for prose or noses. I recast those standards, first to include, then to highlight, the prose or your nose as a perfect example of itself. One’s lover becomes one’s ideal, if only as a lover. Of course, in love (as in all emotions) there is ample room for (even an invitation to) self-deception, but deception is no more essential A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 227]

to love than it is to admiration. Not rationalization (Freud’s sense, not Hegel’s) but sentimentality. See also weeping (kitsch). friendship: Not included by Barthes, but (alphabetically) it would appear near the beginning. What a different shadow that would cast on the rest of the Discourse! In Plato and Aristotle’s Greece, there was very little distance between eros and philia (a merely phallic distance, one scholar has suggested—off the record). Friendship involves (and requires) intimacy (another key word missing from Barthes’s lexicon) and closeness (oneness), not distance. There is little room for absence in friendship; distance does not make the heart grow stronger. Why should we think it so in love? idealization: See falsification. I-love-you ( p. 147): ‘‘I love you has no usages: Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be [an] erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word’’ ( p. 148). Or, rather, ‘‘I-love-you’’ is an action, not a word. It looks like a report, a psychologically descriptive sentence, but it is a performance, an act of aggression. It is only rarely a confession, and then double-edged (like the ‘‘confessions’’ of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’s La Chute, evoking guilt in the reader rather than relieving it in Clamence). If ‘‘I-love-you’’ is not understood, it cannot be explained. If it is unheard, it has not been uttered. If blurted out, it no longer matters that you didn’t really mean to say it. Once done, it cannot be undone. I-love-you does not express one’s love. Indeed, love may not yet be there. Sometimes, I-love-you creates love; it comes into being with the utterance, like the name of a ship or of a baby at a christening. ‘‘I-love-you’’ puts the other on the spot. ‘‘I’m flattered’’ is inappropriate. ‘‘That’s interesting’’ is offensive. ‘‘Why?’’ is humiliating. There is only one response, and that is ‘‘I-love-you-too,’’ also a performance but always under duress (no matter how relieved or overjoyed). ‘‘I-love-you’’ may become a ritual, a meaningful-meaningless repetition, and never say a thing. ‘‘I-love-you’’ can also be a cry (as Barthes suggests), a lament, a warning (‘‘don’t push your luck’’), an evasion (‘‘don’t even ask me!’’). It is often an apology, an excuse, a reminder ( but not of love), a trap, a blessing (te absolvo), a disguise. ‘‘I-love-you’’: ‘‘what a terrible thing to say to someone.’’ ‘‘Tell me you love me.’’ ( The performance has just been undermined.) ‘‘I-love-you’’ is language that destroys language, Barthes would say. Once said, it can never be said again. (But once said, it must be repeated.) Barthes: It is ‘‘released’’—shot out like an arrow. A weapon and not mere discourse at all. ‘‘I love you is in my head, but I imprison it behind my lips. . . . I keep myself from loving you’’ ( p. 234). jealousy ( p. 144): A debatable consequence of love, too readily raised to the status of a sitcom criterion. If one loves, then one will ( logically) be jealous. Economic premise: ‘‘there is only so much love to go around,’’ [ 228] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

a zero-sum quantity. Barthes begins with ( Werther’s) Charlotte, who, as a cake, is divided up; each has his slice ( jealousy as a species of greed). ‘‘When I love, I am very exclusive,’’ says Freud (whom we shall take here as the paragon of normality). ‘‘To be jealous is to conform.’’ To conform, of course, is almost as odious as being ‘‘reasonable,’’ and jealousy does not fare well in Barthes’s Discourse. ‘‘As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common’’ ( p. 146). But is there an escape? ‘‘Inverted conformism: one is no longer jealous, one condemns exclusivity, etc.’’ ( p. 145). joy (fulfillment, p. 54): As ‘‘excess’’ (‘‘for me, enough means not enough’’); ‘‘the utopia of a subject free from repression’’ ( p. 55); ‘‘The fulfilled lover has no need to write, to transmit, to reproduce’’ ( p. 56). (Cf. Spinoza: ‘‘true love is bliss,’’ Ethics.) But also, the joy of love as ‘‘eternal success’’ ( p. 54); ‘‘Joy wants itself, wants eternity, the repetition of the same . . .’’ ( p. 56). ‘‘Eternal success?’’ See Barthes, Mythologies (on wrestling), ‘‘a spectacle of success’’ ( p. 15). Love as wrestling? ‘‘The thrill of victory’’ (even prescripted)? See Descartes: ‘‘Joy is an agreeable motion of the soul in which consists the enjoyment that the soul possesses in the good.’’ Joy as ‘‘possession’’? As ‘‘excess’’ and ‘‘overflowing’’? See Sartre: joy as a (chosen) mode of irresponsibility (The Emotions: Outline of a Theory). See also pleasure. language: ‘‘The ego discourses only when it’s been hurt’’ ( p. 54). ‘‘To escape disreality, I . . . link myself to the world by bad temper. I discourse against something ( p. 88). ‘‘Love has of course a complicity with my language . . .’’ ( p. 98). ‘‘To try to write love is to confront the muck of language, that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished’’ ( p. 99). ‘‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other’’ ( p. 73). But this contact with the other is limited, remote: ‘‘The lover’s discourse stifles the other’’ ( p. 165; ‘‘I am odious’’; monstreux). It is not discourse with or to: ‘‘Love is not always told to but told by.’’ ‘‘Speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object) who does not speak’’ ( p. 3). Discourse too, however, is manipulative, strategic: ‘‘It is by language that the other is altered’’ ( p. 26). It is through discourse that the other becomes anonymous (as in Socrates?): ‘‘The love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other’’ ( p. 7). ‘‘The lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude . . . spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, derided . . .’’ ( p. 1). ‘‘As in Proust, it is ‘‘a whole scene through the keyhole of language’’ ( p. 27; cf. p. 4). A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 229]

languor ( p. 155): Desire as hemorrhage, waiting, absence. ‘‘Love seeks not its fulfillment but its prolongation.’’ Serious ambiguity: languor as prolongation and as longing, the first as a romantic style (cultivated rather than merely ‘‘delayed’’ gratification), the latter as self-imposed abstinence and frustration. Languor can be the continuous delight of exquisite desire—the ‘‘infinite yearning’’ that Aristophanes describes in the Symposium, or it can be taken to be the wrongheaded fantasy of the legendary troubadors, celibate but still singing. Would it change our conception of the history of love to learn just how often and how much courtly lovers enjoyed their consumations, and kept on loving? (Cf. Andreas Capellanus on consumation with discretion.) What misunderstanding of sexual fulfillment has led to its equation with disillusion and death? (See terminus.) love at first sight ( p. 188): Scholarly name: ‘‘enamoration.’’ (See also, in Barthes, magic.) ‘‘Love at first sight is a hypnosis’’ ( p. 189). Or is it rather deja vu—the recognition of fantasies long cultivated? ‘‘Is love at first sight possible?’’ Why not? But it is so only in retrospect, looking back amorously (or regretfully) on a first meeting from the viewpoint of love developed and matured. Love takes time. It is a process, not a state. The lover’s discourse is not a description, nor a lament; it is a structuring of time together. loving love ( p. 31): ‘‘Explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself: by a specifically amorous perversion, it is love the subject loves, not the object.’’ How is it possible to ‘‘love love’’? Does one love the sense of excitement ( hardly unique to love), the novelty (hardly love), the burst of emotion, the languor? But even love loved requires an ‘‘object,’’ some putative (if only convenient) beloved (scholarly name: ‘‘intentionality’’). However, if one does not love that ‘‘other,’’ then it cannot be love that one loves. object: Amorous fetishism (cf. Werther’s knot of ribbon). An odious term, inherited from Freud (via Brentano and the Scholastics) that Barthes uses throughout the Discourse to refer to the ‘‘Other,’’ the ‘‘object of love’’—for instance, ‘‘. . . confronting the other (the loved object)’’ ( p. 3). But to say ‘‘object’’ is to designate a target, to suppose a distance and a distinction: ‘‘subject’’ (who discourses) and ‘‘object’’—always ‘‘about.’’ It is to cut out of discourse the ‘‘we’’ (a rare pronoun in the Discourse) and deny the weness of love. Why such fear of ‘‘we’’? ‘‘Love object,’’ like ‘‘sex object’’— something to be played with. ‘‘Aside from these fetishes, there is no other object in the amorous world’’ ( p. 174). How about the relationship?! obscene ( p. 175): Not sex or perversion, but love’s sentimentality and seriousness ‘‘(the obscenity would cease if we were to say, mockingly, ‘luv’).’’ Love is embarrassing, humiliating, disgusting. (See Mythologies, [ 230] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

‘‘Striptease’’): ‘‘The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh. Striptease is a sport ’’ (Mythologies, pp. 85–86). Love lacks the art of the striptease. It is no longer natural, nor chaste, nor flesh. Love that denies rather than celebrates the body; an intellectual in love: ‘‘extreme stupidity’’ ( p. 176). other: Like ‘‘object,’’ an obscene way of systematically referring to the beloved. The ‘‘other’’ is the one talked about, not necessarily present. ‘‘Imagine oneself talking about the loved being with a rival person—the strange pleasure of complicity’’ (connivance, p. 65). In such discourse (with a third party) ‘‘the loved being is . . . virtually de trop’’ ( p. 65). In the lover’s discourse, we find ourselves ‘‘confronting the other, who does not speak’’ ( p. 3). So, not surprisingly, ‘‘The other is impenetrable, intractable’’ ( p. 134, also p. 22). philosophy of love: ‘‘What do I think of love? As a matter of fact, I think nothing at all of love. I’d be glad to know what it is, but being inside, I see it in existence, not in essence. What I want to know ( love) is the very substance I employ in order to speak (the lover’s discourse)’’ ( p. 59). But can one speak of love ‘‘from the outside’’? (See Kierkegaard on third-party descriptions of love.) Why can’t one know ‘‘from the inside’’? ( Whatever happened to phenomenology?) ‘‘I begin classifying what happens to me.’’ In love, one tends to philosophize: ‘‘From you I shift to he or she. And then from he or she I shift to one: I elaborate an abstract discourse about love, a philosophy of the thing, which would then in fact be nothing but a generalized suasion’’ ( p. 74). But the ‘‘thing’’ in question is an emotion and the philosophy a conceptual endorsement: How could it not be a ‘‘suasion’’? ‘‘Every discussion of love (however detached its tonality) inevitably involves a secret allocution’’ ( p. 74). If for Socrates the philosopher was the ultimate lover, Barthes takes philosophy to be the mark of failure: ‘‘I am . . . doomed to my own philosophy’’ ( p. 23). pleasure: ‘‘Gaudium is ‘the pleasure the soul experiences when it considers the posssession of a present and future good as assured. Laetitia is a lively pleasure. ’ ’’ (Cicero, Leibniz). But unable to obtain the former, I dream of falling back on the latter—‘‘a lunatic project’’ ( p. 51); cf. Spinoza, ‘‘Love is pleasure,’’ Ethics). But is pleasure the point of love, even of desire? (Cf. Sartre, on pleasure as a distraction in love.) A pleasureless joy ( jouissance) that ends in melancholy. Better, instead, ‘‘the pleasure of the text.’’ port(s) of call ( p. 102): ‘‘A compulsion to speak which leads me to say ‘I love you’ in one port of call after another . . . my wandering, my errantry continues.’’ ‘‘. . . all the meanderings of my amorous history’’ ( p. 105). A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 231]

power: Love as impotence (‘‘engulfed,’’ ‘‘ravishment,’’ ‘‘will-to-possess’’). (See resentment.) ‘‘I experience reality as a system of power’’ ( p. 89). See ‘‘The lover’s solitude is not a solitude of person ( love confides, speaks, tells itself ), it is a solitude of system: I am alone in making a system out of it’’ ( p. 212). Alexander Nehamas tells us that Nietzsche made such a system of himself (Ecce Homo). Is Nietzsche (as Socrates) the ultimate lover? (Barthes’s book ends on a ‘‘Nietzschean accent’’: ‘‘Not to pray any longer—to bless,’’ p. 234). reason(s): Warranted, caused, legitimated (‘‘affirmation’’). ‘‘The wealth of ‘good reasons’ for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc.’’ ( p. 22). See Spinoza again: ‘‘Emotions which are aroused or spring from reason, if we take account of time, are stronger than those which are attributable to particular objects that we regard as absent.’’ Love has its reasons; it is not, therefore, ‘‘unconditional.’’ But what if those reasons were stubbornness, obstinacy, the dubious joys of a cultivated unhappiness? (See Capellanus, ‘‘Love is suffering.’’) reasonable: A term of abuse (e.g., p. 147). relationship: See being with. resentment ( p. 200): The ‘‘fundamental mode of amorous subjectivity: a word, an image reverberates painfully in the subject’s affective consciousness.’’ An antithesis of love, the beloved as other, a source of irritation. Love (as resentment) as a lack of power. Love (as ressentiment) as an exquisite, deblitating sensitivity. Resignation ( but not amor fati ). ‘‘Not the man of resentment, but of fatality’’ ( p. 70). sentimentality (the problem of ) ( p. 178): What is ‘‘the problem of sentimentality’’? I would say that the problem is that we are embarrassed by sentimentality. So is Barthes, although his whole Discourse is both about it and an expression of it. sign(s) ( p. 214 and passim): ‘‘The lover lives in a universe of signs’’ (Culler on Barthes, Barthes, p. 110). Looking for signs everywhere, creating signs. A fetishism of the sign? But the relation between signs and between sign and signified is not intratextual but contextual, and in love this primarily involves a confrontation with another human being. How much of this is ‘‘projection’’ and how much ‘‘the real person’’? And how much of what cynics call ‘‘projection’’ is nothing but ordinary intentionality and the confusion of the lover with an ‘‘other’’? The semiotic problem (in love): ‘‘the amorous subject has no system of sure signs at his disposal’’ ( p. 214). skin ( p. 71): The body proper, also a language: ‘‘I rub my language against the other’’ ( p. 73; see language). A medical question: What, then, is in the body? An improper question: what does one sexually ‘‘penetrate’’? Not [ 232] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

skin. The language of the body (discourse)?: ‘‘Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply’’ ( p. 67). ‘‘(A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation)’’ ( p. 67). The dermatologist’s dilemma: to see the skin is to ignore the body, and miss the person (cf. blind). solitude: ‘‘The lover’s discourse is . . . an extreme solitude’’ ( p. 1). See Rilke: lovers as guardians of each other’s solitude. But isn’t love the end of solitude? (A naive question.) strategy: ‘‘The lover’s discourse is not lacking in calculations: I rationalize, I reason, sometimes I count . . .’’ ( p. 85). union (fusion, merging) ( p. 226): ‘‘I spent an afternoon drawing what Aristophanes’ hermaphrodite would look like. . . . I persist, but get nowhere’’ ( pp. 226–227). ‘‘I might as well return to the pusuit of the multiple’’ ( p. 228). ‘‘Dreams of total union: everyone says this dream is impossible, and yet it persists. I do not abandon it’’ ( p. 228). But perhaps Arisophanes is right: ‘‘I am no longer myself without you’’, ‘‘I am Heathcliff !’’ (Cathy, in Wuthering Heights); ‘‘the identity theory of love’’ (See chapter 8). vulnerability: ‘‘Flayed’’ ( p. 95). See resentment. weeping ( p. 180): Suffering, but also joy overflowing (‘‘I am not wounded’’). But is it the lover or the romantic who weeps? ( p. 180). The sentimentality of love (‘‘an obscenity,’’ p. 178). See Milan Kundera on kitsch: ‘‘Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice. . . . The second tear says: How nice to be moved. . . . It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch (Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 251). But see Barthes: ‘‘I remain dry, watertight. My identification is imperfect’’ ( p. 57). writing: ‘‘Two powerful myths have persuaded us that love could, should be sublimated in aesthetic creation: the Socratic myth and the romantic myth.’’ Yet . . .’’ ( p. 97). ‘‘You do not love me for my writing (and I suffer from it)’’ ( p. 79). And again, ‘‘Fulfillments: They are not spoken—so that, erroneously, the amorous relation seems reduced to a long complaint’’ ( p. 55). ‘‘Love . . . cannot be lodged in my writing’’ ( p. 98). ‘‘I cannot write myself ’’ ( p. 98). perhaps i have yielded too easily to both the Socratic and the romantic myths myself, enamored by writing ( but not by my writing) and, quite frankly, turned off by the long complaints that are so often confused with love. Indeed, perhaps it is the thought of being loved as a writer, or worse, writing oneself as a lover, that explains so much of the sour passion that now replaces the traditional saccharine and naive (if not hypocritical) musings on ‘‘merging’’ and ‘‘fusion’’ and happy togetherness. But writers are only sometimes ( perhaps rarely) successful lovers, and the distance created by A Lover’s Reply (to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) [ 233]

writing may indeed be part of the problem. Love, I suggest, is not discourse, much less discourse at a distance, and as we complete our lexicon, the silent conclusion is a palpable desire—not necessarily longing—for ‘‘the other.’’ With some luck (for it is not an ontological impossibility), he or she is already there.

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Eleven On Kitsch and Sentimentality The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running through the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.—Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

As the notion of ‘‘truth’’ requires ‘‘falsity,’’ so the notion of ‘‘taste’’ in art necessitates the existence of ‘‘bad taste’’ and, consequently, bad art. But bad art, like falsehood, comes in many varieties and is subject to different kinds of objections. There is sheer technical incompetence, to begin with (although artistic inability as such is much less fatal than it used to be); there is ignorance of the medium, the tradition and its history, the current fashions and the tastes of the times. For those outside the bustling art centers, what seems to be bad art may be just bad timing. There is unimaginative imitation and straightforward plagiarism. There is such a thing as having ‘‘no eye,’’ the failure to understand color or composition. But there is also an ‘‘ethical’’ dimension to bad art, as in the depiction of the forbidden, the blasphemous, the vulgar expression of the inexpressible, the provocation of the improper, and cruelty (for example, a bar stool whose legs are actual, stuffed buffalo legs). Once upon a time, bad art was, above all, such use of unacceptable subject matter, evoking the wrong emotions and provoking the wrong reactions (e.g., visceral disgust and nausea, but also lust and desire)—but this, too, seems recently to have dropped out of the picture. These days, it is far wiser for an aspiring young artist to offend or disgust or titillate the viewer than to evoke such gentle sentiments as sympathy and delight. But this is just what is particularly interesting, from a philosophical point of view, about that peculiar variety of ‘‘bad art’’ called ‘‘kitsch,’’ and, in particular, that variety of kitsch sometimes called ‘‘sweet kitsch.’’ Sweet kitsch is art (or, to hedge our bets, intended art) that appeals unsubtly and unapologetically to the softer, ‘‘sweeter’’ sentiments. Familiar examples are the highway stop ceramics of wide-eyed puppies and paintings of similarly wide-eyed children. Saccharine religious art (so long as it is serious and not sarcastic) would be sweet kitsch, and so, too, perhaps, much of Muzak and

Rod McKuen-type poetry. Examples of sweet kitsch are often mentioned as paradigm instances of bad art, but the nature of its ‘‘badness’’ is just what makes kitsch philosophically interesting. Sweet kitsch is not always badly done. Indeed, it may be highly professional, much in vogue, and keenly aware of the artistic and cultural traditions in which it gains its appeal. Indeed, what makes sweet kitsch kitsch seems to be that it is flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition, its timeliness, and the fact that it stimulates the very best (in any case, the nicest) emotions—the ‘‘soft’’ sentiments of kindness and sympathy and the calm passions of delight. But the best emotions seem to be the worst emotions where art is concerned, and ‘‘better shocking or sour than sweet’’ has become something of a rule of thumb for artists and a criterion of good taste for connoisseurs. But why is this? What is wrong with sweet kitsch? Its deficiencies appear to be just what we would otherwise think of as virtues: technical proficiency and a well-aimed appeal to the most sentimental of the viewer’s emotions. What is wrong with sweet kitsch, first and foremost, seems to be its sentimentality, its easy evocation of certain ‘‘sweet’’ emotions. But, again, what is wrong with sentimentality, and sentimentality in art in particular? I said that I thought the heart of the problem lies in our poor opinion of the emotions in general, and in particular the ‘‘softer’’ sentiments. In this chapter I would like to focus again on sentimentality, this time in the guise of kitsch, and to defend (sweet) kitsch and the softer sentiments it expresses and evokes against the more serious aesthetic and nonaesthetic charges against them. (When I speak simply of ‘‘kitsch,’’ it is to be understood that it is this ‘‘sweet’’ variety alone which I have in mind, though some of my arguments may well hold where ‘‘sour’’ or ‘‘bitter’’ kitsch is in question. [ Is there a ‘‘salty’’ kitsch? Perhaps a candidate would be what many of our literary critics have (uncritically) made the very substance of their art—their irony.]) In chapter 1 (and throughout this book) I have argued that the sentiments have had a bad time in philosophy as well as in aesthetics, and that ‘‘sentimentality’’ has become, in ethics as well as in art, a term of harsh abuse. I have traced the rapid fall of ‘‘sentimentality’’ in the brief period from Friedrich Schiller’s self-praise to Robert Southey’s dismissal of Rousseau as a writer because of his sentimental writing.1 If Rousseau’s audience was objectionable because it believed itself to have ‘‘finer’’ feelings, the object of Oscar Wilde’s scorn (the young Lord Alfred Douglas) was dubbed a ‘‘sentimentalist’’ because of his fraudulent and contemptible passions. By the turn of the twentieth century, ‘‘sentimentalist’’ had become a term of abuse, connoting superficiality, saccharine sweetness, and the manipulation of mawkish emotion. Kitsch was its artistic equivalent, and artists in Paris who [ 236] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

had been praised only a century before as the ‘‘geniuses’’ of Official Art became figures of loathing and ridicule. In retrospect, they became mere curators of kitsch who produced paradigms of ‘‘bad art’’ that we keep in our museums only for the sake of the historians, and as contrasts to the great art of the ‘‘Refused’’ in the hall next door. Kitsch thus serves us well in museums, where it is not only part of the historical record but also flypaper for the philistines, who in their ignorance flock to the sweet perfection of classical kitsch and leave at least some space in front of the great impressionists and their successors.2 Kitsch and sentimentality have been attacked not only on the grounds of ‘‘bad taste’’ (which I will not dispute here), but also, on ethical grounds, of betraying (or promoting) serious flaws in character. Hermann Broch goes so far as to call kitsch (in general) the ‘‘incarnation of evil.’’3 His objection to sentimentality in both art and ethics is not just its lack of sophistication and bad taste. Kitsch is dangerous. Broch writes, ‘‘The producer of kitsch does not produce ‘bad’ art . . . it is not quite impossible to assess him according to aesthetic criteria; rather he should be judged as an ethically base being, a malefactor who profoundly desires evil.’’4 Now this might seem a bit odd to anyone who has spent an hour in a Stuckey’s just off an interstate highway, contemplating the figurines and ‘‘No Place Like Home’’ placards, but this indeed is the charge. Kitsch and sentimentality are evil. Kitsch and the appreciation of kitsch reveal not only a woefully inadequate aesthetic sense but also a deep flaw in one’s moral character. It has also been linked explicitly with fascism, famously by Kundera but more indirectly by many of its mid-century and cold war critics. With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to go back to the historical parallel between the general fate of the sentiments and the period during which kitsch and sentimentality became such objects of loathing. In the early and mid eighteenth century, moral philosophy was all but dominated by the ‘‘moral sentiment’’ theorists—notably David Hume and Adam Smith. In popular literature, the advent of the ‘‘woman’s novel’’ inspired a flood of widely read potboilers and romances that equated virtue and goodness with gushing sentiment.5 In French art, the revolutionary moral sentiments evoked by David and exotic fantasies inspired by Delacroix were succeeded by the sentimental mastery of such academic artists as Greuze, Messonier, and Bouguereau.6 But by the end of that century, moral sentiment theory was all but dead. The ‘‘women’s novels’’ were dismissed by the male literary establishment as ‘‘sentimental trash.’’7 The French academics were dismissed as ‘‘kitsch,’’ and the status of ‘‘sentimentality’’ went into a steep decline as sentiment lost its status in moral philosophy. Thus the derogatory meanings of ‘‘sentimentality’’ and ‘‘kitsch’’ have to do with the general degradation of On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 237]

the sentiments and their significance. It is the sentiments as such—and in particular those sentiments which pretend to ethical significance—that are in ill repute.

Sweet Kitsch: Sentimentality in Art and Ethics There is a range of quality to sweet kitsch. On the one hand, there are those ‘‘cheap’’ mass-produced K-Mart-style artifacts, disdain for which surely has much to do with economic class distinctions and manufacturing values rather than aesthetic evaluation as such. Much of the literature attacking kitsch is political rather than aesthetic, though ironically much of it comes from Marxists and their kin who despise the mass-marketing origins of kitsch at the same time that they would defend the people who are most likely to purchase such objects. But whether kitsch is attacked because it is cheap and ‘‘low-class’’ or because it is the product of a debased economy, what is wrong with kitsch surely cannot be, philosophically speaking, either the rationalization of snobbery or contempt for its manufacturing and marketing. ( We should be suspicious about the depth of class prejudices underlying even the most abstract aesthetic argument and the extent to which the charge of ‘‘sentimentality’’ is in fact an attack on unsophisticated taste.) Though much of what is called ‘‘kitsch’’ is disdained because it is ‘‘cheap’’ (a word that often performs multiple functions in discussions of kitsch), because it is mass-produced and ‘‘plastic,’’ because it is the sort of item that would and should embarrass someone with a proper aesthetic education, there is some quite expensive and well-produced ‘‘high’’ kitsch (e.g., the academic painting of the mid-nineteenth century that I will shortly use as an example). It is this kind of kitsch that focuses our attention on sentimentality as such and that has attracted such critical abuse and has been accused of moral as well as artistic degeneracy. And high kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as ‘‘cheap.’’ It is typically very professional, well made, and expensive. Of course, this opens up a new argument along class lines, as an attack on the nouveau riche who have money but not taste. Recent aesthetic theory would suggest that proper aesthetic appreciation consists of an appreciation of form, presupposing more than a modicum of education and refinement in the viewer. Being moved by the emotional content, by way of contrast, is at best a distraction, if not a ‘‘dead giveaway’’ that one is having a ‘‘cheap’’ emotional experience instead of a cultivated aesthetic response. High-class kitsch may well be ‘‘perfect’’ in its form and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus the accusation that a work is kitsch is based not on lack of form or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly [ 238] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

provocative but supposedly inappropriate emotional content. ( The best art, by contrast, is sometimes said to eschew emotional content altogether.) The term ‘‘kitsch’’ comes from the nineteenth century. One of several suggested etymologies is that the word is German for ‘‘playing with mud,’’8 and, toying with this, we might speculate that the ‘‘mud’’ in question is emotion and mucking around with emotions inevitably makes a person ‘‘dirty.’’ The standard opinion seems to be that kitsch and immorality go together and that sentimentality is what is wrong with both of them. For instance, Karsten Harries: ‘‘Kitsch has always been considered immoral.’’9 Of course, one culture’s or one generation’s kitsch may be another’s avant-garde, and what is obligatory as ‘‘compassion’’ or ‘‘sympathy’’ in one age may be dismissed as mere sentimentality in another. Accordingly, the sentiments that are provoked by and disdained in ‘‘sweet’’ kitsch may vary as well.10 But whatever the cause or the context, it is the sentimentality of kitsch that makes kitsch kitsch, and sentimentality that makes kitsch morally suspect if not immoral. Granted, kitsch may be bad art. Granted, it may show poor taste. But my question here is why it is the sentimentality of kitsch that should be condemned, why it is thought to be an ethical defect and a danger to society. Let’s look at the sentimentality of ‘‘sweet kitsch.’’ I once visited an exhibit at the Denver Art Museum that featured, among other nineteenth-century French works, a painting by Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and one by Degas, more or less across from one another in the gallery. The Bouguereau is a classically arranged portrait of two very pretty little girls, in rosy pink and soft pastels, set against an expansive sky. The Degas, by contrast, catches one of his dancers in an awkward back-scratching gesture, her body turned away from us, her face unseen. She is framed in a cramped canvas in pale green, ocher, and burnt orange. The Bouguereau is one of those well-painted pieces of sweet kitsch that gives French academic painting a bad name. At the same time, it is an almost ‘‘perfect’’ painting. John Canaday writes, in his classic textbook on modern art: The wonder of a painting by Bouguereau is that it is so completely, so absolutely, all of a piece. Not a single element is out of harmony with the whole; there is not a flaw in the totality of the union between conception and execution. The trouble with Bouguereau’s perfection is that the conception and the execution are perfectly false. Yet this is perfection of a kind, even if it is a perverse kind.11

The Degas, on the other hand, is anything but ‘‘perfect’’ in this sense. It is one of those tiny discomforting treasures which haunts the viewer for hours afterward. But it was the Bouguereau that turned out to be one of the most popular pieces in the exhibit. The curators of the exhibit commented, ‘‘Most of our visitors readily admit they don’t know a whole lot about art. So it’s only natural for them to look for works that are pretty and easy to On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 239]

understand.’’ And then they added, ‘‘Novice viewers rarely speak of the Bouguereau’s features and aesthetic qualities. Instead, they use it as a springboard to dreams of the future or nostalgic memories of the past. More advanced viewers are soon bored.’’12 What makes Bouguereau’s painting kitsch? What makes it bad art? From an aesthetic point of view it is the ‘‘perverse perfection’’ that is so offensive and cloying, the absence of any interpretive ambiguity or dissonance on the part of the viewer. But most important (for our purposes) it is the manipulation of emotion, the evocation of ‘‘cheap,’’ ‘‘false’’ emotions that makes this otherwise ‘‘perfect’’ painting perverse. Clement Greenberg, for instance, complained (in 1939) that kitsch ‘‘is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. . . . It is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.’’13 It is worth remembering what was going on in 1939, when Greenberg made his critical comment. Calling a work of ( bad) art ‘‘kitsch’’ is not just to condemn the glibness of its technique; it is also to question the motives of the artist and the emotional maturity of the audience. In such cases, sentimentality is the culprit, manipulated by the artist, indulged in by the viewer. It is, we hear from critic after critic, false (‘‘faked’’) emotion. And so the sentimentality of kitsch becomes not ultimately aesthetic but ethical, a species of dishonesty. (Karsten Harries: ‘‘to isolate aesthetics from ethics [is] to misunderstand what art is all about.’’)14 What makes Bouguereau kitsch is the one-dimensional purity of the emotion. These girls don’t do any of the nasty things that little children do. They don’t whine. They don’t tease the cat. They don’t hit one another. They don’t have any bruises. They aren’t going to die. The art itself leaves us without imagination; it wholly determines the images we ought to have. It ‘‘manipulates’’ our feelings. There is no ambiguity. Above all, there is no discomfort, no ugliness or awkwardness, no sense (as in the Degas) of intruding on privacy. Bouguereau himself wrote, ‘‘I see only the beautiful in art . . . art is the beautiful. Why reproduce what is ugly in nature?’’ Degas: ‘‘I show my models deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves.’’ It is here (though not only here) that ethics meets aesthetics, in the images we are given of human reality, visual theories of human nature, if you like—one a portrait of pure innocence, the other a reminder that we are awkward animals. Sentimentality is ‘‘false’’ because it gives us a picture of ourselves that is too pure, too ethically one-sided. But isn’t the Degas portrayal just as ‘‘one-sided,’’ as far as its philosophy (its theory of human nature) is concerned? It may be an infinitely better painting (as a painting) but is it better as a moral theory? Even if we were to accept the [ 240] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

rejection of kitsch as art, why is the sentimentality of kitsch to be condemned, in other words, not just as art but as ethics?

What’s Wrong with Kitsch? The strong, shared contempt for kitsch and sentimentality is something of a standard for good taste, but there is all too little agreement about ‘‘what is wrong’’ with kitsch and sentimentality to back it up. We can accept, as simply irrelevant to our concern here, the claim that kitsch represents ‘‘bad taste,’’ but this is hardly a concession, given the rarely rational vicissitudes of taste in an art market that now celebrates street graffiti, a pile of bricks, and an artist’s dragging himself across broken glass as art. But culling through the literature in both ethics and aesthetics, I think we can narrow down the leading candidates for an argument to six in some ways parallel to the arguments treated in chapter 1: (1) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality provoke excessive expressions of emotion; (2) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality manipulate our emotions; (3) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality express or evoke ‘‘false’’ or ‘‘faked ’’ emotions; (4) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality express or evoke ‘‘cheap’’ or ‘‘easy’’ or ‘‘superficial ’’ emotions; (5) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality are self-indulgent and interfere with ‘‘appropriate’’ behavior; and, perhaps the most dominant charge, (6) the claim that kitsch and sentimentality distort our perceptions and interfere with rational thought and an adequate understanding of the world. The charge is that kitsch gives us a false and fraudulent, overly ‘‘sweet’’ and benign vision of the world (or certain beings in the world, notably children and puppies), and thus somehow ‘‘blocks’’ our larger, nastier knowledge of the world (children and puppies, too). Underlying all of these charges, indeed, is the suspicion that kitsch and sentimentality are modes of distraction and self-deception, shifting our attention away from the world as it is and soothing us instead with objects that are uncompromisingly comfortable and utterly unthreatening. Let’s consider the claims one by one. First, kitsch and sentimentality provoke excessive expressions of emotion. It is true that kitsch is calculated to evoke our emotions, especially those emotions which are best expressed by that limp vocabulary which seems embarrassingly restricted to such adjectives as ‘‘cute’’ and ‘‘pretty,’’ or that even more humiliating, drawn-out downward-intoned ‘‘Aaaaah’’ which seems inappropriate even in Stuckeys. But is the charge that kitsch provokes too much of these affectionate emotions, or that it provokes them at all ? I think it is worth noting that our limited vocabulary and expressions indicate a cultivated inability to recognize or publicly express the more gentle emotions. (How rich our vocabulary of On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 241]

abuse and disgust, by way of contrast.) How much of an emotion is ‘‘too much’’? How is this to be measured? Of course, one can condemn the public expression of emotion as ‘‘inappropriate’’ or as ‘‘too much,’’ depending on the context and its customs, and we might well agree without argument that the noisy expression of even the most sophisticated emotion is inappropriate in the cloisters of the art museum, but it is not excessive expression that is being criticized here. It is the emotion and the amount of the emotion as such, whether expressed or not, and the sophisticated viewer will be mortified at his or her responses to a piece of high-class kitsch despite the fact that no expression whatsoever, save perhaps a sneer, is forthcoming. So what is ‘‘too much’’ emotion? If we are embarrassed by the gentle emotions, I suspect that it is because those emotions themselves make us uncomfortable, in any ‘‘amount.’’ Of course, it may be that good taste requires subtlety (though one might well object that this is a very cold-blooded and whiggish conception of good taste), and it may be that certain emotions are indeed inappropriate and out of place (e.g., getting sexually ‘‘turned on’’ by Bouguereau’s two little girls—which may in a few troubled souls be difficult to distinguish from more appropriate feelings of affection). But the bottom line seems to be that feeling ‘‘cuddly’’ just isn’t ‘‘cool.’’ Feeling our ‘‘hearts going out’’ to a painting of two little girls in the grass makes us uncomfortable and indicates incipient poor taste if it is not also a mark of some sort of degeneracy (sexual overtones quite aside). But why should we feel so guilty about feeling good, and what would it mean to feel an excess of kindness, even ‘‘cuteness’’? And why should the unsubtle evocation of tenderness be ethically blameworthy, distasteful, or dangerous? Bad art, perhaps, but why anything more than this? Second, one obvious suggestion is that kitsch and sentimentality manipulate our emotions. Of course, it must be said immediately that one puts oneself in the position of being so manipulated by going to the museum, by standing or walking in front of the painting; and so the ‘‘blame’’ is properly placed on the viewer as well as the artist and the object. Indeed, kitsch is manipulative. It utilizes what Kathleen Higgins calls ‘‘icons’’ to guarantee an instant and wholly predictable emotional response.15 Why else depict little girls, puppies, and other subjects guaranteed to tug at our heartstrings? The argument, presumably, is that manipulation of emotions, even with the initial acquiescence of the ‘‘victim,’’ is a violation of a person’s autonomy. Of course, it is just as manipulative to depict the same subjects being beaten to within an inch of their lives, and while we might object to the latter (on moral grounds, to be sure), the objection is not of the same sort as our objection to kitsch. But, again, my suspicion is that the objection, while cast in the language of violation, is a covert reaction against the emotions themselves. We do not talk about a violation of autonomy when a person is [ 242] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

‘‘reasoned with,’’ so why do we do so when the appeal is not to reason but to emotions? The presumption is that our emotions, unlike our reason, are not truly our own, and they are humiliating rather than ennobling. Of course, this may be true of some emotions, but it does not follow for all of them. One would think that feelings of tenderness would be ennobling and not humiliating, but then why should we feel ‘‘manipulated’’ by their provocation? What does it mean to ‘‘manipulate’’ someone’s emotions? I suppose it means to intentionally bring them about. We do this all the time, of course, in our every social gesture, but one does not ordinarily complain when his or her emotion of gratitude, for example, is intentionally brought about by a gift. The accusation of ‘‘manipulation’’ emerges only when the emotion in question is an unwanted one, for instance, if the gift is given by an offender whom one does not (for whatever reason) want to forgive—or at least not yet. But why should we find even saccharine sentiments so unwanted that we resent their provocation, particularly in the sanctuary of a museum where such feelings would seem to be appropriate? Again, one might insist that great art (e.g., the Degas bather) stimulates much more than such simple sugary feelings. But the question is not whether kitsch is great or good art, but whether the feelings it provokes are odious or morally insidious. Spending one’s time in front of the Bouguereau instead of the Degas may result in one’s leaving the museum edified but aesthetically ignorant. One may indeed feel for a moment or two (at least until hitting downtown traffic) that life itself is sweet and precious, but I do not see that even the most ‘‘schmaltzy’’ feelings, apart from the potential for intrusive expression, are in any sense despicable or dangerous. It is true that such feelings, when intentionally provoked in place of nasty and more urgent political impulses (Kundera’s objection to Communist Party kitsch) or when juxtaposed against a target for extreme hostility, as in racist propaganda (sweet English girls and Belgian babies about to be murdered by Hitler’s hateful Huns; pure and pretty Miss Quested harassed by the dark hands of an Indian native in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India). But in such cases it is not the intentional provocation of the tender sentiments that is objectionable; it is the political situation and the hateful attempt to use honorable emotions as a shield against an honest view of oppression and hatred. Third, the emotions evoked by kitsch and involved in sentimentality are often said to be ‘‘false’’ or ‘‘faked’’—for instance, by Clement Greenberg in his casual but familiar charge that kitsch involves merely ‘‘vicarious’’ emotions which are not ‘‘real’’ but ‘‘faked.’’ But what is a ‘‘faked’’ emotion? And is it true that ‘‘vicarious’’ emotions aren’t ‘‘real’’? One can pretend to have an emotion, of course, and in that sense it can be ‘‘faked.’’ One can even deceive oneself about one’s pretenses, and thus fake an emotion in seeming sincerity. But none of this seems to be what goes on when a piece of kitsch evokes its On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 243]

gentle sentiments. The unsophisticated viewer displays un-self-conscious affection, not affectation, and the sophisticated viewer, with his or her mixture of embarrassed emotion and corrective disgust, is certainly not ‘‘faking’’ that despised emotion. Of course, there is that extreme cynicism which would insinuate that all gentle emotions—as opposed to such professionally familiar emotions as envy and resentment—are ‘‘fake,’’ that is, impossible to feel sincerely and seriously, but I think that (for most of us) such a view need only be openly stated to be repudiated. Emotions can go wrong, of course, and it thus makes sense to say that they can be ‘‘false,’’ particularly when the putatively factual premises on which they are based are false. One might also call an emotion ‘‘false’’ if one of its component evaluations is inappropriate or exaggerated, as when a trivial incident is ‘‘blown up out of all proportion.’’ A work of art can be straightforwardly false if it depicts a situation that is emotionally impossible or contrived, or if it presents a scene that (in any of a thousand ways) is inaccurate. But the emotions evoked by kitsch are anything but false in any of these senses. The Bouguereau errs in the direction of perfect depiction, capturing two perfectly rendered little girls in a pose that is utterly typical (even cliche´d). One might object that the girls and their little game are ‘‘idealized,’’ but idealization is not the same as falsehood (more of this in regard to the sixth claim) and the fact that the artist does, indeed, pick two rather exceptionally ‘‘cute’’ little girls in their best dresses and on their best behavior does not make the depiction or the emotions it evokes ‘‘false.’’ Could it be that showing such scenes, admittedly rare in the experience of most parents and schoolteachers, is itself a ‘‘falsification’’ of reality? Or are such scenes (no matter how rare) and the emotions they evoke essential to our affection for children? (Why else would most people intentionally have them?) Again, cynicism shows its face behind the attack on sentimentality. (Are the posed and perfect portraits of children that sit on executives’ and secretaries’ desks kitsch? Are they and the emotions they evoke in the middle of a busy day ‘‘false’’?) What about vicarious emotions? Are they ‘‘real’’ emotions? That depends on the emotion and on its context. To be sure, the fear (or more properly horror) that one feels while watching a B movie thriller isn’t actually fear (although what it is, is not easy to say; it certainly is an emotion, and it obviously shares some essential features with fear). The disgust we feel looking at a picture (whether real or staged) of a mutilated human face, however, is the same emotion that we feel when we come across a real mutilated face (making allowances, of course, for surprise, proximity, and the stimulation of other senses and other emotions). The moral outrage we feel when looking at a politically loaded painting (Goya’s Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica) or film (Costa-Gravas’s Z, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom) is the same as the outrage we might feel when actually in (as we all are) the [ 244] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

midst of violence and injustice. The fact that an emotion is ‘‘vicarious’’ (in some sense ‘‘secondhand’’) does not mean that it is not a ‘‘real’’ emotion or that it is not an emotion of the morally appropriate type. Some are, some are not. Indeed, it is not at all clear that the sweetish feeling we get when viewing the Bouguereau is ‘‘vicarious’’ in the usual sense at all. ( The term seems to apply better to our voyeuristic viewing of the Degas dancer in her naked privacy.) But in any case, the charge against kitsch cannot be the vicariousness of the emotions provoked, and vicarious emotions are not thereby ‘‘unreal.’’ The sentiments one feels when looking at the little girls in the Bouguereau are the same sentiments as those one feels watching two very real little girls at play, and it would be only in the extraordinary (and probably pathological) case that one would feel sweet sentiment only with the painting and not with two (similarly well-behaved) girls. Karsten Harries writes that ‘‘the need for kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare, when desire lies dormant and needs artificial stimulation.’’16 He then adds—a very different argument—that kitsch seeks emotions where there is ‘‘no object that would warrant that emotion. Thus religious kitsch seeks to elicit religious devotion without an encounter with God, and erotic kitsch seeks to give the sensations of love without the presence of someone with whom one is in love.’’ But the initial diagnosis presupposes a kind of either/or addiction model of emotion, such that one ‘‘needs’’ an artificial stimulant when the ‘‘real thing’’ isn’t available, while the second argument insinuates a kind of fraud, a kick without a cost—or as Oscar Wilde would say, ‘‘an emotion without paying for it.’’ The diagnosis seems to me to be false on the face of it, whether or not one agrees that one ‘‘needs’’ religion or love one way or the other. The role of kitsch for most kitsch lovers is as an emotional bonus, not compensation, and while it is a comfortable pretension to suppose that people with bad taste suffer from an emotional deficit as well, I see very little empirical evidence that this is true. (Of course, there are always the odd, even pathological, cases, and then there is also the tu quoque argument, that it is those who condemn kitsch and sentimentality who are demonstrably lacking in their emotional life—a more plausible hypothesis, I believe.) Harries’s second argument seems to me much more interesting, and I want to deal with it in a bit greater depth later, for it is an argument that concerns the status of the object of emotion. His charge is that kitsch evokes emotion from inappropriate objects. Again, I would dispute the observation on which this charge is founded—it seems to me that those attracted to religious kitsch are attracted just because they are persons who are already devoted to God, and at least some of those who find erotic kitsch most rewarding (as opposed to simply exciting) are persons who are already in love and utilize kitsch to remind them and stir in them semblances of (or the same?) already genuine emotions. On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 245]

Fourth, kitsch and sentimentality are said to express or evoke ‘‘cheap’’ or ‘‘easy’’ or ‘‘superficial’’ emotions. We should note with considerable suspicion the ambiguity of the word ‘‘cheap,’’ which on the one hand means ‘‘low quality’’ but on the other has unmistakable reference to the socioeconomic status of the sentimentalist. ‘‘Cheap’’ means ‘‘low-class,’’ and the suggestion is that we should be ‘‘above’’ such sentiments. We are not particularly surprised when class-conscious Oscar Wilde suggests that the feelings which constitute sentimentality are unearned, had on the cheap, and come by too easily. (‘‘To be sentimental is to be shallow.’’) Irony and skepticism are the marks of the educated; sentimentality is the mark of the uneducated. One cannot understand the attack on kitsch, I propose, without a sociologicalhistorical hypothesis about the fact that the ‘‘high’’ class in many societies associates itself with emotional control and rejects sentimentality as an expression of inferior, ill-bred beings; and male society has long used such a view to demean the ‘‘emotionality’’ of women. I am tempted to suggest that the attack on sentimentality also has an ethnic bias, northern against southern Europe and West against East, with only a few geographical modifications for ethical and aesthetic prejudice in North America. But such obviously class-based criticism is not restricted to those who would confuse aesthetic taste with political legitimacy. Indeed, much of the contempt for kitsch, I would suggest, is not the product of personal or cultivated taste at all but rather the ‘‘superficial’’ criterion which teaches us that kitsch— immediately recognizable by its play on the tender sentiments—is unacceptable. Those sentiments are ‘‘cheap’’ not just because kitsch is cheap but because the person who feels them is, emotionally speaking, cheap as well. In a society that strives for political equality, can we afford to tolerate such snobbery? (‘‘Some of my best leftist friends . . . .’’) I have, quite frankly, never understood the charge of ‘‘easy’’ emotion, unless this is (again) code for a naive response to obvious emotional content in place of hard-earned aesthetic appreciation that comes only with education and sophistication. It is true, there is no subtlety in the Bouguereau; it dictates our emotional reaction. The Degas is ambiguous; it is impersonal and even cold. No emotion comes readily or easily. But why is a gentle and ‘‘easy’’ emotion—one that is directly provoked without ambiguity—in any way blameworthy? Granted, it may have little to do with aesthetic appreciation, but the objection against kitsch and sentimentality is not just artistic naı¨vete´. It is the emotion itself that is supposed to be odious, but the ‘‘ease’’ with which it is provoked does not seem to have anything to do with the quality or desirability of the emotion in question. In what sense are the tender sentiments ‘‘superficial’’? Again, I believe that this oft-abused metaphor needs only to be brought to our attention to be disowned. ‘‘Superficial,’’ one supposes, is opposed to ‘‘deep.’’ What is a ‘‘deep’’ [ 246] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

emotion? The grand emotions of tragedy are deep. The cosmic emotions (religious awe, devout faith) are deep. Lifelong love is deep. By way of contrast, petty irritations are not deep, envying one’s roommate’s new shoes is not deep. Infatuation is not deep. But what seems to characterize the deep emotions is not ‘‘depth’’ so much as thoroughgoing involvement. The deep emotions are those in which we are (to use a not very deep financial metaphor) heavily invested emotionally. Those emotions which signal a dramatic change in one’s life—utter ruin or devastating loss, the joy of having a child or making a long-sought discovery—are deep because of our total engagement. Infatuation is superficial because it is usually short-term, often casual, and at best tenuously attached to a particular person, while lifelong love is deep not (necessarily) because of the intensity of the experience but because of its all-embracing nature. To be obsessed, on this account, is to be deep. To have a fleeting feeling on encountering Bouguereau’s little girls is by this same account superficial, but now we should ask, Do we want to limit ourselves to deep emotions, presumably restricted to those whom we know intimately? Or is it not one of the essential features of social existence that we can be moved by children and puppies and a happiness not our own, that we can have affections that are superficial (that is, in which we have nothing at stake, nothing invested)? That is what kitsch provides for us, and it is only if we demand allembracing engagements in all of our emotions—the province of a few selfdestructive romantics—that such casual emotions become unwanted or intolerable. Casual emotions and not the grand passions are the currency of everyday life, but some of us reject the casual emotions of kitsch not because we are holding out for the grand passions but because we are too timid about or embarrassed by even the gentlest sentiments. Thus the attack on kitsch, I suggest, is a defensive attack on ‘‘easy’’ emotion as such. Better a grand passion than a passing fancy, perhaps, but sometimes better a ‘‘superficial’’ sentiment than none at all. Fifth, Kundera argues at some length that kitsch and sentimentality are self-indulgent. Let me repeat his most famous charge: Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.17

The idea is that kitsch is ‘‘false’’ because it is the emotion, and not the object of emotion that is the primary concern is part of the charge that kitsch and sentimentality are not only fraudulent but self-indulgent as well. Harries writes, ‘‘kitsch creates illusion for the sake of self-enjoyment’’18 and suggests On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 247]

that love is kitsch, for example, ‘‘if love has its center not in the beloved but within itself.’’ We all know the phenomenon of being ‘‘in love with love,’’ but what is wrong with this, in our social lives, is that we know from experience that the supposed beloved usually gets the short end of it. Where the putative object is a figure in a painting or in porcelain, there is no such danger of abandonment or fraud, and the locus of the enjoyment—in the object or in the emotion itself—would not seem to be a matter of concern. Indeed, is the reflectivity of emotion in such cases self-indulgence, or is it what in philosophical circles we would call ‘‘reflection’’—the enjoyment of the seeing and not just of the seen? What is wrong or self-indulgent about enjoying our emotions, even ‘‘for their own sakes’’? Has any philosopher ever suspected that enjoying the games and skills of reason—quite apart from the putative subject of discussion—might be similarly ‘‘self-indulgent’’? Again, I suspect a deep distrust of and disdain for the sweet emotions as such, and the ethical innocence of kitsch and its enjoyment thus becomes a suspected vice. More recently, Kundera has written, ‘‘Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.’’19 Notice that here the charge is not self-indulgence at all, but rather our banal and unoriginal ideas. Of course, Kundera’s concern is political propaganda and the use of kitsch as a cover for totalitarianism; but then it seems that what is so wrong with kitsch is that here it is used to evoke sentimentality on the basis of manufactured objects with the purpose of distracting us from the hideousness of totalitarian rule. But, then, it is not kitsch that is at fault, and there is nothing necessarily kitschlike about either our being moved by children in the grass or by our further being moved by our being moved. ‘‘Self-indulgence,’’ of course, is already permeated with moral disapproval; it means not only ‘‘allowing oneself to yield to temptation’’ but also wallowing in it. But what is the ‘‘temptation’’ here? A warm, satisfying feeling? The enjoyment of some item or event that can best be described in the prohibited language of ‘‘cute’’ and ‘‘nice’’? In art, at any rate, it is not at all clear that ‘‘self-indulgence’’ is any more a mark of kitsch than it is of great art. (Is Degas less self-indulgent than Bouguereau?) But note that the selfindulgence argument shifts the indictment away from the object of sentimentality and back to the subject, to the viewer and not the art or artist. This would seem implausible to begin with, whatever one is to make of the difficult distinction at stake here; the banality is ‘‘in’’ the Bouguereau whether or not it is also a characteristic of the viewer. But, once again, is it at all clear that the museumgoer rhapsodically studying the Degas is any less selfindulgent (which is not the same as being more knowledgeable, more sophisticated, and having more taste) than the ‘‘novice’’ who is enraptured [ 248] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

by the Bouguereau? Is ‘‘self-indulgence’’ here becoming a code word for unearned or untutored enjoyment? Indeed, one might well argue that the sophisticated connoisseur is considerably more self-conscious and selfcongratulatory than the ‘‘novice,’’ who is genuinely caught up in the painting ( by way of his or her feelings) rather than caught up in his or her feelings. As for the charge of banality and lack of originality, this may be a legitimate accusation against an artist (in our culture), but it is hardly fair as a charge against the viewer, much less as a more general charge against sentimentality in general. Kundera rightly points out that our being moved by children running on the grass (or Bouguereau’s depiction of their sitting on it) is perfectly acceptable (though his descriptions elsewhere throw some doubt on this). It is our feeling good about our feeling good that is so obnoxious and constitutes kitsch. But would the same argument hold against the sophisticated viewer of Degas, who quite self-consciously enjoyed his enjoyment of the painting? Does the Degas dancer suddenly become kitsch? Or is Kundera, whose real concern is political propaganda, not sentimental French paintings of little girls, and so many other critics of kitsch giving way here to a confusion between aesthetic bad taste and sentimentality, and a condemnation of sentimentality as a kind of immorality? Those folks who find the Bouguereau ‘‘beautiful’’ will find that it is not only their artistic taste which is being attacked but also their sentimentality, and ultimately their character as such, their indulging themselves in false or phony emotions. It is not the kitsch that is blameworthy; it is them (for indulging themselves with kitsch as the object of their emotions). This is the place to take up again Harries’s charge that kitsch deals with inappropriate objects, objects that ‘‘do not warrant’’ the emotion in question. But what a genuine emotion is ‘‘about’’ need not be the object that stimulates it, and this argument confuses the cause of an emotion with its object. It is the critic of kitsch, not the kitsch lover, who assumes that the saccharine velvet painting of Jesus is the object of devotion or the Bouguereau children are themselves the object of tender affection. Quite the contrary: the objects of such emotions—what they are really ‘‘about’’—are God and children ( perhaps one’s own children), respectively, and the artistic quality of the cause has little to do with the appropriateness of the actual object or the genuineness of the emotion. Again, the matter of aesthetic bad taste is being wrongly used to condemn or belittle genuine feeling. Michael Tanner’s more serious objection against sentimentality can be directly applied to kitsch. Tanner’s objection to sentimentality is that it ‘‘doesn’t lead anywhere.’’20 For example, ‘‘anger about a political extradition in a distant land.’’21 It is this gap between sentimentality and action that Tanner rejects. We have all seen the phenomenon that Tanner finds repulsive, On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 249]

folks who are deeply ‘‘moved’’ even to tears and cries of horror when they hear of or witness some profound injustice or tragedy but do not seem in any way motivated to do anything about it (write a letter, send a check, act on the victim’s behalf ). There seems to be a serious break between the sentimental ‘‘moving’’ and the motivation to action. But it seems to me that the manipulative sentimentality of Jacques-Louis David’s paintings The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Socrates, for example, shows quite conclusively that sentimentality is not nearly so ill-directed nor so ineffective as Tanner suggests. To the contrary, being deeply moved by some specific (even if fictional) circumstance (e.g., David’s Napoleon on horseback, crossing the Alps) would seem to be a much more reliable prod or at least conduit to action (e.g., provoking possibly violent sentiments on the behalf of the revolution or the empire) than a well-rationalized set of categorical imperatives. Popular emotional support is not the least effective ingredient in the success of powerful political movements. But, of course, the action or enthusiasm inspired may well be directed at dubious objects, Napoleon, for instance, or worse, but this is not an objection to the art or to the provocation but rather to the nature of the object. Do fictitious objects make ‘‘appropriate’’ action impossible? There are people, of course, who become so caught up in their own emotional reactions that the emotions block their access or attention to action, and there are people who are sentimental all of the time, inappropriately responding to situations as ‘‘moving’’ or ‘‘sweet’’ when they would be better viewed as disgusting or dangerous. But such pathological sentimentalists are hardly fair examples of sentimentality as such. The gap between emotion and action is not itself the objection against sentimentality. (And does the self-scratching Degas dancer move us to appropriate action?) Indeed, part of the supposed problem of kitsch and sentimentality with reference to action lies precisely in the fact that, by the nature of the case, they are simply viewed, and those who enjoy them are observers or spectators but not participants as such. ( Thus the charge of ‘‘self-indulgence’’ as well, which might mean nothing other than the fact that one is enjoying one’s status as a viewer.) One of the great debates in and about eighteenth-century moral sentiment theory also had to do with the prominence of the spectator and that spectator emotion of sympathy. Robert Montgomery, reviewing this literature in the Times Literary Supplement (May–June 1989), asks, ‘‘Where is genuine emotion?’’ But if ‘‘genuine emotion’’ means ‘‘not the emotions of a mere spectator,’’ then many of the moral sentiments, and sympathy (and compassion) in particular, are simply ruled out of court. Thus James Beattie wrote, in defense of such emotions, that ‘‘their obvious effect is to bind men more closely together in society and prompt them to promote the good and relieve the distresses of one another.’’22 But action is not always the test of true emotion, and our [ 250] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

‘‘best’’ emotions may sometimes be those upon which any ‘‘direct action’’ is simply impossible but which bind us together and ferment ‘‘fellow feeling.’’ Sixth, the most common charge against emotions in general, and against kitsch and sentimentality in particular, is that they distort our perceptions and interfere with rational thought and understanding. I want to argue, again, that this epistemological critique of emotions in general as ‘‘distorting’’ or ‘‘irrational’’—a standard bit in the rationalist’s repertoire—seriously confuses the nature of emotion and the nature of perception. The argument is that sentimentality is objectionable because it is distorting. Mary Midgley argues that ‘‘the central offence lies in self-deception, in distorting reality to get a pretext for indulging in any feeling.’’23 So, too, Mark Jefferson argues that ‘‘sentimentality involves attachment to a distorted series of beliefs,’’ in particular ‘‘the fiction of innocence.’’24 But my reply to this is that all emotions are ‘‘distorting’’ in this sense, and such ‘‘distortion’’ isn’t really distorting at all. In love one celebrates the charms, and not the flaws of the one beloved. In kitsch one celebrates the goodness or even the cuteness of the subject. Why should we always be made aware of flaws and dangers. It is the very nature of an emotion to be engaged, even if only vicariously; to ‘‘take sides,’’ sometimes judiciously and sometimes not. Through our emotions we edit a scene or a situation in such a way that it matters to us, and in sentimentality we focus on the sweet and innocent aspects of a scene such that we are moved. Kitsch is art (whether or not it is good art) that is deliberately designed so to move us, by presenting a well-selected and perhaps much-edited version of some particularly and predictably moving aspect of our shared experience—including, plausibly enough, innocent scenes of small children and our favorite pets playing, and religious and other sacred icons. But what must a critic be thinking of the world when he condemns these representations as ‘‘the fiction of innocence,’’ or worse (according to Broch), as ‘‘universal hypocrisy’’? All emotions have an inevitable bias (not by any means always selfcentered). But why call this ‘‘distortion’’ rather than ‘‘focus’’ or ‘‘concern’’? And why in particular condemn the focus on innocence and cuteness as a ‘‘fiction’’ when every form of enthusiasm or emotion betrays some particular focus and concern? What is the alternative—omniscience? always attending to everything that one knows or remembers about a subject? Must one review the entire subject of child psychology before one allows oneself to be moved by Bouguereau? Should we insist that all paintings of young, adorable children be triptychs—an adorable centerpiece, perhaps, but two obligatory side panels displaying the child destroying a piece of furniture in one and throwing a temper tantrum in the other? Should we make it a point never to have a nice thought without a nasty one as well? That would seem to be the advice implicit in a great many attacks on kitsch and sentimentality: that for On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 251]

the sake of objectivity we should eschew any emotion that does not display the world, at least in part, for the ugly being that it is. In an article titled ‘‘Is Disney Guilty of Innocence?’’ Ron Powers writes: I keep a weather eye peeled for an opposite excess: false innocence. There are pietistic passages in Lady and the Tramp of such over-arching kitsch, such convenient benevolence and good-burgher (or good-mutt) morality that I fear my kid may be psychically over-softened for his next ride on the school bus. There may be such a thing as too little sex and violence on TV.

How much macho paranoia, under the guise of sophistication and moral superiority, underlies the attack on kitsch and sentimentality?

‘‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’’; or, In Defense of Kitsch What is wrong with being moved by a ‘‘too perfect’’ painting of two too perfect little girls, or a ceramic depiction of a wide-eyed puppy, or an idyllic painting of mother and infant, perhaps a particularly maudlin Madonna and Christ Child? It seems to me that there are at least two questions here, which discussions of kitsch and sentimentality typically throw together; one is what is wrong with the so-called work of art as art, while the other has to do with the quality of the emotion that is provoked by it and the character of the person who has that emotion. (Maureen Mullarkey writes in The Nation: ‘‘This should signal art’s irrelevance as a political act. An artistic conscience and a social conscience are not the same, and there’s too much at stake to confuse them’’).25 Little girls are particularly popular kitsch characters, not just by virtue of the fantasies of dirty old male writers and motherly nostalgia but also because of the very real respect that almost all of us have for the innocent happiness of childhood, no matter how often both innocence and happiness have been compromised in our own experience. The art may be terrible, and we may indeed object to the obviousness with which such emotions are evoked in us, but Mark Jefferson objects, rather, to the ‘‘emphasis upon such things as the sweetness, dearness, littleness, blamelessness and vulnerability’’ as such, and the fact that such ‘‘simplistic appraisal[s]’’ are a ‘‘direct impairment to the moral vision of its objects.’’26 But need it be said, or are we too cynical to say, that some things in life are indeed sweet, some things are dear to us, some things are little and blameless and vulnerable, even if such virtues rarely if ever come unalloyed? And if these qualities provide us with an easy sigh or tear, that only shows how central they are to the very foundations of ethics and character. The work that evokes these emotions may not be great or even good art, but the emotions seem to me to be perfectly sound, and feeling them is a virtue and not a vice. [ 252] i n d e f e n s e o f s e n t i m e n t a l i t y

Mary Midgely objects to such use of fictional young female characters who ‘‘could not exist and [are] the product of wish-fulfillment—a subservient, devoted, totally understanding mixture of child and lover, with no wishes of her own.’’ She suggests that ‘‘this figure was well-designed to provoke a delicious sense of pity and mastery, and to set up further fantasies where this feeling could continue.’’ Then she warns, ‘‘one trouble about this apparently harmless pursuit is that it distorts various expectations; it can make people unable to deal with the real world, and particularly with real girls.’’27 But the dubious idea that sentimentality makes it impossible ‘‘to deal with the real world’’ should be juxtaposed against the charge that people who are incapable of tender sentiments deal with the world in notoriously awful ways. If someone responds tenderly to a little girl in a painting, is that not a good (though not conclusive) indication that he or she will tend to do so in the case of a real little girl? And if one responds with cold contempt to the painting, isn’t that a warning that this is a person deficient in essential human feelings? However sophisticated we may be, we respond to representational art as if the subject in question were real and actual, and the way we respond to art says a great deal about how we respond to life. It is not selfindulgence that motivates us to absorb ourselves in a painting and welcome the emotions it evokes. It is part of our emotional engagement in the human drama. Once we remove from consideration those concerns which are appropriate to art and aesthetics rather than ethics, it seems to me that the real objection to kitsch and sentimentality is the rejection (or fear) of emotions and, especially, certain kind of sentiments, variously designated as ‘‘tender’’ or ‘‘sweet’’ or ‘‘nostalgic.’’ (Harries: ‘‘cloying sweetness,’’ ‘‘sugary stickiness’’). But the rejection extends as well to the gloomier emotions, and Karsten Harries warns us: ‘‘How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch, sour kitsch.’’28 Mary Midgley points out that ‘‘thrillers’’ have much in common with kitsch and sentimentality, for they, too, distort reality and manipulate emotion (though different emotions and to a very different end).29 So what emotions are legitimate, ‘‘true,’’ and undistorted? Can art evoke any ordinary human emotions without being condemned as kitsch? Is there any room left in our jaded and sophisticated lives for the enjoyment of simple innocence and ‘‘sweet’’ affection? The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious. These attacks on the most common human sentiments—our reactions to the laughter of a child or to the death of an infant—go far beyond the rejection of the bad art that evokes them. It is true that such matters provide a facile vehicle for second- or third-rate painters, but if such incidents are guaranteed to evoke emotion, it is because they are indeed virtually universal concerns. The On Kitsch and Sentimentality [ 253]

fact that we are thus ‘‘vulnerable’’ may make for some very bad art, but this should not provoke our embarrassment at experiencing these quite ‘‘natural’’ sentiments in ourselves. Nor should it excuse the enormous amount of sophistry that is devoted to making fun of and undermining the legitimacy of such emotions.

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Notes

Chapter 1 I have benefitted from discussions of this topic at the University of Auckland and the American Society for Aesthetics. I would also like to thank Rick Anthony Furtak for some valuable comments. 1. Mark Jefferson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?,’’ Mind 92 (1983): 519, 527. 2. Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 501. 3. Michael Tanner, ‘‘Sentimentality,’’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1976– 77): 128. 4. Mary Midgley, ‘‘Brutality and Sentimentality,’’ Philosophy 54 ( July 1979). 5. The moral sentiment tradition does show signs of revival, for example, in the work of Allan Gibbard at the University of Michigan—Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)—and (with qualifications) of Simon Blackburn at Cambridge—Ruling Passions ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6. Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law : Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, H. J. Paton, trans. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 67. 7. Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, Julius A. Elias, trans. ( New York: Ungar, 1967). 8. Quoted in Jefferson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?,’’ 519. 9. Of course, the sexist division between men and women was not drawn according to this emotional/nonemotional (reasonable) dichotomy, but according to the kinds of emotion ‘‘appropriate’’ for men versus women. Thus men considered it perfectly manly to get angry, even irrationally and self-destructively so. What was inappropriate was for them to express fear or sadness, especially vicariously or at someone else’s loss. (Avenging the other’s loss was perfectly okay, of course, even chivalric.) Women, on the other hand, were expected to express such ‘‘tender’’ emotions easily and frequently. Anger in women, by contrast was inappropriate and ‘‘unfeminine.’’ See Elizabeth Spelman’s classic article ‘‘Anger and Insubordination,’’ Ann Garry and Marilyn M. Pearsall, eds., in Women, Knowledge, and Reality, ( Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 263–273. 10. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 11. Ibid., 123, though for the most part the critics consist of ‘‘giant [male] intellects struggling manfully against a flood of sentimental rubbish’’ (125).

12. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Michael Henry Heim, ed. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 251. 13. Milan Kundera, lecture in Jerusalem, reprinted in Mishkenot Sha’ananim Newsletter no.3 ( July 1985): 5. 14. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art ( Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 77. 15. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976). 16. Midgley, ‘‘Brutality and Sentimentality,’’ 128 17. Jefferson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?,’’ 526. 18. Gwynne Dyer, War ( New York: Time-Life Books, 1987). 19. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India ( London: E. Arnold, 1947). 20. Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 82. 21. Jefferson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?,’’ 523. 22. Jerome Neu, ‘‘Jealous Thoughts,’’ in Ame´lie Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

Chapter 2 This chapter is based on several lectures and papers, the most important being a Memorial Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for I.S.R.E. member Shula Sommers in April 1989; an informal presentation at the I.S.R.E. meeting in Paris, March 1988; a presentation at the conference of N.A.S.S.P. at Oxford University in 1988; and an essay for Melvin Lerner in Justice Research in 1991. Parts of this chapter are adapted from portions of my book A Passion for Justice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990). An earlier version appeared as chapter 4 of my Joy of Philosophy ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). My special thanks to Nico Frijda for his encouragement and support as well as his vigorous criticism of many of the ideas expressed herein. 1. Plato, The Republic, G.M.A. Grube, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985). 2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). 3. Robert C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice ( Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995). 4. Robert Nozick, preface to his Anarchy, State and Utopia ( New York: Basic Books, 1974). 5. William James, ‘‘What Is an Emotion?,’’ Mind vol. 9, no. 34 (1884). 6. Plato, Crito. in The Trial and Death of Socrates, G.M.A. Grube, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1984). 7. James, ‘‘What Is an Emotion?’’ and The Emotions. 8. Nico Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 9. N. H. Frijda, B. Mesquita, J. Sonnemans, and S. van Goozen, ‘‘The Duration of Affective Phenomena or Emotions, Sentiments and Passions,’’ in K. Strongman, ed., International Review of Studies on Emotion, vol. 1 ( New York: Wiley, 1991). [ 256] Notes to Pages 12–24

10. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976; rev. ed., Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1993); Not Passion’s Slave ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11. See L. E. Goodman, ‘‘Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophers,’’ in Shlomo Biderman and Ben-Ami Scharfstein, eds., Rationality in Question: On Eastern and Western Views of Rationality ( Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 95–99. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans. ( New York: Random House, 1967). 13. Frijda, The Emotions. 14. Rene´ Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Stephen H. Voss, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 14. 15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, A. L. Selby-Bigge, ed. ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments ( London: George Bell and Sons, 1880) and The Wealth of Nations ( New York: Hafner, 1948). 16. E.g., Bernard Gert, The Moral Rules, 2nd ed. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 17. Dissertation of 1770, and Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, John Goldthwait, trans. ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 18. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). 19. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. L. W. Beck, trans., ( New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 8. 20. Schopenhauer, Basis of Mortality. 21. Aristotle, De Anima trans. J. A. Smith in R. McKeon ( New York: Modern Library, 1947), p: 147–149. 22. Augustine, The City of God, Philip Levine, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). 23. C. H. Calhoun, ‘‘Feeling and Value,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1981. 24. Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, III.2.6. 25. Ibid., III.2.7. 26. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 214–215. Milton Friedman (characteristically): ‘‘Smith regarded sympathy as a human characteristic, but one that was itself rare and required to be economised.’’ ‘‘Adam Smith’s Relevance for 1976,’’ in Selected Papers of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business no. 50 (Chicago: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, 1977), 16. 27. The term ‘‘negative emotions’’ has been effectively employed by Laurence Thomas in ‘‘Grief and Guilt,’’ in G. Myers and K. D. Irani, eds., Emotion ( New York: Haven Press, 1984). He lists as his basic ‘‘negative’’ emotions not only grief and guilt (which I do not discuss here) but also envy, hatred, etc. The idea is that these are distinctively unpleasant and undesirable in themselves (unlike joy and love, for instance), but are to be valued for the ‘‘support’’ they give to such ‘‘positive’’ emotions. My argument here is somewhat different, but the overall point is much the same. 28. Laurence Thomas, ‘‘Morals, the Self and Our Natural Sentiments,’’ in G. Myers and K. D. Irani, eds., Emotion ( New York: Haven Press, 1984), 144–163. Notes to Pages 24–35 [ 257]

29. Martha Nussbaum has argued similarly with regard to ‘‘love and the moral point of view.’’ She notes that Adam Smith, who defended the importance of all sorts of emotions, nevertheless denied love the status of a moral sentiment on the grounds that it was too exclusive and particular. See her Love’s Knowledge ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. 338–339. 30. Nicholas Rescher, Unselfishness ( Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). 31. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, Michael Glenny and Betty Ross, trans. ( New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969). 32. Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, III.4.9. 33. R. S. Gerstein, ‘‘Capital Punishment: A Retributivist Response,’’ Ethics 85 (1985). 34. Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice ( New York: Harper & Row, 1983). 35. Melvin J. Lerner, Belief in a Just World ( New York: Plenum Press, 1980).

Chapter 3 I am thankful for the inspiration of this chapter to several people, foremost among them Cheshire Calhoun. Earlier versions of parts of the chapter appeared in my book A Passion for Justice (Reading, Mass.; Addison-Wesley, 1990). 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); Lawrence A. Blum, ‘‘Compassion,’’ in Ame´lie Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Annette Baier, ‘‘Trust and Distrust of Moral Theorists’’ in E. Winkler and J. Coombs, eds. Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 131–142. Cheshire Calhoun, ‘‘Justice, Care, and Gender Bias,’’ Journal of Philosophy 85 (September 1988): 451–463; Nel Noddings, Caring ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 2. Kurt Baier, ‘‘Radical Virtue Ethics’’ in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XIII, Ethical Theory P. French, T. Uehling, H. Wettstein, eds. ( Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), pp. 126–135. Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 3. Edmund Pincoffs, Quandaries and Virtues ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 76–77. 4. Ibid., 85. 5. This literature is defended and summarized well in John M. Doris, Lack of Character ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans. ( New York: Random House, 1967). The ‘‘English moralist’’ who is most likely the target is Nietzsche’s good (German) friend Paul Re´e, but Maudemarie Clark argues, plausibly, that the real target is Nietzsche’s own earlier book Human, All Too Human. 7. Bernard Williams, ‘‘Aristotle on the Virtue of Justice,’’ in Ame´lie Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and in Moral Luck ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). [ 258] Notes to Pages 36–47

8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 3. 9. For example, Peter Singer, who ignores compassion as passionately as does any philosopher. But see Robert C. Solomon, ‘‘Singer’s Expanding Circle,’’ in Dale Jameson, ed., Singer and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 10. Noddings, Caring, 1–2, 5. 11. E.g., Milton Mayeroff, On Caring ( New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 12. Susan Griffin, Women and Nature ( New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature ( New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 13. Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments ( London: George Bell and Sons, 1880), I.i.5. 14. Ibid., I.i.1. 15. Ibid., I.i.3. 16. Patricia H. Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 17. Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I.i.1. 18. Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy ( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 12. 19. Ibid. 20. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216. 21. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Adam Smith refuses to recognize love as a virtue for precisely the opposite reason: because it is irretrievably particular and incapable of generalization. 22. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 47, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 23. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 47. 24. Ibid. 25. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 268. 26. Noddings, Caring, 3. 27. Ibid., 2. There has been considerable controversy over Noddings’s attempt to defend caring (as opposed to the ‘‘masculine’’ sense of principled justice) as the sole foundation of ethics within the feminist community. See, e.g., Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Barbara Houston, and Claudia Card in a review symposium in Hypatia 5, no. 1 (Spring 1990). The source of this dispute is in the once groundbreaking research by the social scientist Carol Gilligan, published for a popular audience in In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). But Gilligan, though she draws a significant distinction between male ( Kohlbergian) and female thinking about ethics, does not go so far as to insist that caring should replace justice as the sole framework for ethics, much less that these ‘‘essentialist’’ views characterize male and female thinking about ethics as such. Nevertheless, an extremely important point emerges, not about men versus women but about an overly restricted and inhuman conception of ethics that seriously neglects or demeans personal feelings in favor of abstract principles. It is hardly indicative of deep gender differences in ethics that Notes to Pages 47–56 [ 259]

women tend to be more personal and men tend to have a more abstract and less personal view of abortion (the primary ethical dilemma in Gilligan’s research). If she had used the question of care for elderly, ailing parents as an example, there would be less of an obvious difference in circumstances, but it is not at all evident that one would not obtain anything like the gender-specific results of the abortion survey. (My guess is that the interesting variations would correlate with cultural differences, not gender differences alone.) See, especially, Cheshire Calhoun, ‘‘Justice, Care, and Gender Bias.’’ 28. Blum, ‘‘Compassion.’’ An added benefit: Norma Feshbach, a child psychologist, claims to have shown that sympathy assures success; that fourth and fifth grade students who have been brought up to be compassionate and understanding tend to do better in school and in their relationships. 29. Blum, ‘‘Compassion.’’ 30. Ibid. 31. Marian Dawkins, Animal Suffering ( London: Chapman and Hall, 1981). 32. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), x138. 34. Ibid., x134. 35. The phrase ‘‘upward contempt’’ comes from William I. Miller, Humiliation ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 36. Martha Nussbaum, ‘‘Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,’’ in Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 139–167. 37. Peter Goldie employs the innovative concept of ‘‘borrowed intentionality’’ to describe the sense in which sensation, when part of an emotion, involves ‘‘feelings for’’ or ‘‘feelings about.’’ The Emotions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 38. Nancy Eisenberg, ‘‘Empathy and Sympathy,’’ in Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed. ( New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 677–691. 39. Ibid., 677. 40. Martha Nussbaum offers an extensive defense of compassion as a purely cognitive emotion (an evaluative judgment) in part II of her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). She claims that compassion (and other emotions) need not involve any distinct feelings or ‘‘affect.’’ 41. Noddings, Caring. 42. At the same time, I should protest that this notion of ‘‘identification’’ is probably the most overused and underexplained concept in film criticism. I will try not to pursue this here. 43. Eisenberg, ‘‘Empathy and Sympathy,’’ 678. 44. Goldie, Emotions and ‘‘Compassion: A Natural Moral Emotion,’’ in S. A. Doering and V. Mayer, eds., Die Moralita¨t der Gefu¨hle, spec. iss. of Deutsche Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie ( Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 169–211. 45. Paul Ekman, ‘‘An Argument for Basis Emotions,’’ Cognition and Emotion 6 (1992): 169–200. [ 260] Notes to Pages 60–73

46. Ekman’s research consists largely of showing photographs of facial expressions, devoid of context or narrative. 47. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 45, 181ff.

Chapter 4 1. Paul Ekman, Darwin and Facial Expression ( New York: Academic Press, 1973) and ‘‘An Argument for Basic Emotions,’’ Cognition and Emotion 6 (1992): 169–200. 2. Donald Gustafson, ‘‘Grief,’’ Nous 23 (1989): 457–479; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh, trans. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes, trans. ( New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 4. Steven Wilkinson, ‘‘Is ‘Normal Grief’ a Mental Disorder’’? Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2000): 289–300. 5. Gustafson, ‘‘Grief,’’ 458. 6. Janet McCracken, ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly: Reflections on the Special Character of Grief ’’ (2001), unpublished paper. 7. Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement, 3rd ed. (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1998). 8. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976). 9. Gustafson, ‘‘Grief,’’ 463: ‘‘I propose that we analyze grief as a belief (of the form ‘that P’) and attendant feelings, such as feelings of loss, pain, anger, fear, distress, and unhappiness, and a desire (in the form ‘that not-P’) while in a psychological context.’’ 10. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, chap. 1, following Heidegger. Sartre argues that consciousness by its very nature always goes beyond the facts (‘‘facticity’’) to the many possibilities evident in every perception: alternative perspectives, other sensory possibilities (tasting or touching what one sees, for instance), and the possibility of something’s not being there or not being as it is. Thus the perception of an absence or a ‘‘lack’’ may be as striking as the perception of a presence, and grief would seem to be the most dramatic example (though Sartre does not pick this up). 11. Nico Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12. I owe this insight to Beth Snyder’s excellent paper on grief that she wrote for me. 13. E.g., Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); Stephen Davies, ‘‘The Expression of Emotion in Music’’ in Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 228–277; Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 14. Kivy, The Corded Shell. 15. E.g., Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Notes to Pages 73–84 [ 261]

16. Gustafson, ‘‘Grief,’’ 467–468. 17. Consider Robert Jay Lifton’s conception of the ‘‘second death’’ experienced by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who lived through not only the fear of their own imminent death and the deaths of their families and neighbors, but also the incineration of their entire culture. 18. Nietzsche, of course, made this damning criticism of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in his Birth of Tragedy. But see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), for a nice contemporary analysis of this tendency in Aristotle. 19. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. J. Riviere, in Freud: General Psychological Theory ( New York: Macmillan, 1963) pp. 167 and 165, quoted in McCracken, ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly.’’ 20. I am talking about so-called clinical depression, not the modest moods and ‘‘downs’’ of everyday life. The American Psychiatric Institute quite rightly classifies the former as a serious mental disorder. The latter is better understood as a pervasive but transient form of sadness. 21. McCracken, ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly,’’ 2. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. McCracken refers to the example (parodied in her title) of Anthony Minghella’s film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which a young woman is obsessed and then haunted by the ghost of her lost lover. 24. What Franz Brentano, following the scholastics, called ‘‘intentional inexistence,’’ which initiated almost a century of very strange metaphysics and ontology. How could something that did not exist (or no longer existed) be the ‘‘object’’ of any mental state? (For that matter, how could the denial of the existence of something be about anything?) We have noted, and shall see this problem of ‘‘intentional inexistence’’ again, but it is not my intention to try to sort it out here. See, for example, Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, and Jerrold Levinson, ‘‘Making Believe,’’ in his The Pleasures of Aesthetics ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 287–305. 25. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 82. 26. Albert Camus, The Stranger trans. S. Gilbert ( New York: Vintage, 1946; Paris: Gallimard, 1942). 27. Snyder, ‘‘Grief,’’ 10. 28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics trans, W. O. Ross ( London: Oxford University Press, 1954) Book I, sect 10., p. 19. 29. McCracken, ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly,’’ 8–9. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller, trans. ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 277. 33. Conversation with Paul Ekman, March 26, 2003. 34. Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, On Death and Dying ( New York: Scribner, 1997). 35. Jodi Halpern, author of From Detached Concern to Empathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). [ 262] Notes to Pages 85–94

36. For example, Paul Redding, The Logic of Affect ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Robert C. Solomon, ‘‘The Logic of Emotion,’’ Nous 2 (March 1977). 37. Robert Romanyshyn, The Soul in Grief ( Berkeley, Calif.: Frog Publishers, 1999), 17. 38. Gerrod Parrott, ‘‘Implications of Dysfunctional Emotion for Understanding How Emotions Function’’ Review of General Psychology 5, no. 3 (2001); Nico Frijda, ‘‘Emotions Are Functional (at Least Most of the Time),’’ in Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson, eds. The Nature of Emotions ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 39. James R. Averill, ‘‘Grief: Its Nature and Significance,’’ Psychological Bulletin 70 (1968): 721–748. 40. See Ovid, The Art of Love, for instance, on the use of excitement at the gladiatorial ring to include sexual excitement during a seduction. For a more up-todate experimental version of the same observation, see S. Schachter and J. E. Singer ‘‘Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State’’ Psychological Review 69, pp. 379–399. (1962). 41. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 2nd ed. ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 42. Feld’s Sound and Sentiment, a protracted and sensitive study of the use of communal grief in the making of music among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. 43. Peter Goldie, The Emotions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 44. Robert C. Solomon, Not Passion’s Slave ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 12: ‘‘I say ‘I love You.’ I blurt it out in the midst of a passion. And then I say it again the next morning in calm repose because I want to be sure that you know that I love you. Does it make sense to say that the first is an expression of love but the second is not? Need we say that the latter is an ‘act of love’ as opposed to an expression of love? Doesn’t it make more sense to understand the whole history of my loving behavior as an ongoing expression of my love, and, if you like, focus on some acts that are more direct expressions of my emotion, others that are motivated in part by more divers concerns?’’ 45. Compare this with the customs of many Mediterranean countries, where the wearing of mourning garments and the practice of mourning restraints and rituals often continue for a lifetime. In the American movie The Big Chill, by way of contrast, the friends from the funeral are already initiating new (or consummating old) affairs by the end of the weekend. The one instance of recognizable mourning behavior, an outburst of tears, is consigned to the privacy of a shower stall, out of view of the others. 46. Shula Sommers, ‘‘Adults Evaluating Their Emotions,’’ in Carel Z. Malatesta and Carroll E. Izard, eds., Emotions in Adult Development ( Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984). 47. The question of appropriateness is discussed at length by both Seneca and Adam Smith. 48. Barbara Fredericks, ‘‘Gratitude. . .’’ in Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Notes to Pages 94–104 [ 263]

Chapter 5 1. Noe¨l Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror ( New York: Routledge, 1990). 2. Whether horror is an emotion rather than an emotional experience is not a question I want to take very seriously. The category of emotion is sufficiently indistinct, part from a small set of ‘‘basic’’ emotions (including fear), that I do not think such a question is either interesting or decisively answerable. To muddy such worries even further, ‘‘horror’’ refers to the object of horror as well as to the emotional experience. Thus ‘‘horror movie’’ may refer both to the content of the movie and to the intended reaction of the audience (which Carroll conflates into a single definition of horror as that which provokes those intended effects). But it is the nature of that emotion—and not the content of such movies—which interests me here, insofar as those two questions can be treated separately. 3. Cynthia A. Freeland, ‘‘Realist Horror,’’ in Cynthia A. Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg, eds., Philosophy and Film ( New York: Routledge, 1995), 126–142, and The Naked and the Undead ( Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 3. 4. Dan Shaw, ‘‘Dead Ringers,’’ Film and Philosophy 3 (1996). 5. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, Sara Waller and Chris Meyers, ‘‘Disenstoried Horror,’’ Film and Philosophy, horror issue (2001): 117–126. 6. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror. 7. Waller and Meyers, ‘‘Disenstoried Horror.’’ 8. Senses of Cinema. Thanks to Steven Schneider for referring me to this atrocity. 9. Cynthia Freeland has done a fine job of bringing out the gender issues in a good many classic horror films, but I think it is okay to insist that men and women were indiscriminately victims in the World Trade Center attack, and that was an aspect of the horror. See also James Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), which traces art horror back to the supposedly universal horror of incest. 10. Noe¨l Carroll, ‘‘Horror, Helplessness, and Vulnerability: A Reply to Robert Solomon,’’ Philosophy and Literature 17 (1993): 110–118. But see also Daniel Shaw, ‘‘Power, Horror, and Ambivalence,’’ Film and Philosophy, horror issue (2001): 1–12. 11. Jerrold Levinson, ‘‘Review of Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 253–258. 12. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror. 13. David Hume, ‘‘Of Tragedy,’’ in his Essays, Literary, Moral and Political ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1987). 14. Notably, Kendall Walton in his Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 15. See Susan Feagin, ‘‘Monsters, Disgust and Fascination,’’ Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 75–84; Alex Neill, ‘‘On a Paradox of the Heart,’’ Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 53–65; Noe¨l Carroll, ‘‘Disgust or Fascination: A Response to Susan Feagin,’’ Philosophical Studies 65 (1992); and ‘‘A Paradox of the Heart: A Response to Alex Neill,’’ Philosophical Studies 65 (1992). 16. I am aware that I am taking on some giants in aesthetic theory with this hypothesis, notably Kant, who thought that the sublime (in nature) provides us with a realistic combination of delight and horror. My simple argument would be that it is [ 264] Notes to Pages 108–112

not horror which he is actually discussing but simply the ‘‘awesome’’ (‘‘the dynamically sublime’’). The lost dog on the fresh sidewalk example is from Johnny Hart (‘‘B.C.’’) in Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 17. I am not alone in this, needless to say. Carroll, Walton, and Freeland, to name just three, also defend a largely cognitivist account of horror. Carroll seems particularly attracted and attached to William Lyons’s theory of emotion as a physiological disturbance caused by cognition. See Lyons’s Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). This theory has both advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious advantage (in my not unbiased opinion) is that it places proper attention on the role of ‘‘beliefs’’ (or some sort of ‘‘cognition’’) in the constitution of emotion in general and horror in particular. The main disadvantage is that it puts too much attention on the sheer physiology of the experience and in particular on the shivers and shudders that are typically provided (even promised) as part of the horror movie experience. Carroll defines the horror experience, in part, as disgust, an exceedingly visceral sensation (though arguably not an emotion at all), and it is all too tempting to suggest that horror is just this set of sensations. 18. See, e.g., Paul Rozin, J. Haidt, and C. McCauley, ‘‘Disgust,’’ in Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, eds., The Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed. ( New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 637–653. On disgust as a ‘‘basic emotion,’’ see Paul Ekman, ‘‘An Argument for Basic Emotions,’’ Cognition and Emotion 6 (1992): 169–200. 19. Edward R. Royzman and John Sabini, ‘‘Something It Takes to Be an Emotion: The Interesting Case of Disgust,’’ Journal for the Study of Social Behavior 31, no. 1 (March 2001): 29–60. 20. Ibid. 21. Notably in Levinson, ‘‘Review of Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror,’’ and ‘‘The Place of Real Emotion in Response to Fictions,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 79–80. 22. Paul Ekman, ‘‘All Emotions Are Basic,’’ in Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson, eds., The Nature of Emotion ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 23. Notably, Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness ( New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). 24. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel, dir. (1956). 25. The definitive book on disgust is William I. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 26. Waller and Meyers, ‘‘Disenstoried Horror.’’ Steven Schneider argues that ‘‘Horror film monsters are best understood as metaphorical embodiments of paradigmatic horror narratives’’ in ‘‘Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror,’’ in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Horror Film Reader ( New York: Limelight Editions, 2000), 167–191, see 173. 27. Marc Bekoff and Dale Jameson, eds., Readings in Animal Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep ( New York: Delacorte Press, 1995). Notes to Pages 113–115 [ 265]

28. Jenefer Robinson, ‘‘Startle,’’ Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 2 (February 1995). See also Robert Baird, ‘‘The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory.’’ Film Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 12–24. 29. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 36. Recent work in philosophy on the ‘‘startle response’’ has tended to the same conclusion. Paul Ekman, for example, took shock and surprise as an emotional paradigm in much of his early work on the facial expression of emotion. He now rejects surprise as an emotion proper and classes it, rather, as a straightforward reflex. 30. Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 31. Rene´ Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Stephen H. Voss, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), art. LXX. 32. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 418. 33. Daniel Shaw, ‘‘Power, Horror, and Ambivalence,’’ Film and Philosophy, horror issue (2001) pp. 1–12. 34. Ibid. 35. By ‘‘evaluative judgment’’ and ‘‘appraisal’’ I do not mean the reflective varieties in which deliberation and articulation are predominant, but the ‘‘pre-reflective’’ versions that are essential to even the most primitive emotion and perception. See, e.g., Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error ( New York: Putnam, 1994). 36. The Catholic Church, for example, made a specialty of horror. In the name of ‘‘sexual renunciation,’’ sexual organs were self-removed. A wide variety of medieval self-castrations, one with a sickle, are described in Peter Brown, The Body and Society ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Today, we have movies like Jaws and a hundred lesser Saturday night specials, in which girls who ‘‘do it’’ are the first ones to go. 37. See Harvey Roy Greenberg, ‘‘Heimlich Maneuvers: On a Certain Tendency of Horror and Speculative Cinema,’’ in Steven J. Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 38. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 179–181. 39. Ibid., 182. 40. Noe¨l Carroll, ‘‘Horror and Humor,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 41. See Linda Williams, ‘‘When Women Look: A Sequel,’’ in Steven J. Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42. Walton, Mimesis and Make-Believe. 43. Shaw, ‘‘Power, Horror, and Ambivalence.’’ 44. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror. 45. Waller and Meyers, ‘‘Disenstoried Horror.’’ 46. Richard Gilmore, ‘‘Horror and Death at the Movies,’’ Film and Philosophy, horror issue (2001): 127–142. 47. James Pennebaker, Opening Up ( New York: Guilford Press, 1997). [ 266] Notes to Pages 115–128

48. Roger Booth and James Pennebaker, ‘‘Emotions and Immunity,’’ in Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, eds., The Handbook of Emotions 2nd edition ( New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 558–570. 49. Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Chapter 6 1. Most recently, Robert C. Solomon, ‘‘Victims of Circumstance? A Defense of Virtue Ethics’’ (with a reply by Gilbert Harman), Business Ethics Quarterly 13, no. 1 ( January 2003): 43–62. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann, trans. ( New York: Viking, 1954), pt. II, ‘‘On the Virtues,’’ 207. 3. I want to thank Randall C. Coleman, of Woodlands, Texas, for pointing out Davies’s comments to me. Those comments can be found in William Robertson Davies, One Half of Robertson Davies ( New York: Viking, 1978), 64ff.

Chapter 7 1. My comments on the diminution of religion in the world may seem to be contradicted by the violent religious fanaticism that has gripped the United States and much of southern and western Asia, but more mundane statistics from around the world indicate otherwise. Europeans are generally as horrified by what they see happening in America as they are by what is happening in the Middle East, as are many Americans. Yet church membership is dropping in the United States, and I find it hard to take seriously the percentage of ‘‘yes’’ responses to journalistic ‘‘Do you believe in God?’’-type questions. ( It is only slightly higher than those who recently answered ‘‘yes’’ to the question ‘‘Do you believe in angels?’’) 2. Thomas More, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life ( New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 3. I have nothing but contempt for those well-educated sophists who break all canons of intellectual and argumentative integrity in pursuit of a purely political agenda, for example, using quotes from squabbling evolutionists snatched out of context and made to sound like criticisms of evolution as opposed to objections to this or that particular evolutionary hypothesis, and the infamous manufacturing of evidence. My favorite sophistry is the juxtaposition of ‘‘fossils’’ of dinosaur and human footprints in Glen Rose, Texas (about fifty miles south of Fort Worth). According to the Institute for Creation Research, such ‘‘evidence’’ proves that Darwinism is wrong and Genesis is correct. 4. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic ( London: Gollancz, 1936). 5. Noticeably absent from this expanding humanism are the atheists, who do not have merely a different name for God but see no need to believe in any such being in the first place. Thus the public ritual that preaches tolerance for everyone who believes in a ‘‘supreme being,’’ while attempting to be all-embracing, is highly discriminatory, excluding not only atheists but also believers in any number of polytheistic and ‘‘godless’’ forms of spirituality. Notes to Pages 128–155 [ 267]

6. As measured by the ‘‘best’’ departments in the ‘‘best’’ schools, at least by the fashions of the time, in the infamous Leiter ‘‘Philosophical Gourmet’’ Report on the web. 7. Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could ( New York: Platt & Munk, 1930). 8. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 9. Ned Block, in a review of Jaynes (1981) accuses Jaynes of making what philosophers are fond of calling a ‘‘use/mention’’ mistake, that is, confusing a phenomenon with the name or concept of that phenomenon. Jonathan Miller, in another review, thinks that Jaynes places far too little weight on social and cultural factors in the origination of consciousness. On the first point, I think the argument below—which owes something to Daniel Dennett—absolves Jaynes of that particular philosophical sin. On Miller’s criticism, it seems to me to be quite compatible with the general thesis I take Jaynes to be making, leaving aside his very controversial hypotheses about brain evolution. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (also known as Reason in History), Leo Rauch, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1988), 12. 11. Such a view has been defended, for example, by both Daniel Dennett in his Consciousness Explained and in ‘‘Julian Jaynes’ Software Ideology,’’ and by Dennett’s nemesis, John Searle, in his Construction of the Social World ( New York: Free Press, 1995). 12. Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Media. org, March 23, 2003.

Chapter 8 1. Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, H. J. Paton, trans. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 67 (p. 13 of the standard German ed.). Kant’s phrase ‘‘schmelzender Theilnehmung’’ (Grundlegung Werke, vol. 4, 399) is in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W. Ellington, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981). The phrase is translated as ‘‘melting compassion’’ by Paton, and as ‘‘tender sympathy’’ by Lewis White Beck in his rendition of Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) and by Ellington (12), from whom the rest of the quotation is borrowed. Neither translation adequately captures Kant’s demeaning irony. ‘‘Melting’’ is much better than ‘‘tender’’ for schmelzender, but neither ‘‘compassion’’ nor ‘‘sympathy’’ will do for Theilnehmung, which is more like ‘‘participation’’ (and less like Mitleid, usually translated as ‘‘compassion’’ or ‘‘pity’’). 2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, E. F. J. Payne, trans. ( New York: Dover, 1969), quoted in D. P. Verene, ed., Sexual Love and Western Morality ( New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 3. Franc¸ois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, John Heard, trans. ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917). 4. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Louis Infield, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1963), 164. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost ( New York: Random House, 1969), bk. 8, 11. 83–85. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, W. Kaufmann, trans. ( New York: Viking 1954), sec. 11. [ 268] Notes to Pages 159–170

7. Bernard Williams, ‘‘Morality and the Emotions,’’ in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 8. Edward Sankowski, ‘‘Love and Moral Obligation,’’ and ‘‘Responsibility of Persons for Their Emotions,’’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977): 829–840. 9. David Velleman, ‘‘Love as a Moral Emotion,’’ Ethics 109 ( January 1999): 338– 374, complains that I oppose ‘‘caring for some people more than others’’ to ‘‘according to everyone equal rights.’’ He says that ‘‘the Kantian model forbids only those exceptions by which we act for reasons that we couldn’t make generally accessible. It does not forbid differential treatment of different people’’ (340). 10. For a good defense of the functionalist presumption, see Nico Frijda, ‘‘Emotions Are Functional (at Least Most of the Time),’’ in Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson, eds., The Nature of Emotions ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For some doubts about functionalism, see Gerrod Parrott, ‘‘Implications of Dysfunctional Emotions for Understanding How Emotions Function,’’ Review of General Psychology 5, no. 3 (2001). 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, T. M. Knox, trans. ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 105. 12. E.g., in Baruch Spinoza, ‘‘General Definition of the Emotions,’’ pt. III of his Ethics (Malibu, Calif.: J. Simon, 1991). 13. Ame´lie Rorty, ‘‘Explaining Emotions,’’ in Ame´lie Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 14. This is not to deny the obvious fact that such standards infiltrate our personal taste so that even our most individual judgments are based on common criteria that we have internalized from our upbringing and our culture. But the fact that these are personal and individual judgments and the fact that we do not explicitly appeal to publicly acknowledged criteria, coupled with the fact that in our personal relationships (as opposed to our public aesthetic pronouncements) we make such different choices, all suggest that the common standards are not sufficient to explain our particular tastes. But this is not to say that we do not or cannot give ‘‘reasons’’ for our love. I argue this in ‘‘Reasons for Love,’’ chapter 9 in this volume. 15. I should say that this chapter was written before ‘‘virtue ethics’’ reached its stature as a full-fledged ‘‘theory’’ of ethics. Nevertheless, I would want to ignore the fact that some virtue ethicists—I refer in particular to the virtue czar William Bennett—obviously fancy themselves in a philosopher-king sort of role. 16. To put all of this in Plato’s context, it should be pointed out that he was by no means simply reporting current Athenian views about love. He was on a campaign to turn the concept of eros from a vulgar description of sexual desire into a far more ethereal and transcendent moral notion. I want to thank Paul Woodruff for making this so clear to me. 17. Martha Nussbaum, ‘‘The Speech of Alcibiades,’’ Philosophy and Literature 3, no. 2 (1979); Michael Gagarin, ‘‘Socrates’ Hubris and Alcibiades’ Failure,’’ Phoenix 31 (1977). 18. The status of the Forms as universals is controversial insofar as the Forms can be viewed as perfect heavenly particulars. So, too, while eros before Plato is defined as sexual passion, it is not altogether clear how ‘‘erotic’’ he passion remains when it is directed at the Forms. Notes to Pages 159–170 [ 269]

19. Denis de Rougemeont, Love in the Western World, Montgomery Belgion, trans. ( New York: Pantheon, 1974). 20. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves ( New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1960). 21. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 22. This ‘‘ontological dependency’’ should not be confused with ‘‘codependency,’’ a pathological relationship. Quite often in public lectures I have been challenged by persons in the audience who have accused me of fostering codependency. My view, by contrast, is that it is the refusal to acknowledge the need for ontological dependency which is (demonstrably) pathological. 23. I have discussed this at length in my About Love ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 24. The extreme version of this competition thesis is Jean-Paul Sartre’s brutal account of our ‘‘Being-For-Others,’’ in which all human relationships, including sex and love, consist of such wrestling over self-identity. 25. William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988). 26. Plato, Phaedrus, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985).

Chapter 9 1. I apologize to those readers who may be offended by my extensive use of the first and second person singular and other overly personal stylistic choices in this chapter. It is, it seems to me, suitable to the subject matter. One could, of course, treat questions of love like any other ontological matters or, as Margaret Atwood writes, ‘‘I approach this love/like a biologist/putting on my rubber/gloves and white lab coat.’’ Power Politics ( New York: Harper & Row, 1973). But I do not. 2. Parade magazine, October 8, 2000, 20. 3. ‘‘Trusting,’’ in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). 4. My targets in this campaign are diffuse, since most of the objections to the idea that love has reasons are restricted to popular romanticism. But one author who deserves to be cited as a particularly sophisticated proponent of the view that love does not have reasons is Robert Kraut. See his ‘‘Emotions, Feelings, Contexts,’’ Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 11 ( November 1986) and ‘‘Objects of Affection,’’ in G. Myers and K. D. Irani, eds., Emotions: Philosophical Studies ( New York: Haven Press, 1984), 42–56. But I found a welcome ally. See Laurence Thomas, ‘‘Love and Reasons,’’ in Kathleen Higgins and Robert C. Solomon, eds., The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 467–477. 5. Solomon, About Love. 6. Singer, The Nature of Love. 7. For example, Alan Soble, The Structure of Love ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). See my review in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review vol. XXXI (1992). 8. Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI. [ 270] Notes to Pages 179–195

9. See Hubert Dreyfus’s many writings on Heidegger and on the role of social practices in general, for example, his fascinating rejoinder to the contributors in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 313–350. See also, in the same volume, the illuminating essay by George Downing on specifically emotional practices, 245–270. 10. But on this again see Dreyfus and Downing, ibid. 11. R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). 12. Robert C. Solomon, ‘‘Reasons as Causal Explanations,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34, no. 3 (March 1974). 13. Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 14. E.g., Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 15. Martha Nussbaum, ‘‘Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Inspiration,’’ in her Love’s Knowledge ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 314–334. 16. This question has an impressive history in modern philosophy, in the work of Kant and Schopenhauer in particular. Kant’s notion of ‘‘purposiveness without a purpose’’ (in appreciation of art) and Schopenhauer’s ideal of freeing ourselves from the ‘‘penal servitude of willing’’ are both in play here. 17. Notwithstanding Socrates’ insensitivity to his would-be lovers. Accordingly, it is the Phaedrus and not The Symposium that is the focus of Nussbaum’s analysis. ‘‘Love and the Individual,’’ 324ff. 18. Ibid., 324. 19. I hope it is obvious that I am not making the absurd claim that this ‘‘fit’’ is (as in Aristophanes’ fable) solely determined by some original configuration. Relationships are mutually created, not merely discovered. 20. Martha Nussbaum refers to this as ‘‘the extreme romantic view of love.’’ ‘‘Love and the Individual,’’ 322. She defends Plato against this view, utilizing a sly and sophisticated reinterpretation that avoids, or at least complicates, ‘‘Plato’s problem.’’ 21. Robert Nozick thus notes the significance and the uniqueness of historical reasons in ‘‘Love’s Bond,’’ in his The Examined Life ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 22. I owe these objections to my colleagues at the University of Auckland, Stephen Davies and John Bishop. 23. Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 132–133. 24. ‘‘Love out of inclination cannot be commanded; but kindness done from duty—although no inclination impel us, and even though natural and unconquerable disinclination stands in our way—is Practical, and not Pathological love, residing in the will and not of melting compassion [schmelzender Theilnehmung].’’ Grundlegung Werke, vol. 4, 399; Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W. Ellington, trans. ( Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981). Notes to Pages 197–216 [ 271]

Chapter 10 1. Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977). All page references in the text are to A Lover’s Discourse, Richard Howard, trans. ( New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

Chapter 11 My thanks to Kathleen Higgins for her many good discussions, her expertise on this topic, and, not least, her inspiration to enjoy much of what I once could not. Kathleen Higgins, ‘‘Sweet Kitsch,’’ in Philip Alperson, ed., The Philosophy of the Visual Arts ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). My belated thanks to the late Paul Ziff, with whom a conversation over various knickknacks and tchotchkes in Pier One many years ago stimulated my thinking about the difference between art and (sweet) kitsch. 1. Earlier, I referred to Mark Jefferson, ‘‘What’s wrong with Sentimentality?,’’ Mind 92 (1983): 519, and to Schiller’s contrast between the ‘‘sentimental’’ and the ‘‘naive,’’ using Goethe as a model, this Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, Julius A. Elias, ed. ( New York: Ungar, 1967) and his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, E. W. Wilkinson, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). 2. Gillo Dorfles, ed., Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste ( New York: Universe Books, 1969). 3. Hermann Broch, ‘‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,’’ in Gillo Dorfles, ed., Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste ( New York: Universe Books, 1969. See also Matei Calcineau, Faces of Modernity ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). 4. Broch, ‘‘Notes,’’ 76 (quoted in Higgins, ‘‘Sweet Kitsch’’). 5. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 6. For example, see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). 7. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs. 8. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 74, with reference to Trubners deutsches Worterbuch. 9. Ibid., 77. 10. Higgins, ‘‘Sweet Kitsch’’ in Philip Alperson, ed., The Philosophy of the Visual Arts ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 568–581; Calcineau, Faces of Modernity; Harries, Meaning of Modern Art, 77. 11. John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art ( New York: Holt, 1959), 154. 12. From the exhibit catalog. Denver Museum Publication 1986. 13. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture ( Boston: Beacon, 1965), 10. 14. Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 77. 15. Higgins, ‘‘Sweet Kitsch,’’ 11. 16. Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art. 17. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Michael Henry Heim, ed. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 251. [ 272] Notes to Pages 220–247

18. Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 80. 19. Lecture in Jerusalem, repr. in Mishkenot Sha’ananim Newsletter no. 3 ( July 1985): 5. 20. Michael Tanner, ‘‘Sentimentality,’’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1976– 1977): 130. 21. Ibid., 131. 22. Quoted in Montgomery, Times Literary Supplement. 23. Mary Midgley, ‘‘Brutality and Sentimentality,’’ Philosophy 54 ( July 1979). 24. Jefferson, ‘‘What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?’’, 526. 25. March 6, 1989. 26. Jefferson, Ibid. 27. Midgley, ‘‘Brutality and Sentimentality,’’ 526–527. 28. Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 82. 29. Midgley, Ibid.

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Index

acedia (see also sin, sloth) 137 aesthetics (see also art; literature) 9, 151, 236–239, 241, 243, 246, 249, 253 and kitsch 236–239, 241, 243, 246, 249, 253 affect programs 73, 96, 102 affective individualism 53 agape´ 165–167, 170–171, 179–180 Alciabiades (see also Symposium) 212 altruism 32, 36, 55, 74, 97 American culture and gratitude 104 and mourning 101 and sin 141 American Society for Aesthetics x Amis, Kingsley 166 amor fati 68 Anarchy, State and Utopia 21 anger 24–25, 93, 94, 95 and grief 94 as a process 93 as a sin 133–134, 145 angoisse 122 angst 79, 91 anguish 122 animism 64 Antigone 166 anxiety 119, 122, 225 apatheia 186 Aquinas, St. Thomas 46, 132, 138–139, 141–142, 144

Aristophanes (see also reasons, Aristophanic) 167, 175, 178, 180–184, 223, 233 Aristotle xii, 100, 104, 162, 169, 183, 185, 207, 228 caring and compassion 44, 61 doctrine of the mean 137 eudaimonia 90 grief 86, 92, 97 justice 42 sentimentality 29, 30, 32, 34 unity of virtues 138 vice and virtue 131, 136–137, 139– 140, 145–146 virtue 45, 46, 47, 61, 97, 102, 103 arousal 128–129 art sentimentality (see also aesthetics) 7–8, 10, 235–254 and kitsch 235–254 asceticism 26 Audi, Robert 46 Augustine, St. 137–138, 146 Averill, James 97 Axelrod, R.M. 39 Bacon, Francis 154 Baier, Annette 44 Barthe, Roland 219–230, 232 basic emotions 73, 77–78, 93, 102, 113 disgust 113 grief 77 horror 113 sadness 78 behaviorism 69

Being and Nothingness 77–80 Being and Time 77 benevolence 50–53 Bennet, William 131 Bernard, Williams 170, 172 Bertolucci, Bernardo 225 Beyond Good and Evil 148, 219 Birth of Tragedy 67 Blackburn, Simon 192 Blum, Lawrence 43, 60, 62 Brentano, Franz 30 Broch, Herman 237 Buddhism 150 Calhoun, Cheshire 44 Camus, Albert 42, 78, 89, 105, 174, 228 Canaday, John 239 Capellanus, Andreas 221, 230, 232 care (see also compassion) 43–45, 48, 22–45, 49–50, 53, 55–58 and justice 57 as a virtue 44–45, 47 caritas 179 Carroll, No¨el xii, 108–111, 113–116, 120–122, 124 Cavell, Stanley 117, 119 Chalmers, David 65 charity 53, 60 Christian doctrine (see also JudeoChristian tradition) 29, 148, 150, 152–153, 155, 165–166, 171, 177–180 Churchland, Patricia 119 classical liberalism (see conservatism) cognition 78–79 cognition, intellect and 113–114 cognitive theory of emotions 30 Comic Relief: Netizsche’s Gay Science xii compassion (see also caring) 23–25, 27, 29–31, 39, 43–45, 47–50, 55–56, 58–68, 239, 251 and justice 47, 49, 58 as a motive 59–60 objects of 63–64 [ 290] Index

and pain 61 and pity 65–68 as a virtue 44–45, 47, 61–62 ‘‘Compassion’’ 60 compassion melting (see also Kant) 5, 21, 165 Concept of Motivation 198 Confucianism 134, 156–157 li 156–157 consciousness 160–161 conservatism 55 courage 46 creationism 152 Crito 23 Damasio, Antonio 78 ‘‘Dark Glasses’’ 222 David, Jacques-Louis 8 Davidson, Donald 198 Davies, Robertson 137 Daybreak 67 de Rougemont, Denis 168, 179, 219, 225 de Sousa, Ronald 19, 74 de Waal, Frans 102 ‘‘Dead Ringers’’ 109 Dennett, Daniel 161 deontology 5 depression 86 Descartes, Rene 27, 64, 116, 152, 161, 227, 229 Dickens, Charles 15–16, 19 Diderot, Denis, 7–8 die Sorge 56 disgust 113–115, 121, 244 moral disgust 115 Dostoevsky 36 Douglas, Lord Alfred 6 dread 119 Dyer, Gwyne 16 Ecce Homo 104, 232 Eisenberg, Nancy 70, 73 Either/Or 220 Ekman, Paul 73, 93, 102

Elster, Jon 214 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 186 Emile 184, 219 emotional contagion 54, 70–71 emotions antipathetic 36 displaced 14–15 distortion of 15–17 as distortions 18–19 false/fake 14–15, 243–244 as judgments 23–24 logic of 95 negative 20–21, 23, 26, 35–36, 57, 75–76, 80, 98, 142 gratitude as 76 grief as 75, 80 Emotions: Outline of a Theory 229 empathy 30–31, 44, 52–54, 69, 70–74, 111 and horror 111 Empedocles 166 empiricism 53, 69 Enlightenment viii, 55, 120, 158, 170, 177 envy 36, 133–134, 137, 140–143, 201 eros 165–169, 174–176, 178–180, 194, 209, 224, 228 Essay on Human Understanding 69 Ethics 225, 229, 231 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 102 ethics/ethical theories xiii, 4–10, 13, 18, 32, 43–44, 48, 56, 70, 102–104, 165, 169–174, 185, 187, 35–238, 240–241, 248, 253 on compassion 43–44 and gratitude 102–104 and kitsch 235–238, 240–241, 248, 253 and love 165, 169–174, 185, 187 traditional 43 eudaimonia 90, 100 eunoia 61 Euripides 166 evolutionary theory 39, 152, 162 and cooperation 39 Explaining Emotions 173

facial expressions 73, 102, 113 ‘‘Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly: Reflections on the Special Character of Grief ’’ 79, 83 Faust 56 Fear 24, 80, 109–110, 116–119, 122, 214–215, 244 and horror 109–110, 116–119, 122 and love 214–215 ‘‘Fearing Fictions’’ 116 feminism 7, 49, 56 and sentimentality 7 Fichte 151 Film and Philosophy xii finalite´ 24 Firestone, Shulamith 168 forgiveness 37, 107 and gratitude 107 Form (see Platonic Form) Four Loves 179, 219 France, Anatole, 137 Frankena, William 187 Fredericks, Barbara 104–105 Freeland, Cynthia 109 French, Marilyn 168, 219 Freud, Sigmund 15, 36, 77, 82, 86, 119, 124, 167, 169, 172, 177, 228–230 Frijda, Nico xi, 20, 23–24, 42, 118 fury ix Gagarin, Michael 175 Gay Science 147, 218 gender, sentimentality and 6 Gerechtigkeit 36 Gerstein, R.S 38 Gilmore, Richard 127 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6, 56, 184, 221, 223 Goldie, Peter 73–74, 99, 201 Gordon, Robert 24 Gratitude ix, xiii, 75–76, 101–107 cosmic 104–105 and forgiveness 107 and justice 106 Index [ 291]

Gratitude (continued ) and revenge 106–107 as a virtue 102–104 Greeks, ancient 28, 30, 151, 167 Philosophy 167 Greenberg, Clement 240, 243 Gregory I, Pope 132–135 Grief ix, xi, xiii, 75–76, 78, 79, 80–101 and anger 94 cultural contexts 77 and guilt 94 and love 89–91, 101 and morality 78, 86, 97 objects of 84, 86–88, 90, 92 as an obligation 78 phenomenology of 79–81, 85–86, 89, 93 as a process 93–94, 96–97 and regret 81–82 and relationships 87–89, 92 and selfishness 89 and the self 81, 82) and society 97–99 and sorrow 85 Griffiths, Paul 102–103 Groundwork 5, 170 guilt 94 Gustafson, Donald 77–79, 82, 85, 100 Halligan, Ben 109 Handbook of Emotions 70 happiness 90 Harries, Karsten 13, 18, 239–240, 245, 248–249, 253 hatred 216–217 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich viii, x, 36, 41, 92, 135, 148–149, 151–152, 158, 160–163, 168, 172, 177, 183, 186, 228 on love 172, 177, 186 Heidegger, Martin 25, 77, 79, 91, 153 Hesiod 166 Higgins, Kathleen x, xii, 148, 242 Hippolytus 166 Hobbes, Thomas 32–35, 50, 145 [ 292] Index

Horror x, xii, 108–130, 244 and American films 121, 124 and anxiety 119, 122 as a basic emotion 113 and disgust 113–115, 121 and fear 109–110, 116–119, 122 and humor 124 moral horror 115 objects of 119, 125–126, 128 and terror 118–119 Horror, in art xii 108–118, 120–129 as compensation 125–127 hubris 144 Human All-Too-Human 65 Hume, David viii, 4, 5, 10, 28–29, 31–35, 45–46, 50–55, 59, 68–69, 74, 102, 169–170, 175, 185, 237 on care and compassion 50, 59 on emotions 69 on sentimentality 28–29, 31–35 on sympathy 51–53, 55, 59, 69, 74 on virtue 45–46 humor 124 Hutcheson, Francis 29–30, 50, 55 individualism 55 Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 33 intentionality 13, 30, 69, 71, 72, 83–84, 124, 226, 230 of grief 84 of horror 124 of sadness 83, 84 ‘‘Is Disney Guilty of Innocence?’’ 252 Izard, Carroll 102 Jacobi, Susan x, 39 James, William 7, 22–23, 69, 78, 80, 91, 96, 98, 113, 225 Jaynes, Julian 160–161 Jealousy 93, 214, 228–229 and love 214 as a process 93 Jefferson, Mark 3, 10, 16–17, 19, 251–252

joy 229 Judeo-Christian Tradition (see also Christian Doctrine) 131–147 justice 21–24, 27, 29–37, 41–42, 47–49, 57–58, 61–63, 106 as an abstract principle 47, 48 and caring 57 and compassion 47, 49, 58, 63 as an emotion 35–37, 42, 48, 49 and gratitude 106 and punishment 36–41 as a virtue 47 Kafka 146 Kant, Immanuel viii, xii-xiii, 5–7, 18, 21, 23, 28–30, 32, 34–38, 43–44, 49, 51, 60, 78, 147, 151, 156, 165, 167, 169–173, 185–186, 190, 216 on compassion 43–44, 49, 60, 165 on love 170–173, 185–186, 190, 216 on moral obligation 78 on retribution 36–38 on sentimentality 21, 23, 28–30, 32, 34–35 on sympathy 51 Kierkegaard 89, 105, 119, 155, 157–159, 220, 231 kitsch x, 3, 5, 12–13, 16, 150–151, 228, 233, 235–254 Ku¨bler-Ross, Elizabeth 93 Kuhn, Thomas 153 Kumar, Amitava ix Kundera, Milan 3, 12, 14, 233, 235, 237, 243, 247–249 La Chute 228 La Rochefoucauld 167, 214, 221–222 Lange, C.G. 23 Leibniz 172, 231 Lelyveld, Arthur 35, 37 Lerner, Melvin J. 22, 41–42 Lerner, Rabbi Michael 163 Levinson, Jerrold 113, 115, 123–124 Lewis, C.S. 179, 181, 219

liberalism 47–48 literature (see also art; aesthetics) 3–11, 16 Locke, John 69 logic of affect 94 love 88–91, 93, 101, l26, 165–218, 220–221, 225, 229, 231–232 for Aristophanic reasons for 190, 204, 207–213 and beauty 191–194, 205–207, 209 erotic, love xii, xiii, 165–188, 190, 195 as a virtue 165–166, 168–171, 174–188 and fear 214–215 and grief 89–91, 101 and hatred 216–217 and identity 211–213, 216 and jealousy 214 and marriage 179, 181–182 and moral obligation 171, 215 and objectivity 90 as a process 93, 193, 195, 210–211 and properties-of-the-person-type reasons 204, 208–209, 212 and rationality 172–174 reasons for 189–218 romantic, love 166–169, 171, 174, 177, 179–180, 182, 185, 187, 190, 203, 212 self 182–186 selfishness 88 as a virtue xii, 167, 173, 200 and virtuous reasons 207 and wealth 205 Lover’s Discourse, A 219–221, 223–224, 226, 228–230 Mind of Menicus 28 Mullarkey, Maureen 252 music (see also art; literature; aesthetics) 13 Myth of Sisyphus 42 Mythologies 226–227, 230–231 Index [ 293]

Nagel, Thomas 174 The Naked and the Undead 109 Nation, The ix Nature of Love 176, 179 negatite´ 80 Neu, Jerome 19 New Age Philosophy 49, 148, 150, 152 Nicomachean Ethics 44, 61, 103, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 24, 26, 34, 36, 45–46, 54, 65, 67–68, 105, 107, 118, 125, 131, 133, 137–140, 145–151, 162, 163, 179, 186, 218–219, 232 on cosmic gratitude 105 morality and emotions 36, 46 on pity 54, 65, 67–68 rationality of emotions 26 on sin and virtue 131, 133, 137–140, 145–147 on spirituality 148–151, 162 subjectivity 34 virtue/ethics 45 will to power 118, 125 No Exit 100 Noddings, Nel 44, 48–49, 56–57, 70–71 Nola, Robert 99 nostalgia 18 Nozick, Robert 21 Nussbaum, Martha 77, 79, 88, 95, 116, 174–175, 207–208 Oatley, Keith 116 objects, emotional 63, 84, 86–88 of compassion 63 of grief 84, 86–88 On Lore 219 On the Genealogy of Morals 26, 46 outrage 36, 244 Ovid 179–180 Paley, William 152 panic 119 paradigm scenarios 74 Paris, Gaston 179, 181 [ 294] Index

Parmenides 166 Passion for Justice, A 21 Passions of the Soul 27 Paul, St. 146 Pennebaker, James 127 Peters, R.S. 198, 201–202 Phaedus 187, 207 phenomenology 30, 79–80, 85, 89, 93, 102, 192, 203, 231 of gratitude 102 of grief 79–80, 85, 89, 93 of love 192, 203 Phenomenology 92 philia 228 Philosopher Kings 47 Philosophy and Literature xii Philosophy of Horror xii Philosophy of Law 37 Philosophy of Right 92 philosophy, analytic 77 philosophy, Anglo-American 78 philosophy, continental 77 philosophy, spirituality and 158–159 Pincoffs, Edmund 46 pity 50, 53–54, 65–68, 253 and compassion 65–67 Plato viii, 21, 23, 34, 36, 42, 47, 106, 108–109, 129, 158, 165, 167, 169, 174–180, 186–188, 190, 194–195, 200, 204, 206, 208–209, 212, 219, 223, 226, 228 on compassion 47 on horror 109, 129 on justice 106 justice as character 42 on love 165, 169, 174–176, 179–180, 186–188, 190, 194–195, 200, 204, 206, 208–209, 212, 219, 223, 226, 228 on sentimentality 21, 23, 34, 36 Platonic Forms 167, 182, 194, 209 pleasure-horror paradox 111–112, 118, 123–124, 126–130

Plotinus 166 Poetics 86 Powers, Ron 255 Pre-Socratics 22 pride 69 punishment 37–41 ‘‘Punishment: For and Against’’ 35 Pythagoras 135 Rationality vii, xii, 4, 5, 7, 10, 21–28, 30–31, 34, 38–40, 48–49, 50, 62, 172–174, 187–198, 243, 251 and justice 48 and kitsch 243, 251 and love 172–174, 187–198 and revenge 38–40 Rawls, John 21, 34, 47–49 ‘‘Realist Horror’’ 109 Reason (see Rationality) reasons, Aristophanic 190, 204, 207–214 reasons, causes of 198 reasons, for love 189–218, 232 Reeves, C.D.C. 47 regret 81–82 religion 148–156, 158–160, 162 and nature 151–154 and rituals 156–158 and science 151–157 Republic 42 Rescher 36 resentment 36–37, 39, 141, 232 and envy 141 Restributivism 38–39 revenge x, 23–25, 27, 35–41, 57, 106–107 and caring 57 and gratitude 106–107 Roberts, Robert C. 105 Romanticism viii, 149, 170, 177, 179–180 Romanyshyn, Robert 95 Rorty, Ame´lie 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques viii, 6, 35, 49–50, 145, 170, 184, 219, 236 Rushdie, Salman ix

sadness 78, 82–85 as a mood 83–84 objects of 84 Sankowski, Edward 171 Sartre, Jean-Paul 24, 77, 80, 100, 122, 162, 168, 183, 190, 206, 226, 229, 231 Scheler, Max 5, 30 Schelling, Friedrich x, 149 Schiller, Friedrich 5–6, 236 Schneider, Steven 110, 116 Schopenhauer, Arthur 29, 43–44, 65, 67, 134, 148, 154, 162, 166–167, 190, 193, 221, 224 care and compassion 43–44 scientism 153 self-interest and love 204–205, 208–209 selfishness/self-indulgence 10–12, 14, 32–33, 50–51, 55, 74, 88–89, 241, 247–250 and altruism 32–33 and grief 89 and kitsch 241, 247–250 and love 88 Seneca 81 sentimentality 6–8, 148, 150, 157, 159, 164, 232, 235–254 and art 7–8 and gender 6 and kitsch 235–254 and religion 148, 150, 157, 159, 164 Shaftesbury 55 shame 61, 97 Shaw, Daniel xii, 109, 118, 125 shock (see startle response) Shoeck, Helmut 141–142 sins (seven deadly) 131–137 anger (see also anger) 133–134, 145 envy (see also envy) 133–134, 137, 140–143, gluttony 133–137, 142–143, 146 greed 133–134, 136–137, 141–143, 145 lust 133–134, 136–137, 141–143, 146 Index [ 295]

sins (continued ) pride 133, 136–137, 141–146 sloth (see also acedia) 133, 136–137, 141, 143 Singer, Peter 63, 192 Smith, Adam viii, xi, 4, 28, 30–35, 37, 46–47, 50–52, 54 , 68–71, 73, 145, 237 care & compassion 50 on emotions 69 on justice 37 on sentimentality 28, 30–35 on sympathy 51–52, 55, 69, 70, 73 on virtue 46–47 Snyder, Beth 79, 89, 94, 100 social choice theory 47 social construction 203 Socrates vii-viii, x, 21–23, 32, 35, 42, 106, 158, 162, 167, 169–170, 175–177, 179, 181, 183, 187, 194–195, 207–209, 212, 219, 231–233 justice as character 42 on love 170, 176–177, 194–195, 207–209, 212, 219, 231–233 on revenge 106 on sentimentality 21–23, 32, 35 Sommers, Shula xii, 20, 103–104 Sophocles 166 sorrow 85 Soul in Grief, The f 95 Southey, Robert 6, 236 ‘‘Speech of Alcibiades, The’’ 174 Spinoza 172, 220–221, 225, 229, 231–232 Spirituality 148–164 beliefs and 154–156 philosophy and 159 as self-actualizing 159, 161 spite 36, 142 St. Augustine 29 startle response 115–116 Stendhal 168, 176, 184–186, 214, 219 Stinger, Irving 176, 179–180 [ 296] Index

Stocker, Michael xii Stoicism 68, 80, 81, 85, 89, 95, 101 Stone, Robert 53 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 7, 16, 19 Stranger 78–79, 101, 105 Supreme Court, U.S. 39 surprise 115–116 Swanton, Christine 137 sympathetic emotions 36 Sympathy viii, 28–35, 39, 46–47, 50–55, 59, 68–70, 73–74, 235– 236, 239, 250–251 as a virtue 46–47 and kitsch 235–236, 239, 250–251 Symposium (see also Aristophanes; Socrates; Plato) 165, 167–170, 174–175, 177–178, 180–181, 188, 194, 200, 208, 212, 219, 223, 226, 230 Tanner, Michael 3, 10–11, 17, 249–250 Taoism 150 Tao Te Ching 223 Terror 118–119 Tertullian 178 Testament, New 37, 170–171 Testament, Old 36–37 Theogony 166 Theory of Justice 21 Theory of Moral Sentiments xi, 28, 37, 50 Treatise of Human Nature, A 33, 69 Thomas, Laurence 43 Tompkins, Jane 13 Twain, Mark 134, 193 Unbearable Lightness of Being 12, 233, 235 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 7, 13–14 Upheavals of Thought 77, 79 utilitarianism 38, 44, 162, 170 Valery, Paul 226 Vedas 158 vengeance (see revenge)

Verstehen 70 vice (see also sin) 131–137 Victorian Age 39 Virgil 166 virtue (and sin) 131–132, 134–147 virtue as abstract principles 44, 45 virtue, artificial 33 virtue, love as xii, 167, 173, 200 virtue/virtue ethics xii, 4, 9, 19, 32–34, 37, 42, 44–47, 53, 60–61, 102–104, 107

gratitude as 102–104 justice as 42, 47 moral sentiments as 44–47 Walton, Kendall 111, 113, 116, 121 Wealth of Nations 28, 31, 35 ‘‘What is an Emotion?’’ 23 Wilde, Oscar ix, 3, 6, 10, 13, 15, 166, 236 Williams, Bernard 47, 103 Wittgenstein 152, 192, 198 Zarathustra IV 65

Index [ 297]