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Posted by Tarale
That said, you *have* been fairly condescending, belittling and outright rude to other posters on this forum SamuraiX, and personally I'd rather you stop it. I don't see what they have done to deserve your ire.
Can you not treat other people in this forum with some compassion?
I think you're mistaking "compassion" with "pity," Taryn. Now if I might, I will post this highly informative article on the difference. Seriously, there's a difference. I'm not just insane, I hope.
Posted by http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/staff/academics/gemes-work/GurdrenvonTevenar18Oct05
NIETZSCHE’S OBJECTIONS TO PITY AND COMPASSION
[1]
I take it as given that there is a difference between pity and compassion and that we can describe this difference as follows: both pitying and compassionate agents are distressed by the suffering of others, but compassionate agents show, in addition to this distress, also attentive concern for the way suffering persons endure their suffering. Thus compassion focuses on and is attentive to suffering persons while pity tends to focus just on the suffered condition, say, homelessness or disease. However, focusing just on the suffered condition allows a gap of distance, of separation, of otherness to develop between pitying agents and the pitied and this, in turn, can lead to feelings of superiority and contempt on the part of pitying agents and to feelings of alienation, shame, and inferiority on the part of the pitied. Compassion, by contrast, with its attentive concern for the suffering person, is based on awareness of our common humanity and thus, at its best, is able to bridge the damaging gap of separation and otherness with its associated negative feelings. Hence it follows that only pity, and not also compassion, is open to the much voiced objection of allowing, perhaps even fostering, feelings of superiority and contempt and thus of shaming and humiliating its recipients.
[2]
Due to the fact that there is only one German word, namely Mitleid, for pity and compassion, it is frequently not immediately obvious from an original text whether the author is talking about pity or compassion without careful consideration of context. Yet in the case of Nietzsche context alone is often not conclusive – hence the variations in translation – and I recommend therefore the additional device of close scrutiny of the kinds of objection against Mitleid Nietzsche is actually engaged in. And here we can distinguish three different kinds of objection. These are [1] psychological objections; [2] detrimental-to-recipients objections; and [3] detrimental-to-givers objections. In what follows I will give examples of all three kinds.
[3]
Schopenhauer, famously, celebrated Mitleid as the greatest of all virtues and as the sole basis of genuine morality. He argued that Mitleid alone is able to overcome our naturally selfish inclinations and thus to motivate agents to act solely for the well-being of others, this being the characteristic of morally worthy actions. Nietzsche vehemently rejected this elevation of what he considered to be one of the more regrettable outcomes of slave morality. And while objections against Mitleid are voiced throughout Nietzsche’s work, Daybreak 133 is notable for its strong polemic against Schopenhauer’s psychological explanations of Mitleid. In Daybreak 133 Nietzsche alleges that Schopenhauer could not possibly have had much relevant experience of Mitleid ‘because he observed and described it so badly’. In particular, Nietzsche utterly dismisses as ‘mere inventions’ Schopenhauer’s psychological foundations of Mitleid such as its supposed motivational purity of selflessness. Nietzsche derides the superficial evidence of selflessness and claims, in opposition, that subconsciously we are always and throughout concerned with our own selves. We therefore never act solely for the sake of others but usually harbour a variety of motives which include, in the case of Mitleid, the co-motivations of ‘subtle self-defence or even a piece of revenge’.
Two sections on, in Daybreak 135, Nietzsche provides us with a particularly vivid detrimental-to-recipient objection. He states that the mere idea of being pitied ‘evokes a moral shudder’ in savages, because to savages, being still, we are meant to assume, uncorrupted by conventional morality, ‘to offer pity is as good as to offer contempt’. Indeed, should a defeated enemy weep and plead then savages will, out of Mitleid and contempt, let him live, humiliated like a dog, while those who endure suffering with defiant pride repulse Mitleid and thus earn their admiration and praise.
Regarding the detrimental-to-givers objection, Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare, in the by now familiar detrimental-to-recipients tone, that he badly wronged a sufferer’s pride when he helped him. But, importantly, Zarathustra also declares that he washes his hand and also wipes clean his soul because he has helped a sufferer, and he admits, furthermore, that he feels ashamed because of the sufferer’s shame. These latter statements show quite conclusively that Nietzsche believed agents pollute and degrade themselves when they show Mitleid and that Mitleid is therefore detrimental to its givers.
Variations of the psychological and detrimental-to-recipients objections described above are widely known and much used even in our ordinary, everyday reactions to instances of pity. But the detrimental-to-givers objection is, I believe, distinctly Nietzschean and we will see later on how this kind of objection is informed by distinctly Nietzschean views of the role and significance of suffering.
[4]
When we examine these objections with the pity/compassion distinction as briefly outlined at the beginning in mind, then we find that Nietzsche’s objections are almost exclusively concerned with Mitleid understood as pity and not as compassion. Notice that Mitleid is either contaminated from the beginning with contempt and shame as in the examples of the savages and Zarathustra, or Mitleid seems preoccupied mainly with the mental state of the agent and not with the sufferer. Understanding Mitleid merely as pity seems to me the main reason why Nietzsche’s objections, though very sophisticated and eminently plausible, somehow miss their target as far as Schopenhauer is concerned. Because Schopenhauer, when elevating Mitleid as the highest virtue, speaks throughout of Mitleid as compassion. Thus Schopenhauer claims that compassionate agents can act selflessly and solely for the weal of sufferers precisely because they see in sufferers someone like themselves. In other words, in the eyes of compassionate agents there is, according to Schopenhauer, no gap of distance and otherness between agents and sufferers and hence no associated negative feelings of alienation and shame. Indeed, Schopenhauer takes great pains to distinguish his kind of Mitleid, i.e. compassion, from various deviations and aberrations such as those that Nietzsche concentrates on and grants them no moral value whatsoever. We can conclude therefore that Schopenhauer could, in a way, willingly agree with most of Nietzsche’s objections and yet keep his own theory intact, since he elevates compassion while Nietzsche denigrates pity.
This conclusion, though interesting, is also quite puzzling and leads to two closely related questions: first, did Nietzsche truly believe that mere pity is all there is to Mitleid? Second, if so, was that because he lacked ‘inner understanding’ of the misery and contingency of suffering as Nussbaum claims? I suggest the answer to both these questions is ‘no’.
[5]
Yet before we can answer these questions we must gain an understanding of Nietzsche’s attitude towards suffering, one’s own and the suffering of others. Nietzsche was highly critical of the attitude towards suffering prevalent at his time, and indeed now, where suffering, particularly the suffering of others, of the multitude of others, mattered and mattered greatly. He blamed Christianity for this and also, more narrowly because applying only to the educated, Schopenhauer. Nietzsche observed how both Christianity and Schopenhauer ascribe to our suffering empirical as well as metaphysical significance. Christian dogma links empirical suffering here on earth to both original and personal sin and promises release via purification and atonement as well as salvation via Christ; while Schopenhauer states that our empirical suffering is but the inevitable outcome of a metaphysical reality governed by a blind, relentless drive to life – the Will. Thus both theories offer an explanation why suffering is so pervasive and the seemingly inescapable lot of each and everyone. In view of these explanations, one can readily see why both theories value and promote Mitleid as an appropriate because somewhat soothing and consoling response. Yet Nietzsche utterly rejects this response, particularly its passivity and easy slide to resignation. Nor is that all. Even more abhorrent, because more threatening to Nietzsche’s revaluation project, are the wider consequences of the Christian and Schopenhauerian views, inasmuch as both drain value out of this our earthly lives. Christianity postulates life on earth as a mere testing station and hence just preliminary to the real life to come in the beyond; and Schopenhauer, with his well-known pessimism, goes even further by claiming that it would be better for us not to be born, thus rejecting life altogether. Given hat one of Nietzsche’s most urgent aims was the affirmation and, indeed, re-affirmation of life, it is not surprising why the combination of Mitleid and negative significance of suffering should be seen by him as a threat and odious obstacle to his aim.
Against Mitleid and against the negative significance of suffering Nietzsche puts forward his own proposals. He argues in On the Genealogy of Morals [III:14] that suffering and particularly the suffering of others, i.e. the suffering of the sick, weak, and misshapen multitude of the herd, must not be allowed to obstruct the life of the strong - those lucky, talented, healthy few who must be promoted because needed as blueprint for future men. He warns us therefore against what he calls ‘the conspiracy of the sufferers against the well-formed and victorious’ and makes his famous claim that the weak pose the greatest danger to the strong, and that the strong and healthy have to be shielded from polluting contact with the sick with their secret resentment and veiled pleas for Mitleid. On a more positive note, Nietzsche urges us to accept our suffering as an integral part of a worthwhile life, to actively and purposefully master it and not just passively ‘suffer’ it. Active acceptance and mastering are not just better ways of coping with suffering, they function at the same time also as an affirmation of life. Hence Nietzsche despised the feeble resignation and impotent resentment with which members of the herd fail to accept their suffering, thus fail to cope, thus fail to affirm.
[6]
With the above in mind, let us now turn to the second of our two questions and Nussbaum’s claim [see bibliography] that Nietzsche lacked ‘inner understanding’ of the misery and contingency of suffering. Nussbaum accuses Nietzsche of insensitivity for the way suffering can be erosive of human well-being. She argues that Nietzsche had no grasp of the simple truth that one functions badly when one is hungry and that stoic self-command is just not possible when suffering from what she terms ‘basic vulnerability’. Nussbaum contrasts ‘basic vulnerability’, which comprises deprivations of resources utterly central to human mental, physical, and intellectual functioning, from ‘bourgeois vulnerability’ with its relatively comfortable pains of loneliness, ill health, bad reputation, and so on. These latter pains, Nussbaum argues, are indeed painful enough but not such as to impair human functioning altogether. She insists that Nietzsche simply ignored ‘basic vulnerability’ since he apparently believed that even a beggar could be a stoic hero so long as socialism and Mitleid did not keep him weak. Thus Nussbaum concludes that despite all his famous unhappiness Nietzsche was without ‘inner understanding of the ways contingency matters for virtue’.
These are powerful and thought provoking objections. However, I suggest that they somewhat miss their point because Nietzsche was not interested in virtue, did not address himself to the multitude, and did not, therefore, envisage the possibility of members of the herd growing into stoic heroes. Moreover, there is ample evidence throughout his writings as well as in his letters that he was not insensitive to the fact that deprivation – mental and physical – stunts growth and that severe pain and misery not only hurts but also harms people. Yet Nietzsche nonetheless, and here lies the highly controversial nature of his thought, refused to grant suffering, even severe suffering, the kind of significance assigned to it through the influence of Christianity and Schopenhauer, which leads, almost inevitably, to Mitleid and hence, Nietzsche feared, to erosion of the will to power of those precious, privileged few by undermining their confidence in themselves and in their lives. The truly objectionable feature of suffering, Nietzsche holds, is not the well-acknowledged fact that it hurts and harms people, but the non-acknowledged and deeply deplorable fact that so many sufferers simply fail to respond appropriately to their suffering and thus allow themselves to become feeble, impaired, wretched – in other words, they allow themselves to ‘suffer’ hurt and harm. We can conclude, then, that Nietzsche was not insensitive to the misery and contingency of suffering but simply refused to accept its alleged wider significance.
[7]
Regarding the question whether Nietzsche truly believed that mere pity is all there is to Mitleid, one must concede that much speaks for such a conclusion since, as we have seen, most of the objections put forward by Nietzsche against Mitleid apply to Mitleid understood merely as pity and not as compassion. Because of this some commentators and translators believe that pity is all there is to Nietzsche’s Mitleid and thus to doubt that Nietzsche had any inkling of the existence and power of compassion. In what follows I will argue that Nietzsche was aware of the existence of compassion and, indeed, feared its power.
Let us focus again on the difference between pity and compassion with the help of Nietzsche’s own words. Zarathustra declares [part II: Of the Pitiers]:
But I am a giver: gladly give I as a friend to friends. But strangers and the poor may
help themselves to the fruit of my trees: it shames less that way. [my translation]
Let us leave aside the question of shame and concentrate solely on the attitude of the speaker who describes himself as a giver. He gladly gives to friends – presumably out of friendship – and also gives to strangers and the poor – presumably out of Mitleid. So Zarathustra gives to both, but note the difference in his attitude towards them! With the first group Zarathustra identifies because of the bond of friendship, he is attentive to them as someone like himself – as a friend to friends. But the second group, the strangers and poor, he keeps at a distance, a distance defined by their condition of strangeness and poverty. This is precisely the distance we have earlier defined as characteristic of the attitude of pity. It separates the needy by defining them – as with a label – by their condition of strangeness and poverty thus failing to attend to them as persons, as someone like oneself. One consequence of keeping strangers and the poor in this way separate and at a distance is that, after opening the gates to one’s orchard, nothing stops one now from happily continuing one’s own pursuits such as, perhaps, feasting with one’s friends while the needy are away in the orchard.
Contrast this with what Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals [III:14] where he speaks of the danger the weak pose for the strong as well as of the danger of ‘great Mitleid’. Nietzsche informs us that ‘the failed, downcast, and broken’ are the ones ‘who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves’. And so he warns us against what he calls ‘the conspiracy of the sufferers’ and against a time when the weakest….
….might succeed in shoving their own misery, all misery generally into the
conscience of the happy: so that they would one day begin to be ashamed of
their happiness and perhaps say to each other: ‘it is a disgrace to be happy!
there is too much misery! [my translation]
But how do the weak manage to shove their misery into the conscience of the happy?
They do it by inducing in them ‘great Mitleid’. It begins, according to Nietzsche, with the ‘veiled look’ in the eyes of the wretched which produces in the strong a ‘deep sadness’. Nietzsche eloquently describes that ‘veiled look’ as a dangerous mixture of pain and secret resentment: dangerous, because the resultant ‘deep sadness’ is just the beginning. For Nietzsche predicts that this sadness will eventually grow into guilt and shame until, in the end, the happy begin to doubt their very right to happiness in face of ‘too much misery’. In other words, the misery and wretchedness of the weak has potentially serious consequences for the strong inasmuch as it undermines their hitherto unquestioned confidence in the superior value of themselves and their lives.
Please note that the objection to Mitleid in the Genealogy [III;14] is also of the detrimental-to-givers kind, but, unlike Zarathustra earlier, the agent now experiences and succumbs to ‘great Mitleid’, and is thus unable to simply cleanse herself of its effect by ‘washing her hands and wiping her soul’.
[8]
The difference between the attitude of Zarathustra and Nietzsche’s description of ‘great Mitleid’ in the Genealogy captures an important difference between pity and compassion. Remember the description of pity as agent distress at the suffering of others. There is ample everyday evidence that the distress of pity generally leads to action that relieves, at one and the same time, both the suffering of others and the distress of agents. This is precisely the case with Zarathustra: feeling pity for the hungry, he opens the gates of his orchard [or makes a credit card donation] thus relieving the hungry and his own distress. And now he can switch off, as it were, and continue untroubled with his previous lifestyle. Not so, however, with the agent Nietzsche describes in the Genealogy! Having looked deeply into the eyes of the wretched, that agent now experiences a ‘deep sadness’; a sadness, furthermore, which Nietzsche believes will eventually undermine her previous enjoyment and affirmation of life. In other words, after looking deep in the eyes of pain, even if they also harbour secret resentment, things no longer remain the same, since the agent is now troubled by doubt about her previously unquestioned right to happiness, unsettled by the thought that ‘it is a disgrace to be happy! there is too much misery!’ So, unlike Zarathustra, this agent will be unable to merrily feast with her friends while the hungry are away in the orchard.
So what is the difference? The difference is that Zarathustra feels Mitleid merely as pity while the deeply sad agent feels what Nietzsche calls ‘great Mitleid’, which we can now confidently translate as compassion. By allowing the pain of others to move her in such a way as to feel solidarity with them, this agent bridges the gap of separation and otherness by acknowledging them as persons with whom she has a common bond. That very acknowledgement prevents her now from continuing to enjoy the kind of untroubled outlook that Nietzsche believes is - and wants to maintain as - the birthright of the strong. Moreover, that acknowledgement also initiates the dreaded slide into degeneration, since Nietzsche believed that once tempted by ‘great Mitleid’ to succumb to sadness and feelings of guilt, the agent has forfeited, as it were, her right to membership of the strong for she now identifies with miserable members of the herd. And I suggest that this very power to tempt the strong to identify with the weak, thus subverting confidence in their own superiority, is precisely what Nietzsche most fears about ‘great Mitleid’ or compassion. Hence the polemic, hence the passionate rhetoric of his objections, for Nietzsche certainly has no objections to feeding the hungry! Indeed, it would be a mistake to conclude, as Nussbaum seems to have done, that Nietzsche rejects feeding the hungry when he rejects Mitleid. Feeding the hungry is perfectly all right as long as it is done from an overflow of strength, from an abundance of happiness, and not from Mitleid, especially not from ‘great Mitleid’ with its temptation to identify with the weak thus opening the sluice gates of degeneration. [see also Beyond Good And Evil 260 and Daybreak 103]
[9]
Naturally, one can question whether Nietzsche is correct in his assessment of ‘great Mitleid’ or compassion, and one should note, in particular, the absence of any consideration whether compassion might actually be beneficial to its recipient. All the same, there can be no doubt that Nietzsche was extraordinarily astute and profound in his observations of some of the consequences of both pity and compassion. He well observed that pity can be detrimental to its recipients while nonetheless being relatively safe to its givers, since nothing detrimental or demanding usually accrues to givers when the needy are kept safely at a distance. Nietzsche also noted that compassion, by contrast, can be very demanding indeed to its givers – and thus might be deemed detrimental to them – since allowing oneself to acknowledge a common bond with sufferers might seriously undermine one’s previous, perhaps untroubled, outlook on life.
Nietzsche dreaded what he considered highly deplorable consequences of giving suffering a wider significance; not because he was unaware that misery and want are painful but because he feared that a wider significance would seriously jeopardize his revaluation project. We can conclude, then, that Nietzsche was aware and, indeed, mindful of suffering and that he recognized some of the differences between pity and compassion. It follows that he also recognized that there is more to Mitleid than mere pity.
Gudrun von Tevenar, Birkbeck College, London
Nietzsche, F. Werke; [Schlechta], Carl Hanser Verlag, Muenchen, 1977
Nussbaum, M ‘Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism’; in Schacht [ed]
Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality; University of California Press, 1994
Schopenhauer, A. Werke; Diogenes Verlag, Zuerich, 1977
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