Considering Compassion

Global Ethics, Human Dignity, and the Compassionate God

Frits de Lange, L. Juliana Claassens, de Lange, Claassens

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781498281522
  9781498281546
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498281539
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In light of the numerous challenges posed by globalization, living together as humanity on one planet needs to be reinvented in the twenty-first century. To create a new, peaceful, just, and sustainable world order is vital to the survival of us all. In this regard, humankind will have to expand the limited scope of its moral imagination beyond the borders of family, tribe, class, religion, nation, and culture. Will the cultivation of compassion, as scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Karen Armstrong, and religious leaders like the Dalai Lama maintain, contribute to a more just world? A global movement to cultivate and extend compassion beyond the immediate circle of concern may indeed find inspiration from many different religious traditions. The question at the heart of this book is whether the Christian legacy provides us with sources of moral imagination needed to guide us into the global era. Can the Christian practice of faith contribute to a more compassionate world? If so, how? And is it true that compassion is what we need, or do we need something else (justice, for example)? In Considering Compassion, colleagues from different theological disciplines at Stellenbosch, South Africa, and Groningen, Netherlands, take up these challenging questions from a variety of interdisciplinary angles.

Retrieving Compassion

Rethinking the Ethics of Compassion with Levinas and Badiou

Renée van Riessen

Contemporary Perspectives on Compassion

Compassion and empathy are words which attract attention in the public debate about a possible new ethics. Several popular writers agree that a new ethics of solidarity is needed—an ethics that would reflect the global situation of humankind and that could give new inspiration for solidarity between people who live in different cultures and different socioeconomic situations. Sometimes, the interwovenness of spirituality and ethics is underlined when compassion is in discussion. This is the case with Karen Armstrong, who launched a model for transforming groups and communities of several backgrounds in the direction of a more compassionate lifestyle: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. This was followed by a “Charter of Compassion,” which can be signed by city councils and even countries.134

Three years after Armstrong’s book was published in 2011, the British lifestyle philosopher Roman Krznaric published a book entitled Empathy. A Handbook for Revolution, in which (as the title indicates) he announces a revolution of human relationships inspired by the “radical power of empathy.”135

Although from different backgrounds—Armstrong argues mainly from the perspective of religious studies and the history of religion, whereas Krznaric is one of Britain’s leading “popular philosophers”—both books show many similarities. In both cases, the approach is mainly practical (though supported by theoretical insights). Both Armstrong and Krznaric focus on compassion and empathy as an attitude which can be practiced and in which one may become educated and more accomplished through time.136 Both refer to recent biological research of Frans de Waal and others that gives insight into the true character of human nature as related to the behavior of other primates such as bonobos and orangutans. In addition, both give us the same reassuring message about brain and cortex: that aggression is part of the “old brain” that focused human beings (like most animals) on survival, whereas compassion, understood as behaving empathically toward others, is part of the “new brain” that developed later, in the time when primates were forced to cooperate with one another in order to survive. Finally, both also mention the attitude of mammals toward their offspring as a fact that could offer useful insights about the way compassion is anchored in human nature.137

Whereas Armstrong and Krznaric emphasize the practical development of a compassionate and empathic attitude to others, philosopher Martha Nussbaum engages in a more theoretical reflection on the phenomenon of compassion. For Nussbaum, compassion is a fundamental (“basic”) social emotion: it is the emotion par excellence that induces human beings to behave socially. A good example of Nussbaum’s argument is found in her explanation of the effect of compassion on social relations by recounting the story of Philoctetes that inspired Sophocles to write the eponymous play.138 Nussbaum takes ample time to tell the story of Philoctetes, a good man who was struck by misfortune when he was on his way to Troy to fight on the side of the Greeks. On the island of Lemnos he accidentally trespassed on sacred soil, and was punished with a serpent’s bite in his foot. The pain in his foot made him cry out curses which spoiled the religious observances of the other soldiers. Therefore, they decided to leave him alone at Lemnos as a despicable man, without resources apart from his bow and arrows. Ten years later they came to bring him back, having learned that they could not win the war without him. The leaders of the expedition saw Philoctetes as a tool for their purposes, but in Sophocles’ play the chorus of soldiers expresses another perspective when they imagine vividly what it is to be like Philoctetes. They protest against the cruelty of the commanders, and express feelings of pity:

For my part, I pity him—thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no resources to meet his daily needs. How in the world does the poor man survive?139

Nussbaum points out that the members of the chorus stand in for the imaginative activity of the audience, “for whom the entire drama is an imaginative act of sympathy.” In this way, she considers Philoctetes’s story to be the perfect model of the emotion of pity or compassion that lays at the heart of Athenian tragedy.

Indeed, Philoctetes’s story is both beautiful and impressive. But why should such an expression of the emotion of compassion or pity in tragedy be important for ethics? Nussbaum gives several answers to this question. First, she clarifies that compassion is a central bridge between individual and community, because it is conceived of as our species’ way of connecting the concerns of others to our own personal goods. Thus, compassion is a useful emotion that could foster more social behavior. Nussbaum’s second point is that in several moral theories, compassion is unjustly seen as an irrational force. This claim could lead to a simple dismissal of the emotion on the wrong grounds. Furthermore, the investigation of compassion fits into a larger discussion within social philosophy about the place and value of emotions. Does making room for sentiments like compassion mean that we will base political judgement upon a force that is affective rather than cognitive? Here, Nussbaum shows that Enlightenment thinkers (who at present do not give compassion a central place) could change their attitude and even begin to do so without altering much in the substance of their moral theories. In other words: compassion is not only a basic emotion, but also a kind of reasoning, as it is based on “thought about the well-being of others.”140 But how could one learn such a complex sentiment? To elucidate that, Nussbaum refers to Émile, Rousseau’s book on education. Rousseau observes that Émile, the boy he was trying to “educate” was unable to interpret gestures of suffering until he became able to imagine the suffering himself. Rousseau concludes that to see the suffering without experiencing the feeling is not to know it. In other words: Émile has to do cognitive work. As Nussbaum argues, “[t]o determine whether Émile has pity, we look for the evidence of a certain sort of thought or imagination in what he says, in what he does.”141 Therefore, Nussbaum sees an important role fo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Rethinking Compassion
• Retrieving Compassion
• Enacting Compassion
• Cultivating Compassion