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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 262 a disposition to restore the inner integrity of the other that is altruistic without being - literally - self-sacrificial. This is why compassion requires a symmetric imaginative involvement with the other's inner states. Unlike both vicarious possession by another's suffering, which violates 3(a), and self-absorption, which violates 3(b), compassion preserves the symmetry, required of an appropriate imaginative involvement with another's inner state, between one's empathic understanding of that state and one's own direct reaction to it. In compassion, I sympathetically feel the same inner state I empathically imagine you to feel, namely suffering, and with the same vividness I imagine you to feel it. However, my sympathetic experience of your suffering as I empathically imagine it is connected to my agency in a way in which your direct experience of your suffering as I empathically imagine it is not. That my sympathetic experience is of your suffering as I empathically imagine it, and not of my own, is what inclines me to ameliorate your suffering rather than my own. That my sympathetic experience of your suffering as I empathically imagine it is sympathetic is what inclines me to ameliorate your suffering rather than (or in addition to) you. And that my sympathetic experience is of your suffering, rather than of your gratification, is what inclines me to ameliorate it rather than promote it. But if my sympathetic experience is overwhelmed by the vividness and depth of your suffering as I empathically imagine it, then I abdicate my sense of self and agency to the self I empathically imagine you to have; I am vicariously possessed by your suffering. And if your suffering as I empathically imagine it is overwhelmed by the vividness and depth of my sympathetic experience of it, then I sacrifice your suffering as I empathically imagine it to my sympathetic experience of it; I am absorbed in that sympathetic inner state of my self I empathically imagine to be yours. Like dead-end relationships, self-absorption in one's own sympathy for others is hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon; but it is itself more worthy of pity than sympathy. That is why an imaginative involvement with another's suffering counts as compassion only if it is symmetric with respect to the relation between the other's empathically imagined inner state and one's own sympathetic one.3 How should we analyze our feelings towards the masochist? This depends on the correct description of masochism. If masochism involves feeling pleasure in response to an experience that would cause us pain, then it may difficult to empathize with the masochist's inner state, since difficult to viscerally understand it; more difficult still to sympathize with his inner state, since difficult to for us to feel concordantly; and impossible to feeling any immediate inclination to render aid since, according to this description, he does not suffer. So whatever we may feel about this brand of masochist, it will not be, on this account, compassion. Of course we may feel distressed or shocked 3 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
