Paper presented at the International Congress for Phenomenology, Frankfurt 1985, and printed in: ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA XXII, 1987.
On the Rehabilitation of Compassion
Everywhere today the call goes out for a fundamental change in our thinking, a radical re-orientation of our way of living. And indeed, a revolutionary 'turning' in our behavior is in progress, a turning whose conceptualization is nevertheless as sorely lacking as the morality to which it would have to adhere.1 What then does 'new thinking' actually mean, and what shape does a morality take which is not mere lip service? The search for an effective 'ethics for technological age' has given rise in our time to strange coalitions, cultural borders are crossed with seemingly little or no difficulty, and traditional values turn up in the most unexpected places — as travesties of themselves. The oldest insights prove to be avant-garde. But isn't this all simply sham and a hectic activity of doctors standing helpless at the bedside of a dying patient? Love of one's neighbor, precepts of compassion, non-violent encounter are ideals expressed by all cultures of the world for thousands of years and frustrated a new with each generation. The influence of morality on all vital decisions, i.e. those serving one's own well-being, is notoriously marginal.
But can we resign ourselves to this kind of realism? Will the little time which may be left to the human race never be any different from the way it is now: well-dressed and well-nourished theorists in air-conditioned rooms argue over the principles of morality while elsewhere starvation becomes a way of life and the destruction of the biosphere daily routine? If ethics and morality have any significance at all it is that they express the conditions for a 'self-perfecting way of life'; and it is merely anthropocentric maliciousness to restrict this to human life.
From time immemorial only the very few have been considered capable of moral practice; "higher consciousness" (Schopenhauer) and teachers of Zen are rarities. While this is clearly the case in the life-world, it must be emphatically yet rationally pointed out that it means the death sentence for the human race. An individual of our time, conscious of his own imminent, certain death, may even feel a secret satisfaction that mankind will not long survive him. The search for a positive perspective as well as fear creates a thriving business for the professional theorist.
But even if it is only defiance which drives the philosopher to reject such a judgement on humanity, it leaves us not entirely without realistic prospects. The absence in the past of any fundamental turning in which all living beings participated merely says something about the paths which have already been taken. We know what has been done; but fortunately for us it still remains open as to what we might do. To begin with, we should emphasize and encourage the ability of the individual to completely and unconditionally reorientate himself,2 enabling him to reach that basic state of flux pre-existent3 to all understanding and to the apparently inextricable web of problems in the contemporary life-world.4
The "communicative ethics" of the new Frankfurt School remains just as superficial and irrelevant to world events as the professional realism of academic ethics. Those who ignore the concrete issues of perfecting our way of life and put their faith in an ethics of language use will be left in the end with only the weak argument that the life-world will force one into acknowledging moral standards and norms.5 A medieval guild mentality is employed with curious frankness as a basic argument: After all, we are philosophers and must therefore exchange views with one another, and for that reason are compelled to acknowledge various a priori concepts.6 This is said as if one knew what a philosopher is and what he has to do, and what is forgotten is that every new thinker, if he deserves the name, is in a position to change the nature of philosophy.
A 'turning' in thinking, feeling, and acting cannot be imposed, but by the same token it can be of just as little satisfaction to provide only the formal conditions of self-perfecting life in concrete terms. Instead, we must discover in what way moral action is binding, and in what way it is given, before all theoretical constructs.7 How does the phenomenon of morality show itself? Does it have a face which can be experienced in ordinary, everyday ways? Down below, where according to Hegel, life is real, we encounter a phenomenon which is as trivial as it is mysterious: We call it compassion. For all its inconspicuousness, the occurrence of compassion is capable of spectacularly invalidating all predictions regarding human behavior.8 This spontaneity of goodness in compassion has fascinated philosophers and theologians time and again. Thomas Aquinas calls compassion — in his words" compassion ruled by reason" (misericordia) — the greatest virtue after the love of God.9 And yet only Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Schweitzer10 have developed an ethics of practical compassion which in our time has been renewed as a "Humanism of the Other" by Emmanuel Levinas.11 It is well known that as early as Nietzsche we find a basic critique of the ethics of compassion, which he scornfully characterizes as the ethics of the weak and of "the losers".12 But is this really a reproach? Is it not instead the beginning of an understanding that not in happiness but rather in the common bond of affliction are we identical with all other beings? A continually 'self-perfecting way of life' in no way implies a life without sorrow or suffering; viewed correctly it means simply life without all the unnecessary suffering we cause one another. Thus it is precisely the "hopeless compassion with all beings", as Levinas stresses (with an earnestness characteristic of the Old Testament), which proves to be moral in the ecological and human crisis.
Schopenhauer, who made experience the basis for ethics and who did not propagate any ethics of abstract obligation, differentiated between three basic moral incentives: Egoism, which "desires one's own good"; malice, which "desires another's harm", and compassion, which "desires another's good".13 For Schopenhauer, compassion, the direct participation in the suffering of another, is the "basic phenomenon" of ethics from which humanitarianism and justice derive. Compassion sees through the illusion of our separateness and tears down the wall between "I and thou" (Martin Buber). Max Horkheimer later called this the "solidarity of sufferers".14
But with the very attempt at defining compassion one becomes entagled in an endless ideological dispute. The quarrel takes a different turn in different cultures, as the mutual indignation about the alleged lack of compassion among 'foreign' cultures bears witness. Neither does Schopenhauer's unconventional founding of ethics on the experience of compassion, and thereby on universal suffering, lead to a new and unprecedented morality. Instead, Schopenhauer attempts rather unconvincingly to derive the standard cardinal virtues from compassion and can then include those such as courage and love only with great effort. Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion seems a little too refined for the life-world. The role of justified individuality, which in actuality does practice compassion, is missing in his model, nor does Schopenhauer deal adequately with the 'faces of compassion' met in the life-world. Compassion almost always occurs here mixed with egoism, envy, malignant delight, or even cruelty, as Henning Ottmann recently called to mind. Moreover, Ottmann considers compassion qua emotion inconsistent and incapable of being kept stable of its own accord.15
A phemomenological interpretation of Schopenhauer's ethics as a well-founded theory of an ethics of compassion must, however, free itself from such limitations as result from the desire for pat definitions. We shall instead ask in what way compassion shows itself in our life-world and how we perceive the decisive characteristics of compassion without prior value judgement. A face is formed, as Jean-Paul Sartre teaches us, in the "look": through the interplay and mutual dependence of seeing and being seen.16 The face is by no means only an object in which I can read. On the contrary, it is my way of interpretation itself which belongs to the face and which comes toward me from there. Yet the face is not merely my own design — it speaks for itself, and it is my task to understand this language. Every face can be a mask,17 but it is to be revealed as such only after it has first been acknowledged phenomenologically in its right to existence. The "naked face" may distinguish itself from the masks, but only in the end, after the masquerade of the life-world is over. Faces are not roles, for they don't play anything: Faces are what they appear to be — whether as mask or as true face.
The most familiar face compassion possesses today is that of a compassion toward those furthest from us, toward our distant neighbor. This is most clearly evidenced by donation campaigns for the starving peoples of the Third World. With horrifying picutres — preferably of starving infants and children — and stirring reports, our mass media stimulates the viewer's willingness to give. This is a matter of 'occasional' compassion, one arising from an occasion, as is that of giving to the beggar on the street corner, only in such case a personal identification is possible. Compassion toward the furthermost remains abstract, and merely makes a mockery of what Hans Jonas calls for as a new ethics: responsibility for the one earth.18 The compassion of the donor is a sad substitute, and it is, in Schopenhauer's words, not without malice. For it is of little help to the people in Ethiopia and the Sudan — to name two urgent causes — to be kept alive artificially for one more season by injections of money from Europe and America. This would be compassion only if the causes of their inhumane situation were eliminated at the same time, and here we would be obliged to mention above all the world economic system established by and serving the egoism of those very donors in the industrial nations. The monetary contribution, as much as it is our undeniable duty and obligation, is fatally reminiscent of the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages according to the maxim: "When the penny rattles in the box, the soul leaps out of purgatory"!19
An even greater release from personal feelings of guilt than parting with a bit of money for the poor is afforded us by adherence to a creed or doctrine of compassion. This face is also strangely abstract. It is formed by intellectual submission to an objective order based ostensibly on compassion. This can be established not only by a religion, but by atheistic social doctrines as well: the "precepts of socialist morality" is a case in point. Here, too, compassion is split in half and remains entirely at the service of one's own desire to prove oneself moral. Excellent justification can be found for such compassion as well as for its being converted into social rewards without having to be put to the test unnecessarily. Who does not know the sad figure of the moralist pointing slyly to the preacher who also does not practice what he preaches? None other than Max Scheler laid claim to this mask, so as not to have to show his own face.
More convincing is the face of practical compassion, composed of the consequences of our actions and our failure to act. It is the kind of compassion even the skeptic would trust, since it deals not with words but deeds. This face can, however, exhibit surprising characteristics, its concreteness being at the same time its weakness. Nietzsche in Zarathustra considered it to be the "bestowing virtue"20 — one which gives the man who falls, a shove to boot. And it is certainly true that compassionate toughness, as in drug therapy, produces better results than understanding love which catches someone before the point of deepest humiliation and the final crisis is reached. Without a doubt, the face of practical compassion, manifest in its results is related to a comprehensive ethics, yet is oddly blind. For only afterwards can 'successful practice' be verified, and such knowledge always comes too late. Successful practice is dead and not able to guide the technologies of life.
Schweitzer wanted to formulate practical compassion as reverence for life — in order to conceal (as have other theorists) those discarded parts of a successful existence. "It is good to preserve and promote life; it is evil to destroy or to inhibit life." This basic tenet of Schweitzer's must necessarily come up against a great paradox, as Hiroshi Kojima has recently demonstrated.21 Since all life is equal as life, this fundamental principle is not practicable; every cockroach we poison would violate it. According to Kojima's view, only as an eschatological postulate directed toward the renewal of the entire world of nature would Schweitzer's fundamental principle have meaning. P. Hans Sun has further pointed out that even for Schweitzer life itself was not the supreme value; if it were he could have acted to preserve and promote it in much more efficient ways than he did at his primitive clinic in Africa.22
Kant unmasks the face of practical compassion even more profoundly. According to Kant we must truthfully answer the murderer, without regard for the consequences, who asks for the friend seeking refuge in our house.23 We may have no control over the consequences at the moment of a moral act, but we certainly are responsible for truth forming the basis of human community. Yet Kant's position is also highly ambiguous, since his compassion is for humanity as a whole and not the individual.
Compassion toward one's neighbor has two distinctly differing faces — one psychologically probable, the other improbable. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" — this time-honored maxim rests on a person's strengths, on egoism, which in Schopenhauer's neutral definition really only desires one's own good (and therefore need not harm anyone). Erich Fromm was correct in pointing out that only the person who can love himself is also capable of loving others;24 having compassion for one's neighbor is in a positive sense also compassion for one's self. Not a love of mankind in general, but actual devotion through physically conveyed empathy — this is a significant achievement. The second face of compassion toward one's neighbor — love of another more than oneself — is more improbable, but nevertheless often occurs. It is demonstrated in the fact that I sometimes feel sorrier for another than I would for myself — an altruism through denial of the self.
The egoistical compassion for one's neighbor is defended by realists. According to Ottmann, it contains "in acknowledgement of justified individuality a prudent analysis of the causes of suffering, of the situation of the one suffering, and of the real possibilities for help".25 But compassion so apparently close to the life-world shall never be able to achieve its promise. It restrains radical possibilities of aid, and like Narcissus simply sees its self-image in the other. It may be a mask which has already been inspired by the characteristics of a true face, but, as with natural beauty, it has been deformed by interpretation, turned into a mask itself.
In the case of altruistic compassion for one's neighbor, however, the mask is almost decomposed: the face of the other inflicts pain upon me in its defenselessly abandoned nakedness. Simone Weil wanted to be the "scapegoat" for others and face their misfortune.26 And Levinas subordinated his ethics to this command to help the other, an order which makes me see the other's frailness and mortality. This compassion is "hopeless", as Levinas says, and knows that we are all equal before misfortune.27 The face of this compassion toward one's neighbor offering itself as sacrifice is not formed by misfortune arising through one's own fault but rather by misfortune as an intrinsic characteristic of creation, i.e., by unavoidable suffering. Here compassion becomes keener through the character of suffering of the world and thereby returns to Schopenhauer's definition.
And yet the authentic face of compassion for one's neighbor also remains dependent upon the consent and acknowledgement of the observer or onlooker. He must desire to become the victim to be able to save the other. It is no coincidence that God — even as an absent God — must become the guarantor of this humanism of the other, this genuine compassion for our neighbor.28 But in this way the compelling force of the face of affliction proves also to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the victim himself. There is no onlooker touched by the face of compassion for one's neighbor, only a single cry of all beings: See my sorrow! But no eye has ever opened.
Usually the analysis is broken off after having reached this negative result. We have then confirmed what we always suspected in our dark moments: in an absurd world all that is left for one who is not capable of believing is a "heroic life" (Schopenhauer). But the ordinary phenomenon of compassion presumably touches on our greatest secret: our closeness which is for us the furthest from our grasp. Man looks away from himself, and his own face is for this reason more unfamiliar to him than anything else in the life-world. We experience our own face only as fragments in the look of the other, in the mirror of the world. We would probably not even recognize ourselves if we could see ourselves. And yet, we have a face, a life technology is ingrained in us of which we are capable even when we are unable to name it. Human existence continues largely as a success despite some failures, and fortunately for us this advantageous balance is inaccessible to our discoursive thinking. Intuitive knowledge enlightens our intuitive actions, and not a word is spoken. Language speaks and not man.28 Our organism, which encompasses far more than biologists think, listens to itself and malfunctions when we follow our intentions with no regard for our authentic needs. Such discoursive violence has its consequences; e.g. sitting at our desk for hours on end can only lead to our body's painful reaction! In each moment of our life — whether awake or asleep — we orientate ourselves intuitively toward successful functioning, and by no means do we learn primarily from our mistakes.
Precisely because they were the inventors and beneficiaries of the theory, many philosophers have preserved their feeling for the exceptional status of intuition. For Scheler, intuition was capable of shattering the forms and patterns which had lent the universe the character of a mere human environment,29 and Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis knew of the directly practical significance of intuition.30 Schopenhauer, for his part, indeed loathed "intellectual perception" for being a "dissembling ability" which seeks direct knowledge of that which no one can know. But this was in reference only to metaphysical and religious matters and not to that "intuitive knowledge in perception", peculiar to the artist as well as the saint, according to Schopenhauer.31
Intuitive knowledge is neither an esoteric doctrine nor an irreverent exploration of divine knowledge. Intuitive knowing qua compassion indicates in what way our existence occurs and is never experienced in any other way than in the particular situation. Intuitive knowledge is neither the wordless communication of the Mafiosi nor the verbose, pre-arranged consensus of the philosophers of the new Frankfurt School, both of which are far from accepting and thematisizing their mortality and their misfortune, their guilt and inadequacy.32 The comraderie of the life-world, which does not need many words for common action, is interested in an egoistical fulfilling and desires one's own good, if not another's harm.
But compassion as a way of living will become tangible for us only when it has been bent back into an active sensitization. The language of compassion cannot be gleaned from others, but the indignant pain of suffering wrong as well as the perverted joy of doing wrong reminds us only too well of our failings. Sensitizing means to develop all senses (the few trained, the numerous untrained ones) in a creative process and to do it without fear, without order, without foreknowledge. Once again poets are in the vanguard! Only in an unplanned manner, far from the influence of consciousness can we become humans; this process should be of as little concern to us as it is to all other beings.
The traditional concepts 'intuitive knowing' and 'compassion' tend to embody both halves of the humane way of life. Separated from one another, as generally happens — with the exception of Schopenhauer and Levinas — they decay. Intuitive knowledge without compassion would not have even begun to know about itself. And compassion without intuitive knowledge could only bring forth the masks of compassion. Without this unity the only compassion that would survive would be one which argued with itself, lacked spontaneity, failed to be universally directed, and was not practical. It would also be wrong to understand compassion as being anthropocentric, for the meaning of compassion is not decided by what we wish to have or wish to avoid. Having compassion means to experience the passion of the world and to act in accord with an ongoing process of fulfilling beyond joy and sorrow in the human sense.33 In this way death can be experienced intuitively, and a hard lot is suited to man — which must infuriate the hypocrite of compassion committed to a notion of the good life, but which also inevitably unmasks.
The 'continually self-perfecting way of life' as the meaning of morality and the basis for an ethics of non-violent survival demands a radical departure from our self-images — both present and possible.34 We must, as the Buddhist saints exemplify through their own lives, enter naked, powerless, and unknowing into that place where, in the cryptic words of Ernst Bloch, we already always are and yet have never been: home.35 It is a place at once different and the same for all beings. What sounds so theological here merely shares with theology reference to a common phenomenon. The god of the philosophers is silent. We human beings are not called by name by any god, for we have no name. In being the artificial ones we are the open, undetermined ones. Intuitive knowledge knows nothing, and compassion knows no law.
With its best representatives Buddhism has touched upon the exceptional event of "emptying" (sunyata) which neither aims at nothingness (as antithesis to Being) nor promises a future fullness in reward for our asceticism.36 Our life technology needs no foundations and precedes every rule. Life technology successfully occurs in the "between" (Heidegger) — between presence and absence, Being and time, subject and object. Our true face remains dark in an ontological sense but is effective, as Levinas emphasizes, precisely for this reason.37 But every restriction of this ethics of compassion — whether to our neighbor (as with Levinas) or to creatures capable of feeling pain (as with Schweitzer) — weakens it, sets presumptuous knowing against intuitive unknowing, befitting us alone. Compassion knows no limits, and our life technology is undermined when that which unnoticeably, successfully functions in its process of fulfilling must be replaced by an 'order'.
Neither chaos nor a new, unprecedented order follows the inner collapse of all established orders of knowledge and Being. A life free from the constraints of anxious intent is promised us, as practiced by man with many technologies. We are not, we do not possess ourselves, and we shall not be, for these signals of traditional thinking have been extinguished.38 For us, life technology takes precedence over every interpretation. Within it we adapt ourselves intuitively to the universal process of fulfilling, or we consciously fail it. Universal fulfilling is an order which we can never define. To even describe 'fulfilling' as an order is a mistake, yet is scarcely avoidable. Although indefinable, we experience the fulfilling in all our expressions of life as our event which is not questioned, more than that, which is heeded even throughout that most persistent questioning called the "piety of thinking" (Heidegger).
For the artificial ones, adjusting and integrating is the lifelong challenge to their creativity.39 Language and body, information as well as genes, are starting points, not outlived situations. Intuitive knowing, as it has been embodied in compassion, accompanies our life technology but does not reason over it. Discoursive thinking, the reflective power of judgement, calculating science — they must all be transformed into basic technologies which contribute unnoticeably to continual self-perfecting below the threshold of our attention (and therefore of our egoistical intervention). As far as we still consciously concern ourselves with the repetition of the world in abstract concepts, this will happen in unassuming corners of our culture, as a glass bead game of one-sided talents which are occasionally useful for repairs of certain basic technologies. Something quite different holds true for art, within whose plasticity we then shape our conscious and everyday life. Language, no longer misused as our instrument, unfolds as art and is the medium in which we exist.40 The intuitive language of compassion may well be at once the faintest and least possible of all language to ignore.
Universitat Hamburg
Translated by Virginia Cutrufelli