Empathy as an Ethical Stance

Ethically, empathy belongs in the same space as Aristotelian friendship, in which the friend is as another self; and with the golden rule; Kantian respect for others; and Hegelian mutual recognition. It is a prescription for non-egotism and avoidance of self-centeredness. Nothing is really more important than genuinely caring for others, which must include listening to them, and not simply doing or telling them what we think is right for them.

There is a fine line between making and asserting our own independent judgments of what is right — which every ethical being needs to be able to do — and imposing them on others. Empathy is what helps us navigate these gray areas.

I personally see a complementary principle that helps complete this. That is that we should in general as much as possible mean what we say, and say what we mean. I see this partly as a matter of personal integrity, and partly as a way of helping others understand us as best possible, when they may not themselves see things as we do. This can also be understood as a kind of more specific empathy for the listener on behalf of the speaker.

Enticing Possibilities?

After the interesting discussion of the “crossing out” of previous beliefs, Husserl continues his lectures on passive synthesis with a discussion of doubt and possibility.

In contrast to the “crossing out” that implements negation in lived experience — where a previous expectation is definitively refuted by a new apprehension — the mode of doubt represents a condition in which we experience conflicting apprehensions side by side in a modally weakened state, and the conflict remains as yet unresolved.

The mode of open possibility involves a different kind of modal weakening in which some more general frame has the status of “normal” perception and the associated subjective “certainty”, but unlike the simple case of normal perception, the associated halo of additional expectation does not converge on a single outcome, but rather diverges into alternatives, and nothing motivates us to preferentially expect one alternative rather than another.

What Husserl calls an enticing possibility, on the other hand, is one that we feel drawn to believe in. It is still only a possibility, and we may end up in doubt because conflicting alternative possibilities each entice us to some degree. I find this notion of “enticing possibility” highly intriguing.

“Motivation prefigures something positively, and yet does so in the mode of uncertainty” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 81). “Let us look back to the phenomenon of doubt. Whenever we speak of doubt, we also speak of propensities to believe. What occurs in the front side that is seen, together with its apprehended sense for the back side, may prefigure something determinate. But it does so ambiguously and not unequivocally. This happens when we become unsure whether what we see is a complete thing or a piece of scenery, for example…. In this way the normal egoic act of perception is modalized into acts we call enticements to believe. From the side of the objective senses, from the side of the objects given to consciousness, we also speak here of enticements to be, which is to say that affection issues from the side of the object, that the object exerts on the ego an enticing demand to be…. The sense itself has the propensity to be” (p. 82).

I was a bit surprised by the sudden introduction of an “egoic act of perception” out of the blue here. At minimum, any such reference takes us outside the sphere of passive synthesis. But Husserl means to discuss not only passive synthesis but also how it is interleaved with active synthesis, and he has already implicitly broadened the scope in speaking of belief, doubt, and judgment.

My lingering concern is that I consider anything like an ego to be a teleological tendency, and I don’t take a teleological tendency to be the kind of thing that could exercise simple agency. Perhaps the agency implied here is not really meant to be simple. I do think that all real-world agency is non-simple (i.e., involves a mixture of activity and passivity), but Husserl hasn’t discussed the nature of agency, and his references here seem to suggest the simple kind that I consider suspect. I hope this will be clarified later.

Similarly, I was surprised by the reference to “objects given to consciousness”. Perhaps I am being too literal here, but his earlier discussion of “adumbration” in perception seems to me to rule out any simple givenness of objects as objects. The best connection I can make for a givenness of objects is to the earlier discussion’s mention of the object “in the flesh” that we always have, but that discussion makes clear that the “object” we have in the flesh is far from completely determinate. But what exerts an enticing demand was first of all a determinate possibility.

I think he is saying “object” in more than one way here. The object that exerts an enticing demand to be is not the “object” given in the flesh.

His statement that “The sense itself has the propensity to be” is also intriguing, and seems less problematic to me. If we substitute “sense” for “object”, it makes good sense to me that “the sense exerts… an enticing demand to be” (see Ideas Are Not Inert).

“Let us call these new possibilities problematic possibilities or questionable possibilities. We do this because the intention to make a decision arising in doubt between one of the enticing factions of doubt is called a questioning intention. We speak of questionableness only where enticements and contraposing enticements play off of each other” (p. 83).

“It is now clear that we have determined a closed and exactly limited group of modalities from a primordial mode of straightforward naive certainty” (p. 84).

Here he seems to be claiming it is “clear” that the modalities discussed so far are the only possible ones that could modify naive perceptual certainty. I don’t immediately have any other candidates, but “closed and exactly limited” is a strong claim that seems to come out of the blue.

“We can continue our exposition of problematic possibilities by noting that they and only they appear with a different weight. The enticement is more or less enticing; and that also holds particularly when comparing all potentially diverse problematic possibilities that belong to one and the same conflict and that are bound synthetically through this conflict.” (ibid).

I generally like the analogy of comparing weights here, though it is not clear to me that the intrinsic “weights” of all enticements would be commensurable.

“Such opposing enticements, opposing possibilities, can have differing weight; they exercise a stronger or weaker pull, but they do not determine me. Determining me in belief is just the one possibility for which I am resolved, for which I have decided earlier, perhaps in a process of passing through doubt” (ibid). “Different witnesses speak and present their testimonies, having different weight. I weigh them and decide for the one witness and his testimony. I reject the other testimonies” (p. 85).

“Yet I can potentially mark the differing weights without deciding in favor of one of the enticements…. For example, a cloudy sky together with humidity speak in favor of a thunderstorm, but not ‘for sure'” (ibid).

“[T]he fact that I let myself ‘willingly’ be drawn in, that I am about to follow it, is still something new phenomenologically. However, here this ‘following’ can be inhibited by opposing propensities, or not be ‘efficacious’ at all…. It is not merely the case that the one testimony whose enticement is privileged is stronger: We lend it validity, believing in it in our subjective certainty…. We can then speak of presumption or of a presumptuous certainty in a specific sense…. In itself, in its own phenomenological character, this presumptuous certainty is characterized as an impure certainty…. Obviously, this impurity, this murkiness, has its degrees” (p. 86).

An anticipation of this new dimension of our weighing, willingness, lending of validity, and “presumptuous certainty” is probably what underlay the earlier sudden reference to “egoic acts”. I have no issue with this more concrete development. The fact that he refers to presumption, impurity, and murkiness here provides a reassuring weakening of what earlier seemed overly strong.

Act and Action

Still pursuing roots of the modern “subject” in medieval Latin scholasticism by way of Alain de Libera’s Archéologie du sujet, I’ve reached the point where de Libera reviews Bernard Lonergan’s detailed account of act, action, and related terms in Aquinas. The most noteworthy conclusion is that Aquinas distinguishes “act” from “action” in opposite ways in different texts, when he combines it with his other distinction between cases of immanent and transient action. This confusion appears not to have originated with Aquinas himself, but rather with the Latin translations of Greek texts that he used.

In any event, the way these distinctions are deployed by Aquinas is to say the least highly fluid, which is to say that any attempt to interpret them univocally would result in contradictions. (Burrell, who considers the analogy of being a later development attributable to Cajetan, nonetheless suggests that there is an analogy of action in Aquinas.)

De Libera constructs a table of Latin terms (vol. 3 part 1, p. 325) used by Aquinas for the Greek energeia (literally “in-actness”, for which I’ve been using the conventional translation of “actuality”) in the agent and in an external product, respectively. Energeia may be actus in the agent and actio in the product, or vice versa. It may be operatio in the agent and either actio or factio in the product. It may be actio in the agent and factio in the product.

“What it is necessary to understand in this context is that for Aristotle it is one and the same principle that accounts for act, whether in the agent or the product. That principle is form” (ibid, my translation, emphasis added). According to de Libera, for Aquinas too form is the principle of both the act that remains in the agent, and that which passes to the product. (Burrell reads Aquinas in a relational way that avoids de Libera’s suggestion of something passing between agent and product. The idea of something passing between agent and product suggests Suarez’s later explanation of efficient causation by “influence”.)

De Libera takes note (pp. 327-332) of the Latin translation of the influential definition of praxis (ethical action or practice) in the treatise On the Nature of Man by the 4th century CE Syrian bishop Nemesius of Emesa used by Aquinas. In Greek, Nemesius says “praxis is energeia logiké“. The Latin translation by Burgundio of Pisa says “gestio is actus rationalis“. But the same translator rendered the same Greek sentence in The Orthodox Faith by the 7th century monk John of Damascus as “actio is operatio rationalis“.

This might seem like a complete muddle. But if we take act as form as the guiding thread as de Libera suggests, it may be possible to get something coherent out of it. On the other hand, some adjustment would still be required if we also accepted the identification of act with action and of action with an efficient cause. If act is supposed to be understood as form and end and action as the efficient cause or means by which an end is accomplished, then act cannot be identified with action.

It is one thing to recognize the limits of attempting to apply univocity and formalism in logic to the real world, and quite another to affirm a contradiction. But this is a quite delicate area, and sometimes there are arguments whether there is truly a contradiction or merely an implicit distinction between cases. The answer to this depends on interpretation, and every interpretation is subject to dialogue.

De Libera says that Burgundio’s translation of John of Damascus “introduces nothing less than the ‘modern’ vocabulary of action” (p. 327). Thus it seems that Aquinas ends up with an unstable combination of Aristotelian and “modern” meanings for act and action, but the instability was already present in the sources he used.

Ricoeur on History

Having just treated Ricoeur’s views on historiography at a semi-technical level, and having just received a copy of his collection of essays History and Truth (French ed. 1955), I think this less technical earlier work, roughly contemporary with Freedom and Nature, merits a digression. It gives broad expression to his desire to mediate and reconcile, as well as more specific voice to his personal views on religion and politics.

At this stage, history for Ricoeur particularly meant two special kinds of history — the history of philosophy, and the historical dimension of Christian revelation.

The kind of history of philosophy he wanted to practice would not involve treating views of philosophers as instantiations of generic types of views, but rather treating each philosopher as a singularity. He argues that good history in general is largely concerned with singulars. I would agree on both points. There is a precursor to his later argument about the mediating role of singular causal imputation, and one of the essays begins with the wonderful quote from Spinoza that to better know singulars is to better know God.

In contrast to adherents of philosophical “systems” who would reduce the history of philosophy to moments in a monolithic “philosophy of history” subordinated to a system, he poses the idea of a simultaneously sympathetic and critical account of irreducibly multiple, integral philosophies. Philosophical “problems”, he says, do not eternally have the same meaning.

I find this very admirable, even though Ricoeur at this stage sounds like he uncritically accepted a Kierkegaardian view of Hegel as the bad “systematic” philosopher of history par excellence, whereas I follow more recent readings of Hegel as a leading critic of that sort of thing. On the other hand, he very correctly points out how Hegel reduced away Spinoza’s genuine concern for subjectivity.

Somewhat circumspectly, he suggests that a Christian notion of revelatory events in history creates something like a surplus of meaning that acts as a safeguard against totalizing views of history. I’m generally very nervous about claims of revelation, as revelation is often regarded as an unchallengeable knowledge with self-evident interpretation. Arrogant humans too often claim to just know the will of God, and want to impose their certainty on others. This has nothing to do with piety, and certainly does not reflect any humility or respect for mystery. The idea of a surplus of meaning on the other hand is precisely not a claim to “just know” that meaning.

Ricoeur’s idea of an inexhaustible “surplus” of meaning exceeding any interpretation has been criticized as implying that the meaning then must be predetermined on some virtual level, but that objection seems artificial to me, because Ricoeur’s idea is an acknowledgement of lack of knowledge rather than a knowledge claim. The inexhaustible surplus seems to me to be a less “metaphysical” analogue of the neoplatonic notion that ultimate principles are “supra-essential” and therefore beyond the grasp of rigorous knowledge but only hinted at in symbols, which I think actually reflected a kind of epistemic modesty. This seems to me no more objectionable than Kant’s notion of things in themselves as exceeding our knowledge.

As in the later discussion in Time and Narrative, he ambivalently develops a notion of historical objectivity and truth. On the one hand, he finds the quest for this both necessary and admirable, but on the other he worries that the truth of the historian abolishes both history as grounded in subjective consciousness, and the eschatology associated with revelation. Ricoeur wants to make room for personal faith, without compromising the autonomy of philosophy by asserting its subordination to revealed theology. He advocates for historical objectivity, but remains wary of any objectifying reduction of human or spiritual realities. The antidote to objectification is Marcelian mystery, and a recognition of ambiguity that he associates with faith. Ultimately, he wants to promote hope.

The later, even more nuanced discussion in Time and Narrative carefully weakens this work’s apparent claims on behalf of subjective consciousness, but here too, there is considerable subtlety.

In contrast to Sartre’s identification of freedom with negativity and nothingness, he wants to emphasize the primacy of affirmation. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, he says he wants to emphasize the primacy of a phenomenology of signification and meaning like that developed in Husserl’s early Logical Investigations. Ricoeur already thinks it is an error to treat human perception as if it could be separated from our involvement in language.

One essay is a tribute to Emmanuel Mounier, to whose journal Esprit he was a frequent contributor. Mounier’s “personalist” movement aimed at a new pedagogy to combat modern alienation, combining Christianity and a concern for the individual with a sort of democratic socialism. Another piece deals with nonviolence, and another contrasts Christian Agape with the “punitive violence of the magistrate” (p. 240).

Political power, Ricoeur says, is eminently prone to evil. Utopian belief in the future withering away of the state allowed many to justify a disregard for terrible abuses in the present, while the “false truth” of fascism was morally far worse. Clerical power is as dangerous as political power. “[T]he religious totality and the political totality are genuine totalities of our existence. This is why they are the two greatest temptations for the spirit of falsehood, the lapse from the total to the totalitarian” (p. 189). Ricoeur says that “the Christian has everything to learn from the critique of power elaborated by classical ‘liberal’ thought from Locke to Montesquieu, by the ‘anarchist’ thought of Bakunin, by those who supported the [Paris Commune of 1870], and by the non-Stalinist Marxists” (p. 117).

Ricoeur on Embodiment

I’m still working through the introduction to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature. Having said a bit about how he intends to adapt Husserlian phenomenology, here I’ll add a few notes on the impact of Ricoeur’s Marcelian concerns.

“[A]s we examine actual practice, the understanding of articulations between the voluntary and the involuntary which we call motivation, motion, conditioning, etc., becomes stymied in an invincible confusion…. The triumph of description is distinction rather than a reuniting leap. Even in the first person, desire is something other than decision, movement is other than an idea, necessity is other than the will which consents to it. The Cogito is broken up within itself ” (pp. 13-14).

Considerations like this are why I think it is actually more precise to speak more loosely of “subjectivity” rather than “a” or “the” subject. Ricoeur draws the consequence that “the Ego must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the self’s constant return to itself” (p. 14). He then introduces Marcel’s point about the mystery of incarnation as the answer to the question “How can I regain the sense of being alternately given over to my body and also its master… if not by… attempts to identify with the definite experience of existence which is myself in a corporal situation?” (p. 15; emphasis in original). In a more Aristotelian way, I’ve been making a similar point by suggesting that the hylomorphic, form-of-the-body notion of “soul” makes a good top-level model for the subtleties of what I’ve been calling empirical selfhood. (See also Two Kinds of Character; The Ambiguity of “Self”.)

Ricoeur goes on to say “the concepts we use, such as motivation, completion of a project, situation, etc., are indications of a living experience in which we are submerged more than signs of mastery which our intelligence exercises over our human condition. But in turn it is the task of philosophy to clarify existence itself by use of concepts. And this is the function of a descriptive phenomenology: it is the watershed separating romantic effusion and shallow intellectualism” (p. 17). He goes on to identify this “region of rational symptoms of existence” (ibid) with the space of reason as distinct from analytic understanding.

As Aristotle might remind us, “existence” is said in many ways. I have issues with the use of many of them in philosophy, but I take Marcel’s use of this term in a different and much more positive way than those, as mainly emphasizing all the aspects of things that don’t fit into neat schematizations, and that Aristotle would say are not univocally ordered. Aristotle and Ricoeur both take an emphasis like Marcel’s and reinsert it into a broader context that includes a more positive role than Marcel himself found for developments of reason. (For more on the same book, see Phenomenology of Will; Ricoeurian Choice; Voluntary Action; Consent?.)

Next in this series: Voluntary Action

Subject, Object

Subject and object are functional roles. There is no guarantee that either has any stronger unity than is required by its role. Referentially, members of a subject-object pair may pick out parts of the same content. This can result in confusion when terms are used at different levels of analysis.

In the Sociology of Knowledge? post, I complained about a naive, unproblematic distinction between mind and world, then went on to speak of an asymmetric mutual determination. The latter sort of language might standardly be taken to imply a relation between distinct things, contradicting the former language. However, in context, the latter phrase is intended to be anaphoric at a higher level. In this case, mutual determination and the lack of an unproblematic distinction are two ways of talking about the same state of affairs.

This sort of mixed-metaphor-like phenomenon leading to apparent literal inconsistency often crops up when different dialectical levels are mentioned. We have to choose between potentially cumbersome formal disambiguation and extra interpretive work. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic.)