Category Archives: philosophy

from empathy toward compassion

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The English words empathy, sympathy, and compassion are used inconsistently; a dictionary will not sort them out.* For this discussion, I will posit the following definitions:

  • Empathy: An imaginative identification with someone else’s emotion. This is not just a belief that another person’s feels a certain way, but a kind of mirroring of the feeling. For example, if you are angry, and I empathize with you, then I “feel” your anger in some respect and to some degree. My feeling is embodied, affecting things like my heart rate and my involuntary facial expressions as well as any beliefs that I may express or privately think. Empathy can be positive if it mirrors a positive emotion. It is always partial and concrete. I can empathize with a person’s specific feeling or with the shared feeling of a group of people. I could empathize with many different people’s feelings, but only one by one, just as I can only hear one person’s story at a time.
  • Sympathy: An emotion provoked by someone else’s emotion. It is not a mirroring but a different feeling that arises in response. For example, if you are angry, and I sympathize, then I am sad that you are angry. The phrase “sympathetic joy” makes sense in English and covers situations when your fortunate condition triggers a positive feeling in me. However, this phrase almost always translates the Sanskrit or Pali word mudita. Without a modifier, the English word sympathy connotes a negative feeling, something akin to sadness or even pity. Like empathy, it is concrete and partial. I can sympathize for you in your loss, but not for everyone at once.
  • Compassion: an emotion that responds to someone else’s suffering, but it is not similar to the other person’s feeling, nor is it negative. It is calm and purposive. To be compassionate is to will that the other’s suffering ceases; and to will something seriously means being prepared to act accordingly. I don’t think it makes sense in English to be compassionate for someone else’s happiness, only for their suffering. We can use the English word for an emotion that is impartial and general, such as the attribute of God that is named in the first verse of the Quran or the Buddhist concept of karuna. Thus, if you are angry, I can compassionately desire that your anger cease along with the anger of your enemy and whatever is causing both. It is theoretically possible to feel compassion for all sentient beings, even though it would make no sense to empathize with all of them at once.

Against sympathy

Let’s say that I am angry or otherwise suffering. I may want you to empathize, sympathize, and feel compassion for me. I may want you to feel bad because I do. And I may want your feelings to be partial: Sympathize with me!

These desires are human frailties. Ethically, I should only want you to be compassionate. Asking you to feel my pain just expands the amount of suffering. Besides, you cannot really feel what I do, just a dim reflection of it or a different form of distress. Neither of us should fool ourselves that you can feel my pain, as if that were even desirable.

Empathy and sympathy are unreliable guides to good action. Perhaps you will wallow in your pity for me, or give yourself credit for feeling bad, or—worse—allow your partial feelings about me to negate other people’s valid interests. Politicians often stir up sympathy for favored groups to make us hate other people, and they succeed because sympathy is partial.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca didn’t write about any of the three words that I defined earlier, because none of those were available in classical Latin. But he criticizes misericordia, and although that word is normally translated as “pity,” it sounds a lot like sympathy. He calls it “a sickness of the soul due to the sight of others’ suffering, or a sadness caused by someone else’s misfortunes which one believes to be undeserved.”

For Seneca, misericordia is a sickness, and “no sickness can affect a wise man, for his mind is serene and nothing can get through to it that he guards against.” Therefore, a wise person does not feel misericordia. For Seneca, “it is impossible to be both great and sad.” Even in a disaster, a wise one maintains “the same appearance—quiet, firm—which he couldn’t do if he were overcome with sadness.”

Seneca warns that pity prevents effective planning in the interests of the person whom we may want to help. “A wise person discerns the future and makes decisions without interference, yet nothing clear and lucid can flow from turbulence. Sadness is unfitted for discerning circumstances, planning useful tasks, evading dangers, weighing equities. Therefore, the [wise person] will not feel pity, because there cannot be pity without suffering of the soul [De Clementia (2.5.4-2.6.4, my trans.]

Compassion as a virtue

Seneca’s idea of disinterested benign sentiments that we exercise freely and with a tranquil mind [2.6.2, 2.6.3] could translate the Sanskrit word karuna, which is fundamental in Buddhism. Seneca also relates this virtue to a political idea: equal standing and a common claim on the public good. A great-souled person

will reach a hand to the drowning, welcome the exile, donate to the poor, not in the abusive way of most people who want to be seen as pitying—they toss something and flinch in disgust at those whom they aid, as if they feared to touch them—but as a man gives to a man from the common pool. He will return the child to the weeping mother, unfasten chains, save people from [gladiatorial] games, and even bury the stinking body, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind, of his own will. Thus the wise person will not pity but will assist and be of use, having been born to help all and for the public good, from which he will distribute shares to all.

Even though Seneca addresses his book On Clemency to the Emperor Nero, I think that in this passage, he describes a republican virtue, appropriate for relations among equal citizens who co-own a commonwealth.

I can wish that you feel compassionate without wishing any harm on you, because compassion is a tranquil state that anyone can welcome. A compassionate person is not exposed to chance. If we feel worse as another person worsens, and better as he improves, then we demonstrate sympathy, which subjects us to fate. But compassion remains unchanged regardless of the state of the sufferer.

In fact, to the extent that a person is absorbed in compassion, that person’s own negative emotional states recede. While willing the end of other people’s suffering, we are not desiring concrete things for ourselves, and so we escape from the inevitable frustrations of a selfish will.

Quiet is his wisdom,
Calm his emotion,
Serene and firm his reasoning.
His will has departed. His self-consciousness has been abolished,
Making him serene.

(Lotus Sutra, translated by Reeves, 2014)

It is no accident that the Boddhisatva of Compassion is depicted with a serene expression.

One pitfall is to attach one’s happiness to accomplishing the relief of other people’s suffering. Most remedies fail. Even if they succeed, suffering recurs, and while you address one problem, suffering also afflicts everyone else. However, we can focus on the action, not the outcome, thus avoiding disappointment.

How do we know that compassion is a virtue?

In contemporary courses on moral philosophy or ethics, we usually present students with difficult moral choices about which reasonable people disagree, such whether punishment or war can be just, whether people have a right to health insurance, or whether abortion is acceptable. The overall message is that it is not easy to know what is right, but we should reason about justice, developing and assessing competing arguments. Students may also learn that the ultimate basis of ethical reasoning is hard to determine, a matter of controversy. Value claims may be objective or subjective, discovered or created. We often assign competing arguments about this question.

Until the late 1700s, moral philosophers in the European languages made a different assumption. They thought that all reasonable people knew what was right (Rosen 2022). The philosophical challenge was to develop a theory that matched all our moral intuitions so that we would understand the overall structure of ethics better. The practical challenge was to get people to do what they already knew they ought to do, whether through education, social pressure, rewards and penalties, or in some other way.

Emily McRae (2017) summarizes a similar tenet of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism that I think is widely shared in classical Asian thought:

Most of us understand that there is great and unbearable suffering in the world and that it would be better to alleviate that suffering than ignore or increase it. The moral problem, according to Buddhist ethics, is not that we do not understand what we should do, but we may not have the emotional and psychological resources to actually do it. … One of the basic assumptions—and, I would argue, insights—of Buddhist ethics is that most of us, most of the time, fail to adequately respond to suffering. This failure is not because we are especially bad people, or that human beings are inherently evil or selfish, but it is simply the result of the sheer amount of suffering that is part of the sentient condition (samsara) combined with the habits of thought, feeling, and action that make it difficult for most of us to respond to or sometimes even notice suffering. An appreciation of the myriad ways in which beings suffer and having an adequate response to that suffering is not a basic set of moral skills in Buddhist ethics; it is a rare moral accomplishment that requires a major transformation of our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Empathy is one of the main ways by which this transformation can occur.

Thus empathy reemerges in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism not as a goal but as a step along the way. First, we can imaginatively project ourselves into the experience of a concrete person or animal who is suffering. We strive to feel its pain while retaining our own consciousness, so that we attain a dual perspective. This is a practice that requires attention and time. It is a continuum. We can never replicate another creature’s feelings, but we can work on it.

Next, we can shift our empathy to other creatures. One reason is to avoid partiality. We are trying to develop a general capacity. The goal is compassion, which includes empathy along with a lack of selfishness and a genuine desire to act to alleviate all suffering. A moral exemplar, a bodhisattva, demonstrates empathy plus “other skills and virtues such as wisdom, mindfulness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness” (p. 129)

The overall picture is of compassion as an ideal that does not need a foundation in beliefs but that does require cultivation.

Indeed, there is a path from skepticism to compassion. We can begin by applying skepticism to all beliefs that seem to justify suffering or explain it away, including the Aristotelian idea that people have a telos; theologies that attribute suffering to divine will; the Third Noble Truth (enlightenment frees us from suffering); and all political ideologies that make some people’s suffering seem necessary for a better future.

Once we have made ourselves appropriately skeptical about such beliefs, all that is left is the realization that other creatures suffer for no ultimately good reason. And this realization comes close to compassion.

One might ask: Why care about the others’ suffering? What reason compels concern instead of indifference? This question is the mistake that Stanley Cavell analyzes in his famous interpretation of King Lear—thinking that we need a reason to love (Cavell 1969). Skeptics do not believe in the kind of truth that could serve as a foundation for caring in the face of prevalent suffering. Nor do they believe in the negation of such truths: in moral nihilism. Rather, they teach that seeking beliefs as the basis for happiness and ethics is a habit that we can train ourselves to drop.

We can simply care. And as we do so, we may experience some of the benefits recommended by proponents of compassion, such as diminished self-clinging and increased serenity. We will not escape from our own suffering, but we can find a measure of relief.

*Indeed, sympathy and compassion come from words that mean exactly the same thing—“feeling-with”—in Greek and Latin. The Greek word sympatheia originally meant harmony within nature more than a human emotion, and our modern sense of sympathy as well as the Latin translation compassio come well after the classical period. Empathy was coined on p. 21 of Edward Bradford Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (Macmillan, 1909) as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which goes back at least to Herder.

Sources: McRae, Emily. “Empathy, compassion, and “exchanging self and other” in indo-Tibetan Buddhism.” The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge, 2017. 123-133; Rosen, Michael (2022) The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History (Harvard University Press); Stanley Cavell, “The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1969, updated ed., 2002), pp. 246 – 325.

This post is an amalgam and revision of several previous ones, so apologies for the repetition.

gratitude and the sublime

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Let’s define a sublime experience as one that is dramatically better than life as usual, since life involves suffering—at least in part and over the long run.

I doubt that sublime experiences reveal a truth: that everything is redeemed. Nor are they false, mere fantasies of people who cannot face reality. Rather, they are part of human experience, within our available range.

Life may be suffering, but it also encompasses the sublime. We are constituted to enjoy some things, and that is a wonderfully good fact about us. Just as we may lament our human proclivities to violence, despair, and cruelty, so we can celebrate our ability to savor what we find sublime. And not only celebrate it but actively cultivate this appreciation and share it with other people through the representations that we create.

Some wonderful experiences intrinsically involve interacting with other people. These activities include romance and sex, athletic competition, and success in any collective effort, including (I presume) victory in battle. I will leave this category aside for the present purposes, although it is desirable to gain emotional highs by interacting with other people while also being ethical.

I want to focus, instead, on that diverse category of experiences in which a person encounters an object that seems sublime, whether it is a view of nature, a song or a picture, a religious ceremony, or a meditative insight. Indeed, the word “sublime” is generally reserved for this category.

A classic debate in aesthetics asks how we should interpret such experiences. Does the object cause the experience? If so, do some things merit being called sublime while others should not be treated that way? (Can we be wrong to relish something that is not worthy?) Did the creator of the object have a powerful and positive emotion that the object now communicates to us? Or are observers more responsible for causing our own emotions by how we choose to perceive an object (Peacocke 2024)?

Our answers to those questions may differ if the object is a poem, a sunset, or a meditative exercise. For instance, an author has emotions while writing, so we can ask whether a poem conveys the poet’s inner state to us. But some would say the same about nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) detects a Divine Father behind all “dappled things,“ like “skies of couple-colour” or “a brinded cow.” “Praise Him,” says Hopkins. On the other hand, some doubt that an author’s emotion is relevant in any case, even when a sensitive human being has made a work. They think it is all about the object or the observer.

This debate continues. I want to add a different dimension, not only because I believe it is true, but also because it can enrich our experience.

I think we often relish things because we have been taught how to perceive them. This is a skeptical point. It reminds us that we would enjoy very different things if we lived in a different time and place. It provokes some (appropriate) doubt about whether our reactions are true.

For instance, I like a snowy day. I believe this appreciation is something learned. I do not simply see the snow; I see it with things already in my mind, like Christmas decorations, paper snowflakes on second-grade bulletin boards, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow,” Han-shan’s Cold Mountain lyrics, Robert Frost’s “lovely, dark and deep” woods, Hiroshige’s woodblock prints of wintry Japan, Rosemary Clooney with Bing Crosby. In short, I have been taught to appreciate a winter wonderland, a marshmallow world, and a whipped cream day. Some of these influences probably detract, but they were meant well.

It is sometimes said that when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux (in Provence) in 1336—simply to enjoy and describe the view—he was the first European ever to do such a thing. Clearly, some people outside of Europe had loved mountain views long before Petrarch. I find it plausible that certain communities of people appreciate alpine vistas, while others do not. And some of us may have learned the sublimity of landscapes from a chain of people originally inspired by Petrarch, although he was surely influenced by classical sources. We all see what we have learned to see.

Let’s say that I am looking at a large and dramatic sky, with ragged clouds that are mostly dark but illuminated here and there by a hidden sun. Perhaps there are also wind-blown trees in view and small signs of human habitation.

I believe that I appreciate this vista in part because I have studied and enjoyed 17th-century Dutch landscape painters and some later artists whom they influenced, such as John Constable, the Americans of the Hudson River School, and Impressionists. These artists do not explain nature to me. They do not reveal why the background color of the sky is blue and leaves are generally green. Their representations of nature would not convey sublimity to a different species, such as my dog Luca or an alien from Mars. As Thomas Nagel (1970) says, “A Martian scientist … would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud.”

Instead, these artists help me to see what is in my phenomenal world: how clouds pile up and sun peeks through. Come to think of it, our phenomenal world is a bit strange. It includes an object that is so painfully bright that we avoid it, and it has borders that we cannot see because they move as we shift our gaze. This is also the world that the Dutch painters present on canvas.

In turn, I enjoy Dutch landscapes more thanks to Svetlana Alpers’ 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, which I read when it was still fairly new and have returned to since. Alpers’ project is not to praise the artists whom she discusses; she does not practice “art appreciation.” She identifies a way of thinking about images, an epistemic framework, that explains what the Dutch painters were up to and that distinguishes them from Renaissance Italian painters (without suggesting that either is preferable). Her insights have enriched my understanding of the original works. And she is only one in a sequence of critics and historians, collectors and curators, and subsequent artists who have turned 17th-century Dutch landscape painting into a category and helped us to value it and see it better. Again, how I see that art influences how I see nature, especially when the landscape even remotely resembles Holland.

I hold a doctoral degree and have chosen to visit museums and read academic criticism for decades. I am not claiming that reading scholarly books and labels in museums is the best (let alone the only) way to enrich current experiences. Many people learn to name, value, represent, protect, and use objects from their elders without needing written words. Religious communities also develop ceremonies and observances that convey the creativity of previous generations. Academic criticism is unusually explicit and transparent about its sources; that is the purpose of footnotes. But all human communities accumulate and transmit ways of experiencing the world.

Sometimes, people are motivated to ignore or conceal the influence of previous observers on their own sublime experiences because of an implicit assumption that the sublime should be pure and universal and stand outside of history. Just as an example, North Americans who experience anapanasati, or Buddhist breathing-meditation, may be told (or may tell themselves) that this is the original practice of the Buddha himself. They envision themselves as doing something pure and personal that reveals absolutely general truths, such as the non-existence of the self. A person who may have lived in what is now northern India and Nepal more than two thousand years ago not only did the same thing as modern meditators but is causing us to practice anapanasati now, because we hear the Buddha’s “teachings.”

But we might look around the room, which probably (not invariably) incorporates some aesthetic elements from East Asian art, along with 20th century European minimalism: bare wood, a simplified statue. People speak English with a sprinkling of Sanskrit words. They sit cross-legged and meditate but do not maintain shrines, prostrate themselves, make pilgrimages, or give alms, which would be common manifestations of Buddhism in East Asia (Moon 2024)

Many participants may identify as white and think of what they are experiencing as Asian. Indeed, they may classify the Buddha as an Asian man, notwithstanding that he predated the distinction between Asia and Europe. Rev. Cristina Moon (a Zen priest from Hawaii) recalls:

Over the fifteen years before coming to Chozen-ji [a temple and monastery founded by Asian Americans], I sat with more than a dozen different Buddhist communities where I was often the only Asian and sometimes one of the only non-white people in attendance. When non-Asian Buddhists (particularly at American Zen centers) wore Japanese clothes, bowed to me theatrically, referred to me as “Cristina-san,” responded to requests in English with “Hai!”, and expressed rigid attachment to the technical accuracy of certain Japanese and Buddhist forms, it looked more like cosplay [dressing as a character from a movie] than a means to enter Zen, (Moon 2024)

In the US, there is a certain tendency—I don’t know how widespread—to see Buddhist thought as ahistorical. The Buddha is treated as a contemporary; the meditating mind lives only in the immediate present. There is also a tendency to acknowledge Buddhism’s roots in Asia but to depict Asian or Eastern “culture” as monolithic, apart from superficial aesthetic differences that people can browse like consumers.

The white or European-American Buddhists whom Rev. Moon has encountered may differentiate between the transcendent truths of the Buddha and optional traditions and behaviors that they label “culture.” They then pick and choose from the traditions without recognizing that they (highly educated, mostly White Americans) are every bit as immersed in their own stream of inherited behaviors, aesthetics, beliefs, and values, which influence their choices about what to borrow from Asian contexts. Linda Heuman writes:

The French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour famously described it this way: “A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.” A modern Buddhist, in Latour’s sense, is someone who believes that Asian forms of Buddhism carry the “baggage” of their host cultures but who remains unreflective about the assumptions that shape his or her own modern adaptation (Heuman, 2015).

For instance, sitting in a minimalist pine room feels pure, although it reflects the same Modernist aesthetics as a boardroom in a skyscraper, whereas prostrating before a brightly colored Tibetan shrine would seem like “culture.”

Any mind is ineluctably historical. As we develop from speechless infants into adults, we absorb a vast array of classifications, assumptions, and values that other people invented before us. We can never escape this historical contingency. You might think that you can have an unmediated experience of nature, but your tastes in nature, your words and concepts for nature, and even your physical location in front of a specific patch of nature are all historically conditioned. 

History is highly complex, diverse, and often cruel, whether we happen to know the details or not. Evils are widespread—consider, for example, the use of Buddhist ideas in imperial Japan or in Myanmar today. Human beings widely and blatantly violate principles that they expressly teach, such as nonviolence and compassion. On the other hand, people all over the world also create practices and institutions that reflect wise goals and choices. What we think we know is a result of this complex, globally interconnected, and fraught past.

Cristina Moon’s description of cringy behavior at North American Zen centers is a portrait of people who want to pick and choose ideas and practices that they find comfortable without taking seriously the historical development and interconnection of those ideas, without being genuinely open to practices that might challenge them, without being careful about their own status and impact, and without wrestling with the connections among racial hierarchy and exclusion, everyday culture, and the abstract beliefs that we might classify as Buddhist philosophy or theology. Yet the solution is not to declare these beliefs off limits (nor does Moon suggest we do so), because everyone should always be looking for good beliefs to adopt. We must simply do it with a lot of care–not only about the ideas and their effect on our inner lives, but also about the other people we touch.

To me, our debt to other human beings only deepens the sublime. Nature was not created for us; it just is. And we were not created to enjoy it, although—very fortunately—we do. But our fellow human beings have deliberately shared their appreciation and heightened our own, which means that we are the beneficiaries of benevolent intelligence after all.

In “Of Dappled Things,” Hopkins writes, “Praise Him.” I would (also) say, “Praise them.”

This is a combination and reformulation of previous posts (apologies for the repetition), including: the sublime and other people; the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s Lines Above Tintern Abbey; notes on religion and cultural appropriation: the case of US Buddhism

Sources: Antonia Peacocke, “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.); Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 394-403, p. 443; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Cristina Moon, “From ‘Just Culture’ to a Just Culture, Tricycle, Oc.. 29, 2020; Linda Heuman (2015) “A New Way Forward,” The Tricycle, Spring.

Freud on mourning the past

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In 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote a short essay entitled “Transience.” Just over a century later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the philosopher Jonathan Lear wrote “Transience and Hope” about returning to Freud’s essay in a time of COVID-19, the climate emergency, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Now, Lear has passed, adding one more layer of pathos to their dialogue.

Freud’s piece turns out to be political, but it begins with a personal memory. “Not long ago,” he says, he went on a “summer walk through a smiling countryside” with a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet.” Many commentators have identified this poet as Rilke, but Lear thinks the whole story is fiction.

In any case, Freud and the poet argue. The poet is unable to enjoy the beauty of nature because it will fade with the coming fall, “like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create.” Freud has the opposite feeling, that transience only “raises the value of the enjoyment.” He adds, “A flower that blooms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account any less lovely.” But neither the poet not the silent friend is convinced by Freud.

Freud says that his friends could not accept the transience of beauty because there was “a revolt in their minds against mourning.” He explains that we have a natural inclination to love–first ourselves, then other objects. When an object of love is lost, we cling to it anyway, which is the painful stage that we call mourning. However, mourning “comes to a spontaneous end,” allowing our love to move to new objects. In a later essay, Freud will explicitly distinguish the healthy, temporary process of mourning (which ultimately frees us to love something new) from “melancholia,” which is stuck in place.

The final paragraph of “On Transience” explains what the story is really about:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

In 1914, Europeans like Freud had lost an object of their love–life before the war–and they were mourning it. To make matters harder, they had strongly identified with prewar culture and taken pride and hope in it. They were like a widower who not only misses his deceased partner but also mourns his own lost role or place in the world as a spouse. (This is my analogy, not Freud’s or Lear’s.)

Dr. Freud has a prescription. Mourning passes, and the same will happen to Europeans as the war moves into the past. “When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

Mourning involves, among other emotions, a recognition of the value of what was lost. Thus, for someone like Freud to mourn his optimistic youthful days before August 1914 was to recognize their worth. His sadness reveals that it had been good to pursue medical science in Vienna.

In this case, however, the prewar culture had yielded an unspeakably terrible war. Therefore, the culture was not only over but also discredited. If Freud could travel back in time, perhaps he should not enjoy prewar Vienna (or Paris) but regard it with dismay as the predecessor of a global slaughter. Perhaps Freud and his contemporaries were not like people mourning loved-ones who had died innocently, but like people whose lovers had been unmasked as villains. Worse, the mourners had been part of the lost and discredited world.

When Freud went for his country walk, he and his friends knew that the flowers would fade. But that was not the flowers’ fault. Watching them wither would not negate their value while they bloomed, and the friends could fully appreciate new buds when they returned (as normal) the following spring. In contrast, the First World War revealed that prewar European society, which had seemed so progressive to Freud’s generation, had been deeply corrupt all along.

I am disagreeing here with Freud. He thinks that the negative feelings of his contemporaries are symptoms of mourning, which is healthy but should not be allowed to last forever. Their mourning reflects an authentic and appropriate appreciation for life before the war. They now realize that the past was “fragile,” but this recognition should not detract from its value. Their job is to create good things anew.

It is much harder if we think that something that we have lost is not only transient and absent but was never as valuable as we had previously believed.

I am often nostalgic for the polity and society that I knew as a young adult and up through the Obama Administration. I realize that many people who were less fortunate than I felt less positive about things then, as did people who were more radical than I. I am simply reporting my subjective state. I now experience mourning for that time. The questions is whether my mourning is appropriate because the past was good, or whether it is naive and self-justifying.

Lear’s main objective is to help us to see that mourning reflects a degree of appropriate appreciation for the past, and we can continue to make good things. We should recognize the fragility of what we had built but not reject it all. This is difficult if we blame the past that we miss for what has gone wrong.

Source: Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” 1915 (just “Vergänglichkeit” in the original, without a preposition), translated by James Strachey in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, pp. 305-7, discussed in Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022). See also: the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be; nostalgia in the face of political crisis; there are tears of things; and Rilke, The Grownup

consider the octopus

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Ancient Greek members of the Skeptical School taught methods or habits that helped people to live better. One method involved pondering how different the world might seem to different animals, considering that other species have diverse types of eyes, ears, and tongues; preferences and aversions; and perhaps whole senses unknown to us.

Skeptics said that we are animals and not fundamentally different from the “so-called irrational animals.” Meditating on examples of animal psychology would prevent people from believing that their own experience was true or that the pursuit of truth was possible. In turn, suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.

In this spirit, consider the octopus, as described in detail by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. People who study this animal almost universally conclude that it is curious, intelligent, and interactive and that each octopus has a personality that persists over time. Yet the species is so remote from us on the evolutionary tree that it is like an alien visitor to our planet. Or we could be the aliens on theirs.

For one thing, an octopus has quite different senses from ours, such as suckers that each have 10,000 sensors and eyes of a fundamentally different design. Since an octopus lives underwater and has a soft and flexible body, its whole relationship with its environment must be profoundly different from ours.

I gradually became who I am over many years–the first period now barely a memory for me–and I was deeply connected to other people from the start. I have persisted for almost six decades, building up (and losing) memories. An octopus emerges from an egg and for lives for two years, if it’s lucky, before it dies of old age. Its combination of substantial intelligence and a brief lifespan is unusual on earth and would presumably give it a different sense of time from mine.

An octopus doesn’t have a brain, because its complex nervous system is distributed through its body, and its arms have considerable autonomy. “Octopuses [may] not even track where their own arms might be” (p. 67). Nevertheless, each octopus functions as a coherent organism with an individual personality.

I think of myself as one thing, my body parts as something a bit different (because I control them imperfectly), and the external world as something distinct from both my self and my body. This experience deeply influences my assumptions about fundamentals like self and other, thought and matter, cause-and-effect, intention, and the objective world. It is hard to believe that an octopus feels the same way, yet my experience is no more valid or true.

If you doubt that an octopus has enough mental capacity to have a model of its own world, fine—just imagine an extraterrestrial creature with a similar design as an octopus and 10 times as many neurons. It doesn’t matter whether an alien like that exists on other planets, only that it is plausible. The thought-experiment is enough to tell us that we experience just one of many possible worlds.

Sources: Sextus, Outlines of Pyrhhonism (see 1.13:61 on humans as animals); Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). See also: thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; ‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism;

the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be

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I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”

This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.

Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.

Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.

Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:

  • Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
  • Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
  • Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
  • Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:
  1. Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
  2. Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
  3. Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
  4. Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
  5. Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.

To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.

See also: nostalgia in the face of political crisis; phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now.

Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.