Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004

“It is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion”: APA comments of Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought

NANCY SHERMAN

Georgetown University

Upheavals of Thought is Martha Nussbaum’s most recent, sweeping and mas- terful study of the human life lived through the emotions. The book’s scope is expansive by any measurement, covering in the first part an historical and contemporary analysis of emotions, their sociality, developmental features, and cultivation; and in the second and third parts an in depth analysis of the specific emotions of compassion and love respectively, with chapter length discussions on love that take up Augustine, Dante, Mahler, Bronte, Whit- man, Joyce among others, and discussions on compassion that move through ancient philosophical and literary authors to contemporary discussions of justice and the construction of adequate measurements of the quality of life.

I shall be selective in this brief review and focus on the arguments of Part 11, and in particular, Chapter 8, where Nussbaum takes on the task of con- structing a “reasonable political psychology,” with compassion at its core. The background theme is familiar from Nussbaum’s enduring corpus: to take seriously our personal and public response to the fragility of happiness and goodness. She reminds us that our self-sufficiency is only and always that of a mortal, limited, as Aristotle would say against Socrates and the Stoics, by our ineliminable dependency on external goods, our social natures, and our lives as political creatures. Like most emotions, compassion is responsive to the vulnerability of human life-to our attachments and losses. Compassion, however, records that vulnerability in a way crucial for public institutions. In particular, as Nussbaum limns, it records the fact that 1) a certain threshold level of goods and opportunities are entitlements, the lack of which constitute serious losses for any human life; 2) these goods and opportunities (ie. , capabilities, as Nussbaum and Sen have developed the term) can be lost through no fault of our own; 3) concern extends beyond our own case to others, however difficult it is to know where to place proper boundaries and

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however difficult to draw near to us those whose customs and life styles are unlike our own. These three judgments are at the heart of Nussbaum’s cogni- tivist or appraisal account of compassion. They are at the heart of deliberation about how to shape public institutions and laws that are compassionate and that find dignity not just in human agency but in human suffering as well.

Nussbaum’s own application of the compassionate imagination follows the line of some of her more recent work. So, for example, as she has argued with Sen, compassion can inform economic planning in that through a com- passionate response we come to take more seriously how resources are actu- ally helping individuals to function well, given special needs and specific cultures and contexts. The compassionate gaze, she suggests, in turn requires an empathetic transport into individual lives as they differ across nations and subgroups within nations. Through such a transport we are more likely to make accessible not just numbers of goods accumulated or GNP per capita but the actual quality of lived lives, in such crucial areas as infant mortality, access to health care, life expectancy, racial and gender relations, educational opportunities, and so on (439). Her view also extends to legal and judicial rationality, and she tries to show how the insights of imagination and empa- thetic transport might have led to substantially different judicial decisions. Here she points to Virginia laws prohibiting miscegenation, ultimately struck down in 1967 in the famous Supreme Court case Lovings V. Virginia. Her view is that selective judicial writings upholding the discriminatory laws of that equal but separate era show a clear lack of empathy and compassion that help to explain the merely formal equality and protection of laws deliv- ered in the period (443). Had there been proper empathy and compassion, the laws most likely, she suggests, would have been different. I am not fully convinced here. We can always selectively use empathy to attend to objects of our choice, and simply occlude from our focus what we choose not to dwell on. Compassion, directed as it is at serious loss, nondesert, and a proper scope of concern, offers a less neutral gaze. But even here, and even barring self-deception and willful misrepresentation of data, the exercise of compas- sion is not sufficient to guarantee the substantial results Nussbaum hopes for.

But in fairness to Nussbaum, her principal purpose in this chapter is not to defend substantive, political views. Rather, her goal is to show, in a more structural way, how judgments of compassion shape institutions, and how in turn, institutions and laws contain implicit judgments of desert and nondesert, and of seriousness of value, that elicit our compassion. On this latter point, she insightfully notes, sexual harassment laws change the judgment that women are “asking for” for harassment directed against them, just as changes in rape law also make it less easy to see rape as something a woman “brings on herself’ (420). Here, it becomes clear how laws, through an emphasis on

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tragic consequences that can be no fault of our own, can inform what we select as worthy of our compassion .

The broad spirit of Nussbaum’s chapter can be seen as an invitation to the reader to find a role for compassion in public life. I shall take up her invita- tion by considering a part of public life she doesn’t herself touch on in this chapter-namely, the military and the role of compassion within it. I come to the topic from my own experience serving as the distinguished ethics chair at the US Naval Academy for close to three years. In light of the events of 9/11, there is heightened awareness of the role of the military in our lives and a corresponding need to understand military culture and character. This is a backdrop to my remarks. But I also want to consider the topic from the point of view of something quite central to Nussbaum’s own project-namely, the viability of Stoicism as informing views about emotions and eudaimonia more generally. To narrow the lens even more, I want to consider the role of compassion for someone I shall call the Stoic Warrior.

Let’s begin by bringing to mind Coriolanus, the legendary 5”’ Century BCE Warrior who turns against his native city for banishing him. He is painted by Shakespeare, in the play by that name, as the paragon Stoic war- rior. Physically strong and detached, more at home in the battlefield than with his wife and son, he is the military man par excellence. Fearless, he sheds few tears. And yet the play’s turning point comes when Coriolanus remem- bers how to weep. “It is no little thing,” he concedes, “to make mine eyes to sweat compassion.” It is Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, who reawakens his soul. Her entreaties persuade him to quit his siege of Rome and to restore peace. In weeping, Coriolanus finally finds human dignity.

Despite his tears, Coriolanus admits the strangeness of a Stoic warrior weeping: “It is no little thing” he mutters to himself. Indeed, it doesn’t take too great a stretch of the imagination to turn the warrior into a hard Stoic. For the battlefield capitalizes on the virtues of self-mastery and enduring, tough discipline. The British “stiff upper lip” is a familiar, modem Victorian popularization of the Stoic ideal, cultivated in the public schools for those who must lead an empire.

So, too, there is the more recent example of VADM Jim Stockdale, a self- taught Stoic whose embrace of Epictetus’s writings led to a survival strategy for his 7 1/2 years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton in North Viet Nam. In a remarkably prescient moment, Stockdale, then a senior Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam, muttered to himself as he parachuted into enemy hands, “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving behind the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”’ The Enchiridion had become Stockdale’s bedtime reading in the many carrier wardrooms he occupied as he cruised the

’ From Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Lab of Human Behavior (Hoover Institution Press, 1994).

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waters off Vietnam in the mid-60’s. Little did Stockdale know then or on that shoot down day of Sept. 9, 1965, that Stoic tonics would hold the key to his survival for his years as a POW, over four of which were in solitary con- finement and often in shackles. Stoic tonics would also form the backbone of his leadership style as the senior officer in the POW chain of command.

But if warriors easily fit the bill of a Stoic, and a POW survivor, like Stockdale, even a kind of Stoic sage, where then in this model is there room for compassion and for the sweating of tears at what is beyond one’s control? Stoicism minimizes vulnerability by denying the intrinsic goodness of things that lie outside one’s control. Only one’s virtue and its goodness are candi- dates for one’s happiness. Does Stoicism leave any room for the compassion- ate response of the military officer who records with concern the losses beyond one’s control? For surely there are hundreds of such moments in a military person’s life: there is the indignity of sudden bodily deformity and the psychological trauma that can follow exposure to the horrors of war; there is the loss of comrade’s lives and the loss of those who are counted as miss- ing; there is the anguish of long separations from home and family, including moments when one’s own children are born or parents die; there is fear of the enemy that can turn to paralysis but also a raging frenzy to dehumanize the other.

Compassion may be required for the enlightened military person. But does it have a place in a conception of a Stoic warrior? On first blush, it seems unlikely. Stoicism denies the role of external goods in a conception of happi- ness; the highest status such goods are accorded are as preferred indifferents. In taking our natural teleology seriously, the Stoics argue that it is better to have such goods than not and virtue is a matter of proper selection of them. But even so, a training in Stoic apathy requires appreciating that such goods can never contribute to happiness itself, and that emotions that register attachment to them and disturbance at their loss constitute false judgments. Even the eupatheiai, which are recalibrated emotional responses achievable in full only by the Stoic sage, do not leave room for emotions that m r d serious loss, presumably on the grounds that the sage will not record the absence of external goods as lamentable losses. Thus, the very judgments constitutive of Nussbaum’s analysis of compassion, namely, “that one has suffered a serious loss” and that the loss is “outside one’s control,” will not be available to the Stoic sage. (Nussbaum herself, in the chapter prior to that which is our focus, raises pro-compassion challenges against Stoicism and possible Stoic replies. She, in essence, argues for a modified Stoicism that preserves the Stoic cognitive appraisal analysis of emotions, while jettison- ing normative Stoic views about the irrationality of emotions in the eudairndn life and the absence of serious value in external goods.)

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However, if we shift strategies, we can muster some limited support from within Stoicism itself for the underpinnings of a notion of compassion. At issue here is the Stoic, groundbreaking notion of cosmopolitanism. The Stoic view is that as humans we all share a universal reason and community (in virtue of that reason) that stretches beyond the boundaries of country, city, and family. So, Seneca in On Anger, reminds his interlocutor, Novatus, that he is a citizen not just of his country but of that “greater city” of his, that universal commonwealth of the cosmos.2 Each of us is a “world citizen,” the Stoics emphasize, following Diogenes the Cynic’s notion of the human as a kosmopolim, literally, “cosmic, universal ~it izen.”~ We are each parts of an extended commonwealth and risk our individual integrity, our wholeness, when we sever ourselves from the fellowship of that community. Marcus Aurelius makes the point graphically:

If you have ever seen a dismembered hand or foot or head cut off, lying somewhere apart from the rest of the trunk, you have an image of what a man makes of himself ... when he ... cuts himself off and does some unneighborly act ... For you came into the world as a part and you have cut yourself

The organic metaphor recurs repeatedly in the Stoic literature. As Marcus insists here, in cutting ourselves off from the global community, it is as if we mutilate our bodies.

The Stoic, Hierocles, writing in the first Century CE adverts to the notion of cosmopolitanism through an image of concentric circles: “Each one of us” he describes as “entirely encompassed by many circles, some smaller, others larger.” “The first circle contains parents, siblings, wife, and children.” As we move outward, we move through grandparents, to neighbors, to fellow tribesmen and citizens, and ultimately to the whole human race. He insists that it is incumbent upon each of us “to draw the circles together somehow towards the center,” to respect people from the outer circles as though they were from the inner. And we are to do this “by zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles to the enclosed ones,” to bring what is far to what is near, “to reduce the distance of the relationship with each pe r s~n .”~

Hierocles himself doesn’t tell us exactly how we are to psychologically assimilate those in outer circles to inner ones so that we can come to identify with their circumstances. Nor does he explore the nature of our duties,

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See On Anger 11. 31 in J. M. Cooper and J . F. Procope, eds. Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). As noted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives ofEniinent Philosophers, tr. R. D. Hicks, (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) 6.63. See also Epictetus, Discourses, tr. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925): 2.10.3, 1.9.2. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. A.S. L. Farquaharson. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 8.34 See A.A. Long and D. N. Sedley , eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 349.

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military or otherwise, in terms of which we show respect for others as we move outward in those circles. Later philosophers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, themselves influenced by the Stoics, begin to advance a more psychological story. On Smith’s view, we move outward, “beat time” to another’s breast, by “changing places in fancy.” The educative task is to cul- tivate empathetic imagination.

It would be wrong to view empathy itself as a sufficient condition for compassion, and Nussbaum cautions at length against this in Chapter 6. But psychological research, as she notes by C.D. Batson among others, does sug- gest that those who can concretely imagine others in their circumstances of need or distress are more likely to help, when clear helping actions are pre- sented, than those who do not have that sort of empathetic experience. To be sure, this points to a correlation between empathy and altruism, not empathy and compassion, as Nussbaum herself conceives the latter. Still, the research overlaps with Nussbaum’s concerns.

I want to conclude with some thoughts about contemporary views on the early development of an empathetic response, a subject Nussbaum herself does not treat. I bring up the subject, however, for in a curious way, the Sto- ics more than Aristotle, articulate a developmental model of global outreach that purports to allow us to extend our concerns beyond our own case. The idea is part of the Stoic notion of oikeibsis, a difficult to translate term meaning “familiarization,” “being akin to,” or most literally, “bringing home.” Oikeiasis is a fluid, natural process by which we preserve ourselves out of kinship to self and importantly, “familiarize ourselves” with others, in the sense of develop a sense of other-regard. Notably, on the Stoic account, other-regard develops (or is at least manifest) chronologically very late, in our regard for our own offspring. As Cicero reports, “parental affection is the source to which we trace the origin of the association of the human race in communities” (De Fin. 111.63).

That we may be hardwired to express empathy toward others seems to be borne out in contemporary psychological research. But contra the Stoics, research indicates that the outreach to others is manifest in the first days of infancy and remains ubiquitous throughout early childhood in various forms of protoempathy. To briefly summarize some of the findings, researchers have shown that three-day old neonates can mimic mouth opening and tongue extension6, and that the same aged neonates tend to mimic, with their own strong and hearty cry, the crying of similar aged neonates (as if experiencing the distress themselves).’ Additionally, Daniel Stem has observed a related

MeItzoff and Moore, “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates,” Srienre (1977): 198:75-78. See the results of Sagi and Hoffman (1972) as reported by M. Hoffman, “Development of Prosocial motivation: empathy and guilt,” in Tlie Development of P rosociut Behavior, ed. N. Eisenberg, (Academic Press, 1982).

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phenomenon, “mutual affective attunement,” whereby parent and young child establish patterns of congruent affects or synchronies across different modali- ties, e.g., a nine-month old playfully banging his hand on a soft toy and his mother falling into his rhythm with a “kaaaaa-bum” with the “kaaaa” riding the upswing of his arm and the ‘‘bum’’ its suspension and fall.* Others have observed mechanisms for shared attention’, whereby infants toward the end of the first year look at a person’s eyes and then follow the gaze to its target, showing early signs of sharing another’s world. In a related mechanism, infants, beginning with a focus on a target object, will then refer back to a parent’s eyes and mouth in order to get information about the acceptability of that object.” I have barely skimmed the literature here. But even this partial glimpse gives us some way of filling out the Stoic notion of our capacities to reach beyond our own self-borders and begin to build community. And it gives some credibility to a natural basis for compassion in empathetic mechanisms.

Nussbaum’s conviction is that public institutions of social justice, through the use of concrete narratives, play a powerful role in further develop- ing capacities for empathy and imagination throughout adulthood. This is undoubtedly true. But as always, it depends on which narratives are told and which we choose to listen to. And too, there is the prickly issue of our unconscious evaluations and how these inform our emotional responses. Compassion may not be, as Joseph Le Doux puts it, a “low road” emotion like primitive fear, that bypasses the neocortex and goes straight from thala- mus to amygdala.” But those unfiltered and automatic emotions, like gut fears and hatred, may stand in the way of more mediated, compassionate responses, and make all the more compelling the need for an education in compassion. They also make more difficult its success.

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D. Stem, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Basic Books, 1985): 140-1. Butterworth, “The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Joint Visual Attention,” in A. Whiten, ed. Nafurul Tlieoriev ofMind (Blackwell, 1991). P. Harris summarizes the research well in Children and Ernorion, (Blackwe11,1989). See J. Le Doux, The Emotional Brain (NY: Touchstone, 1996).

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