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In The Rhetoric Aristotle tells us that a judge who allows pity to influence his decision making is about as good as a carpenter who uses a warped ruler. He goes on, however, to give detailed advice to advocates about how to evoke pity in the judge. Thus Aristotle treated compassion in its relation to justice as both unlawful and inevitable. Contemporary legal theory, by contrast, tends to take an all or nothing-view of the relation between compassion and justice. Some argue that compassion should guide our deliberations about justice. Others maintain that we must protect our judgments about justice from the distortions of compassion. In this paper I contemplate the middle ground and perhaps even the paradox found in Aristotle's discussion: that compassion in its relation to justice is and must be both essential and illicit.
Annalise Acorn is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. She holds a BA and LL.B. from the University of Alberta and a B.C.L. from Oxford University. In 2000 she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches Emotions of Conflict and Justice, Law and Popular Culture, Legal Ethics and Private International Law. She is the author of Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice (Vancouver 2004).
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Understanding another person's subjective state is mediated by two different mechanisms empathy and theory of mind. Whereas the latter allows one to take another person's perspective without being emotionally involved, empathy is primarily an emotional mechanism. It generates an understanding of another person's emotional or intentional state by vicariously sharing it. As opposed to emotional contagion, which does not provide the observer with the insight that it is another person's state which he or she shares, empathy draws a clearcut distinction between the emotional domains of self and other. Empathy develops in the second year of life as soon as children form a concept of the Self. In experiments with 126 children, we investigated the subjects' ability to recognize themselves in a mirror and their readiness to empathize with a playmate in (faked) distress. Almost all children who identified with their mirror image showed compassion and tried to help, whereas children who did not yet recognize themselves were perplexed or remained indifferent.
Quite often, empathy is understood as being synonymous with sympathy, concern, or compassion with another person's welfare. However, although empathy is an important precondition for prosocial behavior, it does not yield prosocial consequences in every case. It can also be the basis for sensation-seeking, malicious gloating, malevolence and intentional cruelty. In these cases, the miserable state of the other is empathically shared and at the same time enjoyed.
Whether empathy yields a socially positive or negative response depends on several factors. Sympathy, compassion, sharing and helping are more probable if a person in need is familiar, belongs to the same in-group and shares the same values and opinions. Negative responses are more probable if the person is perceived to be a stranger or morally inferior. These two perceptions quite often coincide as exemplified during times of war.
Doris Bischof-Köhler, Dr. rer soc. Dr phil habil. teaches Developmental Psychology at the University of Munich. She lectures on Development of Social Cognition, Development of Sex Differences, Emotional and Motivational Development and Evolutionary Psychology. Her research fields include Development of Empathy and Mirror Recognition and Connection of Theory of Mind, Time Comprehension and Behavioral Organization. Deutscher Psychologie Preis 2003 (German Psychology Award 2003). Selected Publications: Spiegelbild und Empathie, Bern 1989; Kinder auf Zeitreise, Bern 2000; Von Natur aus anders, Stuttgart 2004, 2nd ed.
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This paper is about visual media, its images of distant sufferings and the politics of compassion. Starting from a presentation of Luc Boltanskis's analysis of styles of reaction to distant sufferings, it will examine the way in which Boltanski's perspective has been applied to images of September 11th. It will look in particular at two areas of transformation. The first area concerns the recipients of compassion: discursive strategies divert attention and compassion from certain situations in order to reorient them in new and sometimes unexpected directions. The second area is one in which compassion itself is transformed at the risk of becoming indifference, or even, open hatred. In this regard, John Peters' notion of a "virtuous killer" is quite useful. Finally, this paper will examine the visual rhetorics the "acts of monstration" through which images enact compassion, hatred or indifference, both in news and fiction.
Daniel Dayan, born in 1943, is a Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and a Professor of Media Sociology at the Institute d'Etudes Politique de Paris. His main fields of research are film theory and media sociology. He studied at Stanford and in Paris, and has taught at Stanford, in Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and Oslo. He is a member of the American Film Institute and participtates in the European Science Foundation program "Changing Media, Changing Europe".
Selected publications: Western graffiti: Jeux d'images et programmation du spectateur dans "La Chevauchèe fantastique" de John Ford, Paris 1983; Media Event: The Live Broadcasting of History, Cambridge (Mass.) 1992; La télévision cérémonielle: Anthropologie et histoire on direct, Paris 1996; À chacun son 11 septembre?, Paris 2002.
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Erik Durschmied will talk about manipulation (sometimes excusable and sometimes not) both ways: politicians, military and press, the "spin war" and "info war", with words as weapons of war, the mind of the war reporter and his influence on the general public: what do we see after the weather report in the morning (shall we support the war effort of the nation)? His reflections include personal examples the dangers war correspondents have to live through ("Get in, get it, get out, and please try not to get killed, it makes for bad reading") and historical cases.
Erik Durschmied, born in Vienna in 1930, emigrated to Canada in 1952, where he studied at McGill University. In 1958, he shot the first and only film about Fidel Castro in the mountains of the Sierra Maestre. Thereafter, he worked for the BBC from 1959 until 1971, and later for CBS. As a TV correspondent he interviewed, among many others, John F. Kennedy, Salvador Allende, David Ben Gurion, and Saddam Hussein. For his documentaries "The Seven Hundred Millions" and "Hill 943" he received an Academy Award. As a war correspondent, he reported from Vietnam (19611970), and later from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. He shot films for NATO and National Geographic. He developed the series "Die Welt des GEO" for UFA (Germany). He lectures at several US universities and at the US Military Academy at West Point, and is a Lecturing Professor at the Austrian Military Academy in Vienna.
Selected publications: Shooting Wars: My Life as a War Cameraman, From Cuba to Iraq, New York 1991 (Ger.: Shooting Wars: Mein Leben als Kriegberichterstatter zwischen Kuba und Irak, Wien 2004); The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity have Changed History, New York 2000 (Ger.: Der Hinge-Faktor: Wie Zufall und menschliche Dummheit Weltgeschichte schreiben, Wien 1998); The Weather Factor: How Nature has Changed History, London 2000 (Ger.: Als die Römer im Regen standen: Der Einfluss des Wetters auf den Lauf der Geschichte, Bergisch Gladbach 2002).
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Beings able to feel are natural born egoists. No sentient being has ever sensed feelings different from its own. It is only through judging others by our own standards that we have access to alien feelings. This is why compassion seems to be an acquired, indirect and thus typically weak feeling. On the other hand, the feelings of others are the most powerful objects our feelings are concerned with. We cannot help to react to the feelings shown to us. We are punished by bad conscience when hurting the feelings of others. Nor is compassion just the opposite of self-love. The self-love we can afford heavily depends on the feelings of love and esteem we are shown. Hence, both conscience and conceit make us care of the feelings of others. The talk will be on this delicate mixture. Since feelings are value judgements, the feelings addressing other feelings cannot help to give rise to some kind of economy when assuming sophistication by way of networking into society. This economy harbours potentials of growth and hazard that only now, after having developed into a sophisticated economy of attention, can be appraised.
Georg Franck, studied philosophy, architecture and economics in Munich. Holding an economics doctorate, he was active as architect and town-planner from 1974. He also engaged in software development, producing a planning tool that has been marketed since 1991. Since 1994, he has chaired the department of computer-aided architecture and planning at the Vienna University of Technology.
Selected publications: Raumökonomie, Stadtentwicklung und Umweltpolitik, Stuttgart 1992; Medien neu?, Stuttgart 1993; Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, Munich 1998.
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Some ancient Greek monuments of victory concentrate solely on the depiction of the defeated's suffering, without showing the victor. Calling upon a spectator with a high degree of aesthetic awareness, they do not seem to incite compassion. The gap between aesthetic attention on one side and and an ethical attitude of compassion on the other gives rise to several questions: is compassion a specific cultural variable? Does the modern, Christian influenced general willingness to overall compassion have any correspondence in antiquity? And if so: what is exactly the difference between modern and ancient compassion? A good basis for an answer can be found in the theory of compassion in Aristotelian rhetoric which itself might also help to a better understanding of the visual representations of suffering.
Luca Giuliani, born in Florence in 1950, teaches Classical Archeology in Munich. 1999 through 2000, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Selected publications: Bildnis und Botschaft: Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Bildniskunst der römischen Republik, Frankfurt 1986; Bilder nach Homer: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Lektüre für die Malerei, Freiburg 1998; Bild und Mythos: Geschichte der Bilderzählung in der griechischen Kunst, München 2003.
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The paper discusses stylistic strategies of music (especially in the west) that have been used for evoking sympathetic or alienating environments responsive to different political and cultural agendas. Among these strategies are those related to harmoniousness, emotionalism, and exoticism. A special emphasis is given to music's "nomadic" nature and its potential to open new modes of "feeling with" (Mitgefühl), overcoming barriers of otherness.
Ruth HaCohen is a Senior Lecturer of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She studied at the Hebrew University Musicology and Jewish Thought and earned her doctorate in 1992. She received the Bernhard Bloomfield Award for her dissertation. Since 1992 she has been a lecturer at the Hebrew University. From 1992 until 1994, she was a member of the Board of the Israeli Musicological Society, and in 1996/97 she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John's College in Oxford. Between 2001-2004 she was the chairperson of the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University. She is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 2001 she is co-chairperson of Ha'Atelier Collegium in Berlin.
Selected Publications: Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetic Theory to Cognitive Science, New Brunswick (NJ) 2003 (with Ruth Katz); The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters, New Brunswick (NJ) 2003 (with Ruth Katz); "The Music of Sympathy in the Arts of the Baroque: Or the Use of Difference to Overcome Indifference", Poetics Today 22:3, Fall 2001: 607-650.
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Every theory of sympathy or compassion must fulfil two claims: first, it must take into account the fact that the person who sympathises with someone else can distinguish between her or his own emotions and those of the other person. Second, any theory of sympathy must describe how it is possible to feel an emotion just like another person. And this involves more than recognising or perceiving what kind of emotion the other person may or may not have. These claims correspond with two possible extreme positions. The first is that sympathy is the same as empathy: one person is affected by the same feeling, or feels the same emotion as another (this is the theory of identification, or, in its more extreme form, the theory of contagion). The second position is that sympathy involves thinking by analogy, imagining what kind of emotion the other person has, or might be having, by using well known patterns of emotions, i.e. asking oneself what emotion could be the response to the situation in which the other person finds her- or himself. The talk will discuss these different concepts by analysing the critical case of music that presents emotions or moods. How is it possible, for example, to sympathise not only with fictional figures but also with emotions that are presented or performed by music? I will refer to Susanne Langer΄s theory of symbolic transformation, to David Hume΄s concept of moral sense and to the phenomenological analysis of sympathy.
Hilge Landweer, born in 1956, is a Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and an associate at Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Historische Anthropologie. She studied in Kiel and Bielefeld, where she earned her doctorate in 1989. She was co-editor of the journal "Feministische Studien" from 1991 to 2002. Her main research fields are practical philosophy (ethics and social philosophy), historical anthropology and phenomenology.
Selected publications: Das Märtyrerinnenmodell: Zur diskursiven Erzeugung weiblicher Identität, Pfaffenweiler 1990; with Mechthild Rumpf: Kritik der Kategorie "Geschlecht", Deutscher Studienverlag Weinheim 1993; with Manfred Bauschulte and Volkhard Krech: Wege Bilder Spiele, Bielefeld 1999; Scham und Macht: Phänomenologische Untersuchung zur Sozialität eines Gefühls, Tübingen 1999; with Christoph Demmerling: Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn, Stuttgart 2005.
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This presentation is a meditation on emotional responses to the re-election of "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush, focusing in particular on websites devoted to anti-Bush post-election expression. The postings speak not just to the current impoverished state of American political discourse, I argue, but to various theories of compassion as well.
Tom Lutz is an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa.
Selected Publications: American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History, Ithaca (NY) 1991; These "Colored" United States: African American Essays from the 1920s, New Brunswick (NJ) 1996 (with Susanna Ashton); Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, New York 1999 (Ger.: Tränen vergießen: Über die Kunst zu weinen, München 2000); Cosmopolitan Vistas, Ithaca (NY) 2004.
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The distinction between pity for nearby and for distant misfortune (Henning Ritter) and the theory of the globalization of emotions (Ulrich Beck) encounter the difficulty of forging a single concept for quite distinct forms of emotional responses. But there are doubts whether pity or sympathy are the appropriate terms for effects triggered by media-conveyed images of catastrophes that occur in other countries and continents.
Here the older discussions conducted in the context of the theory of tragedy since Aristotle can help clarify terms. Since Artistotle, pity (eleos) depended on the sufferer and the pitying party belonging to the same class, as well as on a series of other conditions such as that the suffered misfortune was tied to a flaw in the sufferer's behavior and that, if he exhibited the same flaw, the pitying party might suffer the same fate. Lessing renewed this tradition with great authority, especially for German culture. But he transformed the equality of class to the universality of a pity that responded to misfortune, whatever the class of the sufferer and whatever the conditions that lead to the suffering.
Critics of Lessing, like Walter Benjamin, have contradicted this. In the face of a misfortune of historical-catastrophic dimensions, we don't feel pity, but horror, rage, and desperation. What the media convey today of the horrors of war and terror in a fragmented and decontextualized manner, no longer seems graspable in traditional terms of pity and empathy.
Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus is Scientific coordinator at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Professor (apl.) at the University of Potsdam, where he teaches literature.
Selected publications: Wollust und Grausamkeit: Affektenlehre und Affektdarstellung in Lohensteins Dramatik am Beispiel von "Agrippina", Göttingen 1986; Austausch und intellektueller Dialog: Beiträge zu den deutsch-französischen Hochschulbeziehungen (19851992), Paris 1992; Die akademische Mobilität zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich (19251992), Bonn 1994; Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin 2001.
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Adolf Muschg, born in 1934, is a Swiss writer and a literary scholar. He studied German, English, and philosophy in Zurich and Cambridge. From 1964 onwards, he taught at several universities in Germany, Japan, the USA and in other countries. In 1970 was appointed professor of German Language and Literature at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. He received various awards, including the Hermann-Hesse-Preis (1974) and the Georg-Büchner-Preis (1994). He has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1976. In addition he is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur at Mainz and Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt. In 2003 he was elected President of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Selected publications: Fremdkörper: Erzählungen, Zürich 1968; Albissers Grund, Frankfurt/Main 1974; Baiyun oder die Freundschaftsgesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 1980; Der Rote Ritter: Eine Geschichte von Parzival, Frankfurt/Main 1993; Von einem der auszog, leben zu lernen, Frankfurt/Main 2004.
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Reading both her poems and her prose, Ruth Padel draws on three years of exploring Asian forests in search of wild tigers and their hopes for longterm survival in some of the poorest countries of the world.
Ruth Padel is a British poet, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has won the UK National Poetry Competition and published six celebrated collections of poetry. She wrote the popular "Sunday Poem" column for the Independent on Sunday for three years. Before publishing poetry she studied classics at Oxford, Paris and Berlin, wrote a PhD on Greek tragedy at Oxford, was the first woman Fellow of Wadham College, Research Fellow at Wolfson College, and taught Greek in Corpus Christi Oxford, Kings Cambridge, and Birkbeck College London.
Selected Publications: In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, Princeton 1992; Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness, Princeton 1995; I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll, London 2000; 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, London 2002; Poetry: Summer Snow, London 1990, Angel, Newcastle upon Tyne 1993; Fusewire, London 1996; Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, London 1998; Voodoo Shop, London 2002; The Soho Leopard, London 2004.
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South Indian Srivaishnavism the worship of the god Vishnu in his temples identifies Compassion as a goddess who is the true or deeper identity of the male deity, in effect his authentic self. In the early fourteenth century, the polymath Vedanta Desika composed a century of Sanskrit verses addressed to this divine Compassion the Daya-sataka. In these verses we encounter Compassion in her various guises, as a liquid force connecting what is divided or separate, as endlessly hungry and incapable of satisfaction, as a trap set for traumatized and recalcitrant human beings, and as the solid mountain of Tirupati where Vishnu becomes present through her activity. A Tamil metaphysics of compassion can be abstracted inductively from this radical, somewhat subversive text.
David Shulman studied Islamic History at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, before devoting himself to Tamil and Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He received his Ph.D. 1976 from the University of London for his dissertation entitled The Mythology of the Tamil Saiva Talapuranam. He has been affiliated with Hebrew University, Jerusalem since 1978, becoming a Full Professor for Indian Studies and Comparative Relegion in 1985 (until present). In 1988 he was elected member of the Israeli Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. From 1992 1998 Professor Shulman served as the Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. He has been awarded numerous international grants and prizes including a MacArthur fellowship from 1987 1992.
Selected publications: Hamiqdash vehamayim (poems), Tel-Aviv 1974; The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, Princeton 1985; Textures of Time: Writing History In South India, 1600-1800, Delhi 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam); Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, New York 1999 (with G. Stroumsa); Siva In the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge, Delhi 2004 (with Don Handelman).
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The theatrical scene of compassion is crucial in the history of sensibility in 18th century France. This scene is built and diffused by way of literature, painting and theater to the public sphere: for example to the courts of justice. The melodramatic frame is used as a representation of suffering, a pattern of pity that is strongly linked to the ethical and political project of the Enlightenment. The public demand and the relative consensus about this pattern did not prevent a debate about the contradictions therein and the ambiguity of compassion at that point in time. The French Revolution was not only a field of experience but also a turning point. The sentimental denunciations of injustice as represented in the speeches to the National Assembly are still based on compassion. The notion of pity is rendered a central symbolic enjeu of revolutionary debates on the fall of monarchy. But after the Revolution another discourse emerges in opposition to the sentimentalism of the Enlightenment: compassion based on theatrically enacted feelings seems now unacceptable or reserved to melodrama and popular novels.
Anne Vincent-Buffault, historian. Ph.D. University Paris 7. Member of the centre of social research ESCP-EAP/ Laboratory of social change University Paris 7.
Selected publications: L'Histoire des larmes, Paris 1986 (engl.: The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, London 1991); L'exercice de l'amité: Pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (La couleur de la vie), Paris 1995.