Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Should I feel sympathy for those who are indifferent, for the existentially bored? I can't deny feeling an empathy with the profoundly bored, but should I sympathize with them? Lars Svendsen (A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons, London: Reaktion Books, 2005) asks us to think of boredom as woven into the fabric of the modern condition. He is especially concerned with a type of boredom he calls existential boredom, which is not a question of idleness but rather of a loss of meaning (p. 34). Provocatively, Svendsen identifies indifference rather than alienation as the condition that enables boredom (p. 36). If I were to sympathize with the bored because they have interiorized an awful indifference of modernity, because they have made a loss of meaning their own, I would not only risk disrespecting the existential freedom of the bored, I would risk not seeing boredom for what it is. My sympathies then would in effect be meaningless. "It is impossible," Svendsen tells us, "to make any clear distinction between the respective contributions made by the subject and object to boredom, because the emptiness of the subject and object is so interwoven" (p. 44). Svendsen says, "One feels bored, for boredom does not have any content that would make it mine" (p. 41, Svendsen's emphases). Is there a person whose feeling of loss I can sympathize with, that I should sympathize with?
Boredom, according to Svendsen, is "a death within life, a non-life" (pp. 40-41). I don't extend to my sympathies to the dead, but to those who live with death, to those who feel the loss of others. Does one live with boredom, or is boredom a way of not living? How can one feel and not be living? How can I not sympathize with one who feels?
"Boredom is connected to reflection, and in all reflection there is a tendency towards a loss of world" (p. 33). Again, I empathize with those who reflect, but I am not sure whether I should sympathize with them. Does the thinker who fights to the tendency towards loss, and fails, succumbing to indifference, deserve my sympathies? What of the thinker who succumbs without a struggle?
What is the relationship between boredom and the experience of an uncertain subject? Existential boredom, Svendsen argues, "must fundamentally be understood on the basis of a dearth of accumulated experience. The problem is that we try to get beyond this boredom by piling on increasingly new and more potent sensations and impressions, instead of allowing ourselves time to accumulate experience" (p. 45, Svendsen's emphasis). Let's say I value rumination. It allows me time to accumulate an experience of thinking. Yet I have ample ground for empathizing with those who do not ruminate, for the glib, and I can't easily assign a responsibility for rumination. One of the characteristics of modern individualism is that it places a burden on the individual person to create or discover meaning for her own life, and the more life is focused on the individual, the "stronger the insistence on [finding] meaning amongst the trivialities of everyday life will become" (p. 27). Can I blame somebody for not finding meaning amongst trivialities? Can I be sure that boredom isn't such a triviality, that it truly is a big philosophical problem that Svendsen makes of it? "Only a problematic self feels the need for realization," Svendsen tells us (p. 32). I wouldn't want to make a further problem of somebody's self by suggesting that they shouldn't feel bored, that they should find their own meaning for their life. Yet I am not sure that finding one's own meaning in life doesn't alleviate the suffering of boredom. The "person" who suffers boredom has been bequeathed a problematic self. The suffering of boredom may be a price paid for the resistence to the problematic self. Certainly then I wouldn't pity the bored. It is difficult, though, to find common cause with the existentially bored, so long and insofar as they have succumbed to indifference.
I think there's a lot to be said for accumulating experience together. Sympathy for the bored may not foster togetherness. I don't know that it's a bad thing to sympathize with the bored. Perhaps, though, it misses the point (or pointlessness) of boredom.
Labels: boredom, compassion, existentialism, Svendsen
Monday, August 27, 2007
Is empathy grounded in the play of signs? I'm putting the question to Jesper Hoffmeyer even though others (Donald Favareau, for instance) have already expanded on his work and reformulated the problem. Hoffmeyer remains, however, an exemplar of the semiotic point of view on empathy. He sees empathy as a therapeutic response to a uniquely human existential terror stemming from the thought that one could be replaced, a thought that creates a split between an emotionally whole self and an emotionally neutral player who is free to contemplate his or her mortality (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 132). He says:
The interchangability of the players implies an emotional and cognitive relationship between them. Human beings could never have learned to put themselves in someone else's psychological place if they had not already learned to see themselves reflected in that other person, to see the other person as a creature just like them.
The terror and the empathy go hand in hand and language is their medium. In actual fact it was not humanity, much less erectus, who engendered them. It was a little child. Lacan's reflection theory holds the key: the mutual empathy between mother and child provided the protection necessary to cope with the unleashing of the awful isolation inherent in the idea of "not."
(pp. 132-133)
Phenomena like atruism in chimpanzees suggest that either chimpanzees are more intellectually capable than Hoffmeyer gives them credit for (calling into question the uniqueness of the existential terror of imagining oneself as interchangable), even though they lack language. Such phenomena might also call into question the notion that empathy emerges as response to a kind of cognition. We needn't turn to the behavioural studies of primates however in order to philosophically question this premise. Kojima, for instance, talks about the ontic meaning of the other being present to us immanently prior to any perspective that would allow for an exchange of viewpoints, and he speaks of an ontological anticipation of alterity that precedes any introjection of one's own being into other bodies. Favareau might tell us that such ontological anticipations are also a kind of neurological interpretation (and therefore also "cognitive"), but I wonder if instead we might question the semiotic nature of empathy.
If empathy is semiotic in anything like a Peircean sense, it would seem to involve multiple interpretants. The stubbed toe affects its owner and any empathetic witnesses at once. I can't say whether Peirce ever provided a satisfactory account of empathy or compassion, but the very idea of com-passion challenges my understanding of the idea that sign relations are purely triadic. Sign relations in empathy appear to be tetrahedral, at the least. I see meaning in the relationship between interpretants, but I don't know what semiotic model would be capable of exploring it.
I've quoted Jean-Luc Nancy before as saying:
Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.
(Being Singular Plural, pp. 86-87).
Now I want to ask whether meaning is always meaning towards something, or more simply meaning something. (A secondary question concerns whether meaning is always for somebody–I'll leave that aside for the moment.) Is meaning towards a thing qualitatively the same as meaning towards another person? Nancy invites us to roam in a region of meaning between singularities. Can this meaning of the with also be thought of as a meaning towards, or would that necessarily imply a kind of foundation that Nancy rejects? I'm not sure.
All told the semiotic depiction of empathy feels a little cold to me. Perhaps there are senses in which empathy is grounded in the play of signs, but I'm having a hard time envisaging a semiotic approach that doesn't obliterate the meaning of the other or, alternatively, the meaning of being with others. What sense of meaning, if any, does the phenomenon of empathy call for?
Labels: chimpanzees, compassion, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kojima, meaning, Nancy, Peirce, uniqueness
Thursday, April 26, 2007
I've been on a little vacation and haven't been reading much of the philosophy books I've set out to read this spring. I have, though, just reread The Lord of the Rings and thought I'd comment on something that didn't quite make it into Peter Jackson's cinematic adaptation: sympathy for the oliphaunts (or mûmakil) felt by Samwise Gamgee. "And when he learned that at the siege of Gondor there had been a great number of these beasts and they were all destroyed, he thought it a sad loss" (p. 936). Understandably the movie adaptation, even the eleven-hour plus extended edition, had to pare down the book in order to bring it to the screen; however, sympathy for the oliphaunts should have been included in the movie. It should have colored how Jackson portrayed the oliphaunts from beginning to end. It didn't. On the commentary to the extended edition dvd, screenwriter Fran Walsh raises the problem of audience sympathies leaning toward the oliphaunts and going against the Rohirrim, the riders of Rohan. Some more graphic scenes of violence aimed at the oliphaunts were cut from the film for this reason. Jackson offers the opinion that a common sensibility of pity for abused circus elephants explains why audiences react negatively to such scenes of violence. He and the digital effects team made some effort to make the oliphaunts seem less like elephants and more like monsters. That doesn't really solve the problem of audience sympathies–which is in essence the problem of compassion and one of the key themes of The Lord of the Rings. The journey toward compassion, most strongly portrayed through the character of Frodo, suffers in Jackson's adaptation. Jackson's Frodo is initially less aggressive and finally more agresssive and less compassionate that Tolkien's Frodo. Generally, Jackson strays too far from his source material in his portrayal of monsters, relying on graphic horror rather than dread, suspense, or compassion. Tolkien's oliphaunts warrant compassion, even as they are led into battle in the service of evil. They are in many ways not unlike men, who may be misled, yet who may also be redeemed.
Labels: compassion, elephants, Lord of the Rings