Ep. 364: Max Scheler on Sympathy (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 364 is something like what is it to sympathize with other people? We've read the first four chapters of Max Scheler's The Nature of Sympathy, first published in 1913 with a much expanded second edition that produced some of what we read in 1922. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer vividly visualizing your feelings, yet feeling no pity for you. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin

0:42 Seth: experiencing before understanding through vivid experience. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan

0:48 Wes: dissolving into a common stockpot of misery.

0:51 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey grasping my fellow feeling as like stubbing my toe and saying ouch.

1:00 Mark: All right. So again, the reason we're doing this is I discovered this Edith Stein book on the problem of empathy, but then discovered this book the Nature of Sympathy, from around the same time, thought they might go well together. He decided to insert Brentano because that was mentioned in the intro of the Scheler here. But the connection between those two is tangential at best. I guess he had another book around the same time Scheler did the Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, which maybe is a more direct jumping off point from that Brentano I thought the whole point of reading this was to talk about the foundations of ethics.

Do we know it like Kant thinks? Because of just some rational thing? Brentano kind of gave us an ethical intuitionism which is not that different from rationalism. We just certain ethical things just strike us as oh, that's just correct. The other side seemed to be the empiricists, like Hume, like Smith, where somehow because we have this feeling of sympathy for other people, we somehow found ethics based on that. And the first chapter of this, the Ethics of Sympathy, just dashes that says no, that's not Scheler's view at all. You can't found ethics on the mere fact that you sympathize with somebody.

What if they're doing something bad? Sympathizing with them wouldn't be good. Then what about ethical duties toward yourself? Who are you sympathizing with then? There are a bunch of reasons why he thinks it wouldn't work. And so the remainder of what we read has very little to do with ethics. It's just about ways in which people, according to various theories, can Be in sync with each other? Is it because we're all part of the great one? Is understanding somebody else a matter of identifying with them in some strong sense? And he goes through all these different ways in which psychologically people might identify with other people, very weird ways.

Hypnotism, religious experience. Let me hand it off to you guys. I think that the ethical point is, I just stated, right, it's. It's not going to be an ethics of sympathy, but it's going to be relevant to ethics, right? There's some kind of sympathy. Certainly fellow feeling is a great thing. And so what is fellow feeling? What can we learn about it?

3:10 Wes: Yeah, I mean, maybe we should just start out by clarifying because he's going to talk a lot about fellow feeling, Right? It's a book about sympathy. But I think the word that he's. The phrase that he's going to use for that more often is fellow feeling. And that can break down into either pity, which he also calls commiserating, or taking pleasure in someone else's joy. And one of the principal points of all of this is that fellow feeling, in whatever form, is an intentional act that takes another person's emotional state as an object directly.

So it doesn't involve Right. To pity someone for the pain that they're suffering doesn't mean, as many theorists seem to have thought, that I somehow replicate that pain inside of me, that I simulate it and then. Right. I feel your pain, as Bill Clinton might put it, in a sense, I'm feeling your pain, but I'm not feeling it as your pain. I'm sensing your pain. I'm taking your pain as an object. It doesn't mean I'm experiencing your pain. And that, for Scheler, is very important. And it's important if you want to say anything about morality at all.

4:27 Dylan: I found it confusing because I felt like he was spending a big chunk of time trying to figure out, telling me what it wasn't. Yes. So I will admit straight off that I found it challenging to figure out what parts were fellow feeling and what parts were fellow feeling like. But that distinction, and to me, the most interesting piece, which I'm still getting my head around, is the notion that all of these ways of interacting with other people are part of the way in which we interact with them as. Not as love, not as if we're drawn to them, but their reactions that we have to other beings and not always people. But it's a reaction that we have.

5:13 Wes: Let me just clarify. I think, Dylan, it's good you brought up that confusion because he does talk as if fellow feeling sometimes as if fellow feeling were a general umbrella under which he's going to categorize. So. Right. The second chapter, classification of the phenomena of fellow feeling. And he bumps under that. These four different types, community of feeling, fellow feeling about something which is rejoicing or commiseration, mere emotional infection, and then true identification or emotional identification. We'll get into all of those.

But it's really the second one, which you all also call fellow feeling proper. Right? For the most part in the reading, when he's talking about fellow feeling, he's distinguishing it from identification or emotional infection, and he's referring to fellow feeling proper as opposed to the umbrella term. And I think that'll help us maintain some clarity about all of this.

6:05 Dylan: Yeah, I think that's right, but I guess we'll have to. What I would like to get more clarification on is it doesn't seem to be that in any of the cases of fellow feeling, even in the cases of pity, that they're part of the act of us in our connections outward towards people. He reserves that for love in his side comments. That's the active part of us. So fellow feeling, even the experience of pity or sympathy is a reaction that we have. Hence my opening. It's a condition of our being in that way, that we interact in the world that way. So we can classify it that way, but it's not part of the active connection that we have to other people because of. It's not an act of ourselves at all. It's a reaction. Now, I might be completely off base on that, and so I would like to understand that more.

7:00 Mark: But yeah, he does say. Right. I have a note at the end of chapter one. Fellow feeling is essentially reactive. So he's saying that about all the types. But the ones that he doesn't like are involuntary. So merely mere contagion of feeling. That seems like it would be fellow feeling. But what if you're just, you know, you work in a place with a lot of grumpy people, or you go out to a party and people are joyous and then you just kind of catch that. You might just feel good. You might not realize even where it came from, where he talks about tradition of acting in ways that your parents did and you're not.

It's not like you're doing this out of reverence for them and you're saying, yay, dad, remember of you. I'm going to act pissed off at the same things you were Pissed off at. No, it's just you caught this. These dispositions. So he just gives. In fact, a general tradition is a way of being infected. But that's different than communication where somebody is not just giving you an idea, but like telling you, I believe this idea, you should too, or something like that, you know, reminded me of our. The whole discussion on meaning that we had last year or so.

Yeah. So the fellow feeling proper ends up being the good kind. It's the kind that assures us, establishes a foundation that you're not the only one in the world that. So it came down to kind of that Buber Levinas thing for me is that he was trying to establish that how do we relate to other people? Well, foundationally, it is not because we are all ultimately one, or we recognize the species being that is common to both of us and identify as the species being. And so you are part of the species being too. And so my circle of self expands to include my family and the stranger and anybody else that.

Because that doesn't necessarily respect them as an other whose private inside you will never know that it's true. Reaching outward to an other. That's what ethics is supposed to do.

8:56 Dylan: Well, but so that helps clarify. And I agree with that. Makes sense in the way he talks about it. It still doesn't feel like a reaching outward. It feels like a capacity to be affected from the outside by individuals. That's all.

9:10 Seth: Yeah, I think that's right, Dylan. I mean, there's so much to unpack here. And the first three quarters of this reading are expositional in character. And it's not until the end that you actually kind of understand what's going on. But the project here is something like he's saying, okay, we recognize that there is a role for feeling in ethics. And he goes through. He talks about Hume and he talks about Bentham and Mill and Schopenhauer and Hegel and Kant and all these people like the idea. You know, he's trying to say there is a role for feeling.

I agree, but the way in which feeling has been. I almost want to say reified, but that's not really it. The way in which feeling has been encoded in a metaphysics by these other thinkers or in a psychology by these other thinkers is kind of missing the point or getting it wrong. And so he goes through step by step, talking about the conception and how feeling works in all these different systems. And his point about reactivity, I think, is he's trying to counter. He was talking about. He talks about it Specifically in the context of this metaphysics of monism.

Or that feeling is somehow connected or related. Or it's a function of the unifying activity that you talked about, Mark. So feeling plays this role of connecting us to others and showing us that we have something in common. And ultimately leading up to we're all one and all, this unity in God and so forth. And he's trying to say it really can't do that work. And it can't do that work because it is reactive. He's like, you can't have a fellow feeling. You can't have sentiment. You can't be empathetic or sympathetic. You can't have this feel somebody else's pain.

Unless you're already given the other with a set of preconditions about what that other is. So he wants to point out that feeling is reactive, but it's constitutive of the way that we experience the world and the way that we interact with others. And it is, I think, in some sense, codependent with understanding, with knowledge. But it's not dependent on it and it's not ancillary to it.

11:40 Wes: Yeah, that's important. We should clarify that reaction can mean two different things. And he's very against what he calls genetic theories of fellow feeling. Which are basically all about reaction, the causal theories. He wants to say that this is actually about intentionality and subjectivity. Right. So I can take the feelings of others as intentional objects. And that is. He does call that a reaction. Various points. But it's the same way that I have a reaction to a rose. By seeing the rose, there's some subjective insight. There's some awareness of an other thing.

There's an intentional relationship to another object. What he thinks that genetic theories do, causal theories do is in a sense, they make us blind to any intentional object. And there's just this causal process that happens underneath everything. And then I get aroused with some contagious feeling. And then I'm aware of my own feelings. In the same way that some philosophers might want to say, well, I don't really know things in themselves out there. I only know my own representations of those things. So I become aware of my own, according to genetic accounts, of my own feelings and response.

And then I might projectively say, okay, well, the other. That's what's going on in the other person, what's going on in me right now. And he's going to want to say, no, it's more like the case of the rose, where, you know, under the proper understanding of Perception where I can just take. I can take something else as an intentional object. And perceiving a rose doesn't mean, ooh, I feel like a rose right now. I don't have to feel like a rose or identify with a rose to understand what a rose is, to comprehend the rose, to perceive a rose. Likewise, I don't have to experience your pain or have ever experienced any.

You know, have had that particular experience of pain that you're having right now to be able to take your actual pain as an intentional object. I think this is. It's a very important point and I think it is. It's very relevant because from what I've been looking into, this kind of view has become an important part of the contemporary debate on empathy. What is empathy is. I don't see how you get past this very profound point that we somehow can take the experience of others, their emotional states as objects, and that doesn't mean simply replicating those states inside of us.

14:10 Mark: Right. And that there's something direct about our awareness of that. So it's not like even just so part three of this, which we didn't read, is about establishing other minds. And I think the idea is that the traditional argument of, well, I know my own mind and you kind of act like I do. I have a body, you have a body, therefore I infer that you must also have a mind. He just thinks that is absolutely not how it works. We just directly perceive others in the same way that Thomas Reed was saying, I directly perceive physical objects. Yes. I'm actually perceiving this idea that I have in my head that is a symbol for something that is typically caused by that object.

So I could be wrong. It could be an illusion. It could be. It's going to be the same thing is that I read your expression of grief as a symbol for, not as I'm seeing an outward manifestation. And I think that it is caused by an inward thing. No, it is the perceiving the external thing is the symbol, the correlate for the inner life. And so that's just part of our raw ability.

15:19 Wes: Let me just give another example of this. So, for instance, if I see you smile, someone might say, I think what he thinks, Theodor Lipps is arguing, is that somehow I imaginatively imitate the physical, the smiling in. In my mind, and then I have the feeling associated with it. And that's how I know what feeling is associated within. In you. So that's a replication theory. Or you might use some other sort of inference theory about that. It's a little bit ambiguous.

15:44 Mark: Right.

15:44 Wes: Because obviously, you know, on the best possible interpretation, which I think is Scheler's interpretation, the smile is still a signifier. He says he calls it a symbol. I would prefer to call it a signifier here. And so we do read the smile, but we do read it in the read way, the Thomas Reid way, which is immediately right. We see through the text, for instance, to its meaning and it's very, very immediate. And this is just an inheritance, It's a biological inheritance that we do this so we don't have to go through this process of oh yeah, I know what a smile means because I felt this feeling when I smile, you know.

No, no, no. It's a priori. We're born with this ability to immediately perceive the meaning of the smile. So in our field of experience, we don't just see when there's a smile. It's not just a physical thing. It's also the intentional object, is also an emotional intentional object.

16:38 Dylan: But just like perceiving objects in the world, even if we come with inherently the ability to do so, all of the challenges that we have with perceiving the objects in the world come with perceiving other beings in the world in terms of we can be wrong about what their smile signifies, we can be right about what it signifies, just like we can be wrong about whether the ball is going up or going down depending upon what perspective we have on it. All of that's going to be true. Just because we can make those perceptions doesn't mean that. And that's our endowed gift, our evolutionary endowment where we are as beings, as part of our raw powers doesn't mean we're any more. We've avoided the problem of interpretation and being correct about those things.

17:32 Wes: Egocentricity is the counterforce that we have to overcome.

17:36 Dylan: Yeah, so I'm. One of the things that have been confusing to me is just my. Maybe I should have been on that Adam Smith episode where understanding something more about the ways in which we would have accounted for in philosophical accounts for how we understand others as, you know, or maybe I misunderstood Hegel, that the way in which we understand others as through the mediation of them being part of a whole or something like that. I guess I never really read that because when we say something like my perception of another is in the same form as my perception of non human beings, I'm like, yes, isn't that what we've always been talking about?

You know, the idea that we would only have fellow. We only feel things from other People because of some kind of alternate thing. Now of course, Scheler explains, like talks about all these people, how they're wrong in this way. And so I guess I learned a whole bunch of things about the way in which the history of thinking about this is right.

18:42 Mark: I was looking up other figures, this is von Hartmann and Lipps and other. Several other people to see who is this? Is this somebody we should read? Is this. And throwing in Bergson and throwing in a good amount about Schopenhauer that we do know about and Adam Smith. So we'll say why Adam Smith is wrong. It was actually in the intro, so the translator's intro, it's very long intro that he lays out the origin of like why do we have this ability, like he just says in the body of the text, Scheler just says we have this ability to directly perceive others mental states.

And he says what we said about the symbols. So I'm reading here from roman numeral, page 39. Originally, the experience of self and the experience of others is in no way differentiated. The child feels the feelings and thinks the thoughts of those who form a social environment. And there's one broad roaring stream of living in which he's totally immersed. It takes a long time before vortices form within this stream and which draw together what later on will clearly be recognized as mine and others. Even when we come to integrate our own self to cut it out of the texture as it were, in which it had formed one indistinguishable strand alongside many others, we continue to see it against the background of a surviving, although progressively receding common consciousness which contains in principle experience of others as well as the experience of the self.

So this is the origin.

20:05 Wes: Where are you reading this is again,

20:07 Mark: it's a Roman numeral 39. So it's before chapter one. So I guess this is something from one of his other books, from his ethics book or. I'm not exactly sure, I don't remember the context what he's talking about here, but. Right, I'm quoting the editor, not Schiller himself. So it's basically the Hegelian picture that we start out as herd animals and somehow we over cultural evolution and in the individual's life we identify ourselves as individuals. And at that moment, yes, then we do have this idea that I'm the only real one. So it's that egocentrism.

Egocentrism is a very natural stage and we are able to have fellow feeling to get back to it on the one hand, because yes, we're, he says the great change from this is work by sympathy and love. When the primal endowments of our soul, which are known by these words come into play, the prison walls which our egocentrism is built around us are broken. And our eyes are open to the fact that others, qua human beings qua persons, are as valuable as we are ourselves, and not only as valuable, but as real. So we can emerge from that, but it seems like we can only have the ability to do that because we started out as part of this undifferentiated mass thinking that my parent, you know, these things that he identifies as bad for a mature person, Right.

If you somehow confuse your own beliefs and desires in inner life with that of your family members or your group members or people in a mob or something, that this is a pathological. So the pathological allows us to do the healthy thing, even though he's going to be concerned exclusively in what we read with distinguishing the healthy thing, which is a very simple thing, from all these other things that are messed up ways of identifying with each other, which I guess he just saw in Hegel, for instance, as being such a strong metaphysical trend of, oh, ultimately, you know, the Buddhists and the Hindus, they were all right, we're all one.

And he just thinks that phenomenologically that is untenable and that is the death of ethics.

22:12 Seth: Yeah, I think he makes a pretty compelling point. There are a number of interesting things that come out of this, but his reaction to the concept of unity is really that ethics wouldn't be possible if what you experience is a complete identification with the other, because it would ultimately be like self reflection. There has to be a different other.

22:37 Dylan: You wouldn't have another.

22:38 Seth: You wouldn't have another. And so he's critical of all of these approaches, all these theories that Spinoza, I mean, he kind of lumps them all together, right? It's like Indian philosophy, Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, all of these things that ultimately find the foundation of ethics is somehow grounded in the unity of all beings, ultimately is going to fail for him.

23:07 Dylan: So is it this way that the problem with all of those other ones is they're deriving ethics or deriving our recognition of others in a kind of transitive property way that every. All the others participate in the one, and we recognize them as participating in the one. And so therefore we recognize others.

23:29 Wes: If our individuality is an illusion and our sympathy for others is a indication and grounded in the fact that we are really all just one, let's call it God or the will or whatever, then what's happening underneath everything is just God is worried about himself. And it shows up within the field of representation as me being worried about you and you being worried about me. But it's all just God being worried about himself, which we don't think of as a distinctively ethical feeling. It reduces ethics to egoism.

24:08 Dylan: Yeah, it's a little bit like Leibniz's monadism then. Right. All the monads are doing the thing that they're doing because God's thinking them, doing them. Maybe you don't have to go that far in which you described that everybody who's doing, every person who's acting in the way that they're acting is doing so because it's different parts of God's ego all acting against each other. You don't probably don't have to go that far.

24:31 Wes: But yeah, I mean he's very resistant to any theory that's going to reduce altruism to egoism. And I think he's right about this. And that goes for the genetic theories as well as for the. As he and he thinks for these metaphysical theories. There's something irreducibly other oriented about us. And it can't simply come down to us, me feeling your pain and therefore feeling distressed because now I'm in pain. That's not a distinctively ethical state. Nor can it be, oh, you and I are really one and I care about you because I realize where I really care about myself and I discover you're part of me. Well, I got to care about you too. No, not ethical, but.

25:14 Dylan: And you also were pointing out earlier another very strong conclusion that you'd get out of this is the it grounds the ability for us to communicate with one another and have genuine communication without having had the experience of each other or of the things that the other is experiencing. Right. So it allows for something like genuine empathy and, or sympathy, not distinguishing those for a few minutes where I don't have to have experienced the thing that you have experienced in order to be able to recognize it, understand what it is to be able to interact with you about how that is affecting you, communicate in general about it.

26:05 Wes: And I don't have to share your form of life, your way of life.

26:09 Dylan: Yes.

26:09 Wes: In order to empathize with you. I don't have to belong to your race or ethnicity or nation or other class. I can cross those boundaries or age

26:18 Dylan: or all of those. But the same thing would go true for all sorts of other experiences. Right. You could talk to me what it's like to lose a job, even if I've never lost a job before.

26:32 Wes: Right. Or I always think of. This is a stupid example. Oh, you got your legs sawn off. Yeah, I can't. I've never had that happen to me. Therefore, I don't. Or I have to patch it together from other experiences in order to imaginatively reconstruct it. No, that's. According to Scheler. That's not right.

26:53 Mark: Right. Scheller doesn't like that. I tend to like that. Like, if somebody has experienced something that is just. Somebody says, I just had oneness with God. I just had a mystical experience. I was meditating and I was one with the universe, I could see all and hear that will mean nothing to me. I mean, I can be like, huh, okay. But can I really say I have fellow feeling with you? Even like, if you're happy about it? Like, oh, okay. And maybe this is part of what Scheler says is we can't understand, we can't share. Like, if you, The Japanese really like eating raw fish, I believe is the example he gives.

And we can't share if we don't. If we're not familiar with that culture, if we haven't participated in it, we haven't tried raw fish, we can't actually get on board and have that fellow feeling with them. But we can see that they're excited about the raw fish, and then we can feel excited with them or we can feel excited for them, for their joy. Like, we can still have fellow feeling. It's just not about the content until

27:46 Wes: we adopt their ways. He understands that we can acclimate ourselves culturally to it, and then it becomes exciting to us as well. But that doesn't mean we have to wait until that happens in order to understand that they love raw fish.

28:02 Mark: Well, and clearly the kind of thing you had in mind, Wes, was like this, how do we deal with racism? And, well, if you've never experienced the pain of racism, you don't know what it's like. And then we respond, well, I've experienced other kinds of pain. I've been left out in some situations. So I could extrapolate maybe what it's like. Like I was a geek. Well, okay, you were a geek squared, because you were. As a teenager, you were. Had all the stuff that I had going on, but you had it worse in certain ways. And I can kind of piece that together and show her saying, you don't have to do any of that. You can just understand what Suffering is. And like, yes, I don't know the specific content of you being, having, experiencing that thing, but if you just tell me about it, if I just observe

28:45 Wes: it, I think he thinks it's part of our basic equipment. And yes, I would want to say it's a biological inheritance. So if I'm born, I don't know where was Superman born? Was that a shiny happy place where no one had any problems? Krypton, Krypton, Krypton. They had no problems except for Kryptonite. That apparently was their only problem. But suppose you had someone who had, they had such a great upbringing, childhood or, you know, country of origin that they had never experienced suffering. I know it's impossible technically, but the idea is even if that were the case, it's just part of our basic equipment to be able to understand suffering in others before we've experienced it in ourselves.

Which isn't all that far fetched, right? Because it has to be part of our basic equipment to experience it in ourselves as well. There's no reason why it shouldn't be basic equipment in both those senses and that one not necessarily depend on the other.

29:42 Dylan: Tomasello would say exactly this, right? This is part of his whole ways in which we have different. The hierarchy of agency and the ways in which human beings are one part of the evolution of organic beings that our capacity for community ends up being. This would be one of the signs of that. One of the ways in which those communities get built is because of this.

30:08 Wes: Yeah, he does talk about moral feeling, right? And the fact that children automatically start to get and apply morality in ways that chimpanzees won't. And it's connected to this concept of joint attention. Being able to take, yes, other objects as objects of joint attention and have a theory of mind and all that stuff. And so, yeah, so we do see this, you know, towards the end of the reading that we had today, where this capacity for fellow feeling is intimately linked to the concept of the very existence of others and their moral equality, our capacity to understand them as morally equal.

30:47 Dylan: As we go through this, we should also, again, we should talk a little bit about the way in which we're. Just because we have the capacity doesn't mean we're always exercising it. Nor does it mean that we have the same amount of sensitivities or even agree on all of them. Right? So I think it's going to have to be admitted that even if we have the capacity, it doesn't mean that, well, we don't all treat Each other in the same way.

31:16 Wes: Well, he thinks we start out right with normative egocentrism. I'm going to translate to medic to normative. Okay, so we. And to some extent solipsism in general, which. So I think he thinks egoism and a prior. We'll talk about this more later. But practical egoism and then kind of solipsistic attitudes. The attitude as if the minds of others don't really exist on some level. I think he thinks this is their hate. This is our natural position, right. As normative egocentrists where we don't immediately understand that others have their own values and their own point of view that's different from ours. So we can call it the basic equipment. I think this is a good point you're making, Dylan, but it's really dispositional equipment and it can be very non expressed. And it seems to be running against another fundamental equipment, human tendency and egocentricity.

32:19 Mark: Yeah, it was a little confusing. I mean, you're pointing at a little. What happens at the end of the reading, at the end of chapter four, where he. He's been saying again and again, look, it's. It's not. There's no justification to say metaphysically that we're all one. And it's certainly not something that we have to believe in order to understand, to explain fellow feeling. In fact, fellow feeling seems to imply the opposite, that we are separate. But then at some point near the end he says, well, but we do have to sort of be on the same wavelength.

This is around page 66, right? Independently existing persons in mutual recognition to one another are by nature predisposed for a communal mode of life and are teleologically adapted to one another regardless of whether and how far they actually live together. So in other words, we're social animals. It's a natural predisposition which is intuitively grasped in fellow feeling as harmonious fulfillment of human worth going down a little bit. An intrinsically teleological relationship of mutual adaptedness necessarily requires an intelligence transcending all finite persons to ordain this object and destiny.

An intelligence which in bringing persons into existence at the same time conceives their individual diversities of character according to a pattern. If so, pure fellow feeling by the very fact of being inexplicable in genetic or associative terms, lends support to the conclusion that all persons intrinsically capable of sharing in this feeling have one and the same creator. So this whole thing is going to launch into. And again he. I don't Know, if you guys looked at the translator's intro or the. If it went into this in the Stanford. But he's got a really weird theology that underlies this, that sort of remind me of Plato or Fichte or something like that.

Yes, we can talk about how we're related biologically. Maybe we do have a species being we could talk about, but as separate spiritual beings. It's like that Kantian thing of like there's the empirical realm in which we're all just connected by causality, and then there's the. The realm of the. In itself. Or, you know, this Fichte playing off. Kant, you know, talks about us being sort of citizens of the universe or so I forget how he puts it, but you know, our transcendental selves. And so there's something like that that Scheller's going to end up pointing at.

So somehow we. There's going to be something divine in our ability to reach beyond ourselves and actually connect with somebody that's totally other. There both has to be this biological basis that allows us to do that reaching. And there's going to be something profound and spiritual and weird that divides us from each other. And I don't know if I understand any better than that. Do you guys find that the stuff at the end muddied the waters for you? This whole. Oh, well, some kinds of monism are better than others. Bergson's monism is not as bad.

35:21 Wes: Yeah. And then the vitalism that he's talking about is a bit unclear as well. But yeah, he's sympathetic to monism in some ways, but just not in the way it's used by Schopenhauer to explain things. Yeah, but this idea of one and the same creator is really important. Yeah.

35:35 Dylan: He's also definitely against vitalism.

35:38 Wes: Right. Well, I thought he was more sympathetic.

35:41 Mark: It was one of the simp. There were parts of it that he was against. If vitalism. You mean that everything reduces to one single demiurge. No, no, that is like elan

35:50 Dylan: Vital.

35:51 Mark: Right.

35:51 Dylan: I thought that he was against that.

35:53 Mark: That's basically like Schopenhauer's will. But I think Bergson had a sort of more biological way of looking at it that it's not a metaphysical underlying will. It's nature itself is one vital force. And whenever we will anything, we are sort of tapping into that. Yeah, I think he was against. I think it's just. It's another kind of monism. But Wes, maybe you got some of the subtleties.

36:14 Wes: I think what he says and something to the effect. He doesn't like the idea of an underlying metaphysical unity. But he's more sympathetic to a vitalistic unity. That is this thing that kind of a unity of all things that underlies life. Now that was my impression. But yeah, we can get to that. We can figure that out if we get into that in a detailed way later. But it is a bit fuzzy to me.

36:42 Seth: There's a point. I don't know if you remember. He says something to the effect of feeling and understanding and their relationship. And he. I thought he used the term causality or dynamism that he's trying to recast the relationship. So I think part of what he's trying to say is when you go the monist route and you start talking about metaphysics, you have problem one is you're extracting yourself from the lived experience and it's becoming theoretical and conceptual and so forth, and we have to pay attention. But the other part is that you're trying to subsume things like love under a conceptual framework and understanding. And you're not getting at the true relationship between understanding and feeling, which is dynamic like it's causal. So they do coexist and they do interact. But they're not subsumed under some sort of conceptual structure.

37:45 Dylan: It's.

37:46 Seth: He's trying to bring in that élan vital is talking about. If we go all the way back to the pre Socratics, it's this vital force in nature where there's an interaction and a dynamic interaction between things. And that's how this feeling works. Is that he's a proto phenomenologist, right? So he's trying to bracket the conceptual stuff and get at what's actually happening in the lived experience. And he thinks that the monistic conceptual framework can't really capture that experience.

38:19 Wes: So on page 73. So this is what I'm thinking of with being more sympathetic to vitalistic monism. So he'll say in every single case it is always the same level of being and consciousness which becomes one in the phenomenon of identification. And this is the sphere of vital activity in the man or the creature concerned. So that it's not just. It's not oneness at the level of consciousness or spirit, it's oneness at the level of. I don't know. I think of it as more the instinctual. But anyway the biological, the vital, the biopsychological. Thus we are supposed that there are good reasons to be found elsewhere compelling the assumption of a universal, transcendent totality of life and hence a real unity of all life everywhere.

But it would then be not love and fellow feeling, but in the facts of identification or consciousness of vital unity in general. That we should have to seek both for an indication of the validity of the metaphysical insight and subjective consciousness and for an immediate emotional confirmation of its reality and all life everywhere. And they'll say it's an unquestionable advance on the earlier monistic standpoints of Hegel, etc.

39:31 Dylan: Just on that same page, lower down, the metaphysical universe life is taken for granted by leaders of thought so widely divergent. Emphasize the following. We entirely reject metaphysical biologism, I.e. the conception of ultimate reality in the manner of Bergson, Simmel, Lotze and others, as itself an élan vital or life principle, or as the life and soul of the universe. For neither is it knowing, intuiting and thinking capacity, nor is its emotional and volitional one is spirit or nous an outcome or sublimation of life. So maybe there's a distinction between vital force and elan vital that I'm just missing.

40:14 Mark: I mean this is hilarious that we of course are attracted to the most difficult part of the reading and we're doing this in part one before explaining a lot of the simpler stuff. No, but I do. We're here, let's dwell on it. Right? The paragraph you started is a good one. The next paragraph says on the other hand. So we are going to get the two sides of it right here. So I think this is. And it's right at the end, right, the phrase you referred to, Seth. Dynamic causality. I see that is in italics on page 76, our very last page, which is right after what we're talking about here.

So this is what I was saying that on the level of the biological there is a unity. And this is what enables these forms of identification that we have yet to actually talk about. They're not real fellow feeling, but they are real that you can have a parent and child for instance, identify. This is what I was reading that part from the intro is that in fact all children just sort of start with according to this, not as little egoists, but as just kind of a mushy cell in a larger biological unity. And so they take whatever the parents express. It's infection that they are infected by their parents emotions and things and just will think that they're, you know, insofar as they think about the self at all, they just identify with the larger group, with the parents.

But that's not what actual personalities are. The personality that develops as an individual is going to be. Not biological, but it's going to be spiritual. So the very last part of that paragraph on page 75, personality is thus elevated and in its pure form exalted above the body and above life in itself or any other, this being at once its mere earthly condition of existence and the material upon which it works. So he's almost like a freaking Cartesian dualist here. This is why I said, you know, he's more of a Kantian dualist in terms of. Yes, there's the realm of the biological, of the causal, and then there's the realm of the spiritual, which is.

Somehow runs in parallel to that. I don't know. This is all supposed to be phenomenologically defensible.

42:19 Dylan: So this whole section at the end is where I did find myself saying my experience was. I'm reading along and he's deriving something. So, okay, I get it. And then he makes a qualification that seems to be. But the following is. He's staking out something like the whole personality thing. I'm like, what are you doing with that? I don't understand. I didn't understand. But that's okay. Maybe the way to say it is I struggled with how the different things he was compartmentalizing always were compartmentalized in a way that was consistent with the previous compartmentalizations. Because he's clearly dedicated to an a priori metaphysical unity that is reflected in some way.

43:11 Mark: Well, biological unity, not a metaphysical unity. Sorry, that's the stupid.

43:15 Wes: He wants to.

43:15 Mark: Yeah, that's the distinction.

43:17 Dylan: Yeah.

43:17 Mark: Because the spirit would be included in metaphysics. So he wants to say that we are absolutely. I, as spirit, am absolutely separate from you as spirit, but as animals.

43:28 Dylan: Okay, now I'm glossing different metaphysical unities. You're right. Not the metaphysical unity of us as beings. But he also seemed to be on board and very concerned with there being a metaphysical unity of the universe.

43:42 Mark: All right, to summarize, for people that have now been lost from what we said, I think it's actually pretty simple. Right. That is the ethical famous last word. As we've saying, proper fellow feeling is understanding of. And then on top of that, sympathy with somebody that is fundamentally other. And those are very different, actually, because you could understand somebody. I understand your pain. In fact, I'm cruel. If I didn't understand your pain, I wouldn't get any jollies out of inflicting on it. Inflicting it on you. I have to be able. So just the understanding and the sympathy are different things, and they are Both steps toward.

None of them is the foundation of ethics. Right. There has to be some just sort of a priori ethical stuff that we then can look at this kind of identification, this kind of sympathy and say and judge. That's the good kind, that's the bad kind. So ethics comes first, then comes sociality, then comes actual sympathy, fellow feeling with other people. And beyond that is going to be love, which is going to be truly spiritual and reaching out. And is has to do with part two of the book that we didn't read. He talks a little about the end. That's my summary.

44:58 Wes: That's good, Good summary.

44:59 Dylan: So the stuff that we're talking about, and it's a good summary, but stuff that we've been most focused on are basically a description of our capacities. And the whole discussion about ethics, which is a priori from this, would be our capacities. These capacities we have allow us to participate as ethical beings in the ethics that exist outside. And other beings, animals in particular, don't have these capacities. So they don't behave ethically because they can't be sensitive to ethical. They can't participate in ethical exchanges because they don't have those ethical capacities.

45:33 Mark: Right. It sounds rather Kantian. It sounds. I mean, I think we should try to read the Brentano pretty much directly into this, so you can refer to that. Let's wrap up Part one here. Obviously we're going to talk for another hour here. Come back next week or become a Partial Examine Life supporter. Personal examinedlife.com support. And if you do it through our website or through Patreon, you can get it right away. Should be in your feed coming up here. Thanks, everybody.

46:01 Wes: Thanks.

46:02 Dylan: Good night.

46:03 Seth: Thanks.

46:03 Wes: Thanks.