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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 364, part two. We've been discussing Max Scheller's part one of the Nature of Sympathy. And this is a very strange structure. As I was saying before, there was a short version of this from 1913, but then he had a lot of subsequent thoughts. And so this version in 1922 comes out. In fact, now it's part of a series. This is going to be all about the phenomenology of emotion. I'm going to have one on fear. I'm going to have one on honor. He doesn't write any of those. He's dead by 1928. He doesn't write any.

You know, he's written a lot of stuff, but. So this series is aborted. But in any case, he is bogged down. So these four chapters that we read Right. The Ethics of Sympathy. Very, very short chapter. Classification of the Phenomena of fellow Feeling. This was added for the second edition. Genetic theories of fellow Feeling. That's from the original metaphysical theories. This is the longest chapter. There's a part on Schopenhauer that was in the first edition. The rest is added for the second edition. In general, it just seems like the second edition stuff is where he gets really picky and pedantic and detailed and he even says in the intro in the preface to the first edition.

I hope this can be an example of how you can give philosophy in a concise way.

1:23 Wes: So we should have done the first

1:24 Mark: edition, but I guess we're.

1:26 Dylan: Yeah.

1:27 Mark: What else did we have to say about these three page chapter one on the ethics of sympathy? Had we gotten that out enough?

1:34 Wes: Well, he's making I guess three points, right? One is that we can't derive morality from fellow feeling. That kind of presupposes what we're trying to deduce. Presupposes that what we're sharing in, the feeling that we're sharing in is itself moral. When we might, in fact we might rejoice in someone else's pain, for instance, or rather rejoice in the cruelty of someone else who's inflicting pain. And then the second point is that there are other possible foundations for ethical judgment than fellow feeling. And then brings up the Adam Smith and the question of what conscience is. And Adam Smith's idea is that it involves this looking at our own behavior through the eyes of an impartial spectator, having this fantasy of how they might be indignant at what were bad thing that we're doing and therefore judging ourselves by that standard. And yeah, he doesn't like that.

2:40 Mark: Yes.

2:41 Wes: Why is that?

2:42 Mark: No attempt to build it on social grounds like. Well, morality is mostly just custom. It's kind of what we have a group have found works well. Or of course there's the idea of works well. So there's already normativity. So maybe this is a circular explanation, but you know, this is what a Hume or a Smith has to say. So it's just a matter of rationalizing and making consistent these basically social intuitions that we as a society have come up with over time about proper behavior. And so like where we are distorted when we think of our own case. We like to think that anything that benefits us personally is good. And so you have to abstract from your own situation. You have to say how would somebody else look at this situation? How would objectively. How would they look at it? And go with their judgment, the imagined judgment of the impartial spectator rather than your own.

3:37 Wes: I mean, I think part of this, again, is it's kind of reminiscent of Hart and acceptance, because he'll say conscience isn't really about some almighty social authority, which is analogous to saying it's not about doing something because we've been threatened by a bank robber. So in the same way that the law, acceptance of the law doesn't come down to just, okay, I'm going to do it because I'm fearful, it's not the case that I'm going to. The psychology of morality, the psychology of having a conscience involves just being fearful of social authority, fearful of how others might respond to me, or even just fearful of the sting of conscience itself, that there's got to be some fundamental recognition of the authority of the normative before we even feel the sting of conscience. So that's the way I'm understanding this section.

4:29 Dylan: But he doesn't get into that part of it. He's saying that that's true, but he's just pointing to that.

4:34 Wes: And then there's the last point. 3. Well, he doesn't mark it off as 0.3, but he makes that comment about ethics of sympathy. Right. If we ground ethics and sympathy, we'd be grounding it in something reactive rather than spontaneous.

4:49 Dylan: Though in that sentence, fellow feeling is essentially a reaction, as love, for instance, is not. It makes one think that one would ground it in love or could.

5:03 Wes: Right.

5:04 Dylan: But given the other stuff that I've read, in reading this, I was thinking, oh, that's where he's going to go. He's going to go down the route of love. Right. But then the whole thing is about fellow feeling and not about love. Well, maybe, I guess we get love and hatred at the end.

5:19 Mark: Part two is going to be about love.

5:20 Dylan: Yes, it's all about love.

5:22 Wes: Okay.

5:23 Seth: Well, it's interesting, the biography. He hung in some really interesting circles. He's a very interesting guy. And he was surrounded his whole life by big name brilliant intellectuals, including Buber Husserl, you know, as well as Edith Stein. And he also hung out with like, Rilke and poets and writers and so forth. So anyway, I think he has a really lively way of thinking about things. And I understand, you know, it doesn't feel like kind of the. It's not turgid the way Husserl is, and it doesn't have that kind of like rooted in academic philosophy kind of approach to phenomenology.

But I think he's grappling with here he's looking at people talking about love as the question is, how do these things operate? How does love actually operate? How does fellow feeling operate? And then what can we learn? Looking just taking it as a phenomenon, what can we learn about ourselves and human experience? And what can we gather about things like ethics? And I thought it was really interesting. He outlines in the beginning of the book the four different ways of fellow feeling.

6:51 Mark: Yep. Chapter two, we'll get.

6:53 Dylan: Yeah.

6:53 Seth: The different relationships. So he says, let us now turn to fellow feeling, which is primarily based upon those constituents of vicarious understanding already dealt with here. There are four quite different relationships to be distinguished. One, immediate community of feeling, for example, of one and the same sorrow with someone. I just scare quoted that. Two, fellow feeling about something, rejoicing in his joy and commiseration with his sorrow. Three, mere emotional infection, which is an interesting way of putting it. And four, true emotional identification.

And the reason he wants to call these things out is. And he makes that delineation before he starts talking about love because he wants to say we have these very romantic. There are these romantic and spiritual notions of love that result in unity and identification and sameness, you know, and all this sort of thing. And, you know, I think he thinks that a lot of the people who've talked about love or talked about how love operates in this realm of establishing relationships between human beings and ethics and so forth, haven't really looked at.

At what love is and how it operates. And so that's where we were talking about earlier. You can't have fellow feeling without there being a different other already in place that you. There's a whole bunch of work, acknowledgement that needs to be done. And if you think of feeling or love as operating, you know, as a unifier, as something that brings together two different things that makes them the same, then you run into all sorts of problems. From a philosophical perspective, it's poetic, right? But it doesn't work philosophically because we're still very grounded in intentionality.

We have to have, you know, we have to be pointed towards something. We have to have subjectivity, you know. I'll be interested to see what he says in the second half of the book about his version of love and how he thinks it operates. But he clearly thinks that everybody who has brought it up or referred to it before is thinking about love in the wrong way or thinking that the way love operates in the wrong way.

9:17 Wes: Chapter two. We've kind of jumped to the end of that here. And this chapter is all about the intentionality of fellow feeling, which we have covered quite a bit of. I don't know if we want to say anything more about that or get into some of the page reference, but we.

9:32 Dylan: Chapter two starts like at page five.

9:33 Wes: Right now I'm talking about chapter two as a whole.

9:36 Dylan: Yeah.

9:36 Wes: Oh, the whole.

9:37 Seth: Sorry, I thought you were about to refer to something.

9:40 Wes: So pages eight. True. Yeah, it's short, but yeah. So all this stuff about basically. Well, first of all. So the beginning of chapter two, fellow feeling presupposes knowledge of the nature of experience and others, which in turn presupposes that we know that there are other conscious beings or that we, you know, that we think that there are other conscious beings, but it is not the instrument of learning that that's very important. So we don't. It's not that we. Because we're capable of empathy, that we know that others have experiences, that they exist and have suffering experiences from that.

In fact, we reverse that dependency. We need to start out with a theory of other minds and what's going on in them before we can add something to that and then have fellow feelings. So for instance, it's not that we learn of pain in others by having pity for them. First, we understand that there's pain and we can understand the facial expression of pain without actually engaging in pity. Obviously pity and fellow feeling itself happen on top of that. So there's a kind of givenness to the. He uses this word himself, a givenness to the emotional experiences of others.

And it, it's not based on fellow feeling. It's not based on propositional knowledge or factual judgment. I don't say, okay, you know, or inference or anything like that. When I see someone grimace in my perceptual field, it is just like any other sense datum, a given. The pain is a given. So, you know, there's another interesting comparison to here and I think this is on page nine, which is to memory.

11:32 Dylan: Yeah.

11:33 Wes: So because it does sound weird to be attending to someone else's emotional experience without having it. It is a weird sounding thing. How do I. Right. We tend to want to say that. I think it's a natural tendency if you talk to the average person on the street, they would understand empathy as replicating the other person's experience inside themselves. And they would, according to Scheler, have that wrong.

11:56 Mark: Well, maybe that's. Is that the difference between sympathy and empathy? I guess we'll figure out how Stein uses empathy.

12:02 Wes: Well, no, I'm thinking. Okay, yeah, shouldn't use the word empathy. So sympathy as an even pity, though. Right. Pity is not. If I pity someone for their suffering, I'm not replicating their suffering inside of me, according to Scheler. So. Right. So I have to feel it, he says, but I don't feel it by going through the same experience. As I've said, when I feel your pain, it's not because I'm feeling your pain. I'm touching your pain from the outside, so to speak. So it's similar to memory in that I can remember something without directly perceiving it. In the same way that I can understand your pain without actually experiencing it.

12:43 Dylan: Yeah, and he draws that direct analogy, actually, that you remembering something of your own experience is closer to what it would be like to have pity for someone.

12:55 Mark: So what would scheller say about Mr. T saying I pity the fool? Because that seems rather condescending. It's the fool. So clearly Mr. T is not feeling your pain as he pities you.

13:08 Wes: He pities your foolishness.

13:10 Seth: Yeah.

13:10 Wes: He pities your foolishness because of the consequences which is going to bring, which involves him.

13:14 Mark: He's aware of your smashing you.

13:17 Seth: This is kind of what I was trying to pity.

13:18 Wes: The suffering that I'm going to inflict on you for your foolishness.

13:22 Seth: Yes. Well, I think Mr. T's utterance is a performative act, Mark,

13:30 Wes: as is the whole concept of Mr. T in the first place.

13:33 Seth: That's true.

13:33 Wes: Clearly a Persona.

13:34 Mark: Very true.

13:36 Seth: Okay, so this gets at what I was trying to talk about earlier, the Mechanism of page 11, the mechanism of how these things work. He says, the relationships between expression and experience have a fundamental basis of connection which is independent of our specifically human gestures of expression. We have here, as it were, a universal grammar. I wonder if that's a literal translation valid for all languages of expression and the ultimate basis of understanding for all forms of mime and pantomime, living creatures. So we are able to understand that there's inadequacy of gesture to experience.

In other words, somebody who expresses pain. We understand we get something from that expression. We get something from somebody's expression of pain. We understand they're in pain, but there's a connection, but it is not an identification between their expression of pain and their experience of pain. So then we have this capability as human beings to have this fellow feeling where we become. We feel their pain, but in experiencing the pain of the other, that person, we certainly aren't going to imitate the experience because we have no access to that experience at all.

There's a connection inside that person between Their pain and their expression of pain. All we have access to is the expression of pain. And so we don't go and recreate or imitate the experience in ourselves so that we may express the exact same thing. That's not what happens in this kind of reaction. Right.

15:14 Wes: He's responding to a theory which I think he associates with Lipps that, you know, we see a smile, and then we imaginatively imitate that in our heads and therefore generate the feeling associated with it and then project that feeling onto the other person. And in the particular universal grammar section that you quoted, he's thinking about animals. And so the universal grammar that we possess allows us to interpret the emotional states of animals based on their behavior without ever having participated in that behavior ourselves or replicating ourselves.

So if I hear a dog yelp, I know that it's in pain, and it's not because I simulate yelping in myself and. Right. That's the whole idea of universal grammar. There's something more fundamental going on. It's still symbolic. You'll say this relation is symbolic but not causal. Right. So when we experience body language and grimaces and other sorts of behaviors in our environment, we treat them as signifiers and we read through them to the emotional state. And we can do that with animals just as well as with human beings.

16:19 Seth: Yeah. I would just clarify and say, Wes, that it signifies. It doesn't symbolize.

16:24 Wes: Well, he uses the word symbolic. I'm using the word signifier.

16:28 Seth: Right. Well, I agree with you on that. And then, you know, he says at the end, right. The process of understanding a thing is in no way dependent on the experience of the thing. Right. So we understand somebody is in pain based on their gesture, and that understanding then allows us to have fellow feeling, but in no way are we participating in that experience.

16:53 Wes: Yeah. So if a man is drowning and in mortal terror, we don't have to be feeling mortal terror to understand that experience or to sympathize with it.

17:04 Mark: The flip side of this reminded me of you talked about Langer and other folks in our aesthetics episodes was a romantic view of aesthetics is just the artist is expressing the emotion. But no, does the violinist who is playing the sad line, does the violence have to be sad? Does the violinist have to be crying while doing this? Like, no, we have a symbolic language for emotions. We have a symbolic language for these things. You don't actually. You can convey it and get somebody to understand it and actually do it very effectively without yourself feeling that the artist, even the songwriter, can be depicting a thing. Doesn't have to directly feel it.

17:41 Dylan: It also seems like he doesn't have to go as far as talking about universal grammar and so forth as being the way in. I guess it's just a characterization of how we would identify things in the world and communicate with each other in general. Is going so far as to say that we necessarily have a universal grammar as opposed to it being something that we learn, given that we have a capacity for it. That probably is a controversy that's neither here nor there for this particular thing, I guess.

18:15 Mark: I thought we read somebody recently that was saying that there was something like a universal grammar and this was what enables us to learn more complicated.

18:21 Dylan: Oh, no. This is the whole thing that. Wasn't it also Tomasello, who was disagreeing

18:26 Wes: with Chomsky against Chomsky's universal grammar.

18:28 Dylan: Yeah. So this is the whole question of powers that we have and our ability to exercise them and the way in which we get the content for those powers. And so universal grammar here is implying a content of those powers, that they operate in a particular way that has actual content. And someone like Tomasello would say we have those powers and capabilities, but they all get informed for their content.

18:52 Wes: This is about a level of generality. Right. So for Tomasello, we have this innate capacity for joint attention and these other very general.

18:59 Dylan: Exactly.

18:59 Wes: Cognitive capacities that aren't inherently linguistic, but ground language.

19:03 Dylan: Yes.

19:03 Wes: And for Chomsky, there has to be much more specific language function that includes grammar, you know, and rules of grammar that are universal across all languages. So they're. They both accept the. The innateness.

19:16 Dylan: Yes.

19:17 Wes: But that there must be something innate. It's just a matter of level of generality and. Yeah, yeah.

19:23 Dylan: The manifestation of that.

19:24 Wes: And here, this is innateness with regard to interpreting.

19:27 Dylan: Yeah.

19:28 Wes: Body language and facial expressions and things like that.

19:31 Dylan: Scheller's a Chomsky in this respect.

19:33 Mark: Okay. That's what I was trying to figure out, whether maybe that he was even a Platonist. Because he does say at some point, not only do you not need society, you could figure out social, ethical things even if you never knew anybody, even if you were just by yourself on an island. He says something to that effect and it just seemed.

19:56 Dylan: Seems doubtful.

19:57 Mark: That's crazy.

19:58 Wes: Well, right. So, I mean, I would say. Right. Yeah. Smiling is. And our capacity to understand smiles is completely evolutionarily determined. It's not cultural at all. It does arise within the context of a social environment and development. And if you're feral, if you grow up with wolves, then. Yeah. You may not end up Understanding smiling. But given the normal environment, it's a natural capacity that will be evoked in you. And so this is hardwired and I completely agree with that. And so the question is, well, how deep is the hard wiring? Right?

Is it just human to human? Is it just these specific human facial expressions and forms of body language that I can understand? Or in a way does it go deeper into our evolutionary history such that a. I can understand a yelp as well without doing some form of inference. And that is the universal grammar thing that I think that he's getting at here, which I think he's right about.

21:03 Mark: I was maybe reacting too strongly to what was a footnote that he. This is on page 61. He says look ahead to part three, chapter two. On how the idling or non fulfillment of the a priori intentional function of pure fellow feeling may help to furnish an intuitive conviction of belonging in general to a community. Even for a man who has never had occasion to make contact with anyone else, there being no empirical occurrence can only be a matter of pure fellow feeling. So yeah, we have the ability, we have fellow feeling baked into us.

21:37 Wes: Yeah, we have must have some natural capacity for sociality before we become social. Because you know, we can't just say the social itself is socially constructed because then what is it socially constructing on? There's no receptor for anything social, so there's gotta be something baked in.

21:55 Dylan: We have to have a capacity for it for sure.

21:57 Wes: But the last part of this on page 11 to 12, you know, he's kind of, he's going to repeat himself a lot, but this. So he's foreshadowing things that he's going to say repeatedly, but that this kind of imitation theory is not really explaining fellow feeling, but it's explaining emotional infection and more importantly. Right, so emotional infection as in you walk into a room, you're feeling depressed, you walk into a room full of happy people and then suddenly you're feeling happier. At least in a bar, let's say the booze doesn't. Doesn't hurt either.

It's not because you're. Oh, I'm empathizing with. I have fellow feeling towards everyone. I can sympathizing with their emotions. And so now I feel their emotions. That's not what's happening. It's just pure contagion, pure infection. And in a way that is not a means to fellow feeling. It's kind of bars you from it. It's a barrier to it. Unless you really think about it, you're not really Thinking about the experience of other people in that moment. You're just having your own experience of being happier now that you're in the bar. And fellow feeling is about the other, not about oneself.

23:07 Mark: Yeah, phenomenologically I have a hard time with this. I see why he's saying. But it's certainly a natural thing to not just go into a party and then, oh, I'm just magically. I just feel like. I just feel good. It's not that I've. I'm not aware of actually how I've affected the. No, it's because you enter into something and it is a conscious social gathering that people have gathered in part for that purpose to share love and conviviality. And so, yes, you get in the spirit of the thing. And so it does not seem like it is mutually exclusive to have a mood be infectious and also to enter into actual communion and communication with the people that you're with.

23:52 Wes: Yeah, totally. I totally agree with that.

23:54 Dylan: Yeah, I do. But there are people that don't feel that way. In going into groups of people, I

23:59 Wes: was going to say.

24:00 Dylan: Right.

24:01 Wes: It's like how soon is now that Smith Smith song. You go and stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die. That's some people's experience of a party.

24:11 Dylan: It is, it's true. I mean, I also consider myself. I get energy more often than not out of being with other people, but there are a lot of people who don't get that. For them, interacting with especially large groups of people is exhausting. It's tiring for them. I'm not saying that that doesn't disprove this notion. Right. I'm just saying that there's. Despite all of his words, there's more to say about the dynamics of this capability. So, yes, all of those things are true about this capability. I think that you wouldn't be able to feel the burden of being around other people without having the capacity to be sensitive to it.

24:54 Mark: Right. I think the fact that what you're pointing out, I think supports the idea, contra Scheler, that these two things hang together, that the being infected by and actually having fellow feeling with tend to go together. He's saying they can come apart and in fact being infected will rule out fellow feeling. Whereas if you say no, when you go to a party, either you're not going to be infected and you're not going to relate to the people or you're going to be infected and you're going to relate to the people. In both cases, the things are together.

25:25 Dylan: Yeah.

25:26 Mark: So both of those are contra.

25:27 Dylan: Scheler. Yeah. What you just described, Mark, you just articulated what I struggled with here, which is he makes these classifications which are informative of the different dimensions of fellow feeling, but then he makes them. He talks about them as if they're not on a spectrum or a gradient or a different mix of things, but as sort of categorically different from one another, which I found confusing.

25:54 Wes: I do think of going to a party, though, or to. Yeah, let's keep the party. Example is quite.

26:00 Seth: And getting party going.

26:01 Wes: Keep the party going. Uplifted by it, unless you're Morrissey, is quite distinct from feeling good for someone who is joyful over something. Right. So if you win the lottery and I get over my envy and rage about that and then feel good for you that you've done that. Great, great for you. With the fake smile on my face. Can I borrow some money? I really. I'm in trouble. But yeah, I think of that. I might have a very positive feeling, or if you're getting married or whatever the occasion is that's very positive for you. I might have a very positive feeling for you.

But it's of course very distinct from the positive feeling that you're having about having won the lottery or getting married or whatever. So I think there's something to be said from making this distinction, even if we might want to say, well, the contagion is kind of inevitable as well. So maybe contagion and identification and these other things kind of have to be going on at some level as well. It's not just like we. Right. And so they have to be. And maybe he would acknowledge that because maybe our fellow feeling is kind of always being interfered with at some level by these other psychological factors.

I mean, we know it's interfered with by envy, for instance, and why wouldn't it be interfered with by our susceptibility to infection?

27:29 Dylan: We talked about this many, many years ago, having a podcast on fandom. I think that this is getting the closest we've gotten in a long time to what that phenomena is and its different dimensions.

27:45 Mark: In the spirit of that, look at this first one on 12, community of feeling, because so the example he gives. Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the same sorrow, the same anguish. It is not that A feels the sorrow and B feels it also. And moreover, that they both know that they're feeling it. No, it is a feeling in common. And I don't know if I buy this. I kind of want to go the existentialist route and say no. Even if you're feeling qualitatively similar things, because you're in the same situation. And so of course you're going to have this.

So this is why I'm saying fandom, like a bunch of people that are both all rooting for this team and they all see the team score. Are they having the same experience? Are they having a community feeling? Or is each of them actually just. They have their own internal triggers and none of them are actually are going to be exactly the same?

28:39 Wes: Well, I think it's the same, supposedly, in terms of an intentional object and a polarity in terms of good or bad. Right. So the value of that object, I mean, the distinction he's trying to make here. Right. If you lose a child and supposing I don't know your child, I've never met them, you and your wife are going to take the same sorrow as an intentional object. And I might feel sorry for you, but I'm not having a community of feeling with you in that way. I'm not mourning the child. I didn't know them. I can't be sorry for that death. I didn't know them, but I can still feel sorry for you. So when your wife feels that same sorrow over a child, she's not emotionally infected by you. She would happen anyway. She's not just sympathizing with your sorrow. She's not identifying with you. She feels it regardless. And you guys share this intentional object.

29:35 Mark: Okay, well, the intentional object is the death is not the sorrow. Right?

29:41 Wes: This is a good point. I guess I'm kind of confusing things by using that phrase.

29:46 Mark: Yeah, we are having a feeling experience of the shared or, you know, of the relationship or something, you know, and it does seem though still, though, are they qualitatively the same? Because they are going to be qualitatively very, very similar. But he seems to say stronger than that. They're quantitatively the same. Like that we are getting outside of your own in a good way. Right. That we're actually sharing a thing that is not just where. Whereas I always feel like no matter how like we all face death alone, so even if we're all facing the comet that is coming toward us and it's about to obliterate our whole planet, each of us is having our own, it still does not. Or is that just about death in particular? It doesn't seem like we could have a communal experience of death. And so why would we have any other communal.

30:38 Wes: He says, on the contrary, they feel it together in the sense they feel an experience in common. Not only the same. The self. Same value situation, which I take to be the death of this child, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to which. Mark, I think you're calling quantity. Right.

30:57 Mark: Qualitative.

30:58 Dylan: Yeah.

30:58 Wes: And that's the sorrow.

31:00 Dylan: The sorrow as value content and the grief as characterizing the functional relation therein are here one and identical.

31:09 Wes: So the sorrow is the intentional object, I think. Well, is that right?

31:13 Mark: The sorrow is as value content.

31:15 Dylan: Yeah, it's the value content of the. The grief of the grief of what's being responded to by the intentional object. So you. You. The sorrow is the reaction to the intentional object.

31:29 Wes: So it's like they're engaged in the same intentional act. It's unclear to me here. Can that really happen?

31:36 Mark: Yeah. I feel like we should have read the basic Scheler phenomenological guide before reading this to understand how he's putting it. Supposedly he's a student of Husserl. We should be able to get a straight from Husserl, but I don't know Husserl that well in this respect either. To say exactly. Is it a propositional content that is the thing that I'm intentionally related to. Yeah, it seems like it is an object.

31:58 Wes: I mean, we know we can share intentional objects according to phenomenologists. Can we share intentional acts? I didn't think so.

32:07 Dylan: Well, maybe we can. There are whatever these four different modes of fellow feeling, one of which ends up being sort of more authentic, but it would also not be the case that they're always exclusive.

32:20 Wes: Right. So true.

32:22 Dylan: It immediately seems to me that there might be multiple things going on, multiple aspects of our capacity, multiple aspects of the modes that our capacity for fellow feeling is being exercised at the same time.

32:39 Wes: So the second one is just fellow feeling. Proper intentional reference to the feeling of joy or sorrow in the other person's experience. I think we've said a lot about that.

32:50 Mark: Yep.

32:50 Wes: It involves the understanding component, where we grasp what the other is feeling, which is not right by itself enough. We would also have to commiserate or to have a positive feeling if it's your joy that I'm having fellow feeling towards. So.

33:11 Dylan: Yeah, but it's worth also noting. I mean, the second paragraph I found surprising to me. But the fact that we can be cruel to one another is rooted in our ability to have fellow feeling for each other. And this only underlines the lack of a normative or valued judgment associated with this. This is an exercising of our capacity. And so the fact that we can be cruel is tied to the fact that we have. We're sensitive. The capacity for fellow feeling.

33:44 Wes: Yep.

33:44 Mark: And are delighting into it. And I like what he says then about. In contrast to cruelty, brutality is merely a disregard of other people's experiences despite the apprehension of it in feeling. So to regard a human being as a mere log of wood and to treat the object accordingly is not to be brutal toward him.

34:01 Seth: Right. You have to.

34:02 Mark: You still have to understand that they're in pain and not care.

34:06 Wes: Right. So you can understand they're in pain and get off on it. Which case you're cruel, sadistic, could not care which case you're brutal. Which case you're brutal. Or you could feel sorry for them, be a real person. So the third one I think we've talked a lot about, this is where the pub or party example comes from, emotional infection. And he talks a little bit about how crowd dynamics work with this and the kind of vicious circle between. You infect me with your emotion and then I'm going, rah, rah, rah. And then that infects you back and you get all kinds of crowd behaviors that are more than the sum of the parts. You know, I would do, Might do things in a crowd that I wouldn't do as an individual person just because of this emotional infection.

34:50 Mark: And I like his comments about Nietzsche here, that Nietzsche thought emotional infection was the only way that we connect with other people. And so pity, for instance, is just a matter of, you have sorrow. Well, I catch that sorrow by feeling, oh, I feel sad for you. That's just spreading the sorrow around.

35:09 Wes: Heard consciousness.

35:10 Dylan: All of our connection is herd consciousness.

35:13 Mark: Yeah. By contrast, Scheler's going to say no because of these distinctions I already made. I can recognize that you're in pain, not reproduce this in myself, not catch it. But I can use. Take your pain as my intentional object and feel bad for you. And actually, that's ennobling. It enables me to get outside of myself, stop being self consumed. It enables me. Probably gets me to help you out or just let you know that somebody is there for you. And so it halves the suffering, as he says, instead of doubles it, as Nietzsche might think.

35:44 Wes: So then we get emotional identification, which is the longest of these sections by far, which is interesting because. Right. Section two is about fellow feeling proper, which is really the subject of the book. And the rest of these things are just sort of red herrings. Right. They're what we're ruling out. But the fourth red herring is a really big red herring. We're going to spend lots of time on emotional identification. I mean, which is psychologically, of course, really fascinating. But it is interesting that he spends so much time on this and we

36:16 Mark: should not spend so much time on it. But maybe just give a couple of the examples that he. Like he's talking about, for instance, hypnotism that I could master you and you are only thinking my thoughts because I have hypnotized you, which clearly is. Is likewise not. We have one and the same intentional act. It's. I have somehow got you to replicate. So it's just, It's a. He's saying it's a special case of infection. I'm infecting you in a special way.

36:44 Wes: It's a limiting case. Yeah, yeah.

36:47 Mark: All this stuff about the ancestor cult and the leader. And I did think about people identify, right. If they voted for Trump, they got behind Trump, then they sort of identify with Trump. And so if you attack Trump, you're attacking them. Right. It's not a very literal one. I don't literally feel the pain. Maybe. Maybe if you, you know, you're a real Trump fan and you see that attempted that assassination attempt on tv, you might feel as if it was you being almost assassinated.

37:13 Dylan: Well, but this dimension would be part of a discussion of fandom as well. Right. Where, you know, or just even partisanship, not even political partisanship, but just like, you know, you identify with, you know, someone in some group or you feel part of it and you then feel harm associated with them harming that group, even though you're not being harmed directly.

37:37 Wes: Yeah. In group identification.

37:38 Dylan: Yeah.

37:39 Wes: I have to imaginatively identify myself with a group. So I'm a part of the group, but also in some sense, I am the group. And if the group is very powerful and great and culturally superior. Right. Thinking back to Orwell, then I am superior by virtue of being part of it. If the group is attacked, I am attacked. All of that stuff. He gives another example of masochism, sadomasochism. And as he's repeating a point made by Freud, which is that if someone is a masochist and getting erotic pleasure out of that, if they're engaged in a state of masochistic act that involves an identification with the sadist.

Right. So if I'm getting whipped, for instance, and I'm finding that pleasurable in a way, I'm in both positions at once. I'm identified with the one who's doing the whipping. And the fact of that dominance is exciting to me. So yeah, I think it kind of illustrates this concept in a vivid way.

38:44 Mark: So they're not all crazy, right? He also talks about erotic.

38:48 Seth: Right.

38:48 Mark: In when you're not just using the body of another person but engaged in sex that involves true love, then there is likewise a sort of, you know, there's a reason that it's described as merging that we can actually have.

39:04 Wes: You complete me.

39:05 Mark: Right. Page 25. Truly loving sexual intercourse. The parties in an impassioned suspension of their spiritual personality itself. The the seat of individual self awareness seem to relapse into a single lifestream in which nothing of their individual selves remains any longer distinct, though it has little resemblance to a consciousness of us founded on the respective self awareness of each. So I think that's. It's a biological thing still. It's not that you're spiritually coming together because spiritually that's you're. We're separate.

39:35 Wes: But it seems to me he's going to reject the idea that. And correct me if I'm wrong, that the mother instinct is a case of identification with the child because it. Right. In which case nursing is a kind of the instinct to nurse is an extension of the instinct of self preservation. He's going to reject that. Right. The mother regards herself and her child as two separate entities. And so that sounds closer to fellow feeling in a way than it does to identification.

40:10 Mark: But well, so like I thought, this is one of the cases where so he talks about identification at the organic level so you can have a conscious. I know that I, you know, I love my child and I acknowledge it, it's a separate being. But also just the fact that it is so automatic that when the milk come, you know, your, your need to lactate goes with the needs of the appetite of the baby. That that is actually an organic unity. So you could have an organic unity but a spiritual otherness at the same time. And that's actually, I think part of what we've been saying is that that organic unity might be what makes the spiritual otherness possible is that we have this twofold relation to each other.

41:00 Seth: Well, he's also, he's taking pains, I think, to go through all these things not just because he's very Aristotelian, but also he wants to point out, I'm trying to think of. So there's a passage here on page 32. It's only by identification at the organic level and only by learning on the intellectual plane to understand the form and pattern of other ways of life. Can we hope for a gradual smoothing out of the private idiosyncrasies and limitations besetting each of us like a horse in blinkers? And this is kind of, you know, just to bring us back.

Remember that this is nominally a text about ethics. And he's pointing to this two part or, you know, dual mechanism that he's advocating in the context. Not solely understanding, not solely sentiment, but sentiment and understanding working together to help us or to lay the foundation or be the foundation for an ethical system. So it's like the fellow feeling. The identification is a critical piece, but the identification without understanding isn't sufficient. The understanding without the identification, fellow feeling is not sufficient. And, you know, he's sort of putting this out there like, look, there are two ways that you engage others in this world.

You're not solely a disembodied ego that encounters them as purely in a subject object relationship, and your relationship to them is not strictly epistemological. There is the epistemological knowledge side of things, and then there's the he doesn't, where it's not even emotional. It's just like the organic side of things. And he's kind of saying like, look, we have to look at both of these things to talk about not just how that works in itself, but how it could possibly give us any kind of ethical compass.

43:09 Wes: Should we look at chapter three, since we're running out of time? Sure. So this is where he's going to reject. We've gone into this a little bit already, so we can. We don't have to linger on anything that we've already discussed.

43:22 Mark: But about tradition I mentioned.

43:25 Wes: Yeah, but, yeah, Genetic theories, in a way, are causal theories. And, you know, I think he sees them as kind of equivalent to identification or emotional infection, which is, you know, tradition is one form in a way of emotional infection. So it's not, you know, as he gets further into this fellow feeling is not comparison. It's not simulation. In fact, comparison, which is the word he's using now, isn't found in commiseration at all. Commiseration being one form of fellow feeling. This is on page 40. And here on page 40 is where he's going to reject egoism, Right. Or the attempt to reduce everything to egoism. I feel your pain by feeling my pain, and I can only really be intimately familiar with my own pain.

44:17 Dylan: So this is again an example where he's pointing to phenomena that happen and he's making distinctions that, you know, they may be related to our capacities for fellow feeling or capacities for recognizing the other, but the mechanism by which they occur. Like you're saying he's rejecting a genetic account is, for instance, the fact that we have tradition. Seems there's. The account would seem to follow from some of the stuff we've been talking about in terms of fellow feeling. But it's not through the account of traditional or it's part of our biology through the presence of our powers.

45:08 Mark: So I think what's wrong in general with all these is they're not phenomenologically accurate. Which, you know, if you just say we just are able to do this, that seems like a sort of unsatisfying thing. But that's what the phenomena tell us. And I did give from the introduction, I think he has a genetic theory of how this is possible, that we start as children identifying with parents. And so this provides a foundation, right? We have this organic unity that gives us the foundation for real fellow feeling. But it is not merely that the fellow feeling is an outgrowth of that organic unity because in fact, it's in sort of a dialectical turn against it in a certain way.

45:50 Seth: Right?

45:51 Mark: It is, as we've been saying, that you have to assume that there's a real Other.

45:56 Wes: Page 41 to 42, bottom of 41 and 42. It may seem extraordinary that we should be able to feel the emotional states of others and really suffer over them. That the result of rejoicing with them should be not that we are joyful on their account, for this would then simply be our own joy. But they were. They were able to savor their joy. I like this word savoring. Savor their joy without thereby needing to get into a joyful mood ourselves. But this is just what happens in the phenomenon of genuine fellow feeling. And again, this I think he's right about as against the simulation theorists or the comparison theorists or the genetic theorists. There's no way to get beyond this fact.

46:42 Dylan: Yes. And so this is. This is both the power, but also, again, why I found it a little bit challenging is that it's getting this kind of observation, this kind of manifestation of our capability to not really suffer with them, with others, but we can rejoice with them. But it's not because we are joyful ourselves necessarily that capability and all of that comes, goes along with that. The recognition of others, our ability to form community and stuff like that ends up having a great power. But along the way, he's effectively re. Baselining all kinds of other things that also Happen.

47:25 Wes: There's a way in which we kind of enter into their joy. And it's still their joy.

47:30 Dylan: Yes.

47:31 Seth: Well, I mean, part of me thinks that this is just. That in some sense, this is a mistake of language. You know, like, we talk about, oh, I feel your pain, right. You know, or whatever. And like, I don't think anybody. The common sense understanding of the things. Me being happy, that you're happy means that I'm having your happiness or I'm having the same kind of happiness or anything. Like, you know what I mean? It's just like. It's a confusing way of speaking, but I think there's just so many different modalities in this. As a parent, right?

When you take joy, your kids are having fun, you take your kids to kickball practice or birthday party or whatever, and that makes you experience joy, it makes you happy. Obviously, it is not the same thing. You're not identifying with them. That is your joy. That is totally your joy. And it's not bizarre to say that or think that. And to say that it's as a result of someone else's emotional state doesn't somehow implicate that person in your emotional state. It's just. This is a weird thing. I mean, when you start to actually think about it, it's just very strange, right?

Like being happy, that other people are sad or upset, you know, it's just like. In other words, being a human being is very strange and bizarre and wondrous thing. But I think we shouldn't get too caught up on this notion of identification. I understand he's doing all this exegesis on it, but I think from a common sense perspective, it's not a live theory, if you will.

49:12 Wes: I completely disagree, I think, with that. I think the common sense perspective is the one that he's rejecting. I think the phenomenological perspective is extremely counterintuitive. So, yeah, I think the way the average person understands sympathy or commiseration is through the whole feeling pain analogy. And it makes its way into the philosophical debate. I think that's the way the philosophical debate kind of gets stuck with that model. And so the phenomenological approach is a corrective.

49:42 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. He's certainly reacting to people that way. I guess I do wonder about how it does seem a little bit strange to me. But maybe just the fact that it's so common to want to reject true understanding of other people's experience on the basis of the fact that you haven't had that experience indicates that there's something Very common about the things that Scheller's reacting against.

50:10 Wes: And when I say the philosophical debate, I don't just mean the one that, you know, he's responding to, just even the recent philosophical debate who's dominated in by this type of simulation theory, for instance, and other alternative competitors. But really I think all the sort that Scheler would reject. And it's only maybe in the last 10 years or so, as far as I understand it. Maybe it's a bit more than that that this phenomenological approach is beginning to have a resurgence and to upend the more dominant theories in philosophy. But I do see the dominant. Those previous dominant theories as sort of an extension of common sense, what the common person would say about these things.

50:53 Mark: All right, well, we're not done with this book. We're Gonna Tackle Part 2 on love and hatred and maybe just the end of part one as well to wrap up this story for next time. So now you can really be sure. Hopefully we've given you enough. So Scheler, you know, that's the sort of German pronunciation different than Schiller. That's a different person shelling different person. He can collect.

51:17 Wes: Isn't there one.

51:18 Mark: He had words about Stirner here, another Max as being the right being frozen in that egotistical stage. He thinks that that's like what Stirner is likely. You guys are saying cannot imagine that we can actually understand other people. But that is just being stayed being retarded in your development as a normal person. Am I allowed to say that in that context?

51:41 Wes: I don't think you're allowed to say it at all, but.

51:45 Mark: Well, maybe Scheler says it anyway. Yeah. So come back. We're going to talk more about this. You should email us. Pl partiallyexaminelife.com make a comment on the blog post of this episode. Contact us through Facebook or X.com or LinkedIn or Instagram. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks and good night, everybody.

52:03 Wes: Good night.

52:03 Dylan: Good night.

52:04 Seth: Good night.