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

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Episode 364, Part 3. You did not think we were necessarily going to have a part three, since episode 365 is also going to be on this book, Max Shaler's the Nature of Sympathy. But we were jumping forward to part two of the whole book for that episode. And we only assigned ourselves the first four chapters of part one. And we really only got through about two and a half of them. So there's a lot left to talk about. Even though of course we've gotten it in summary to you already. But yeah, I think around page 40 in the middle of chapter three is, I thought, where we stopped.

0:45 Wes: I have us at 41, so we're

0:47 Mark: close, at least somewhere around there. So we're down a Seth, but we're. The rest of us are here. Although. Dylan, have you come down with a. You sound like a different person.

0:56 Wes: You.

0:56 Mark: Have you come down with a cold?

0:58 Dylan: I've had a chest thing for a week.

1:00 Mark: Well, we feel for you.

1:02 Dylan: I'm feeling better, actually.

1:04 Mark: I had a chest thing like that recently and so I sympathize.

1:09 Wes: No.

1:09 Mark: Anything wrong with that?

1:11 Dylan: Do you have any fellow feeling wrong?

1:14 Mark: I understand that, but yet I cruelly have suggested we do this recording anyway in disregard or. Well, brutally, because I'm disregarding your discomfort, but cruelly because I rejoice in your pain.

1:29 Wes: Very good.

1:29 Mark: I don't actually feel that way. I just wanted to clarify.

1:32 Wes: It's always good to have bring examples to class.

1:37 Mark: The point that I thought we had stopped on page 40 was about comparison. I guess we had said a lot about how fellow feeling is not identification, but is that the same thing as comparison? Where I could be in that? You know, there but for the grace of God go I. So it's not that I identify exactly with you or that I've even had this experience that you had, but like, you're just like me. If I prick you, do you not bleed? Therefore I will have fellow feeling with you. And it seems like that's a pretty uncontroversial way of grounding fellow feeling, right? Don't be dehumanized. Don't be brutal about somebody because they are just like you. But again, he wants to say that that's too close to identification for him. That's not commiseration.

2:21 Wes: So in comparison, right? Something happens to you, you prick your finger or whatever, and I say, how would it be if it happened to me? And one of Shaler's first objections to that is, well, maybe not so bad because I have a different character I have a different temperament. It's possible it wouldn't be so bad. So that's one problem with it. So true. Fellow feeling would exclude anything that might be modified that by our characters, our personalities. I mean, he's really pretty radical about this. There is no comparison in fellow feeling according to Scheler. And he thinks it really implies that fellow feeling is just a form of egoism. This comparison idea reduces fellow feeling to egoism because really we just get directed towards our own suffering. Me, you know, does it relate to me, Right?

3:10 Mark: So pedagogically it seems like this is a sound practice. This is how you teach children to feel sympathy. Stop. How would you like it if I hit you? In fact, I could do it in a mean way. How would you like it if I hit you? Bam. You know, like, oh, that's how it felt like for them to be hit. Now you share in the fear and you will, you know, maybe control yourself. But clearly the fact that I could do it in that mean way means that we're doing something base, right? We're doing the noble lie to get you to be virtuous. Something comparable to that. We're manipulating you rather than somehow cultivating your innate capacity for fellow feeling.

3:47 Dylan: It's not that that wouldn't necessarily be effective regarding some certain kinds of ends. It's just that the thing that he's trying to articulate of fellow feeling. Isn't that right?

3:58 Mark: Maybe I was wrong in saying this is not effective in bringing out your native fellow feeling. Maybe it could be, but it doesn't explain what fellow feeling is. Fellow feeling is supposed to be a presupposition for the ability to. This seems to be the overall thing. I was sort of scanning ahead some of the other chapters in part one. Toward the end of part one, it got explicitly to the point that this is the whole thing is an ontological point, is that fellow feeling has to do with being there for another, or rather another's being there for you.

And somehow fellow feeling is directly related to that primal phenomenological fact about being in the world that you cannot, per Descartes, experiment. Just say, I wonder if other people are there. No other people are there. And that is the whole reason that we could potentially identify with them or put ourselves in their shoes or anything like that is because they are already there.

4:47 Wes: Yeah. The other objection he makes to this comparison idea of fellow feeling, and this goes into page 41, is that because it directs us towards the idea of our own distress, then our natural response to fellow feeling would be to avoid the person. It is sometimes what we do. And then he references Nietzsche. Nietzsche kind of makes this point in his critique of pity. So, you know, it foregrounds our own pleasure and pain, masks that of the other. And then that's when Mark, he goes on to this point, and we made this in the last recording that. That there's just this extraordinary fact that we can have a feeling for the emotional states of others and suffer over them, savor over them. It's not because we're identified with them. It's not because we've been infected by them. They just are our intentional objects.

5:38 Dylan: We have access to understanding them.

5:41 Mark: Yeah, yeah. I know that the understanding and the feeling are different. I know that both are based on this being for us, that the other is. It seems. It's. Even though I just said seems like the being for us of others is still more fundamental than either fellow feeling or understanding.

6:00 Dylan: So isn't part of this challenge like even the word fellow feeling? Because the way he's articulating it is fellow feeling is the feeling of another fellow you're understanding and have access to them as another being.

6:17 Wes: We take their emotional states as intentional objects in much the same way as we might take a object of perception as an intentional object.

6:25 Dylan: Yes.

6:26 Wes: It's fellow in the sense that we feel alongside them. I think that's the way to think about it.

6:32 Dylan: Yes. But it's not. He's explicit on 41. True fellow feeling is wholly functional throughout. There's no reference to the state of one's own feelings. And so there's something confusing a little bit about that term fellow feeling, because it seems like. It seems like you would be feeling what someone else feels. But part of his whole point is that's not the case. You have access to the emotional states

6:59 Wes: of other beings, but it's still a feeling. You know, the intentional act is a feeling act. I mean, there is understanding as part of it, as Mark pointed out. Right. Part of it is understanding what is it. Right. We have to have a theory of mind. What is it they're actually feeling. But that's not enough for fellow feeling. Fellow feeling means we are going to sympathize, commiserate, or pity or rejoice with if it's a positive state. So it's a feeling about a feeling. We take their feelings as intentional objects. Their feelings are the objects of our feelings.

But it's not the case that we simply replicate their feelings. That there's this match between the feelings that are. My feeling is identified with Your feeling. And I may even suffer because you're in pain. But the important thing here is it's not because, well, I imagined how it would be for me and that would be painful for me and that gives me a bad feeling. So I'm having a bad feeling for you. I just am distressed by your suffering at a basic level.

8:02 Dylan: And I'm not processing that through my own individual experience. I'm able to recognize it, as you point out, a distinct object of the world, of my interacting with the world.

8:14 Wes: Yep, yep.

8:15 Mark: What's the quote that you were looking at, Dylan? Do you know?

8:17 Dylan: It's at the bottom of page 41. It's about six lines up from the bottom.

8:22 Mark: Now, true fellow feeling is wholly functional throughout. There's no reference to the state of one's own feelings, which does not mean that your own feelings are not involved. Like you are actually feeling something. Yeah, but it's not a self reflective feeling.

8:34 Dylan: This is what I'm clarifying.

8:36 Wes: So he'll say, for example, on 42, we can savor another's joy without being joyful. That's a really good example of what genuine fellow feeling is. I don't have to feel joy to empathize with your joy.

8:49 Dylan: Well, and this brings to mind maybe this is not the same kind of thing.

8:53 Mark: Right.

8:53 Dylan: But I was just thinking of like the joy that you would have for a friend or a family member or a child that is experiencing something truly joyful for themselves. The joy that you experience is not their joy. And I'm not sure if this is the same thing. Right. When a friend gets a new job that they've been really wanting to get and they're thrilled about it. When you're happy for them, you don't even experience the happiness of them getting a job that they wanted.

9:23 Wes: Right. And you're not imagining, ooh, how wonderful it is for them with the spreadsheets. If I were in that position, I would love it.

9:35 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's especially true if it's the kind of job that you know that they're happy about that they really wanted. But you would stick an ice pick through your.

9:45 Wes: Which is often the case before you,

9:47 Dylan: before you took it. You can genuinely feel happy for them. But it's distinctly not because you wanted that job, or let me put that, that brings an envy or something like that. It's not because you are processing that in any way or have access to it because of that experience that you

10:08 Wes: can vividly imagine enjoying that job in the way they would. Yeah.

10:11 Dylan: The closest would be analogously that you would replace the job that they really wanted to have with a job that you really wanted to have.

10:19 Mark: Can I give another example which is with little children that so much of like they can enjoy birthday presents and Christmas and all these things in a way that we crusted and jaded people just cannot. So when we're enjoying their enjoyment, what are we actually enjoying? And I wonder about like, am I just enjoying the fact that it's so cute? The fact that it's, you know, would it be the same if I look on the Internet and I see some random child experiencing this versus seeing my own child experiencing this? And I'm not sure what Scheller's theory of fellow feeling says that I should feel like it's.

It. It's okay. I know according to him that the child is different than me, that he has a higher capacity joy and that I can appreciate that. But like, is this just mere ogling? You know, and you could have this sort of child joy porn. And I don't mean that there's actual porn involved. I just mean the expression at which I'm looking at video after video of cute babies enjoying things. Is that actual fellow feeling? It seems like that. That can't be. That must be something more. More base.

11:29 Wes: I think we.

11:31 Mark: Okay, I will never speak the term child joy porn again.

11:36 Wes: But yeah, right. So I don't think we can rule out that in some cases our states are complex and we are actually have a mixture of fellow feeling and emotional contagion and identification. I would imagine that what's going on with children involves contagion and identification as well. Whether or not it involves fellow feeling too. That's a good question. But.

11:59 Mark: Right. He's. He said feeling like I just want cheerful faces around me because that will cheer me up. That seems maybe more like I want to look at happy babies because this will just make me feel happy.

12:11 Wes: But you know, if you're with a child who's feeling wonder about the world and why is the sky blue? You know, up to the point where that becomes annoying. There's that point. But before that, you know, you are. I think there's identification in the sense that you see the world through their eyes and their excitement to some extent and yes be returned to one's own state of doing that as a child yourself.

12:35 Dylan: And well, and these are good points because it's reminding me that Scheler isn't denying that these things also exist. That there is contagion, that there is, you know, a kind of Infection where you can have a. I feel like almost a conventional emotional connection with something where you're caught up in it yourself. This is distinct from the point that he's making about what the nature of fellow feeling is for, I guess, the reasons that we were articulating last time, that it's not the way in which we actually make social connections and understand our ethics.

13:09 Wes: Right, right.

13:11 Mark: The point is. Yes. Is there any ethical value, even though it's fun, enjoyable, to see through your child's eyes and that might have some sort of rejuvenating quality that will then enliven you to other kinds of fellow feeling? But that kind of identification in its. Is not morally laudatory.

13:29 Wes: Yeah. And so he, you know, in these next pages, he gives an example of the way in which identification can be morally compromising. Right. If you simply live in the lives of others, live vicariously through others, you are no longer leading your own life. And he gives sort of different types of this, you know, a person who is. What does he call them? A mental parasite. And then he goes on to talk about the spiritual vampire, which made me think of that show, that TV show, what we do in the shadows. You ever watch that?

14:04 Mark: I have this emotional energy vampire.

14:06 Wes: The energy vampire.

14:08 Mark: Well, actually he has a girlfriend who's an emotional vampire, specifically. Shows up.

14:12 Wes: That's right.

14:13 Mark: Women's groups where they're talking about their problems. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about your misery over your.

14:21 Wes: And then he talks about hysterics and living the hysteric lives in the desire of the other. I think we're all prone to this sometimes. Right. The way in which we are living according to other people's standards or standards that feel alien to us. Speaking of alienation, that somehow we've incorporated, but that are not our own. Which is important because I think a lot of the way we get values. For Freud, he's very influenced by psychoanalysis. Identification is sort of a fundamental part of psychological development. And it's how we acquire values, it's how we acquire culture. So, yeah, this gets complicated.

14:57 Dylan: Well, but he puts all of these under this characteristic. He calls them all purely reactive style of life. And on that account having a low moral value. So all of these categories. I guess he starts with the abnormally vain, as opposed to this merely proud person, the mental parasite, the spiritual vampire. All of these are people who are fundamentally reactive. They're depending on. Upon other people's emotional states in order to move and interact on their own. And in that way, they're not autonomous in the way that would have the moral character that he's saying is distinguishing of fellow feeling.

15:35 Wes: Yeah. So morality is not just living according to other people's standards or living in a certain way because we're afraid of being shunned or chastised. And then he'll say on 44, something about morality which inherently involves independence from others and self respect. So in the same way, he's going to emphasize as we go on, fellow feeling implies the separateness of selves. That's very important. We all don't just collapse and merge into each other. That's not the way it works. Likewise, morality is the same thing. It can't be grounded on simply collapsing the difference between you and me.

16:10 Mark: Wes, his definition of hysteria sound. Certainly he was knowledgeable about Freud. He refers to Freud all over the place. But so the quote here, he has to describe hysteria here. The presence of an onlooker immediately upsets the patient's natural self possession, his consciousness of himself being replaced by the image of himself as seen by the onlooker and as judged by the latter standards of preference. So it's like the extreme version of the vanity that we were saying. He speaks, acts and conducts himself by reference to this image. And on the spur of the moves, it evokes refusing to eat, for instance, or even committing suicide in some cases. Does that sound like Freudian hysteria?

16:43 Wes: Yeah, it's one version of it. It's hysteria as character structure, which is very much the Lacanian, even though this is quite a bit before Lacan. But it's there in the psychoanalytic literature. The hysteric lives in the desire of the other, and they are in a way robbed of their own desire. So hysteric, for instance, they might be a bit nympho, for example. That's like a classic example of someone who's very seductive and wants to get others to desire them, but they're not ultimately really interested in, say, the sexual act itself, you know, and it's not really about their desire. And often what they want is kind of clouded or unavailable to them. So, yeah, that's an extreme case. Right. Or that's the sort of limiting case of what hysteria is.

17:29 Mark: This dynamic is interesting that he talks about. We talked a little last time about treatment of authority figures and what it is to that A version of this hysteria might be, I live in the shadow of my leader and, you know, the cult leader. And I am only what he, this person makes it be. And he talks about how, as you'd expect, the line between love and hate in that sort of relationship is very, very thin because it is a fundamentally parasitical relationship.

17:56 Wes: The final point I think he makes in this chapter is that, you know, against the comparison types of theories is that fellow feeling would be confined to just. We would only be able to have fellow feeling for experiences that we ourselves have had. And we have this innate capacity, says, to comprehend the feelings of others even if we've never encountered them ourselves. And that becomes truer the more into the spiritual realm that we get.

18:23 Mark: So chapter four is on metaphysical theories, which we haven't really talked about how this kind of phenomenology leads to a metaphysics or not. It seems like phenomenology is a matter of putting aside metaphysics. You can talk about essences, you can talk about an ontology, but that sort of replaces metaphysics. So that you can't, from a phenomenological point of view ultimately say yes or no to there is a God or the universe is all one. But you can say these things make a mark or do not make a mark in experience. And he's been very firmly against, I think, throughout the idea that we can't really prove that the universe is not all one.

But that's certainly not the preconceptions. It's not the assumptions on which we engage in social life. Obviously, obviously we treat other people as if they were not just all one. But of course, the metaphysician thinks that's a mistake. The Buddhist thinks, you're a fool. You, you know, you see separateness and this is what gives rise to war. And if you just realize our fundamental sameness, then we would all be compassionate for each other. But Scheler wants to say that's not a good recipe for ethics. Ethics is only possible out of egoism.

Like I only, I only will be nice to you because I think we're like limbs of the same giant body. So you're like a part of me. And why would I be so mean to a part of me? That's irrational. But there must be some better way of founding ethics, you know, that actually acknowledges separateness.

19:45 Wes: He starts out with Schopenhauer, Right. So when you say sameness, the idea is that fellow feeling reveals this underlying lying unity of being where the multiplicity of individuals of separate selves, that is just an illusion. It's there in Spinoza already. We're all just modes on the one God substance.

20:07 Mark: Yep.

20:07 Wes: So there's long been this kind of, you know. And I think he points to some ancients as well. So there's long been this kind of idea.

20:14 Mark: He actually says later that for the ancients and for the entire Eastern world it was the norm, that it's actually only sort of been in the rise of post Greek philosophy that, like Aristotle was a little better in that at least he thought that humans are better than the other. You know, the rationality makes us special, but still we're fundamentally part of one thing. And now, you know, in the modern age, it's a minority position in the west to be like the Romantics and affirm this.

20:40 Wes: So he gives a few critiques of Schopenhauer in particular, Schopenhauer's pessimism and the idea that there's something moral ethical about maximizing our suffering, because to do so right, is to plug into this underlying unity, the real underlying unity of all selves and confuses, this kind of pity for the suffering of others, the kind of thing that Nietzsche critiqued for fellow feeling. Scheler goes so far as to say there's kind of a sadism to Schopenhauer, this focus on suffering. He seems to actually enjoy it.

21:17 Mark: It's enjoyable in that it raises your consciousness. The more I suffer, the more I realize the fundamental suffering of the universe, and the more I participate in, the more I feel it. Scheler has some things to say about Buddha's conversion that you might think that Buddhism is the same kind of thing, right? Life is suffering. But the story of the Buddha's conversion is not that he underwent all this suffering until he realized, as Schopenhauer would would have it, his oneness with the universe, his oneness with the suffering, is that this has been person who's coddled all his life.

And just by going out of his house once and witnessing a few people suffering, he somehow got the idea that all is suffering. So that couldn't have been that he felt it deep in his bones that he was a part of the suffering. No, he recognized he had fellow feeling for somebody that was not him, that had experiences that were not his.

22:11 Wes: Yeah. Ultimately, you know, the way he ends this first section is to say, yet again, this is another conflation of fellow feeling with identification and emotional infection in Schopenhauer. So it confuses moral pity with susceptibility to infection and tries to account for pity by saying it involves us being essentially the same person. Which would mean, again, right, it really becomes about us and our pain. If that's true, oh, it's your pain. Well, really we're one. And so it's about my pain. And that's not, you know, if there is such a thing as fellow feeling, it has to preserve this distinction.

22:48 Mark: Well, he wraps up the discussion of Nietzsche by talking about or of Schopenhauer by talking about Nietzsche's critique of Schopenhauer and his critique of pity in general that we've covered in our podcasts. And it's more that Nietzsche had a straw man. I mean, it was Schopenhauer's position, but it is not the real version of pity that Nietzsche would be entirely right in saying, you pittiers, you're just getting off on each other's pain and inviting infection. And I, I would rather if I see somebody suffering instead of, oh, let me enter into pity with you and roll around in the muck with you and just kind of sweep them out of the way so I can have a clear field of experience that I can thrive in.

We can't keep track of all the people that are falling off the wagon and experiencing suffering. We have to fight to push ourselves above that so we can be strong. And Scheler does not agree with that ultimate like, yeah, okay, that's a good dismissal of Schopenhauer's view of pity. But no, you shouldn't just ignore all the suffering people. Well, we, I guess we haven't really gotten to how pity can be ennobling in itself. Obviously it helps you, it incites you to help them. So it is morally good in a way that Nietzsche doesn't care about. But does it strengthen you as an individual?

It doesn't have to drag you down as Schopenhauer says. Does it matter if it strengthens you? I guess just to dwell in Nietzsche

24:13 Wes: land for a minute, it strengthens you.

24:15 Dylan: He just doesn't think it does. He thinks it only weakens you, Nietzsche,

24:19 Mark: because it inevitably involves contagion.

24:22 Dylan: Yeah.

24:22 Mark: So if he's wrong about that, could we give Scheller's counter argument in a little more detail than he gives here on Nietzschean grounds to say, like, I know Nietzsche himself thinks that, like, you can help other people out of magnanimity, out of an over fullness. And this is kind of what real pity, I think, could be described as for Scheler is. I'm not feeling your pain, I'm acknowledging your pain and I am not savoring

24:49 Wes: it, but I am commiserating.

24:52 Mark: Comm. I'm commiserating, but that still sounds like identification. It's like we don't have the words to say the way that Scheler wants us to.

24:58 Wes: No, I mean this is Scheler, this commiseration is Scheller's word.

25:01 Dylan: Yeah, but isn't the problem ultimately with Nietzsche from Schaller's point of view going to be that diet's ideal? You know, the highest human being really doesn't care about other people at all. Or they're not influenced by other individuals, they're self absorbed ultimately, in a way that Scheler would say that the notion of fellow feeling doesn't factor in for Nietzsche, does it? Does fellow feeling factor in any way for Nietzsche?

25:27 Mark: I mean, if Nietzsche were Stirner, then no. But I think that you can be as a Nietzschean, inspired by other geniuses. Right. You're participating in a community and it's having friends, having enemies even. It's definitely not entirely isolated in the way of Stirner, I believe. So it seems like you can have fellow feeling you want to have fellow feeling you want to have. Right. Zarathustra has his companions, his serpent and his eagle. Yes, he has plenty of friends. It's just you don't want them to drag you down. I mean, this just sounds like the Aristotelian friendship is that you rejoice in each other's virtue and you push each other toward excellence.

26:10 Dylan: From a Nietzsche point of view, yes, that I.

26:12 Mark: You could see a Nietzsche being worried about. Right. A Nietzsche does need time off in the mountain by themselves, but then they need to come down and interact with people as well. It's just sort of what the cycles of your energy require at that moment.

26:27 Dylan: Part of me wants to say that Nietzsche would ultimately not truck much with fellow feeling because he considers ethical grounding as a constraint getting beyond good and evil is getting beyond ethical constraint.

26:44 Mark: Sure. I guess this is what we haven't uncovered yet is like what actually is the relationship between ethics and fellow feeling? We know that it is laudable, but is it the foundation of ethics? I think we've seen. I think the point of us reading this whole thing is that you can't have ethics without it. But does that mean that it's only good is an ethical good? So if Nietzsche, you're right, doesn't care about the ethical goods in that manner, he doesn't care about herd ethics. But if it's also something that is inherently enlivening, then that would be another good that it provides. That is just preferability. I'm not saying it's an amoral type of good because for Brentano the preferability of something, I think for Scheler too is going to be one of the things that goes into it. I'm just not clear on this relationship.

27:31 Dylan: Yeah.

27:31 Mark: Do you want to get into number two, the scope of metaphysical theories in general, page 55 and such?

27:37 Wes: Yeah. He's going to start out by saying there is an aspect he likes about metaphysical theories. He likes the fact that these monistic theories are at least metaphysical. And he thinks that fellow feeling is a phenomenon of the metaphysical order, as he puts it. So then he's going to give us a little analysis of what metaphysical monism involves. I mean, ultimately, as we get to the end of this, right. He's going to embrace this hybrid picture of biological monism and spiritual pluralism where we are all these discrete spiritual substances, discrete spiritual entities.

Right. We have to preserve the separateness of ourselves, but there's an underlying vitalistic unity in us. So just to kind of foreshadow where we're going with this and why he's still interested in monism in some form. So he gives us this point by point analysis of a variety of monistic theories, including Buddhism. And then vitalists like Bergson, even our friend Driesch Dylan makes an appearance.

28:42 Dylan: Yep.

28:43 Mark: Is that somebody you covered in St. John's or something?

28:46 Wes: Is it St. John's yeah, Driesch and Spemann, Teleki versus Evolucio. Yeah.

28:52 Dylan: Yeah. And they're, they're biologists trying to talk about what the source of life is in living beings.

28:59 Wes: Embryological development. Yeah.

29:01 Mark: So does that have to. That that is at least possible. Not that again, not that identification and fellow feeling at the same time. But are the same, but they have some relation to each other. And you can sympathize, you can identify with. You can jibe with something that is alive, that has a struggle, that has joy, that has sorrow. You cannot do that with rocks. You cannot do that. Even though Schopenhauer wants to say that the movements of nature are all will. You cannot actually jibe with the forest or the volcano or any of that stuff that is phenomenologically nonsense.

29:34 Wes: This first point that he's making is he wants to say that fellow feeling gives us this objective value, insight into metaphysical reality. This is part of the metaphysical significance of fellow feeling. That part of what we have intentional access to, which Right. Is it's non conceptual, it's presentive, it's a lot like perception. When we take another feeling state as an object, as an intentional object, we get access to these value qualities. Right. That's part of the data. So he thinks there's something very morally significant in that this is part of how we come to grasp value. So it really is interesting because it's suggestive of a metaphysical grounds for morality.

30:20 Mark: So quoting at the end of 56. Does fellow feeling is a purely emotional function, possess significance for knowledge, a cognitive bearing on the unity of absolute reality, or some variation of that? Is there indeed in the act itself a dim and confused intimation of a metaphysical reality which would either have been hidden altogether or have remained opaque to us in some particular respect if not approached by this root? Or does a monistic ontology, such as the attribution of corporate life to the animate universe, or the identification of all minds as ultimately one, merely serve to explain how the phenomenon of fellow feeling is actually possible?

30:53 Wes: Right. And as we know, he's going to reject the theory of the sort that Schopenhauer represents, right? So it's neither the case that metaphysical monism, in the sense of the unity of selves, explains fellow feeling, nor is it the case that when we are having fellow feeling that we are getting insight knowledge of that metaphysical truth. Those two things are ruled out. But that is not to say that there isn't something here that we can get insight into via fellow feelings, some metaphysical reality. So it's on 58 that he'll say the value qualities of objects are already given in advance at a level where their image and conceptual features are not yet vouchsafed to us, and hence that the apprehension of values is the basis of our subsequent apprehension of objects.

Thus it could well be that vicarious emotion in the shape of fellow feeling might be a means of gaining objective value insight into metaphysical reality. So might be. So this is a bit speculative on his part, and we don't get a lot of detail about how this works or what this means.

31:59 Mark: Well, so in introducing this recording I was saying that the being there of another person is primordial. And this is saying more than that the being there as a reality, as a locus of value is there in advance. So it's not just merely that other people exist. He had said before that acknowledging somebody else exists, acknowledging they are fully real, well that's almost the way to saying that they are fully valuable, right? Because we actually encounter others minds really the same way we encounter our own minds. Wes and I read a little of Husserl that this was seemed like phenomenal, like why the problem of other minds is not a problem for Husserl is because even in perceiving ourself, it's not like Descartes says that I like I perceive my own thoughts and I know it's I perceive My body.

And as a stratum of my body, I perceive my mentality. And to sort of the inner life, you know, requires then over and above that, the sort of Hegelian recognition of the other. And then I start engaging in introspection and things. But it's a much more primordial that I am minded that I. And it's actually the same way that we encounter other people is we perceive not just bodies and then look at our own minds and say, hmm, I think that person has a body like mine, therefore they have a mind like mine. No, I just perceive their minds in the same way.

And the fact that they are real and are just as valuable as mine.

33:22 Wes: But I also think it's really about they have values. And we'll get more into this in this section too, because what he's going to say at the end of this section 1 is that where Schopenhauer thought, fellow feeling this dissipates the illusion that we are separate and that really we're all just one. He's going to say, well, it really does dispel a certain illusion. And that is the illusion of what he calls egocentricity. And he's concerned with this general umbrella term and two of thematic egocentricity, which in our last episode, I just think we should translate into normative egocentricity, which he defines as, quote, the tendency to identify subjective values as environmental ones and these in turn as belonging to the objective order of values.

So what I value is just what is objectively valuable. It's as if we can't imagine other people as loci of, I would even say, desire, Right? But loci of this valuing function. We can't imagine them wanting something different, valuing something different. And this is what I've said to Mark on a few occasions when I said there's something weird about ethics and we kind of have to embrace the other's egoism. It's not like we reduce ethics to our own egoism. But there's this weird way in which when we take other people as intentional objects, we are sort of aligned to or in touch with their egoism.

And this is part of the kind of thing. I mean, we have to get this presentive, intentional object access to their normative

34:55 Mark: life, let's say, yes, we have to see them not just as minded, as conscious, as I was saying, but as seeing, as desiring. And so then fellow feeling is right there.

35:07 Dylan: It's our direct recognition of that as opposed to. I hadn't thought about it exactly this way, but like you were describing with Husserl, not having problem of other minds that has to get solved for someone like Hegel. It's more clear to me now, now how that's happening with Scheler as well, that the problem that someone like Hegel is having to solve is just completely avoided because this metaphysical aspect of the world, which is why I think Scheller's right to at least see his articulation of fellow feeling is providing metaphysical insight into the world, is because it has to do with the kinds of objects that we have access to. And for Hegel we have to go through this big rigmarole to get access to other individuals.

35:57 Mark: Yeah, I just want to put Descartes in that slot because I think Hegel gets complicated and I don't want it. Probably we shouldn't go down that road right now. But, but, but I brought it up. But yeah, there is a rigmarole, but

36:08 Dylan: it feels like it's one line, right? I mean it feels like Hegel's at the end of a line that's very Cartesian in this respect.

36:14 Mark: I just thought that Hegel would be compatible with Scheler in that he is saying that the recognition, the other comes first and then you, you get the other's recognition. So he's actually with Scheler saying I recognize that the other has a mind and is seeing me and that's actually how then I enable introspection, which I don't know if that actually works as an explanation. It seems like extra introspection actually must be something that is an innate ability. You couldn't learn. It just you could only apply somebody else's seeing you to then develop minded. Anyway, this is getting too much into whether Hegel makes sense. But yeah, as far as Scheler is concerned, Scheller's not talking about introspection. In fact, you don't need introspection for fellow feeling. It's just, it's much more basic than that. So I think he shares that in common probably with Hegel. That.

37:03 Dylan: That's right. That's right.

37:04 Wes: So in this particular section we're talking about being able to see that other people have their values and there might be different than my own. And it seems like, well, yeah, don't we all realize that, you know, isn't that really kind of obvious and easy? And he'll say no. In fact, we are kind of normative solipsists by default. It's a cultural and spiritual attainment to get beyond that. And we kind of tend to gravitate towards that basically towards being normative solipsists. Do we understand other people exist and they have different values?

Yeah, at some level. But do we act that way? In many cases, we tend to default towards not acting that way. We fall back into egocentricity where we. Right, he'll say we treat other people as extensions of ourselves, or he'll say we ascribe to them the ontological status of mere dependence on oneself as a seeming absolute reality. So this, I think, is a very interesting psychological point.

38:02 Mark: I was most excited about us doing this part three, because the fact that he talks about Max Stirner and you spent this time on Max Stirner, and we didn't even really touch on him in our last discussion that. You're right, what you just described, Scheler ascribes to Max. Stirner has graphically depicted this in his book. Yeah, well, his translation of The Ego and His Own. This translator is the solitary one in his estate.

38:26 Wes: Interesting.

38:26 Mark: Is that how you read the Estate or the own to be the fact that other selves are mere objects for use, domination or enjoyment, as clearly shown in the expression estate. So the ego. I got my ego. Everything else that's laid before me in my phenomena, including other people, are just my own. Like, I didn't think that was what Stirner meant by that.

38:48 Wes: I mean, that's what I took from him, that we couldn't use others. But I mean, we got fans writing to us saying, oh, you haven't understood him. And, you know, when we recorded that episode, we knew we were going to get that kind of objection that, well, there's got to be something deeper underneath this. But the manifest content of Stirner is that, yeah, others are there for our use and that's it.

39:09 Mark: So that was an interesting kind of phenomenological claim that Stirner is like, look, I'm just describing what we actually find that we value. And I find that if somebody is imposing an ethic on me of altruism or just of general principle, something that is supposed to override, you know, this would be basically being in bad faith that I'm taking something objective and external and I'm putting my locus of value, I'm. I'm making it the boss over me. To be existentially honest, I have to say no, all these things are at my disposal are my. Part of my estate are my own.

And everybody, each one of us is in that position. And that's just, you know, that's the human condition. This fundamentally separateness, fundamental separateness we have from each Other, end of story, where Scheler says, well, you only think that because you are emotionally immature. You have to, you have to somehow realize your inborn faculty of fellow feeling.

40:05 Dylan: Egoism is therefore the outcome of a closed heart and mind, not a cause of this disposition.

40:10 Wes: So he'll close this bullet point too by giving us this idea that there's an a priori element to fellow feeling. Pure fellow feeling is an intrinsic characteristic of the human spirit. It is thereby established further that it is an a priori act of having the worth of others in general as its a priori content. It is not a product of such acquaintance as we may happen to have with other people and their emotional states, nor is its scope determined, thereby being merely assisted in its development and provided with opportunities for its application and display.

40:43 Mark: It's just so hard because clearly genetic as a genetic account is, it is a matter of like, this is how you get people to be more fellow with each other, is you like, make some friends, have some practice dealing with another person and their problems. Like, why don't you try to listen to other people? Like, this is, this is the advice we give to people. And he's just going to insist that. Yes, even though as a practical matter, sure, sure, sure. But that just goes in line with what we were saying about Brentano says, like, oh yeah, you know, of course we get ethics in society and in individuals by like whipping them, saying, be ethical, be ethical.

But, but ultimately the essence of ethics is just seeing, you know, those a priori truths. And so we're getting the same thing here, that this ability that we have is an a priori one. Even though clearly as a matter of practice it helps to have these things that are sort of extrinsic to it to motivate you to discover this a priori ability.

41:43 Wes: This is really what he's getting at with this whole metaphysical basis of fellow feeling. And in section in this bullet point three, he's going to use this interesting phrase. Fellow feeling takes us beyond our own welfare situation. And the kind of causal genetic theory that von Hartmann gives is not sufficient to explain that. We really do need a metaphysical basis for this if we are going to explain this way in which we can transcend our own welfare situation. You can't do this with empirical psychology.

42:13 Mark: I had a quote from von Hartmann here that I put in my notes. We experience a feeling which exists nowhere but in our own minds, yet we do not think of this feeling of ours, of that which evokes our fellow feeling. So we fancy ourselves able as it were to have feelings in another person's mind or to participate immediately in someone else's feelings when we are merely sensible of the reaction which it produces in our own. So this is a general illusion. Yeah, it's, it's where it's, it's actually a little pathological to like oh, I, I feel your pain. No you don't, you don't, you don't feel my pain. I guess it's a nice illusion that it makes you feel like you're going to be more ethical because you think you understand me even though you don't.

42:53 Wes: Yeah. What we're really encountering for von Hartmann is our own reaction. We think we're in the other person's feelings, but we're in our own. And that's what the end of this he wants to say. No. If we're stuck with the kind of account von Hartmann gives, then yeah, but if we want to think that there's a ground for ethics and that we can be out of our own welfare situation, then we have to go to this a priori metaphysical ground. So that means. Right. That implies for this bullet point four there is this metaphysically cognitive function to fellow feeling. It's not an insight into our fundamental underlying unity or oneness with others, but as we've said, it's insight into the value of others and into their values and their minds.

43:38 Mark: So to close out this full episode, does anybody have any. I'm really torn. I think maybe von Hartmann and Stirner might be right, that I can understand you have feelings too. And I agree with Scheler that there's something very fundamental about that. This is not a matter of analogy, but is there something a little self deceptive in feeling like I can get outside myself? Like yes, you can have an ethical rule that says respect other people's otherness. You don't have to understand them even you don't have to have experience anything like them. But I just want you to respect them. And a priori say every person is a universe into themselves and everybody has unconditional value. Even that stuff I already buy. But that is almost nothing to do with fellow feeling.

44:20 Wes: I'm inclined to be sympathetic to Scheler. I don't have a very well formulated opinion on this even though I've been doing a lot of thinking about it. But I don't think we can explain not even just morality but even the phenomenon of conscience without at least saying I think we can do it naturalistically, but I think we have to say that there's this fundamental built in mechanism a priori to get into the minds of others. And I completely agree with him that it's not based on some underlying metaphysical unity. It's obviously a product of evolution.

Conscience can't be explained in these genetic ways. Right. You know, going back to Hart on law and acceptance. Right. It's not enough that oh I'm afraid of the sting of conscience. Conscience is like the robber in the bank holding the gun to your head or I'm going to be punished or something like that. It doesn't work like that. We really do think of norms as authoritative at some fundamental level and you can say, yeah, you can be Freud and say well we acquired those values through identification. I think that's true as a matter of development.

But to explain this psychological phenomenon you have to do this weird thing where you preserve the separateness of others which he gets into this is at the end of this section. He gives a lot of these grounds for rejecting monistic theories and one of them is just that fellow feeling must preserve distance between persons even as it gives us insight into them. So whatever theory that we're going to give has to do this very special thing. It has to put us inside other people's minds while maintaining this requisite distance.

46:00 Mark: Dylan, you get the last word.

46:02 Dylan: I am sympathetic with Wes's account on the weirdness of this ability that we have to then preserve the distinction between ourselves and others but also be connected to them. And I am confused about this term genetic and the way it gets used both in this book and the way we're just using it because it seems to me that we would be talking about this power that we have. It has to be part of our being in that way it's genetic, it's part of what human beings are.

46:34 Wes: I mean he's been using it to mean causal in the sense of like contagion and identification or genetic theories of fellow feeling.

46:42 Mark: Where did it come from? Yes, that. But I'm really glad you pointed that out because this is not the normal way people use the term at all. Yeah, genetic should mean inborn right? You know, is part of our genes. No, that's not.

46:54 Dylan: It's generative as opposed to being genealogical.

46:57 Mark: That would be. I don't know if that's better anyway that's the way Nietzsche uses it when you give an origin account.

47:03 Wes: Right.

47:04 Dylan: I understand it better when we saying that Scheler is articulating fellow feeling is effectively part of the powers that we have as human beings. I also just keep coming back to Tomasello, frankly, and the way in which he accounted for our agency, I think it aligns tremendously well with the way in which he was accounting for our agency and that the way in which we form social bonds that Tomasello talks about as a manifestation of our agency, that is a distinct power over, in fact, other primates, is exactly what Scheller's talking about, it seems to me.

47:41 Wes: Yeah.

47:42 Mark: All right, thanks, guys, for the extra. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We will, yes, keep talking about this book, but jumping forward to Love and Hate because it does seem like love is going to be important for ethics. There's going to be a little more of the story of, you know, it's not just Fellow Feelings sufficient for ethics. So hopefully we'll get fully fleshed out theory by going through as much as we can a part 2 the book next time.

48:06 Wes: At the very least, it's going to be exciting.

48:08 Dylan: And, yeah, it would be very, very weird if our ethics was founded on hate.

48:16 Mark: Let's see. Let's see.

48:18 Dylan: I don't know.

48:19 Mark: For Nietzsche, maybe. I don't know. No, no. All right. Good night, everybody.

48:24 Dylan: Good night.

48:25 Wes: Good.