More re: Heart of Flesh/Heart of Stone. Optimism, empathy and ethics

[pegkerr]

Lots and lots of comments on my last point. Um, where to start. I'm going to try to answer some of the comments and articulate a little bit better exactly what I'm getting at with this metaphor of "heart of flesh/heart of stone." I plunge into these explanations with trepidation, sure that I'll mess up again. Bear with me. I'll do my best.

I didn't mean to imply that magdalene1's vision of His and Her future was superior to awatson's (parodied) vision because magdalene1's was more hopeful or optimistic or idealistic.

I didn't always see that so clearly. I used to make the mistake--and I really do think it was a mistake--to think that optimism was morally superior. This caused me a great deal of anguish over the years until I got this straightened out in my own mind. Bad enough to struggle with chronic depression. It's even worse if you get down on yourself, and see yourself as a moral failure, because you see things in a gloomy way.

If this optimism/pessimism scale is what cakmpls was referring to by arguing that there is no intrinsic superiority between one way of looking at the world and the other, then yes, I agree.

I also think that people who have what I call the heart of flesh can certainly be pessimistic.

cakmpls also said I don't believe that there are hearts of flesh and hearts of stone. I think that there are simply people with different needs.

Well, yeah, I don't believe it literally, of course. I meant it as a metaphor. Let me try to pin down a little better what I meant.

As I understand it, People with a heart of flesh may be impervious to hurt because of a natural resiliency or very sensitive to hurt. The key is, they open themselves up to the possibility of being hurt. They are also open to the possibility of joy, too, in a way that those with hearts of stone are not. They allow themselves the whole range of human emotion, both joy and anguish. People with a heart of stone decide (unconsciously or not) that they don't to risk the ridicule of the world, or they don't want to feel pain.

I think that a large part of the reason why is that they refuse to feel empathy.

Let me point you to a passage from a book that I think gets at this directly, Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant Palace. The hero of the book, Greg Rivas, begins the book as a cynical man with a heart of stone. He was hurt in love years ago, and the experience was so painful that he never wants to go through anything like that again. Now he feels, the hell with the rest of humanity. He is hired to snatch back from a cult leader the girl whose family rejected him years ago. In the course of the journey he makes through the book, getting closer and closer to the cult leader, actually a totally egotistic alien, he is wounded again and again. He encounters people on his journey, and those encounters teach him something he had forgotten about entirely: empathy. At the climax of the book, the alien cult leader, recognizing a kindred spirit, invites Greg to join him in running his kingdom:

As to the question of why you--my dear fellow you, you underestimate yourself! I learned something from you, too, during our brief psychic linking. Why, in all my travels, I swear to you, never have I encountered such a fellow soul! Confess, confess--you too find other entities interesting only to the extent that they might give you pleasure or hindrance. Like me you consume with greedy haste everything you can get from them, and are indifferent to what might become of them afterward; you are in fact sickened by the sight of them, like being forced to linger over the chilling, congealed remains of a dinner! And like me, your real focus of attention, shorn of peripheral poses and pretences, is the one thing, the only thing, worth an eternity of regarding--yourself! You and I understand each other perfectly, boy. We could, without having to simulate any affection for each other, help each other considerably. We don't merge with anybody, boy. We consume. You and I are always distinct, undiluted, individual. Quanta rather than arbitrary segments of a continuum." Jaybush laughed sharply. "We're two of a kind."

Rivas stared across the deck table at the fat smiling face and knew that no one had ever understood him so thoroughly....

"I'm afraid," Rivas said . . . "that I'm going to refuse."

"Are you sure, boy? Tell papa why."

Rivas downed the remainder of his tequila and refilled the glass. "Well," he said almost comfortably, sure now he would never leave Deviant's Palace alive and that nothing he could say would change anything, "because of a . . . a bald boy who died on a garbage heap. And a pile of old stove parts [a robot Rivas met on his travels] that died on a glass plain. And a murdering pimp who evoked, and died out of, loyalty. And a whore with a sense of justice. Am I boring you? And because of Sister Windchime, who has compassion, though you've tried hard to stamp it out of her. And because the hard selfish part of Greg Rivas is swimming around in a canal someplace."

What changed was that Rivas discovered empathy with other people. Because people who guard their hearts of flesh can feel, they can feel connection with others. I prefer magdalene1's rooting for Him and Her, over awatson's (parodic) narrator, who found pleasure in wishing them misery. And yeah, I agree, magdalene1's picture of a bright future for Him and Her might not match theirs at all. They might hate kids, and want to run away to live in Tibet in a poly trio with a third person. Whatever. What was significant to me was that she wanted the best for them, whatever it was. She wanted them to be happy, because happiness mattered to her.

Those with what I call hearts of flesh can be pessimists. Frodo thought his mission was doomed, he despaired throughout the quest, but he kept on going because he knew that laying down his life for others was right. Was he a fool? The world may say so.

Certainly those with hearts of stone can be very happy. I'm sure Hitler loved his dog and enjoyed opera and got great pleasure out of the vast ampitheaters he built and the lovely machinery of death he dreamed up. I would rather be Anne Frank who near the end of her life said that in spite of everything, she still believed that people were really good at heart--and who died in a concentration camp at fifteen.

Yes, as cakmpls says, states of mind such as optimism or pessimism can be morally neutral. But states of mind, of understanding the world, lead to actions, and I don't believe that all actions are equally morally neutral. I also believe that intentions that lead to those actions can be judged.

Is it dangerous error to speak of "hearts of stone"? Is this metaphor hopelessly simplistic? Perhaps. But there's something, something there, with real moral implications for me. If what I call a stony heart leads a person to commit a moral wrong, the ethical must condemn them. But conversely, those with hearts of flesh will continue to reach out to those with stony hearts, trying out of empathy to make a connection that may save both. Think of Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, two women on opposite sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, who each refused to believe that other had only a heart of stone and reached out to one another, empathizing with the other's pain, creating a movement that won the Nobel Prize.

I understand and agree with what cakmpls is saying about that she has a richer life when she uses binocular vision. I believe (if I remember correctly) that cakmpls has also objected to my trying to "tell no lies and of the truth all I can." What is truth, in a relative world? How is your truth better than mine?

Perhaps it is more helpful to think of what Galadriel said to Frodo, when he started to realize the enormity of the Quest, and what he was being asked to do and yet decide to do it anyway: "You begin to see with a keen eye." Yes. That is what I want. I don't deny that things may turn out badly, as awatson points out. But I want to also see the possibility of hope. I want to operate from the assumption that I don't to cut myself off from pain or joy, both mine or other people's. I want to make my decisions ethically. I believe that some things are right and some are wrong. If I try to be aware of other peoples' points of view as well as my own, I think I will choose those right courses of action more reliably than not.

That, I guess, is what I mean, by having a heart of flesh.

Comments

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Perhaps here's further help from Sense and Sensibility: After Willoughby's perfidy is discovered, Marianne and Elinor are discussing what Marianne's marriage to Willoughby might have been like, had it gone forward:

...your marriage must have involved you in many certain troubles and disappointments in which you would have been poorly supported by an affection, on his side, much less certain. Had you married, you must have been always poor. His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses which would not be the less grievous to you from having been entirely unknown and unthought of before. Your sense of honour and honesty would have led you, I know, when aware of your situation, to attempt all the economy that would appear to you possible; and perhaps, as long as your frugality retrenched only on your own comfort, you might have been suffered to practise it, but beyond that -- and how little could the utmost of your single management do to stop the ruin which had begun before your marriage? -- beyond that, had you endeavoured, however reasonably, to abridge his enjoyments, is it not to be feared, that instead of prevailing on feelings so selfish to consent to it, you would have lessened your own influence on his heart, and made him regret the connection which had involved him in such difficulties?"

Marianne's lips quivered, and she repeated the word "Selfish?" in a tone that implied "Do you really think him selfish?"

"The whole of his behaviour," replied Elinor, "from the beginning to the end of the affair, has been grounded on selfishness. It was selfishness which first made him sport with your affections -- which afterwards, when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession of it, and which finally carried him from Barton. His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle."

"It is very true. My happiness never was his object."

"At present," continued Elinor, "he regrets what he has done. And why does he regret it? Because he finds it has not answered towards himself. It has not made him happy. His circumstances are now unembarrassed -- he suffers from no evil of that kind, and he thinks only that he has married a woman of a less amiable temper than yourself. But does it thence follow that, had he married you, he would have been happy? The inconveniencies would have been different. He would then have suffered under the pecuniary distresses which, because they are removed, he now reckons as nothing. He would have had a wife of whose temper he could make no complaint, but he would have been always necessitous -- always poor; and probably would soon have learnt to rank the innumerable comforts of a clear estate and good income as of far more importance, even to domestic happiness, than the mere temper of a wife."

[more to follow]

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it is really that simple. All the characters I have been thinking about in this way: Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby, Nick Tooley in Tam Lin, Kett in my first book, Rolf in the one I'm working on now, Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, (remember: "Greed is good"? Remember "Why are you wrecking this company?" "Because it's wreckable!"), Jaybush in Dinner at Deviant's Palace, yeah all of them. Maybe it boils down, in the end, to selfishness.

Why use the heart of flesh/heart of stone metaphor then? I think it gives a feeling for how emotions are involved. As I said, it doesn't have to do with the demonstration of emotions. "When I speak of "opening the self up" to emotion, it may be my fumbling way to trying to explain empathy, the ability to sympathetically understand how another person feels. If you strangle that ability in yourself, perhaps I've been implying, the price you pay is that eventually you fail to be able to feel anything at all. I have to think about that a bit, but isn't that generally said of psycopaths and sociopaths? They cannot imagine other people's points of view, their hurts--and eventually, it is said, they don't seem to have a sense of "feeling" at all.

I think the first time I ran across the metaphor of the heart of stone was when I was a child and read the story of Exodus in my Bible story book for the first time. The Pharoah was afraid and promised to release the Israelites with each plague, but when each plague passed, his "heart would be hardened" and he would refuse to release them. I was fascinated by that metaphor at that age. Note, here, how it's the same thing: selfishness. As long as the "price" to the Pharoah of keeping the Israelites is expensive (it involves gnats, frogs, boils, blood in the water), selfishness leads the Pharoah to calculate it makes more (economic) sense to let them go. But when the plague passes, the selfish need to exploit the Israelites' labor outweighs the pain that is now in the past. At no time does the justice or injustice of enslaving the Israelites enter into the Pharoah's reasoning. He simply is incapable of think that way at all. "Hardening" of the heart is a useful metaphoric way to describe that deadening effect on emotions and reasoning.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

empathy, the ability to sympathetically understand how another person feels.

In fact, though, we can never know how another person feels. We can only know how we would feel in their position, and then make a guess at how similar or different their feelings are, based on our knowledge of them individually and our experience with people in general.

(I'm going to make my responses stick to one point from here on!)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, there's one easy thing to do: we can always ask them.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Sure, if we know them, and know them sufficiently well to ask such a question. But what of the millions upon millions whom we don't know, as well as those we know but not well enough? If we want to help people in Sudan, or North Korea, or Kosovo, or even here in the U.S., even in the next town, even the burned-out family on the next block whom we have never met, we cannot ask the individuals what they are feeling. We can only look at their circumstances and use our intellect and our own experience to tell us what will probably help them.

(Even when we ask, we face the problem of not knowing whether what you mean when you say "I feel sad" = what I mean when I say "I feel sad," but that's probably a different philosophical discussion.)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If you strangle that ability in yourself, perhaps I've been implying, the price you pay is that eventually you fail to be able to feel anything at all.

But is it? Have you any evidence whatsoever that people who don't "sympathetically understand how another person feels" don't feel anything?

. . . isn't that generally said of psycopaths and sociopaths? They cannot imagine other people's points of view, their hurts--and eventually, it is said, they don't seem to have a sense of "feeling" at all.

Sociopaths and psychopaths generally show signs of these traits from their earliest years, rather than progressively "strangling" some inborn empathy for others. There are a lot of different definitions floating around of "psychopath" and "sociopath." I haven't found one that says that eventually they don't have a sense of "feeling" at all, though such a definition may exist. However, their defining characteristic isn't that they can't imagine others' feelings, but that they don't care. In fact, some psychopathic killers derive pleasure from being able to imagine their victims' terror, even from "feeling" it with them.

Here may be a key point where we differ: To me, it is not necessary that one be able to imagine how another feels in order to care about what happens to that person. And it is not necessary to care what happens to another in order to still behave morally toward that person. All of this can be an intellectual process, with no emotional involvement at all. One can believe that the proper activity for a human is to treat other humans (or other living creatures) in a certain way, and that treatment may be indistinguishable from the treatment given by the most emotionally affected, empathetic person.