ROUSSEAU AS CHAMPION AND CRITIC OF COMPASSION

Rousseau is, of course, not the first to praise charity, but in the Discourse on Inequality, he elevates the status of compassion understood as a natural impulse. The “natural repugnance to see any sensitive being suffer, principally those like ourselves,” is one of just “two principles anterior to reason,” the other being interest in our own well-being and preservation, out of which “all the rules of natural right appear to…, flow” (DI, III, 126; 15).⁷

Comparing the natural pity found even in animals to the pitilessness of civilized human beings, who can reason their way out of feeling compassion for others, Rousseau concludes that “it is in this Natural feeling, rather than in subtle arguments, that we must seek the cause of the repugnance every man would feel in doing evil” (DI, III, 156; 38). The Discourse makes sensitivity to suffering a sign of purity and one's ability to suppress it a sign of depravity. The Discourse is also itself an education in compassion, through which “we are to come to see as never before the preponderance of suffering in social life, and so to learn to be ashamed of our past lack of response to it” (Orwin 1997a, 301).

Rousseau's praise of compassion is further developed in Emile, in which Rousseau imagines a wise governor charged with the education of a pupil from infancy to adulthood. Whereas the Discourse on Inequality describes human beings in a presocial state of nature, Emile describes the education of a human being who maintains his core naturalness even as he acquires the knowledge and develops the faculties that make him more than a match for civilized human beings. Emile, the pupil in question, is to be a “natural man living in the state of society” (E, IV, 483; 205). Compassion is among the defining characteristics of such a natural man. Indeed, Emile impresses his future wife, Sophie, by bursting into tears at the story of her parents' hard luck.

Emile not only moistens and salts the hands of the afflicted but also actually helps them, practicing “active beneficence” (E, IV, 545; 251). Providing aid and comfort to suffering others is an ongoing and significant part of his life. Emile is led to this way of life by his governor, who carefully exploits Emile's adolescent expansiveness and developing imagination to help him put himself in the place of others (E, IV, 503–15; 221–29). Compassion, which originates as a mere repugnance at the sight of suffering comes to fruition in Emile, who, by virtue of identifying with them, feels for and with those who suffer.

Admittedly, compassion, though it moves us to assist others, depends on self-love. Although Rousseau describes two principles anterior to reason in the Discourse on Inequality, he concedes in Emile that the second, pity, is a transformation of the first, interest in our own well-being. One experiences compassion in its fullest sense only when one identifies with the sufferer, or suffers “in him” (E, IV, 506; 223). However, this dependence in no way diminishes compassion's standing in Rousseau's thought, because every passion depends on self-love. “Self love” is “anterior to every other passion,” and all other passions are “in a sense only modifications” of it (E, IV, 491; 213). Both the passions that incline us to exploit others and those that incline us to assist them are manifestations of self-love.⁸

What distinguishes one passion from another is not the extent to which each depends on self-love but the extent to which each tends to achieve the goal of self-love—our genuine advantage—and, relatedly, the way in which each causes us to see and act toward other human beings (E, IV, 491, 506; 213, 223). Rousseau praises compassion, then, not because it opposes self-love but because it is among those modifications of self-love that are good for us and for others.

Rousseau's rank among the foremost theorists and advocates of compassion is undisputed. What is less noted is his rank among its foremost critics. Yet Rousseau's treatment of compassion assumes that an account of it already exists, influences his audience, and badly misses the mark.⁹

In his Letter to D'Alembert on the theater, Rousseau refutes those who praise the theater for inspiring pity, criticizes theatergoers who are “proud of their tears,” and worries that such pity undermines virtue (LA, V, 48–49; 268, 289–90).¹⁰ In Emile, too, Rousseau does not introduce compassion to readers who never suspected its value but introduces a version of compassion that corrects the defects of the existing version, in particular by favoring service over money and addressing all ills, not just curable ills (E, IV, 325–26, 545, 786, 804–5; 95, 251, 422, 435–36).¹¹ More broadly, Rousseau concedes that compassion as such is weak because it can be overwhelmed by the narrow self-love it is supposed to combat and because the relief of ills is quite unnecessary to its satisfaction. The “sterile pity” of theatergoers, which is “soon stifled by the passions” is a case in point (LA, V, 23; 268). And he is aware that compassion can be undiscriminating, that it easily attaches itself to undeserving objects. Our sympathy as theatergoers for weak lovers and our secret hope that they will choose love over duty is a case in point (LA, V, 48–49; 289–90).

Rousseau is also aware that the consequences of compassion's shortcomings may be grave. Consider especially the Levite of Ephraim, Rousseau's free adaptation of the last three chapters of the Book of Judges. In it, the people of Israel are moved by “compassion” for the remnants of the tribe of Benjamin to “exterminate Jabesh-Gilead and all its inhabitants…except only the virgin women” to be “given in marriage to the children of Benjamin.” The Israelites are “cruel even in their pity” (L, II, 1220–21; 362–63).¹²

Almost equally striking are the Dialogues, which dwell on the conspiracy Rousseau thinks is directed against him. Rousseau attacks his persecutors for claiming they are animated by pity for him. Although decent and intelligent people may quietly doubt the humaneness of the treatment to which Rousseau is subjected, the profession of pity by the conspiracy's leaders is an important and effective part of their effort to make persecuting him acceptable: “the masterpiece of their art was to transform the precautions they took for their own safety into consideration of their victim. A veneer of humanity…completed the seduction of the public” (D, I, 892; 180).

In observing that compassion is weak and undiscriminating, Rousseau anticipates the bulk of the contemporary criticism of compassion. Rousseau is interesting to us because his advocacy of compassion occurs in full awareness of its shortcomings and dangers. How, then, does Rousseau's account of compassion resolve the doubts that he, no less than today's critics, raises about compassion?

COMPASSION'S WEAKNESS (AND STRENGTH)

In his analysis of the Discourse on Inequality, Boyd (2004) observes that pity, though it is often supposed to be Rousseau's foundation for society, may be, on Rousseau's own account, just one more reason for avoiding others. Aside from a mother's solicitude for her children, which is not obviously based on pity alone, Rousseau gives not one example of pity carrying natural man “without reflection to the aid of those whom we see suffer.” Instead, his examples tend both to support his initial, negative definition of pity as “an innate repugnance to see his fellow suffer” and to illustrate the maxim of natural goodness, negative insofar as it concerns others: “Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others” (DI, III, 156, 154, 156; 37, 36, 38). However, repugnance at the suffering of others can be assuaged as effectively by fleeing from them as by helping them. In any case, pity will not prevent natural men from harming others, let alone cause them to help others, where their own preservation is concerned (DI, III, 126; 15). So it seems unlikely that it, any more than rational self-interest, will draw people together or inspire beneficent deeds (Boyd 2004, 521).¹³

This is one way of understanding the weakness of pity.

To be sure, no one denies that pity may lead civilized man to help others. His expansiveness and imagination put him in their place, and he cannot easily avoid them. But even here, Boyd argues, the thrust of pity is negative and disposes us to turn away from rather than relieve suffering. Pity in its developed form is founded on the recognition that “all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and pains” and that “all are condemned to death” (E, IV, 504; 222). Pity “serves as a dispiriting reminder of the profound dependency of the human condition” and consequently may repel human beings from suffering rather than leading them to help (Boyd 2004, 521, 532–33).

Emile's governor offers evidence for Boyd's argument when he tells his charge that knowledge of suffering counsels restraint at least as much as action: “the contemplation of human misery makes the wise man always moderate. He stays in his place” (E, IV, 820–21; 446). In a parallel passage,¹⁴

Rousseau warns against extending oneself “over the whole earth,” so that one becomes “sensitive over this entire large surface” and one's “ills are multiplied by all the points where [one] can be wounded” (E, IV, 307; 83). To avoid this danger, one must, again, stay in one's place: If “no one becomes sensitive [to suffering] until his imagination is animated and begins to transport him out of himself” (E, IV, 506; 223), and if our knowledge of suffering discourages us from extending ourselves, then the knowledge that is supposed to inspire compassion may undermine it.

However, compassion's weakness is really a strength because human beings, at least in society, have a dangerous desire to extend themselves and show signs of power and activity. Although in the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau writes of the profound laziness of natural men (DI, III, 145, 193; 28, 66), in Emile, he writes of an “active principle” that in the child takes no definite direction. The child's activity is “superabundant and extends outward; he senses within himself, so to speak, enough life to animate everything surrounding him. That he do or undo is a matter of no importance; it suffices that he change the condition of things” (E, IV, 289; 67). Indeed, it belongs “to every age…to want to create, imitate, produce, give signs of power and activity” (E, IV, 330; 98). Human beings are even natural imperialists. Hobbes is right that it “is a disposition natural to man to regard everything in his power as his” (E, IV, 314; 87). To be sure, where power, imagination, and social ties are limited, natural imperialism is correspondingly limited, but the disposition in question endangers even the natural man when, as in Emile, he is destined to live in society.

It is beyond the range of this essay to investigate why Emile describes the active principle whereas the Discourse on Inequality leaves it out. For our purposes, it is enough that for a man, even a natural man, raised to live in society, the tendency to act and extend oneself is at least as powerful as the tendency to avoid action and draw oneself back. Indeed, the developments most to be feared in the child are impulses toward tyranny and rebellion. Rousseau discusses these potential developments just after he explains that suffering privations and discomforts not only prepares one to experience the “sweetness of commiseration” later on but also insures that one will not “quit his constitution” (E, IV, 313–14; 87). Children who are spared such suffering come to believe that it is in their power to have every pleasure and avoid every pain. They are despotic when they hope to bend the world to their wills and rebellious against animate and inanimate beings alike when they see that the world will not bend (E, IV, 314–15; 87–88). Although the world typically breaks the wills of such children, and “cowardly, fearful, and fawning” dispositions develop, Rousseau's allusion here to Xerxes and Achilles suggests that some persist in attempting to break the world's will (E, IV, 315; 88). Because the different types that arise from an overly indulgent education are bad for themselves and others, it is no surprise that Emile is made to feel throughout his education, “the harsh yoke which nature imposes on man, the heavy yoke of necessity.” Here, again, awareness of nature's harshness is associated with staying in place: “put him in his place and hold him there” (E, IV, 320; 91).

The wish to “change the condition of things” and to show signs of power and activity, which affects the natural man raised to live in society, is bad for him and others when it is not constrained by the recognition of necessity. It is easy to see how Rousseau's account of compassion responds to this problem. Compassionate action fulfills the wish in question: the compassionate man “feels himself to be in a condition of strength which extends us beyond ourselves and leads us to take everywhere activity superfluous to our well-being” (E, IV, 514; 229). But because that action is founded on the belief that suffering is the lot of human beings, it is self-limiting; it always carries with it the warning that human beings must not seek to quit their station. Compassionate people, without such a constraint, are as subject to tyrannical and rebellious impulses as anyone else. One need only think of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who becomes a Caesar and imprisons God Himself in the name of alleviating a human suffering he refuses to accept as part of the order of things.¹⁵

Of course, however good Emile's education in compassion may be for keeping him in place, that education would lose much of its appeal if Emile never acted on it. But Emile engages in compassionate action of many sorts, from defending the weak before the powerful, to helping farmers improve their techniques, to tending to the ill (E, IV, 543–44, 804–5; 250, 435–36). Rousseau contemplates “how many benefactions Emile and Sophie can spread around them” (E, IV, 859; 474).

How can one explain Emile's active beneficence, once one grants that compassion is at least as likely to contract as it is to expand the self? In the next section, I will argue that compassion need not be stronger than it is because it has allies among the social passions, namely gratitude and friendship, that may motivate action on behalf of others where compassion fails. But for now, I merely repeat what is often noted about Emile's compassion, that it is backed not only by his identification with others but also by his separation from them (Boyd 2004, 525; Orwin 1997a, 303–7). When he helps others, Emile experiences both the pleasure of activity and the pleasure of comparing himself to others and finding himself better off:

One might add that although we may envy those who are better off than we are, Emile, who is unlikely to judge anyone better off than he is, is glad to make others happy: the “image of happiness delights him, and when he can contribute to producing happiness, this is one more means of sharing it” (E, IV, 545; 251). There is no reason to think that this delight is closed to those who, though less satisfied than Emile, find many they consider less fortunate than themselves.

COMPASSION'S ALLIES: GRATITUDE AND FRIENDSHIP

Whereas the alliance between compassion and self-love has been an object of scholarly commentary (Orwin 1997a, 298–300), the alliance between it and other social passions has been neglected.¹⁶

The complaint that compassion is weak loses much of its force if it is not the sole or even main basis on which concern for others is supposed to rest. Yet, as important as compassion may be for drawing human beings together it is not, as John Charvet claims, Rousseau's “solution to the social problem” (1974, 19). Rousseau is able to advocate compassion in full awareness of its weakness because it is, in his account, only one of the passions that concern us with others and motivate action on their behalf.

To begin with, human beings are drawn together by gratitude. Indeed, benevolence is initially founded on gratitude, whose roots are struck early.

The care a child receives provokes in response a sentiment of love for those who care for him or her. This gratitude,¹⁸ if the child comes to think that he can expect other human beings to want to assist him, is generalized into benevolence, a “sentiment favorable to his species.”

Gratitude, then, like compassion, is a cause of good will toward others that has a natural source in self-love. And it is cultivated through Emile's early education at least as much as compassion is. If Emile's pity is cultivated by suffering, his gratitude is cultivated by the belief that others are inclined to do him good. Before he views others as sufferers, Emile views them as benefactors. He develops a “modest confidence in his fellow man” and thinks that although he may be refused assistance, “humanity inclines toward providing it” (E, IV, 422; 161). That such confidence is a product of the particular education Emile receives is apparent from Rousseau's attack on the “barbarous” education that, however well-intentioned, “burdens a child with chains of every sort,” so that the “age of gaiety passes amidst tears, punishment, threats, and slavery” (E, IV, 301–2; 78). Even the premature attempt to reason with children about their duties makes them view adults as tyrants from whom favors must be obtained by fraud (E, IV, 319; 91). The child must therefore be protected not only from those whose ill-intentioned acts might undermine his confidence in others but also from those whose well-intentioned acts may have the same effect. That is presumably one reason why the governor is so careful from the beginning to establish his influence over those with whom Emile is likely to associate (E, IV, 325–26; 94–95). Establishing a sentiment favorable to the species on the basis of gratitude is no less an object of Emile's early education than establishing such a sentiment on the basis of compassion.

Gratitude not only adds to compassion in promoting concern for others but also complements it. Gratitude differs from compassion in at least two ways. First, whereas compassion is the feeling of a relatively strong being for a relatively weak being, gratitude is the reverse. At the very least, it is founded on the memory of having been weak at one time. Consequently, it, unlike compassion, permits one to feel affection for others even when one thinks them better off. I do not wish to deny what Rousseau affirms, that being in an inferior position tends to wound one's vanity and provoke envy (E, IV, 506–7; 223). However, there are plainly circumstances in which benevolence flows from gratitude and in which envy does not overwhelm the tenderness one naturally feels toward those who do one good. Presumably, the most favorable circumstances are those in which, having experienced benefactions as a weak being, one now feels in a position of relative strength. If the child experiences the need for help as “a kind of humiliation and longs for the moment when he can do without” help, the adult is delighted to demonstrate that he, too, is a benefactor: “my turn has come” (E, IV, 311–12, 522; 86, 234)!¹⁹

Second, gratitude appears to require that we put ourselves in another's place much less than compassion does. Gratitude, to be sure, demands imagination and reasoning, because one must understand that those who do one good intend to do one good in order to be grateful to them. And as Kelly (2003, 66) points out, the capacity to understand that others are conscious of us, which precedes our capacity to understand that they intend to do us good, requires us to identify with them. Nonetheless, gratitude does not seem to require, as compassion does, that we “transport ourselves outside of ourselves” and identify with another to so great an extent that we feel their feelings almost as our own (E, IV, 505; 233). Gratitude can presumably be felt toward people in whose shoes we can barely imagine walking, and Rousseau gives no indication that it requires the same kind of identification that compassion does. Although gratitude is no less notoriously unreliable than pity because, it, too, can be overwhelmed by more direct manifestations of self-love, it appears able to fill in as a foundation for social ties where pity fails.

The same may be said of friendship.²⁰

If compassion is felt by the relatively strong for the relatively weak, whereas gratitude is felt by the relatively weak for the relatively strong, friendship is felt among equals. Unlike either gratitude or compassion, friendship must be reciprocal: “Attachment can exist without being returned, but friendship never can” (E, IV, 520; 233). Moreover, whereas compassion and gratitude can be felt for strangers who have nothing in common with us aside from humanity, friendship is felt for those who are familiar to and, in important respects, like us (E, IV, 671; 339).²¹ In this respect, friendship closely resembles what Rousseau calls “the first bonds linking [Emile] to his species”:²² Although Emile is expected eventually to generalize “his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity,” he will not thereby replace his affection for those who are close to him but “join to his particular affections those which can make him identify with his species” (E, IV, 520; 233). Although common pain is one element of Emile's affection for his friends, it is not hard to see both that this affection is different from compassion or gratitude and that it serves different purposes than either. It can be the basis of strong affection extended over a neighborhood or, for those less particular about their friends than Emile, a small polity.

If compassion is just one of the passions behind our concern for others,²³

why does Rousseau put so great an emphasis on it? As we have already noted, the Discourse on Inequality makes pity one of just two “principles anterior to reason” out of which “all the rules of natural right appear to…flow” (DI, III, 126; 15). One also finds in the Discourse on Inequality the remarkable claim that “benevolence and even friendship” arise from “constant pity fixed on a particular object.²⁴ If, as I think I have demonstrated, gratitude and friendship are distinguishable from pity, Rousseau cannot be altogether in earnest when he makes this claim. In the next section, I argue that Rousseau's reduction of the social passions to pity is connected to the admittedly dispiriting understanding of the world that we have already examined, that “all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and pains” and that “all are condemned to death” (E, IV, 504; 222). Although this understanding of the world promotes moderation, it also runs the risk of promoting passivity and even wickedness. It must therefore be counterbalanced by the more uplifting understanding of the world associated with gratitude.

GRATITUDE AS COMPASSION'S COUNTERPOISE

Rousseau's puzzling reduction of the social passions to pity is accompanied by an equally puzzling question: “Is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy” (DI, III, 126; 15)?” This question is puzzling not only because the answer is not obviously yes but also because Rousseau thinks the answer is no. In Emile, happiness consists not merely in not suffering–indeed, it is consistent with bearing “the blows of fate”—but also in acting:

Before we conclude that Emile is not consistent with the Discourse on Inequality, however, we should notice that the inconsistency is also within Emile itself, in which Rousseau also asserts that “man's felicity on earth is…only a negative condition; the smallest number of ills he can suffer ought to constitute its measure” (E, IV, 303; 80). And the Discourse contains the same inconsistency, because it suggests both that happiness is a negative condition, that of not suffering, and that “the happiest…epoch” in human history is characterized by several positive goods, including “the sweetest sentiments known to man”: “conjugal love and Paternal love” as well as the “sweetness of independent intercourse.” This happiest epoch is experienced by human beings who are several steps removed from the state of nature, and it appears to contain more suffering than that state, because human beings have become “bloodthirsty and cruel” and experience “shame and envy” that they did not experience in the state of nature (DI, III, 168–71; 46–48).

Rousseau's reduction of the social passions to pity can be understood then, as connected to that understanding of the world according to which human beings are essentially sufferers who can hope for nothing better than relief from suffering. But that understanding is only one part of the account of our lot that Rousseau presents. It is counterbalanced by that more uplifting understanding according to which it is possible for us to hope for happiness.

The first understanding, as we have already observed, has an important advantage: it restrains our tendency to excessive and dangerous activity. However, keeping overactive human beings in place is not the only problem those who wish to relieve human misery face. If the cause of human misery were simply our desire to act on the world and exercise power, then an education that discouraged activity and limited desire might relieve that misery. However, Rousseau thinks that not only excesses but also deficiencies of desire and activity are possible.

Consequently, Emile's education seeks not so much to suppress desire and activity as to preserve an equilibrium between what he hopes to do and what he is actually capable of, to “put power and will in perfect equality,” so that with “all the powers in action,” we remain “well-ordered” (E, IV, 304; 80). The teaching that life is above all suffering and that happiness is a negative condition prevents us from being thrown out of balance one way, by an excess of desire and will, but as a sole teaching it threatens to throw us out of balance another way, by a deficiency of desire and will.

The teaching that life is suffering has another disadvantage: it may incline us toward evil. Because Emile has been “free and contented,” he has “stayed just and good”; “pain and vice,” Rousseau observes, “are inseparable, and man never becomes wicked except when he is unhappy” (E, IV, 815; 443). Whereas self-restraint is one possible response to the view that one can hope for very little in the world, outrage, rebellion, and the renunciation of virtue are others. Rousseau claims early in Emile that no one rebels against necessity (E, IV, 320; 91), but he also concedes that human beings rarely see the good or bad things that happen to them as products of necessity. Instead, they see wills at work in the world; even human beings who are quite close to the state of nature fill “the universe with gods” (E, IV, 552; 256). As we have already noticed, the overindulged child, who expects the world to bend to his will, is infuriated when he does not get his way, even to the point of being angry at inanimate objects. But a child who is mistreated and finds the source of that mistreatment in the will of another is no less outraged (E, IV, 286–87; 66), and if he thinks that not just other human beings but the world itself is responsible for his misery, then his outrage will be no less generalized than that of the overindulged child. Rousseau himself, in an autobiographical aside in Emile, observes that his own misfortunes not only made him misanthropic as a young man but also inclined him toward the “forgetting of all religion” and of “the duties of man” (E, IV, 561, 564; 263, 265).

It is therefore no surprise that Rousseau quickly retracts, at least in part, his suggestion that the governor's strategy in Emile's education should be to disguise his will, letting Emile feel “the heavy yoke of necessity” but causing him to see “this necessity in things,” not in wills. Although the governor mimics necessity in that he is unmovable once he has decided to grant or refuse what Emile asks for, he departs from necessity in that he “grant[s] with pleasure” and refuse[s] only with repugnance” (E, IV, 220; 91). Similarly, although the governor, like necessity, exposes Emile to suffering, he, unlike necessity, deliberately exposes him only to ills that permit him to avoid greater ones and tries to protect him from other ills (E, IV, 815; 443). Just as the governor arranges Emile's encounters with people in such a way that he comes to think that they are inclined to help him, so he mimics necessity in such a way that Emile will be inclined to suppose that, whatever suffering it may impose, it, too, is inclined to help him, or that there is a benevolent will, not mere necessity, behind what happens to him. In this way, the governor balances Emile's understanding that life is suffering, with the view that the universe cares for him, a view that protects him from despair and anger.

By accustoming Emile early on to see the world as caring for him, the governor prepares him for the religious education he will have later on. Although Rousseau does not reveal the precise details of this education, he does offer, in a lengthy digression, “an example of the way one can reason with one's pupil in order not to diverge” from Rousseau's method and suggests that Emile's religion will be at least akin to that example (E, IV, 635–36; 313–14). In that example, a Savoyard Vicar describes the way in which his own love of God comes about. He loves God for the same reason Emile begins to love other human beings, namely, that he is grateful: “I am moved by the supreme power and…its benefactions…. This worship is dictated by nature itself. Is it not a natural consequence of self-love to honor what protects us and to love what wishes us well?” (E, IV, 583; 278).²⁵

Like Emile's gratitude and benevolence toward other human beings, the Vicar's gratitude toward and adoration of God is a natural consequence of self-love, for the Vicar supposes that God takes care of human beings and is inclined to love what wishes him well. Although we do not know the precise extent to which Emile shares this reasoning, we know that for him, too, self-love and love of God are intertwined: “He [fulfills his duty] not only for the love of order, to which each of us always prefers love of self, but for the love of the Author of his being—a love which is confounded with that same love of self” (E, IV, 636; 314). In order for Emile to love God, he must think that the world God created is good for him.²⁶

Gratitude, then, serves a purpose aside from adding to or complementing compassion when it comes to promoting concern for and action on behalf of others. Just as compassion has an understanding of the world connected to it that discourages action, that life is essentially suffering and human beings essentially sufferers, so gratitude has an understanding of the world connected to it that promotes action and guards against despair, that the universe cares for us and makes our happiness possible. Together, these teachings help maintain the balance between expansion and contraction of soul on which Emile's happiness and usefulness to others seem to depend.

In drawing our attention to gratitude and friendship, Rousseau indicates that the affective foundation of our concern for others is broader and more diverse than either compassion's critics or defenders admit. In drawing our attention to the importance of balancing the account of the world associated with compassion against the account of the world associated with gratitude, Rousseau responds to the charge that compassion is weak in a way that even its most ardent contemporary defenders have not. For all that, it is important to note that he does not see compassion, even when allied with other social passions, as a substitute for justice. Although Emile is moved by compassion to help others, he is also obligated to others as a matter of right. In Emile, Rousseau tells the story of the first genuine obligation that Emile takes on by agreeing to a kind of contract. Although the governor prepares the ground for this contract by inflaming Emile's “young heart with all the sentiments of friendship, generosity, and gratitude which I have already aroused” (E, IV, 649; 323), the contract becomes an independent reason for obedience, even when the sentiments are stacked against obedience. Feeling provides a motive for taking on an obligation but is not the ground of obligation. I defend this assertion in the next section.

COMPASSION AND CONTRACT

Much of the anxiety about compassion assumes that it is meant to be “a stand in for natural right” and “a surrogate for justice,” that its advocates propose “listening to our hearts (rather than legalism or the more abstract reasoning of our minds)” (Boyd, 2004, 531, my emphasis). Understood in this sense, compassion seems to fall well short of justice. In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, describing a sentiment he claims is commonly felt by recipients of charity, puts the worry this way:

However, compassion, Rousseau suggests, is not a replacement for but an ally of justice and even of contract. Indeed, the first mention of Emile's education as it concerns helping the unfortunate occurs before pity has developed in him and centers not on the heart but on keeping an agreement. Although the governor does not permit Emile to help others at this stage on the grounds that real generosity is impossible for a child, he does explain why one helps. One has contracted to help:²⁷

Although pity may dispose one to fulfill one's obligation and to adhere to the social contract, it is, at least at this point, neither the source of obligation nor an alternative to the social contract.

It is worth noting, too, that the contract the governor now describes is different from the one that introduced Emile to property. Emile is introduced to the need for a contract concerning property when the governor arranges for him to work a piece of land, on which his gardener, Robert, has already planted. A conflict arises between what Emile perceives as his right to the products of his labor and his gardener, Robert's, preceding right to the land Emile has worked. Robert, who plays the role the governor assigns him, ultimately grants Emile part of the land, but his willingness to do so appears to be founded on sheer liberality, not on his recognition that he owes Emile anything. Robert never budges from his assertion that as the first to work the land, or as the heir of the first to work the land, he is entitled to it and its produce. When Emile points out the problem with Robert's claim, that he does not have a garden of his own and cannot get one, because “there is hardly any fallow land left,” Robert is unperturbed: “What do I care?” (E, IV, 332; 99). For this reason, the governor's assertion just a little later that his own claim to property is founded on an agreement that the rich must help the poor, comes as a surprise.

But Emile is well prepared to accept this shift because he has just learned what it is like to be without property, even though, thanks to Robert's liberality, he does not suffer from not having property. In this respect, Emile's experience puts him in a position later on to sympathize with the dispossessed and their claims. At the very least, it puts him in a position to see that the poor would be unwise to agree to a contract that contains no protections for them. But that admission should not distract us from the fact that an obligation to the poor, not sympathy with them, is at this stage the sole basis for helping the poor that Emile is offered.

When Emile enters adolescence, compassion obviously moves him to help others. But in that decisive case in which Emile chooses to risk offending his beloved, Sophie, to help a peasant, he does so, or at least so he claims, out of respect for “the rights of humanity” (E, V, 812; 441; my emphasis), not because his compassion for the unfortunate is more powerful than his love for Sophie. Here, Emile demonstrates not that he feels for humanity more than he feels for Sophie but that he prefers his “duty to her and to everything” (E, V, 809–10; 439). Granted, Emile's heart is attached to virtue, but it has chained itself to a law, not to a whim. That some passion supports our attachment to the law is not a damaging admission because Rousseau and his early modern predecessors disagree on which passions are best suited to support the law, not on whether or not law requires the support of passion.²⁸

Moreover, compassion is only one of Emile's motives for freely accepting an obligation to obey his governor. The moment when Emile accepts this obligation is among the most important in his education. Emile, whose adolescent passions resist governing, gives the governor authority to demand that he “obey not [his] senses but [his reason]; he asks the governor to “force me to be my own master,” much like the citizen in Rousseau's Social Contract notoriously must be forced to be free (E, IV, 652–53; 325). Emile consents to obey for several reasons. First, as already noted, the governor inflames Emile's heart with “sentiments of friendship, generosity, and gratitude.” He tells Emile all that he has done for him, that he has done it all out of tenderness for Emile, and that Emile's rejection of his authority at this stage will “cause the unhappiness of [the governor's] old age” (E, IV, 649; 323). Second, Emile is moved by self-love, narrowly conceived, and his awareness that there are “solid reasons” to keep “attentive watch over himself” (E, IV, 639, 641; 316, 318). Third, the governor insists that Emile is his “property” (bien) and his “work” (ouvrage) and that Emile, in harming himself, would be “robbing” the governor of 20 years of labor. Although the governor cannot mean that Emile is literally his property, the terminology he uses is the same as the terminology used in the property episode. Robert, in that episode, refers to his melon crop as his “ouvrage,” whereas Emile also refers to his bean plant as his “ouvrage” and his “bien” (E, IV, 331; 98–99). Given the close connection between the discussion on property and the discussion on obligation that directly follows it, and given the way in which the discussion of Emile's first obligation refers back to the property episode, we are entitled to conclude that Emile is moved by the argument that it would be an injustice to deprive the governor of the fruits of his labor. So although compassion figures into Emile's motives for “so to speak, signing the contract” (E, IV, 653; 326), it is just one among several others.

This contract is not superfluous. Although it may be backed by passion, it is invoked when the weight of Emile's passions is on the side of rebellion, when the governor commands him to leave Sophie for a time. When reason and Emile's attachments to the governor fail, the promise, made in circumstances Emile is unlikely to forget, succeeds: “Since you do not obey reason, recognize another master. You have not forgotten the promise you made.” Emile, who had resisted, now submits despite his strong wish to rebel (E, IV, 825; 449).

Rousseau claims that the precepts of natural law themselves have a basis in self-love (E, IV, 523; 235), so I do not claim that Emile conquers passion without the assistance of other passions but only that free submission to a contract independently motivates him. Compassion replaces justice no more than it replaces other social passions. It is instead one of several motives that, properly directed, supports justice.

COMPASSION AND JUDGMENT

Rousseau's account of compassion is a model for how certain doubts about compassion can be resolved. Rousseau turns compassion's weakness to an advantage and counts on it only in conjunction with other forces, including gratitude, friendship, and consent, to concern us with others and motivate us to help them. Rousseau's account also explains how compassion can escape the charge that it is undiscriminating. Boyd puts the case against compassion well. Pity is an “unreliable guide to determining who truly deserves our sympathy” and can wring tears from us for the deserving and undeserving alike; it can cause us to sympathize with criminals more than victims or even with handsome criminals and victims more than with plain criminals and victims (Boyd, 2004, 531). Compassion, which “depends necessarily on a visceral response” to apparent suffering will sometimes “overwhelm our critical faculties” to the detriment of justice and good sense (Orwin, 1997b, 25).²⁹

As I observed at the beginning of this essay, and as Boyd and Orwin acknowledge, Rousseau was well aware that compassion might overwhelm our critical faculties and even motivate grave injustices. However, Rousseau's account of compassion explains that compassion is less likely than self-love, narrowly conceived, to overwhelm our critical faculties and how the danger that it might overwhelm our critical faculties can be avoided.

Compassion, being relatively weak, is less likely than other passions to overwhelm reason. For example, the suffering of others moves the adolescent Emile to speak to the powerful on their behalf but “having nothing to ask of [the powerful] for himself, what he wants to persuade them of does not touch him enough to move him excessively” (E, IV, 546; 252). Although the context here is Emile's oratorical style, the relative weakness of Emile's concern with the affairs of others proves important in the cultivation of his judgment, because “those who never deal with anything but their own affairs are too passionate to judge things soundly” (E, IV, 547; 253). As we have already noted, the governor takes advantage of Emile's adolescent expansiveness to develop his compassion. We can now note that this development of Emile's expansive adolescent passions is less dangerous than other possible developments. Although the preadolescent Emile had few or no overheated passions to fear, the adolescent Emile is about to undergo a “stormy revolution”:

Compassion is not an alternative to cool, rational self-interest but a redirection of an expansive self-love, now aware of and concerned about its connection to others and, if not carefully directed, inclined to “see the overturning of the whole universe” in whatever opposes it (E, IV, 547; 252). Though compassion is a modification of self-love, it has the advantage of distancing us from ourselves: “Do we, then, want Emile to love the truth; do we want him to know it? In his activities, let us always keep him at a distance from himself. The more his cares are consecrated to the happiness of others, the more they will be enlightened and wise” (E, IV, 547–48; 252).

Moreover, the danger that compassion does present to reason can be avoided. As Orwin acknowledges and explains, it is too simplistic to understand compassion as a visceral feeling that either overwhelms or is undermined by reason.³⁰

To the extent that pity depends on identifying with others, it depends on our capacity to compare ourselves with others and to notice that they are like us, even to deduce the likeness of their inner motivations with ours from their actions and words. “It is not to natural commiseration but to ‘pity modified by reason’…that Rousseau credits…humanity, benevolence, clemency, friendship, and generosity” (Orwin 1997a, 300; my emphasis). Developed compassion is always compassion guided by reason. This guidance is sometimes for the worse, as when the civilized man talks himself out of feeling compassion for people who deserve it. But as I will argue later in this section, this guidance can correct the very defects that concern Boyd; Emile is perfectly capable of distinguishing between deserved and undeserved suffering.

Not only can reason hone pity but also pity can hone reason. Once beneficence develops in Emile, it moves him to learn how to “calculate the action and reaction of particular interests” in society and how to judge soundly the requirements and means of promoting human happiness.

As in the Discourse on Inequality's account of species development, in which it “is by [the passions'] activity that our reason is perfected” while the passions, at the same time, “derive their progress from our knowledge” (SD, III, 143; 27), so in Emile's account of individual development, compassion is developed by reason and at the same time guides its development. Emile proposes both an education in compassion and an education of judgment by compassion.

Finally, it is a mistake to consider the tension between compassion and justice without remembering that both are rooted in self-love. We need only recall Rousseau's famous dictum that “Love of men derived from love of self is the principle of human justice” (E, IV, 523; 235). Compassion is among the natural foundations of justice, but in Emile's case, it never overshadows the recognition that his “first duty is to himself” (E, IV, 544; 250). For example, although Emile dislikes quarrels on the grounds that he “suffers when he sees suffering,” he will respond to insults to his honor because he “knows the justice he owes himself.” It is true that he also knows “the example he owes to the security of men of honor” (E, IV, 545; 250–51). But the point to bear in mind is that just as Emile's compassion, to the extent that it moves him to help others, is guided by his judgment of what is good or bad for them, so also is Emile's compassion, guided by the same judgment that otherwise guides Emile in pursuing his own good. He will not become a champion of the wicked out of pity because he recognizes the danger the wicked pose to him and to others with whom he identifies.³¹

It is fundamentally “for the sake of love of ourselves” that “we must have pity for our species still more than our neighbor, and pity for the wicked is a very great cruelty to men” (E, IV, 548; 253). That is to say, it is out of love of ourselves that we recognize that wickedness, even in one's friends, is not to be overlooked to the detriment of justice.

However, it is surprising that, in spite of Rousseau's assertion that pity for the wicked is a very great cruelty to men, he also proposes that Emile will pity men who do great harm to others, those “miserable kings” and “false wise men” and “rich fools” and “conspicuous voluptuaries” whom he comes across in his study of history. Emile will recognize that no “one does the bad for the sake of the bad” and will “pity even the enemy who would do him harm, for he [will] see his misery in his wickedness” (E, IV, 535–36; 243–44). Similarly, Rousseau says both that the rich are not pitiable because they, unlike the poor, bring their unhappiness on themselves (E, IV, 509; 225) and that Emile pities the rich (E, IV, 536; 244).

It is difficult to know what to make of this contradiction. But one way it can be understood is as a manifestation of Rousseau's insistence on tempering compassion with judgment. As Orwin (1997a, 310) argues, from the standpoint of the history Rousseau narrates in the Discourse on Inequality, both the rich and the poor of his time are the products of a historical process that has unfolded over centuries. That process has eventuated in a social structure in which the odds are so stacked in favor of corruption that it is a gross exaggeration to say, as Rousseau does in Emile, that the rich have only themselves to blame for their unhappiness. At the same time, a compassionate person of sound judgment, aware of the unhappiness and unfreedom of rich and poor alike, might incline toward the view that the good of both would be best served by a rhetoric whose dominant theme is chiding the rich and whose lesser but still audible theme is that the rich, too, are pitiable because they are unhealthy and shaped by forces largely beyond their control. Indeed, Orwin proposes that Rousseau invented “liberal guilt” not because he hated the rich but because he hoped to get them to behave better (Orwin 1997a, 310). Such a rhetorical move may be especially called for if, as Rousseau suggests, it is necessary to combat the argument that, because there is “the same proportion of happiness and misery in every station,” the rich need not worry about the poor (E, IV, 509; 225).

We might understand along similar lines the tension between Rousseau's insistence that Emile must be educated not to despise others (E, IV, 536; 245) and his admission that Emile despises at least some others. Consider Emile's judgment of the young men of Paris:

This passage is shocking because it defies our expectation that Emile will refrain from crushing and tyrannizing others because he is compassionate. Instead, he refrains from crushing and tyrannizing others because insects are not worth enslaving.

However, first, as we have just observed, Rousseau claims that pity for the wicked is cruelty to men. Although Emile is in some respects like the savage, who understands that no one does the bad for the sake of the bad, he cannot be altogether like the savage if he is to live in society, because the savage “looks at us without emotion and says, ‘You are mad.”’ Even the disdained philosopher is indignant at his own vice and the vice of others and “says to himself ‘We are all wicked”’ (E, IV, 535; 243; my emphasis). Emile, without quite taking this position, because he is aware that “man is naturally good” and that “society depraves and perverts men” (E, IV, 525; 237), is not permitted to detach himself from other human beings with the conviction that he is wise and men are mad (E, IV, 536; 245). Emile is taught not to despise others and to despise certain others for more or less the same reason. To despise other human beings, even if one pities them, is to suppose that their travails have nearly as little to do with one's own as those of animals; but to fail to despise the wicked is similarly to take so great a distance from the cares of ordinary human beings as to render one's compassion useless to them.

Second, Emile's contempt for corrupt young men who in some ways outwardly resemble him is the negative counterpart of his esteem for those who inwardly resemble him, whose “moral taste” resembles his (E, IV, 671; 339). As we have already seen, cool and rational self-interest is not an alternative for Emile once he reaches adolescence and begins to consider his relative position. Even for Emile, there is a danger that amour-propre, the self-love that takes its bearings from comparisons with others, will produce “cruel and malignant” passions or passions of “envy and covetousness” (E, IV, 523; 235). In considering his relative position, it is crucial that he learns to despise alternatives, like kingship, that might otherwise appear to be superior to the alternatives open to him. That is why Emile will study history to despise apparent greatness and why Rousseau will not be dissatisfied if Emile comes to feel “shame and disdain” for his species as a result of this study (E, IV, 532; 242).³²

There will be time enough to insure that Emile understands that he, too, is capable of falling into humiliating error (E, IV, 537–38; 245–46).

Rousseauian compassion is not a visceral response to suffering that prevents one from distinguishing between deserving and undeserving victims. To the extent that it is developed by and is an instrument for developing reason, it cannot so easily be opposed to judgment. To the extent that it is a visceral feeling, it is less likely to overwhelm reason than some others and operates in conjunction with other feelings, including self-love and contempt, that counter whatever tendency it may have toward indiscriminateness.