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Compassion and Education pp 37–62Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Emotions at the Heart of Compassion

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Abstract

Emotions are central to – and for – compassion, and in the last chapter it was noted that compassion can be viewed as a virtue which stems from an emotional response to the suffering of others. As discussed in Chap. 2, so far as compassion is concerned, emotions play a crucial role in helping us to understand significant moral features of given situations. Thus, for virtues such as compassion, ‘the assumption is that without emotions, the moral enterprise would never have gotten off the ground in the first place’ (Kristjánsson 2014, p. 348). At this stage of the analysis of compassion offered here, then, it is both necessary and important to engage with precisely what the key emotional aspects of compassion are.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be noted that Snow also includes grief in this family of emotions.

  2. 2.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw

  3. 3.

    See, for example, Nietzche (1881/1997) and Arendt (1963) for leading criticisms of compassion.

  4. 4.

    It should be noted here that for Rousseau, so far as pitié is concerned, we may act in an ‘unreflecting’ manner.

  5. 5.

    Readers should note, again, that translations of Rousseau use the term ‘pity’ to refer to what here I am referring to as sympathy as it relates to compassion.

  6. 6.

    While I seek to separate them, both of these readings can be seen in Adam Smith’s (1759/2009, pp. 15; 13–14) suggestions that ‘grief and joy…strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion’ and that ‘by the imagination we place ourselves in the other’s situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’.

  7. 7.

    In their analysis Wilhelm and Bekkers (2010, p. 12) explain, for example, that ‘a large portion of this evidence is from experiments that manipulate empathy in specific situations’. In their review of empirical evidence on empathy published in the mid-1980s, Eisenberg and Miller (1987, p. 114) point out that empirical studies have tended to focus on empathy for the object of participant’s helping behaviour in a specific situation, which would tend to be more likely than one’s helping is for others beyond the object/situation.

  8. 8.

    ‘Often, empathetic reconstruction will involve compassion, but empathy is not necessary for compassion as I understand it, since compassion can, as in the case of neonates, take the primitive form of mere pain or distress in the presence of the pain or distress of others, independently of any imaginative reconstruction’ (Crisp 2008, p. 234).

  9. 9.

    It is because of this imaginative gap that Nussbaum (2001, p. 328) places great importance on the role of literature in educating for empathy on the basis that ‘only in fiction is the mind of the other transparent. The empathetic person attempts to reconstruct the mental experience of another’. This point is returned to in Chap. 6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Andrew Peterson

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Peterson, A. (2017). Emotions at the Heart of Compassion. In: Compassion and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54838-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54838-2_3

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