Nancy Yousef is Professor of English at the City University of New York.

ROMANTIC INTIMACY

By NANCY YOUSEF

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8609-6

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixIntroduction: Ethics, Literature, and the Forms of Encounter……………11. Feeling for Philosophy: The Limits of Sentimental Certainty………….252. Knowing Before Loving: Rousseau and the Ethics of Exposure…………..493. Sentimental Justice: Hume, Wordsworth, and the Ends of Sympathy………714. Respecting Emotion: Austens Gratitude……………………………..995. Alone Together: Romanticism, Psychoanalysis, and the Interpretation of
Silence…………………………………………………………..117Coda: Sitting with Strangers………………………………………..137Notes…………………………………………………………….157Index…………………………………………………………….179

CHAPTER 1

FEELING FOR PHILOSOPHY

The Limits of Sentimental Certainty

We often feel the Pain of Compassion; but were our sole ultimate Intention orDesire the freeing ourselves from this Pain, would the Deity offer to us wholly to blotout all Memory of the person in Distress, to take away this Connection, so that weshould be easy during the Misery of our friend … [or] would relieve him from hisMisery, we should be as ready to choose the former way as the latter; since either ofthem would free us from our Pain, which upon this Scheme is the sole End proposedby the compassionate Person—Don’t we find in ourselves that our desire does notterminate upon the Removal of our Pain? Were this our sole Intention, we wouldrun away, shut our Eyes, or divert our Thoughts from the miserable Object, as thereadiest way of removing our pain: This we seldom do, nay, we crowd about suchObjects, and voluntarily expose ourselves to this Pain.

Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue

The “ethical turn” in literary studies has been broadly characterized by apreoccupation with an emergent poststructuralist ethics where the dynamics ofrecognition is central and where the miscarriage of recognition is virtuallyunavoidable. The Levinasian face evinces an infinite responsibility that afortiori confounds and shames mundane modes of attention and solicitude. GiorgioAgamben’s homo sacer appears as the figure for an exclusion that vexes all formsof communal participation. If ethics has returned to literature by means of thesetheoretical approaches, then so has philosophy as a mode of cultural analysisthat is not reducible to strictly ideological or psychoanalytic diagnoses of thedynamics of objectification. Nevertheless, renewed attention to ethics has only rarelyextended to the written corpus of moral philosophy and to the long intellectualhistory within which the problem of recognition repeatedly arises. To bring ethicalwriting to the foreground of literary critical work on ethics is notto displace contemporary theoretical approaches but to recover somepart of the history of our current sense of the impossible-yet-imperative dynamics ofmutual recognition. This chapter offers an account of the rich contradictions between claimsof knowledge and assertions of feeling in eighteenth-century ethics. Thisrecurrent and vexing tension is crucial to an understanding of how responsivenessto and identification with others manifests itself as a specifically moral (ratherthan epistemological) challenge in the period. Indeed, the ethical aspirationsand imperatives that emerge from undiminished and unsatisfied epistemic longingsconstitute a climactic fulfillment of a certain line of Enlightenment inquiry—afragile victory wrought from failures and misgivings that are not overcome butleft unresolved.

WE DO NOT FEEL THEIR SENSATIONS: LOVING OURLIKE WITHOUT KNOWING OUR LIKENESS

In a late twentieth-century lecture hall, the philosopher Derek Parfit invited ashow of hands in agreement with the proposition that individuals arefundamentally driven to avoid pain and pursue their own pleasure. Facedwith a clear majority of students willing to concede that conviction, Parfit(characteristically) proposed a thought experiment designed to confound, andstretch to the point of absurdity, the very meanings of pleasure, pain, and theself subject to those sensations. Suppose yourself a parent magicallytransported to the heavenly halls of the omnipotent deity. You are seatedbefore two levers. One ensures you a lifetime of contentment, free from allconcern for the child you see thriving and bound for all good things, but uponyour death that same child will suffer untold misfortunes and misery. Theother lever dooms you to a lifetime of anxiety, weighed down with carefor the child you see bound for trouble and pain, but upon your death that samechild will come to enjoy great good fortune and fulfillment. You have a choiceto make in this instant, about your life and the life of your child—achoice that will be permanently forgotten as soon as it is made.The same preponderance of students who moments before had pledged their beliefin basically self-interested motivations now readily “chose” years of sufferingand placed the welfare of their child over their own well-being. Moreremarkable than the result of this thought experiment was theobduracy with which many strove to reconcile this un-self-serving choice withthe theory of fundamental self-interest, stretching and extending the boundariesof the self so as to encompass the child and to count the child’s pleasures andpains as, in some sense, one’s own—even, indeed, especially (given theterms of the experiment) after one’s own death. The ensuing debate reproduced, invirtually the same terms, eighteenth-century defenses of self-interest derided by philosopherswho insisted on the motivational force of sympathy in social experience. Here,for example, is Francis Hutcheson’s exposure of the specious expansion of “self”necessary to turn love of others into a derivative of self-love:

An honest Farmer will tell you that he studies about the Preservation and Happiness ofhis Children, and loves them without any Design of Good to himself. But say some ofour Philosophers, “The Happiness of their Children gives Parents Pleasure, and theirMisery gives them Pain; and therefore to obtain the former, and to avoid the latter, theystudy, from Self-Love, the Good of their Children.” … Do the Child’s Sensations givePleasure or Pain to the Parent? Is the Parent hungry, thirsty, sick, when his Children areso? No; but he [is] … affected with Joy or Sorrow from their Pleasures and Pains….”No,” say others, “Children are parts of ourselves, and in loving them, we butlove ourselves in them.” A very good Answer! Let us carry it as far as it will go. How are theyParts of ourselves? Not as a Leg or an Arm: we are not conscious of theirSensations. “But their Bodies were formed from Parts of ours.” So is a Fly, or aMaggot, which may breed in any discharg’d Blood or Humour—Very dear Insects surely! theremust be something else then which makes Children Parts of ourselves…. Love makesthem Parts of ourselves….

Another Author thinks all this easily deducible from Self-Love. “Children arenot only made of our Bodies but resemble us in Body and Mind; they arerational Agents as we are, and we only love our own Likeness in them.” Very good allthis. What is Likeness? … There is Likeness between us and other Mens’ Children,thus any Man is like any other…. Is there then a natural Disposition in every Man to love his Like,to wish well not only to his individual Self, but to any other like rational or sensitiveBeing? … If all this is called by the Name Self-Love; be it so: The highest Mystic needsno more disinterested Principle; ’tis not confined to the Individual, but … may extendto all, since each one some way resembles each other. Nothing can be better than thisSelf-Love, nothing more generous. (Inquiry, 160–162; original emphasis)

Here, as in Parfit’s thought experiment, questions of intention and desirebecome inextricably entangled with questions of identity, identification, andthe sensory and affective boundaries of the self. Hutcheson clearly insistson the irreducible difference, at the elemental level of sensation, betweenone person’s pains and pleasures and another’s: “Is the parent hungry, thirsty,sick, when his children are so?”; “we are not conscious of their sensations.” Atthe same time, and in spite of this absolute difference between two separatelyembodied beings, Hutcheson proposes that love brings others into the ambit ofthe self’s concerns. “Children are parts of ourselves,” not because they are flesh of our flesh like themicrobial creatures we unknowingly nurture on our bodies. In the somewhat macabreliteralization of his imaginary interlocutor’s claim, Hutcheson effectivelyexposes the fact of biological kinship to be, in this context, a metaphor for someother, ineffable ground of identification between one and another, concern of one foranother. What is this ground if not a recognition of likeness, as anotherimaginary disputant proposes? If “we love our own likeness” in our children, andthereby love ourselves in loving them, then how many others must be comprehendedin the circle of the self that loves those akin to it? The empire of self-interest,in Hutcheson’s rendering, is really more a kingdom of ends where each “wish[es] wellnot only to his individual self, but to any other like rational or sensitive being.”

As the context out of which, and against which, idealism and utilitarianismarose, eighteenth-century debates about sympathy and fellow feeling present anopportunity to reconsider the shared history of what came to be opposed views ofethical motivation and deliberation. Philosophers of moral sentiment—principallyShaftesbury, Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, David Hume, and Adam Smith—arrayedthemselves against the influential formulations of Thomas Hobbes, emphasizing whatHutcheson called the “bright side of humane nature” against the dark view of menas “all injurious, proud, selfish, treacherous.” Insofar as their works collectivelyconstitute a powerful counter-tradition to Hobbesian views of human individualsas fundamentally self-interested creatures, the arguments of the sentimentalists mightbe seen as the necessary background for the constitutively moral recognition of othersimplicit in Kantian notions of dignity and respect. (Recall Hutcheson’s demonstrationthat efforts to reduce all motivation to “self-love” amount to arguments for aradically “disinterested principle” of concern for all others.) More commonly,the sentimentalists’ naturalistic approach to moral psychology, with its emphasison the motivating role of emotions and affective attachments, has been viewed asa historically discarded alternative to the austere rationalism ofKant’s ethics, but one ready for revival. (Recall Hutcheson’s evocation of the”honest farmer’s” uncomplicated love for his children.) Important as these revisionaryinterpretations are, philosophical study of eighteenth-century sentimentalismremains embedded within the context of contemporary Anglo-American ethical debates,too removed from the characteristic tensions and challenges specific to the era inwhich it arose and certainly more liable to be mined for the current relevance of itsarguments than arrested by its rhetorical complexities.

Particularly unaccounted for in contemporary philosophical engagement with moralsentimentalism are the epistemological implications of its arguments, especiallyits vital and vexed struggle with proliferating and troubling analyses of knowledgein the eighteenth century. Consider, for example, Hutcheson’s conclusion in theprevious passage that what we mistakenly call “self love … may extend to all,since each one some way resembles each other.” The easily asserted resemblance of “one”and “each other” takes for granted a certainty about the grounds of identification thatthe passage’s earlier insistence on the absolute separation and individuation ofbodies countermands. Insofar as “we don’t feel [the] sensations” of others, howcan we know the degree and depth of our likeness? And if we don’t feel the sensationsof others, then precisely how are we affected in the presence of others?The scene described in the opening epigraph to this chapterpresents—albeit inadvertently—the same difficulty. I am afflicted bythe “Pain of Compassion” in proximity to a “person in Distress,” presumably because Icannot fail to see the evidence of the other’s misery. This pain of compassionis unquestionably mine in Hutcheson’s rendering; it is not a vicarious experience ofthe other’s distress; I do not feel the other’s sensation. I could seek relief byfleeing this sensational occasion, running away, shutting my eyes, diverting mythoughts, but instead I stand transfixed before the “miserable Object,” willinglysuffering the pain. Hutcheson’s argument here, as in his discussion of theparent’s love for her child, is that our desires and intentions include concernfor others and that this concern cannot be reduced to the narrowly selfish pursuit ofpleasure and avoidance of pain. Were that the case, we would easily freeourselves from the “pain of compassion” by turning away from the person whoarouses it. Whether or not we accede to the agreement presupposed by Hutcheson’srhetorical question (“Don’t we find in ourselves that our desire does notterminate upon the Removal of our Pain?”), it would be a mistake to imagine thatthe feeling of and for the other that Hutcheson describes here involves a perceptionof resemblance or experience of identification that amounts to a (re)cognition of theother. Hutcheson’s rhetoric seems to drift in altogether the opposite direction, turningthe “person in Distress” into a “miserable Object” and, finally, into an undifferentiatedexample of many “such objects.”

The strange cleavage between sympathetic feeling for others and recognition ofothers is a pervasive and recurrent problem in British eighteenth-centurywriting about the moral sentiments. It is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than inthe writing of Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)has become the most common touchstone in literaryscholarship on sympathy and sensibility in the period. In fact, among thesentimentalists, Smith is uncharacteristically explicit in articulating thecontradictory presuppositions of empirical and moral psychology. Thefirst paragraph of Moral Sentiments takes it “as a matter of fact too obvious torequire any instances to prove it” that we “derive sorrow from the sorrow ofothers”; the second paragraph places this fact alongside the equally obvious truththat “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” that “our senses …never did, and never can, carry us beyond our person.” As is well known, Smith willallow the imagination to do for us what the senses cannot, to “form some idea of [theother’s] sensations” (11). Far from transporting us “beyond our own person,”however, Smith’s imagination transposes the feelings of one onto the other. “Bychanging places in fancy with the sufferer,” the sympathetic “spectator” (in Smith’s terms) considersonly “what he himself would feel if he were reduced to the same unhappy situation,” and,quite crucially, the feelings that arise by virtue of this projection might not and neednot “be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer” (15). In being both explicit andexplicitly untroubled about the radical limitations of our knowledge of others,Smith develops a theory of sympathy that is often more emphatic and eloquent inits articulation of emotional distance than emotional proximity between subjects. The affectivedisjunction between persons is poignantly articulated when Smith writes of thelimits of our sympathy for even those friends and intimates with whom we feel some”correspondence of sentiments” (26). Even in such ideal cases, “the secretconsciousness … from which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary” (27)so that even as “we sit down by them … [and] listen with gravity and attention,” wecannot, as it were, reach our close companions because we cannot “keep” (or, let us say,share) time with them (“how far are the languid emotions of our hearts from keeping timeto the transports of theirs”?) (52). Not surprisingly, in such moments, a friend mightbe “confounded by my violence and passion” while I grow “enraged at [her] coldinsensibility and want of feeling” (26). Subsequent chapters willexplore how romantic literature reshapes these epistemic and affectivedisjunctions as forms of intimacy that can neither be assimilated norsubordinated to a predetermined concept of fellow feeling.For the moment, it is simply worth noting that even though Smith is typicallyfound at the core of arguments critiquing the factitious, self-absorbed, evennarcissistic qualities of sympathy, it would be a mistake to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments as thedefinitive eighteenth-century text on the subject. The paradox with which Smithbegins—the fact of compassion alongside the fact that we cannot know whatothers feel—is symptomatic, but his apparent comfort with the implicationsof that latter fact is exceptional. Indeed, the intellectual history andconceptual fate of sympathy in the period cannot be fully understood without anappreciation of just how troublesome it is to concede that “we have no immediateexperience of what other men feel.”
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