a theory of moral sentiments, continued

I had lots more to say on the subject of my last post, but I was out of time and whenever I start a post and save it to finish later, it lingers in my "drafts" box for weeks and months, and by the time I get back to it my ideas have so evolved that I can't continue it. So I decided to just post it and continue later, if moved.

The state of mind I ended with in the last post-- the understanding, not just intellectual but emotional, that my neighbor's suffering is an evil equivalent to my own suffering-- is most clearly felt when the neighbor is loved. In fact I might make this one of the cornerstone definitions of love. A strange thing happens, only in moments and glimpses mind you, but even these moments and glimpses are peculiar and powerful... a strange thing happens when we love someone, and that someone suffers. For a moment we feel that suffering, and it is just as potent and painful an evil as if it had happened to us. It is not simply the discomfort of having a loud crying in our ears (though that occurs too, and is a factor at times even in the most loving relationships); it is, for moments and glimpses, a true fellow-feeling. Not that we ever think, at such times, "I feel just as bad as if this was happening to me"... that thought belongs to a different state of mind. What I am talking about is sitting beside a friend in pain, and feeling their pain without reference to oneself, or to the friend, but as a wound on the face of the world, under which we all suffer.

This is not to denigrate the individual sufferer's place in suffering. If there were no individual sufferer, there would be no suffering at all. But the suffering of the individual, if we only understood it properly, acts as a wound and a blight to all of us-- to the whole of humanity, and possibly to the nonhuman world as well. To feel this-- not to know it but to feel it-- persistently and wholly, would be in the truest sense to love our neighbors as ourselves. Possibly it would also crush us.

Then comes the final question of my last post. If one person's experience of suffering is a universal wound, should not one person's experience of joy be a universal blessing? I don't know; the second conclusion doesn't seem nearly as intuitively sound to me as the first. I will have to think about it more.

I have strayed a long way from my fable of the infants. But the connections should be obvious. If the infant loves his twin in the deepest sense, then it truly will not matter to him which of them receives the pinch. It is because he does not see clearly enough that he and his twin are the same kind of creature that he prefers the pinch to fall on his sibling's foot rather than his own. He has learned that they are the same, but he keeps forgetting it; he keeps thinking there is some grander distinction than simply which feet they are connected to. But that is all it boils down to. I occupy a particular place in space and time; I am connected to a particular set of receptors-- eyes, ears, skin-- by which the world touches me. But whether a pain is given to these receptors, or those to which my neighbor is connected, is a trivial matter; the important thing is that there is pain. And if I could know this, and feel it in my gut, and never forget it, then I would be incapable of hurting another person by either activity or neglect.