11
A Principle of Sensitivity and Respect
Contemporary philosophies of self and other are providing a new context for interpreting the golden rule, especially for thinkers developing continental European traditions of philosophy. One cannot help remarking that world war has marked the lives of surprisingly many of the authors treated in these chapters, including three discussed here, heightening sensitivities, strengthening moral conviction, and showing the reciprocal influence of philosophical reflection and committed human living.
The experience of empathy: Edith Stein
The careful study of empathy has been undertaken in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. This discipline, as developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and others, originally aimed to describe rigorously the most general features of experience, and it may be regarded as a philosophic approach to psychology. Describing the experience of other persons, Husserl focused on the phase of relating in which the self, the conscious subject, forms its sense of the other. According to Husserl (philosophizing in the first person singular, inviting the reader to see for himself and speak forth his own insight), I, as an embodied ego, in the presence of another person before me, recognize that person as analogous to myself. The other person's stream of experience is never intuitively presented to me as though it were part of my own stream of experience. For this reason, in talking about intersubjective understanding, Husserl speaks of apperception rather than intuition, to indicate that I do not perceive the other's experience, even though I do have a sense of it: I apperceive it. Nor do I go through a process of inference, reasoning that the other person's body is similar to what mine would look like if I were experiencing X, so the other person must be experiencing X (or something similar), too.[1] There is no reasoning that goes on in the miracle of the recognition of one embodied ego by another. I do not first view the other's body as a material thing and then imagine that there must be some subject inside this thing; rather, I see the body of the other as already animated by consciousness, as a living body.[2]
Husserl never published an extended discussion of empathy, but that was done by his assistant Edith Stein (1891-1942), whose life illustrates the mutual reinforcement of academic and practical commitments. While an assistant to Husserl, she interrupted her studies in 1915 to serve in the Red Cross. In 1916, back from the war, she completed a dissertation under Husserl on the phenomenology of empathy. Raised an Orthodox Jew, she had lost her faith early, but became interested in religion through the influence of Max Scheler and others whom she met in Gottingen where had gone to study. She was baptized a Roman Catholic in 1922, and taught in a convent school run by Dominican nuns; then, in 1933, no longer permitted to teach, she entered a Carmelite convent, where she continued writing on philosophy, women, and spiritual living.[3] In 1938 she was transferred for her safety to the Netherlands, but she was apprehended by the Gestapo on August 2, 1942, and sent to a concentration camp in Westerbork. There are accounts of her in Westerbork before her transfer to Auschwitz on August 7 and her execution on August 9. Hilda Graef has pieced together the story of Stein's last days.
Some prisoners who were fortunate enough to be released have preserved accounts of their impression of Sister Benedicta. They stress her extraordinary calm and the great charity with which she devoted herself to the care of the children in the camp, whom she washed and dressed as best she could, since their own mothers, beside themselves with fear, were too distressed to do so.[4]
In her book on empathy, Stein observed that controversies over empathy are "based on the implied assumption that foreign [fremd] subjects and their experience are given to us."[5] She uses the term "empathy" as the title for our basic recognition of other consciousness; her book examines every phase of human recognition, though only a portion is summarized here. Empathy as awareness of another is distinguished from sympathy, which in Stein's strict usage, means feeling the same thing together with someone, for example in rejoicing over the same good news.[6]
Stein's contribution most immediately relevant to the golden rule is her explication of an empathic comprehension prior to the imaginative role reversal, showing, by contrast, how the latter can be regarded as derivative.
Like Husserl, Stein emphasizes that the experience of empathy is an experiencing of another's experience, although the other's experiences do not become one's own. One's own experiences are "primordial"--they belong to one's own stream of experience--whereas another's experiences are not primordial. "While I am living in the other's joy, I do not feel primordial joy. It does not issue live from my "I."
Stein portrays a process of empathy moving through a cycle of three phases. The first phase is empathy in the simplest sense.
Let us take an example to illustrate the nature of the act of empathy. A friend tells me that he has lost his brother and I become aware of his pain. What kind of an awareness is this? I am not concerned here with going into the basis on which I infer the pain. Perhaps his face is pale and disturbed, his voice toneless and strained. Perhaps he also expresses his pain in words. Naturally these things can all be investigated, but they are not my concern here. I would like to know, not how I arrive at this awareness, but what it itself is. . . . I perceive this countenance outwardly and the pain is given "at one" with it.[7]
Starting from phase one, initial empathy, one may be spontaneously drawn into phase two, experiencing the situation from the other's position, and then one returns in phase three to face the other person directly, so to speak, once again, having deepened one's sense of the other's experience.
[Initially, the other's experience] arises before me all at once, it faces me as an object (such as the sadness I "read" in another's face). But when I inquire into its implied tendencies (try to bring another's mood into clear givenness to myself), the content, having pulled me into it, is no longer really an object. I am no longer turned to the content but to the object of it, am at the subject of the content in the original subject's place. And only after successfully executed clarification, does the content again face me as an object.[8]
Moving into the second phase is not an imagining, not a deliberate act to approximate an impossible cognition, but something more like following out the threads of one's present involvement, being engaged in attending to the other's experience. Immersing oneself in the other's experience more thoroughly brings it into fuller view. "To project oneself into another [hineinversetzen] means to carry out his experience with him."[9] Indeed, there is a phase of empathy which involves sustained, self-forgetting involvement in the other as the drama of the other unfolds before one's "eyes" (in text or conversation or conduct). For example, watching an acrobat: "I am not one with the acrobat but only "at" him. I do not actually go through his motions but only quasi."[10] Rather, at the "highest grade of the consummation of empathy--we are "at" the foreign subject and turned with it to its object."[11] Phase two involves self-forgetting, but not (normally) a feeling of oneness, an emotional fusion of self and other, a regress to a level prior to interpersonal differentiation.[12] In particular, empathy does not imply living in feelings that are spontaneously transmitted from one person to another. Stein emphasizes the difference between empathy and emotional invasion:
When I want to stop worrying, I seek out gay company. . . . It is certain that as we are saturated by such "transferred" feelings, we live in them and thus in ourselves. This prevents our turning toward or submerging ourselves in the foreign experience, which is the attitude characteristic of empathy.[13]
Stein insists that "empathy" is the fundamental experience, and that the imaginative moves of putting oneself in the other's situation and bringing to mind the other's situation are derivative and secondary phenomenona.[14] The point is not that there is something wrong about the imaginative role reversal. "Should empathy fail, this procedure can make up the deficiency . . . . We could call this surrogate for empathy an "assumption" but not empathy itself.[15]
Beyond empathy: Hans Reiner
From the natural law tradition of ethics, relatively marginalized in contemporary ethics, has come, in the writings of Hans Reiner, a major boost to research and thinking about the golden rule. Twentieth-century western scholarship on the golden rule has been marked by enhanced historical understanding, careful reasoning, and creative encounter with a diverse philosophic and religious traditions.[16] All these features are represented by Reiner, who draws especially on Aquinas and Kant to offer an updated statement of several central strands of western ethics.[17]
Reiner's 1948 article, "Die goldene Regel," influential for German discussions of the rule in philosophy and theology, merits a detailed review, since it used fresh philosophical reflection on new historical research to develop a sequence of interpretations of the rule.[18] Mindful of objections to the rule raised by Leibniz (that the rule presupposes social norms) and Kant (e.g., that a judge would have to forgo punishing a criminal), Reiner insisted that it is necessary to avoid "the mistake of taking the . . . self-evident character of the golden rule as a sign of something final, incapable of further explication."[19] One must not rely simply on the verbal formulation in order to interpret the rule.
According to Reiner, the golden rule must be distinguished from a number of ethically unsatisfactory principles sometimes associated or confused with it: repaying good with good and evil with evil; conforming to custom; and doing whatever the other person wants. The golden rule has three distinct, essential forms or meanings. What all three have in common, it turns out, is that they use one firm and definite willing (about what one wants to experience or does not want to suffer, or about what one judges to be right or wrong) as a standard for deciding about some action of one's own that is in question.
In its first essential form, the golden rule enjoins action based on empathy (Einfuhlung). Most formulations of the golden rule do not explicitly exclude this interpretation. What concept of the will is implicit in the antecedent clause, "Whatsoever you will that people should do to you"? The will envisaged in this interpretation is naturally and egoistically striving for what is pleasant and useful and avoiding what is unpleasant and frustrating. Both positive and negative formulations of the rule are thus relevant, corresponding to what one does or does not want to experience or suffer. The practice of the rule of empathy is an exercise of practical love--being considerate of others, not acting unpleasantly or harmfully, bringing aid and comfort.
The rule of empathy calls for the crucial transition from self-centeredness to ethical willing. Although the will which here serves as the standard for how to treat others is the egoistic will, the rule of empathy precisely calls for transcending the egoistic standpoint.[20] The rule of empathy is attuned to "relative" values that not everyone enjoys or possesses, values that are relative to oneself or to others [for example, the value of having enough to eat]. Though we originally experience ("feel") these values in our own case, the values are to be actualized for others, too, and so we must promote others' realization of them. Additional principles are required to decide what to do in cases where an action can avoid harm to another person only at the cost of injuring oneself or a third person, and in cases where higher and lower values conflict.
Since he saw the golden rule as a principle of natural law transcending any particular human social order, and since he had studied how medieval Christian ethics became a static ethics of order, Reiner paid keen attention to the worry that the golden rule presupposes existing social norms. He argued later that this dependence of the rule on existing social norms does not pertain to the second or third essential forms of the rule and can therefore be regarded as a defect merely of the rule of empathy, not a fatal objection to the golden rule in its full development. How, then, from the limited perspective of the rule of empathy, could one respond to the counterexample of the criminal appealing to the golden rule in order to get released by the judge? The counterexample provokes the realization that the rule is tacitly understood to operate only within certain limits. The rule of empathy is obviously not intended to preempt valid values of social order, such as law, ownership, and punishment. Such values are tacitly accorded precedence over the values evoked by the rule, so the rule has no fundamental importance; it supplements the principles governing daily life and the social order. Despite the value of such a golden rule in sustaining legitimate institutions, the rule would presumably be deprived of any power to criticize institutional norms.[21]
The second essential form of the golden rule Reiner calls the "rule of autonomy." "Autonomy" refers to the standard or law (nomos) that one takes for oneself (autos). The central idea of the rule of autonomy is that one's praise or blame for others' conduct is to be taken as the standard for one's own conduct. This rule covers not only interactions with others, but all conduct.
Much more is involved in the rule of autonomy than the idea that our estimate of the ethical quality of others' actions is likely to be less distorted than our judgment of our own actions. Unlike the rule of empathy (pertaining to what we do or do not want), the rule of autonomy starts out from an ethical judgment. This does not involve presupposing existing social norms. Now we come to the core of Reiner's philosophy of ethical judgment as presented here (setting aside the theological dimension of natural law theory) affirming that values, real values, are felt, and that laws of ethics are based on values. We spontaneously feel the values (or disvalues) in another's conduct, and then acknowledge the necessary connection between our ethical valuations and ethical requirements that we ourselves must accept.[22] Expressing valuations of another's conduct implies our will that actions, including our own, accord with them. Autonomy implies that the will freely recognizes and adopts the demands arising from the most basic value judgments. This rule of autonomy differs from Kant's categorical imperative: whereas moral reasoning for Kant begins with the principle that only universalizable maxims are acceptable, moral reasoning with the rule of autonomy proceeds from particular valuations.
In all the literature of the golden rule, there is no more compelling account of the import of golden rule consistency than the one Reiner gives. Writing just after World War II, he describes the consequences of betraying the rule of autonomy, violating one's conscience, failing to act according to the standards set by one's judgments of others' conduct. To set a high standard for others but not for oneself brings both experiential and objective consequences, shame and loss of credibility, as one's show of being ultimately serious about high standards is exposed to oneself and others. Thus one is centrally untrue to oneself. Crucial to being human is the ability to determine oneself according to principles that express absolute and relative values. To appear to commit oneself and then to give up when it becomes burdensome corrupts one's value as a person of enduring unity and wholeness. To fail the decisive test is not a matter of logical consistency but an issue of character. Moreover, there is a social expectation that all will do their part in promoting values, and thus it is unjust to seek a special advantage for oneself by not doing one's part. Any citizen who wants to live in a civilized condition with a degree of trustworthiness cannot exempt himself from being trustworthy, too. It is not enough to defer responsibility to the police or other authorities, for the state depends on people of a certain character. One loses the right and the ability (insofar as one's betrayal is known) to communicate moral expectations to others; this is especially true for parents, teachers, and those in positions of political power. To want others to act morally expresses one's wish to live in an ethical world. Part of one's interest in such a world is egoistic, but part can be love for objective values in themselves; to betray them is to be unworthy to live in the ethical community. The rule of autonomy directs us, in a certain way, to these discoveries.
The golden rule in Reiner's third form, the rule of reciprocity (Gegenseitigkeit), is the same as the rule of autonomy, with the restriction that it envisages only conduct affecting others. Whereas the rule of empathy had focused on what one wants to experience or does not want to suffer, attention shifts to what the other person does and to one's ethical judgment of the other's conduct. In the rule of reciprocity, the standard for one's own conduct is the treatment of oneself by others that one recognizes to be right. In the rule of reciprocity we have, at last, a golden rule that can be put into practice. It also can serve as a foundation for social order, though an additional principle is needed to instruct the judge what to do to "restore the rule in cases where it is violated."[23] The golden rule can thus be "completely understood and justified as a principle of 'natural law.'"[24]
In systematic ethical writings drawing on Aquinas and Kant, Reiner placed the golden rule in a wider context, emphasizing the function of conscience in free human personality. Our obligations to act in certain ways are grounded in objective obligations about how we are to be, and feelings of responsibility and respect point to these objective obligations.[25] The golden rule plays a key role alongside many other principles, including principles of justice, love, reverence for life, and recognition of higher and lower values.[26]
In a 1977 article Reiner explored the relation between the golden rule and natural law, presenting new historical research and arguing that the golden rule plays a key role in demonstrating certain basic rights, evident to reason. Here, in a nutshell, is the argument. The initial thought is that a just social order is prefigured by our response to an attack on our body or life.[27] Then, according to the golden rule as Reiner had previously interpreted it, insofar as our judgment on others' behavior presupposes a norm, we already grasp an ethical reason for our own action. (In other words, we do not merely dislike it when others interfere with our possessions or capacities; we feel that wrong has been done.) Putting oneself in the place of others then leads to recognizing the demand for equity, since one can only expect one's own claims to be recognized as objective if one recognizes others' comparable claims (regarding security from attack). The same reasoning can be extended to other rights than the basic rights regarding one's body or life. Those who apply the golden rule are thus led toward a social order in which fundamental rights are recognized.
The infinite dignity and need of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jew imprisoned by the Nazis, philosophized in response to totalitarianism, which accords ethical recognition to people only insofar as they are the same. Levinas portrays each Other person as radically different from the self-absorbed, separate ego, whose private enjoyments conceal hatred of the Other. The Other breaks into the separate ego on a level prior to the ego's opportunity for a self-collected act of conscious commitment. The very face of the Other carries the absolute command, "You shall not kill," and the abyss of the Other's need calls the self into radical responsibility.
Levinas explored how the categories of western philosophy, in contrast with Jewish religion, cooperate with the domination of the same over the Other. Inasmuch as the ego lives in the project of assimilating everything to itself (e.g., by scientific and philosophical understanding and technical control), relation becomes impossible. His claim is that each of us is wrapped up in the ideology and the totalitarian practice of "the Same" until we acknowledge our own abjection before the Other, recognize the Other as the master of justice, give ourselves over sacrificially to the service of the Other. Levinas exhausts the resources of language in his extreme insistence on recognizing the otherness of the Other. To look into the face of the Other is to confront the Infinite, and the dignity of the Other calls for a degree of respect that borders on self-abasement. The claim of each Other upon the self is so thoroughgoing that it is difficult to think how to respond to multiple Others in a group.
The response to the Other that is required is to put oneself in the place of the other; but this, for Levinas, is not a cognitive adventure to guide one in applying an abstract moral principle. No sympathetic appropriation of the other's "interests" is authentically possible; no technology of social welfare judgments does justice to the Other who faces you. The mind's effort at comprehension obscures the infinity of the Other. To put oneself in the place of the Other means bearing responsibility for everything that every Other is and does, for example, by taking the Other's punishment. An example may be found in a story told by Edith Wyschogrod of the Polish Franciscan, Maksymilian Kolbe, who was sent to Auschwitz and who persuaded a camp official to substitute for a fellow prisoner sentenced to death.[28] Insofar as the rule, "Do to others as you want others to do to you," participates in simplistic assumptions that ignore the otherness of the Other, it, too, is caught in totalitarian thinking.
According to David Goicoechea, Levinas provides "a profound alteration and yet renewal of the golden rule."[29] A key issue is whether the relation to the other be interpreted as symmetrical (as in the equalitarian interpretation of the rule in modern western philosophy) or asymmetrical, as in various stories of the Old Testament, e.g., Abraham's obeying Sara's command to send away Hagar and Ishmael, and in various images, e.g., the suffering servant. "The suffering face of the other obligates me to do unto her or him as she or he would have me do unto her or him." A question arises, "How does the suffering servant who submits and is committed to the suffering other respond to the right other and the right command?" Prior to any knowledge, prior to any decision, comes the appeal of the Other. The abused Other cannot relate reciprocally; but the guilty me can give and serve sacrificially, can suffer as a substitute for the Other, can be a hostage for the Other, in the hope of reconciliation, in the hope, never guaranteed, of reciprocal relation.
A middle way: Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher who also knew the inside of a Nazi prison, spent much of his career at the University of Chicago and shows close contact with many currents of philosophy. In his earliest book, Freedom and the Will, he investigated how active, voluntary phases of willing are always correlated with involuntary, passive phases, in which the self is involved in responding to conditions not of its own volition. That same theme is developed in terms of interpersonal relationships in his most recent book, Oneself as Another, where he explores the moral relation with the other to elucidate the nature of the self. His thesis is that action is interaction which always comports a passive aspect. Ricoeur assigns the golden rule a significant place in the context of a morality in the context of a philosophy of the relation between self and other. The key to Ricoeur's use of the golden rule is the recognition that in action there is experienced an unbalanced relation between the agent and the recipient. The agent exercises a certain power over the recipient. What the agent does (or what the speaker says) affects the other, who has an unavoidable degree of passivity as the recipient of the action. Insofar as violence (in a gross or subtle way) infects action, or when "disesteem of self and hatred of others" come into play, the unavoidable passivity of the recipient is turned into real suffering.[30] "Do to others as you want others to do to you" is a call for reciprocity in the light of the fact that in the exchange of roles the agent becomes the sufferer. In dialogue, moreover, the exchange of roles is not merely imagined, but actual, since each person, in turn, adopts the role of self, by saying, "I" and addressing the other as "you." Each in turn poses a question calling for an answer.
In order to comprehend Ricoeur's interpretation of the golden rule, it is first necessary to grasp his relational concept of the self. He positions his philosophy between what he presents as two extremes, the philosophy of Husserl, which tends to regard the other as analogous to the self, a variation on the theme of the self, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, which posits an other so absolutely commanding and suffering, so radically other than the self-absorbed ego, that a relationship of equals hardly envisioned. Ricoeur interprets these philosophies as bearing complementary insights that can be clarified and synthesized. Ricoeur responds to Husserl and Levinas by drawing on Aristotle, Kant, and diverse contemporary analytic and phenomenological philosophers, to develop a new concept of the self. What does it mean to be a self, and how do I know? One possible answer is that each person knows himself intuitively, introspectively. What could be more obvious? And yet we often conceal ourselves from ourselves. Therefore, it is only by way of an extended detour that we approach self-knowledge.
Ricoeur presents the self as an agent in the objective world, as understood through narrative, and as ethically and morally related to others. When we ask what the agent is, we think of a character, a (relatively) continuous sameness, a set of predicates in terms of which it is possible to objectively identify someone as the same person from one year to the next.[31] These stabilities, however, never make up the whole story. When we ask who the agent is, we turn to the dramatic dynamics of the self as an embodied subject whose initiative produces effects in the objective world, even though it transcends the predicates of the objective world. Ricoeur uses the term "flesh" to name the body as subjectively lived. The self is not such a thing as a log, waiting to be described with the fixed predicates of things. The self, rather, is a process, never complete, never all wrapped up in a package tied with a nice bow. Given the possibility of lies, deceit, misunderstanding, and illusion, the question of veracity haunts the agent's self-descriptions.[32] The question of how trustworthy the agent will prove to be is at issue in every promise.
Narrative highlights the self as agent and sufferer. It is in narrative (including stories not intended as imaginative fiction but as history), that the self acquires a relatively unified, coherent sense. Narrative synthesizes the stable predicates of character together with departures, reversals of fortune, and contingent events. The self resulting from this synthesis involves "a dialectic of ownership and of dispossession, of care and of carefreeness, of self-affirmation and of self-effacement."[33] Since our lives are interwoven with one another, we do not absolutely determine our own lives, but are rather co-authors.[34] Therefore, the golden rule does not impose itself as a merely external or arbitrary demand, since the self is not, to begin with, a self-constituted, self-understood, self-sufficient entity. "Action is interaction."[35] While sometimes the projects of different individuals dovetail nicely, sometimes they diverge and conflict: one person's action is another's suffering. In Ricoeur's broad sense, sufferers are "those affected by processes of modification or conservation"; agents are those who initiate those processes.[36]
The speaker or agent "imposes" something on the listener or recipient; hence their relation may be said to be asymmetrical, with "suffering" imposed upon the recipient. In caring ("solicitude"), however, the asymmetrical relation between agent and sufferer can become a relation of giving and receiving. Despite the obvious difference between giving and receiving, Ricoeur discerns a "sort of equalizing" which keeps sympathy, "the wish to share someone else's pain," from becoming "simple pity, in which the self is secretly pleased to know it has been spared."
In true sympathy, the self, whose power of acting is at the start greater than that of its other, finds itself affected by all that the suffering other offers to it in return. For from the suffering other there comes a giving that is no longer drawn from the power of acting and existing but precisely from weakness itself. This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, when unequal power finds compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which, in the hour of agony, finds refuge in the shared whisper of voices or the feeble embrace of clasped hands. . . . A self reminded of the condition of mortality can receive from the friend's weakness more than he or she can give in return by drawing from his or her own reserves of strength.[37]
Aware of its lack, its need of friends, the self perceives itself, not as self-sufficient, but as "another among others"; thus friendship can be mutual. This involves the element of reversibility--that self and other can exchange roles, for example the roles of speaker and the one spoken to, saying "I" and "you" to each other, or in putting oneself in the other's place in imagination and sympathy. Nevertheless it remains true that persons are not substitutable for one another; each is irreplaceable, as one discovers in losing a loved one.
What role does the golden rule play in the larger drama of ethical and moral living? Ricoeur defines ethical fulfillment as the good life with and for others, in just institutions. He bases self-esteem primarily on a common human capacity: "I am that being who can evaluate his actions and, in assessing the goals of some of them to be good, is capable of evaluating himself and of judging himself to be good."[38] Ricoeur, like Kant and Mill before him, offers an argument for other-regarding action. Since the other, too, is a oneself capable of the achievements which encourage self-esteem, "I cannot myself have self-esteem unless I esteem others as myself."[39] At times the capacity is actualized, the "resources of goodness . . . spring forth"; one has "the conviction of judging well and acting well in a momentary and provisional approximation of living well."[40] It is not enough, however, merely to aim for the good life and to enjoy self-esteem. Radical evil, for which the individual is responsible, corrupts human motives to such an extent that the individual alone cannot put things straight, and domination tends to corrupt the relation between agent and recipient. Self-esteem tends toward conceit and toward taking excessive advantages for oneself. The remedy that Ricoeur proposes is a moral filter to purify self-esteem into self-respect.
Morality requires the agent to act only in ways that are universalizable, fair for everyone. But morality involves more than the principle of universalizability and a respect for humanity as a unitary concept. Morality also requires respect for persons, for a plurality that cannot be reduced to the set of predicates that are shared by humanity.[41] Kant's imperative of respect for persons expresses clearly and formally the gist of the popularly phrased golden rule.[42] Where Kant had elevated respect for the moral law above respect for persons, Ricoeur holds to the golden rule as getting the priorities right.
Ricoeur presents both positive and negative formulations of the golden rule as expressing legitimate principles. The negative form cannot be eliminated because there is an enduring need to say no to violence. The rule implicitly prohibits all types of evil, from manipulation to violence concealed in language, torture that destroys self-respect and the power to act, violation of property rights, sexual violence, and murder.[43] Ricoeur finds that the negative form facilitates moral creativity: it "leaves open the range of things that are not forbidden and in this way makes room for moral invention in the order of what is permitted."[44] It is more clear in the positive formulation that morality requires actually engaging in benevolent action. Finally, the positive formulation is implied in and hence is more basic than the negative formulation, because prohibition presupposes something which is affirmed. In the mutual exchange of self-esteems, original affirmation arises.
For Ricoeur, the special merit of the golden rule is that it calls for the norm of reciprocity over against the power asymmetry implicit in the difference between agent and recipient. A morality which only emphasizes regard for the common humanity of persons eliminates difference, but the golden rule keeps alive the sense of the difference of agent and recipient. On this analysis, even solicitude, it would seem, cannot avoid domination. Thus the golden rule is a norm which enjoins respect for persons "in their plurality and in their otherness."[45] Ricoeur refuses, however, to embrace "difference for the sake of difference, which, finally, makes all differences indifferent, to the extent that it makes all discussion useless."[46]
Ricoeur's concept of the golden rule is summarized in the following passage.
The passage from ethics to morality--from the optative mode of living well to the imperative mode of obligation--occurred . . . under the protection of the Golden Rule, to which we thought we gave full credit by assigning to it the merit of interposing the commandment at the very intersection of the asymmetrical relation between doing and undergoing (the good you would want to be done to you, the evil you would hate to be done to you). Acting and suffering then seem to be distributed between two different protagonists: the agent and the patient, the latter appearing as the potential victim of the former. But because of the reversibility of the roles, each agent is the patient of the other. Inasmuch as one is affected by the power over one exerted by the other, the agent is invested with the responsibility of an action that is placed from the very outset under the rule of reciprocity, which the rule of justice will transform into a rule of equality. Since each protagonist holds two roles, being both agent and patient, the formalism of the categorical imperative requires . . . a plurality of acting beings each affected by forces exerted reciprocally.[47]
Responsible life with others is of course not merely an affair of conformity to rules. This is true, for Ricoeur, for many reasons: because rules may come into conflict, and communities cherish an irreducible multiplicity of goods; because discernment is needed for the concrete historical and communitarian aspects of situations; and also because, e.g., in medical ethics problems such as abortion, there is no sharp distinction between persons and non-persons.[48] Moreover, the tendency toward finding equality in relationships of solicitude leads to the quest for equality in just institutions.
Thus, for Ricoeur, the golden rule has a crucial function within a life aiming for happiness with and for others in just institutions. The rule does not simply call for the agent to imagine herself in the other's position. Rather, the rule reflects the actual reciprocity between speakers and interacting persons, between agents and sufferers.
Conclusion
In this chapter and the two previous ones, there is a pervading theme: the golden rule illumines the transition from egoism to sympathy, and from sympathy as a merely immediate response to reasonable, thoughtful, rational, morally active living.
If the world were to act on a golden rule of sympathetic regard for others, violent crime would cease, and altruism would multiply. The greatness of sympathy is that the spontaneous outreach of heartfelt sympathy can incorporate the highest wisdom and love in response to human suffering. Sympathy is human warmth, especially attuned to emotional and physical needs.
I believe, however, that any psychologist or philosopher would agree with a balancing point. If sympathy can rise to the level of wise compassion, it can also be naive, shortsighted, impulsive, egocentric, and harmful. Someone who feels pity at the sight of a handicapped person may react in a condescending and patronizing manner. Problems with extreme sympathy show up in cases where parents overindulge their children's desires, or where a weak person plays along with a spouse's addiction, or where the politics of pity violate wisdom. Overemphasis on consideration for others' feelings, moreover, leads to a morality of merely being nice, and it is never nice to respond decisively to evil. Excessive sympathy, moreover, disrupts mental poise. In other words, sympathetic intentions often require more than sympathy to be effective. Insofar as sympathy operates as a merely emotional reaction, it stands in need of being infused with a higher perspective; the critique of sympathy is simply that it may be exercised in isolation from intellectual and spiritual qualities.
Upon reflection, most people do not simply want their immediate desires to be gratified. We know that sympathetic indulgence is not how we want to be treated and not how we should treat others. We consider long-term welfare in addition to the pleasure of the moment, and we care about whether the means are likely to achieve the end. Reason is thus required in order to interpret the golden rule appropriately.
Stein shows how genuine identification with others achieves approximating their perspective in a way that does not require an act of imagination, though in the adventure of comprehending another person, all useful means should be welcomed. Reiner has shown a way to trace a logical path beyond the golden rule as a principle of sympathy to the rule as involving ethical judgment. He lucidly recognizes the intuition of higher and lower values and the fact that the golden rule presupposes some ethical judgments. In the dialectic between sympathy and moral reason, Ricoeur moves from sympathetic responsiveness to respect for persons, and gives respect for persons priority over the notion of universal moral law. Ricoeur's notion of moral reason thus goes beyond self-consistency to responsibility. Ricoeur finds in the golden rule a principle of movement and transition between sympathy and moral reason.
Adding ideas of Reiner, Levinas and Ricoeur to Stoic and Kantian ideas deepens the concept of golden-rule respect. Respect for persons involves recognition that each individual has, to a significant degree, the power thoughtfully to determine his or her commitment and conduct. Respect refuses to manipulate or distort the mind's adventure in coming to grasp truth and walk in the light of truth. Respect involves an emotion bordering on awe for the sublimity of the beauty of each unique, indefinable, uncountable, and irreplaceable personality. Respect for the other is coordinate with respect for oneself. Profound self-respect requires living in loyalty to values, including ideals that one cherishes for the other as well as for oneself.
The risk in an ethics of sensitivity and respect lies in placing disproportionate emphasis on the problems of imposition and appropriation. It is also important to describe and reflect upon experiences of interaction when what one person does is welcomed by the other as expressing love. When we interact in the momentum of shared understanding and positive inspiration, we do not feel imposed upon or made passive by the other's speaking and doing, nor are we prey to self-concern about offending the other. We do not in fact experience the other person as other; the experience is one of kinship. Otherness is not annihilated in a mystical oblivion, but neither does it confront us as a challenge. We do not pause to imagine ourselves in the other's shoes because we are not worried about stepping on the other's toes. We engage not in deliberation but in action, and we spontaneously make course corrections as we apprehend the other's changing needs and adjust our own grasp of things. When we live in faith as members in the family of God, we are not staggered by the otherness of the other, and faith learns to embrace situations when otherness is stark and difference looms large: those, too, are situations that arise within the family.
Chapter 11
[1]. The account here is based primarily on Husserl posthumous writings on intersubjectivity. Husserl's position on this topic is normally criticized on the basis of his Fifth Cartesian Meditation; this is unfortunate, since that text exhibits reflection closer to the brink of solipsism than the bulk of the other writings.
[2]. Ricoeur will add that I cannot claim to know that the other's experience is similar to my own simply because the other's verbal expressions are similar to my own. The other's experience remains the other's, not mine. The marvel is the very recognition that the other is also a self, also a center of consciousness: "Like me, the other thinks, desires, enjoys, suffers" (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 335).
[3]. Stein's writings on the role of women anticipate many contemporary feminist ideas, and her religious perspective balanced the two major themes of gender relations, equality and complementarity.
[4]. Hilda Graef 1956, 13-14. Stein wrote books of religious philosophy and translated Disputed Questions on Truth of Thomas Aquinas. She has been recently canonized.
[5]. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 1964, 4.
[6]. Stein 1964, 14.
[7]. Stein 1964, 6-7.
[8]. Stein 1964, 10.
[9]. Stein 1964, 20; cf 10.
[10]. Stein 1964, 16.
[11]. Stein 1964, 12.
[12]. Stein 1964, 16-17. The phenomenologist Max Scheler had emphasized the importance of such emotional "contagion" of mood, conveyed beneath the conscious transactions that occur between people. The contagious enthusiasm of a crowd is a favorite example, but the phenomenon occurs as well between just two persons. According to Scheler, this level of shared emotion is an enduring and essential stratum of human unity, never completely lost, although severely constricted in modern western society. In adult life, according to Scheler, primal undifferentiated emotional sympathy remains the affective bond underlying other human bonds. It is a residual capacity less common in the average civilized adult than "in primitive peoples, children, dreamers, neurotics of a certain type, hypnotic subjects and in the exercise of the maternal instinct" (Scheler [1913] 1953, 31; quoted in Katz 1963, 60).
[13]. Stein 1964, 22-23.
[14]. Stein 1964, 14.
[15]. Stein 1964, 14.
[16]. It is appropriate to note the contributions made by Germans, whose scholarship on the golden rule has unfolded in five phases: (1) the encyclopedic study of the golden rule in the world's religions by Leonidas Johannes Philippidis (1929, supplemented in 1933); (2) persistent philosophical articulation and increasingly detailed historical research by Hans Reiner (1948, 1951, 1964, 1977), whose conception of the golden rule has become a standard reference for German philosophers and theologians (writings that build on Reiner's work include Spendel 1967; Langer 1969; Lesnik 1975; Hoche 1978; Schueller 1980); (3) Albrecht Dihle's 1962 book, previously discussed, which has been influential, despite some criticisms (Lutz 1964; Reiner 1977; cf. also Robinson 1966; Lerne 1970, Wattles 1993); (4) continuing engagement, by Hans-Ulrich Hoche and others, in the discussion of questions raised by Hare's Freedom and Reason and other writings (Hans-Ulrich Hoche 1978 and 1983; Hoerster 1974; Kese 1990); (5) social and political philosophy, which though creative in developing Kantian ethics, has had little explicit reference to the golden rule, except in Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg (1975).
[17]. Historically, the golden rule has been associated with the conviction of the profound and equal basic dignity of each person. In the wake of Stoicism, Roman legal theory had three branches: laws pertaining to citizens of Rome, laws pertaining to those living within the empire, and "natural law," pertaining to human beings as such. The resulting conception of natural law has generated evolutionary and revolutionary tensions in systems with gross inequalities. The golden rule is central to middle-age and modern natural law tradition, which emphasized the limited powers of rulers and the obligations of rulers toward the governed, an obligation sometimes thought to be grounded in a contract between the citizens or in the consent of the governed. Commenting on the clash between the individualism of natural law theory and the advocates of early modern monarchies, Otto Gierke writes that natural law doctrines were radical and unhistorical, by virtue of their appeal to eternal (though non-theocratic) principles, which indicated an ideal to be approximated. According to the early modern conception of natural law political theory, "Men were originally free and equal, and therefore independent and isolated in their relation to one another." The contemporary importance of this tradition is that it is the source of human rights talk today.
[18]. Reiner observed that Kant's derogatory footnote about the golden rule footnote had extinguished interest in the rule among German philosophers for 150 years. His historical research, much of which has been incorporated into earlier chapters, will not be summarized here.
[19]. Reiner 1948, 80.
[20]. Reiner 1948, 84.
[21]. Reiner 1948, 85-86.
[22]. Reiner writes,
In praise and blame of another's conduct and in our requirements directed to him, we have recognized the rightness of certain ethical valuations and their connection with corresponding requirements. This means that we have therein expressed that we ourselves will that action be in accord with these valuations and requirements. Since we have done this, however, as free people and with our free personality at stake, we have taken upon our autonomous personality ethical requirements which originally arise from values . . . . (Reiner 1948, 90.)
[23]. Reiner 1948, 101.
[24]. Reiner 1948, 101.
[25]. Reiner 1951.
[26]. Reiner 1964.
[27]. Reiner 1977.
[28]. Wyschogrod 1990, 27.
[29]. I am grateful for permission to use a copy of David Goicoechea's unpublished paper, "Beyond the Golden Rule with Levinas," presented at the Canadian Council for the Study of Religion, June 7, 1993.
[30]. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (1993), 320.
[31]. Ricoeur 1993, 119.
[32]. Ricoeur 1993, 72.
[33]. Ricoeur 1993, 168.
[34]. Ricoeur 1993, 161.
[35]. Ricoeur 1993, 145.
[36]. Ricoeur 1993, 144. Philosophic terms for interaction represent a compromise. Instead of using "agent and recipient," one might use either "agent and patient" (the type of case which Ricoeur has in mind) or "donor and recipient" (the happy possibility which he neglects). Talk of donor and recipient, however, connotes a distance between interacting persons, as though the transfer of a thing necessarily mediates the relationship; therefore, "agent" is preferable to "donor." And talk of patients connotes an extreme which obscures interaction; therefore, "recipient" is preferable to "patient."
[37]. Ricoeur 1993, 190.
[38]. Ricoeur 1993, 181.
[39]. Ricoeur 1993, 193.
[40]. Ricoeur 1993, 189; cf. 307; 180.
[41]. This idea is signaled by the fact that Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative elaborates meanings not explicit in the first formulation (Ricoeur 1993, 211).
[42]. Ricoeur 1993, 222.
[43]. Ricoeur 1993, 220-221.
[44]. Ricoeur 1993, 219.
[45]. Ricoeur 1993, 274.
[46]. Ricoeur 1993, 286.
[47]. Ricoeur 1993, 330.
[48]. Ricoeur, 259, 268, 269, 274, 272.