Love, Pity, and Compassion

I've been reading Tragic Sense of Life, by Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno recently, and his ideas on love, compassion, and central morality have been intriguing. He captures his thoughts beautifully in words, and while I don't agree with some of his conclusions, as I'll discuss here, I definitely think it's worth a read, especially beyond chapter six. 

What is the highest form of love? What transcends above the other methods through which we show affection, and exists as the ultimate goal in a loving relationship? As Unamuno puts it, love can find no greater pedestal than pity. He claims that man can feel no higher love than the love a beggar experiences on the street when someone condescends to speak with him. The evidence for this absurd claim may be seen in humanity's lust for God, he says, as religious people endeavor to prostrate themselves before God's pity - his love.

This evidence stands strong on its own. However, I do not believe that pity should be deified. I find pity to be corrosive and pathetic, and I would hope no one ever pities me. Now, even saying that I recognize there are times when we act to feel pity, especially as children. We may play up a small injury for the affection of our parents, or hyperbolize our stomachache for the sake of staying home, piteously groaning though our motivations are corrupt. But those things are figments of a child's fantasy - they possess absolutely no utility when it comes to young adulthood and beyond. In fact, that they are notably corrupt suggests that even this form of longing for pity contradicts the truth.

And what is the truth? That love finds no higher perch than respect. Mutual respect forms the foundation of any healthy relationship (how could it be otherwise?). This allows for those things which make long lasting partnerships successful - spending silence in peace, not worrying about your partner misbehaving when they're on their own, and allowing your full spectrum of thoughts and feelings to be expressed, just to name a few. If pity were a higher love, then we would look forward to groveling at our partner's feet and basking in their superiority.

In applying this principle of respect as the grandest form of love, Unamuno's excellent evidence on man's relationship with God can no longer be used, and I as of this moment, I don't have a valid rebuttal. I know from some experience in Hinduism that gods are not meant to pity you - that they respect you as you respect them, and when they do respect you it blossoms beautifully in the afterlife, as you walk amongst them. Far from the Christian vision of angels blinded by the purity of God, and a species primordially subservient to Him. Now, I'll be the first to point out that my experience in Christianity ends at the Old Testament, but for now I can find no good alternative to Unamuno's claim of mankind's desire for God's pity.

This brings us nicely to compassion, which can be thought of as the holy manifestation of pity, pure in its intentions. According to Unamuno, all morality centers around compassion, and I can find no bolder claim than that, except perhaps Nietzsche's belief that morality hinges on strength of will. I find myself in fundamental disagreement with Unamuno's words - how can the ultimate pity be the center of morality? But what could it be, if not that? What glues an individual's morality together? Perhaps we must come once again to respect, though this time not for a person, but for a game. For the game of life, as we play it.

Dostoevsky wrote eloquently on the presence, or lack thereof, of intrinsic morality in human beings, outside of all institutionalized morality, in Crime and Punishment, a book I'll get to in due time. For now, we can settle on his conclusion: even if you have all the reason to commit an act of savagery, and the other person absolutely deserves it, your conscience will not rest once you have done it. In other words, morality finds its roots deep within us, far beyond any transcendent morality taught by any religion.

Sticking with Dostoevsky's work, we can see also that pity and compassion play no part in this morality. Rather, an unspoken rule breaks when one acts amorally, and that rule depends on the game being played. For example, in any conversation there are rules governing how the people taking part should act. One should not punch the other in the face, for example. If one party breaks such a rule, the perpetrator may feel oddly satisfied for some time, however; if this behavior continues, social selection will ensure they pay for it - you can only punch so many people in the face during conversation before no one wants to converse with you.

This rule finds its own roots within our evolution - within the necessary social structures we formed in order to survive. In those times, if you weren't sociable, if you didn't follow the rules of the game, you were cast out of your social circle and left to starve in the heartless abyss of nature, likely to perish. Thus we developed the ability to conform to certain rules which gave us boundaries in our games. One such boundary was: do not kill those with whom you coexist, for obvious reasons. Now, those rules were created tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years ago, and by now they are so deeply embedded within our psyches that they seem to us to be inexorable rules of our morality.

Of course, I don't mean to discount the role of compassion in higher morality - it definitely has its place. However, it does not form the basis of our ethics. If it did, early humans would never have made it out of nature's evolutionary gauntlet: we'd be too concerned with being nice to survive. No, we had to obtain a respect for our surroundings, each other, and the games we play to interact with one another at a very early stage, lest we be easily divided and picked off by our own predators. It could even go deeper than respect, but respect seems to me as the most abstract concept which can be used to describe the core of morality while still being specific.

Unamuno's writings are quite powerful, if flawed at times. In fact, I fundamentally disagree with his thesis for Tragic Sense of Life, and while that's a post for another time, I can't dispute his knowledge and depth of analysis on these matters. His theory of pity-centric love would be the only thing I would openly balk at, for respect centers all the healthy relationships I know of, and while compassion plays an important part in higher morality, I find his claim that it forms the basis for all morality absurd. Morality finds its footing in the respect we show for one another, and the many games we play in our day to day lives.