Rousseau's concept of compassion (love)

J. J. Rousseau states that compassion, which is love according to my terminology, has the potential to combat the evils brought on by excessive amour-propre (self-love). He stresses, thought, that compassion is a natural feeling and that, prior to the use of reason or force of law or the excercise of conscious virtue, it has the power to move us to acts of generosity, clemency and gentleness -- all of which are pleasurable to us.

Rousseau refers to the topic in Book IV of Emile, where compassion emerges as the most fundamental factor on which he hopes to ground the possibility and actuality of creative, cooperative and humane relations between persons, on an individual and on a social scale. In compassion we find the basis for an alternative form of human relationship to that established by the combative, competitive and aggressive concerns which petulant amour-propre gives rise to. Through the influence of pity, people may come to feel benevolent concern for each other, and want to live together in mutual support. Human society could then be an aid and a blessing instead of the blight and source of suffering that, in Rousseau's estimation, it so often it.

To extend compassionate concern is a way of becoming aware of and sensitive to another's state of mind, and hence of being drawn into a relationship of mutual awareness and response; it is a very different way from that characterized by the desire for ascendancy over others which amour-propre brings with it. Compassionate concern enters the same territory as amour-propre; that is, it comprises a route by which humans engage with the most fraught and complex issue -- that of finding a footing for themselves in the lives, feelings and concerns of other people. No issue is more decisive for the individual's life prospects. If it can be resolved satisfactorily, the prospects for a rewarding, constructive and happy life are immeasurably enhanced, both for the individual and for those he comes into contact with. It is through the settlement of pity, Rousseau believes, that this satisfactory resolution can be achieved. In Rousseau's view, the capacity for compassionate concern for the suffering of others is innate.

According to Rousseau, in a compassionate response one 'identifies' with the suffering person who is the object of concern. His use of this term has led some critics to say that the feeling of pity abolishes the distinction between persons, and so does not establish any real relationship between distinct individuals. This is a misunderstanding. What he means is that, moved by pity, one aids the sufferer with the same immediacy and spontaneity as one would seek to relieve oneself of pain. One's readiness to help is not mediated through thoughts of reciprocity or reward. In this sense only, one takes on another's pain as if it were one's own; there is no loss of awareness of the separateness of the other self. Indeed, Rousseau says that one reason why helping a person who is suffering is often not felt as an imposition is that his relative weakness gives us a quickened sense of our own strength and well-being, which we take pleasure in expressing. This would hardly make sense if any genuine amalgamation of self and other had occurred.