Download NATURAL EVIL, EXTREME STATES OF MIND, AND THE

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NATURAL EVIL, EXTREME STATES OF MIND, AND THE DISRUPTION OF SYMPATHY.
INTRODUCTION
In the paper I am dealing with only one part of a complex (and emotive) topic, and dealing with it
(only) as a philosopher, with the caveat that I am not a moral philosopher and I am not engaging
with that literature. But, as Bernard Williams remarks, the fundamental philosophical question is,
‘How shall we live?’, and this question brings in its train perennial concerns about the treatment of
human beings by other human beings.
As a philosopher working on psychoanalysis I have two interests in the problem of evil.
First, I’m interested in what psychoanalysis might bring to the ‘philosophical’ problem of evil, the
problem as philosophers, particularly moral and social philosophers, try to understand it. Generally
speaking, this way of connecting psychoanalysis and philosophy takes the form of exporting a
particular psychoanalytic concept or set of concepts, or piece of theory, into philosophy more or less
‘wholesale’ and unexamined. The success of this move depends heavily on the respect, or tolerance,
extended to psychoanalysis’ often difficult and poorly explained concepts. (By contrast a clear
account of the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification and the moral psychology of evildoing, is to be found in an article by Michael Lacewing.)
There is therefore an important and interesting philosophical project of clarification of such key
psychoanalytic concepts and theories. For instance, of something needed to complete the account I
outline below, the concept of a ‘primitive state of mind’. This project of intellectual ‘housekeeping’ is
a part of the second interest in exploring the idea of evil in terms of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
But it’s not (just) about tidying things up. It’s about exploring, and demonstrating, what philosophy
(moral, social, and straight analytic) can bring into psychoanalysis as, so to speak, a partnership
between two disciplines which have the same subject matter or object of study – ‘how we should
live’ or, what a ‘real option’ (the phrase is due to Williams) is for us.
In the case of the topic of ’evil’, psychoanalysis has its own particular preoccupation with what evil
might be, partly from its practitioners’ exposure to human malfeasance. There is also the
psychoanalytic preoccupation with human aggression and destructiveness of which both Freud and
following him the Kleinian tradition in the UK have attempted an unsatisfactory theoretical account
in terms of the Death Instinct. In this paper I shan’t be talking about this, since the concept of the
Death Instinct requires a lot more philosophical-conceptual housekeeping than it has yet had. Here I
make just a start on what philosophy can bring to a psychoanalytic perspective on evil.
I’ve indicated that an important psychoanalytic contribution to the problem of evil is to describe the
psychological mechanisms which are involved in evil doing. Prior to that, as I shall suggest, we need
to consider the experiencing of evil. All I shall try to do here is to set out a basis for defining, and so
for identifying an experience as evil in the first place. The aim is to find a ground or a criterion for
distinguishing an evil from an atrocity, or a piece of malevolence, or something that is wicked or
morally wrong but not something we want to call evil.
In the heyday of ordinary language philosophy the conceptual geography of such morally loaded,
overlapping and complex terms as ’atrocity’, ‘wickedness’, ’evil’ would have been exhaustively, and
exhaustingly, surveyed in order to map out their conditions of use and so, their meanings. Along the
way, problem cases might well be adjudicated by appeal to our ‘moral intuitions’ in support of
various distinctions claimed. The first approach is methodologically unexceptionable but extremely
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tedious and requires a cast of mind that is special even among analytic philosophers, while the
second is appealing but methodologically unacceptable (far too much analytic philosophy being
based on ’intuitions’ which are no more than ideas in untutored minds).
I shall avoid both of these, and instead take the ‘Socratic’ approach (the ‘what is X?’ question). I
shall offer a (strictly) philosophical argument for a sketch of an answer to the question, what is evil?
(‘strictly’ in being based on fact and argument, and not on ‘intuition’ or on cultural considerations).
Before I turn to the main part of the paper itself, there are some reflections of my own (not
untutored!) that I want to consider, which arose following the colloquium on ‘Evil’ (of
psychoanalysts and academics across a number of disciplines) at which an earlier version of this
paper was given.
I had been thinking afterwards about the colloquium and the work done in it, in terms of what was
said and what was not said (or was left unsaid, or was said by being not-said). I've observed that
audiences of talks on psychoanalytic topics particularly (because these are very experience-near)
tend to a sort of enactment that reflects the topic in question: paranoia, depression, hysteria, for
instance. This is a manifestation of group behaviour (on which, generally, there is a lot of
psychoanalytic writing, in the form of theories of small, and large, groups). I think much can be
learned about that topic if one is alive to the manifestations of enactment in the group and in one’s
own responses as a group member. This is very much so in the case of a subject as difficult to think
about as evil. Having said that there is, plainly, a delicate and difficult line to be drawn between the
methodological alertness to phenomena indicating the activity of repression of what needs to be
brought into public discussion, and an analytic sensitivity to the group and individual processes
themselves, which need to be left in the background. I’m certainly not advocating eliding the
distinction between an academic meeting and a psychoanalytic (therapy or training) group.
What I learned from my participation in the mixed psychoanalytic-academic meeting-group of the
colloquium, and from my own reflections, was that what we enacted was 'remaining silent'. The
phrase is Edmund Burke's, which I have taken from his remark to the effect that 'for evil to triumph
it is enough for men of goodwill to remain silent'. In the word ‘remain’ Burke is marking the
voluntariness of not saying something; the remark implies that men of goodwill can, and ‘should’,
speak up against what they perceive to be bad, so that it can be named and resisted. That must
indeed be part of how morally bad states of affairs are averted by human intervention. But I want to
suggest that the relation of silence and evil is more complicated than that, whether or not it is what
Burke himself intended. Before the main part of my paper I want to think a bit more about
remaining silent, and what else enactment might tell us about evil.
There is a French expression (I don't know just where it comes from) which is 'le non dit'. It’s most
directly translated, obviously, as 'the not-said'. It is however an ambiguous phrase, in that we can
understand the ‘what is not said’ in more than one way. First is the ‘excess’ beyond what is said, in
what is meant, what is implied but not said, and which may still be conveyed in different ways:
through irony, satire, denial, allusion, or simply refraining from speech under certain circumstances.
Here the not-said has a positive function or role in human communication. But ‘le non dit’ also
means 'the unsaid' (already a slightly different meaning as the implied) and a further argument could
be made that construed as the ‘not-to-be-said’, it covers the unsayable, and perhaps the
unspeakable, all these being uses with a possible connection to things needing to be said that are
not. A literary or a cultural theorist would bring out the literary relations between the these aspects
of not-saying: for instance the use of one form of the not-said such as irony or satire, to resist,
challenge, subvert or get around the interdiction of the ‘not to be said’, for instance. The different
uses can also be observed, at close quarters, in the psychoanalytic encounter, both in the 1:1
situation of the transference and counter-transference, and in group interactions.
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I’ll confine my remarks to psychoanalysis, where it’s a methodological principle that what can't be
said (for whatever reasons) will come out otherwise, will 'escape' control and come out as Freudian
'slips' and what Freud called parapraxes, more generally theorised as the ‘return of the repressed’.
Unconscious repressed thoughts and wishes ‘return’ by emerging as distortions and traces into the
culture in multifarious ways, into its institutions, practices, texts and material culture and (what
concerns us here) as individual and group enactments. The word ‘enactment’ has a quite specific
meaning here: a charged idea, thought, concept, is ‘fast-tracked’ out of consciousness into action
before it can be reflected on, its immediate emotional charge thereby being dissipated.
Inconvenient and uncomfortable ideas can by this means be voided from consciousness.
This methodological principle enjoining attention to the not-said bears on my ponderings about evil,
following the colloquium I mentioned, and about remaining silent. 'Remaining silent' was enacted in
different ways, listed for expository purposes as the 4 Ds:
displacement of what is talked about into a different time (history), different place (country, culture,
society), different mode of reference (fiction, film, drama, poetry);
disowning of responsibility or involvement (it’s them);
diminishment as the reduction of evil to something else ('nothing more than...');
detachment either intellectual (my own intentional strategy, in fact, by confining myself to the idea
of natural evil) or an affective detachment such as lack of interest, or even depression (which I in fact
felt throughout the colloquium) which vitiates the wish to speak up.
These can be summarised as: ‘not now (history), not here (another culture), not real (fictional), not
really evil (ie envy really), not worth the effort of objecting’... . and most of all, and for us all, ‘not
me’.
One can as I’ve said learn about a topic such as evil, by looking at the enactments - the actions - that
replace thinking about it. In the case of evil itself I’ve suggested that remaining silent can be a form
of enactment (I hope it’s clear enough that remaining silent is not, by itself, an evil act; sometimes,
after all, it’s a good one). These individual and collective enactments, as acts of remaining silent, can
be thought of in philosophical terms as speech acts, which provides a bridge to theorising them
within the different social sciences. One might consider the mechanisms of social control of speech
acts; controls on what is and can be said in the family, in the social group, in organisations. At the
social level of analysis one can look at how the formal and informal institutions of society (the legal
system, the media, the education system) enforce or bring about silence, compliance, collusion. One
might look also at enactment at the levels of politics and economics.
Again, as a philosopher of psychoanalysis, my focus is on these sorts of topics taken as philosophical
ones (rather than as politics, or social theory, or literary theory, though evidently they overlayer one
another) and on how psychoanalysis can illuminate them and add to our philosophical
understanding (what philosophy takes from psychoanalysis). Here, we can think of Freud on the
return of the repressed, the uncanny, etc; also, social theorists who employ psychoanalysis, such as
Habermas on language, as well as Lacanian literary theory, where it seems to me one of Lacan's
more useful contributions is to have linked enactment to language written in the text. But the
Lacanian symbolic does not go beyond language into action, gesture, the pragmatics of speech and
speech acts, which is one route back into what philosophy brings to psychoanalysis.
What I have to say fits into this very large field of enquiry first as a piece of preliminary (conceptual)
analysis, second (I come back to this shortly) as a bridge between psychoanalysis and the social
sciences ‘proper’. My limited aim is to deal with the question of evil only by offering an analytic
definition of natural evil (and a definition of moral evil based on it). I argue that for evil to befall, for
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someone to suffer evil, (to ‘fare badly’, in Ricoeur’s phrase) is at the least, for the individual human
being to suffer a ‘natural’ evil. And, for that, there need to be two components (conditions) in place:
the subjective experience of what I shall be calling an extreme state of mind (or one that threatens
to become extreme) and, the partial or complete absence (the inadequacy) of the social mechanisms
for containment of the individual’s experience so as to name, recognise, acknowledge, or in other
ways to share, a feeling or an experience. By an ‘extreme state of mind’ I mean one with an
‘unthinkable’ phenomenology, that ‘edge’, quality, experiential force that makes us conscious of the
state as ours (its ‘subjectivity’). Everyday examples are nausea, or labour pains; less usual but
paradigmatic are states of panic or terror; also canvassed for inclusion are extreme degrees of some
emotions - fear, sadness, loneliness. I suggest that the connection to the ‘not said’ can be made at
two levels, the social-political level, and the level of the individual unconscious.
First, I maintain that for the natural evil of an extreme state of mind to be mitigated it must be
captured by thought and so, must either be put into words or be otherwise symbolised. And, when
there is the intentional disruption of the possibility of putting such states of mind into words or
otherwise symbolising them, what we have is non-natural, moral, evil. When Burke talks of ‘men of
good will remain(ing) silent’, he means that they remain silent by allowing themselves to be silenced
about the interpersonal, social, and other arrangements that make moral evil possible. I am arguing
(though not Burke, who so far as I know did not mean this) that these are arrangements which
promote or permit the escalation from natural to non-natural (ie moral) evil.
Second I suggest that ‘remaining silent’ (and here again this is not Burke but me,) has the further
meaning that ‘men of good will’, ie ordinary people like us, enact the disruption of the containment
and symbolisation of feeling and experience that produces the evil of un-thought, unthinkable
extreme states of mind in the individual (who is intentionally detached from the structures and
availability of sympathy). We do this through the mental defence mechanisms of: disowning,
diminishing, displacing, distancing – all ways of detaching ourselves from sympathetic engagement
with the other.
Now, the first way of connecting evil and ‘remaining silent’ as ‘being silenced’ with respect to the
relevant social arrangements might invite the response, well we should reflect, resist and speak up.
It’s (just!) a question of being aware of what’s going on, and being clear about one’s moral
responsibilities. But the connection made at the second, individual unconscious, level does not lend
itself to exhortations of this sort since here remaining silent is brought about by collusion,
scotomisation or ‘turning a blind eye’, and all the other defensive manoeuvres and mechanisms.
These can be exploited so as to disable us, and just as much can be unconsciously activated by us
ourselves, so that we disable ourselves; in both cases we are disabled from seeing what there is to
speak up about and what the social arrangements are that we collude in.
This critical-social analysis instances a well-recognised conceptual-explanatory link between
psychoanalysis and social science, in which psychoanalysis figures as critical social theory. It shows
how a psychoanalytic account can be ‘keyed into’ explanations in the social sciences ‘proper’
through the idea that social and political arrangements and structures, and the way these can be
manipulated, and can galvanise individual psychological defences into a collusive, or at any rate a
compliant, response. It also shows that psychoanalysis has something important to contribute to our
understanding of how evil comes about, and how it can do so at the hands of ordinary people.
But now I change direction a bit, since the topic of evil suggests another way that the social and
psychoanalytic/ individual levels of explanation can be linked. I want to retrieve, or at least sketch
how to retrieve, a further, less well explored connection between psychoanalysis and social science.
This is the connection to what in the title of the paper I refer to as ‘sympathy’, as the bridge theory
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between psychoanalysis and the social. Sympathy, properly spelled out, is the theory of the social
that psychoanalysis needs.
I am arguing that it is when the psychological containment of extreme states of mind fails that evil
befalls the mind of the individual. By ‘psychological containment’ I mean, the interpersonal and
mental mechanisms through which human beings communicate, recognise, understand and share
their emotional experience with one another. This is the area in which the theory of sympathy of the
Scottish philosophers Hume and Smith is relevant, as I shall go on to explain. I shall argue that an
extreme state of mind becomes an evil when sympathy is unavailable, or is disrupted, whether from
natural causes or non-naturally through human intention.
I’ve been talking about the relation of psychoanalysis to the social sciences. The theory of ‘sympathy’
provides the outline social theory that psychoanalysis requires to ‘scale up’ its own concept of
identification (‘projective identification’) from the 1:1 relation in the psychoanalytic consulting room
to the social world. I shall give a non-specialist account of this sort of identification (leaving aside the
explanation of identification itself).
Sympathy is a notion at the centre of the philosophy of human social life propounded by the
philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, prominent as ‘Scottish Naturalists’ in the 18th C. Hume is
the theorist here: man’s intellectual achievements and moral nature are dependent on natural
capacities or ‘propensities’. One such natural capacity is the imagination, whose contribution to our
ability to understand and engage with other human beings is crucial. Imagination is the modality of
thought at work in sympathy, and sympathy is the ‘natural propensity’ to read the feelings and
emotions of others from their bodily behaviour in a given physical and social context. Sympathy is
the ‘practical imagination’, the imagination deployed in guiding the behaviour of the individual
herself, so that her actions are responsive to those of others.
Smith describes our capacity to imagine being someone else from our observing their behaviour,
‘reading’ it using the natural responses of our bodies to theirs. He gives examples of (what we would
now call ‘mirroring’ or ‘motor empathy’) a natural unreflective mimicry of the other’s position: ‘the
mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance
their own bodies....’ this is not intentional mimicry after the event, however: ‘When we see a stroke
aimed.....to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own
leg or arm...’.
And, he says we feel for someone being tortured (‘our brother on the rack’) by our imagination
‘representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case’. ‘We conceive ourselves enduring
all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same
person with him’. This is done by our imagination: when we see someone in pain we ‘change places
in fancy with the sufferer’. And, we feel the same feelings to some degree ourselves. ‘It is the
impressions of our own sense only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy’. These are not
‘imaginary feelings’.
So for Hume and Smith sympathy is intrinsically social; it is a response of the imagination to other
human beings which joins them together in a (complex) social relation of understanding feelings and
motives, and predicting behaviour. As the practical imagination, sympathetic reading of another’s
behaviour in a given situation enables us to understand their intentions and to act accordingly. But
at the same time, in the idea that sympathy is a natural imaginative response which reproduces in
the observer the feeling or emotion as it is felt by another person, and where we become that
person ‘in fancy’, we can also see sympathy as a general type of identification.
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Smith also indicates a containing function of sympathy by others: ‘The mind is rarely so disturbed,
but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquillity and sedateness’ (p.28).
‘Society and conversation are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its
tranquillity....’. All in all, though, the theory of sympathy is left undeveloped by the Scottish
philosophers, being largely elaborated to serve their moral and social philosophical projects).
My argument for the equivalence of sympathy and (psychoanalytic) individual-level identification is
that the imagination can be shown to be working in essentially (just) the same way in both. They are
two manifestations of the same psychological ability or mental mechanism, the difference being one
of context (social vs clinical) and ‘level of description’ (‘ordinary vs psychoanalytic psychology).
Sympathy, I’m suggesting, is the ordinary flexible identification that is part of the psychology of
everyday social life, where identifications are not fixed but are continually being made, and then
withdrawn.
It might then be asked, why bother to introduce sympathy at all? Why not just talk about the more
familiar notion of identification, or even ‘empathy’? One reason is that neither of these notions is
well-defined or well theorised, and as I have argued elsewhere, common explanations of what
identification is are unsatisfactory, while ‘empathy’, which has come to stand in for sympathy in
some of its uses, has no real theoretical basis at all. By returning to ‘Scottish sympathy’ we pick up a
well-established tradition of thought (one that descends from Plato on audience responses, and
Roman authors writing on rhetoric and mimicry).
To illustrate my claim that sympathy is the working of ‘ordinary’ identification, I give a (made up)
example from everyday life, which I call ‘the bad teacher and the good teacher’. Take the common
experience of feeling muddled when faced with explaining something to a puzzled student. The bad
teacher feeling this then ‘projects’ this muddle onto, and in the case where he finds a suitable
recipient, into, a student. This is done, unsubtly, by blaming the student, or more subtly by things
that are not said but are conveyed as gesture, tone of voice etc. (eg, failing to pick up or subtly
disregarding moments when the student evinces some degree of understanding, impatiently or
condescendingly re-phrasing clumsy attempts to say something, in ways that disable the student
from thinking through the problem, deprive him of support etc). The end-product is the stupid
student and the triumphantly clever teacher.
The good teacher, by contrast, tries to understand the student’s difficulties and what the student is
(unconsciously) communicating, from his own feelings of muddle, or of irritation. Unlike the first
case, the teacher here accepts feeling muddled and recognises it as something familiar in herself,
and in her imagination she situates herself and her own subjective experience of muddle into the
place of the student; she imagines things from the student’s side, equipped with her own
recognition of the feeling as something familiar to her, something recalled, and now re-lived by her
in the thought ‘I was just like that’. From her ‘reading’ his situation she can use this knowledge to
elicit and respond to the student’s attempts to understand his task. There is a continuous to and fro
of (projective) identification and de-identification, to test her ‘interpretations’ ie her understanding
of what is holding the student up, so as to support his own moves in trying to do the task.
Much more could be said about identification and this form of (central) imagining; in particular, the
analogous way that the analyst uses her imagination to imagine her patient and so, ‘read’ his
unconscious communications to her in her psychoanalytic counter-transference. But, the above
sketch is intended to support my proposal that we can equate the identification naturally and
mutually operating between individuals (and which psychoanalysis observes and theorises at the
‘micro-level’) with sympathy as the natural propensity that supplies, through reciprocity, the
medium for social interaction and understanding. And, I will suggest that, like any natural process
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this can be disrupted, by other natural processes and events, as it also can by the intentional actions
of human beings.
The last step in my argument uses this equating of sympathy with (psychoanalytic) identification to
suggest that the availability of sympathy is the condition under which social containment and
thinking about feeling and experience can occur. This idea of containment is due to Wilfrid Bion, a
Kleinian psychoanalytic theorist who argued that in the analytic situation, as in nurture, one person’s
mind (analyst, parent) can be a container for the feelings and thoughts of another patient, infant),
and that such containment in an available mind enables processing and naming of feelings that an
individual left all alone experiences as inchoate, overpowering, un-thinkable. The idea of being such
a container can be extended to others in the social milieu (Smith on ‘conversation’). Sympathy is the
social availability of psychic containment, in which the experience is ‘thought for’ the sufferer.
We now arrive, finally, at ‘natural evil’ and the contrast I intend to make with ‘non-natural’ evil,
recalling that the claim I shall end with is that ‘moral’ evil is non-natural evil. Here I am making use of
a piece of philosophical terminology. The ‘natural’ - ‘non-natural’ contrast was used by the
philosopher Paul Grice to distinguish two ways we use the word, ‘meaning’. ‘Natural’ meaning is, eg,
‘those spots mean measles’, ‘those clouds mean rain’. ‘Non-natural’ meaning is, ‘he means
business’, ‘those words mean trouble’, ‘he means what he says’, ‘When I say ‘no’ I mean it. The
difference, Grice said, is that non-natural meaning involves the intentions of the speaker towards
another person (‘the hearer’). What I take from Grice is just this idea; that ‘non- natural’ refers to
the intentions of persons vis a vis others.
What I mean by ‘natural’ is less technical; I have already been using the word in connection with
sympathy, as the idea that it is a ‘natural’ capacity, something we have because of our nature as the
sort of creatures we are. We are conscious embodied creatures and we have bodily sensations.
These come with what is called a ‘phenomenology, the ‘edge’ or quality of subjectivity. This too is a
natural fact about us. There are other senses of ‘natural’ that come into the discussion of moral evil,
but we won’t need them here.
With this sense of ‘natural’ in place, what do I mean by ‘natural’ evil? In ordinary usage we have: the
‘evils to which the flesh is heir’, the ‘evils which beset us in this world’; sayings and usages conveying
the idea that we are naturally, as embodied creatures with self-consciousness, ‘heir’ to evils that
come to us from the world inevitably.
The etymology of ‘evil’ (OED) is ’beyond due measure’ (German ‘ueber’ = beyond); my thesis is that
what is ‘beyond due measure’ is a certain sort of experience, that of an ‘extreme’ state of mind. This
‘extremeness’ is phenomenological in the sense I’ve given. The ‘edge’ and force of the experience
‘floods out’ reflective self-consciousness without eliminating consciousness, and it exceeds the
capacity of the person to grasp the experience in thought or, as I want to call it, to achieve
phenomenological capture of the state of mind. Examples I gave are labour pains, and nausea, as
natural and also states of mind induced by natural disasters, the violence of human aggression, and
other traumatic events in the world, states such as terror and panic.
My claim is that the ‘evil’ of such naturally occurring states lies in their ‘beyond-ness’: the extremity
and un-containability of their phenomenology. As is well known, such extremeness can be mitigated
by the available presence of others. The defining feature that I postulate these states to have is that
their phenomenology is such as to elude capture by the mental apparatus of the sufferer, and
consequently the presence of others (with their capacity for sympathy) is the only condition that can
mitigate the experience (apart from the presence of an internal object).
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With this sketch of ’natural evil’ in place I finally suggest that moral evil is non-natural evil, in the
following sense. Moral evil arises when (though perhaps not only when) through the intentional acts
of one person (or, of persons) an extreme state of mind is induced or prolonged in another human
being and its mitigation is intentionally prevented. First, the production (or prolongation) of the
extreme state of mind is intentional (this may be done directly through the bodily pathways and
processes that are naturally available to be manipulated or through psychological means, or by
failing to alleviate a natural evil). And second there is intentional disruption of the resources
available to the individual to contain the experience and so keep it ‘within due limits’. What is
necessary for the inducing of the extreme state to be morally evil is that the doer also intentionally
disrupts the structures that enable sympathy and its containing function, removing the (only)
psychical resource the individual has for achieving phenomenological capture and control. A natural
evil is brought about and maintained intentionally. I suggest this as a criterion for saying when an
act is an evil one.
How does this connect us to the first, introductory part of the paper? There I talked about remaining
silent as enactment of the evil that cannot be talked about. Here is one connection: remaining silent
is failing to indicate solidarity, failing to provide containment (though not always, of course;
sometimes silence models and so performs, containment just as sometimes non-responsiveness
models and so performs, restraint and control); it may then be enacting the disruption of sympathy
by suspending or disabling one’s human responsiveness to other people’s experience.
Louise Braddock
December 2012