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1 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 2 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. 3 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 4 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 5 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. 6 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 7 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). 8 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