Person:

Frazer, Michael

Contemporary theorists critical of the current vogue for compassion might like to turn to Friedrich Nietzsche as an obvious ally in their opposition to the sentiment. Yet this essay argues that Nietzsche's critique of compassion is not entirely critical, and that the endorsement of one's sympathetic feelings is actually a natural outgrowth of Nietzsche's immoralist ethics. Nietzsche understands the tendency to share in the suffering of their inferiors as a distinctive vulnerability of the spiritually strong and healthy. Their compassion, however, is an essential element of the imaginative creativity that Nietzsche holds to be the goal of human existence. Although shared suffering may prove debilitating for some, great individuals must come to affirm their compassion as necessary in achieving accurate knowledge of the human condition.

John Rawls shares the Enlightenment’s commitment to finding moral and political principles which can be reflectively endorsed by all individuals autonomously. He usually presents reflective autonomy in Kantian, rationalist terms: autonomy is identified with the exercise of reason, and principles of justice must be constructed which are acceptable to all on the basis of reason alone. Yet David Hume, Adam Smith and many other Enlightenment thinkers rejected such rationalism, searching instead for principles which can be endorsed by all on the basis of all the faculties of the human psyche, emotion and imagination included. The influence of these sentimentalists on Rawls is clearest in his descriptive moral psychology, but I argue that it is also present in Rawls’s understanding of the sources of normativity. Although this debt is obscured by Rawls’s explicit “Kantianism,” his theory would be strengthened by a greater understanding of its debts to the sentimentalist Enlightenment.

Arthur Melzer deserves considerable credit for amassing a remarkable collection of evidence that most pre-modern and early modern philosophers wrote that esotericism was widely practiced. It does not follow, however, that esotericism was actually as widely practiced as these authors claim it was. If we are to take esotericism seriously, we must consider the possibility that these discussions of esotericism are themselves written esoterically. Considering this possibility raises puzzles related to, but distinct from, the classical conundrum of the liar’s paradox. Despite the difficulty of these puzzles, there is no evading the fact that, under Melzer’s own account of esotericism, philosophers have a wide variety of reasons to write about esotericism esoterically. These reasons apply, not only to the authors that Melzer discusses, but also to Melzer himself.