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Chapter 2

The Compassion Machine

Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570–1692

How do we imagine the relation between political life and poetic representation? In Jean de La Taille’s “Art de la tragédie,” written between 1570 and 1572, the Huguenot playwright notes that the French court is surrounded by horror “si pitoiable” [“so pitiful”] that tragedy risks being too much after “les piteux desastres advenus nagueres en la France par nos guerres civiles” [“the pitiful disasters which came about of late in France because of our civil wars”].¹ La Taille’s essay, reprinted three times before the end of the wars, insisted that tragedy’s goal is to move its audience through emotion for the “piteuses ruines des grands seigneurs” (226) [“pitiful ruins of great lords”] but that what we see on stage must be distanced from us, depicting someone else’s suffering instead. La Taille’s observations make brief reference to Aristotle and Horace, but he assures his dedicatee Henriette de Clèves that he is suiting his discourse to her ears and not those of the erudite alone. This is a domesticated discourse; it proposes a new commonsense language for writing about tragedy, and it is also bound up in France’s domestic piteousness even as it seeks to distance it. This careful affective distancing will be central to the French stage in the century to follow.

Yet La Taille did not succeed in distancing the memory of the wars, and he did not succeed in distancing Aristotle either.² In this chapter I trace a seventeenth-century story about tragedy, ethics, and pity, showing how a particular Aristotelian formulation about pity comes to structure a century’s reflection on both tragedy and moral life. In the Rhetoric Aristotle maintains that pity is “a certain pain occasioned by an apparently destructive evil or pain’s occurring to one who does not deserve it, which the pitier might expect to suffer himself or that one of his own would.”³ These terms suggesting that pity is a form of fear for ourselves, along with the insistence that the sufferer must not deserve their suffering, are repeated in the Poetics, whose passages on the question provoked vigorous debate in France (even before the text itself was translated into French later in the century). Some early moderns insisted that theatrical pity and terror purged all passions, others that they addressed only the smaller and more precise emotional machinery pertaining to pity and terror themselves.⁴ Yet the Aristotelian formulation was to be found on both sides of that argument and throughout a very broad range of reflections on tragedy or ethics. The standard seventeenth-century reading of pity sees it as never entirely disinterested since the pity one feels for another stems from a fear for one’s own interests, and in describing this position early moderns pulled on one or the other of the Aristotelian source texts, as their interests or professional obligations dictated. The seventeenth century’s reflections on Aristotle sought to theorize suffering in the context of a particular classical tradition and perhaps to hold its horror at bay in so doing.

In this chapter I draw together moral and dramatic theory, two different sorts of accounts that draw on Aristotle’s conception of pity. (I take up more explicitly theological discussions of compassion in Chapter 3; these categories overlap to some extent, but the texts of this chapter draw on a classical as well as a Christian vocabulary and direct themselves more to civility than theology, even if they sometimes imagine the two hand in hand.) In the first section of the chapter I read a series of essayists and moralists in dialog with Aristotle, with slantingly different relations to him; in the second, I ask how dramatic theorists elucidated the Aristotelian formula differently and consider what sort of moral theory they propose. Many of these writers are reading each other. To try and bring out that reading and reflection, I have staged the series chronologically, although they do not form a progression as much as a continual oscillation around two affective positions.

Both moral and dramatic theory often revolved around the affective draw of literary forms. In dramatic theory, of course, the imagined emotional relation between stage and spectator is central to any argument. Moral theory frequently references a staged scene but also calls on a different sort of scene of reading, in which a relation to a literary text brings about a different relation to compassion. In both cases, these reflections on the emotions of aesthetic response gesture to new imaginings of civility and sociality. How does this ideal literary response, either reading or spectating, shape the structures of compassion?

Compassion and the Self: Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Charron

For some commentators of the period, the observation that pity indicates a concern with the self suggested that pity could be only a narrow and almost mean response to suffering, prompted by the self-love so key to the thinking of seventeenth-century moralists. For others, the ritual observation of this same pairing leads to a broader reflection on pity that understands the connection to mark a human vulnerability that cannot be dismissed as mere weakness. Some writers move across this affective spectrum and even mock it. Montaigne clearly draws on the familiar pairing of pity and fear when he notes lightly of his kidney stones that his mind tells him, “La crainte et pitié que le peuple a de ce mal te sert de matiere de gloire.” [“The fear and pity that people feel for this illness is a subject of vainglory for you.”]⁵ Elsewhere he comments on this desire to turn the pitiful self into a spectacle for others, something he describes as “cette humeur puerile et inhumaine, qui faict que nous desirons d’esmouvoir par nos maux la compassion et le deuil en nos amis” [“that childish and inhuman humor that makes us want to arouse compassion and mourning in our friends by our misfortunes”].⁶ Montaigne’s insides are not just pained by kidney stones, for even in the generous movements of compassion, he notes the sharp interior turn of a less pleasing and less definable emotion: “Au milieu de la compassion, nous sentons au dedans je ne sçay quelle aigre-douce poincte de volupté maligne à voir souffrir autruy.” [“In the midst of compassion we feel within us I know not what bittersweet pricking of malicious pleasure in seeing other suffer.”]⁷ Yet Montaigne puts his bittersweet interior into necessary consideration with the wider world. Jean Starobinski argues of “Des coches” that “it is Montaigne’s initial attention to his own bodily discomfort that prepares and makes possible the lively sympathy he feels with the suffering endured by other men, inhabitants of a remote corner of the earth.”⁸ Despite his sharp attention to the self, or rather because of it, Montaigne essays the space for a more supple and generous compassion, as we also saw in the previous chapter.

In contrast, seventeenth-century responses tend to demarcate more sharply the borders between responses to self and others. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero suggests that some people are prone to pity as others might have a proclivity to infirmity; seventeenth-century accounts eagerly subdivide and catalog the various causes of such proclivities, often attributing them to different social types or to different genders.⁹ The neo-Stoic Pierre Charron, usually a keen recycler of Montaigne, sets out these social variants neatly in one small chapter of De la sagesse which seems to draw on Aristotle and Cicero rather than Montaigne as reader of them:

Nous souspirons avec les affligez, compatissons à leur mal, ou pource que par un secret consentement nous participons au mal des uns des autres, ou bien que nous craignions en nous mesmes ce qui arrive aux autres.

Mais cecy se fait doublement, dont y a double misericorde: l’une fort bonne, qui est de volonté, et par effect secourir les affligez sans se troubler ou affliger soy-mesme, et sans se ramollir ou relascher de la Justice ou de la Divinité. C’est la vertu tant recommandée en la Religion, qui se trouve aux Saincts et aux Sages: l’autre est une passion d’ame foible, une sotte et feminine pitié qui vient de mollesse, trouble d’esprit, loge volontiers aux femmes, enfans.¹⁰

[We sigh with the afflicted and compassionate with their suffering either because through a secret consent we participate in the sufferings of others, or because we fear for ourselves what is happening to others.

But this is done doubly, so there is a double kind of mercy: one very good, which is willed, and assists the afflicted without being troubled or afflicted oneself, and without being softened or letting justice or divinity slide. This is the virtue so recommended in religion, which is found in saints and the wise; the other is the passion of the feeble soul, a foolish and feminine pity which comes from softness, a trouble of the mind, and easily resides in women and children.]

Compassion can be the sign of a willed (and secret) choice, or of a weak and womanly pliancy; this gendered distinction will be central to many subsequent separations of good from bad compassion. The Stoic response to compassion teaches us that we can assist but not “flechir et compatir” [“bend and compassionate”]; instead, like a doctor with his patient or a lawyer with his client we must show “diligence et industrie” [“diligence and industry”] without accepting the pain of the other. If woman is the rebuffed negative exemplar of compassion, the troubled weakling who responds too fully, the proper unfurling of compassion is defined through its masculine professionalism.¹¹

Compassion’s Regulations: René Descartes

Descartes’s version of the Aristotelian formula for the relation between pity and fear is the most sustained of the period. In drawing on the theater as an example for discussions of moral life, he exemplifies the tightly bound relation between moral and dramatic theory. Descartes begins his account of pity in Les passions de l’âme by describing its status as a mingling of other passions that arises only in certain circumscribed situations: “La pitié est une espèce de tristesse mêlée d’amour ou de bonne volonté envers ceux à qui nous voyons souffrir quelque mal duquel nous les estimons indignes.” [“Pity is a sort of sadness mingled with love or good will towards those that we see suffer an ill of which we judge them unworthy.”]¹² To Aristotle’s precision on judgment, Descartes adds the carefully parsed relation of each passion to another. Since pity is what he terms a mixed emotion, he divides out his articles in Les passions as if to parse out its varied possibilities. In the following article, Descartes draws on Aristotle to note that pity’s intrinsic fear for the self means that the emotion is a mark of weakness:

Ceux qui se sentent fort faibles et fort sujets aux adversités de la fortune semblent être plus enclins à cette passion que les autres, à cause qu’il se représentent le mal d’autrui comme leur pouvant arriver; et ainsi ils sont émus à la pitié plutôt par l’amour qu’il se portent à eux-mêmes que par celle qu’ils ont pour les autres.¹³

[Those who feel weak and subject to the adversities of fortune seem more inclined to this passion than others, since they imagine the sufferings of another as something that could happen to themselves; and they are thus moved to pity more through self-love than though love for others.]

With a modicum less disdain but also following Aristotle, the Christianizing Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche makes the same consignment of compassion to the weak (this time distinguishing women as likely compassionaters) in De la recherche de la vérité, as I discussed in the introduction. For Malebranche and his very bodily philosophy, feeling for a suffering other has most effect “dans les fibres d’un corps délicat” [“in the fibers of a delicate body”].¹⁴ This broadly Stoic position on pity imagines the emotion as a mark of moral or physical weakness, regarding an oversensibility to suffering as a block to rational reflection. For both Descartes and Malebranche, the problematic example of pity is part of a larger system of reflection on the place of the passions within rationality. In forming his general system, however, Descartes distinguishes between different forms of pity allowed to different social or moral types.

In the following article, Descartes goes on to propose a more redemptive vision of pity, for he distinguishes between two kinds of feeling or rather two kinds of feelers: whereas for the weak pity marks a fear for the self, stronger minds will feel for others in a more admirable way.

Mais néanmoins ceux qui sont les plus généreux et qui ont l’esprit le plus fort, en sorte qu’ils ne craignent aucun mal pour eux et se tiennent au-delà du pouvoir de la fortune, ne sont pas exempts de compassion lorsqu’ils voient l’infirmité des autres hommes et qu’ils entendent leurs plaintes. Car c’est une partie de la genérosité que d’avoir de la bonne volonté pour un chacun.¹⁵

[But nonetheless those who are the most noble (generous) and who have the strongest mind, so that they fear nothing for themselves and imagine themselves to be out of reach of fortune, are not exempt from compassion when they see the infirmity of other men and hear their woes. For it is a part of generosity to have good will for all.]

Descartes’s use of the term “généreux” allows for a particular social inflection of the structures of fellow-feeling. The “généreux,” in seventeenth-century French, is noble: he who acts without self-interest and without expectation of return, in a display of expenditure.¹⁶ For Descartes, only such a noble figure can imagine himself beyond fortune and thus take pleasure in a benevolent compassion. To describe the particularity of such pleasure, Descartes draws upon a literary structure, describing the way a spectator feels for the tragic events seen on stage:

Mais la tristesse de cette pitié n’est pas amère; et, comme celle que causent les actions funestes qu’on voit représenter sur un théâtre, elle est plus dans l’extérieur et dans le sens que dans l’intérieur de l’âme, laquelle a cependant la satisfaction de penser qu’elle fait ce qui est de son devoir, en ce qu’elle compatit avec des affligés. Et il y a en cela de la différence, qu’au lieu que le vulgaire a compassion de ceux qui se plaignent … le principal objet de la pitié des plus grands hommes est la faiblesse de ceux qu’ils voient à se plaindre. (art. 187, 233–34)

[But the sadness of this pity is not bitter; and, like that brought about by the tragic actions we see on stage, it remains more in the exterior and in the senses than in the inside of the soul, which however has the satisfaction of thinking that it does its duty in feeling compassion for the afflicted. And therein lies the difference, that whereas the vulgar have compassion for those who bewail their sufferings, the principal object of the pity of the greatest men is the weakness of those whom they see thus complaining.]

Theater is the model for a better-regulated fellow-feeling, in which the “généreux” feels for the other with a certain degree of distance but never stoops to imagining a similarity between them.¹⁷ In drawing on this example, Descartes seems to rewrite Augustine, who in the Confessions critiques the pleasurable but illusory pity he felt in the theaters of his Carthaginian youth.¹⁸ In contrast, Descartes’s theatrical pleasure observes and maintains the distinction between suffering and its spectator; pity is redeemed through a particular model of the theater. The ideal compassion is not immediate but mediated through distance and detachment; this model of theater, likewise, insists on distance rather than on immediate likeness and emotional contagion.

Descartes sets out another example of such exteriorized pity in article 147, where in discussing the interior emotions generated by the soul (as opposed to the passions suffered) he suggests that the different movements of such emotions can become entangled, giving us the troubling example of a husband who weeps at his wife’s funeral even though he is glad she is dead: “Il se peut faire que quelques restes d’amour ou de pitié qui se présentent à son imagination tirent de véritables larmes de ses yeux, nonobstant qu’il sente cependant une joie secrète dans le plus intérieur de son âme.” [“It can happen that some remainder of love or pity which comes to his imagination pulls real tears from his eyes, even though he feels a secret joy in the depths of his soul.”]¹⁹

We have seen something like this mingled emotion in the histoires tragiques of Chapter 1, and we will see it again in the nouvelles historiques of Chapter 4. Descartes, though, turns to this snippet not as the seed of a narrative but as a way to account for intellectualized emotions, and the example he gives is again based on a literary structure, this time imagining someone both reading and seeing a play:

Et lorsque nous lisons des aventures étranges dans un livre, ou que nous les voyons représenter sur un théâtre, cela excite quelquefois en nous la tristesse, quelquefois la joie, ou l’amour, ou la haine … mais avec cela nous avons du plaisir de les sentir exciter en nous, et ce plaisir est une joie intellectuelle qui peut aussi bien naître de la tristesse que de toutes les autres passions.

[And when we read strange adventures in a book, or we see them represented on stage, sometimes that excites sadness in us, sometimes, joy, or love, or hatred … but along with that we are pleased to feel those passions excited in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy which can as well be born of sadness as of all the other passions.]

In this account, as Henry Phillips has suggested, there is no suggestion (as there will be from defenders of the theater) that drama could be a didactic force.²⁰ Rather, the story serves as an example of an emotional exteriority. What we see at the theater, and the way we respond to it, cannot (and should not) affect our interior and secret emotion.²¹

For Descartes, this distancing theater serves as a model for how we should experience the world: our response to events in general should be more like our literary or theatrical response. In a letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia (May 18, 1645), he tells her how “les plus grandes âmes” [“the greatest souls”] are able to consider the events of fortune “comme nous faisons ceux des comédies” [“as we do those of comedies”].²² Watching “les histoires tristes et lamentables” [“sad and lamentable stories”] at the theater, Descartes notes, can make such people cry, but they also take satisfaction in them, just as seeing their friends suffer “elles compatissent à leur mal, et font tout leur possible pour les en délivrer” [“they compassionate with their suffering, and do all they can to alleviate it”].²³ The pleasure they take in carrying out their duty has more effect on them than the first affliction of compassion.

In our modern distinction between the two notions, we might term Descartes’s superior model a distanced pity rather than compassion, although the distinction between those two terms is not yet fully determined in this period.²⁴ Without venturing into such loaded descriptions, though, we can say that Descartes distinguishes between a narrow and a larger understanding of the emotion’s scope. Descartes casts the “généreux” as a Stoic who feels not for the material difficulty of the afflicted but rather for the smallness of mind that allows the afflicted to think of material loss as suffering, since Stoic objections to compassion imagined softheartedness for material conditions to obfuscate more truly important claims.²⁵ This careful appraisal of and response to suffering displays a true mastery of the self.²⁶ Compassion is a chosen reaction, applied neatly and precisely to the suffering object without contaminating the feeling subject.

Descartes particularly valued the proper exercise and taming of passions, and in this model the theater becomes a privileged model for imagining the proper emotional life, a rational emotional life. But this is not the theater of the distracting and illusory emotion described by Augustine; rather, the theatrical pity Descartes imagines is almost juridical, both regular and capable of regulating its object. In casting theater as the model for a regulation of compassion, Descartes imagines theater as a compassion machine which sorts and disposes self and suffering other in the appropriate fashion, insisting on a firm distinction between suffering and the spectator, he who is the object of compassion and he who experiences it. In this model of theater, the ideal spectator must never imagine any similarity between what he sees on stage and his own life. Descartes’s theatrical pity does not create a bond but rather works to police existing barriers.

Gender and Civility: Madeleine de Scudéry

Descartes does not gender his distinction between the généreux and the feeble compassionate in the way that Charron does when he assigns the latter role to women and children. The notion that women were easily and irrationally drawn to a feeble compassion was standard in contemporary writing on women. Du Bosc’s L’honnête femme (1632–36) insisted on the naturalness of women’s pity and suggests that their habitual leaning to “douceur,” “clémence,” or “tendresse” [sweetness, clemency, tenderness] stems from their weak nature.²⁷ In contrast, Descartes’s scrupulous separation of the lofty from the ordinary allows for the existence of superior female virtues such as that of his correspondent Elisabeth of Bohemia.

Descartes’s distinction, turning on social rank rather than gender, would be recycled by a writer who abandoned Du Bosc’s understanding of tendresse as weakness to build instead one of her greatest texts around a new ethic of tendresse particularly available to women, though only certain women. In Clélie, Madeleine de Scudéry holds tenderness to be “une certaine sensibilité de cœur, qui ne se trouve presque jamais souverainement, qu’en des personnes qui ont l’âme noble, les inclinations vertueuses, et l’esprit bien tourné, et qui fait que, lorsqu’elles ont de l’amitié … elles sentent si vivement toutes les douleurs, et toutes les joies de ceux qu’elles aiment, qu’elles ne sentent pas tant leurs propres” [“a certain sensibility of the heart, which almost never rules except in persons with a noble soul, virtuous inclinations, and a well-turned wit, such that, when they are friends with someone, they feel all the pains and all the joys of those they love in so lively a fashion that they feel their own the less”].²⁸ Scudéry clings to the notion of a social refinement that shapes emotional capacity. It is Clélie’s nobility, as well as her gender, that makes her exceptionally able to wield tenderness with the proper social competence, with “la civilité et l’exactitude” (117) [“the civility and exactitude”] demanded. The social homogeneity of the characters in Clélie means that compassion as a response to difference counts less than civility, an emotional capacity played out in exteriorized social acts. Like seventeenth-century compassion, civility implies a gesture toward others even as it remains bound by a rigidly hierarchal structure. But where discussions of compassion in this period figure it chiefly as the response to a particular instance of suffering, Scudéry’s ethic of tenderness describes a more diffused and less event-responsive emotional disposition dependent on the rhetoric of friendship. If compassion presents itself as a response dependent on distinctions, in Clélie Scudéry instead sets out a new language more akin to empathy, entering into the other’s emotional experience, but only another with whom one shares similarities and who does not step out of the bounds of civility. By 1680, Scudéry would have a character mock the kinds of people “dont toute la Conversation n’est que de longs Recits pitoyables & funestes, extremement ennuyeux” [“whose whole conversation is only long pitiful and mournful tales, extremely boring”]; in civil conversation, the sorts of stories that might generate compassion quickly move outside the social norm.²⁹

Rhetorical Reworkings: François de La Rochefoucauld

Another midcentury commentator on civility set out a troublingly untender vision of compassion which delighted in playing with earlier writings in the tradition. In 1659, La Rochefoucauld published an anonymous self-portrait, suggesting that he sought to be the sort of ideally distanced compassionate extolled by Descartes:

Je suis peu sensible à la pitié et je voudrais ne l’y être point du tout. Cependant, il n’est rien que je ne fisse pour le soulagement d’une personne affligée et je crois effectivement que l’on doit tout faire, jusques à lui témoigner même beaucoup de compassion de son mal, car les misérables sont si sots que cela leur fait le plus grand bien du monde, mais je tiens aussi qu’il faut se contenter d’en témoigner et se garder soigneusement d’en avoir. C’est une passion qui n’est bonne à rien au-dedans d’une âme bien faite, qui ne sert qu’à affaiblir le cœur et qu’on doit laisser au peuple qui, n’executant jamais rien par raison, a besoin de passions pour le porter à faire des choses.³⁰

[I am not easily touched by pity, and wish I were not at all, although there is nothing I would not do to comfort people in affliction, and indeed I believe that one should do everything, even to the point of showing great compassion for their sufferings, for misery makes people so stupid that such pity does them all the good in the world. But I also hold that one should not go beyond showing pity, and take the greatest care not to feel it oneself. This passion should have no place in a noble soul, for it only makes one softhearted, and it should be left to the common people, for they never do anything because of reason and have to be moved to action by their emotions.]³¹

La Rochefoucauld’s rejection of pity, like that of Descartes, sets out a distinction between greater souls and the vulgar. He indicates his profound civility but also his concomitant desire to keep himself at a distance; he goes on to say that he likes his friends, although he does not show it in “caresses.” This is a Stoic rejection of pity, made all the more compelling for being told in the first person with an account of that person’s struggles; here, the theories of antiquity are turned into a very seventeenth-century self-portrait.

What happens when that moral world of the portrait becomes concentrated in the form of the maxim? La Rochefoucauld’s carefully poised barbs stay familiarly in the territory set out by Descartes, and also turn around the Aristotelian linking of pity with fear, but his characteristic renaming of virtue lends the familiar material a virtuosic rhetorical turn: “Ce qu’on nomme libéralité n’est le plus souvent que la vanité de donner, que nous aimons mieux que ce que nous donnons.”³² [“What is called generosity is most often just the vanity of giving, which we like more than what we give”] (72). This critique of generous emotions and actions participates in the important tradition of paradiastole, in which one redescribes something so that it may be seen in a different light than usual, a trope central to the moralist project. The famous maxim “Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés” [“Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise”] (37), which La Rochefoucauld sets as the epigram of his 1678 edition, is a baseline example of the trope, central to early modern political writing.³³ In La Rochefoucauld’s reformulation of the Aristotelian-Cartesian position, the maxim’s pithiness and its presence among other paradiastolic zingers makes it seem as though he is reversing a standard position rather than simply repeating a very old insight. The sense of effort apparent in the self-portrait disappears, and in its place comes a generalized position. In maxim 264, we find an edited reworking of the familiar formula:

La pitié est souvent un sentiment de nos propres maux dans les maux d’autrui; c’est une habile prévoyance des malheurs où nous pouvons tomber; nous donnons du secours aux autres, pour les engager à nous en donner en des semblables occasions, et ces services que nous leur rendons sont, à proprement parler, des biens que nous nous faisons à nous-mêmes par avance.³⁴

[Pity is often feeling our own sufferings in those of others, a shrewd precaution against misfortunes that may befall us. We give help to others so that they have to do the same for us on similar occasions, and these kindnesses we do them are, to put it plainly, gifts we bestow on ourselves in advance.] (72)

The mimetic power of the maxim means that already by Richelet’s dictionary of 1680 La Rochefoucauld’s iteration is given as the first usage under the definition of “pitié”:

Compassion. Douleur qu’on a du mal d’autrui. (La pitié est souvent un sentiment de nos propres maux dans les maux d’autrui. C’est une habile prévoiance des maux où nous pouvons tomber. Mémoires de Monsieur le Duc de la Roche-Foucaut.)³⁵

[Compassion, A pain one has for the suffering of another. (Pity is often feeling our own sufferings in those of others. It is a shrewd precaution against misfortunes that may befall us. Memoirs of Monsieur le Duc de la Roche-Foucaut.)]

Richelet’s speedy recycling of La Rochefoucauld sets the moralist up on the same standing as Aristotle, whose Rhetoric is the first text cited under his definition of “compassion.” If Descartes considers Aristotle within the terms of a seventeenth-century philosophy of the passions, it is La Rochefoucauld’s spin on that conversation which fixes and Frenchifies the pity-fear dyad within the terms of worldly observation. This is not the redemption of pity that Descartes sees in the disinterest of the “généreux”; rather, it is a canny accrual of compassion points. In La Rochefoucauld’s rhetorically deft handling of the question, the economically inflected language of the moralist tradition allows him almost to mock pity as a form of anxious savings policy. This economic language will be taken up not only by the Richelet dictionary but also by other devoted readers.

Christian Emotional Economies: Jacques Esprit

For Jacques Esprit, a Jansenist collaborator of La Rochefoucauld, pity is a force which regulates all social transactions.³⁶ In La fausseté des vertus humaines (1678) Esprit describes a complicated collaboration between Providence and personal intervention that attenuates human suffering:

La vie de l’homme est sujette à tant de sortes de maux, d’infortunes et de traverses, qu’il seroit presque toûjours consumé d’ennuis et de déplaisirs, si personne n’étoit sensible à ses peines et ne prenoit soin de les adoucir: Mais la Providence a pourvû à son soulagement d’une manière admirable par les différentes liaisons qu’elle a établies entre les hommes; car ces liaisons les engagent à s’intéresser à ce qui les touché, et à s’assister mutuellement.³⁷

[The life of men is subject to so many kinds of ills, infortunes and setbacks, that they would be almost always consumed by sorrow or displeasure, if no one were aware of our sufferings and took no care to soften them. But the foresight of Providence has provided relief in an admirable way through establishing various relations between men; for these relations bring them to be interested in what touches them, and to help each other mutually.]

Providence provides not just family but also a larger sense of shared humanity:

Mais comme la proximité du sang ne s’étend qu’à un petit nombre de personnes, et que l’amitié est encore plus limitée, la pluspart des miserables seroient abandonnés, si la même Providence n’eût trouvé le secret de les joindre aux plus heureux par la nature qui leur est commune. (368)

[But since the proximity of blood extends only to a small number of persons, and since friendship is even more limited, most sufferers would be abandoned had not this same Providence found the secret to join them to the happiest through their common nature.]

In this case, pity is a contrivance that brings together divine and human assistance. Those who feel pity provide a sort of social service for those without friends or family; they “tendent les mains aux personnes qui leur sont le plus indifférentes” (368) [“reach out their hands to those with whom they have no connection”]. For Esprit, our self-love certainly underwrites such an emotion; when we see people who help the poor, he notes that

quoy que leurs actions nous persuadent qu’ils ont une veritable compassion des afflictions et des miseres de leur prochain, ce sont des gens qui n’ont pitié que d’eux-mêmes, qui se servent, s’assistent et se soulagent en la personne des autres. (371–72)