Presence by Kleinberg Ethan;Ghosh Ranjan; & ETHAN KLEINBERG

Author:Kleinberg, Ethan;Ghosh, Ranjan; & ETHAN KLEINBERG
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6919-0
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

For Smith, even more clearly than Hume, sympathy—our involuntary and unavoidable association of ourselves with those around us which, Smith begins by saying, even the greatest ruffians and the most selfish in some degree share—brings the other home to ourselves, breaches the wall that separates self and other and makes the other’s pain to some extent involuntarily our own, so that “we…tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.”

Here, I think, lies one important explanation for the odd proliferation of barriers and walls so prevalent today. Whatever geopolitical policies and material ambitions legitimate them, these walls create a protective distance that human sympathies always in some measure threaten to breach. Whereas they seem intended to keep foreigners out, they more importantly expel or abject the strangers who, we struggle not to think, are already at home in our hearts and minds. In the picture above, the woman’s presence and her suffering are distanced by the meanings ascribed to the wall behind her. Even her clothes come laden with significances that conceal not only her body but also her being. The scarf on her head might signify Muslim piety and allegiance to Hamas, or it might afford the sort of protection against wind and weather that women of my mother’s generation seldom left home without. In the context of contemporary American and Western understandings of Arab women, a headscarf cannot but resonate with religious and political meanings. Like the meaning of the wall—protective barrier or punitive enclosure—Arab women’s heads in the East and in the West remain very much an issue of contention, and very few Arab women actually get to be present in the dispute.10

In the realm of politics, whose borders Gumbrecht’s impatience with meaning would like to leave at least momentarily behind, sympathy and presence have long played a complicated part especially when artists have dreamed that an aesthetics (for what is the question of fellow feeling and compassion but an aesthetic question?) of sympathy might settle moral and political issues on a more solid basis than the seemingly endless and endlessly wearing contentions of news media and political debate seem to allow. In this connection, any student of sympathy within the borders of the United States thinks immediately of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose appeal to “right” feeling originates in the author’s own fatigue with the meanings of the world, a fatigue similar to the weariness Gumbrecht and Nancy register as they turn away from meaning and toward presence. “See, then, to your sympathies in this matter!” she enjoins her readers speaking of slavery at her novel’s end, “for your sympathies, if they be in harmony with Christ’s, will preserve your sensibility and judgment from the perversions of “worldy policy” and its “sophistries.”11 Earlier in the novel, readers will remember, Stowe offers an object lesson in how such sympathies communicate (perhaps propagate would be a better word) through presence. In an oft-cited chapter, Stowe takes the reader into a U.S. senator’s home. There she stages a debate between the senator and his wife on the vexatious issue of slavery.

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