The Compassionate Instinct

The job of writers or actors is to write or act in such a way that the reader/audience experiences these rasas. The Indian theorists thought that we experienced rasas because, by means of the suggestiveness of the poetry and the actors’ skills, memories would be brought to mind from the whole range of past lives. We moderns would probably now say that we experience emotions even from outside our own experience because of our kinship with the rest of humanity. But here is the important point that was stressed by the Indian theorists: rasas are like everyday emotions, except that we experience these literary emotions without the thick crust of egotism that often blinds us to the implications of our ordinary emotions in our daily lives. For instance, if we are sexually attracted to someone in ordinary life, we can become rather selfish. Indeed in the West, falling in love is often given as a reason for suspending other social obligations. In a play or novel, however, we not only feel empathically with the character in love, but can feel with other characters as well. The idea of a rasa is that we can feel the emotion, but also understand its social implications without our usual, often self-interested, involvement. We can experience the energizing aspects of love, but also—depending on the context—understand its potential effects on others.

You may be surprised to learn that in the West, the person who seems to have been the first to write about empathic processes in literature was Adam Smith, who became famous for his ideas about how the market regulated itself as if by an “invisible hand.” Smith’s abiding interest was in the glue that holds society together. His first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it he argued that an important component of this glue is what I am here calling empathy, which he called sympathy or compassion. Reading, he argued, draws on sympathy, because we necessarily become an interested but “impartial spectator” in other lives. We become involved in what is going on in the story, but not as if it were happening to us directly. We might become angry in sympathy with a protagonist, but without the narrow-minded vindictiveness that can occur when injustices affect us directly. The argument is the same as that of the rasa theorists, although it seems unlikely that Smith knew about them.

Reading certain kinds of fiction, then, is the very model of how we might properly view events in our social world. It is right that they engage our emotions, as if they were happening to someone with whom we are closely involved, but not directly to us. In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory—but in a safe space. In this space, we can, as it were, practice empathy. We can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our ability to feel with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or too threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can better understand why people act the way they do, and react with caution, even compassion, toward them.

In her book Poetic Justice, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken Adam Smith’s argument further and claimed that reading, particularly of certain novels, not only uses our faculties as sympathetic spectators, but exercises them in such a way as to make us better citizens when it comes to social issues such as justice. Nussbaum points out that what we really mean by justice is not just mechanically applying a rule book. It involves being able to understand imaginatively and deeply what is going on both for perpetrators and for victims. It is hard to think how this can be better achieved than through certain kinds of literature. Even some television shows, such as Law and Order, are written to enable the viewer to enter imaginatively into both sides of issues such as racism, women’s rights, and questions about whether people who are seriously mentally ill can act voluntarily.