42.

What, Susan Sontag wonders, is a proper reaction to another’s suffering? In Regarding the Pain of Others, she asks whether photographic representations of another’s agony, no matter how well-intentioned, can ever transcend exploitation and produce authentic, ameliorative empathy. She acknowledges that certain images—such as the “snapshot of the little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, his hands raised, being herded to the transport to a death camp”—can function as “objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as secular icons, if you will.” But this kind of encounter is unlikely, if not impossible, in our contemporary culture, which in general lacks the “sacred or meditative” spaces conducive to genuine thinking and feeling. Most of our public spaces are megastores or airports or museums—places not meant for seriousness.

Sontag believes that depictions of suffering even in the most reverential museums are cheapened by babbling tourists, busy educational programs, and crowded walls. She wonders if pictures in a book might represent the pain of others more effectively. At least one usually looks at a book in private, and so is more likely to apprehend the hurting. But the time with the book will end, and the intensity of the emotion, regardless of its initial force, will fade.

The problem isn’t only exploitation. It’s also our emotional response. Most of us try to whip up sympathy in the face of harrowing pictures. But as Sontag argues, “the imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between faraway sufferers … and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power.” Sympathy in fact removes us from the agony, because it is based on the idea that we “are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.”

For Sontag, only when we set aside sympathy—assuming we’ve already rejected sentimentality, the romanticization of suffering—can we potentially reflect on how “our privileges are located on the same map as suffering and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others.” It is possible, though unlikely, that the images of the pain of others might supply an “initial spark” to this shouldering of responsibility.

How does this sharing of responsibility occur? I’ve said that morbid curiosity—as opposed to traumatic shock before the horrific and to reduction of the gruesome to commodity—can be a muse to empathetic imagination, which isn’t the ability to feel for someone in pain (this is sympathy) but the capacity to feel with the tormented person, to achieve emotional unity and like intensity. Practicing empathy, one elevates to what the theologian Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” connection, in which the beholder, by way of charitable imagination, opens to the complex, unique fullness of the beheld, and grasps, if only for a second, what it’s like to exist as this being and no other and thus what this person (or creature) requires for its thriving and how, with labor, to grant it.

Moments of such imaginative intimacy, I’m sure Sontag would have agreed, are extremely rare, maybe even nonexistent. But does it matter if this transcendence lacks palpable reality? Can’t it stand as an ideal toward which we generously aspire, an inaccessible goal that nonetheless calls forth actual deeds that make us and our world more alive?

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus, suggests that this kind of empathetic transcendence, infrequent though it might be, is possible. It occurs when we become unselfishly attuned to permanent sorrow. Stephen focuses on tragedy, the aesthetic devoted to suffering. He agrees with Aristotle: the tragic inspires fear and pity. However, Stephen thinks that Aristotle neglected to define these emotions sufficiently. He proposes to do so.

He draws a distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic fear and pity. For Stephen, these emotions lack aesthetic power—they are not beautiful—when they are kinetic. Pity can decline into a desire for the shallow pleasure of self-satisfaction. “Look at those poor African children; I’m glad I’m not in their place, and it sure makes me feel good to send them money.” This fall into egocentrism is pornographic, a reduction of the suffering into an object to be consumed. This inclination is kinetic because it is a movement toward something. Fear can likewise become degraded; it can turn into mere loathing, an impulse to move from a phenomenon. “The images of African hunger show the world’s terrible injustice; I blame capitalistic greed for this, and denounce this economic system as evil.” When this revulsion occurs, fear is didactic, a self-righteous disgust toward what offends. The kinetic—the nonaesthetic—comforts the ego, reassuring it with conventional sentimentality or prudery, and alienates it from actual pain.

In contrast, a proper aesthetic encounter, though static in nature, throws us into the suffering: it disarms the narcissist’s pornography and didacticism and frees pity and fear to be what they should be. Correct pity, or tragic pity, doesn’t evoke sentimental yearning for a pained object but “arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.” The legitimate fear inspired by tragedy is also connective. It doesn’t induce aversion from the fearsome event. Instead, it “arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” In both cases, the beholder of the event elevates from particular to general—from the unique torment of this unprecedented moment to the enduring gravity of the human condition. The viewer realizes that he is fundamentally linked to this episode. Through pity, he suffers with the person in torment; through fear, he understands the terrorizing powers. He comprehends victim and victimizer both, the agony and his implication in it.

When the witness achieves empathy with the object—which can be verbal or visual or aural—he recognizes it as an “esthetic image.” Such an image possesses three qualities. First, it strikes the beholder as a cogent, discrete event, “selfbounded and selfcontained,” unique in its emergence from “the immeasurable background of space and time.” It shines as just this image, and nothing else. It has integrity, integritas. With this awareness comes another: the unity is not simple but a gathering of disparate parts into a dynamic harmony. The image, though one, is also many, a coalescence of complexity. It has consonance, consonantia. Together, unity and diversity generate radiance, claritas : revelation of the object’s inmost essence, the fullness and force of its identity. Encountering this threefold brilliance, one undergoes “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state … [an] enchantment of the heart.”