The Night of the Wake

The father had been ill for two years, and died one autumn before dawn. On the night of the wake the elder son wept several times. Afterwards he could say roughly what he had been thinking each time: once it was of what lay ahead, “what will I do now”; once, watching the mourners bow one after another, it was that “everyone must die”; and once it was when his younger brother came through the door. In his last six months the father had still often asked about the younger son marrying. It had not happened in time.

This is a constructed example from the special study of the Laughter Series, Judgment and Weeping; it does not recount any real person. The paper asks: what was he weeping over? His own loss, his father’s pain passing over into him, or something else? The several weepings of that night need not be of one kind, and the paper’s answer holds for one kind only.

The papers of the Laughter Series looked at laughter. The Overview has a sentence about laughter’s two neighbours: “Weeping and fear both focus on the construct: weeping is the construct lost, ‘it’s gone’; fear is the construct threatened, perhaps about to be gone. Laughter focuses on the remainder.” The special study takes up that sentence, turns around to look at weeping, and puts its weight on 15DD.

What the paper treats is a weeping of this kind: he has lost something within some construct; I judge “this loss is his,” acknowledge him as an end, and do not take it over as mine; I am pained over it, and the pain is my pain; weeping follows, as the cannot-not that comes after the emotion. It is called the weeping of non dubito. Weeping from pain, weeping from fear of separation and weeping over one’s own loss are all real weeping; they are not unimportant, they simply lie outside what the paper discusses. With the elder son as “I” and the father as “he,” what is to be pursued from that night is the third weeping.

The Loss Has Begun

First, the two words of the Laughter Series. A construct is any way of grasping that is currently in operation: an expectation, a definition, a set of manners, a person’s understanding of his own situation; the constructs common in weeping are a plan, a shared life, a belief. A remainder is the point that this construct has not fully taken in, and that is nonetheless right there before one’s eyes. Laughter focuses on the remainder; weeping and fear both focus on the construct, and they differ in tense.

Fear falls on prediction: the construct may be about to be gone, and the loss still lies ahead. Weeping falls on structure: something has already been lost within the construct; the loss has begun. The line is drawn at “the loss has already begun.” To use it, one must first say which construct is meant. Someone who weeps on the day of the diagnosis may have lost, at that moment, the construct of “a future one could count on”; but then every weeping over the future could be renamed a loss of the future one could count on, and the line could no longer be falsified. So the paper adds independent markers: look at what the person says and does afterwards, whether the drift of talk falls on what is already gone (“we had agreed that after retirement…”) or on what may yet come (“how much longer,” “will he be in pain”). The drift of talk is a fallible hint, not inferred backwards from whether there was weeping; where several shares of attention are mixed and cannot be told apart, they count neither as falsification nor as confirmation.

Entry is decided by “the loss judged at this moment to have begun”; whether it is factually so is checked separately; otherwise weeping on a misjudgment would be shut out at the front door by “something has in fact been lost.” When someone close is gravely ill, one can fear that he will go, and one can also weep over what he has already lost: his health, his plans, the days as they used to be. The two shares are recorded separately, and the tense is checked item by item.

Mencius says: “when people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, all have a heart of alarm and commiseration.” The child has not yet fallen. Alarm, which Zhu Xi glosses as “the look of being startled,” is on the side of fear. Commiseration, which Zhu Xi glosses character by character as “the urgency of hurt” and “the depth of pain,” is pain, not startlement: a pain before the loss, pressing right on this line. The paper does not force it onto one side; it lists it among the remainders at the end of the paper, the questions left open.

What is lost? The paper gives three examples, no more than examples: a shared life can no longer go on; a path of action has lost its feasibility; the grounds of a belief have been withdrawn. That a construct is “present” means that it can be called to mind and looked back on at this moment, not that it persists; when a person has died, the constructs concerned can still be looked back on, and mourning is directed at them. Nor does the paper say that the construct he lived in has broken; it says that he has lost something within this construct. An oppressive arrangement can run very smoothly, while what is damaged is the person.

Checking the List

Paper III of the Laughter Series describes a single moment: still tense while checking the results list, one sees the word “admitted.” That paper distinguishes two landing points; the special study adds two more: wry laughter, taken from Section 4 of Paper III, and weeping for joy, its own extension of Paper III, 4.1. All four concern the one checking the list himself, at 14DD. Attention falls on “already done,” which is a remainder, and so there is laughter: the laughter of triumph. Attention stays on “it nearly didn’t come off just now,” and what comes out is belated fear, not laughter. Attention falls on the cost of these years, seen as the point this purpose did not take in, and so there is wry laughter: “my hair has gone white over it.” Attention falls on the same cost, seen as something he has himself lost within this construct, and so there is weeping: weeping for joy.

The last two are directed at the same cost and are two ways of seeing it: seen as a remainder, it is wry laughter; seen as a loss within the construct, it is weeping. What separates laughter from weeping is not the cost but whether attention falls on the remainder or on the construct. The drift of talk in the two ways of seeing is often different: whether the cost is spoken of as something that will not come back (“those years won’t come back”) or as something extra, unforeseen (“it came to all this”). This is only a fallible hint, not a code of mutually exclusive signs: the sentence “I never thought I’d miss his whole childhood” has both. One must ask what was judged this time; what cannot be told apart does not count. Nor does weeping for joy need to supply the person with an antecedent of “nearly losing”: supply that item, and what comes out is belated fear. What the weeping is directed at is the item actually paid that will not come back.

Carried over to weeping for joy for someone else, what changes is the owner of that cost: it is his, not mine. Standing must be checked anew: only if attention falls on his loss, and he is acknowledged and not co-opted, does it reach 15DD. There is a narrow gate here. “Hard-won” is not loss. That something really took time and effort is one thing; that for its sake he lost or gave up something that had been open to him is another; that the one now weeping judges exactly that item is yet another. A person looking back on years of hard study may hold that this was just the life he wanted, and that he lost nothing. So the positive instances are limited to cases in which, this time, some item he lost along the way is really judged: the years that will not come back, the childhood of his children he was not there for, another path he gave up for it. The talk sounds like this: “he’s had such a hard time all these years, he wasn’t there for the kids when they were small.”

Nor is the formula widened. “This loss is his” stands as it was; were “this hard-won thing is his” let into the formula, joy would enter the content of what is judged, and the claim “weeping focuses on a loss within the construct” would lose its guardrail. The paper writes that claim as a testable one: if there is a case in which attention falls on the construct, yet no loss at all can be found that is judged at this moment to have begun, and the person still reports the jolt of weeping, the claim must be narrowed. Being moved to tears by a stranger’s kindness, where no cost can be spoken of; the tears Plessner describes before the sublime, before beauty and before the innocence of children: the paper registers these as pressure cases, and does not supply an antecedent for the person because he wept. Tears shed for beauty, if attention falls on the remainder, press on a broader claim, that weeping focuses on the construct at all. And noticing that “so people can be like this” does not automatically count as laughter.

The Centre Is Still Me

The paper treats only the weeping of non dubito at 15DD. The weeping at the other layers has its structure registered, and the wording is kept uniform: “outside what this paper discusses,” never “unimportant,” and never “without judgment.” Perceptual weeping is at the lower bound: pain, hunger, physiological tearing, on the same side as the laugh that comes once tickling has made contact. Predictive weeping is a tendency: separation anxiety; newborns crying on hearing other infants cry, which the paper takes only as boundary material at a low layer, without saying that the infant represents another person’s loss. In the weeping of the self and the weeping of one’s own purpose, the loss is mine: self-pity, failing an examination, losing a job, weeping for joy at one’s own success where one judges some item one has lost along the way; where the thing was only hard-won and no loss is judged, it is a pressure case. Its relation to judgment is not as strong, but it is not absent; there is another route in, namely my own loss.

The row that most needs to be kept apart is another: the loss is his, but the centre returns to me. Psychoanalysis IV distinguishes three stances toward the other: “I understand you” is the empathy of 13DD; “I do things for you” is the investment of 14DD; only “I confirm you are an independent end” is 15DD. Condescending pity belongs in this row too. All of them can see that he has lost; they can see it, and can understand it very precisely; it is only that the centre is still me, and that is not yet enough to be certified as the weeping of non dubito. Whether such weeping is weeping of the self, weeping of one’s own purpose or something else is recorded separately by its own operation; excluding one item does not issue a positive certificate to another layer.

Nor is the centre fixed by pronouns. In “I acknowledge you as an end,” the grammatical subject is still “I”; in “you make me very sad,” the grammatical subject is “you,” yet your independence is not necessarily preserved. The centre is fixed by what is judged and what is held. Empathy can coexist with non dubito, and understanding does not necessarily co-opt; it is only that understanding is not enough to testify for non dubito. When Kant calls beneficence from pity “an insulting kind of beneficence,” the other having become the object of my good heart, it is exactly the condescending kind he means. Investment carries no pejorative sense in itself; it is the self’s purpose directed at the other’s welfare. What the paper examines is only the kind that takes his loss over as material for my purpose: using it to fulfil my plan, or using it to make demands on a third person. Only substituting my purpose for his own law is called colonization; the paper does not write “pity is colonization.”

Doing things with weeping is recorded separately. Weeping to be seen, weeping as a threat, using weeping to display a good heart, using weeping to seek forgiveness: these are actions around weeping, recorded separately, after Paper III of the Laughter Series, “Laughter as Judgment, and Doing Things with Laughter.” One and the same weeping can really happen and also be used to make demands on others; the two entries are recorded separately, and the second is not used to infer backwards that the first did not exist. Using another’s loss as material for one’s self-image is also recorded here. DD refers to the layer at which an operation stands at this moment, not to a permanent rank of a person: the same person, on the same night, can weep at several layers.

This Loss Is His

The weeping of non dubito is a narrow class, defined in the paper by six conditions, all concerning an inner weeping that has already occurred. A person who does not weep and respects the other just as much is not within this definition; this does not mean that he has no acknowledgment. The first condition is where attention falls: this share of attention, and the emotion through which this weeping passes, fall on the loss he bears within some construct, not on the damage this loss does to me; I may also have lost something at the same time, and the two shares are recorded separately. The second is what is judged: “this loss is his.” What is judged can be wrong.

The third is acknowledging him as an end. This is a stance, not a proposition. The first paper of the Moral Law series says (its English has “recognition” where this essay has “acknowledgment”): “Recognition is not cognition”; “It is a practical posture”; “Cannot-not recognize the specific other as End, irreducible to means.” Acknowledging is not agreeing. I can weep for a friend who chose the wrong path: I do not endorse his choice, yet I acknowledge that it is his life and his loss. But sympathy for a mistaken choice is not necessarily something only 15DD can manage, so “weeping despite disagreeing” does not by itself fix a layer.

The fourth is not co-opting: not using my feeling to prescribe to him what he actually feels; not requiring his loss to serve my good heart or my purpose; not occupying his place in advance, and accepting available material to correct my present understanding. This also applies to the dead and to fictional characters, and does not presuppose that the other can answer in his own voice at any time. The fifth: a clue is not contagion. His crying and his face can be clues by which I learn what he has lost, and clues can be wrong; a response produced merely by contagion does not on its own count as the weeping of non dubito. The sixth: open to correction. The concrete facts that are judged can be wrong; the reflexive negation of 13DD can afterwards withdraw the validity of what was judged, but it cannot withdraw the fact that this weeping happened. Acknowledgment is a stance, and there is no question of withdrawing its validity.

Conditions 3 and 4 fix the layer. Exclusivity is carried by these two; it is not derived from within a single weeping, by the same method as Paper IV of the Laughter Series uses for the laughter of despair. The other four are entry conditions: condition 1 keeps out weeping for oneself, condition 5 keeps out contagion, and conditions 2 and 6 together keep out the tendency of 12DD, and also lay down the discipline of fallibility and correction. The six conditions are not six pieces of evidence for a layer; nor can it be inferred, from each of them holding separately, that a weeping has been certified in the third person. When the paper says “that judgment,” it means what is judged together with what is held; the mark of 15DD lies in what is held, not in what is judged.

The formula is “this loss is his”; it is the content of what is judged. The short form is “the pain is my pain”; it is how the emotion side is written. Neither fixes the layer on its own: the empathy of 13DD can also say “he has lost” (“I understand that he has lost”), and the self-pity of 13DD can also say “the pain is my pain.” Taken together, the two sentences are the two directions of not co-opting: his loss is not taken over as mine, and my pain is not called his. Paper II of the Laughter Series says “this judgment is mine”; here, this loss belongs to him and this pain belongs to me. All of them say to whom something belongs.

Weeping Waits

The paper divides this weeping into three links. Judgment: what is judged, “this loss is his”; what is held, acknowledging him as an end and not co-opting. Holding is not judging; acknowledgment is an operation at the level of stance, not a judgment at the level of proposition. Emotion: what I cannot not feel over this loss of his. It is directed at his loss in that construct; it is structural, not feeling what he feels, and not measuring how much he feels; the pain is my pain. Weeping: the jolt of cannot-not after the emotion. Weeping is not part of the emotion; it is itself the jolt as felt, and in this it is like laughter; the difference is that it must first pass through emotion. Outward weeping is its expression, and may or may not be there.

The emotion has a component of judgment in it: what it is directed at is the loss that is judged; its shape is set by what is held: it is pain over a loss taken as his and not co-opted. So that judgment is already felt in the emotion, and acknowledgment is in it too. That there is judgment in the emotion does not make the emotion a judgment. Nor are the three links three steps joined end to end, each passing through a round of verbal reasoning: the judgment need not be completed before it is handed to the emotion, and the emotion need not stop before there is weeping. They are three things in this experience, and the dependence among them: without that judgment, there is no emotion of the kind meant here; without the emotion, no weeping of the kind meant here.

This lets beauty, laughter and weeping be set side by side. Beauty is seeing, and cannot-not acknowledging that it is beautiful; the acknowledging does not rest on emotion, and emotion may come along or may not. Laughter is judgment felt directly, two sides of one event with the judgment, and need not pass through emotion; emotion may be in the same scene, like the bitterness of wry laughter, coming first or coming after. Weeping too is the jolt felt, but it must first pass through emotion, and this emotion has a component of judgment in it. All three are cannot-nots, and all bear on judgment, but not in the same way. The difference between beauty and laughter the Laughter Series has already written: it lies in the object. What sets weeping apart from both is a point new in the special study, written only for the emotion through which the weeping of non dubito passes; the two upstream papers are not changed by it.

The author has a rough observation: laughter comes quickly; weeping takes a process. It fits the structure here, but is not inferred from the number of links. What can separate the two is “waiting”: laughter need not wait for emotion, even if the bitterness has already arrived first; weeping has to wait until the emotion reaches the jolt of cannot-not. On the night of the wake the pain was there the whole time, and only when the younger brother came in did it reach the jolt. The “process” means this stretch of waiting, of no fixed length, not three links each taking up a stretch, joined end to end.

Plessner, in Laughing and Crying, also starts from this contrast. As the special study reads him in the English translation, laughter follows directly on its occasion, whereas in crying an act of the person himself, a reflexive act, has to be inserted between occasion and outbreak; the automatic process of crying begins more or less slowly; openness, immediacy and eruptivity belong to laughter, closure, mediacy and gradualness to crying. He also says that feeling is a precondition of crying but not a sufficient one: pain and joy, love and despair can take full possession of a person without moving him to tears. The paper, for its part, says that neither cannot-not is a causal prediction, and neither guarantees that seeing his loss will necessarily bring weeping. The two run the same way.

Holding Back

Feeling is at 9DD and 10DD; emotion and weeping are both felt by way of it, and what feels it is an upper layer. Theorem 2 of Methodology IX says: “the lower layer composes the upper; the upper layer accesses the lower; the lower does not perceive the upper; the upper does not determine the lower.” Governing runs in the same direction: an upper layer’s veto over a lower one is “I decline to receive,” not “you are forbidden to send.” 13DD stands above 9DD and 10DD and can govern the feelings that carry no cannot-not: it declines to receive them and does not let them out, while the feelings themselves still arise. The cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD stands above 13DD; 13DD cannot govern it, or it would not be called cannot-not; it can at most delay it, and cannot cancel it: the jolt is felt all the same, and what 13DD can hold down is only its coming out.

This is exactly the cell of holding back, not showing: the jolt is still there within, and what does not show is its expression. The Overview of the Laughter Series says that “what can be held back is only the expression.” That it can at most delay and cannot cancel is the author’s view, not drawn from Theorem 2, and it is more general than weeping: say a person has a purpose, something he cannot not do; 13DD can delay it, but in the end he still cannot not do it. The special study applies it only to weeping.

The inner–outer grid is drawn only for the weeping of non dubito, and has four cells. Within, and weeping outwardly too: crying aloud, shedding tears; both the judgment and the expression are present. Within, but not weeping outwardly: holding back, not showing. Not within, but weeping outwardly: only the expression is recorded; it may be another real weeping, tears drawn out by some other judgment, such as laughing till one cries or being moved to tears by another’s kindness, or there may be nothing felt within. Not within, and no outward weeping either: other inner experience is recorded separately. Whether one weeps outwardly does not on its own decide whether that felt jolt, that stance, or the facts judged are or are not in place. Ritual weeping, professional mourners and performance speak of situation, role and use: a person can feel grief and at the same time express it according to the rite; feeling, expression, use and layer are four entries kept separately, none judging for another. Onion tears appear only at the lower bound and do not enter the grid.

When Paper IV of the Laughter Series mentioned Plessner, it left a question to be checked: in laughing and crying, which capacity for response is it that the body takes over, and does that exclude judgment? The special study answers from the English translation of the book. On the text, what fails is the answer of action, speech, gesture and expressive movement; a person capitulates as a soul-body unit but not as a person, and losing control over the body itself still attests to his sovereign understanding of what cannot be understood. In crying, a person also puts himself, by his own inner act, into the anonymous answer of his body. So Plessner cannot be read as dealing only with the body on the outside. He does not call the grasp within crying a judgment, and the judgment the special study speaks of is not the conclusion of reasoning either, so the two need not collide. What can be settled is this: the failure of expression to answer does not on its own rule out an inner grasp.

The two accounts part after the emotion. Plessner says that after the feeling a person’s own inner act still has to be inserted: loosening, surrendering oneself; it brings on the crying and also constitutes it, half-voluntary, half-forced; in surrendering, one feels a weakness coming on, which one sometimes masters and sometimes no longer can. The special study says that when the emotion reaches the jolt of cannot-not, that jolt is the weeping. The two can be joined by layer. Where the weakness is mastered and there is no outbreak of crying, either it carries no cannot-not yet and 13DD declines to receive it, which happens within, not only in the face; or the jolt is already there and 13DD holds down only its coming out. Where it can no longer be mastered, it is the cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD, and what the special study treats is the 15DD kind among them. The two accounts’ units of experience and conceptual boundaries do not correspond one to one; this is only a reading, which neither says the two are the same nor judges which is more accurate.

When His Brother Came Through the Door

Back to the night of the wake. The paper first sets the first two weepings aside. In the first, the drift of talk falls on what may come later, which is on the side of fear, and it also carries his own loss: the days he lived with his father are gone. The two are mixed together; the share of fear is recorded separately, and the share of his own loss falls in the row “I have lost something in it.” In the second, attention falls on the human lot: it may be speaking of the finitude of his father’s life, or it may turn back from the human lot to himself; if what it turns back to is his own future death, its tense is checked first. On these two drifts of talk alone, neither is enough to be certified as the weeping of non dubito.

In the third, what is judged is: “This ‘too late’ is his.” The one who wanted to see the younger son married was the father; this wish was a construct in which the father’s life was lived, and it is he who did not live to see it. What is judged has content and can be wrong; it concerns a loss already complete at this moment, not what will happen. Nor does it judge the father’s place after death: “he has lost” is a third-person description, and on whether he is still carrying forward at this moment the paper, following the Meaning Theory, draws no conclusion. Paper 4 of the Meaning Theory says: “Whether the position has exited after death, this paper draws no conclusion.” The weeping of non dubito does not wait for that judgment.

What is held. In that same moment he did not take this “too late” over as his own. He did not pre-emptively and groundlessly decide that “he didn’t really care,” nor that “he must have died very unreconciled”: both sentences prescribe to the father what he actually felt. Still less did he turn to his brother and say, “Dad’s wish, you’ll have to fulfil it for him”; had that sentence been spoken, the father’s loss would have become material for a demand on a third person, and the centre would have returned to his own purpose. Nor did he use this weeping to let the mourners see a dutiful son; that is doing things with weeping, and even if it was there, it is not in this weeping. He acknowledged that it was his father’s wish and his father’s life, and did not occupy that place in advance.

His father can no longer answer, so not occupying the place in advance comes down to accepting available material to correct himself. Some months later he read the diary his father had kept before going into hospital, and learned that his father had long since let go of much of this matter. What was judged then has to be revised: the “too late” is still his father’s, but it does not weigh as much as it seemed that night. Had the material been stronger, it could also have withdrawn the attribution of some item, not just lightened its weight. What is revised is the validity of what was judged; the weeping of that night has happened and cannot be withdrawn.

What is felt. This judgment is felt by way of emotion: he cannot not feel pain over his father’s “too late,” over what his father wanted to see and did not. This pain is the elder son’s own, and it is added; it is not a copy of his father’s suffering. In his last days the father was mostly unconscious; whether or not he was aware of it does not prevent that loss from being his, and the elder son need not imagine how he himself would feel lying there. This pain was there the whole night; at the moment his brother came through the door it reached the jolt of cannot-not, and that was this weeping. He made no sound; he only lowered his head. Whether he wept outwardly neither testifies for this jolt nor against it.

How the several weepings are told apart: by the drift of later talk and by stance, not by how hard he wept. When he later speaks of that night, if what he says is “now it’s just the two of us brothers,” the drift of talk is on what he himself no longer has; if it is “everyone has to go this way,” it falls on the human lot, and whether it speaks of his father or turns back through it to himself remains to be seen; if it is “he wanted so much to see my brother married, and he did not live to see it,” it falls on his father’s loss. The drift of talk only divides the shares of attention; whether a share is the weeping of non dubito depends further on stance: whether he prescribed his father’s feelings for him, whether he used his father’s wish to make demands on his brother, whether he let the diary change his judgment. Nor does this assign a layer to the elder son as a person: the same person, on the same night, can have several of these shares.

No Need to Feel What He Feels

In his last days the father was mostly unconscious, and the elder son had no need to imagine how he himself would feel lying there. There is a more general ground for this. Paper IV of the Laughter Series says that the jolt within another person “cannot be lived through by me in his stead … I can hear his report and let it correct my understanding; non dubito here means not letting my own expectation occupy that place.” The Overview says that what is felt inwardly “can only be lived through by the person himself, and others cannot claim it for him; they can only not doubt.”

Applied to weeping: I can fail to understand your pain, for instance a loss of a kind I have never lived through, and still judge that the loss is yours, acknowledge you, and be pained over it and weep. If he really is in pain, and I know it, this fact can be written into what is judged: what he is bearing. But the emotion is not feeling that pain. This holds at both ends: his inner feeling can only be lived through by himself, and I do not claim it for him; my pain is only mine, and I do not call it his. So weeping for the dead, for someone who is unconscious, for someone wholly unaware, or for a character in a novel all fall within the scope: there is no need first to prove a pain that the other is feeling at this moment and that I could copy; there is a structural loss, and it is his.

Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, also writes of being sad for a madman wholly unaware of his state and of sympathizing with the dead; for him both are a matter of imagining how I myself would feel, the latter being a placing of our own living souls in their lifeless bodies, which he himself calls an illusion of the imagination. The special study’s difference is that the loss is structural; whether he is aware of it or not does not prevent the loss from being his; nor need I imagine how I would feel. Smith holds that sympathy arises not so much from the view of the passion as from the situation that excites it; the special study compares on this basis the material of access and the content judged, and does not write him as excluding all direct contagion. This remark comes closest to the condition that a clue is not contagion; and an exchange of situations in imagination is not the same as copying the other’s original experience.

At that moment, too, there was no prior question, “is he qualified?”, followed by an answer. Non dubito is not the conclusion of reasoning. Nor is non dubito “no question occurred.” The Overview says: “It is non dubito, not prediction; doubt and questioning remain.” Questions can be present, or can come only afterwards, and non dubito does not wait for them to be resolved. The line of defence follows Psychoanalysis IV: “If ‘not-doubting’ requires shielding from countervailing input, it is forced closure.”

No Concern of Mine

The special study introduces its contrasts through Kant. Kant on fellow feeling touches at least three questions. The first is aesthetic standing. The General Remark following §29 of the Critique of Judgment says that affects of the softening kind have nothing noble about them, though they can be counted toward a beautiful cast of mind; that tender emotion, once it rises to an affect, is worth nothing at all, and the propensity to it is called Empfindelei; that novels and tearful plays make the heart languid and insensible to strict duty; and that sorrow grounded in moral ideas can count as a vigorous emotion, while sorrow grounded in fellow feeling, however lovable, belongs only to the softening kind, and only the former may be called sublime. So it cannot be said that Kant judges all weeping worthless: he leaves sympathetic sorrow beauty and lovableness, but not sublimity or nobility.

The second is duty. §34 of the Doctrine of Virtue divides humanity into two kinds: free participation, grounded in practical reason, and unfree fellow feeling, which spreads like warmth or a contagious disease. Only the former can be a matter of duty. §35 adds that although fellow feeling is not itself a duty, active participation in the fate of others is; it is therefore at least an indirect duty to cultivate the natural sympathetic feelings in oneself and to use them as means to participation from moral principles; to this end one should not avoid the poor, sickrooms and debtors’ prisons, but seek them out. The third is how it arises. §34 says that if another suffers and I cannot help him, yet let myself be infected by his pain, then two people suffer; and there cannot be a duty to increase the suffering in the world. In the same place Kant records the Stoic sage: he wished for friends so as to be able to help, and when a friend could not be saved, he said to himself, in effect, “no concern of mine,” and refused to suffer along.

The special study agrees with Kant at three points: contagious fellow feeling is not what is treated here; condescending pity is not the weeping of non dubito; weeping is not set up as anyone’s duty. The divergence lies at two points. The first is the ground. The Critique of Judgment gives sorrow two grounds: one passed in from outside, which is fellow feeling, and one coming down from the universal, which is moral ideas. The ground of the weeping of non dubito is a judgment about this one concrete other: the cannot-not of acknowledging the concrete other as an end; the weeping arises out of this judgment and does not wait for consent. The Overview says: “Cannot-not comes from the judgment itself.” This is not setting the concrete against the universal: a concrete judgment may draw on universal reasons as well. The second is the relation between weeping and judgment. In Kant, sorrow is an object of judgment: judged vigorous or softening, placed on the side of the beautiful, or judged to have nothing noble about it. The special study says that inner weeping simply is that judgment felt by way of emotion.

What stands nearest to the special study in Kant is the free participation of the Doctrine of Virtue: it is directed at the fate of others and grounded in practical reason; it is not passed in from outside. The difference lies in modality, at three points. Ought and cannot-not: free participation is a duty; it is bound by the law, it can fail, and it has to be cultivated and exercised by the will; the weeping of non dubito is a cannot-not; it does not wait for consent and is not something one sets out to do. A demand on everyone, and the overlap of cannot-nots: Kant’s law holds for every rational being, so one can say to another, “you ought to as well”; SAE holds that people’s cannot-nots overlap, an intersection, not an identity, but this overlap cannot be turned into an external demand, nor into an external verdict; each cannot-not is a cut that the subject in question makes, and several cuts landing in one place do not thereby become a norm. Means and acknowledgment: Kant keeps sympathetic feeling as a means to participation, to be cultivated; the special study says that this feeling is what acknowledgment looks like when it is felt, and does not take its use as the ground of its standing, which does not prevent it from later taking part in some other action that has reasons of its own. This is a comparison of office and of what each takes up and leaves aside, not three pairs of mutually exclusive mental states: natural feeling, free participation and cultivation can coexist in one person.

Nor, for the same reason, is a layer assigned to any person. A person can be not standing at 15DD in a given matter, and some people are not standing there in many matters; if he does not harm others, he may live his own life. Not harming others is a boundary on the side of rights, not the 15DD cannot-not turned into a demand on him. Where the weeping of non dubito falls in Kant’s division, whether he would read it as a moral idea and count it on the sublime side, the special study does not decide for him, and it does not seek to be counted there. It does leave a question for the Stoic sage. What he refuses is suffering along, that is, the link of emotion; he has not co-opted his friend, for he sought friends precisely in order to help, and his acknowledgment may be intact. Then, if the emotion is a cannot-not that does not wait for consent, what is it that he is able to refuse? The special study’s reading: what he refuses is the claiming and cultivating of this emotion; if the jolt never happened at all, the case is not one treated here.

The Added Suffering

Kant’s question still stands: another suffers, I cannot help, and if one more person suffers, the suffering in the world has grown by one share. The special study first owns it. In the weeping of grief it treats, the emotion is a suffering; it is in me, and it is added. It does not deny that suffering increases, nor does it delete it from the count by separating the names “felt” and “emotion.” This suffering is my suffering over his loss, not a copy of his suffering; but that is not yet an answer, since Kant had already separated the one who originally suffered from the one who later suffers along. The duty to increase suffering that §34 denies, the special study does not set up either; the cultivation and means that §35 asks about are not the ground on which this experience stands. What it further undertakes is this: not to reduce this experience to an item to be cut, merely because suffering increases.

How it is entered. Not as an evil to be reduced: it is precisely this suffering, together with the weeping after it, that is what acknowledgment looks like when it is felt. It keeps his loss as his, an unfinished loss: it neither refuses this emotion with “no concern of mine,” nor files it away under “everyone must die.” What comes with it is a greater possibility of being questioned. What opens the questioning is acknowledgment: not co-opting means accepting available material to correct me; where non dubito is present, doubt and questioning remain present too. The questions are of two kinds: one kind comes to me, “what more can I do,” “did I have a part in it”; one kind concerns him, “what has he lost,” “what is left,” “how would he see this.” Questioning is not the use of this suffering, and does not rise or fall with its amount. Even if my suffering really increases, this experience still contains a judgment and a stance that “the number of those who suffer” cannot exhaust; nor is it fully explained by the fact that one could not help.

What this says is that the suffering is not put in the column of “ought to be reduced,” because it is the emotion through which that judgment is felt, with acknowledgment in it. This column is the record kept on the side of the one who weeps, and it is also the special study’s record; others who come to comfort him are directed at him as a person, and that does not conflict with this record. It does not say that this suffering is worth pursuing, that more is better than less, or that the one who weeps is thereby better.

Guardrails go up with it. It is not a duty: SAE does not say ought to others, and no one may be forced by consequences to claim a feeling; inviting someone to tell, or asking how he feels, is not included in this. It is not something to seek: what matters is acknowledgment, not suffering itself; deliberately seeking to be softened is one kind of Empfindelei, and using weeping in exchange for something else is doing things with weeping. It does not rank persons: the one who weeps is not higher for this weeping, and the one who does not weep is not thereby judged to have no acknowledgment, just as the Overview says that “someone who does not laugh is not thereby judged not to have seen.” It is not evidence: this weeping is what acknowledgment looks like, felt, when acknowledgment is present; it does not in turn testify for acknowledgment, and the weeping of empathy at 13DD can feel the same from within. “It does not rank persons” blocks “not weeping means no acknowledgment”; this guardrail blocks “weeping means acknowledgment.”

It is not measured by amount: the layer is not judged by the intensity of weeping, and no merit is credited by the amount of suffering; that this suffering later lessens, or is comforted, does not on its own mean that the acknowledgment of him lessens too; he can still be asked about and remembered, without keeping the same pain to testify for it. It does not beautify his loss: his loss is not made better by having drawn out this weeping; if anything here is worth having, it lies only on the side of acknowledgment; otherwise his loss becomes material for my sensibility. It does not replace help, and is not cancelled by help: whatever help can be given is given; having helped does not void this weeping; the two are entered separately.

One ready place for the cost to land is this: his loss was caused by me. Then acknowledging that “this loss is his” means owning my own share; 15DD does not withdraw because of this cost. Withdrawal here means withdrawing the stance of acknowledgment and not co-opting, that is, no longer taking that loss as his; withdrawing the attribution of some loss on the basis of new material is a factual revision, and does not count as a self-protective retreat. Whether the self-protection of 13DD often withdraws here, the drift of talk moving off his loss and turning to self-defence, the paper offers only as a generalization to be tested. There is often my own guilt and remorse in the same scene; that is an emotion that falls on me, recorded as a separate share; using weeping to seek forgiveness is doing things with weeping.

The Horse in Turin

The story that Nietzsche embraced a horse in Turin and then collapsed into madness is very widely told. Following Townsend’s investigation (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017), the special study notes that its only original source is a chain of hearsay at third hand: a guard told the landlord, Fino, and after Nietzsche’s death in 1900 an anonymous journalist went to interview Fino. In the original version there is only Nietzsche clinging tightly to a horse’s neck: no coachman, no whipping, no suffering horse, and no tears; all of these were added in later retellings. So the whole layer of “the horse is suffering” lies in the legend. The special study takes only the structure of the legend, marked “reportedly,” vouches for no source, and does not claim to know the psychology of a historical person at that moment.

The paper first takes several predicates apart. “The horse is a bearer of end-value”: by Value Theory P1, V14, this does not hold. V14: “A gateless object, say an animal, has its experience, can be an end that is cared for, but does not, as a bearer of end-value, fill the fact-position here.” “The horse is suffering”: in the legend, this holds. Caring about the horse itself: not mistaken. Not filling a kind of fact-position does not on its own show that the one who weeps has made a corresponding mistaken assertion. And if, with a staged whipping, it is later established that the harm one took to be happening did not occur, what is withdrawn is the validity of that factual judgment; this does not retroactively erase the felt jolt, nor automatically withdraw the concern; conversely, “it was staged” alone cannot guarantee that the actors or the animal did not suffer.

Weeping for a horse acknowledges not “him as an end” but its standing as conscious and sentient. Acknowledging subjectivity extends to this: being saddened by seeing a cat suffer, being unable to bear seeing a horse whipped. By definition this is not the 15DD stance, and it is not within the narrow class of the weeping of non dubito. Two directions, stated by standing, not by person. When one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance, and the shape of the stance is shared: not taking its suffering as material for me, and accepting available material to correct me, including whether it is really suffering at all. When one has not yet stood there, sympathy for animals can be an emotion on the way to 15DD. To say it is on the way is not to say that it is a means for training up 15DD, nor is it set up as anyone’s duty. On the legend, Nietzsche’s weeping can be an instance of this extension.

The author has an observation: a person who cannot bear to see cats and horses suffer can mostly not bear to see people suffer either; there are counterexamples, but such people are rare. It is only an observation, not a proof. Kant, in §17 of the Doctrine of Virtue, sees a connection running the same way: cruel treatment of animals violates a person’s duty to himself, because it dulls his fellow feeling for their suffering and so weakens a natural predisposition that is very serviceable to morality in relations with other people; he puts this fellow feeling in the position of a means and makes the connection the ground of that duty: it is protected for the sake of morality toward people. Schopenhauer criticizes this as amounting to sympathizing with animals only for practice; he himself says that sympathy for animals is closely bound up with goodness of character, and flows from the same source as justice and loving-kindness toward people. In the direction of “on the way,” the special study runs the same way as Kant, but only describes, using the connection neither as a ground nor as a means; in the direction of “extension,” it is closer to Schopenhauer, neither being practice for the other, but it differs in what is primary: he says the two flow from one source, rooted in the unity of the will; the special study says that acknowledging animals is an extension of the acknowledgment of subjectivity, without borrowing the metaphysical ground of the unity of the will.

People in Novels

Characters in novels count. The “he” the reader weeps for is the character and the character’s loss within the work. An author writing a character often gives him a first person, a direction and his loss; the reader, in his own weeping, projects subjectivity onto the character. The author’s projection is, for the reader, only clue and material; the projection has to be the weeper’s own, and readers can project even onto a flat character without a first person. Nor does the character become an actual bearer because the author is a subject; extending weeping to fictional objects is the special study’s own responsibility. Three entries are kept separately: what is represented in the narrative is the character and the character’s loss; the judgment of actual existence is that the reader knows this is fiction; the reader’s real stance is checked against the six conditions. Unlike the horse, with the character the reader projects subjectivity, and can enter the narrow class of the weeping of non dubito.

The confrontation with Kant’s “tearful plays” lands here. Kant’s Empfindelei is the propensity of tender emotion to rise into an affect, and he gives two cases: a participating pain that refuses to be comforted; and sinking deliberately, through imagination, into fictitious misfortunes until one takes them as real. As for the latter, the weeping of non dubito is directed at the character’s loss within the work and has no need to take it as real; deliberately sinking in until one takes it as real, and enjoying being softened, is one kind of Empfindelei, not the weeping of non dubito. As for the former, if refusing to be comforted means keeping this pain going in order to testify for acknowledgment, the special study does not take it up either; being comforted, and the suffering lessening, do not conflict with its position. A reader enjoying being moved does not on its own cancel an attention to the character present at the same time; the shares in the same scene are recorded separately. The question of consequences Kant raises, making the heart languid and insensible to strict duty, the special study registers and does not answer.

Turning Back

Schopenhauer is the special study’s main contrast. In Volume I of The World as Will and Representation, §67 treats weeping. In the English translation the paper uses, he says that “we never weep directly on account of the pain we experience, but always merely on account of its repetition in reflection,” and that “Weeping is accordingly sympathy with our own selves, or sympathy directed back on its source.” Weeping over another’s suffering has two paths: either we put ourselves in the sufferer’s place by imagination, or we see in his fate the lot of humanity as a whole, and so, first of all, our own; so that, by a very roundabout way, it is always about ourselves that we weep.

For weeping over a bereavement, his example is exactly a son weeping bitterly at the death of a father who had been old and ill for many years. He says that the mourner does not weep for his own loss, which would be egotistical tears he would be ashamed of; first of all he weeps for the fate of the dead, but he weeps too when death was to this man a wished-for deliverance; so it is chiefly sympathy for the lot of all mankind that seizes him, and in the lot of mankind the mourner sees first of all his own, the more so the closer the kinship, most of all if it is his father. The constructed example of the wake borrows his scene and changes one thing. His father’s death was a wished-for deliverance, and from this he says that what is chiefly wept over is the lot of mankind; what the night of the wake judges is “too late,” which deliverance does not cancel. On this example, the two accounts part ways here.

There are two layers in Schopenhauer, and they must be kept apart. The layer of sympathy: sympathy comes from seeing through individuation; the will is the thing in itself of all appearances, and seeing through individuation one finds one’s own inner nature again in the other: tat twam asi. At this layer the boundary of his “self” is large enough to contain the other. He also writes of sympathy as looking toward the other: I feel his suffering as my own, not in myself, though, but in him; he knows for certain that the other’s skin does not enclose my nerves, and sympathy crosses that separation. The layer of weeping: weeping is this sympathy finally turning back upon our own individuality, seeing one’s own lot by way of the lot of mankind. What weeping returns to is the individual self, not that large “self.”

At the layer of sympathy the two accounts are close in experience: both look toward the other, and his suffering is in him, not in me; what they share lies only at this level. Schopenhauer attacks imperative ethics by asking who tells us that there are laws our conduct ought to be subject to, which runs the same way as SAE’s not saying ought to others. The difference is in emphasis. Schopenhauer says I feel his suffering as my own, which requires that I become to some degree identified with him, the boundary between I and not-I being for the moment broken through; the special study says the pain is my pain, the loss is his, and the emotion is not a feeling of what he feels. Schopenhauer’s concern is whether one has drawn the other within the boundary of “oneself”; the special study stresses that oneself is oneself and the other is still the other, two subjects neither of which contains the other. This is not opposition: a large boundary is not self-interest, and in Schopenhauer selflessness rests precisely on this large “self.” The special study simply does not borrow the metaphysical ground of the unity of the will. In the author’s words in Action Theory VI, the meaning of a life lies outside that life: what this life points to need not be oneself. Looking toward the other, the other is still the other.

At the layer of weeping, what he describes is accepted, and another kind is pointed out. Starting from another’s suffering, by way of reflection, coming back to oneself: such weeping the special study accepts. Accepting here means taking on an intelligible account of how it arises; it does not declare its frequency, nor does it take on his “always.” Turning back to what one has oneself lost falls in the row “I have lost something in it”; turning back to one’s own future death has its tense checked first; neither is said to be without judgment. But one cannot, merely because a representation of one’s own lot once appeared, revoke a looking toward the other that comes after it or runs alongside it. Beyond this, the special study points to another weeping: attention and stance stay on his loss throughout, with no need to assume that it turns back to oneself.

The weight of proof must also be set right. What the special study contends for is not “it has been proved that there is no return” but “there is no need to assume a necessary return.” In the third weeping on the night of the wake, if later talk stays with the father, there is no need to assume a turning back; Schopenhauer would grant it as the starting point, first of all weeping for the fate of the dead, but would say that the essence of the weeping lies in the turning back that follows. Later talk and the available words and deeds can divide, not decide: they can strengthen or weaken the reasons for adopting one explanation, but cannot decide which account is true; the absence of a corresponding report does not prove that the psychological process did not occur. The markers of stance divide 13DD from 15DD, not the special study from Schopenhauer: his mourner can have all three markers and still turn back. Conversely, if one says, however the person reports, that “really he is secretly weeping for himself,” that claim too must hand over its grounds. Plessner also directly rejects Schopenhauer’s “always”: he says that Schopenhauer’s answer is nearer to the truth than the usual view, and errs in taking it as the universal cause of crying; tragic conflict is an inexhaustible source of crying, but there the weeping is no longer directed at the weeper’s own person.

Laughing First, Weeping Later

Two people weeping over the same loss, each judging on his own, is weeping at the same thing; add that each knows of the other, and it is tacit understanding; where each takes the other as an end, it is embracing and weeping, at 16DD, which the special study registers only and does not develop. Embracing, weeping in step, and each knowing the other’s loss do not on their own certify 16DD. Paper IV of the Laughter Series stopped before looking at each other and laughing; the special study stops before embracing and weeping.

Beauty, laughter and weeping all bear on judgment, but not in the same way. Beauty is seeing, and cannot-not acknowledging that it is beautiful; laughter is judgment felt directly; weeping too is the jolt felt, but it must first pass through emotion. This also fits the author’s rough observation: laughter comes quickly, and weeping waits. The Laughter Series, going layer by layer, began with an infant at peek-a-boo. The author has one more estimate, which the special study hands over to Exercises and Games of Judgment: children listening to stories are able to laugh before they are able to weep, because listening to a story depends on judgment, not on contagion.

Back to the night of the wake. When his brother came through the door, the elder son lowered his head and made no sound. That “too late” is still taken as his father’s; his pain is his own pain, an added suffering, and acknowledgment is in that suffering. With it come the questions still to be asked in the days ahead: what was his father thinking then, and what could he himself still have done.