Transforming Compassion

1
Transforming Compassion

• at the University of Agder

F. LeRon Shults Professor of Theology (UiA),
Scientific Director (Stiftelsen Arkivet)
2
Transforming Compassion

• What is Stiftelsen Arkivet?
• Why Transforming Compassion?
• Why Transforming Compassion?

3
Transforming Compassion

• Our interest is not only on what promotes inner
  feelings of sympathy, but on the factors that
  transform real human agency in a suffering world.
  And we are interested not just in any kind of
  caring agency, e.g., noblesse oblige, in which
  one does what is perceived to be ones duty, not
  out of real empathy for the other. And we are
  not interested in just any kind of empathic
  agency. Some agents can feel the pain of the
  other and respond in abusive or manipulative ways
  (e.g., psychopaths). We are interested in
  understanding and facilitating care-giving
  empathic agency.

4
Transforming Compassion

• What promotes the truly good life in human
  society, the well-being (bene) of interpersonal
  harmony?
• It is one thing to feel benevolent to be
  willing or wish (volo) well-being for others,
  but quite another to become beneficent to give
  of ones self in order to make (facio) another
  person flourish.

5
Transforming Compassion

• Calling for more compassion is well and good, but
  one of the dangers of such an enterprise is that
  dialogue and facilitation could easily get
  sidetracked or derailed by too quick or too
  narrow focus on debates between scientific
  disciplines or religious traditions about the
  definition of compassion.
• This is one of the reasons for including
  caring-giving practitioners from the beginning
  their resistance to endless conceptual debate.

6
Who Cares?

• Many research projects have a concluding section
  with a title of this sort, indicating at the end
  of the process some of the possible implications
  or applications of the research.
• In our project, however, the question who
  cares? comes at the beginning, serving as the
  material focus orienting the inquiry itself.
• Who cares? Why do they care? How can empathic
  caring be facilitated? What are the origins,
  conditions and goals of care-giving agency?

7
Research Questions
The research questions that guide the project are
designed in such a way that will allow each
participant to make concrete contributions toward
answering them while also maintaining the
integrity of his or her own particular field of
expertise or professional practice.
8
Research Questions
1. What are the origins, conditions and goals
of empathic care-giving agency among humans?
9
Research Questions
2. What facilitates the emergence of
compassion among persons who differ in relation
to religion, race, class, gender, age, family
background, nation, discipline, profession or
other kinship boundary?
10
Research Questions
The Transforming Compassion project will gather
insights from a variety of scientific
disciplines, religious traditions and care-giving
practices, and seek to promote further research
on and collaboration around these issues.
11
Seminar I - Practitioners

• Buddhist
• Teacher
• Save the Children
• Norwegian Army

12
Seminar II - Academics

• Ethicist
• Sociologist
• Sexologist

13
Why Emergence?

• The second research question is also designed to
  encourage us to be self-reflective as we go
  along. Built into its formulation is a reminder
  to attend to the emergence of methodological and
  contextual factors that engender healthy dialogue
  among religion scholars, scientists and
  care-giving practitioners.

14
Why Emergence?

• Contemporary theories of emergent complexity,
  which are inherently inter-disciplinary,
  recognize the need for a variety of disciplinary
  perspectives on any particular phenomenon, and
  can provide a conceptual framework for the
  dialogue.
• The success of particular scientific
  applications of emergence theory is less
  important to this interdisciplinary project than
  the underlying shifts in philosophical categories
  that the theory itself illustrates.

15
Why Emergence?

• For example, we find a shift from emphasis on
  stasis to dynamism, from reductionism to holism,
  from substance to relation, and from the
  assimilation of material parts to an appreciation
  for differentiated generative fields of energy.
• Much early modern science was caught up in a
  materialistic reductionism all that really
  exists is matter. Qualitative phenomena like
  consciousness, hope or compassion were reduced to
  the level of material explanation. For some
  scientists, religious experience itself was not
  real because it presupposed some non-material
  substance.

16
Why Emergence?

• In late modern science, however, such
  reductionism has been significantly challenged,
  and concepts like matter no longer function in
  the same dominating way. Concepts such as
  organization, complexity and information play a
  more generative role in the philosophy of
  science.
• The dynamic, energetic forces that used to be
  explained in philosophy by postulating a
  different kind of substance (spiritual,
  immaterial or mental) may now be understood as
  the complexification of relational fields of
  force.

17
Why Emergence?

• Here we are on explicitly interdisciplinary
  terrain. The leading theorists in these fields
  are attempting to identify principles of
  emergence that can make sense of all kinds of
  complex phenomena, from quanta to quasars,
  including the human phenomenon of empathic
  care-giving agency, which itself often emerges
  out of religiously saturated experiences.

18
Why Emergence?

• First, different scientific disciplines really
  can contribute to answering the research
  questions, but they cannot offer a full
  explanation. Instead of reducing the phenomenon
  of compassion to the categories of our favoured
  field or profession, we ought to explore ways in
  which our categorization is shaped by and can
  shape the insights of other disciplines that deal
  with other dimensions of the development of human
  empathy.
• Emergence theory can provide a philosophical
  conceptual space that allows and even promotes
  such dialogue across such boundaries.

19
Why Emergence?

• Second, emergent complexity theory can provide a
  shared language for scholars within different
  religious traditions. We can acknowledge the way
  in which our interpreted experience of ultimate
  reality is conditioned by its emergence within a
  complex hierarchy of nested domains (e.g.,
  biology, psychology, sociology) without accepting
  that religious functional capacities are
  reducible to these domains.
• Together we can reflect on the way in which our
  traditions attitudes toward and practices of
  compassion are emergent contextually shaped
  (and shaping) experiences of being bounded by and
  bound to the quest for ultimate value, meaning
  and reality.

20
Why Emergence?

• A third implication is that care giving
  practitioners can play an active role as well as
  learning from the conversation across
  disciplines. The stories and insights that
  emerge out of the pragmatic contexts of the
  practitioners can serve as valuable resources for
  academicians reflecting on the factors that
  facilitate compassion.
• In other words, we ought not to imagine a simple
  unilateral movement from theory to practice, but
  recognize that theory also emerges out of
  practice.

21
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• One way to focus the shared concern about the
  conditions that facilitate compassion more
  precisely is by looking at the role of fear and
  love in this process.
• We can explore the shared interest among
  religious traditions and scientific disciplines
  concerned with understanding human sociality and
  human confrontation with infinity as manifested
  in religious experience.
• I call this the delightful terror of transforming
  compassion.

22
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• Empathic care-giving agency emerges (or fails to
  emerge) within the complex, dynamic field of
  human sociality, which is constituted by tensive
  personal relations.
• One of the most significant tensions that shape
  this existential field is between fear and love.
  Like all living organisms, humans tend to avoid
  that which seems to threaten destruction and
  pursue that which seems to promise pleasure.
• Social interaction is structured by both our
  longing for and our dread of being bound to one
  another.

23
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• Our experience of feeling-with or feeling-for
  others is ambiguous. We fear being suffocated or
  absorbed by needy others, but we also fear being
  isolated or abandoned by significant others whom
  we hope will fulfil our needs.
• We desire independence from the painfully
  overwhelming demands of others, but our
  overwhelming desire for pleasurable intimacy
  demands our dependence on others.
• And so sociality is characterized by pushing away
  and pulling close, an interactive play of
  repulsive and seductive forces that shape our
  capacity to become compassionate.

24
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• In addition to the finite tensive dynamics of
  sociality, scholars of religion are also
  interested in the role of a potentially
  compassionate agents understanding of ultimate
  reality (or value, or meaning) in the fostering
  of empathic behaviour.
• Religion as even its etymological root
  (religare) indicates has to do with the way in
  which one is ultimately bound together with
  others.

25
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• Here the tension between fear and love is shaped
  by ones interpreted relation with an infinite
  Other. What is the ultimate origin, condition
  and goal of all social bindings whatsoever?
• The dynamics that hinder or facilitate compassion
  are also related to our fear of our own
  limitations (finitude) and our desire to be cared
  for without limits.

26
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries

• Both sociality and infinity have to do with
  limits, with our struggle within and against our
  being-limited by and for others, which evokes
  both fear and love.
• However, the idea of infinity does not function
  in and among the religions in exactly the same
  way that sociality functions in and among the
  sciences. We are not dealing with one limit
  among many but with the conditions for the
  differentiation that constitutes all limitation
  whatsoever.

27
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries
Despite their disparate expressions in space and
time, all religions have theological (in the
broader sense) and anthropological assumptions
that structure the conceptual and pragmatic
framework within which compassion is understood
and practiced. In other words, transforming
compassion emerges within the mutual interplay
between particular dynamics of sociality and
particular interpretations of the encounter with
infinity.

28
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries
Inter-traditional discourse on infinity does not
escape the conditions of sociality. Like all
human inquiry, theology is embedded within a
complex semiotic coding process, always and
already signalling and being signalled in acts of
signification. However, theology begins at (and
with) the significance of limitation itself,
i.e., with (and at) the existential negotiation
of the ultimately significant limit of our very
being-here (or not). It begins by attending to
the infinite as the absolute condition for any
and all finite limitation whatsoever.

29
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries
All of this language about absolutes and
infinites can sound intimidating, especially in
light of the way in which the idealization of
particular religious symbols or beliefs about God
can be (and have been) used in terrible ways
inciting terror throughout the world. It is
unfortunately quite easy to point to particular
technological and methodological developments in
science and particular forms of religious belief
and practice that have fostered violence and
hatred rather than compassion.

30
Fear, Desire and Human Boundaries
Precisely for this reason, it is important for us
to engage in this difficult inter-disciplinary
and inter-religious task in a way that takes
seriously the natural human longing for engaging
the infinite within and at the limits of
sociality.
31
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
It will not be enough for us simply to continue
struggling with the conflict between our
interpretations of infinity and our evaluations
of sociality. We must also open ourselves to
reflecting on and reconstructing our way of
interpreting and evaluating. Instead of a
default position of either a hermeneutics of
suspicion or a hermeneutics of trust, we might
attempt to indwell a hermeneutics of compassion.
Interpreting compassion cannot be an abstract
exercise divorced from compassionate
interpretation.
32
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
This will require empathic care-giving agency
across boundaries of significant otherness.
Engaging in such boundary crossing will
inevitably shape our ways of knowing, acting and
being in the world. What are some of the key
issues, resources and promising directions for
developing a hermeneutics of compassion?
33
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
First, the use of the term hermeneutics itself
in this context should not be interpreted within
the confines of a hard distinction between the
human and the natural sciences, or a
separation between the tasks of understanding
and explanation. Late modern philosophers of
science have increasingly challenged such a
dichotomy and pointed to the way in which
explanation emerges out of pre-understanding and
understanding emerges out of new explanations.
34
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
In this sense, hermeneutics is not limited to the
social sciences, nor even to scholars, but is a
natural and distinctive characteristic of human
life. A more holistic and embodied approach to
hermeneutics can provide a hospitable space for
dialogue across disciplines, religions and
professions.
35
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
This is not the place for a comprehensive list of
resources for developing such a hermeneutics, but
let me point to two resources that have not been
sufficiently mined. Charles Peirce
interpretation as engagement Gilles Deleuze
interpretation as production
36
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Second, the term compassion in this context
should not be understood merely as an expression
of human thought or even human action.
Compassion is a mode of human feeling,
feeling-with and feeling-for others. By
feeling I do not mean an inner emotional or
mental state or even a disposition toward acting,
but the whole-bodied and wholly-embedded human
experience of engaging within and being engaged
by the world.
37
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
One way to spell this out is articulating
feeling (aesthesis) within a broader,
metaphysically robust understanding of
aesthetics. My interest here is not in criteria
for adjudicating between conflicting judgments
over which particular things are pretty (or
valuable), but in developing a meta-aesthetics
that incorporates ethics and epistemology.
38
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Such an approach could begin with the category of
belonging, with the felt experience of fear and
desire that characterizes the human experience of
longing to belong-to and be longed-for within
harmonious communion. Compassion emerges out
of and within this tensive, dynamic mode of being
felt and feeling our way in the world.
39
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Our struggle to become compassionate is
contextualized within and driven by our search
for the beauty of peaceful and joyful
participation in the life of others. This
aesthetic desire is not isolated from our longing
for goodness (ethics) or our longing for truth
(epistemology), although early modern philosophy
has taught us to think so. A hermeneutics of
compassion can incorporate the concerns of
epistemology and ethics within an aesthetic
ontology that thematizes knowing and acting as
integrated modes of our coming-to-be in relation
with others.
40
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Third, placing the dialogue within the context of
the pursuit of a hermeneutics of compassion (in
the sense just outlined) clarifies the rationale
for emphasizing the conceptual space provided by
emergent complexity theory for exploring the
relation between the dynamics of sociality and
the human encounter with infinity.
41
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
On the one hand, we can acknowledge the real
(ontological) causal power of compassionate
engagement within the nested hierarchies of
sociality in which one belongs, spelled out (for
example) in the overlapping fields of
inter-personal, inter-institutional and
inter-cultural relations. On the other hand, we
can attend to the way in which the social nature
of our hermeneutical (pragmatic) engagement is
mutually shaped by the way in which we deal
imaginatively with our desire to be infinitely
cared-for, and with our fear that our limited
capacity for empathic intimacy will fail to
secure the beauty of our belonging with others.
42
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
As we explore the interplay of our engagement
with(in) sociality and infinity, understood
(with)in the context of emergent complexity
theory, we can learn from one another about
facilitating compassion across the bounds that
limit us and within the bounds of our limitation.

43
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Studying compassion much less attempting to
practice it can make us feel vulnerable.
Facing the limits of our compassionate agency is
scary. But this fear is a condition for our
delightfully vulnerable participation in empathic
sociality. The question is not whether we fear,
but how we fear and how we can tend to our
anxieties in ways that are transformative.
44
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
How can we overcome debilitating fear and promote
empathic care-giving in our differentiated social
contexts? How can we facilitate healthy and
salutary empathic loving agency in the field of
human sociality in ways that respect and even
enhance the human encounter with infinity?
45
A Hermeneutics of Compassion
Developing a pragmatic, aesthetic hermeneutics
of compassion that transforms the way in which we
care for one another across boundaries of
significant otherness is surely one of the most
important tasks facing us today. Understanding
and facilitating compassion is a task that
belongs to all of us precisely because we all
belong to one another, in one way or another.
46
Parliament of World Religions
47
2009 Pre-Parliament Meetings

• Pedagogy, Compassion and Religious Boundaries
  (Nobel Center)
• Politics, Compassion and Religious Boundaries
  (Oslo Center)
• Hermeneutics, Compassion and Religious
  Boundaries (UiA)

48
International Society for Science and Religion
49
UiA ERC Advanced Grant

• Transforming Religious Pluralism
• 5 years
• 2.5 million euro

50
Transforming Compassion

• QA
• www.transformingcompassion.typepad.com
• F. LeRon Shults