I appreciate gerry's having the guts to bring the gut into the
conversation. The English word "compassion" comes from Latin roots
meaning "to suffer along with." But other languages explicitly recognize
the visceral connection. For example, the Greek word ("splagchnizomai")
that Biblical scholars translate as "have compassion on" actually refers
to the wrenching of the bowels ("splagchnon" = guts). If I could
pronounce "splagchnizomai" for you, you would hear that it actually sounds
like a wrenching of the bowels, as well. I would agree with gerry that
compassion is emotional and is not reducible to concerned reflection or
any other "mental" activity.
A question: what is the value of maintaining a dualism between mind and
body such that the compassion in the gut is not also in the mind, and vice
versa? It seems to me, although I could be inaccurate or incomplete, that
the mind is an emergent phenomenon of the living body. In that specific
sense, it can be said to be "in" the body. (It's certainly not confined
to the brain!) Thinking is a bodily function and is regulated, to a
significant extent, by the same hormonal systems that regulate the other
bodily functions.
In my view, if my gut responds emotionally to a situation, it is because I
have perceived the situation and interpreted it as the sort of situation
that evokes emotion in me. This perception and interpretation can be, and
often is, instantaneous and unconscious, but it involves cognition
nonetheless. The same physiological changes that produce the emotion also
alter the thinking, and, in fact, this alteration of thinking and our
inner experience of it are indispensable parts of what it means to
experience that particular emotion. (Consider how your thinking changes
when you feel terror, joy, anxiety, or romantic love.)
>From this point of view, compassion is a response of the whole person,
not only of the brain or of the gut. It is an integrated human response
which includes as indispensable components a strong emotion with all its
attendant bodily sensations, a characteristic mode of thinking, and
certain recurring patterns of thought.
(BTW, if anyone is feeling that my description of thinking as a bodily
function is a debasement of that which makes us uniquely human and gives
us dignity, that is the old Greek dualism showing itself. Once you split
mind and body, it's damn hard to prevent one from coming to be valued more
highly than the other. In our culture's case, the mind is valued and the
body is devalued. A higher view of both body and mind is one of the
therapeutic effects of overcoming dualism.)
gerry continues:
>BTW, it is completely possible to distort the experience, based upon our
>own view. For example, it could well be that the individual is not so
>badly off as we may imagine them to be, given our own response to their
>situation.
This keen observation starts to show the relevance of all this to
individual and organizational learning. How exactly is this kind of
distortion produced? Can we learn not to produce it? If so, how can we
learn that?
Depending on your view of the relationship between perception, thinking,
emotion, and learning, one could decide that compassion (or another valued
response) is best learned in a Skinner box. It seems to me that much of
our orthodox thinking about organizational behavior, rewards, incentives,
performance management, etc., is in this vein. (Dilbert would go out of
business if this weren't the case.)
On the other hand, if you're a mind/body dualist with a strong cognitivist
bent, you might look to Argyris's Ladder of Inference to explain how the
distortion is produced and prescribe learning to test one's inferences as
the remedy.
As for the integrated view I'm advocating, to my knowledge, the learning
system that perfectly supports it hasn't been invented yet -- at least not
in a form that I would know how to introduce into corporations. (Can you
imagine your CEO as a Tibetan monk? No, neither can I.) For now, I start
with Argyris (in the form of simple functional tools developed by one of
his students) and add Gardner's Multiple Intelligences and some Dewey style
Pragmatism to correct for the cognitive/linguistic bias.
Cheers,
John Snyder
Innovation On Demand
Round Rock, TX
jsnyder@bga.com