'The Tender Instinct is the Hope of the World': Human Feeling and Social Change Before Empathy

Abstract

This essay addresses the question of experience in today's 'technological modernity'. The essay sets up the earlier classically modern notion of experience in Kantian critique and finds that it is irreducibly connected to Kant's self-identical subject. We interrogate the temporal dimension in Kant's transcendental aesthetic in the context of such experience and subjectivity. We then shift our attention to today's technological modernity. Here we first consider perhaps the dominant voice in cultural/social theory -in Badiou, Zizek and Lacan -in which the subject is constituted through the subtraction from experience in the context of a mathematical notion of time. This subtraction from experience takes place in the register of the real. We criticize this and attempt to rescue experience, through consideration of, not the real but the imaginary in the more phenomenological thinking on temporality of Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler. We then break with the apriorism of both Heidegger and Badiou in an attempt to take experience back to its radical empiricist roots. We do this through drawing on the religious thematic in the late science-fiction writing of Philip K. Dick. We set this up in contrast again to today's notion of the religious as subtraction from experience in Badiou's St Paul and Zizek's Christ. We draw on Dick's Gnosticism to reconstitute experience and the subject as a technological system. Dick's 'vast active living intelligence systems' operate, not in time, but as time. They constitute a socio-technical imaginary that engages structurally with cultural objects. Here experience is fundamentally empirical: yet this re-casting of the subject as socio-technical system at same time largely effaces the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental.Abstract Social feeling is understood as the foundation of civil society, an emotional connectivity that underlies pro-social action. These 'ordinary affects' are commonly expressed in the concept of empathy, a transpersonal state of emotional extensiveness. But this term was only introduced into Anglophone cultures in the first decade of the twentieth century, gaining purchase on social explanation over twenty years later. This essay examines competing understandings of social feeling in this period of transition, which resisted situating it in relation to those individual processes of perception, 'inner imitation' and projection that spoke of empathy's origin in aesthetic theory. By contrast, psychologists, sociologists and political theorists invoked an innate capacity for association and 'fellowship ' -the 'gregarious' and 'herd' instincts -with altruism as the expression of that transindividual formation in externally directed action. In

Collectivity, human fulfilment and the ‘force of life’

“…Hobhouse’s earlier argument for the evolutionary coincidence of intelligence and gregariousness also informed the society’s interests, and was taken up by his pupil Karl Pearson and elaborated by Trotter. As we will see, attending to the way social dynamics were shaped by the organic and subjective life of the individual was part of a concerted address to the ‘science of life’ used to elaborate a psycho-physical model of collective behaviour in early 20 th -century Britain (see also Swanson, 2013). Trotter’s work can be seen to embody this alliance.…”