SAE Laughter · Special Study: Judgment and Weeping
SAE 笑论·专论：判断力与哭
The Laughter Series says that 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. This paper is a special study within the Laughter Series. It takes up that sentence and treats weeping and judgment, with its weight on the weeping of non dubito at 15DD: he has lost something within some construct; I judge "this loss is his", acknowledge him as an end, and do not co-opt his first person, his direction or his response into my purpose; I am pained over this loss, and the pain is my pain; weeping comes after the emotion, as a cannot-not. 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 this paper discusses, and here their structure is only registered. The weeping of non dubito is defined by six conditions, two of which fix its layer: acknowledgment and not co-opting. Exclusivity is carried by the definition; it is not derived from within a single 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, not resting on emotion; laughter is judgment felt directly, without having to pass through emotion; weeping too is the jolt felt, but it must first pass through emotion: it is the cannot-not that comes after the emotion, and the emotion has a component of judgment in it, with acknowledgment inside it. This also fits a rough observation: laughter comes quickly, weeping takes a process. The emotion is directed at his loss within the construct; it is structural, not a feeling of what he feels; weeping for the dead, for someone who is unconscious, or for a character in a novel all fall within the scope. Weeping for a cat or a horse lies outside the definition: when one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD. Weeping must first pass through emotion, and this emotion is a suffering, an added one. This paper owns it and does not enter it as an evil to be reduced, because acknowledgment is in this suffering: together with the weeping that follows, it is what acknowledgment looks like when it is felt; and with it comes a greater possibility of being questioned. Guardrails go up with it: it is no one's duty, it is not something to seek, it does not rank persons, it is not evidence, it is not measured by amount, it does not beautify his loss, and it does not replace help.
The contrasts are introduced through Kant. Kant distinguishes unfree fellow feeling from free participation: the former is not what is treated here; the latter is the nearest neighbour, and the difference lies in normative office and modality. On one side stand ought, a demand that can be put to everyone, and a means that can be cultivated; on the other stand cannot-not, an overlap that makes no external demand or verdict, and acknowledgment. Schopenhauer is the main contrast. He says that weeping is sympathy turned back upon one's own individuality. The two accounts are close in experience and differ in emphasis: his concern is whether one has drawn the other within the boundary of "oneself"; this paper stresses that oneself is oneself and the other is still the other. At the layer of weeping, the weeping that turns back, as he describes it, is accepted, only without his "always"; beyond that, the paper points to a weeping that need not turn back. The Stoic no concern of mine, Plessner's Laughing and Crying, Smith, Aristotle and Mencius serve as further contrasts; the examples include the night of a wake, weeping for joy, characters in novels, and Nietzsche embracing a horse (reportedly).
Keywords: weeping, 15DD, the weeping of non dubito, judgment, emotion, acknowledgment, not co-opting, Kant, Schopenhauer, the Stoics, Plessner, fellow feeling, weeping for joy
Writing statement: This paper was co-drafted with Claude (Anthropic). All intellectual decisions, framework design and final editorial judgments were made by the author.
1. Introduction: How Kant Distinguishes Fellow Feeling from Participation
1.1 The Question
The father had been ill for two years, and then he was gone. On the night of the wake, the elder son remembered how, in his last six months, his father had often asked about his younger son marrying. It had not happened in time, and the elder son wept.
What was he weeping over? His own loss, his father's pain passing over into him, or something else?
This paper's answer holds for one kind of weeping only. In what follows, the elder son is "I" and the father is "he": he has lost something within some construct; I make out this loss, judge that it is his, acknowledge him as an end, and do not take it over as mine; I am pained over it, and the pain is mine; weeping follows. This weeping is called the weeping of non dubito. It is at 15DD and is one form that judgment takes: inner weeping of non dubito is that judgment felt by way of emotion; outward weeping is its expression. The example is developed in 4.4.
Kant on fellow feeling is the best way into this question. He touches at least three different questions, which are taken up one by one below.
1.2 Kant's Three Questions
Aesthetic standing. The General Remark following §29 of the Critique of Judgment (AA 5:272–276) says the following. Affects of the softening kind have nothing noble about them, though they can be counted toward a beautiful cast of mind. Tender emotion, once it rises to an affect, is worth nothing at all, and the propensity to it is called Empfindelei (5.5). Novels and tearful plays make the heart languid and insensible to strict duty. Sorrow grounded in moral ideas can count as a vigorous emotion; 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.
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 (AA 6:456–457).
An account of 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 (6:457).
1.3 Where This Paper Agrees with Kant
- Contagious fellow feeling is not what is treated here. The definition excludes responses produced merely by contagion (4.1, condition 5).
- Kant calls beneficence from pity an insulting kind of beneficence (eine beleidigende Art des Wohltuns, 6:457). Condescending pity is not the weeping of non dubito either (4.8).
- Weeping is not set up as anyone's duty (4.11).
1.4 Two Points of Divergence
First, the ground. The Critique of Judgment gives sorrow two grounds: one passed in from outside (fellow feeling), one coming down from the universal (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 (Moral Law P1, §2.5); the weeping arises out of this judgment and does not wait for consent (Overview, 5.2: "Cannot-not comes from the judgment itself"). This paper is not setting the concrete against the universal: a concrete judgment may draw on universal reasons as well, and "concrete" does not by itself show that it falls outside moral ideas.
What stands nearest to this paper 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 from it lies in modality, at three points. 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.
- 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 (Overview, 7.1: intersection, not 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; it is not a norm holding horizontally between subjects (Methodological Overview, V3.1 Revision Note, where the subject of the sentence is 15DD). 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. This paper says that this feeling is what acknowledgment looks like when it is felt, and that it does not take its use as the ground of its standing; this does not prevent it from later taking part in some other action that has reasons of its own.
Nor, for the same reason, is a layer assigned to any person. What this paper looks at is how that moment is to be understood structurally: a person can be not standing at 15DD in a given matter, and some people are not standing there in many matters (Action Theory VI, D33). 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.
Second, 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. This paper says that inner weeping simply is that judgment felt by way of emotion (4.3).
Both points are differences of ground and of relation, not opposite answers to one and the same proposition. The texts at hand yield no counter-thesis of the form "no spontaneous feeling can embody a judgment", and this paper does not supply one on Kant's behalf.
1.5 One Confrontation, One Question
Confrontation. Where does the weeping of non dubito fall in Kant's division? Kant calls sublime only sorrow grounded in moral ideas. On this paper's description, the ground of the weeping of non dubito is the cannot-not of acknowledging the concrete other; whether Kant would read it as a moral idea and count it on the sublime side, this paper does not decide for him, and it does not seek to be counted there.
Question. What the Stoic sage refuses is suffering along, that is, the link of emotion. He has not co-opted his friend: 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? This paper'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.
On "adding a suffering". This suffering is owned; the content of Section 4 is not kept by denying that suffering increases. The answer is in 4.11.
2. Weeping Focuses on the Construct
2.1 Taking Up the Laughter Series
A construct, in the Laughter Series, is any way of grasping that is currently in operation: an expectation, a definition, a reading of a sentence, 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; it can be seen only as the remainder of some construct (Overview, Section 0 and 2.1).
Overview, 3.1: "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". 3.2 adds that in one and the same situation one can laugh or weep, and that attention can be divided into shares, each share recorded separately. These are taken over here, not set up anew.
2.2 Weeping and Fear: Structure and Prediction
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 between the two is drawn at "the loss has already begun".
To use this line, 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", and then the case falls on the weeping side. But then every weeping over the future could be renamed "having lost a future one could count on", and the line could no longer be falsified. So, following Overview, 5.4, two things are added:
- 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; it is not inferred backwards from whether there was weeping, nor sorted automatically by the literal words.
- Mixtures do not count. Cases in which several shares of attention are present and cannot yet be told apart count neither as falsification nor as confirmation; components that can be told apart may still support a local explanation.
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 (9.5) would be shut out at the front door by "something has in fact been lost".
The two senses of "prediction" should not be confused. The "predictive weeping" of Section 3 refers to a layer, the capacity of 11DD and 12DD; "fear is prediction" here refers to the tense toward which that experience is directed.
Mencius: "when people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, all have a heart of alarm and commiseration (乍见孺子将入于井，皆有怵惕恻隐之心)"; the child has not yet fallen. Alarm (怵惕), which Zhu Xi glosses as "the look of being startled", is on the side of fear. Commiseration (恻隐), which Zhu Xi glosses as "恻 is the urgency of hurt; 隐 is the depth of pain", is pain, not startlement: a pain before the loss, pressing right on this line, and it is kept as a remainder (Section 11).
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 (9.3).
2.3 What Is Lost, Concretely
The following three are examples only, not an exhaustive list, and they may cross one another:
- a shared life can no longer go on;
- a path of action has lost its feasibility;
- the grounds of a belief have been withdrawn.
When the Laughter Series says a construct is "present", it means that the construct can be called to mind and looked back on at this moment, not that the construct persists (Overview, 2.2). When a person has died, the constructs concerned can still be looked back on, and mourning is directed at them.
"The construct he lived in has broken" is written here as "he has lost something within this construct". An oppressive arrangement can run very smoothly, while what is damaged is the person.
2.4 Two Claims and Their Falsification
"Weeping focuses on the construct" is written, after the manner of Overview, 5.4, as testable claims, of two kinds:
- Claim A: weeping focuses on the construct. If there is a case in which, as checked by independent markers, attention falls only on the remainder and no share falls on the construct, yet the person reports the jolt of weeping, Claim A must be narrowed. Tears shed for beauty, if attention falls on the remainder, press on this claim.
- Claim B: weeping focuses on a loss within the construct. 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, Claim B must be narrowed. Being moved to tears by a stranger's kindness, where no cost can be spoken of, presses on this claim; the tears Plessner describes before the sublime, before beauty and before the innocence of children press here too (7.3).
Weeping for joy comes in two kinds. Where the one who weeps sees and judges some item lost along the way, it does not press on Claim B; only where the thing was hard-won but no loss is judged does it still press (9.1). Whether it presses on Claim A depends on whether that share of attention takes the cost as a loss within the construct or as a remainder. Both must be checked by independent markers, not inferred backwards from whether there was weeping.
2.5 Four Landing Points at One Moment
Paper III, 2.2 of the Laughter Series describes a single moment: still tense while checking the results list, one sees the word "admitted"; at the moment of breaking the tape, the whole body is still driving, and the race is already won. That paper distinguishes two landing points; two more are added here. All four concern the one checking the list, standing at 14DD.
- Attention falls on "already done", which is a remainder, and so there is laughter: the laughter of triumph. The gap stands guard: the frame that had to strain has not yet relaxed at this moment, and the thing is already done; not every accomplishment brings laughter (Paper III, 2.2).
- Attention stays on "it nearly didn't come off just now", and what comes out is belated fear, not laughter (ibid.). Belated fear is directed at a loss that could once have happened and in the end did not; this paper reads it as lying near the side of fear.
- 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". This is exactly Section 4 of Paper III: the cost is a remainder, attention falls on the remainder, and so there is laughter; the bitterness is an emotion.
- Attention falls on the same cost, seen as something the one checking the list 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. This agrees with Overview, 3.3: cost does not separate laughter from weeping; what separates them is whether attention falls on the remainder or on the construct. The branch that Paper III, 4.1 leaves for weeping is "if it falls on the loss of the purpose, there is weeping"; in weeping for joy the purpose has been achieved, so that branch does not apply. Seeing the cost as a loss within the construct extends Paper III, 4.1 without changing it (this paper's reading).
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.
This also shows that weeping for joy does not 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.
When the fourth landing point is carried over to weeping for joy for another, the acknowledgment and not co-opting of 4.1 are also needed before it is the 15DD kind taken in 9.1.
3. Weeping at Each Layer
This paper treats only the weeping of non dubito at 15DD. The weeping at the layers below is not the weeping of non dubito; it is not unimportant, this paper does not discuss it, and only its structure is registered. The wording is kept uniform: "outside what this paper discusses", never "unimportant", and never "without judgment".
| Layer | Name | Structure | Examples | Treatment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9DD+10DD | Perceptual weeping | Stimulus and body | Pain, hunger; physiological tearing | The lower bound, on the same side as the laugh that comes once tickling has made contact (Overview, 8.2); pure lacrimal reflex and the weeping of pain are classified on different grounds, not developed here |
| 11DD+12DD | Predictive weeping | Prediction falls on the loss of the construct | Separation anxiety (Paper I, 3.1, a section marked "This Paper's Inference"); newborns crying on hearing other infants cry (Sagi & Hoffman 1976) | Tendency. The latter is only boundary material at a low layer; the abstract does not show that the infant represents another person's loss |
| 13DD, 14DD | Weeping of the self, weeping of one's own purpose: "I have lost something in it" | The loss is mine | Self-pity; failing an examination, losing a job; weeping for joy at one's own success, judging some item one has lost along the way | Its relation to judgment is not as strong, but it is not absent: there is another route in, namely my own loss, and judgment is not its only route. Only where the thing was hard-won but no loss is judged does it enter the pressure cases of 2.4 |
| 13DD, 14DD | "Facing his loss, the centre is still me" | The loss is his; the centre returns to me | Weeping of empathy ("I understand you"); investment ("I do things for you"); condescending pity (4.8) | This is precisely the row from which the weeping of non dubito most needs to be kept apart. It is not yet enough to be certified as the weeping of non dubito; whether it is weeping of the self, weeping of one's own purpose or something else is recorded separately by its own operation, and excluding one item does not issue a positive certificate to another layer |
| 15DD | The weeping of non dubito | He has lost something in it, and this loss is his; acknowledging him, not co-opting | Section 4 | What this paper treats |
DD refers to the layer at which an operation stands at this moment, not to a permanent rank of a person (Overview, 6.1). The same person, on the same night, can weep at several layers (4.4).
Boundaries. Following the table form of Paper IV, 2.3, the table below concerns only the share of attention that falls on his loss; it is a descriptive comparison, not a falsification condition.
| Standing | What is visible when facing his loss | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| 13DD | Can see that he has lost, and can understand; the centre is me: "I understand you" | Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3: "I understand you" is the empathy of 13DD |
| 14DD | Can see his loss and puts it into my purpose: "I do things for you" | Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3: "I do things for you" is Superego-layer (14DD) investment, "self's purpose directed at the other's welfare" |
| 15DD | Sees that this loss is his; acknowledges him as an end; does not occupy his place in advance, and accepts available material to correct oneself | Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3: "I confirm you are an independent end"; 4.1 |
The markers of stance visible at a single moment are only that stance's own expression; set against an antecedent defined by the stance, the two necessarily exclude each other and cannot make an empirical counterexample. So this table serves only to draw boundaries, and it is read by the following four rules:
- if, within one and the same exchange, the person withdraws a demand that used a last wish to press someone, re-read by the changed operation, and do not let the earlier act seal off this moment;
- if self-report conflicts with checkable words and deeds, that is a conflict of material; go on checking the same object and point in time, and do not let the self-report complete the certification;
- if different acts or shares of attention run in parallel, for instance real concern for the dead together with using weeping to make demands on a third person, record them separately, and do not use one share to deny another;
- if there is only self-report and no checkable words or deeds, the table certifies nothing, and the case is recorded as insufficient material (4.11, "it is not evidence").
Anyone who sets up a separate empirical hypothesis needs an antecedent that can be recorded independently and is not identical to the definition of the stance to be judged. This paper sets up none.
Doing things with weeping. 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, and they are recorded separately, after Paper III, 1.3, "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.
4. The Weeping of Non Dubito
4.1 Definition
What this paper calls the weeping of non dubito is an inner weeping that has already occurred, a narrow class defined by the six conditions below. 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 (4.11).
- 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; the two shares are recorded separately (2.2, 9.3).
- What is judged: "this loss is his." Entry is decided by the loss judged at this moment to have begun; whether it is factually so is checked separately (2.2). What is judged can be wrong, and that falls under condition 6.
- Acknowledgment. Acknowledging him as an end. This is a stance, not a proposition. Moral Law P1, §2.5: "Recognition is not cognition", "It is a practical posture", "Recognition is an operation at the level of posture, not a judgment at the level of proposition"; the same section: "Cannot-not recognize the specific other as End, irreducible to means." Methodological Overview, §1.7: "I acknowledge you, but you have not chiseled me back."
- 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.
- A clue is not contagion. His crying and his face can be clues by which I learn what he has lost; clues can be wrong. This follows the Overview's treatment, in 4.4, of another's laughter as a clue. A response produced merely by contagion does not on its own count as the weeping of non dubito; if there is also a share of contagion in the same scene, it is recorded separately.
- 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; it cannot withdraw the fact that this weeping happened (Overview, 5.3: "A Wrong Judgment Is Still Cannot-Not"). Acknowledgment is a stance, and there is no question of withdrawing its validity.
Conditions 3 and 4 fix the layer. "Acknowledging him as an end" and "not co-opting" are the two conditions that explicitly fix this stance of non dubito. They correspond to Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3, "I confirm you are an independent end", and to the first and second criteria of §2.2 (4.5). Psychoanalysis IV, §1.2 also says that confirming the other as an independent end is the structural test-condition of non dubito. Exclusivity is carried by these two conditions; it is not derived from within a single weeping, by the same method as Paper IV, 2.3 uses for the laughter of despair.
The other four are entry conditions. Condition 1 keeps out weeping for oneself: the share of attention that falls on my damage is not counted. Condition 5 keeps out contagion. Condition 2 requires something judged, condition 6 requires that what is judged can have its validity withdrawn by reflexive negation; together the two keep out the tendency of 12DD, and also lay down the discipline of fallibility and correction.
The third point of condition 4 and condition 6 are two things, not one thing counted twice: the former is a stance, the willingness to let material change me; the latter is that what is judged can itself be wrong and can be withdrawn.
These 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.
"That judgment". When this paper says "that judgment", it means the first link: what is judged (condition 2) together with what is held (conditions 3 and 4). The mark of 15DD lies in what is held, not in what is judged. When only the content is meant, the paper says "what is judged".
When the object is not a subject. Being saddened by seeing a cat suffer acknowledges not "him as an end" but its standing as conscious and sentient. This is not within the narrow class defined above. When one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD (5.4).
4.2 The Formula and the Short Form
The formula: "This loss is his." This is the content of what is judged. It does not on its own constitute the definition, and it is not enough to fix the layer; the layer is fixed by what is held, conditions 3 and 4. "He has lost" is not enough: the empathy of 13DD can say that too ("I understand that he has lost"), and the shift of centre is not in that sentence.
The short form: "The pain is my pain." This is how the emotion side is written, and it hangs under the first point of condition 4: not using my feeling to prescribe to him what he actually feels, and so not calling my pain his. The short form does not fix the layer on its own either: the self-pity of 13DD can also say "the pain is my pain"; not co-opting depends on its standing together with the formula, and on conditions 3 and 4.
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. They are of a piece with "this judgment is mine" in Paper II of the Laughter Series; all of them say to whom something belongs: the Laughter Series says this judgment belongs to me; here, this loss belongs to him, and this pain belongs to me.
4.3 Judgment, Emotion, Weeping
Three links.
- Judgment. The first link, which contains two things: what is judged, "this loss is his"; and 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. The two together are "that judgment".
- 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 (4.7). The pain is my pain. 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; weeping is still the jolt after the emotion.
- 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 (Section 6).
The three links 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. They are not 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.
Being felt. Being felt is a matter of feeling; feeling is at 9DD and 10DD. Emotion and weeping are both felt by way of it; they differ elsewhere: emotion is the ongoing pain, weeping is the jolt of cannot-not after the emotion. When the Laughter Series says that laughter is "felt, not an emotion", it means that the jolt of laughter is not an emotion, not that emotion is not felt. Feeling is below, and what feels it is an upper layer: in the weeping of non dubito, 15DD can feel the feelings of 9DD and 10DD; the perception of 9DD and 10DD cannot perceive the power of judgment of 15DD. This is the direction stated by Theorem 2 of Methodology IX: "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."
What 13DD can govern. 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" (Methodology IX, Theorem 2). 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. 14DD and 15DD stand above 13DD; 13DD cannot govern their cannot-not, or it would not be called cannot-not; 13DD can at most delay that cannot-not, and cannot cancel it: the jolt is felt all the same, and what 13DD can hold down is only its coming out. The cell "holding back, not showing" in Section 6 is exactly this case: the jolt is still there within, and what does not show is its expression; this agrees with Overview, 5.2, "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; 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. This paper applies it only to weeping (Section 11).
Laughter comes quickly; weeping takes a process. This is a rough observation of the author's; it fits the structure here but is not inferred from the number of links. Plessner also starts from this contrast between laughing and weeping (7.3). 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 (4.4: the pain was there all night, and only when the younger brother came in did it reach the jolt). The "process" here means this stretch of waiting, of no fixed length, not three links each taking up a stretch, joined end to end.
Two cannot-nots. The emotion is the cannot-not over that loss of his; weeping is the cannot-not after the emotion. Both take the modality of Overview, 5.2: conditional, not waiting for consent, working from the inside out. When this is carried over to the second cannot-not it must be stated precisely: weeping passes through the emotion and still comes from that judgment. Neither is a causal prediction, and neither guarantees that seeing his loss will necessarily bring weeping. To claim that, under some set of independently identifiable antecedents, this weeping must occur would be a further claim that has to be tested; it is not made here (Section 11).
There may be more than one emotion in the same scene. Joy can be present too. In the kind of weeping for joy taken up in this section, joy for him is one emotion; what the weeping passes through is another, the one directed at what he has lost along the way (9.1). This is the exact mirror of wry laughter: in wry laughter the laugh falls on the remainder and the bitterness is an emotion in the same scene; in weeping for joy the weeping passes through the emotion directed at the loss, and the joy is another emotion in the same scene.
How it differs from laughter and from beauty.
| Relation to judgment | Relation to emotion | |
|---|---|---|
| Beauty | Seeing, and cannot-not acknowledging that it is beautiful | Acknowledging that it is beautiful does not rest on emotion; emotion may come along or may not (Judgment and Aesthetics, §5.1) |
| Laughter | Judgment felt directly, two sides of one event with the judgment; felt | Need not pass through emotion; emotion may be in the same scene, like the bitterness of wry laughter, and may come first or come after (Overview, 3.3, 5.1; "come first" rests on the author's observation: bitterness first and laughter after is common, laughter first and bitterness after also occurs but is rare) |
| Weeping at 15DD | The jolt of cannot-not, felt, after that judgment has passed through emotion; also felt | Emotion is a necessary link, and the emotion has a component of judgment in it; weeping is not part of the emotion but the cannot-not after 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: both are cannot-not, and they differ in object. What sets weeping apart from both is that it must first pass through emotion, and that this emotion has a component of judgment in it. This point is new in this paper, written only for the emotion through which the weeping of non dubito passes; it is not taken over from upstream, and the two upstream papers are not changed by it.
A wrong judgment. What is withdrawn is the validity of what was judged; the emotion and the weeping that have already happened cannot be withdrawn (Overview, 5.3).
Beginnings and endings. Judgment, emotion, weeping and outward expression can each begin and end on their own. The emotion can last longer than the weeping: grief is a longer emotion and can be a background or a state of a relationship, without being given a layer of its own. A single weeping is an identifiable jolt that occurs while the emotion lasts; it can break off and start again, and the emotion can remain between two weepings.
Mourning observances are arrangements of rite and practice; within them there can be grief and repeated weeping, but particular feelings are not inferred backwards from the observances.
4.4 An Example: The Night of the Wake
This is a constructed example, meant to let the reader see what the definition looks like when it lands on a single experience. It does not recount any real person, nor does it serve as an empirical counterexample.
First, how this weeping actually arises.
The father was 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.
These need not be the same kind of weeping. In the first, the drift of talk falls on what may come later, which by 2.2 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 (2.2), and the share of his own loss falls in the 13DD, 14DD row of Section 3. 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, and the latter is exactly the mourner Schopenhauer describes (7.1); if what it turns back to is his own future death, its tense is first checked by 2.2. On these two drifts of talk alone, neither is enough to be certified as the weeping of non dubito.
What is to be written here is the third.
What is judged. This time the judgment is: "This 'too late' is his." The elder son judges that 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 whether he is still carrying forward at this moment, this paper, following the Meaning Theory, 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 (Section 3), 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. In this constructed example, 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 emotion; it 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 shares are told apart. The several weepings of the same night 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. Where several shares are mixed and cannot be told apart, they neither falsify nor confirm. 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.
In this pain, that "too late" is still taken as his father's; and 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.
4.5 Against the Four Minimum Criteria of Non Dubito
Following the table form Paper IV, 6.2 uses for the knowing smile. This table unfolds the conditions of stance within the narrow class; it cannot infer a whole long record of testing backwards from one stretch of expression, and there is no need, for a single weeping, to invent how many of life's shocks the one weeping has already come through.
| Psychoanalysis IV, §2.2 | Gist of the text | The weeping of non dubito | 4.1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Criterion 1 | Survives remainder-impacts without withdrawing; maintained by acknowledging remainders, not by blocking feedback | His loss I cannot fully understand, and he or available material may revise me; this stance stands by acknowledging this, not by declaring "I understand completely" | Conditions 4, 6 |
| Criterion 2 | Allows the other's direction not to serve my direction | His loss does not serve my good heart or my purpose; disagreeing with his choice, I still acknowledge him (9.2) | Conditions 3, 4 |
| Criterion 3 | Certain about direction, uncertain about outcome | Certain about this stance; uncertain about the facts: what he has lost, and how much, can be wrong, and is kept under monitoring | Conditions 2, 6 |
| Criterion 4 | Does not withdraw before costs, but not through self-coercion | What is maintained is the stance of not occupying his first person, direction and response, and this stance does not rest on extra self-coercion. The cost has two ready places to land: his loss was caused by me (9.4); his direction runs against mine (9.2). Whether the jolt of weeping occurs, and whether tears fall outwardly, is another matter; "not forcing myself to weep" does not testify for this stance | Conditions 3, 4 |
4.6 The Centre Is Not 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. So the centre is fixed by what is judged and what is held, that is, by conditions 3 and 4 of 4.1, not by pronouns.
Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3 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. 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.
"Acknowledge" names only the act, as a verb and its verbal noun; it is not a name for a layer. The name of this layer is "non dubito" (Methodological Overview, V3.1 Revision Note).
4.7 No Need to Feel What He Feels
Paper IV, 7.2 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, 7.4 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 (4.3). This point 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 (4.2).
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.
Conversely, however precise the empathy, if the centre is still me, it is not yet enough to be certified as the weeping of non dubito (Section 3).
4.8 Pity and Investment
Condescending pity returns the centre to me: the other becomes the object of my good heart. When Kant calls beneficence from pity an insulting kind of beneficence, this is exactly the kind he means.
Investment, following Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3, is the self's purpose directed at the other's welfare, and carries no pejorative sense in itself. What this section examines is the kind of investment 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 when one handles the other through pity or investment, substituting my purpose for his own law, is it called colonization (taking the broad sense of Overview, 7.3). The paper does not write "pity is colonization". Commiseration and pity must also be kept apart; neither is simply equal to 15DD.
4.9 Weeping at the Same Thing, Tacit Understanding, Embracing and Weeping
Following the three cells of Paper IV, 7.2 of the Laughter Series:
| Weeping at the same thing | Tacit understanding | Embracing and weeping | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | Two people weep over the same loss, each judging on his own | Weeping at the same thing, plus each knowing of the other | Mutual non dubito; each takes the other as an end |
| Layer | Each by his own layer. Only if each satisfies 4.1 are there two 15DD weepings; two 15DD weepings do not rule out their forming 16DD at the same time | Still each by his own layer | 16DD, outside the scope, registered only |
The intersection of 16DD "comes into being at the moment of looking at each other, from both sides together" (Paper IV, 7.2), and does not presuppose that the two already took each other as ends before. Embracing, weeping in step, and each knowing the other's loss do not on their own certify 16DD.
4.10 Non Dubito Is Not the Conclusion of Reasoning
At that moment there was no prior question, "is he qualified?", followed by an answer.
But non dubito is not "no question occurred". Psychoanalysis IV, §2.2: not "I have no doubts" but "doubts are present, remainders are present, the construct's gaps are present, yet I do not doubt." Overview, 7.4: "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 also follows §2.2: "If 'not-doubting' requires shielding from countervailing input, it is forced closure".
4.11 The Added Suffering
First, own it. In the weeping of grief treated in this section, the emotion of 4.3 is a suffering; it is in me, and it is added. The paper does not deny that suffering increases, nor does it delete it from the count by separating the names "felt" and "emotion".
What it is. This suffering is my suffering over his loss, not a copy of his suffering. But that is not yet an answer: Kant had already separated the one who originally suffered from the one who later suffers along, and needs no second person mistaking the disaster as fallen on himself.
Its relation to Kant's two entries. The duty to increase suffering that §34 denies, this paper does not set up either. The cultivation and means that §35 asks about are not the ground on which this experience stands. What this paper further undertakes is this: not to reduce this experience to an item to be cut, merely because suffering increases.
How it is entered.
- Not entered 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: the emotion has a component of judgment in it, and what is held is within it (4.3). 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 (4.1, condition 4); where non dubito is present, doubt and questioning remain present too (4.10). This suffering is what acknowledgment looks like when felt, and so questioning comes with it; questioning is not its use, and does not rise or fall with the amount of suffering. The questions are of two kinds: one kind comes to me, "what more can I do", "did I have a part in it" (9.4); one kind concerns him, "what has he lost", "what is left", "how would he see this".
- A division of explanatory labour. 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 "not entered as an evil to be reduced" says, and what it does not. It says: this 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 (4.3). This column is the record kept on the side of the one who weeps, and it is also this paper'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.
- Not a duty. SAE does not say ought to others; cannot-nots overlap, but make no external demand (1.4). 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. This is the same as the Overview, 7.3 calling "making someone laugh at a certain point by means of consequences" colonization.
- Not something to seek. What matters is acknowledgment, not suffering itself. Deliberately seeking to be softened is one kind of Empfindelei (5.5); using weeping in exchange for something else is doing things with weeping (Section 3).
- It does not rank persons. The one who weeps is not higher for this weeping; the one who does not weep is not thereby judged to have no acknowledgment. As in Overview, 7.3, "someone who does not laugh is not thereby judged not to have seen": not weeping is not lacking acknowledgment. Cannot-not makes no external verdict either; for speaking by single operations and not assigning layers to persons, see 1.4.
- It is not evidence. This weeping is what acknowledgment looks like, felt, when acknowledgment is present; it does not in turn testify for acknowledgment; the weeping of empathy at 13DD can feel the same from within. The same feeling is entered this way only when acknowledgment is present. "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; more suffering is not better. 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. Refusing to be comforted is compared separately (5.5).
- 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, not on the side of his loss; otherwise his loss becomes material for my sensibility, exactly the co-opting that 4.1, condition 4 blocks.
- 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.
5. Examples: Nietzsche's Horse (Reportedly) and Characters in Novels
5.1 The Standing of the Example
The story that Nietzsche embraced a horse in Turin and then collapsed into madness is very widely told. According to Townsend's investigation (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017), its only original source is a chain of hearsay: a guard told the landlord, Fino, and after Nietzsche's death (1900) an anonymous journalist went to interview Fino; hence "thirdhand hearsay in its sole original form". 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. What is analysed here is the structure of the legend, marked "reportedly". In method this follows Paper II, 2.2 of the Laughter Series on the line about marrying a bad wife and becoming a philosopher: only the structure is taken, and no source is vouched for.
5.2 The Layer Goes with the One Who Weeps
Following Overview, 6.1, the layer of a weeping is fixed by the layer at which the one who weeps stands at this moment. What activates the layer is what is faced at this moment, not who is wept for.
When the object is not an actual subject, there are two paths:
- A character in a novel goes by projection. The reader projects subjectivity onto the character. Projection does not require, as a precondition, that the character have the full qualifications of an actual subject; nor does projection on its own suffice to fix the layer, which still depends on conditions 3 and 4 of 4.1 (5.5).
- An animal goes by extension. Weeping for a cat or a horse acknowledges its standing as conscious and sentient; it does not enter by projecting subjectivity onto it; it is not within the narrow class of 4.1 (5.4). That animals do not enter the narrow class is not because the object fixes the layer; it is because what condition 3 asks to be acknowledged (an end) has no bearer here (V14).
5.3 No Prior Reasoning
In this paper's reading of the legend, there is no antecedent requiring that a reasoning about qualification be completed first: he need not first judge whether the horse is qualified and only then weep (4.10). This paper does not claim to know the psychology of a historical person at that moment.
5.4 The Horse: Extension, Not Within the Definition
Condition 3 of 4.1 speaks of acknowledging him as an end. Weeping for a horse does not acknowledge this. First, several predicates are taken 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. V14 says an animal "can be an end that is cared for".
- Not filling a kind of fact-position does not on its own show that the one who weeps has made a corresponding mistaken assertion. If he has also made a specific assertion about capacity, standing or harm, it is checked by what was asserted; not all concern directed at animals is registered as a mistake.
The extension of acknowledgment. Acknowledging subjectivity extends into acknowledging the standing of being conscious and sentient: being saddened by seeing a cat suffer, being unable to bear seeing a horse whipped. By definition, this is not the 15DD stance. 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 (1.4).
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. This is the author's observation, not a proof, and no layer is assigned to anyone on its basis.
How the two others speak of animals.
- Kant, in §17 of the Doctrine of Virtue, says that 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 (AA 6:443, checked against an electronic transcription of the Academy edition; this paper first came to it through the quotation in Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality, §8). The connection he sees runs in the same direction as the observation above, except that he places fellow feeling for animals in the position of a means, and makes this 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 (§8). He himself says that sympathy for animals is closely bound up with goodness of character, that one who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man, and that this sympathy and justice and loving-kindness toward people flow from the same source (§19).
- This paper compares the two directions separately. In the direction of "on the way", the connection this paper describes runs the same way as Kant's, from sympathy for animals toward people; the difference is that Kant makes it the ground of a duty and puts it in the position of a means, while this paper only describes it, using it neither as a ground nor as a means. In the direction of "extension", this paper is closer to Schopenhauer: neither is practice for the other. It differs in what is primary: he says the two flow from one source (§19), rooted in the unity of the will; this paper says that acknowledging animals is an extension of the acknowledgment of subjectivity, without borrowing the metaphysical ground of the unity of the will (7.1).
The mirror experiment and the negation gate must be written apart. Baragli et al. (2021) report evidence of mirror self-recognition in horses at group level; a correction followed in 2022, along with criticisms of method and interpretation and the original team's response. Mirror self-recognition is only an early sign that 13DD is available (Paper I, 4.2: "this series' present reading"). "The horse cannot carry out negation and has not passed the negation gate" is a theoretical registration this paper carries over; it is not derived from that experiment.
Nietzsche's weeping. On the legend, it can be an instance of this extension: in stance and feeling directed at the horse's suffering, without co-opting it. It does not enter the narrow class of 4.1, nor does it enter by projection (5.2).
5.5 Characters in Novels
They count. What the weeping is directed at is the character: the "he" the reader weeps for is the character and the character's loss within the work.
There are often two projections; the first is not a necessary condition. 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, in the sense of 4.1, condition 5; the projection has to be the weeper's own. An author may also write a flat character without a first person, and readers can project all the same. So what "counts" rests on the weeper's own projection; "the author is a subject" explains where projection often comes from, not the standing of the character. When a subject writes a character, a mountain or a house, the author's subjectivity is not transferred item by item to what is written, and the character does not thereby become an actual bearer. Extending weeping to fictional objects is this paper's responsibility. If a reader cares, through the character, about the author's own life, that is another direction and needs material of its own.
Three entries 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 and makes no mistake about it; the reader's real stance is checked against whether it satisfies 4.1.
How this differs from the horse. One difference is the path of entry: with the character, the reader projects subjectivity and can enter the narrow class of 4.1; with the horse, what is acknowledged is the standing of being conscious and sentient, by way of extension (5.4). One is where the projection comes from: with the character there is often the author's projection first. One is the factual entry: with the horse, factual judgments such as "the horse is suffering" may be wrong; a character's fortunes are checked against the material of the work, and the reader's judgment about them can still be wrong, or may be undecided, so 4.1, condition 6 applies equally. Knowing that a work is fiction does not guarantee that one has read the narrative correctly.
The confrontation with Kant's "tearful plays" lands here. Kant's Empfindelei is the propensity of tender emotion to rise into an affect. He gives two cases, joined by "or": one is a participating pain that refuses to be comforted; the other is sinking deliberately, through imagination, into fictitious misfortunes until one takes them as real (1.2).
- 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.
- The former: compare by the guardrails of 4.11. If refusing to be comforted means keeping this pain going in order to testify for acknowledgment, this paper does not take it up either; acknowledgment does not depend on keeping the same pain. Being comforted, and the suffering lessening, do not conflict with this paper's position.
- The comparison uses the full definition of 4.1, not just the condition "not co-opting". A reader enjoying being moved does not on its own cancel an attention to the character that is present at the same time; the shares in the same scene are recorded separately. Nor is Empfindelei equal to this paper's 13DD; the two can only be compared case by case, not mapped onto each other directly.
- The question of consequences that Kant raises (making the heart languid and insensible to strict duty) is registered by this paper and not answered.
6. The Inner–Outer Grid
The inner–outer grid is drawn only for the weeping of non dubito:
| Weeps outwardly | Does not weep outwardly | |
|---|---|---|
| Inner weeping of non dubito | Crying aloud, shedding tears: both the judgment and the expression are present | Holding back, not showing: the jolt is felt all the same; what 13DD holds down is only its coming out (4.3) |
| No inner weeping of non dubito | Only the expression is recorded. It may be another real weeping (13DD, 14DD), tears drawn out by some other judgment (laughing till one cries, being moved to tears by another's kindness), or there may be nothing felt within | No weeping of non dubito, and no outward weeping; other inner experience is recorded separately |
- Cannot-not works from the inside out (Overview, 5.2). 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.
- The body takes over. Plessner says that when action and speech can no longer answer, the body takes over the answer; in weeping, a person by his own inner act also puts himself into the body's answer (p. 147). His division does not map one to one onto this table: this table divides the jolt within from the expression without. The failure of expression to answer does not on its own rule out an inner grasp (7.3).
- Ritual weeping, professional mourners and performance speak of situation, role and use; they do not on their own say whether there is weeping within. 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; only where the felt jolt meant here is really absent is the case entered in the lower left cell.
- Onion tears appear only at the lower bound (Section 3) and do not enter this table.
7. Contrasts
7.1 Schopenhauer (the Main Contrast)
Sources. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §67 treats weeping, and the first sentence of §68 sums it up (Haldane and Kemp's English translation; the German original is to be verified). In the order of his text, he says:
- "we never weep directly on account of the pain we experience, but always merely on account of its repetition in reflection". He goes on: "We pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere idea of it".
- "Weeping is accordingly sympathy with our own selves, or sympathy directed back on its source".
- Weeping is conditioned by the capacity for love and sympathy, and also by imagination: "whoever can still weep, must necessarily always be capable of love, i.e., sympathy towards others".
- Weeping over another's suffering has two paths: "Either we vividly put ourselves in the place of the sufferer by imagination, or see in his fate the lot of humanity as a whole, and consequently, first of all, our own lot"; so that "in a very roundabout way, it is yet always about ourselves that we weep".
- Weeping over a bereavement: the mourner "does not weep for his loss; he would be ashamed of such egotistical tears"; "First of all he certainly weeps for the fate of the dead, but he also weeps when, after long, heavy, and incurable suffering, death was to this man a wished-for deliverance. Thus, principally, he is seized with sympathy for the lot of all mankind"; and "in this lot of mankind the mourner sees first of all his own", the more so the closer the kinship, "thus most of all if it is his father". His example is a son weeping bitterly at the death of a father who had been old and ill for many years. The constructed example of 4.4 borrows his scene and changes one thing: the death of his father was a wished-for deliverance, and from this he says that what is chiefly wept over is the lot of mankind; what 4.4 judges is "too late", which deliverance does not cancel. On this example the two accounts part ways from here (9.3).
- The first sentence of §68: "the identity of pure love and sympathy, the final return of which upon our own individuality has, as its symptom, the phenomenon of weeping": weeping is the symptom of sympathy finally returning upon our own individuality.
Two layers must be kept apart.
- The layer of sympathy. Sympathy comes from seeing through individuation. §44 and §66 cite tat twam asi (§44: "this living thing art thou"): the will is the thing in itself of all appearances and does not lie in plurality; seeing through individuation, one finds one's own inner nature again in the other, and all love and sympathy come from this (§66, §68). At this layer, the boundary of his "self" is large enough to contain the other. On the Basis of Morality writes of sympathy as looking toward the other: "I feel it as my own, not indeed in myself, but in him" (§18, Bullock's translation); and it takes sympathy as the only genuine moral motive (proposed and proved in §16, confirmed from experience in §19).
- The layer of weeping. Weeping is this sympathy finally turning back upon our own individuality (§68, first sentence); by way of the lot of mankind one sees one's own lot, and the closer the kinship, the heavier the turning back (§67). What weeping returns to is the individual self, not that large "self".
The layer of sympathy: close in experience, different in emphasis. The two accounts are close in experience: both look toward the other, and his suffering is in him, not in me. Schopenhauer himself says, "I share his pain in him, despite the certainty that his skin does not enclose my nerves" (On the Basis of Morality, §18): the separation is something he knows for certain, and sympathy crosses it, feeling in him; what the two accounts share lies only at the level of "his suffering is in him". In §4 he attacks imperative ethics: "Who tells you that there are laws to which our conduct ought to be subject?"; this runs the same way as this paper's not saying ought to others. The difference is in emphasis. He says I feel his suffering as my own, "not indeed in myself, but in him"; this requires that I become to some degree identified with him, the boundary between I and not-I being for the moment broken through (§18). This paper says: the pain is my pain, the loss is his, and the emotion is not a feeling of what he feels (4.2, 4.7). Schopenhauer's concern is whether one has drawn the other within the boundary of "oneself"; this paper 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; in Schopenhauer, selflessness rests precisely on this large "self". This paper 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.
The layer of weeping: what he describes is accepted, and another kind is pointed out. His description of how weeping arises is reasonable: starting from another's suffering, by way of reflection, coming back to oneself. Such weeping this paper 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" ("it is yet always about ourselves that we weep"). Turning back to what one has oneself lost falls in the 13DD, 14DD row of Section 3; turning back to one's own future death is first checked for tense by 2.2; 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 paper points to another weeping: attention and stance stay on his loss throughout, with no need to assume that it turns back to oneself.
A division of labour between criteria. He explains the essence of weeping by its route: sympathy turns back upon oneself, and weeping is the symptom of this return. This paper fixes the centre by stance: acknowledging him and not co-opting is 15DD (4.1, conditions 3 and 4), wherever it psychologically began. The two have different offices. An account of how something arises does not necessarily on its own decide the final stance toward the other; a definition by stance does not necessarily on its own rule out some imaginative access.
One narrowing. He says we do not weep directly over the pain we suffer; this agrees with this paper's placing perceptual weeping at the lower bound on one point only: the direct feeling of pain is not the centre of weeping. In his account even the weeping of pain passes through reflection, "even when it is physical"; the same section adds that a hurt child often weeps only when someone pities it. This paper keeps only the pain type that has not passed through such reflection at the lower bound, as a boundary registration (Section 3), and does not generalize here about all weeping from pain.
The weight of proof. What this paper contends for is not "it has been proved that there is no return" but "there is no need to assume a necessary return". The two accounts of how weeping arises are compared in 9.3; the drift of talk and stance are both fallible material. The metaphysical disagreement about the boundary of "self" is explained separately on each side's own grounds, and the drift of talk does not testify for it. 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" (7.3).
7.2 Four Ways of Standing
| The boundary of the self | The link of emotion | Modality | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schopenhauer | The layer of sympathy: contains the other (tat twam asi) | Present; the layer of weeping: sympathy turns back upon one's own individuality | Sets up no ought (§4); takes sympathy as the only genuine moral motive (§16) |
| The Stoic sage (as Kant records him) | Held; seeks friends in order to help | Refused: no concern of mine | Helps when he can; when he cannot, does not suffer along |
| Kant | Held; each person is an end | Kept as a means, to be cultivated | Ought; an indirect duty |
| This paper | Held; two subjects neither of which contains the other | Cannot-not; the pain is my pain; weeping need not turn back | Cannot-not; cannot-nots overlap, but the overlap makes no external demand or verdict |
Set out this way, Kant is the nearest neighbour, the difference lying in normative office and modality (1.4); Schopenhauer is the main contrast, close in experience, differing in emphasis and at the layer of weeping (7.1).
7.3 Plessner
Sources. Plessner, Lachen und Weinen (1941). What follows is based on the English translation, Laughing and Crying (Churchill and Grene, from the third edition, Northwestern University Press, 1970, open-access edition), with page numbers from the English translation; the German original is to be verified, as with Schopenhauer and Smith. The English translation is a scan; the whole book was read through OCR, and the passages cited were checked against the page images.
How he speaks of crying.
- The body takes over the answer. Laughing and crying both occur in situations to which action, speech, gesture and expressive movement can no longer give an answer. Then "The body, displaced from its relation to him, takes over the answer"; a person "capitulates as a soul-body unit … but he does not capitulate as a person" (p. 67).
- Crying is mediated; laughter is not. Laughter follows directly on its occasion; in crying, an act of the person himself has to be inserted between occasion and outbreak: "an act oriented to the person, a reflexive act, must be inserted between the occasion and the outbreak" (p. 117). He refers to this act with such expressions as "capitulation", "giving up in defeat" and "letting oneself go" (p. 116), and says that this surrender is "half-voluntary, half-forced" (p. 117). One does not simply break out crying; one feels oneself growing weak, sometimes holding it, sometimes not: "We do not simply burst out crying but feel a weakness, a yielding coming on, which we either master or can no longer master" (p. 117); and one can feel oneself growing weak only because the inner loosening and surrender have already gone before, "otherwise we would not feel ourselves growing weak" (p. 117). This surrender is within; it both brings on the crying and constitutes it: "it not only triggers crying but is constitutive for it" (p. 118). In crying, "He participates within himself—he is moved, touched, shaken" (p. 116).
- Fast and slow. The automatic process of crying "begins more or less slowly" (p. 116). "Openness, immediacy, eruptivity characterize laughter; closure, mediacy, gradualness characterize crying"; laughter also develops, "Only this development takes a shorter time than that of crying" (p. 146). "Even if we are 'suddenly' overcome, feeling, emotion, and shock must first develop into loss of self-control" (p. 147).
- Feeling has an object, but is not sufficient. Feelings are not attitudes but "resonant appeals" bound to some objective quality; "Although a feeling may be unjustified and unjust, it is never without content" (p. 129), yet they do not rest on doubt and decision (p. 128). Feeling is a precondition of crying, but not a sufficient one: "Pain and joy, love and despair, can, in their full authenticity and power, take possession of a man without moving him to tears" (p. 126).
Here this paper takes up, and checks against the original, the question left in Paper IV, 4.4 of the Laughter Series. There the Laughter Series had turned the point into a question about one and the same case, to be verified: which capacity for response is it that the body takes over? Does it exclude judgment? On the original text, what fails is the answer of action, speech, gesture and expressive movement (pp. 67, 143). The person as a person does not give up; losing control over the body itself still "attests to his sovereign understanding of what cannot be understood" (p. 67). In crying, a person also puts himself, by his own inner act, into the body's answer: "Deeply moved, he implicates himself by this act in the anonymous 'answer' of his body" (p. 147). So he cannot be read as dealing only with the body on the outside. He writes of the two limits that laughing and crying answer to as lying beyond the competence of reason, disrupting the relations that are binding for reason and volition (p. 157); he does not call the grasp within crying a judgment, and the judgment this paper speaks of is not the conclusion of reasoning either (4.10), so the two need not collide. What can be settled here is this: the failure of expression to answer does not on its own rule out an inner grasp; how the two accounts' concepts correspond cannot be decided on this point alone.
Where they agree.
- Crying takes a stretch; laughter need not. This agrees with the structure of 4.3 and with the author's observation that "laughter comes quickly, weeping takes a process". Both also say that emotion is a precondition but not sufficient: he says feelings are preconditions of crying, "but still are not sufficient" (p. 126); this paper says the two cannot-nots do not guarantee weeping (4.3).
- Emotion and knowing are not divided in advance. He says that when we are moved, "it is not the 'understanding' but the 'heart' that speaks" (p. 127). Nearer to this paper are two other passages: the awareness in crying at a turning point he calls "a knowledge akin to feeling" (p. 134); in remorse, emotion and knowing are separated only afterwards, "in the schema of emotional and cognitive components" (p. 135). This paper is close to him only on these two points, that emotion has an object and that emotion and knowing are not divided in advance (4.3); it does not borrow his theory of feeling.
- Crying need not return to oneself. He says Schopenhauer's answer is "nearer to the truth" than the usual view (p. 118), and errs in taking it as the universal cause of crying: the inner loosening "is not to be confused with crying about oneself" (p. 118); what Schopenhauer describes, objectifying one's own pain and then sympathizing with oneself, is only one case of crying at a turning point, "what Schopenhauer mistakenly described as the universal reason for crying" (p. 134); tragic conflict is an inexhaustible source of crying, "but weeping no longer directed to one's own person" (p. 135). This runs the same way as 7.1's accepting Schopenhauer without his "always".
- Weeping for joy needs to judge what will not come back. He says that in crying at a turning point, such as remorse, reunion or the joy of release, what is decisive is not only the release of tension but also "the awareness of an irretrievable, ineffaceable, irrecoverable life", "pain for the irretrievable" (p. 134). This runs the same way as the positive instances of 9.1: judging the item lost along the way, which will not come back. This part mostly concerns the weeper's own experience; where it fits the antecedent of the own-purpose type in 2.5, it can be compared there, and the rest is checked by its particular operation.
- Contagion and sentimentality. Collective crying arising from contagion "has no true primality" (p. 147), which agrees with 4.1, condition 5. Sentimentality "is out to be touched and misses no opportunity to enjoy inner capitulation", and hardly lets genuine feeling arise (p. 128); this runs the same way as Kant's Empfindelei (5.5) and as "not something to seek" in 4.11.
Where they part and how they correspond.
- After the emotion: loosening and cannot-not, joined by layer. The two accounts part after the emotion. He says that after the emotion (in his terms, 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 oneself growing weak (pp. 116–118, 147). This paper says that when the emotion reaches the jolt of cannot-not, that jolt is the weeping. The two accounts can be joined by layer. In this paper, feeling is at 9DD and 10DD, and 13DD, above it, can govern the feelings that carry no cannot-not: it declines to receive them and does not let them out (Methodology IX, Theorem 2); the cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD lies above 13DD, and 13DD cannot govern it, or it would not be called cannot-not; 13DD can at most delay that cannot-not, and cannot cancel it (4.3). That weakness coming on, he says, one sometimes masters and sometimes can no longer master. Where it is mastered and there is no outbreak of crying, in this paper either that weakness 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, in this paper it is the cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD; what this paper treats is the 15DD kind among them. The two accounts' units of experience and conceptual boundaries do not correspond one to one; this is this paper's reading, which neither says the two are the same nor judges which is more accurate.
- External pressure on 9.1. He speaks of tears before the sublime, before beautiful works and landscapes, and before the innocence of children, "as before a grandeur that transcends every relation to ourselves" (p. 133). He says that there, "nothing threatening and hostile now confronts us" (p. 133), and does not list some loss already begun as a precondition of the tears; his explanation is "the sudden transition from an attitude of tension to one of relaxation" (p. 134), together with "an unconditioned end" and the negation of the relativity of existence (pp. 134, 143). If, on checking, no loss already begun can be found in such weeping, it presses on Claim B; if attention falls on the remainder, it presses on Claim A (2.4, 9.1). This paper registers these as pressure cases and does not borrow his explanation to answer on its own behalf.
- Others being moved as well. He says crying leaves a person "detached, in the sense of being isolated, from the situation of normal behavior" (p. 147). This is being cut off from the situation of normal behaviour; it does not mean that crying can only take oneself as its object; he himself says that tragic weeping is no longer directed at the weeper's own person (p. 135). Where the two accounts really part is over others being moved as well: he says this "must have an inhibitory effect on crying", immediately asks himself "Must—not can?", and assigns the contrary collective case to contagion (p. 147). This paper's weeping at the same thing does not conflict with this thesis merely because two people each weep; nor can embracing and weeping be certified by its outward look (4.9). What still has to be compared is this: when each keeps acknowledgment and not co-opting, can seeing the other moved as well bring on one's own weeping under conditions that are not merely contagion? This paper keeps this question open.
One point of connection. Kant speaks of suffering along when one cannot help; Plessner speaks of the body taking over when there is no answer. This paper says: not being able to help does not explain this weeping away (4.11).
7.4 One Set of Questions for Several Thinkers
The thinkers are not presumed to occupy one position each, nor ranked by DD; they are read against one set of questions.
| Thinker | What is to be explained | The path of access to others | Whether the distinction between self and other is kept in experience | Where normative weight comes from | Relation to this paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aristotle, Rhetoric II.8 | The emotion of pity (as used in rhetoric) | Seeing undeserved evil fall on another; the conditions are that this evil might fall on oneself or one's friends, and that one pities those like oneself | Kept | Not in this chapter | This paper does not make likeness or "it could happen to me" a condition; that is a condition for feeling, not the same as a self-centred motive. The same section has another example; see below the table |
| Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments | Sympathy and moral approval | Exchange of situations in imagination. I.i.1.10: "Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it"; VII.iii.1.4: "I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters" | Kept: "My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own" | The impartial spectator and propriety | Smith holds that sympathy arises not so much from the passion before one's eyes as from the situation that excites it; this paper compares on this basis the material of access and the content judged, and does not write him as excluding all direct contagion. This sentence is the closest to 4.1, condition 5. Being sad for a madman wholly unaware of his state (I.i.1.11) and sympathizing with the dead (I.i.1.13) are, for Smith, both a matter of imagining how I myself would feel; the latter is putting "our own living souls in their inanimated bodies", which he himself calls an "illusion of the imagination". This paper's difference is that the loss is structural, and whether he is aware of it or not does not prevent the loss from being his; nor need I imagine how I would feel (4.7). Imaginative exchange is not the same as copying the other's original experience |
| Mencius, Gongsun Chou I | The sprout of humaneness | "When people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, all have a heart of alarm and commiseration" | Kept | The doctrine of the four sprouts | About to fall, not yet fallen. Alarm is on the side of fear; commiseration presses on the line and enters the remainders (2.2). The three "not"s exclude forming ties, seeking praise and avoiding a bad name (Zhu Xi: 声 means name), but not the participation of perception |
The example of Amasis. Aristotle says in the same section that those wholly taken up with great fear for themselves do not pity. Amasis did not weep on seeing his son led to death, but wept on seeing his friend begging; the reason given is closeness: the son was almost a part of himself, so his fate was terrible, and "the terrible … tends to cast out pity". This example can serve as a neighbouring contrast for "fear crowds out pity", but not as supporting evidence for the tense line of "the loss has already begun"; the text reports whether he wept outwardly, and does not on its own report the inner felt jolt this paper speaks of.
For Schopenhauer, Kant and Plessner, see 7.1, Section 1 and 7.3.
8. Scope and Exclusions
- Scope: the weeping of non dubito at 15DD, including weeping for joy for another (9.1), weeping for the dead (9.3) and weeping for fictional characters (5.5).
- Extension: weeping for a cat or a horse (5.4). Acknowledgment extends to the standing of being conscious and sentient; this is not within the definition of 4.1. When one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD.
- Registered, not developed: weeping at the lower layers, whose structure only is registered (Section 3); embracing and weeping at 16DD (4.9); the fear of non dubito (2.2).
- Recorded separately from the weeping of non dubito: doing things with weeping (Section 3); outward weeping in ritual and performance (Section 6).
- Lower bound: tears from stimulus, that is, physiological tearing.
9. Pressure Cases
9.1 Weeping for Joy and Being Moved to Tears
Joy, too, has layers. Weeping for joy at one's own success, if one judges some item one has lost along the way, is at 14DD (the row "I have lost something in it" in Section 3); only where the thing was hard-won but no loss is judged does it enter the pressure cases below. The own-purpose type set up in this section fixes its layer by what is judged and by attention, not merely by the heading "my success". Weeping for joy for another judges a loss that is his; where it satisfies 4.1, it is a positive instance of the weeping of non dubito.
Carried over from 2.5. The four landing points of 2.5 concern the one checking the list himself, at 14DD. Carrying them over to weeping for joy for another changes the owner of that cost: it is his, not mine. Standing must be checked anew: only if attention falls on his loss and conditions 3 and 4 of 4.1 are met does it reach 15DD.
Positive instances are limited to the kind in which a loss is judged. "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. The first cannot on its own accomplish the other two: 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 here 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. This item falls under the second example of 2.3: a path of action has lost its feasibility.
Three links. Judgment: he has got it; for it he lost that item, which is his; acknowledging him, not co-opting. Emotion: joy for him is one emotion in the same scene; what the weeping passes through is another, the one directed at that loss of his (4.3). Weeping: the jolt that follows.
The formula is not widened. "This loss is his" stands as it was; "hard-won" is only a colloquial phrase and does not enter the formula. If "this hard-won thing is his" were let into the formula, joy would enter the content of what is judged, and Claim B would lose its guardrail.
Independent markers. Whether later talk speaks of that item as something that will not come back ("he's had such a hard time all these years, he wasn't there for the kids when they were small") or as something extra, unforeseen. As in 2.5, this is a fallible hint, not a code of mutually exclusive signs; one must ask what was judged this time. What cannot be told apart does not count.
What remain pressure cases. The weeping in which the thing was hard-won but no loss of his is judged; being moved to tears by a stranger's kindness; the tears Plessner describes before the sublime, before beauty and before the innocence of children (7.3). If attention falls on the construct and no loss already begun can be found, they press on Claim B; if it falls on the remainder, as in tears for beauty, they press on Claim A (2.4). The cases everyday speech calls "being moved" differ from one another and must be kept apart; an antecedent is not supplied for a person because he wept; and noticing that "so people can be like this" does not automatically count as laughter.
9.2 Weeping 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; this is a good example of "acknowledging is not agreeing". 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; it depends on whether 4.1 is satisfied.
9.3 A Close Relative Gravely Ill or Dead
Two shares of attention side by side. I have lost him: the construct of my life with him, in the row "I have lost something in it" in Section 3. He has lost: his life, his plans. These are recorded as separate shares by 4.1, condition 1; that the one who weeps has suffered no personal loss at all is not a condition of entry.
Tense is checked item by item. During grave illness, fearing that he will go is prediction; weeping over what he has already lost is structure (2.2). For weeping on the day of the diagnosis, first say which construct has been lost at this moment, then look at the drift of talk. With death, the loss is complete.
Meeting the Meaning Theory. In weeping for the dead, "this loss is his" is a third-person, fallible description. Meaning Theory, Paper 4, Y32: "Third-person descriptions may still change thereafter, and that does not of itself show that the departed bearer is still carrying forward"; Y30: "Whether the position has exited after death, this paper draws no conclusion." So this paper, following the Meaning Theory, does not judge what becomes of his place; the weeping of non dubito does not wait for that judgment (4.4).
Comparing two explanations with Schopenhauer. The analysis of the drift of talk is in 4.4; only where the two accounts part is kept here.
| Drift of talk in 4.4 | Schopenhauer's reading | This paper's reading | Where the two part |
|---|---|---|---|
| "What will I do now" | The mourner does not weep for his own loss; those would be egotistical tears he would be ashamed of | Fear and one's own loss mixed together | They do not part: neither counts it as weeping for the dead |
| "Everyone has to go this way" | Seeing one's own lot by way of the lot of mankind, the main body of weeping over a bereavement | Falls on the human lot; whether it speaks of the finitude of the father's life or turns back through it to oneself depends on later talk | Whether later talk turns back to one's own lot |
| "He wanted so much to see my brother married, and he did not live to see it", together with the three markers of stance in 4.4 | Grants this as the starting point, "First of all he certainly weeps for the fate of the dead"; the essence of the weeping lies in the turning back that follows. In his example death was a deliverance, so the layer of weeping for the dead does not take the main place | Attention and stance both fall on his loss; if later talk stays with him, there is no need to assume a turning back | As above. The markers of stance divide 13DD from 15DD within this paper; they do not divide this paper from Schopenhauer: his mourner can have all three and still turn back |
The last column can divide, not decide. This table first compares whether later talk and available words and deeds turn toward the weeper's own lot. 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; other material that can distinguish the processes may still be added. The present material neither requires a turning back nor excludes it; nor does this table test whether individuals share one metaphysical essence (7.1).
For Smith's example of the dead, see 7.4.
9.4 His Loss Was Caused by Me
Here, acknowledging that "this loss is his" has a cost: owning my own share. 15DD does not withdraw because of this cost (Psychoanalysis IV, §2.2, criterion 4: "it does not withdraw before costs"). 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 permitted by 4.1, condition 6, and does not count as a self-protective retreat (9.5).
Whether the self-protection of 13DD often withdraws here, the drift of talk moving off his loss and turning to self-defence, is offered only as a generalization to be tested, not as a frequency already proved.
Making clear how responsibility is divided is not in itself withdrawal. 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 (Section 3). No layer is assigned to a person on the strength of one withdrawal.
9.5 A Staged Whipping
If 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 does it automatically withdraw the stance toward the other: toward a person, acknowledging him as an end; toward an animal, the concern of extension (5.4). Conversely, "it was staged" alone cannot guarantee that the actors or the animal did not suffer.
10. Terms
- Construct (构): following the Overview, Section 0, any way of grasping that is currently in operation; the constructs common in weeping are a plan, a shared life, a belief (2.1).
- Remainder (余项): following the Overview, Section 0 and 2.1, the point that the construct has not fully taken in and that is nonetheless right there before one's eyes; it can be seen only as the remainder of some construct; laughter focuses on the remainder. This paper says that weeping keeps his loss as "an unfinished loss", not that it keeps it "as a remainder".
- DD: the layer at which an operation stands at this moment, not a permanent rank of a person (Overview, 6.1).
- Being felt (被感到): a matter of feeling; feeling is at 9DD and 10DD, and what feels it is an upper layer; the perception of 9DD and 10DD cannot perceive the power of judgment of the upper layer (Methodology IX, Theorem 2). Emotion and weeping are both felt by way of it, and they differ as the ongoing pain and the jolt after the emotion (4.3).
- Felt (感): following Overview, 5.1, the jolt as felt, not an emotion. Laughter and weeping are both felt; emotion is felt too, but it is an ongoing emotion, not the jolt (4.3).
- Weeping (哭): the jolt within, the cannot-not after the emotion; it is itself the jolt as felt. It is not defined by tears. In English, weeping, as in the glossary of the Laughter Series.
- Emotion (情): here, what I cannot not feel over his loss; the emotion has a component of judgment in it, with acknowledgment inside it; it is directed at a structural loss, and is not feeling what he feels; in the weeping of non dubito it is a necessary link (4.3). This is said only of the emotion through which the weeping of non dubito passes. The "felt, not an emotion" of Overview, 5.1 is said of laughter; weeping is felt too, but must first pass through emotion.
- That judgment, what is judged, what is held (那一判、所判、所持): that judgment is the first link and contains what is judged and what is held. What is judged is content; it can be wrong, and its validity can be withdrawn. What is held is acknowledgment and not co-opting; it is a stance, not a judgment (4.1, 4.3).
- Formula and short form (公式与简式): the formula "this loss is his" is the content of what is judged; the short form "the pain is my pain" is how the emotion side is written. Neither fixes the layer on its own (4.2).
- The weeping of non dubito (不疑之哭): the narrow class defined in 4.1.
- Non dubito (不疑): non dubito; mutual non dubito (双向不疑).
- Acknowledge, acknowledgment (承认): names only the act; an operation at the level of stance, not a judgment at the level of proposition (Moral Law P1, §2.5); not a name for a layer, the name of the layer being "non dubito". When the object is an animal, what is acknowledged is its standing as conscious and sentient, by way of extension (5.4); this is still a stance, not the proposition "it is conscious", which, if asserted, belongs to what is judged and can be wrong. On the shared word with the Rights Theory: the Rights Theory's constitutive recognition gives the source-identity of a rights position; acknowledgment in this paper is a stance, and does not, by one feeling, create any recognition-based right for the other. The published English of Moral Law P1 and of the Rights Theory renders this word as "recognition"; quotations keep their wording.
- Confirm (确认): used only for "I confirm you are an independent end" in Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3, that is, Cert; not used elsewhere.
- Empathy, investment (同理（共情）、投注): following Psychoanalysis IV, §2.3; investment carries no pejorative sense in itself (4.8).
- Commiseration, pity (恻隐、怜悯): recorded separately; neither is simply equal to 15DD.
- Fear and weeping (怕与哭): fear is prediction falling on a possible loss of the construct; weeping is that something has already been lost within the construct. The "prediction" of "predictive weeping" in Section 3 refers to a layer and is not to be confused with this.
- Clue (线索): his crying and his face, by which I learn of his loss; fallible; not the same as contagion.
- Drift of talk (话头): where later words and deeds fall, used as an independent marker; a fallible hint, which only divides the shares of attention and assigns no layer.
- Overlap (交叠): people's cannot-nots overlap; this is intersection, not identity (Overview, 7.1); it makes no external demand and no external verdict. Each cannot-not is a cut made by the subject in question (1.4).
- Extension (延伸): weeping for animals is not within the definition of 4.1. When one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD (5.4).
- Doing things with weeping (用哭做事): action around weeping, recorded separately from the weeping itself (Section 3).
11. Remainders of This Paper
- Animals and the negation gate. Between mirror self-recognition and the negation gate there are finer layers within 13DD. This must be aligned with Paper I, 4.2 of the Laughter Series (on the mirror reading, chimpanzees have entered the early stage of 13DD), Value Theory P1, V14, and On Rights and Entitlements, §VI, and left to the series concerned to settle.
- Extension and the way there. When one stands at 15DD, weeping for animals is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD. How the two directions are connected, and the observation that "a person who cannot bear to see cats and horses suffer can mostly not bear to see people suffer either" (5.4), this paper does not argue.
- Other emotions and judgment. This paper says that emotion has a component of judgment in it only of the emotion through which the weeping of non dubito passes (4.3). How the emotions through which weeping at other layers passes, and the emotions that come along in the Laughter Series, stand toward judgment, this paper does not discuss.
- The fear of non dubito. Alarm at a loss about to befall another, including Mencius's example; commiseration presses on the line between weeping and fear.
- Caring, through a character, about the author himself. Another direction, which needs material of its own (5.5).
- Being moved to tears where no cost can be found, and tears for beauty (9.1), including the tears Plessner describes before the sublime, before beauty and before the innocence of children (7.3).
- Loosening and cannot-not. Plessner says that after the emotion a half-voluntary inner act still has to be inserted; in surrendering, one feels oneself growing weak, and sometimes masters it, sometimes not. This paper joins the two by layer: where it is mastered and there is no outbreak of crying, either that weakness carries no cannot-not yet and 13DD declines to receive it, or the jolt is already there and 13DD holds down only its coming out; where it cannot be mastered, it is the cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD, and what this paper treats is the 15DD kind among them (7.3). For how the two accounts' concepts correspond, this paper offers only one reading.
- It can delay, it cannot cancel. 13DD cannot govern the cannot-not of 14DD and 15DD; 13DD can at most delay that cannot-not, and cannot cancel it (4.3). This is the author's view, not drawn from Theorem 2 of Methodology IX; 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. It belongs to the level of the framework, to be treated separately there; this paper applies it only to weeping.
- Others being moved as well: inhibiting or bringing on. Plessner says that others being moved as well inhibits primary crying; whether, when each keeps acknowledgment and not co-opting, seeing the other moved as well can bring on one's own weeping under conditions that are not merely contagion, this paper keeps open (7.3, 4.9).
- Where the weeping of non dubito falls in Kant's division between vigorous and softening affects. This paper does not decide for Kant (1.5).
- What the Stoic is able to refuse. This paper's reading is the claiming and cultivating of the emotion (1.5); it awaits a positive argument.
- The connection of arising. To claim that the weeping of non dubito must occur under some set of antecedents would need separate testing (4.3).
- Whether the withdrawal of 13DD before costs is common is to be tested (9.4).
- The persisting self across time. Whether weeping for one's past self can count as 15DD must be aligned with two treatments: the Relation Theory's treatment (in preparation), on which a temporal position is not described as another subject, and the Laughter Series' taking "the future self" as the other of the laughter of despair.
- Hearing stories: laughing first, weeping later. The author's estimate: 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. This estimate is handed over to Exercises and Games of Judgment; designs such as same-layer comparison, comprehension load, quantifiers and spontaneous drifts of talk go over with it.
- Embracing and weeping at 16DD. Registered only, not developed.
Conclusion
Weeping focuses on the construct. This paper does not take all kinds of weeping under one account: 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 this paper discusses. What this paper treats is a narrow class: the weeping of non dubito. He has lost something within some construct; I judge "this loss is his", acknowledge him as an end, and do not co-opt his first person, his direction or his response into my purpose; I cannot not be pained over this loss, and the pain is my pain; the emotion has a component of judgment in it, with acknowledgment inside it; weeping comes after the emotion, as a cannot-not. Of the six defining conditions, the two that fix the layer are acknowledgment and not co-opting; exclusivity is carried by the definition.
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 a rough observation: laughter comes quickly, weeping takes a process. The emotion is directed at his loss within the construct; it is structural, not feeling what he feels. So weeping for the dead, for someone who is unconscious, or for a character in a novel all fall within the scope; weeping for joy, if the one who weeps judges that item he lost along the way, falls within it too. Weeping for a cat or a horse, in which acknowledgment extends to the standing of being conscious and sentient, lies outside the definition: when one stands at 15DD, it is an extension of that stance; when one has not yet stood there, it can be an emotion on the way to 15DD.
Weeping must first pass through emotion, and this emotion is a suffering, an added one. This paper owns it and does not enter it as an evil to be reduced, because acknowledgment is in this suffering: together with the weeping that follows, it is what acknowledgment looks like when it is felt; and with it comes a greater possibility of being questioned. It is not a duty, it is not something to seek, it does not rank persons, it is not evidence, it is not measured by amount, it does not beautify his loss, and it does not replace help. People's cannot-nots overlap, but the overlap cannot be used to make demands on anyone, nor to pass verdicts on anyone.
Kant is the nearest neighbour. Contagious fellow feeling is not what this paper treats; free participation differs from this paper in the normative office and modality compared here: on one side, ought, a demand that can be put to everyone and a means that can be cultivated; on the other, cannot-not, an overlap that makes no external demand or verdict, and acknowledgment. Schopenhauer is the main contrast, and the two accounts are close in experience: his concern is whether one has drawn the other within the boundary of "oneself"; this paper stresses that oneself is oneself and the other is still the other. At the layer of weeping, this paper accepts the weeping that turns back, as he describes it, only without his "always"; there is another weeping in which, looking toward the other, the other is still the other, with no need to assume that it turns back to oneself.
References
Within SAE
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · Overview: Judgment and Laughter. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23286244. Section 0; 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 7.1, 7.3, 7.4, 8.2.
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · I: Laughter as Tendency (11DD+12DD). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23287462. 3.1, 4.2.
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · II: This Judgment Is Mine (13DD). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23287559. 2.2.
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · III: Purpose Enters the Construct Laughed At (14DD). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23287629. 1.3, 2.2, Section 4 (4.1).
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · IV: The Laughter of Despair and the Knowing Smile (15DD). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23287669. 2.3, 4.4, 6.2, 7.2.
- Han Qin. SAE Judgment and Aesthetics — In Tribute to Kant (the SAE aesthetics general framework). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19296710. §5.1.
- Han Qin. SAE Methodological Overview: The Chisel-Construct Cycle (V3.1). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18842449. §1.7 and the V3.1 Revision Note.
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External
- Kant, I. Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), General Remark following §29, AA 5:272–276. Sentences checked against the Academy-edition transcription in Project Gutenberg #55925.
- Kant, I. Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Tugendlehre (1797). §17, AA 6:443; §§34–35, AA 6:456–457. All checked against an electronic transcription of the Academy edition (korpora); the original print not checked; §17 was first reached through the quotation in Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality, §8 (Bullock's translation).
- Schopenhauer, A. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I (1819), §44, §66, §67, §68. English translation after Haldane & Kemp (Project Gutenberg #38427), checked; the German to be verified.
- Schopenhauer, A. Über die Grundlage der Moral (1840), §4, §8, §16, §18, §19. English translation after A. B. Bullock, The Basis of Morality (Project Gutenberg #44929), checked; § numbers follow the German edition and correspond to Bullock's Part II, chs. 2 and 6, and Part III, chs. 5, 7 and 8; the German to be verified.
- Plessner, H. Lachen und Weinen (1941). English translation Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, translated by J. S. Churchill & M. Grene from the third edition, Northwestern University Press, 1970; open-access edition DOI: 10.21985/N2313X. Checked against the English translation, with page numbers from the English translation: pp. 66–67, 116–118, 126–129, 133–135, 143, 146–147, 157. The scan was read through OCR, and the quotations checked against the page images. The German original to be verified.
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Appendix: Connections and Contrasts
For reference. Sources are given at each point in the text; this table sets up no claim of its own.
| Point in this paper | Connection (within SAE) | Contrast (outside) |
|---|---|---|
| Construct and remainder; weeping focuses on the construct; weeping and fear; the same situation can bring laughter or weeping | Overview 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 5.4 | Mencius (alarm, commiseration) |
| Weeping for joy: two ways of seeing the same cost | Paper III 2.2, 4.1 (extended, not changed) | Plessner (crying at a turning point, p. 134) |
| Weeping at each layer, not taken under one account; boundaries | Overview 6.1, 8.2; Paper I 3.1; Paper IV 2.3; Psychoanalysis IV §2.3 | Sagi & Hoffman 1976 |
| The six defining conditions of the weeping of non dubito; the two that fix the layer | Psychoanalysis IV §1.2, §2.2, §2.3; Methodological Overview §1.7; Moral Law P1 §2.5 | — |
| The three links of judgment, emotion and weeping; being felt and what 13DD can govern; the formula and the short form; how weeping differs from beauty and laughter | Overview 3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3; Paper II; Judgment and Aesthetics §5.1; Methodology IX, Theorem 2 | Kant (sorrow as an object of judgment); Plessner (crying is mediated, pp. 116–117, 146–147) |
| No need to feel what he feels; the emotion is directed at a structural loss | Paper IV 7.2; Overview 7.4 | Smith (exchange of situations in imagination) |
| The added suffering; overlap, with no external demand or verdict | Methodological Overview V3.1; Action Theory VI, D33; Overview 7.1, 7.3, 7.4 | Kant §34, §35; the Stoics |
| Weeping at the same thing, tacit understanding, embracing and weeping | Paper IV 7.2 | — |
| Characters in novels: projection | — | Kant, Empfindelei |
| Animals: extension | Value Theory P1, V14; Paper I 4.2 | Nietzsche's horse (Townsend); Baragli et al.; Kant, Doctrine of Virtue §17; Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality §8, §19 |
| Schopenhauer: the layer of sympathy and the layer of weeping | Methodological Overview §1.7 (unidirectional non dubito); Action Theory VI (the meaning of a life lies outside that life) | Schopenhauer, WWV I §44, §66, §67, §68; On the Basis of Morality §4, §16, §18, §19; Plessner pp. 118, 134 |
| Weeping for the dead | Meaning Theory, Paper 4, Y30, Y32 | Smith I.i.1.13; Schopenhauer's mourner |