Compassion’s Nature
This chapter builds on Chapter 2’s therapy by specifying compassion’s nature. The distinction is drawn between compassion’s nature and its content. The former is common to the quality of all relationships characterised by compassion while the latter is constituted by the interaction and negotiation between what people bring to such relationships by way of specific beliefs, doctrines, or practices concerning suffering and the human condition. Compassion’s nature is defined as, paradigmatically, a quality of intersubjective relationships formed as wayfarers and pilgrims with diverse views about suffering encounter each other in the course of their lives. As such, compassion is described as cognitive, normally consensual, affective, typically bodily or intercorporeal, alleviative and, in principle, persuasive, and narratival. While compassion is primarily a quality of second-person relatedness, it is also a personal character excellence, which decentres the agent in ways which are conducive to such relatedness.