“Umana cosa è aver compassione”: Boccaccio, Compassion, and the Ethics of Literature

Abstract

THE EMOTION OF COMPASSION has been at the center of scholarly attention of several disciplines in recent years: history, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literary studies all have taken interest in this emotion and its ethical, political, and poetic implications. For thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Stephen Pinker, compassion, defined as “a painful emotion directed at another person’s misfortune or suffering,” is the “basic social emotion,” the glue that holds humans together and serves as the basis of a democratic and just society. For both, moreover, it is literature—and especially literature with a strong tragic component— that serves as the primary means of cultivating this essentially humane trait. The empathetic identification with the hardships of literary characters, they argue, develops our ability to recognize our shared human vulnerabilities and thus become compassionate and caring people in real life. This view regarding the value of compassion—and the power of literary fictions to cultivate it—is not without its critics, however. Some contemporary scholars challenge the social and political merits of compassion, claiming that it leads hu-