Fruits of Sorrow.

Elizabeth V. Spelman. Boston: Beacon, 1997. 206pp. $24.00 (cloth); $12.50 (paper).

It is strange that a book about human suffering is something unusual in contemporary ethics. Elizabeth Spelman states what is largely true, that "professional philosophers have left examination of human suffering to other inquirers" (12). Yet this book itself is not a treatise on the nature of sorrow and suffering. It is a series of studies that feel like meditations on the limits of our understanding of human misery. It is about the ways our attention to various people's suffering is organized; how it is elicited, channelled, energized, inflated, preempted, deflected, deflated, or confused.

This startlingly novel idea of (what is later called) a "political economy of suffering" (170) is quietly introduced at the outset of the book, and gains momentum as it threads through six varied essays. The book's Conclusion reprises its continuing theme: "the means by which attention is brought to suffering may prolong or deepen rather than alleviate it" (159); and "the distribution of compassion . . . is not likely to be neutral with respect to the distribution of other resources in society" (170). The essays instruct us by example in ways that paying attention to suffering, which seems a condition of compassion and right response, may instead be "morally and politically problematic" (2). Spelman features a refreshingly diverse set of writers - Plato, Aristotle, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Arendt, nineteenth- and twentieth-century white women suffragists and activists, and contemporary dance critics - as examples in cautionary tales of how attention to suffering can divide human beings even in some cases where it appears to affirm a common lot and a defining condition. Spelman is a philosopher known for her shrewd and revealing analysis of the acrobatic epistemological maneuvers that characterize self-serving prejudice. She is especially good at exposing how those who are socially powerful can erase the voices and experiences of those less powerful than they are, while hiding from themselves the assumptions that allow them to do this.

A brief opening essay examines Plato's conviction that the philosopher must wrest the moral judgment of appropriate grief and sorrow from the poets, who might wallow in it, and from the cynics, who will sneer at grief not their own. Plato seeks to moderate grief, and to enlist it in service of a community of pleasure and pain that the well-ordered state requires. No topic at the margins, the cultivation and culture of powerful human feelings is a central stake of political life for Plato.

In a second essay, Spelman further plumbs the political significance of feeling as an expression of social order or an index of social places. In a surprising but effective juxtaposition, Spelman uses Aristotle to show how calling U.S. slavery "The American Tragedy" encodes a self-serving perspective of whites on whites. Aristotelian tragedy teaches its intended audience appropriate occasions and objects of pity and fear by dramatizing what happens to a particular kind of man whose misfortune under very specific conditions is ethically instructive (39). But those who are slaves "by nature" have neither tragic faults nor ethically interesting misfortunes; they have only "permanent limitations" (46) that consign them to their natural and necessary lot. Using Aristotle's conception of tragedy, Spelman exposes how calling U.S. slavery "tragic" redeems slave-holders as pitiable sufferers from an all-too-human flaw (also spoken of as an "irony," "a paradox," or a "malignancy") in their otherwise noble and gallant characters (54). This characterization shifts interest and importance (for whites) to the "painful" failure of whites, and at the same time away from the actual victims of slavery's enormous cruelty, black slaves.

In what I found the most absorbing of the essays, Spelman reveals the predicament of the narrator in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a now widely read and gripping narrative of a woman's birth into, harrowing life within, and final escape from slavery. It is tempting to suppose that the slave's humanity shows through these moving stories, so that the stories become vehicles for compassion and moral recognition. Spelman sees that Jacobs knows how the actual context in which she is writing puts her authority over the meaning of her experience in question. She is a slave, writing out of her experience within that demeaned and demeaning condition. In a situation in which a slave's suffering is not necessarily seen as humanly important or ethically instructive, Jacobs must elicit from her white readers not only compassion or Christian charity, compatible with a diminished status, but outrage that embodies a recognition of her moral agency. Spelman shows Jacobs' delicate orchestration of lessons for her audience in how to think and feel about her story as she tells it, introducing in counterpoint Hannah Arendt's view that suffering is incommunicable and unsuitable for public deliberation (84).

If there are "moral and political dangers in becoming the object of compassion" (70), there are also different moral and political consequences in being an object of regret, embarrassment, guilt, or shame in one's own or another's eyes. In a conceptual study that has as its practical target the "cruelties inflicted by women on women" (91), Spelman uncovers ways "our emotions reveal the moral dimensions of our relationships" (99), including whom and what we take seriously. She argues with uncomfortable precision that certain unearned privileges are proper objects of shame, rather than regret, embarrassment, or even guilt (111). The chapter on white women suffragists' use of a comparison between sex oppression and slavery shows that such comparisons court "paradoxes," at once honoring the suffering of others and erasing its distinct importance or distorting its real nature.

A final essay in a somewhat different vein takes up New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce's defense of her refusal to review a dance theater event by choreographer Bill T. Jones that featured videotapes of people suffering from AIDS and other devastating illnesses. Spelman takes apart Croce's rationale for disdaining the performance as an artwork and an object of criticism, uncovering a strong suggestion of contempt for some of the suffering represented. I found this essay less critically satisfying than the others, culminating as it did in a relatively bland warning that one cannot make suffering the subject of art and "not send a message" (153).

I imagine some might think that study of a "political economy of suffering" avoids the philosophical question of what human suffering is and means. This would be a mistake. Spelman's probing studies show us that we cannot know what suffering is like and what it means without being sure we know who suffers and without hearing from them what it means for them. And we cannot be complacent about the conditions under which we recognize people's suffering. These conditions may embody points of view that are blind to or careless about the reality of some people's misery, its sources, and its possible redemption or compensation.

While the results of her inquiries are often embarrassing, philosophically and morally, for the views she probes, Spelman's tone remains one of sympathetic reasonableness and unaffected clarity. Fruits of Sorrow is a beautifully produced book. Its elegant design and presentation do justice to the importance of its topic, the depth of its insight, and the analytical but always humane voice of its author.

MARGARET URBAN WALKER