To commiserate, to feel compassion, to pity — these come to the same. Might compassion be a mistake? Suppose an evil befalls you. If I am in a position to help, then perhaps I ought to. But it is unnecessary that I 'feel your pain' to use a Clintonian expression. Indeed, my allowing myself to be affected might interfere with my rendering of aid. And even if it doesn't, the affect of pity is bad in itself. Why should I feel bad that you feel bad? Of course, I should not feel good that you feel bad; that would be the diabolical emotion of Schadenfreude. The point is that I should not feel bad that you feel bad. For it is better if only one of us suffer. Better that I should remain unaffected and unperturbed. That way, at least one of us displays ataraxia.
Is pity perhaps a 'wastebasket emotion,' one that ought to be discarded or eliminated? Is it perhaps an incorrect emotion? That there are correct and incorrect emotions is an eminently defensible thesis, almost as defensible as the idea that there are true and false beliefs.
Worry, for example, is a useless emotion, and to that extent incorrect. Either the dreaded event occurs or it does not. If I worry that it occur and it does occur, then I suffer twice, once from the worry and once from the event itself. But if I don't worry, then I suffer only once if the event occurs and not at all if does not occur. So Alfred E. Neuman might have been on to something: "What, me worry?"
But my topic is pity, compassion, commiseration. Spinoza defines pity as follows: Commiseratio est tristitia, concomitante idea mali, quod alteri, quem nobis similem esse imaginamur, evenit. (Ethica, Pars III. De Affectibus, Definitio XVIII. "Commiseration is sorrow together with the idea of an evil that has happened to someone whom we imagine like ourselves." My German translation shows Mitleid for commiseratio. That conveys the notion of suffering-with, com-passion and supports my contention that commiseration, pity, and compassion are interchangeable terms.
Proposition 50 in Part Four ("Of Human Bondage") of the Ethics reads: Commiseratio in homine, qui ex ductu rationis vivit, per se mala, & inutilis est. "Pity in a man who lives in accordance with the guidance of reason is in itself evil and unprofitable." Spinoza's argument (demonstratio) for proposition 50 goes something like this:
Pity is sorrow; sorrow is evil; so, pity is evil. The good that issues from pity, moreover, can be attained without the troubling affect. We can undertake to free from misery the man we pity "from the dictate of reason alone." We can and we should. So pity in one who lives in accordance with reason is mala et inutilis, bad and unprofitable.
So we who live in accordance with reason should do what we can to prevent ourselves from being touched by pity. This is not to say that pity is bad and useless in those who do not live by reason. If the only way they will be moved to alleviate the suffering of others is by pity, then that is surely better than if they act neither from reason nor from pity and do nothing.
Cognate questions: How are Nietzsche's views on pity (Mitleid) like and unlike those of Spinoza? Is Buddhism with its emphasis (in the First Noble Truth) on sarvam dukkham predicated on a mistake?