Pain, Power, and Human Community: Empathy as a “Physical Problem” in Pseudo-Aristotle and Beyond

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag declared that “no ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” Sontag was attuned to the problems that arise from the widespread circulation in the US and Europe of photographs of atrocities. She was responding, too, to a long history in European moral philosophy of imagining sympathy as the manifestation of a bond among all humans. In this paper, I look at how concerns similar to Sontag’s arise through an engagement with an obscure ancient Greek text, the pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems, that posits contagious pain as a problem to be addressed by the resources of medicine and natural philosophy. I first situate the problem of shared pain within a book addressed to problems of “sympathy.” I then consider the interaction of these problems with the phenomenon of mimesis and the hypothesis that we share pain because of a nature in common and an underlying kinship. I close by querying the nature of this kinship, taking a closer look at the body in the pain as the body of an enslaved person in order to ask how the text posits a naturalistic account of human kinship while also reinforcing the hierarchy of persons described by Aristotle in his account of natural slavery.