The Sympathic Oiler Fan

This is Max Scheler, a German philosopher that is full of interesting contradictions: like his repetitive shifting loyalties between Catholicism and non-religiousness, and lustfulness and skirt-chasing. Personally I think these are some of the reasons I like the guy. Well, he talks a lot about an idea I am working with: it is called 'mitgefuhl' or literally feeling-with. Feeling-with is deeply related to the concept of sympathy or fellow-feeling; as in how do we feel with each other, or how are we in sympathy with each other. So as normal, I am suppose to be writing a paper on this concept (in relation to politics) but instead I am going to write a blog about this.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the hero of 2006, St. Fernando, at his best and the way most of us will always remember him. This week week, we have heard that another flare-up of ulcerative colitis has struck him down. When most of feel for him, we are not engaged in sympathy with him (I am not saying you/me are heartless, just keep reading) but instead we engage in empathy for him. We attempt to 'put ourselves in his shoes,' or that we relate to his emotions by referring experiences or emotions we have had. In empathy, we the other feeling subject either annihilate Pisani by placing our self into his self or eclipse ourselves by bring Pisani into ourselves. In the emotion, or process, of empathy we are not feeling with him, but rather feeling for him. Scheler sees empathy as problematic since it endangers one of the self, and hence does not build community.

Rather then seeing how to apply fellow-feeling to just Pisani, I am going to look at the relationship of fellow-feeling in relation to the fans of the Oilers, or how we create the diaspora that binds individuals to the orange and blue. Scheler does define four fours of fellow-feeling, or sympathy, for use to dissected our feeling with other:

"1. Immediate community of feeling, e.g., of one and the same sorrows, 'with someone.'

2. Fellow feeling 'about something'; rejoicing in his joy and commiseration with his sorrow.

3. Mere emotional infection.

4. True emotional identification."

Community of Feeling

This is when two, or more, individuals directly experience feelings together, as feelings-in-common. These feelings must be of abstract feelings (Scheler would say spiritual or emotion) and never physical feelings: since we can share intellectual emotions but we do not have the same body so we can not have share a physical feeling in this way. Scheler's example is when two parents lose a child: the feeling is one and identical. With the Oilers, I think we can talk about feeling-in-common in relation to not making the playoffs three years in a row. We as fans/bloggers have a immediate feeling with each other, we share the same feeling of sorrow and disgust of having to watch the Flames and the Canucks play in the second season. We, as bloggers, cannot share this feeling with the Oilers' players themselves; that they have different feelings of disgust, shame, and disappointment that are not immediately accessible to fans.

Fellow Feeling (seriously the translators should have come up with a better term for this sub-group of Fellow Feeling)

In this type of sympathy, my experience of feeling and yours are two separate feelings, unlike the previous case: for example, their is your suffering and my commiseration. I do not direct my commiseration at you as a person, as 'stepping into your shoes', rather I directed it at your emotion itself. When you feel for an injured Oiler, say the Big Sexy and his concussion, you are are directing your sympathy at his frustration of not being able to play: that you, as a fan, feel frustrated that your best dman can't play and he, as an player, is feeling frustrated that he has to watch and can do anything. You both have feelings of frustration, but they are not one and the same feeling. You emotion functions on two levels: your frustration with the luck of the Oilers' blue line, and your commiseration with Souray's frustration. In the former case, I can commiserate with you, as two fans, that you experience the frustration and I can feel with you. In the latter case, we as fans can commiserate with the Big Sexy as we relate our feelings to his emotions of frustration but not him himself. These are two different process fellow-feelings, not one and the same.

Emotional Infection

Scheler sees this as the most immoral of all fellow-feelings, that there is no societal benefit to this type of feeling-with. He relates it to mob or herd mentality: his examples included the feeling of gaiety one experiences when they go into a cheerful party or pub. It is not that the person, entering the party, is themselves happy but instead they are infected by the happiness of others. He excludes this type of fellow-feeling from community building emotions because it is not your happiness I am sharing-with, but I take your happiness as my own (that we cannot share feelings in a constructive way since one self is always diminished, but not annihilate, at the expense of the other self). The most obvious Oiler examples is the Whyte Ave riots in 2006: in these moments we where not sharing our feelings-with each other, but rather being catch up in emotion. There were individuals that had no feelings about the Oilers at those riots, and I would say that they were not just trouble makers, but individuals actually feeling the emotions of extreme happiness without the experiences that make those feelings meaningful to me or you. Another examples, is when you go to Rexall Place: if you are having a bad day, just walking into the arena picks up your spirits. You are infected with the anticipation and cheerfulness of the crowd, just as I have found the most kind hearted fans booing the Oilers in a crowd during blowouts, they are infected with the anger being shared with other fans.

Emotional Identification

This type of feeling-with is the highest and most important, for Scheler. It is where the true forms of community are formed, not through based infection of identity but a actual emotional bond between, but not of, people. One way to understand this phenomenon is through mutual coalescence: that it is a state of emotion that "neither . . . one individual self despotizes, as it were, the other, nor . . . in which the one self is entirely 'lost' in the other." The partners of this type of feeling have "an impassioned suspension of their spiritual personality (itself the seat of individual self-awareness), [they] seem to relapse into a single life-stream in which nothing of their individual selves remain any longer distinct, though it has equally little resemblance to a consciousness of 'us' found on the respective self-awareness of each." I find this type of fellow-feeling within the community if bloggers around the Oilers (actually it is the ontological force that creates the bloggers as a community). That is this type of feeling that creates a new 'life-stream' of a fan, or a feeling that exceeds our individual feelings for the Oilers and creates a new set of selves that feel with each other. Materially, or I guess electronically, you can see this manifest itself in a certain type of blog: Covered in Oil and recently the hilarious Inebriated Oiler Fans. These blogs are not a sole creation of one self, but a collection of selves that create them. It does not stop at this level, rather these blogs create a space for a new feeling of fandom, in the comments and visceral emotions that are expressed on them. While Scheler might be disgusted that I am using blogs often referred to as immature to demonstrate his highest moral type of fellow-feeling. he can go fuck himself: as I love these blogs, I often have to wear diapers while I read them to avoid ruining good pairs of pants. I would say that these blogs serve as a physical place to create a new life-stream of (spiritual or intellectual) emotions for Oiler Fans, since they allow us to create new emotions, not of yours or mine, in common with each other. Scheler would say that these emotions are a creation of love for each other, but I am arguing that they are solidarity with each other: that it is in these new emotions that we create ourselves as a community.