on to "vicarious": ambiguity of the idea!

[Timothy D. Sergay]

Dear Prof. Condee and SEELANGERS,

Alina writes

> I'd like to disagree with Katzner. "chuzhoj" is opposed to "svoj" in
> Russian: Chuzhaja nosha ne tjanet, Svoja rubashka blizhe k telu. Someone
> else's has no effect on you. Vicarious, on the other hand, is what you
> experience second-hand, so to speak. One may get vicarious pleasure from
> gift giving, for ex. Cambridge dictionary gives "vicarious thrill from
> watching motor racing". Granted, vacarious is more common in English, but
> so are many other psychological terms. While it's possible to find
> "opsredovannoe udovol'stvie", it's not so easy with catastrophes, because
> in this case Russians "sochuvstvujut" or "soperezhivajut".

Very interesting problem. Russian evidently has two diametrically opposed 
poslovitsy: Chuzhaia nosha ne tianet (ne zabotit) and Svoia nosha ne tianet.

A kakaia togda tianet?

At bottom, "vicarious" basically indicates surrogacy, proxy, delegation, 
substitution, etc., as in the Pope's being regarded as the earthly "Vicar of 
Christ" (namestnik Khrista). The Latin root of the words "vicarious," 
"vicar", and the prefix "vice" as in vice-president is vix, vicis, 
indicating "change, alteration, bend, weakening," hence the idea of 
"vicarious" would map to Russian lexicon like "zam-, zamena, zamestitel', 
zameshchaiushchii, namestnicheskii, upolnomochennyi" and so on. The term 
"vicarious" gained currency in English describing various kinds of 
attenuated, "sympathetic" sensation derived from keenly identifying with 
others ("surrogates") who are experiencing that sensation directly, 
themselves, at full strength, "v natural'nuiu velichinu." The collocation 
"vicarious thrill" is a very common instance, and well illustrates the 
affinity between the term vicarious and the idea of voyeurism. But the term 
has an ambiguous focus: in some contexts, often where the experience 
involved is painful and dangerous, the focus is on the invidious safety, 
comfort ("numbness") and freedom from consequences enjoyed by the subject of 
vicarious experience, the distant "secret sharer." (I'll call that the 
"negative focus" with respect to vicarious experience.) It was in that 
spirit that I suggested translating your title "Vicarious Catastrophe" as 
"Katastrofa na chuzhoi shkure," and it's in that spirit that I would 
interpret "Chuzhaia nosha ne tianet" which I might translate as "It's no 
skin off my nose." But in other contexts, as in voyeurism, and maybe 
spectator sports like motor racing, it seems the focus of the term 
"vicarious" is the opposite: it's actually "positive" with respect to the 
experience, i.e., it indicates not the "numbness" but the "sensation" felt 
(at attenuated strength, to be sure) by the vicarious experiencer. (From 
here it's not far to Aristotelian "catharsis.") It could be that the focus 
of the essay "Vicarious Catastrophe" is likewise "positive" and that the 
stress is on real compassion felt remotely by viewers of televised 
castastrophes. If that's the case, then my translation was wrong, and it 
should be something more like what Alina suggested with the words 
sochuvstvie and soperezhivanie, maybe closer to "Perezhivanie chuzhoi 
katastrophy, kak svoei." If you really want your title to be "jarring," I 
would even consider something a bit paronomastic: "Chuzhaia nosha --  
tianet!"

Best wishes,

Tim Sergay

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