On Suffering

Everyone would agree that life is, at times, miserable. But not everyone would agree that misery is a good thing. Life, as it journeys through the waxing and waning of its joys and miseries, must be occasionally bad. This is nature’s way. Misery is essential; it is, in short, a fundamental part of what makes us human. Without suffering, there would be no rewards. Happiness would lose its meaning and drift away like some drunk vagrant. Humankind would struggle to find any purpose worth living for. In such a world, men and women would die of boredom.

In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher famous for his uncompromising pessimism, offered such a view of the world’s problems. The world, he said, ‘is everywhere full’ of suffering, pain and distress. Therefore it is absurd to view our endless afflictions as ‘purposeless and purely accidental’ (p. 41). Misfortune is the general rule, and this problem, according to Schopenhauer, requires our full attention.

Schopenhauer by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, 1815.

Here, the view of suffering as positive (i.e. as something life affirming in the sense that it gives way to fulfilment) is the main idea behind Schopenhauer’s outlook. Humans have spent far too long ‘explaining evil as something negative’, he says, and have neglected our every misfortune as secondary (p. 41). ‘One can even say’, he continues, ‘that we require at all times a certain quantity of care, or sorrow or want, as a ship requires a ballast, in order to keep on a straight course’ (p. 43). Therefore, in the long-term, our will to live depends on sadness and the part it plays during our lives.

Schopenhauer’s attitude to suffering is what I call positive pessimism. His is a pessimistic viewpoint because of a focus on what generally makes us too uncomfortable to talk about – life’s grim realities such as pain, illness, death. Yet, contrary to tradition, his pessimism steers towards the positive things in life. He encourages his readers to find deeper, logical reasons that lie behind the world’s more terrible qualities.

Schopenhauer draws on the Old Testament to make the point that suffering is natural. The story of Man’s Fall (i.e. Adam and Eve cast out of paradise), he argues, contains a single metaphysical truth: we are born into the world already encumbered with guilt. We must continually atone for this guilt – hence why our ‘existence is so wretched’ (p. 49). Whatever our theological beliefs, he hints, the fact still stands that suffering prevails in the life of everyone.

There is, however, one issue. Schopenhauer seems to employ an unhelpful rigid dichotomy between what constitutes as good or bad, happiness or suffering. For him, there is no grey area between, say, the joy of lovemaking (as something good) and the suffering of war (as something bad). This is highly problematic. Is there such a thing, for example, as minor suffering? Of course there is; but not in the eyes of Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer’s eyes, ‘life is an expiation of the crime of being born’ (p. 50). But suffering varies, as does life. It is more helpful to view suffering as multi-faceted, as a sort of scale, rather than something that is totally determined by a simplistic view which organises the world in only two categories: good or bad, virtue or vice.

A reformed version of Schopenhauer’s radical philosophy is helpful. Instead of ignoring suffering’s inevitable consequences, we now know to welcome it into our lives, whatever forms it comes in.

Source:

Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’ in R. J. Hollingdale (ed. and trans), Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms (London, 1970), pp 41-50.