The meaning of suffering

Painful effort (ponos) is the very means of virtue: Diogenes trains himself to cold, hunger and destitution to harden himself and become free, embracing snow-covered statues in winter and rolling his jar over burning sand. Suffering voluntarily chosen is no evil but a gymnastics of the soul that forges self-sufficiency and frees one from the blows of fortune. It is hardship sought, not undergone, that makes the sage.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 23 and 71

Suffering and the negative are not pure evils to be abolished: they are the labour of the negative, the power by which spirit tears itself apart, tests itself and rises. The life of spirit is the one that "endures death and maintains itself in it": nothing ripens without passing through the rending.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (the power of the negative)

Cynicism makes painful effort (ponos) the very means of virtue: Diogenes trains himself to cold, hunger and destitution to harden himself and become free. Suffering voluntarily embraced is no evil but an askēsis, a gymnastics of the soul that forges self-sufficiency and frees one from the blows of fortune.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI

For the Stoics, hardship is not an evil but the occasion to exercise virtue: adversity reveals and strengthens the sage as training reveals the athlete. Seneca writes that the divine tests good men as a stern father does, and that no excellence shows itself without a difficulty to overcome.

Seneca, On Providence · Epictetus, Discourses, I, 24

Hardship has the value of training: difficulties are the opponents providence sends us to reveal and strengthen our character, as for the athlete. Suffering, rightly used, is fruitful.

Discourses, I.24 (How to struggle against difficulties) · Discourses, I.6

In the Theodicy, evil and suffering are not gratuitous scandals: God permits them because they are necessary conditions of a greater good in the economy of the best of worlds. Suffering thus fits into an overall finality that redeems it, a clearly fecund rather than abolitionist position.

Theodicy, §10-25 (metaphysical, physical and moral evil) · Theodicy, §118-119 (partial evil contributes to the good of the whole)

Suffering is not an accident to be removed but a trial that deepens and reveals: it is in melancholy, mourning and the « mal du siècle » that the Romantic soul touches its truth and the work is born. The suffering hero, from Werther to René, makes his wound the sign of a higher sensibility and the night the place of a revelation.

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther · Chateaubriand, René

Adversity is not for Confucius a pure misfortune: it is in ordeal that the gentleman is revealed and tempered, staying upright where lesser men give way. Mencius systematizes this fruitfulness: when Heaven is about to confer a great mission on someone, it first exercises his heart with suffering and his sinews with toil, so as to strengthen what he lacked.

Analects (Lunyu), XV.2 · Mencius, VI B, 15

Confucianism grants ordeal a formative fruitfulness: it is in adversity that the gentleman is distinguished, and Mencius teaches that Heaven hardens through suffering and toil those it destines for high tasks. Ordeal is no pure misfortune but the occasion to temper character and to strengthen virtue.

Mencius, VI B, 15 · Analects (Lunyu), XV.2

Close in this to the Stoics, Descartes holds that adversity is the occasion to test one's own strength: generosity, the firm resolve to use one's free will well, yields an inner contentment that nothing external can remove, and that arises precisely from the effort to do well despite the ordeal. Suffering, mastered by judgment, thus becomes matter for a legitimate self-satisfaction, not a pure evil.

The Passions of the Soul, arts. 147-148 and 190 · Letters to Princess Elisabeth

Hardship is neither to be fled nor wept over: the soul turns into material for virtue what claimed to thwart it, and the impediment to action becomes the action itself. The stance sits between Stoic indifference, which counts pain as nothing, and the active fecundity of adversity, which makes it the occasion of progress.

Meditations, IV, 1 · Meditations, V, 20

Plato does not hold suffering to be a mere evil to flee: just punishment is a remedy that heals the soul of injustice, and it is better to undergo it than to escape it. More broadly, access to the true demands a painful tearing away from the sensible, the ascent out of the cave at first dazzling the one set free: ordeal has a purifying and forming virtue.

Gorgias, 476-479 · Republic, VII (allegory of the cave)

Platonism holds suffering to be potentially purifying: just punishment heals the soul, and the conversion toward the intelligible demands a painful tearing away from the sensible world and the pleasures of the body. Ordeal separates the soul from what enslaves it and brings it closer to the true, which gives it a value that an easy life ignores.

Plato, Gorgias; Phaedo · Plato, Republic, VII

Rousseau does not value suffering for its own sake, but he grants it a fruitfulness: pity, the first natural movement, is born of another's suffering felt as our own, and grounds all humanity. Ordeal and melancholy deepen the feeling soul, which heralds the Romantic valuing of painful sentiment, far from the worldly person's insensibility.

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Emile, IV

A revealing tension: nothing justifies suffering, and compassion commands relieving it everywhere, which pulls him toward abolitionism; but great pain 'sobers,' breaks the attachment to willing, and opens the second road to deliverance. Suffering has no meaning, it has an effect, which forbids ranking it wholly on the side of pure evil to be abolished.

The World as Will and Representation, §68

For Socrates, the true misfortune is not to suffer but to act wrongly: it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Nothing external can reach the good man in what makes his good, his soul; so he meets ordeal, and his own condemnation, with a steadiness that defuses its character as evil.

Gorgias, 469 · Apology; Crito

Kant does not make the absence of suffering the end of morality: what has unconditional worth is the good will, independent of pleasure and pain. Suffering is thus morally indifferent as to the worth of the person, and ordeal can even display moral firmness. But this detachment is bordered by a duty of beneficence that commands relieving the suffering of others.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I-II · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue

Taoism opposes to suffering neither crusade nor valuing: it invites one to welcome the alternation of fortune without judging it, like the old man in the parable who does not know whether the loss of his horse is bad or good. Pain arises above all from resistance and desire; attuning oneself to the course of things through wu-wei defuses its torment, a position close to equanimity.

Zhuangzi · Huainanzi (the old man of the frontier)

Pyrrho grants suffering neither a fruitfulness that would forge the soul, nor the status of an absolute evil to be abolished: either would be to judge it by nature twice over. The greater part of the torment, he holds, comes from the added opinion that what happens to us is an evil; to withdraw that judgment lightens it accordingly, and only the forced pain of the body remains. The position is thus close to the median indifference, a suffering defused by the suspension of the value judgment rather than magnified or fought on principle.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 66-68 · Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V (on the imperturbability of the sage)

For Bentham, pain is evil itself: together with pleasure, it is one of the two sovereign masters of conduct, and the whole moral and legislative calculus aims to minimize it. No suffering has redemptive value; the only relevant question is that of its quantity and of what can reduce it, for every being capable of feeling it.

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I and IV

Suffering has no redemptive value: it is the very evil that the whole poem seeks to disarm by tracing it back to its causes, the false opinion about the gods and about death. The great suffering, for Lucretius, is not so much bodily pain as the terror of the soul, which no ordeal sanctifies and which knowledge of nature must dissolve. The leaning is clearly abolitionist, without bodily pain itself receiving the slightest meaning.

On the Nature of Things, III, 1053-1075 (the malaise that drives men to flee)

The whole project aims at the cessation of suffering and of conditioned rebirth: Nāgārjuna grants suffering no redemptive value, it being an effect of ignorance and grasping, to be dissolved by seeing emptiness (śūnyatā). It is in grasping the absence of inherent existence that the mental fabrication (prapañca, conceptual proliferation) sustaining dis-ease comes to rest: a clearly abolitionist leaning.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), XVIII, 5 (the cessation of conceptual proliferation) · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, ch. XXVI (the examination of the twelve links)

Marx holds the suffering of the oppressed to be a social evil, the product of exploitation and alienation, not a fatality or an ordeal to be sanctified. The religion that consoles it is the opium of the people, a veil laid over a very real misery. The task is not to give suffering a meaning but to abolish it by transforming the conditions that produce it.

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction · Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Faithful to utilitarianism, Mill makes the reduction of suffering, together with the increase of happiness, the very end of morality: no pain is good in itself. He acknowledges that effort and ordeal can develop character, but never relinquishes the goal of a world where avoidable suffering would be abolished through moral and social progress.

Utilitarianism, II · On Liberty

Marxism holds the suffering of the exploited to be a historical product of oppression, not an ordeal to be sanctified: religious consolation, the opium of the people, is only its veil. The point is not to give misery a meaning but to abolish it by overturning the social relations that engender it, emancipation being the end of avoidable suffering.

Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right · Marx, Capital

For Hume, suffering is an evil that sympathy and benevolence move us to relieve: virtue is measured by its usefulness and agreeableness. So he ranks the monkish virtues, fasting, penance, mortification, among the vices, for they add to the world only suffering while producing nothing good: no fruitfulness in sought-out pain.

An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, IX

Moral empiricism, with Hume, measures good and evil by usefulness and agreeableness: suffering is an evil that benevolence moves us to relieve, and the pain one inflicts on oneself without profit, through mortification, is only a vice. No fruitfulness is granted to sought-out suffering; sensibility commands reducing it.

Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, IX

Suffering, for Advaita, has its source not in being but in an error of knowledge, avidyā: it is the superimposition (adhyāsa) that takes the Self for the body and the appearance for the real, as one sees a snake where there is only a rope. But an illusion is not redeemed, it is dispelled: the moment the rope is recognized, the fear of the snake vanishes without a trace, and no act or merit was needed. This is why Advaita rejects the path on which suffering would be fruitful or redemptive: since its cause is cognitive, only liberating knowledge (jñāna) abolishes it at the root, not endured hardship nor accomplished work.

Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya), introduction (adhyāsa) · Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya-Kārikā

The suffering of oppression has no redemptive fruitfulness: it is an evil to be fought, and any morality that would justify it in the name of a radiant future is a mystification Beauvoir denounces. Without denying the share of finitude and failure inherent in any existence, she leans toward the concrete abolition of avoidable suffering rather than toward its sacralization.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), critique of sacrificing the present to the future · The Second Sex (1949), suffering as a product of oppression

Sadness is always the passage to a lesser perfection, a diminution of the power to act: in itself it has no redemptive value. Wisdom consists in reducing it by understanding its causes, never in seeking or sacralizing it, hence a clear abolitionist leaning.

Ethics, III, prop. 11, scholium and definitions of the affects (sadness, the passage to a lesser perfection) · Ethics, IV, prop. 41 (joy is never directly bad, sadness never directly good)

The Enlightenment makes the reduction of suffering an object of progress: against judicial torture (Beccaria), fanaticism and its cruelties (Voltaire), the diseases that science must push back, it refuses to sanctify pain or to resign oneself to it. Avoidable suffering is an evil that reason and reform are charged with fighting.

Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments · Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance

Pragmatism is meliorist: it holds evils and sufferings to be concrete problems to be reduced through intelligence in action and social reform, not a fatality to be interpreted. Dewey refuses both resignation and metaphysical consolation: the task is to act on the conditions that produce avoidable suffering, wagering on their possible improvement.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy · Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

In Lockean psychology, pain is, together with pleasure, the spring of all action: we naturally flee pain, and the good is measured in part by what delivers us from it. Suffering has no value of its own, it is an evil to be avoided and relieved, even if Locke's Christian horizon leaves it a place in the trial of this life.

Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 20-21

Suffering belongs to saṃsāra and to the ignorance that identifies the self with the body: it has no redemptive value of its own, it is an evil bound to the empirical condition whose root is error (avidyā). The aim is not to assume or sanctify it but to undo it at its source, by dispelling ignorance through knowledge: the realized self, an impassive witness, is no longer reached by it. The position thus meets the idea of an abolition of suffering, by way of knowledge rather than mere relief.

Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā · Upadeśasāhasrī

Sartre refuses any redemptive justification of suffering: without God or providence, no theodicy redeems it, and to lend it a hidden meaning would be a flight into bad faith. Suffering is a contingent fact that freedom must assume and, as far as possible, transform through action; it has only the meaning we give it, not a fruitfulness inscribed in the order of things.

Being and Nothingness · Existentialism Is a Humanism

Against Stoic indifference, Aristotle holds pain and misfortune to be real evils: great misfortunes, like Priam's, can spoil a happy life, for eudaimonia also requires external goods. Suffering therefore has no value in itself and should be avoided; but courage consists in enduring it nobly when the good demands it, without however seeking it out.

Nicomachean Ethics, I, 10-11 · Nicomachean Ethics, III, 6-9

Pain is quite real, and Montaigne, who suffered from kidney stones, dresses it in no redemptive virtue: he rejects the heroism of Stoic contempt as well as the Christian idea of meritorious suffering. But opinion adds much to the evil, and pain borne with suppleness, without swelling it through imagination, can become a schooling of the self. It is less a fecundity of suffering than an economy: neither to exalt it nor to think oneself crushed by it.

Essays, I, 14, "That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends on Our Opinion" and III, 13

Suffering is neither an evil to be abolished nor a redemptive trial that would forge character: it is a moment of the flux to be welcomed without dramatizing it, like the sickness that may turn the arm into a rooster. Zhuangzi lends it no moral fecundity in the manner of Pascal or Nietzsche, but neither does he campaign for its abolition: he dissolves its weight by ceasing to judge it a misfortune. The position leans slightly toward the median indifference, through release from the judgment that constitutes the hurt.

Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

Aristotelianism holds pain and misfortune to be genuine evils, against Stoic indifference: happiness needs external goods, and great misfortunes can impair it. Suffering has no value in itself and should be avoided; but the courageous person endures it nobly when a good end demands it, without seeking or sacralizing it.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I and III

The skeptic holds that the greater part of suffering comes not from the affections themselves but from the added opinion that they are evils by nature: it is this belief that doubles a pain with moral distress. To withdraw the judgment lightens it accordingly: the forced pain remains, but the surplus of anguish is removed. The position meets the "median" indifference toward the meaning of suffering, neither fruitful nor to be abolished on principle, but defused by suspending the value judgment.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238