Fecundity and redemption

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

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

For Nietzsche suffering is a condition of growth: what does not kill me makes me stronger, and the discipline of great suffering has produced every elevation of humanity. He explicitly despises moralities that make the abolition of suffering the supreme goal.

Beyond Good and Evil, §225 · Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows", §8 · The Gay Science, §338

To the problem of the suffering of the just (why does providence let misfortune strike good people?), Seneca answers by denying the premise: what looks like an evil is none, for virtue is proved and forged only under trial, like the soldier at drill or the pilot in the storm. Adversity then ceases to be something to endure and becomes something to desire: the god does not spare those he loves but tests them, and the good man must wrestle misfortune as an athlete wrestles a worthy opponent. Suffering is neither absurd nor redemptive in itself: it is the occasion without which greatness of soul would lie unused.

On Providence, II-IV (adversity as the exercise of virtue)

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)

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

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

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