The Faces of Suffering
The experience of suffering has many faces.
Consider the following fragment from Andrew Solomon’s description of his depression:
“ I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn’t expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I … In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.”
Imagine another scenario you are at a child’s funeral, and this child is yours. The air is numb with silence. An ache so deep that you can barely breathe moves inside of you until it bursts. Somebody passes a tissue to wipe your tears; another rests his hand on your shoulder. In time, your eyes will run out of tears. But for now, there is a hole in your heart, and it feels like it will never heal. Maybe it shouldn’t, you think to yourself. You have lost a child. This stays with you. It’s supposed to be with you.
Given that suffering comes in many forms and faces, from Solomon’s depression to experiencing the death of your child, it’s an excellent question to ask what unifies them?
What makes them all examples of suffering? And as such prima facie bad for the sufferer. To put it simply what is the thread that ties them all?
As Michael Brady, in his book Suffering and Virtue, has recently persuasively argued, it won’t do to appeal simply to the unpleasantness of the experiences because we need not be suffering even if we experience something unpleasant, even if it is intense.
When I talk about suffering , I mean it in the experiential sense, in which some experiences constitute suffering. As Brady noted, it is essential to highlight, since the term (suffering) is also used more widely for any other kinds of harm that might occur to something, for instance when we say that a car suffered damage from a collision.
As a form of experience, suffering is psychological (or mental) although some suffering obviously has bodily causes. So what makes a mental experience one of suffering? Here are some platitudes that can serve as speculative fixed points:
· Suffering is unpleasant.
· Suffering is intrinsically bad for the sufferer.
· Anyone has a pro tanto reason to relieve anyone’s suffering, if they can.
· Animals and children can suffer, not only adult humans.
· It is possible for a person to desire that he suffer, for example because they thinks that it’s a fit punishment.
· We can suffer from many kinds of things, including hunger, pain, the loss of a loved one, exhaustion, loss of a job, lack of promising future prospects, lack of friends, injustice, or simply a lack of meaning.
So suffering involves two essential components: (i) an unpleasant feeling or experience of negative affect, which is a central to our experiences of grief, sadness, loneliness, hunger, and the like; and (ii) an occurrent desire that this unpleasant feeling or negative affective experience not be occurring.
If this is not making sense simply put it you have to feel that you are experiencing something negative and at the same time you should have a desire present not to be feeling this way.
But does this account meet all the desired theory of suffering? While this certainly is progress, I don’t think it encompasses all that entails suffering. The core problem is that this description is inwardly focused. Particularly, the key elements are unpleasantness of a feeling and a desire directed at one’s inner state. This model arguably better fits experiences like bodily pain.
It leaves questions out like what if I don’t know if I am suffering?
Before I leave you and you try to concoct a description that entails all suffering I want to know is suffering is bad and should be avoided?
One of my favorite philosopher may hold a different opinion on it:
And to pursue pleasure as good, and flee from pain as evil — that too is blasphemous. Someone who does that is bound to find himself constantly reproaching nature — complaining that it doesn’t treat the good and bad as they deserve, but often lets the bad enjoy pleasure and the things that produce it, and makes the good suffer pain, and the things that produce pain. And moreover, to fear pain is to fear something that’s bound to happen, the world being what it is — and that again is blasphemy. While if you pursue pleasure, you can hardly avoid wrongdoing — which is manifestly blasphemous. — Meditation by Marcus Aurelius
