ON SUFFERING: Philosophical Reflections on What It

Means to be Human
By Gary Brent Madison
Copyright © 2009 by G.B. Madison
All rights reserved
Les Érables Publishing/McMaster Innovation Press
387 pp; $24.95 CDN
Book orders may be placed with Mark Lefebvre
(lefebvr@mcmaster.ca) at McMaster Innovation Press

CHAPTER 1

THE MEANING OF “SUFFERING”

THE HUMAN CONDITION

Some conceptual clarifications may prove useful at the outset of this inquiry
into the nature of suffering. The generic term for the phenomenon with which
we are here concerned is “suffering,” but the term itself is polysemic and has
an extremely wide range of signification. The O.E.D. defines suffering as “The
bearing or undergoing of pain, distress, or tribulation” and “to suffer” as “To
have (something painful, distressing, or injurious) inflicted or imposed upon
one; to submit to with pain, distress, or grief.” We have here quite a number of
functional stand-ins for “suffering”: pain, distress, tribulation, injuriousness,
grief. To this list could also be added: agony, torment, anguish, wretchedness,
hurt, misery. “Suffering” is a highly protean term that can refer to just about
any of the vexations—“the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”—to
which human flesh is heir. Even those who in fact suffer little sometimes in-
vent for themselves factitious forms of suffering—creating pain out of discom-
fort—in order to suffer more, the name for this peculiarly human abnormality
being “hypochondria.” Thus, for the purpose of my analysis in this essay I
would like to introduce a distinction between the two main terms that in com-
mon parlance are often used interchangeably, viz., pain and suffering.
Although “to suffer” and “to be in pain” can in many instances function as
synonyms, the former term has a broader significance than does the latter. For
while pain can be a source of suffering, so too can a great many other things
—there would seem to be no end to the kinds of upsets and misfortunes that
can befall us as we wend our way through life and that can give rise to
8 On Suffering
suffering. Metaphorically speaking, the terms “pain” and “painful” can be used
to refer to just about any kind of adverse condition of a physical, emotional,
mental, or spiritual sort, but their primary significance, their semantic home-
base, so to speak, is nevertheless physical: Webster’s New World Dictionary
defines pain as “a sensation of hurting or strong discomfort, in some part of
the body, caused by an injury, disease, or functional disorder, and transmitted
through the nervous system.” Pain is primarily a neurological phenomenon
(“nociception”), not a spiritual phenomenon, whereas a great deal of suffering
is of a properly spiritual or “existential” nature, “psychic pain.”
Medicines of a sufficiently potent sort can relieve us of many of our aches
and pains, but they cannot really do away with the kind of suffering (pathos,
aegritudo, distress) that is occasioned by the hard knocks and dirty tricks that
Fortune always has up her sleeve: by, for instance, an assault on one’s self-
respect; one’s being subjected to false allegations or defamation of character as
well as human injustice; of being betrayed by those in whom one has placed
one’s trust (an archetypal theme in all the world’s literature); the wrenching
pain of a marital break-up; the loss of someone dear; dreadful accidents and
injury to life and limb; painful disabilities and deformities; the depredations of
nature; the physical erosions that come with advancing age; the anxiety one
may feel when confronted with the cruel adversity of the world; or any other
of a host of woes, great and small—in short, by anything that threatens our
personhood, our basic integrity or intactness as existing individuals. According
to the Buddha, the number of “passions” that can give rise to suffering is infi-
nite. “Suffering,” as one Buddhist master has said, “takes many forms, ranging
from the nagging whisper that we would be happier ‘if only’ some small aspect
of our lives were different, to the panic of illness and the terror of death.”1
The fact of the matter, as the preeminent French phenomenologist Paul
Ricoeur observes, is that while “pain” and “suffering” are often used inter-
changeably in ordinary parlance, they nonetheless represent to distinct “ideal
types.”2 Pain and suffering, as physician Eric Cassell has pointed out in an oft-
cited article, are “phenomenologically distinct.”3 Suffering differs from pain
in that, as Cassell says, it is a specifically human phenomenon; bodies can
experience pain, but only persons suffer. “Bodies do not suffer, persons suf-
fer,” as Cassell puts it. Failure on the part of physicians to recognize the dif-
ference between pain and suffering can result, he says, in medical interven-
tions that not only “fail to deal effectively with suffering but can become a
source of suffering in their own right.” Summing the matter up, Cassell states,
“Suffering is an affliction of persons, not bodies, and can occur in relation to
any aspect of a person: physical, psychological, social, or spiritual.”4
There is, one could say, an inherent—and perilous—ambiguity that lies at
the very core of clinical medicine: Precisely because medicine is a dedicated
attempt to resist our vulnerability to illness and disability, it can also lead us to
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 9
ignore the fact that, in order to live a properly human life, we must not reject
but must learn to accept and live with our innate frailty—and the suffering that
necessarily goes along with it. This is the reason why, as Cassell says, medical
interventions can not only “fail to deal effectively with suffering but can
become a source of suffering in their own right.” Suffering of this sort could
be called “iatrogenic,” in that it is a suffering that is caused by doctors them-
selves—when they fail to distinguish properly between pain and suffering.
All in all, while pain can be a cause of suffering, it can act as such only to
the degree that we allow it to do so. As Montaigne said, speaking from his own
experience, “Even real [physical] pain is not so shrill, harsh and stabbing that a
man of settled temperament must go mad with despair” (Essais II, 37).5
Indeed, depending on how we react to painful experiences, these experiences
will become either millstones weighing us down or stepping-stones leading to
an enhanced mode of being. Suffering of an unnecessary sort occurs when, as
a psychologist might say, we “elaborate” on our pains and other sorts of
physical/psychic discomfort and unpleasantness and let ourselves become
caught up in negative attitudes towards them—or, what comes down to the
same thing, when we let ourselves get all wrapped up in avoidance responses
in order to deny or flee from them. The real issue is not whether we shall
suffer but how we choose to suffer, when suffer we must. We suffer needlessly
when we respond in a negative, irrational way to the more unpleasant and
stressful aspects of life. Suffering of this needless sort is, one might say,
synonymous with mindless, undisciplined “reactivity.”
This is the point that the greatest exponent of the Stoic philosophy in the
Latin language, Seneca the Younger, was getting at when he said: “Provided
that one’s thinking has not been adding anything to it, pain is a trivial sort of
thing…. Everything hangs on one’s thinking….A man is as unhappy as he has
convinced himself he is” (Letters, LXXVIII). Or as another great Stoic known
simply as Epictetus summed it up, “It is not the things themselves that disturb
men, but their judgments about these things (Encheiridion, 5). As the ancient
Stoics knew—long before the advent of modern psychology—the crucial thing
is always the interpretation or “value-judgment (hupolepsis)” one places on
one’s pain or suffering, for this is the means whereby blind fate can be either
the source of one’s undoing or the means by which it can be transformed into a
meaning-giving, life-enhancing challenge.
Indeed, the only way, the Stoics pointed out, that one can be rent asunder
by pain or suffering is if, through weakness of the will or in a fit of reactivity,
one “assents” to being so afflicted. As the most famous of the Stoics, the
emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius regularly reminded himself, “Remove
the judgment, and you have removed the thought ‘I am hurt’: remove the
thought ‘I am hurt’, and the hurt itself is removed” (IV, 7). “All is as thinking
makes it so,” Marcus said, articulating a basic tenet of the Stoic philosophy.
10 On Suffering
Stoicism is, like Buddhism, a means for working with the mind and devel-
oping a sense of personal responsibility—so as to be able to overcome all the
mindlessness or foolishness (stultitia) that tends to permeate our lives and is
the ultimate source of our sufferings. Suffering (dukkha), Buddhists maintain,
is the First Noble Truth, and thus the crucial thing, as the Vietnamese monk,
Thich Nhat Hanh, points out, is “not to try to run away from suffering. You
have to confront suffering,” he states. “Once you understand the roots of suf-
fering, the path leading to the transformation of suffering is revealed. And if
you go on that path—namely the path of right thinking, right speech, and right
action—then you can transform your suffering.”6

*
The great error of the scientistic approach so prevalent today in medicine is its
underlying, operant assumption that suffering can be adequately dealt with—
can be “cured”—in a purely symptomatic, physicalistic way by means of the
appropriate medical interventions and pharmaceuticals and that individuals are
not required to engage in a personal struggle to come to terms with their suf-
fering by confronting it head-on. In this respect, there is no approach to human
suffering that is more oblivious to what it means to be human than that of a
vulgar UTILITARIANISM for which pain and suffering are the ultimate evils and
for which “quality of life” reduces to material comfort, having pleasant feel-
ings, and the effortlessly blissful fulfilling of one’s wants and desires.
It takes an unrepentant materialist to think that a life of unmitigated plea-
sure and comfort is equivalent to what Socrates and other moral philosophers
have called the “good life” or that, Freud notwithstanding, the pleasure-princi-
ple is a recipe for human happiness. This is the Hollywood view of happiness,
the life of the pleasure-seeking lotus-eater. Pleasure and displeasure are fickle
states and are not a formula for happiness or well-being. “I can think of no-
thing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure,” the richest man in the
world once said.7 It is a basic fact of experience that one can have many plea-
sures without being happy—and that one can be happy without all that much
in the way of pleasure; “the happy life,” as Marcus Aurelius remarked, “de-
pends on very little” (VII, 67). Moreover, to equate happiness with plea-sure
would amount to saying that there is nothing more to life than just being plea-
santly alive, and this would amount to saying that life itself is without any
transcending meaning or purpose, a meaning or goal which enables one to lead
a life that is something more than a mere biological or animal mode of exis-
tence.
A life devoid of meaning or purpose is, however, as everyone knows deep
down (and as psychological studies have shown), a life that is most definitely
an unhappy life, a life that is not really worth living at all. A life spent solely in
the pursuit of pleasure—and its corollary, the avoidance of pain—is a life that,
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 11
when it is finally over, will have amounted to not much more than a hill of
beans in a crazy world (as Humphrey Bogart would say). Here today, gone
tomorrow, as Ecclesiastes for his part might say. It is a superficial life like that
of a dog-day cicada which amounts in the end to not much of anything, all the
racket it might make in the course of its few frenzied weeks in the sun not-
withstanding. To live a life without meaning is, as C.G. Jung said, to be soul-
sick.
It is not by satisfying one’s trivial whims and desires that one achieves
happiness but by living in accordance with certain moral values, ones that con-
fer coherence on one’s passions and that make for what Walter Lippmann (a
student of philosophers William James and George Santayana) called “the
discipline of an ordered existence.” This is the way of wisdom and virtue; a
wise and virtuous life is a life lived not under the sway of the passions but in
accordance with the logos, right reason. “Happy are those who find wisdom”
(Prov. 3:13).
Sapientia est ordinare: It is—as this old Aristotelian/Stoic dictum asserts—
by conferring order on our lives and setting limits to our animal passions
through the exercise of reason and the building of character that we grow in
wisdom and cultivate depth in our everyday lives. As formulated by Zeno of
Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, the basic moral imperative and the key
to a happy life is: “Live in a coherent way, that is to say, live in accordance
with a rule of life which is one and harmonious, because those who live in
incoherence are unhappy.”8
The art of virtue—the title of a book that, true to the spirit of classical vir-
tue ethics, Benjamin Franklin wanted to write but never managed to complete
—is the indispensable means for dealing successfully with all the un-welcome
adversities that may befall us as we struggle to lead a good life. “A good
character [i.e., virtus],” Seneca said, “is the only guarantee of ever-lasting,
carefree happiness” (Letters, XXVII), a point subsequently reiterated by
Epictetus: “It is virtue that holds out the power to create happiness and calm
and serenity” (Discourses I, 4).9 (All things considered, it would perhaps be
better to say, as did Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century Sage of Könings-
berg, that virtue neither guarantees happiness nor is identical with it but,
rather, that it demonstrates our “worthiness” to be happy.10)
As a would-be ethical theory, utilitarianism—which embodies a Hobbesian,
egoistic view of what constitutes the moral good, i.e., self-preservation and
pleasure—is crudely naïve and lacks the conceptual wherewithal to distinguish
between genuine well-being and simple physical pleasure, as if there were no
significant difference between the satisfaction or gratification a person can get
from doing something for no other reason than that it is “the right thing to
do”—even though one may not particularly “feel” like doing it—and the dopa-
mine-induced pleasure a monkey or a rat can get from electrically stimulating
12 On Suffering
certain sets of neurons in its brain by pushing down on a pedal connected to an
intracerebral electrode. Laboratory experiments of this sort, wherein a poor
creature tethered to a hedonic treadmill will literally waste away and die in its
obsessive pursuit of what Cicero called the “melting lassitude of pleasure,”
serve, actually, to highlight an age-old truth of moral philosophy: The more a
person drains the cup of pleasure wherever offered, the more consuming, as
Cicero said, will be his thirst and the more wretched will he be. “Lust will
never discover its limits” (TD V, 20). “Once you go beyond the measure,”
Epictetus for his part said, “there is no limit” (Encheiridion, 39).
Not only that. There is, as Seneca pointed out, a decidedly dark side to the
pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. For the more pleasure that a person chases
after, “the greater is the number of masters he has to serve.” Those addicted to
pleasure “do not possess pleasure, but are themselves possessed by pleasure,
being tortured by the lack of it or choked by its excess, miserable when it
abandons them, more miserable if it overwhelms them” (On the Happy Life,
14). The frenzied pursuit of pleasure, Lady Philosophy said to Boethius, “the
last of the Romans,” procures us nothing “but the pains of longing followed by
the regrets of satisfaction.”11
In contrast to ordinary “goods” or pleasures, it is the mark of “the right
thing to do (recta factum),” of that which is genuinely moral and honorable
(honestum)—and not just useful (utile)—that it always presents itself with a
certain “unconditionality” as to what one is dutibound to do.12 Moreover, the
satisfaction that comes from striving to follow one’s moral conscience is, as
Montaigne said, “the only satisfaction that never fails us” (Essais III, 2).13
Serenity and peace of mind come from acting in accordance with the realiza-
tion that we must do what we must do. The reward for doing what one has to
do rather than simply what one wants to do, Marcus Aurelius maintained, is
happiness and tranquility: the good life. Joy in living, he said, comes from
doing one’s duty, the duty one has to oneself as well as to others (see VIII, 26;
XII, 3).
There is no greater difference than that between mindless pleasure (of the
monkey-in-a-cage type), on the one hand, and, on the other, the personal satis-
faction that comes from engaging in self-enhancing activities. As the Ancients
knew—and as modern psychology has recently rediscovered14—mere pleasure
demands little or no effort and thought and is short-lived, whereas personal
satisfaction or moral gratification makes use of our strengths, draws us out of
self-centeredness, and contributes to an enduring sense of well-being. It brings
with it a sense of personal accomplishment and is a source of justifiable
pride.15
Happiness,” as Aristotle said, “does not lie in amusement.” It lies in “virtu-
ous activities” (Nicomachean Ethics X, 6); it is an “activity of the soul in ac-
cordance with virtue” (I, 7, 1098a17). For its part, the story of the young
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 13
prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later to become the Buddha, the Awakened One,
tells us that a life of luxury and princely pleasure does not add up to a truly
good life. To speak in philosophical, specifically Stoic terms, while wealth,
health, fame, beauty, and all other pleasurable things are indeed “goods”—and
are thus, everything else being equal, preferable to their opposites—they are
not unqualifiedly good, are not goods in se et per se, for, in and of themselves,
they do not serve to make one a good person—and are thus themselves “indif-
ferent,” are what the Stoics called the indifferentia or adiaphora.
Genuine well-being only comes from leading a life that is dedicated to the
pursuit of virtue, and virtue always involves a disciplining or moderating of
one’s passions and desires in such a way as to achieve mastery over oneself. If
one wishes to be genuinely free and happy, Epictetus says, one’s primary
desire ought to be not to desire adventitious pleasures or anything that is
dependent on external circumstances or the whims of other people (see
Encheiridion, 14). While there is nothing wrong, from time to time, with
“having a good time”—one should allow oneself time for amusement and
merriment, Seneca said (On Tranquility, 17), for relaxing with wine or dancing
to music—a thinking person is not a partying person, and vice versa. It is, as
Nietzsche remarked (Gay Science, 338), the mark of the petty, small-minded
person to confuse happiness—which is, as he said, suffering’s twin sister—
with comfortableness. Utilitarianism is the “religion of comfortableness” for
the weak-willed and feint of heart.
As one British philosopher has pointed out, utilitarianism “represents the
attempt by science to take charge of our moral lives.”16 As such, it can easily
be used as a philosophical justification for something like Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World or B.F. Skinner’s equally inhumane and technocratic Walden
Two. For hedonistic utilitarianism the highest form of ethical reasoning is
nothing more than a kind of self-centered, instrumentalist, cost-benefit
calculus (a “calculus of pleasure”) designed to “optimize” pleasure (“maxi-
mizing one’s utility functions”)—the kind of rationally displayed by that soul-
less, self-centered creature known as Homo economicus.
The basic meaning of “utilitarian” is, indeed, “economic,” economics being
the utilitarian discipline par excellence. For utilitarianism, virtue (as Cicero
said of the Epicureans) is nothing more that what proves useful for obtaining
pleasure. Utilitarian “ethics” is the ethics of the calculating technocrat who is
concerned only with “pubic utility” and the “general welfare,” i.e., impersonal,
statistical averages, as it is of the self-maximizing loner whose only consid-
eration is the “marginal utility” of his actions and who is concerned only with
his own “utils,” as an economist would say. Or as Paul Ricoeur (whose work I
shall be drawing on throughout this study), has said, “[U]tilitarian man…
wishes simply to increase his advantage in the competition for material
goods.”17 Because they have no “hedonic value,” notions having to do with a
14 On Suffering
virtuous and just life like “human dignity,” “sanctity of life,” and “human
rights” (which have their origin in the philosophy of the Stoics) have, and can
have, no proper place in any utilitarian mode of discourse. 18 Like the cynic, the
calculating utilitarian is someone who knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing. Reducing, as it does, all moral problems to technical ones,
utilitarianism, along with the “consequentialism” associated with it, is utterly
incapable of recognizing the supreme importance of philosophical/moral prin-
ciples (logoi) in ethical matters.
This is why throughout this book I shall, in opposition to utilitarianism and
the consequentialist way of thinking, be drawing on the insights of the great
Stoic philosophers and moralists. Stoic ethics is part and parcel of the peren-
nial wisdom I alluded to in my Prologue, and the heart of this ethics is the be-
lief that there are some things that are intrinsically good and worth doing for
their own sakes—such as being gracious and showing kindness to another hu-
man being or giving thanks for the unmerited gift of life—and not simply on a
quid pro quo basis and for the personal benefit one thinks one might get from
doing them.19 True virtue or, as the Stoics called it, “moral purpose (prohaire-
sis)” consists in wanting to do the good for no other reason than because it is
the good. As the great chronicler of ancient thought, Diogenes Laertius, said in
summing up the position of Zeno the Stoic, virtue is “choice-worthy for its
own sake and not from hope or fear or any external motive” (VII, 89). Indeed,
it is only in virtue that true happiness consists, for, as Diogenes went on to say,
virtue is “the state of mind which tends to make the whole of life harmonious.”
The wise and truly happy person, as the Stoics ever insisted, is the one who
can find pleasure in virtue—“not the kind of insubstantial, fleeting pleasure
that needs constant renewal but a pleasure which is sure and lasting.”20
Because the only form of reason that utilitarianism knows is mere techno-
logical-instrumental rationality, utilitarianism ignores the fact that, as Aristotle
pointed out (and as psychologists have since demonstrated), true happiness
—“well-being” or “flourishing” (eudaimonia, felicitas)—can never be had if
one seeks deliberately to obtain it; the pursuit of happiness for its own sake is
self-defeating. Indeed, the general consensus of the Ancients, reflected in
many common proverbs and sayings down through the ages, was that living
solely by one’s desires and wants is a recipe for unhappiness. “The search for
happiness,” the longshoreman turned social philosopher, Eric Hoffer, a
devoted reader of Montaigne, profoundly observed, “is one of the chief
sources of un-happiness.” While (as has been empirically documented) there
are many benefits associated with knowing how to be happy—ranging all the
way from having more friends, being financially better off, to living longer—it
is no more possible to find happiness by aiming at it directly than it is for
people who are under a great deal of stress to overcome their discomfort by
expending a lot of energy trying to make themselves feel relaxed.
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 15
Genuine happiness, to the degree that it exists, is the by-product, as it were,
of leading—or of striving to lead—a virtuous and noble life, and virtue, in the
Aristotelian, Confucian sense of the term, is not simply a matter of being
“prudent,” in the sense in which the term is generally used nowadays, i.e.,
looking out for oneself first and foremost and maximizing one’s own personal
pleasures (“preference schedules”). As Confucius said, “The noble [or virtu-
ous] person [junzi] understands rightness, whereas the petty person [xiaoren]
understands profit” (Analects, 4.16). Those who, like “utilitarian man,” have
allow-ed themselves to become addicted to the pursuit of pleasure and per-
sonal profit and who go through life tethered to a hedonic treadmill, seeking to
fulfill one desire after another, never pausing to be grateful for the things they
do have know in the end only emptiness and unhappiness, as Seneca for his
part observed: “No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and
turns everything to his own purpose” (Letters, XLVIII). “Virtue,” Seneca said,
op-posing the Epicurean ethic of pleasure and self-gratification, “invokes nei-
ther profit to attract nor loss to deter….Things that are honorable contain their
own reward” (On Favors, IV 1). The truly good, as Aristotle would say, is
some-thing that is aimed at for its own sake.

A remark about Confucius and Confucianism. As Wing-Tsit Chan has noted, Confucius
(Kongzi) “was the first person in Chinese history to devote his whole life, almost ex-
clusively, to teaching.”21 He may be compared in this regard to the first professional
pedagogues in ancient Greece, the Sophists or rhetoricians, who around about the same
time emerged as the first great moral educators in the history of the West. For both
Confucius and the Sophists the overriding goal of education was not the inculcation of
technical skills or abstract learning but ethical self-cultivation; they conceived of edu-
cation as a regimen aimed at the realization of self in the self’s relations to others. Edu-
cation in the true sense of the word should aim at the production of cultivated, civil, hu-
mane human beings (good citizens and persons of noble virtue). This is to say that they
were in the first instance moral philosophers.22 Since in this book I shall be drawing
heavily on Confucian thought, it is important to note that Confucianism is above all a
philosophy, not, as is often thought, a religion (even though it has often functioned as a
kind of quasi-religion in popular Chinese culture).23 As Mircea Eliade has rightly said,
“Properly speaking, Confucius is not a religious leader….Metaphysical and theological
speculations concerning Heaven and life after death are useless (Analects, 5.12; 7.20;
11.11). The ‘superior man’ [junzi] must first of all be concerned with concrete human
existence, as it is lived here and now.”24 Like Socrates, Confucius was concerned exclu-
sively with the moral Way, the way of right living, and did not, unlike Mozi who came
after him, trouble himself over metaphysical or religious issues; he also was not a
mystical thinker in the manner of Laozi. Confucius’ concerns, one might say, were ex-
istential-phenomenological. He himself was quite clear on this score; he was concerned
not with nature in the metaphysical sense of the term or with the gods (Tien) but with
the down-to-earth realm of human reality itself. “Zigong said: Our Master’s views on
16 On Suffering
culture can be gathered, but it is not possible to hear his views on the nature of things
and on the Way of Heaven’” (Analects, 5.13); “The Master never talked of: miracles,
violence, disorders; spirits” (Analects, 7.21). Confucius’ silence on supernatural matters
was indeed eloquent. One could say of Confucius what W.K.C. Gutherie says of
Protagoras of Abdera, the first great professional teacher or Sophist in the great age of
the Greek Enlightenment, viz., that he “did not deny the existence of the gods, but re-
fused to discuss the question on the grounds that certainty was impossible.”25
“Concerning the gods,” Protagoras said, “I have no means of knowing whether they
exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the
brevity of human life” (an utterance for which Protagoras was expelled from Athens
and all the copies of his book burned). Protagoras, like Confucius, was keenly aware of
the limits of human understanding, and his famous (and usually grossly misunderstood)
“Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not,
that they are not” is akin to Confucius’ “Man can enlarge the Way; it is not the Way that
enlarges man” (Analects, 15.29).26 The key concept in Confucius’ existential philoso-
phy of being-human is, as it was for the Greeks, virtue, de, and the principal Confucian
virtues serving to define what it properly means to be human are pretty much the same
as the one’s listed by the Roman philosopher, Marcus Aurelius: “being just, high-
minded, self-controlled, intelligent, judicious, truthful, honorable and free….integrity,
dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence,
simplicity, direction, magnanimity” (IV, 49; V, 5).

As Confucius, Aristotle, and the Stoics all knew, virtue is always a matter
of Bildung, of moral self-cultivation, character-building, and, as I shall want to
argue later, the Way of virtue (Daode) is that of right behavior or civility, of
being mindful of others, including our nonhuman others—Brother Wolf, Sister
Bird, and all the rest of the great family of creation. And it is not through self-
centered contentment but only, as the Buddha taught, through suffering—
whereby an awareness of the inherent frailty and vulnerability of the human
condition is forced upon us—that we are able to be mindful of others and
relate to them in concernful reciprocity and in the common knowledge (com-
passion or sym-pathy) that in our susceptibility to suffering we are not alone.
As psychologists have shown, the understanding of self and the understanding
of others develop in tandem, and it is above all the experience of what it means
to suffer that drives this development.
As a general rule, the acquisition of virtue, along with freedom and happi-
ness, is always bound up with doing things that one is likely to find arduous or
unpleasant. The social phobic, for example, who hides away in his or her shell
like a snail and shies away from, as psychologists say, “exposing” him or her-
self to any unpleasant or challenging situation will never overcome his or her
unhappy situation. Happiness is not the same thing as “having fun” or maxi-
mizing one’s utils. The “morality of utility” is one that is blind to the notion of
moral excellence and the importance of seeking to lead an admirable life
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 17
rather than just a pleasurable one. It is, as Nietzsche said, a “slave morality”
(see Beyond Good & Evil, 260). In the final analysis, as Marcus Aurelius ob-
served, “a person’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values” (VII,
3).

*
In the sense in which I shall be using the term, suffering is synonymous with
what it means to be human. To be born into the world of humans is to be flung
into a torrent not of one’s choosing, with the consequent obligation of forever
having to learn, often painfully, how best to navigate the treacherous waters of
life, while subject all the while to the whims of inscrutable Fate and capricious
Fortune. So long as the existing individual can keep from going under in this
sea of uncertainty, he or she is caught up in a never-ending process of learning
through suffering. “Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job
5:7). From the day we come into the world to our dying day, we are prey to all
manner of ills.
Suffering such as this is an essential aspect of what, following Montaigne
(for whom he had a great, though by no means uncritical, appreciation), Pascal
called la condition humaine in his Pensées, which has been called “the most
eloquent book in French prose.”27 This is the situation to which humans are
fated and which sets the limits to what they can aspire to and within whose
boundaries they are forced to work out for themselves their own individual
destinies. All sentient creatures can experience pain, but only humans suffer in
the proper psychological/spiritual sense of the term. As Rabbi H.S. Kushner
says of the difference between humans and animals, with the biblical story of
the Fall in mind: “Animals can feel pain, but human beings, because we have
eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, can feel loss, dread, frustration, jealously,
betrayal, at levels animals will never know. It is part of the price we pay for
our humanity, for our being able to feel love, joy, hope, achievement, faithful-
ness, and creativity.”28
Humans are indeed unique in Nature in that only they are fully aware of the
nature of their plight, and only they, like Job, raise the question as to the why
and wherefore of it all. To experience pain, as animals do, is bad enough, but
to suffer in the way only humans—thanks to their capacity for self-reflection
and self-awareness—are capable of, to suffer from a need for meaning, is
immensely worse. The agony that can afflict the soul itself in the depths of its
uncertainty as to what it means for it to be—the dark side, one might say, of
what it means to be (self)conscious—is the most wretched form of pain there
is.29
However, as Pascal pointed out in a famous pensée, it is precisely the hu-
man being’s awareness of its own wretched condition (misère) that constitutes
“the greatness of man” and forms the basis of what we call human dignity.
18 On Suffering
Addressing the question “For what, after all, is man in nature?” Pascal re-
marks:

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking

reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to
crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even
if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than
his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage of
the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.
Thus all our dignity consists in thought (Pensées, 200).30

Pursuing this theme of man as the “thinking reed,” Pascal stated:

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the

ordering of my thought….Through space the universe comprehends
[comprend] me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I
comprehend [comprends] it” (Pensées, 113).

Thought constitutes man’s greatness (Pensées, 759).

Whence Pascal’s conclusion: “Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic
principle of morality” (Pensées, 200). Such is the Pascalian ethic which, to
borrow a phrase from the Spanish existential philosopher, Miguel de
Unamuno, is based on “uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mys-
tery of one’s final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
foundation.”31
Pascal described the kind of douleureuse conscience, the vague and in-
choate, yet altogether unsettling anxiety which subtends the human being’s
awareness of its place in Nature, in the following way:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity
which comes before and after,…the small space I occupy and
which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of
which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [the vast
expanses of the seemingly infinite universe], I take fright and am
amazed to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put
me here? (Pensées, 68)

When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the
whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no
light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing
who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of
him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to
terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 19
island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape (Pen-
sées, 198).

When Pascal, who was not only one of the greatest moral philosophers of all
time but also a leading figure in the development of mathematics (probability
theory) and science (hydrodynamics), contemplated the dark and frigid empti-
ness of outer space that the then new scientific image of the universe conjured
up in people’s minds, he exclaimed, “The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces fills me with dread.”32 Anxiety or dread is nothing other than the con-
crete realization of the utter contingency of our being-in-the-world, of the
“human condition.”
In more recent times, Martin Heidegger has written at length about the kind
of existential dread or anxiety Pascal so poignantly described. As Heidegger
points out in his major work, Being and Time, anxiety or dread (Angst) stems
from the fact that, when we begin to reflect on our existence, if indeed we ever
do, we simply “find” ourselves—stumble upon ourselves, as it were—in a pre-
given world, as having been rudely, without so much as a “By your leave,”
“thrown” into it—whence Pascal’s question: “Who put me here?” We are all,
as it were, foundlings who are ignorant of where we come from and how we
came to be where we are. The reflecting subject does not coincide with its own
origin but discovers itself as “already there”—abandonné, as Pascal would say
—and the brute facticity of its sheer being-there blots out any apparent “why”
or “wherefore” for this factual state-of-affairs: “The pure ‘that it is’ shows it-
self, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘whither’ remain in darkness.” 33 Or as Heidegger
also says: “Even if Dasein [the human being] is ‘assured’ in its belief about its
‘whither’, or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its
‘whence’, all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the
case: for the mood [of attunement of Dasein to its factual situation] brings
Dasein before the ‘that-it-is of its ‘there’, which, as such stares it in the face
with the inexorability of an enigma” (BT, sec. 29). Life is the one thing for
which there is and can be no preparation: We blunder into it and have to try to
make sense of it all as best we can as we stumble along in the shadows.
The kind of anxiety Pascal and Heidegger are describing is something that
is capable, at any moment, of breaking into the humdrum lives that people are
often caught up in and of shattering the walls of stolid indifference within
which they pass their days. The terrifying and anxiety-laden perplexity that
then may ensue is not a happy situation to find oneself in. And yet, as Pascal
would say, it is “our true state (notre état véritable)”—condemned as we are,
as Montaigne had said, to drift forever, “sans bride et sans but / without bridle
or goal,” in what he called “cette mer vaste, trouble et ondoyante des opinions
humaines / this huge troubled, surging sea of human opinion” (Essais II, 12).
20 On Suffering
Following up on Montaigne, Pascal declared, in the course of an unusually
lengthy pensée, revealingly entitled “Disproportion of Man”:

That is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge or absolute

ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always
drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have
a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and
leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips always,
and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our
natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We
desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to
build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks
and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss (Pensées, 199).34

Alexis de Tocqueville was echoing Pascal when he wrote: “The nature of

man is sufficiently disclosed for him to know something of himself, and suffi-
ciently obscure for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness, in which he
gropes forever, and forever in vain, to lay hold of some completer notion of his
being.”35 The only thing of which we can be truly certain is our own un-cer-
tainty. One of Montaigne’s favorite lines (cited in Essais, II, 14) was that of
Pliny in his Historia naturalis (II, 7): “There is nothing certain except that no-
thing is certain, and nothing more wretched than Man nor more arrogant.” De-
spite their unremitting search for truth (“science”), in the end all that humans
are capable of knowing for sure, Montaigne said, is their own innate weakness
and natural ignorance (see Essais II, 12).
The pivotal insight that Pascal expresses in his reflections on the “dispro-
portion of man,” and that was reinforced by his reading of Montaigne, is that
the human condition is intrinsically “aporetic,” is rent by inner, insurmount-
able contradictions. For while we are moved by an insatiable desire for the
comfort of certain knowledge, the utter contingency and groundlessness of our
being—the “opacity of the fact,” as Heidegger called it—always emerges to
stare us in the face “with the inexorability of an enigma.”

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty.

We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.
We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness
and incapable of either certainty or happiness (Pensées, 401).

As these texts of Pascal make clear, the ontological or existential anxiety

that plagues the human being has a two-fold source: our ardent desire to find a
reassuring, absolute ground, on the one hand, combined with our inability ever
actually to do so, on the other. This discrepancy between our deepest longings
and the degree to which they are fated to remain unsatisfied is the source of
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 21
our greatest unhappiness. As Hegel appropriately remarked, human conscious-
ness is most decidedly an “unhappy consciousness.” Adrift in the universe and
in doubt as to the cosmic significance of its place in Nature, the human being,
in the depths of its being, experiences its own being as one of estrangement or
alienation, of not-being-at-home in the world—“a nameless Unheimlichkeit,”
as the “greatest and most typical American psychologist and philosopher,”
William James, referred to it.36
From this point of view, the human being is, as Nietzsche said, the “sick
animal.” Or as Unamuno put it, “Man, by the very fact of being man, of pos-
sessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab a diseased
animal” (to which he later added: “…but this disease is the font of all vigorous
health”) (18). By being, as it were, born into language—which is to say, into
the various stories our culture has constructed over the ages about what it
means to be human—humans are irreparably cut off from the things of Nature.
The fact that, thanks to language, we are endowed with reflexive self-aware-
ness and are, accordingly, aware—in a way that other animals mercifully are
not—of the contingency of our birth and the inevitability of our death is the
ultimate source of human suffering and the reason why each one of us has a
cross we are condemned to bear. “All consciousness,” as Unamuno observed,
“is consciousness of death and of suffering….Suffering is the path of con-
sciousness, and by it living beings arrive at the possession of self-conscious-
ness” (139-40).

Language: human and animal. Animals are fully capable of communicating among
their own kind by means of various sign-systems (“languages”), but they do not appear
to tell stories to one another about what it means that they are the particular kind of
animals they are. My dog Cluis is very adept at understanding a number of English
words and grammatical phrases, as am I in understanding some of his expressions, and
we communicate quite well in this regard—for certain practical purposes. Montaigne,
who had a great respect for animals (see, for instance, Essais II, 11), remarked on how
his dog was very adept at communicating his wants and needs and at persuading
Montaigne to go along with them, even when it was not particularly convenient for him
to do so. Human language, properly speaking, is of a different sort, however, and is
something more than just a sign-system serving practical purposes. It is more than just
a kind of tool for dealing with the physical environment (as in the case, for instance, of
bees); humans, qua humans, use language in a uniquely self-reflexive way to tell stories
about themselves as, precisely, language-using beings. In so doing, they transcend the
physical environment (Umwelt) they share with their fellow animals and exist in
openness to the/a World (Welt), the world-as-such (Being). (For a discussion of the
phenomenological-hermeneutical view of language, see my “Being and Speaking.”)
The fact that humans are the “speaking (story-telling, self-interpreting) animals,” the
animals that have the logos (reason/speech, ratio et oratio), means that they are
22 On Suffering
burdened with an unsettling awareness of their problematic relation to the animal world
—and, indeed, to their own animality.37

*
There can be no doubt that happiness (however defined) has always been for
humans the summum bonum, the “sovereign good,”38 something that they tend
to look upon as their birthright, but it is equally obvious to any patient ob-
server of the human scene—or, as Erasmus would say, the follies of human-
kind, la comédie humaine—that the pursuit of happiness has also always and
everywhere tended to lead humans astray, into what Pascal referred to as
mind-numbing divertissements, diversions or distractions,39 or what Heidegger
called an “inauthentic,” “fallen” mode of existence. In a headlong flight away
from anxiety, suffering, and uneasiness—in a vain attempt to avoid the un-
avoidable—humans can easily succumb to ersatz, inauthentic forms of
contentment, such as those afforded by the consumption of various conscious-
ness-altering drugs.40
Unlike the anxiety experienced by the neurotic or the psychotic, ontological
anxiety is an integral part of what it means for humans to be, and it is therefore
something from which individuals can attempt to flee only at the cost of dead-
ening their consciousness-of-being and falling into inauthenticity, deceit and
despair, and a less than fully human mode of being. It was in a true Pascalian
spirit that Henry David Thoreau observed in his reflections on living for two
years in the woods by Walden Pond: “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of man-
kind” (Walden, “Economy”). This existential despair and suffering is only
compounded when, through the pursuit of mindless distractions or the con-
sumption of drugs or alcohol, one attempts to flee from it, for one is then al-
lowing oneself to be distracted from the all-important question of what it
means for one to be, the point of it all. As Pascal had every reason to know
(having himself been something of a playboy earlier in his life), the compul-
sive gambler thinks that he is having the time of his life, but all he is doing is
throwing away the little time he has. The price one must pay for seeking hap-
piness by means of pleasurable divertiseements is an ever-recurrent boredom,
and the more frenetic the pursuit of pleasure becomes, the greater and more
soul-deadening is the boredom. As Pascal observed, it is inevitable that people
who are forever calculating how to be happy will never be happy.
We invariably fall into inauthenticity and a fraudulent mode of being when
we refuse to acknowledge the insuperable limits of the human condition—our
irremediable finitude—and attempt to lay claim to a kind of knowledge and a
degree of certainty—a kind of self-reassuring security—that are the sole pre-
rogatives of the all-knowing gods. This form of inauthenticity (or delusion, as
a Buddhist would say) is perhaps most acutely manifest in the widespread
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 23
phenomenon of religious fundamentalism, along with the religious fanati-
cism, sectarian violence, and sheer savagery into which it so easily mutates
and which Voltaire aptly characterized as an “epidemic illness.”41 The desire
for “absolute truth” (“an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising
up to infinity”) and the literalist vulgarization of the salvific myths of religion
which this engenders is, quite simply, a willful denial of the essential facts of
the human condition, and thus a most pernicious form of self-deceit and inau-
thenticity.
Literalist fundamentalism, Saint Augustine said, is “foolish (stultum)”
(Confessions XII, 25). It is a most blatant form of hermeneutical naïveté to
think that one could ever get at the literal, “inerrant” truth in the Scriptures—
or in any other text, for that matter. If the Scriptures are truly the word of God,
then, both Origen and Augustine maintained—along with a number of earlier
Jewish rabbinical scholars—they must be open to a host of differing, poten-
tially infinite interpretations and cannot be reduced to their literal, surface
meanings—which are often contradictory and can even be morally repellant
(given the far different mores of the times when they were originally com-
posed). Those who think they can read God’s mind, know His will, and are
qualified to speak on His behalf would be well advised to heed the words of
the Apostle Paul: “How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past
finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord or hath been His coun-
selor?” (Rom. 11:33-34). It is, as that great Christian humanist, Desiderius
Erasmus, said in his defense of free will (sec. 6), “more devout to adore the
unknown than to investigate the unexplorable.”
To claim to know what one cannot know is not only hypocritical, it is an act
of bad faith pure and simple—a supreme form of that greatest of sins: hubris.
For, as Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the twentieth-century’s leading
philosophers and one whose life spanned the entirety of the century, observed:
“What self-knowledge really is is not the perfect self-transparency of know-
ledge but the insight that we have to accept the limits posed for finite na-
tures.”42 Or as Pascal said, “If man studied himself, he would see how incapa-
ble he is of going further” (Pensées, 199).

*
The preceding remarks, I hasten to add, are in no way meant to disparage the
religious impulse in humans or to imply that, as Freud asserted, religion is a
“system of wishful illusions” and a “neurosis of humankind.” (The religious
impulse is something that Freud confessed he never experienced.) They
amount to saying only that the literal reading of sacred texts so favored by
fundamentalists—many of whom appear to believe that the Bible was written
in English—is a falsification of their true meaning, which is never literally
straightforward but is always, as the fifth-century Dionysius the Areopagite,
24 On Suffering
known also as the Pseudo Dionysius and, to the Medievals, as Saint Denis,
said, “veiled,” expressing itself in the form of metaphors, myths, symbols, im-
ages, parables, fables, similitudes, metonymies, allegories, anthropomor-
phisms, and other literary tropes.43 As Thomas Aquinas, who was deeply influ-
enced by Dionysius, said in this regard, “The very hiding of truth in figures is
useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds, and as a defense against the ridi-
cule of the unbelievers, according to the words, ‘Give not that which is holy to
dogs’ (Matt. 7:6)” (Summa theologiae I, 1, 9, ad 2). Or, it might be added, to
idolaters of the printed word and prophets of false religion: O ye of little faith
—so little faith that you cannot bring yourselves to believe unless you can
fancy yourself in possession of the absolute, literal truth.
As doctors of the Church and defenders of the faith like Saint Thomas fully
realized—and as the great twelfth-century Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides
also maintained, following in this regard Philo Judaeus—there is a world of
difference between taking religious texts seriously, in accordance with their
sensus spiritualis, and taking them literally, in accordance with their sensus
literalis. The latter amounts to what could rightly be called bibliolatry. Indeed,
as Saint Paul declared, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor.
3:6).
Scriptural texts are not history in the modern sense of the term (and make
no claim to being such); they are of a wholly different genre and belong to a
different kind of “language game.” They are, to borrow a phrase from theolo-
gian Rudolph Bultmann, theology dressed up in the language of myth. In re-
gard for instance to the sacred mystery of the Trinity, the fourth-century theo-
logian Gregory of Nyssa stated that the names Father, Son, and Spirit are not
to be taken ad litteram, in a mundane, merely human sense, but are round-
about ways of expressing that which is ultimately “unnamable and unspeak-
able” (Why There Are Not Three Gods). God is Infinity itself, Gregory said,
and the Infinite cannot be known positively by humans. Anticipating
Dionysius, Gregory, a leading figure in the history of apophatic or “negative”
theology, insisted that it is only through a kind of not-knowing (agnosia) that
God can be known, an “understanding of our non-understanding,” as Saint
John of the Cross later referred to it. This is indeed the only way that we can
know that which is above all being and thus all knowledge. The God that can
be named is not God.
In terms of human desire, eternal life would most certainly (or arguably) be
the greatest of all goods, but salvation from the trials and tribulations of
earthly existence when couched in terms of an afterlife, taken in any kind of
quasi-literal or empirical (“supernatural”) sense, as something to come “after”
this life, after “the end of time,” is a notion that, from the point of view of
natural reason, makes no sense whatsoever.44 As Paul Ricoeur, a devout Chris-
tian and member of the Reformed Church of France but also, at the same time,
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 25
a scrupulous and uncompromising philosopher, freely confessed late in his
life: “Afterlife is a representation that remains prisoner to empirical time, as an
‘after’ belonging to the same time as life….[W]e have no discourse available
to think of the relation of time to eternity….To use a language that remains
quite mythical, I would say this: Let God, at my death, do with me as he wills.
I demand nothing, I demand no ‘after.’”45 If what Christians call redemption
and eternal salvation have any existentially valid meaning, one thing they do
not mean is that one is thereby made “immortal” and ceases to be a finite
creature so as to live on indefinitely “afterwards” in some “supernatural”
realm.
For any existing individual, the existence of any kind of “afterlife” beyond
the narrow confines of this earthly abode can never be anything more than, in
the words of Rabelais, “un grand peut-être,” a great Perhaps.46 Death may be
the “essential passage into a new phase of life,” we may indeed hope that it is,
but whether or not it is is something that, in this mortal life of ours, we can
never hope to know. It is a phenomenal fact that, as Pascal observed, we do not
know what will become of us after we die, and this fact cannot simply be
brushed aside or overturned by any kind of religious or metaphysical wishful
thinking that would seek to portray death as being merely the gateway or
portal opening onto Eternity and the Great Beyond. And, in any event, as
Omar Khayyam, a kind of Persian Ecclesiastes, remarked long ago, none of
the myriads who before us have passed through the door of Darkness have
returned to tell us what they encountered on the other side: “Not one returns to
tell us of the Road, / which to discover we must travel too” (Rubáiyát, LXIV).
Although the myth of Osiris tells us that it is possible to pass through the
Valley of Death and come out on the other side to life everlasting, it is also
said in the Song of the Harper that was inscribed sometime in the latter part of
the twenty-seventh century, B.C. on the walls of the tomb of the Egyptian king
Inyotef, “No one goes away and then comes back.” The anonymous author of
this exceedingly ancient text is referring to the same “undiscover’d country
from whose bourn no traveler returns” that the young Prince Hamlet found
himself brooding over many millennia later as he pondered, weak and weary,
the relative merits of being and non-being. The mythical story of Er who
purportedly traveled to the place of last judgment and then returned to earth to
tell his tale (related by Plato in the last book of The Republic) is just that—a
myth. Thus, if there is a good reason for fearing death, it is because, as the
wary fox said to the cagey old lion, “I see a lot of footprints leading up to you,
but I don’t see any footprints leading away from you.” Phenomenologically
speaking, the bridge to the Beyond, if such a bridge there be, is a one-way
bridge.
It is of course true that, as humans, we are haunted by the Ideas of eternity
and the infinite (“intimations of immortality,” as Wordsworth put it), but we
26 On Suffering
are also aware, when we are honest with ourselves and admit to our inherent
fallibility, that any infinite of which we can conceive is no true infinite at all
—“Infinitum inquantum humiusmodi ignotum est / The infinite as such is
unknown,” as Thomas Aquinas said, quoting Aristotle.47 The locus of guilt and
suffering, according to Ricoeur, is nothing other than this disproportion (a
Pascalian term that Ricoeur takes over) or failed synthesis (a kind of
ontological fault-line or “wound”) between the infinite and the finite and the
eternal and the temporal in the human being. In the last analysis, the only
absolute accessible to humans by means of the natural light of reason (lumen
naturale) is the realization that any true Absolute is forever beyond their ken.48
The Christian God is, as Pascal said, a deus absconditus, a hidden, non-
appearing God (the term derives from Isaiah 45:15). “No man hath seen God
at any time,” as the Evangelist states (1 John 4:12; see also Matt. 11:27). And
as the anonymous medieval author of the Cloud of Unknowing said, speaking
of the “Divine Darkness” mentioned by Saint Dionysius, “The universes
which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”
We never see but through a glass darkly.
In this regard, it must not be thought that religious faith can step in and
substitute for reason where reason fails us. Religious faith is often taken to be
a kind of knowledge—or, at least, a particular sort of knowledge-claim—a
kind of quasi-theoretical belief that an entity called “God” exists. There is,
however, nothing cognitive or “epistemological” about religious faith. Even
though it involves an act of the intellect and is not just a matter of nice, lofty
feelings, faith, in the proper sense of the term, is an existential, practical ori-
entation or disposition (a “stance”), not a theoretical, propositional belief. Be-
lief is always a watering-down of faith, faith congealed into an object of
idolatry, and idolatry, as the story of Moses attests, is the oldest of religious
sins. The Book of Genesis, for instance, is not science, primitive, pseudo or
what-have-you, and to speak of “creation theory,” as some perfervid funda-
mentalists do, viewing this as a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolu-
tion, is to commit a serious “category mistake.”49 Genesis is in fact a poetic
description, expressed in the form of a cosmogonical myth (mythos, story),
about how, through a divine poiesis, the world was brought forth out of non-
being.
Religious faith is not a belief that God exists (as one might believe in the
existence of UFOs) but is, rather, a faith or deep-seated confidence, i.e., a trust
(the Latin fides, like the Greek pistis, can be translated as either trust or faith,
depending on the context)—a trust in “God,” “Divine Providence,” or some
such ultimate reality, call it what one will. The renowned theologian, Paul
Tillich, for instance, preferred to speak of “the ground of being” rather than
simply of “God” and conceived of religion as the way in which people relate
to what for them is of “ultimate concern.”50 Religious trust is a trust that goes
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 27
beyond the comfort of self-assured belief, it is a trust that is able to
countenance uncertainty and insecurity, it is a trust that enables one to entrust
oneself to something greater than oneself.

*
Eternity being unintelligible and impossible to think, time is the only reality
we can know. Time is “life’s most precious commodity,” one ancient writer
said, but this is not quite correct. Although we are always checking our
watches to see if we “have enough time” for this or that and are generally care-
ful about how we “spend” it, time, strictly speaking, is not something that we
have; it is something that we are. “The meaning of existence is temporality,”
i.e., lived time, as Heidegger said (BT, sec. 65). The greatest of French phe-
nomenologists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was expanding on Heidegger when he
insisted that the human subject does not exist in time but is, rather, time itself,
nothing other than an ongoing process of temporalization, “one single ‘living
cohesion’, one single temporality which is engaged, from birth, in making
itself progressively explicit, and in confirming that cohesion in each succes-
sive present.”51
Moreover, although life can only be understood backwards, retrospectively,
it is, as Kierkegaard noted, necessarily always lived forwards, for what it
means to exist, in the case of humans, is to be in a continual process of self-
transcendence; existence (existere) is an ex-sistence, a standing-out from one-
self. To be is to be in a continual process of becoming. As long as we are alive
and self-conscious, we are always “projecting” ourselves into the future, into
the realm of possibility, carrying our past along with us as we do so—until at
some point it may become too much of a burden to bear and we have lived
long enough. To exist is to be always on-the-way, to “find” oneself at some
undefined point on the path between birth and death, suspended between a
beginning of which we have no recollection and an end which, when it comes,
we will never experience. “I came like Wind [why not knowing], and like
Water I go [I know not whither],” in the words of Omar Khayyam (Rubáiyát,
XXVIII, XXIX).
Our birth and our death are the limits between which we live out our lives,
but these limits which define our existence are ones we can never actually
experience. Merleau-Ponty—who, as Sartre once said, was a Pascalian even
before reading Pascal and who always had a heightened and painful awareness
of the inexorable passage of time, of what Marcus Aurelius called “the yaw-
ning gulf of past and future time, in which all things vanish” (V, 23)—ob-
served in this regard:

Neither my birth nor my death can appear to me as experiences of

my own, since, if I thought of them thus, I should be assuming my-
28 On Suffering
self to be pre-existent to, or outliving, myself, in order to be able to
experience them, and I should therefore not be genuinely thinking
of my birth or my death. I can, then, apprehend myself only as “al-
ready born” and “still alive”—I can apprehend my birth and my
death only as prepersonal [anonymous] horizons: I know that peo-
ple are born and die, but I cannot know my own birth and death….
[M]y life slips away from me on all sides and is circum-scribed by
impersonal zones.52

In the end, of course, we are outrun by time: “Our time is a very shadow
that passeth away” (Wisdom of Solomon 2:5). Just when one has learned what
one needs to know and to do in order to live well, it is, as that author greatly
admired by Montaigne, Seneca, said, time to die.53 “For what is your life? It is
even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away”
(James 4:14). Thus, as Heidegger also said, death is the meaning of life—not
as an event in life, to be sure, but as the as the ever-present “coloring” or at-
mosphere of life. “Death, in the widest sense,” he remarked, “is a phenomenon
of life” (BT, sec. 49). “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon
as it is. ‘As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die’” (BT,
sec. 48). Montaigne had already made the same point: “The first day of your
birth sets you on a track of dying as well as of living….The continuous work
of your life is to build death. You are in death when you are in life” (Essais I,
20).
“Is anyone so foolish, however young he be,” Cicero asked, “as to be cer-
tain that he will live until evening?” (On Old Age, 67) Life does not come with
a warrantee but, rather, like many of the products we buy, with a its own built-
in obsolescence: “The children will not know, / Till time has withered them, /
The woe / With which they’re rife.”54 From the moment we are born into this
world, full of boundless energy, we are all singled out for defeat, desolation,
and death. Death is indeed part of life and a defining feature of the essence of
existence, as Eric Cassell has duly noted: “What is the age, who is the philoso-
pher, and how many of us are there who have not given thought to the fear of
death? It fills the fantasies of children and adolescents, occupies countless
midnight hours of anxiety in the healthy, and infuses the contemplation of stu-
dents of the human condition.”55
Because we all exist only on borrowed time and under a temporary reprieve
from the fate to which we are ultimately condemned, human being is, as
Heidegger said, a “being-towards-death.” Life is synonymous with possibility,
the possibility of being ever-more, but death, as the ultimate possibility, is the
impossibility of any further possibilities. By way of forestalling any possible
misunderstanding, however, it must be said, as did Montaigne, that while death
is the end (bout) of life, it is nevertheless not its goal, object, or meaning (but)
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 29
(see Essais III, 12)—as a dour pessimist like Schopenhauer might say—for it
is a phenomenal fact that life always seeks life, ever more life, ever more
fulfillment. Morgen ist auch ein Tag / Tomorrow is yet another day, as the
Germans say, but this does not mean that we can, or should, live our lives as if
there will always be a “tomorrow.” Inevitably, a day which has no morrow ar-
rives in the life of every existing individual and he or she falls into a sleep
from which there is no earthly awakening.
Tocqueville summed it all up very nicely when he wrote: “Man springs out
of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God; he is
seen but for a moment, wandering on the verge of the two abysses, and there
he is lost.”56 All of us, Seneca said, “being born from nothing…are reduced to
nothing” (SL, 101; see also On Tranquility, 15)—or as Job put it: “Naked came
I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither” (Job 1:21). The
harsh reality of the human condition, Seneca also remarked, brings low even
the most exalted, and our inevitable death, wherein we shall return to ashes,
makes of all men, the greatest as well as the lowliest, equal in the face of their
ultimate destiny (see Letters, XCI). In the words of an old Roman epitaph, In
nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus / How quickly we fall back form nothing
to nothing.
If human beings are the quintessentially mortal creatures, it is because, as
the ancient Greek physician, Alcmaeon of Croton, a disciple of Pythagoras,
remarked, they are unable to conjoin their beginning with their end and are
thus fated to die. Or as the Buddha said around about the same time, “Every-
thing that has a beginning will necessarily have an end.” This is what it means
to exist “in time.” Time is a kind of immedicabile vulnus, an incurable (“un-
medicalizable”) wound in the substance of our being. For while it is the means
by which, throughout the flux of unceasing change, we are made to be present
to the world and to ourselves and are made to be, like the ship of Theseus
Aristotle speaks of, ever the self-same—idipsum, as Saint Augustine would
say—throughout change, it is also, at the same time, that which ultimately robs
us of our being and makes us to be no more. “Tempus edax rerum / Time is the
devourer of everything,” as Ovid said (Metamorphoses XV, 234). It is, as
Shakespeare put it, that which “nursest all and murder’st all that are” (Rape of
Lucrece, 929). However successful we might be in navigating the seas of life,
we are all destined in the end to become shipwrecks of time.
The individual, be it a human being, a snow flake, or a blade of grass, is a
very insubstantial and ephemeral sort of thing: “Mais ou sont les neiges d’
antan? / O where are the snows of yesteryear?”57 Neither the immortality of
the soul, nor reincarnation, nor transmigration (metempsychosis), nor any
other kind of vita post mortem is a given, something that can be known.58 All
that we are in a position to say is, in the words of the poet:
30 On Suffering
Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we,
too, once. And never again. But this having been once on earth—
Can it ever be cancelled?59

While life is never futile or absurd (unless one makes it so), there is
nevertheless an undeniably tragic dimension to it since in the end we are all
condemned to die. In the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, it is
said: “Each of us is like a shattered urn, grass that must wither, a flower that
must fade, a shadow moving on, a cloud passing by, a particle of dust floating
on the wind, a dream soon forgotten.” And in the story of Job it is written:
“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of troubles. He cometh
forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth
not” (Job 14:1-2). Or as Virgil described the matter: “All the best days of life
slip away from us mortals first; illness and dreary old age and pain sneak up,
and the fierceness of harsh death snatches us away” (Georgics III, 66).
To be born into this world is to be born with a death sentence hanging over
one’s head, never knowing when it might be carried out. Mors certa, hora
incerta. To exist as we humans do, in an awareness of our being, is to be
haunted by a sense of impending doom; it is to exist in the awareness of the
ever-present possibility of our not-being, of our being no-more. Perhaps, with-
out knowing it, we have already had our last meal. From this point of view we
are like the condemned men Pascal spoke of. “Imagine,” Pascal said,

a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of

whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those re-
maining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and look-
ing at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an
image of the human condition (Pensées, 82).

Humans, ever on the look-out for greener pastures and the pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow and ever engaged in an interminable search for the elusive
blue bird of happiness, know in the end only decay, degeneration, and desola-
tion. “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw
earth over your head and it is finished forever” (Pensées, 165). The grave,
Epictetus for his part said, is “that dwelling place [that] stands open to every
man” (Discourses I, 25). In the end we all founder upon the rocks of adversity
and come to grief, as the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone observes:

Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,

[man] comes to nothingness.
Through no flight can he resist
The one assault of death, even if he has succeeded in cleverly
evading painful sickness.60
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 31

*
Death “individualizes,” as Heidegger said. Death and “aloneness” are the twin,
ultimate realities of the human condition, for every individual is condemned to
die his or her own death: “We shall die alone. We must thus act as if we were
alone” (Pensées, 151). In this way, the fact of our own mortality drives home
to us the realization that, however much we may long to be comforted and
recognized, we are all, as it were, orphans and lone travelers who have to
make our way in an often indifferent and uncaring universe—living our own
lives and dying our own deaths. Hegel referred to human consciousness as an
“unhappy consciousness” because to be human is to have been irremediably
wrenched away from a state of prelapsarian innocence and from the kind of
primordial oneness with Nature that animals enjoy—and which, as the biblical
myth relates, humans too enjoyed once upon a time before they partook of the
forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The human being is, in this sense, an “alien” in Nature. This is the onto-
logical meaning of alienation, symbolized in the biblical myth by the angel
with a flaming sword whom God stationed at the entrance to the Garden of
Eden in order to prevent Adam and Eve from attempting to return to their lost
paradise; human life on earth, as the Old Testament portrays it, is one of
alienation and exile. Indeed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great admirer of
Montaigne, said, “We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
God.”61 “We do not,” he went on to say, “understand the notes of birds. The
fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us.” For all of its
frequent warmth and loveliness, Nature is profoundly indifferent to our own
innermost hopes and aspirations.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,

Will neither care nor knows
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.62

Even in regard to their own kind, humans are, to borrow a term from
Matthew Arnold, “enisled,” separate islands of self-awareness which, precise-
ly as such, are painfully aware of their separation not only from Nature but
also from other such self-awarenesses.

Yes! In the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.63
32 On Suffering

In speaking of this essential “separateness of individuals,” psychologist Carl

Rogers very pertinently observed: “Each person is an island unto himself, in a
very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of
all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself.”64
As Rogers’ remarks indicate, were it not for this sort of existential-onto-
logical solitude or aloneness—which is not to be confused with loneliness,
which is a psychological state of mind, not an ontological characteristic of
existence—we could never relate to others in a meaningful, insightful way—as
others—and could, accordingly, never experience compassion for, and soli-
darity with, the sufferings of our fellow humans. “Solitariness,” Alfred North
Whitehead said, is the “awful, ultimate fact” of the human condition, yet it is
also, as he went on to say, the source of all spirituality and of universal bro-
therhood.65 It is only because we have all, in our own uniquely individual
ways, been hurt by life and bear its scars that we can all be brothers and sisters
in that suffering that none of us can ever succeed in evading.
Ontological “aloneness” is not, it should therefore be apparent, the opposite
of human “togetherness.” Human beings are by nature social animals and do
not live in an asocial isolation from one another as do some animals; but they
are also not like herd animals or insects which are pretty much interchangeable
among themselves. They are “social” in a way peculiar to them. They are, as
has often been said, like ships that pass in the night—alone together for a short
while in a vast and lonely world. Genuine human community and “being-with”
(Mitsein, as Heidegger termed it) can exist only between individuals who are
aware of the fact that they are indeed individuals who, while they may at all
times stand in need of the aid and assistance of others, must nevertheless
assume sole and ultimate responsibility for themselves. Whatever consolation
one may derive from a happy relationship, the basic fact of life is that other
people can never meet the need for fulfillment that everyone harbors in
themselves. No one can take over the task of being-human—of living and
dying—for another.
This is one aspect of what it means to say that the human person is (in the
words of André Gide) le plus irremplaçable des êtres, the most irreplaceable of
beings—cf. the old biblical idea that God addresses every individual by a
name known only to Him and no one else. Genuine “being-with” does not
involve a fusion of souls but is a sharing one’s of solitude with another’s, a
relationship in which each recognizes and respects the irreducible otherness of
the other. “We are alone,” one psychoanalyst observes, “and never more so
than when in relationship to another.”66
As the Stoics and other ancient thinkers fully realized, it is only to the
degree that we can embrace our solitude—what Seneca called “withdrawing
into yourself” (Letters, XXV)—that we can escape the loneliness to which we
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 33
are often prone; the best cure for loneliness, it has been said, is solitude. Those
who cannot bear ever to be “by themselves” are people who are likely to flitter
from one meaningless relationship to another and to lead truly lonely lives.
Indeed, as modern psychology has shown, the attempt to flee from one’s
essential aloneness is the source of some of the most pervasive of mental/
spiritual pathologies. Only if this is realized, is it true to say, as did Saint Paul:
“For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself” (Rom. 14:7).
No one lives entirely unto themselves, for, as existing individuals, we are all,
as we well know, in the same boat together: “Every man bears the whole form
of the human condition,” as Montaigne said (Essais III, 2).
When we mourn the death of a fellow human, it is, therefore, not just the
passing of that individual we are mourning; it is indeed our own fates and the
precariousness and transience of human condition itself that we are mourning.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was speaking of this kind of mourning in his poem
“Spring and Fall,” where he portrays a young girl, Margaret, grieving over the
autumnal fall of leaves:

Margarét are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

This blight—reminiscent of that of which the ancient Greek poet and

inventor of the “art of memory,” Simonides of Ceos, spoke when, drawing on
Homer (cf. Iliad VI, 146; XXI, 463), he bemoaned the fact that the generations
of men fall like the leaves of the trees—is a predicament from which there is
no escape. We are all condemned, throughout our lives, to live in the valley of
the shadow of death. This is, as Gulliver in the land of the Luggnaggians said,
the “universal calamity of human nature.”
34 On Suffering
*
Confronted with life’s uncertainties and betrayals, we may seek consolation in
the unconditional love that only a dog can give—“Fido,” a name the ancient
Romans often gave their dogs, means “I am faithful,” “I will always be by
your side.” The dog, Voltaire said, “prodigiously surpasses man in friend-
ship.”67 Unlike people, who often have hidden agendas, dogs are indeed the
most devoted of companions and steadfast of friends. (Selected as dogs were
by Nature for the express purpose of being man’s best friend, can there be
anything lonelier than a dog deprived of human contact, lying abandoned in a
dog pound and longing to be adopted by some generous soul?) In their ability
to afford us consolation, to raise our spirits, to protect us from adversity, and to
help us keep in good health and live longer, dogs are truly “godlike”—if one
translates the enigmatic words by which God identified himself to Moses,
“Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” as “I will be with you.” Steadfast faithfulness is indeed a
manifestation of godliness. There are some Buddhist schools that maintained
that even animals can be bodhisattvas, living buddhas, as it were.
While our animal companions do have the power to heal us of many ills
and to reconcile us with life, they also, however, given the brevity of their
lives, serve to remind us each day of the tenuousness of life and the imperma-
nence of all things, ourselves included. Like the leaves of Margaret’s beloved
golden grove, dogs—our companions and alter egos since before the dawn of
history when, for whatever reason, they decided to come over to our side and
leave their wolf-being behind—are hermeneuts, messengers of Chronos, old
Father Time. To the degree that their inarticulateness can be made articulate,
what they say to us when we gaze into their enigmatic, yet incredibly soulful
eyes which seem to express a wisdom as old as time is, in the words of Virgil
in his book on husbandry and la vie campagnarde (which Montaigne consid-
ered to be “the most perfect achievement in poetry”—see Essais II, 10):
“Fugit inreparabile tempus / Time is fleeing never to return” (Georgics III,
284).68 For all of the joy they can bring to our lives, our animal companions
can also provoke in us thoughts that, as Wordsworth would say, “lie too deep
for tears.”
Even the love of another human being offers no escape from heartbreak and
suffering, for, although all love yearns for eternity, every love story has, sooner
or later, given the ultimate reality of death, an unhappy ending—love,
Unamuno said, “is death’s brother” (132). This is why even the truest and
long-lasting of loves is invariably bittersweet and is permeated by a poignant,
threatening sense of loss and an unsettling awareness that all things, great and
small, are ephemeral and are destined to pass away and fade into oblivion.
“Tous nos biens ne sont qu’en songe / All our goods exist only in a dream,” as
Montaigne noted (Essais II, 12). And of course most love stories end sooner
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 35
rather than later and leave us with a lasting sorrow, as the old French chanson
reminds us:

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.

The precariousness and bitter-sweet character of all things human is indeed

perhaps best expressed in poetry and music, one of the most moving, Orpheus-
like examples of which is the Portuguese Fado and the saudade (melancholy,
nostalgia, longing, etc.) it so plaintively articulates.
Such is indeed the way of the world: “The woods decay, the woods decay
and fall, / The vapors weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills
the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan.”69 There
is no end to the ways in which our happiness can fall prey to the onslaughts of
adversity. “Tout contentement des mortels est mortel,” as Montaigne said.70
Love, beauty, and all good things, including life itself, are as fleeting as are the
magnificent color displays of Fall foliage. “As with the fleeting pleasures of
men, a stern law decrees that nothing in life lasts.”71 The specter of irreme-
diable loss hovers continually over everything in our lives. Even the most
banal of partings can be tinged with sorrow, for there is no assurance that
when one says Good-bye to someone close one will ever see them again.
“Epictetus used to say,” Marcus Aurelius tells us (XI, 34), “that when you kiss
your child you should say to yourself: ‘Tomorrow you may be dead.’”
In this uncertain world nothing is secure. “Rien n’est jamais acquis à
l’homme.” “Nothing is durable (nihil stabile est).”72 The sober realization that
they may at any time be torn apart is, in fact, that which serves to bring friends
and lovers ever closer together, confronted, as they are, on all sides by the
threat of the unknown and the unforeseeable. It is only when we realize how
thin the threads are that bind us together with those we love that we are in a
position to truly cherish and value them. Or as Seneca expressed the matter:
“We ought to love all our dear ones,…but always in a realization that we have
received no promise that they will be ours forever, no, not even for a length of
time….The heart…must not forget that those we love will leave, indeed are
already leaving” (Consolation to Marcia, 10).
When we do experience the death of others—our beloved trees, our faithful
animal companions, those fellow humans who have occupied a prominent
place in our lives—we always die a little ourselves. The bell that tolls for
others tolls for us as well: Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.73 “One man
follows a friend’s funeral and is then laid out himself.”74 The death of others
drives home to us the precariousness of our own situation and forces upon us
an awareness of the fringes of darkness that surround us on all sides and that,
like a wild beast on the prowl searching out whom it may devour, threaten us
36 On Suffering
at every moment with death and destruction. It is indeed the death of our
fellow humans, nos semblables, nos frères, that forces upon us the painful
realization that we too are mortal and are doomed to perish. (Voltaire said that
a human infant abandoned at birth on a desert island and left to grow up on its
own would have no more an awareness of its own mortality than a rat or a cat.)
The questions that invariably arise at such moments are profoundly un-
settling ones: What has become of those who have gone before us and have
now passed away, taking all of their secrets with them? Where have all those
worlds and all those values that they represented now gone? What does it
mean that they were? What is to become of us all? For just as the world begins
anew with every birth, so also does it end with every death. As an Anglican
graveside prayer proclaims, “In the midst of life there is death.”
In the case of human communities, this is quite literally the case, for hu-
mans do not cast away their dead but build parallel communities—cemeteries
(cities of the dead, “necropolises”), often replete with house-like tombs—to
house them in, erect monuments in their honor in the midst of their cities, and
religiously invoke their memories of them in the commemoration rites and
rituals of Remembrance and Memorial days, such as the Chinese Qing Ming
or Tomb-Sweeping Day. The strange mark of humans, Unamuno observed, is
that they store up their dead; the human being, he said, “is an animal that
guards its dead” (20, 41). Although some social animals like elephants and
chimpanzees appear to show something of an interest in the remains of their
own kind, only humans have developed elaborate cults of the dead, replete
with myths concerning the afterlife, for the explicit purpose of venerating their
dead and resisting what Thomas Hardy called “oblivion’s swallowing sea.” As
Karen Armstrong observes in her survey of human myth-making, “Animals
watch each other die but, as far as we know, they give the matter no further
consideration.”75

*
The origin of self-awareness in humans is undoubtedly correlated with this
phenomenon and the emergence of burial rites, funerary art, and the cult of the
dead among our ancient ancestors. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead it is
written, “To repeat the name of the dead is to make them live again.” All of
these commemoratory rites and rituals are ways of celebrating the posthumous
presence of the dead in the memory of the living, buried, as it were, in their
hearts. Memory, it has been said, is a monument harder than stone. They are a
kind of testimonial to the belief that, as Thornton Wilder put it in the last lines
of his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, “There is a land of the living and a
land of the dead, and the bridge is love.” What one always wants to say to
someone who has departed or is close to doing so and who, like a loving
 The Meaning of “Suffering” 37
mother, has accompanied one along a long stretch of the road of life, is, in the
words of the refrain to the old children’s song À la claire fontaine,

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,

Jamais je ne t’oublerai.

On the subject of burial rites, Gadamer has said:

[I]n contrast to everything else with which we are familiar in the

animal realm, [human being] possesses an indisputable specificity.
The latter is not diminished in the least by the study of animal so-
cieties and their forms of communication, solidarity, and aggres-
sion. This special human dimension is the in-built capacity of man
to think beyond his own life in the world, to think about death. This
is why the burial of the dead is perhaps the fundamental phenome-
non of becoming human. Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of
the dead, a swift clearing away of the shocking impression made by
one suddenly stuck fast in a leaden and lasting sleep. On the con-
trary, by a remarkable expenditure of human labor and sacrifice
there is sought an abiding with the dead, indeed a holding fast of
the dead among the living. We stand amazed before the wealth of
mourning gifts that continually flows up toward us from the graves
of every ancient culture. They do not let death have the last word.
We have to regard this in its most elementary significance….[W]e
are dealing here with a conduct of life that has spiraled out of the
order of nature.76

The concern for self that Hopkins poem speaks to goes to make up the very
essence of our selfhood; the essence of human existence, Heidegger said, is
care or concern or, as Kierkegaard said, “interestedness.”77 This is what could
be called le souci de soi: the fundamental concern everyone has for themselves
and their own well-being or, as the Ancients would say, their happiness. Now,
concern for the self is intimately bound up with care for the dead, and the
“scandal of death,” which it is the function of burial rites to assuage, is at the
root of all awareness of self—which is why the consciousness of self is insepa-
rable from the experience of anxiety. Like Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty insisted
that the human being is not a natural species but a historical-cultural idea, a
product or artifact of its own making. “No nature, but history,” as Ortega y
Gasset had said earlier. “Custom is our nature,” as Pascal said (Pensées, 419).
Humanness is indeed not a physical or biological characteristic of that entity
we call Homo sapiens but is, rather, a meaning-giving way of relating to our
natural condition, to our mortality, and the pain and anguish of being-human.
“No one,” as Seneca observed, “is so ignorant as not to know that some day
he must die” (Letters, LXXVII). Indeed, the fear of death confounds us all, as
38 On Suffering
it is said in the age-old Catholic Office of the Dead: Timor mortis conturbat
me. Well might one therefore lament, along with Saint Paul, “Who will deliver
me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24), and well might one exclaim, in
the words of the Lord’s Prayer, Libera nos a malo. Philosophically speaking, it
is only by finding meaning in the meaninglessness of death by calling upon
powers we perhaps did not know we possessed that we are “saved.” How, in
“this sorry Scheme of Things” (Rubáiyát, XCIV), to achieve “redemption”
without falling into bad faith and losing oneself in inauthenticity—humans, as
Pascal noted, have a seemingly unlimited capacity for duplicity, narrow-
mindedness, self-deception, and hypocrisy78—is the great question, and one to
which this book will seek to formulate a response. It is addressed to all those
who, whatever their walk of life, still look to philosophy for assistance in
figuring out how to live a decent life and who seek to master what Montaigne,
following the Stoics, called l’art de vivre, the art of living.

NOTES
1
Y. Mingyan Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: The Secret and Science of Happiness (Three Rivers Press, 2007), 16.
2
P. Ricoeur, “La souffrance n’est pas la douleur,” Psychiatrie française, numéro spécial, juin 1992.
3
See E. Cassell, “The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine.”
4
Cassell, Doctoring, 5.
5
Readers seeking to find the exact location (in the French text) of this or that citation from Montaigne can do so through a word search by
means of the Montaigne Project (http:www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/
projects/ Montaigne).
6
In B. Abernethy and W. Bole, The Life of Meaning, 309-310. Compare in this regard the following remarks of Hahn with those of
Seneca and Epictetus cited above: “Your suffering is there because you have been feeding it. If violence, hate, despair, and fear are there,
it is because you have been feeding them by your unmindful consumption. Therefore, if you know how to recognize the source of the
nutrients of your suffering, and if you know how to cut off that source of nutrition, then the suffering will have to vanish” (310).
7
The man was, of course, John D. Rockefeller, the son of a traveling salesman who managed to become the world’s leading industrialist
and richest person and who subsequently, in the last forty years of his life, worked equally hard to give away most of his wealth to
educational and healthcare causes, as well as to the reconstruction of France after World War I.
8
As cited by Hadot, The Inner Citadel, 75.
9
See in this regard Diogenes Laertius’ account of Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school; the “supervening accessories” of those
who partake in virtue thus defined are “joy and happiness and the like” (VII, 94).
10
See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pt. 1, bk 2, chap. 2, sec. 5.
11
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III, 7.
12
Cicero described this “unconditionality” in the following way: “The only good is that which is right; and from this it follows that happy
life is bound up with rectitude alone” (TD, V, 44). Moral worth consists, not just in doing what is right, but in doing what is right because
it is the right thing to do—because, for instance, it is in accord with the Golden Rule (to be discussed in chap. 5).
13
Montaigne was here likely drawing on Seneca, who maintained that there is “something more” to doing what is good and right than
what is merely useful to one-self—even if and when there may be some personal reward or satisfaction in doing so (see Seneca’s On
Favors IV, 1.26).
14
See M. Seligman, Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002), chap. 7. Differentiating between “pleasure” and “gratification,” Seligman,
the founder of “positive psychology” in the late 1990s, identifies the latter with the “good life” and the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia
(happiness). Gratification has to do with virtue; it is “part and parcel of right action” and “can only be had by activity consonant with
noble purpose” (112). It cannot, he insists, be chemically induced.
15
See in this regard M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1990). For an unabashed
utilitarian like the well-known animal rights activist and “bioethicist” Peter Singer—for whom the notion of human dignity is utterly
foreign and who advocated the euthanasia of new-born humans with serious handicaps—there is no qualitative difference (“no sharp
difference”) between animal contentment and human well-being. Even though, like other utilitarians, J.S. Mill maintained that pleasure is
the measure of value, he at least realized that there are qualitative differences that have to be observed in this regard when he said that it is
“better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
16
See R. Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (St. Martin’s, 1990), 109. Scruton characterizes utilitarianism as “that morality of the
Philistine which was launched into the world by the smiling idiot Jeremy Bentham, and which has marched onwards ever since.”
17
See J.-P Changeux and P. Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 308.
18
Indeed, Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, asserted that the notion of “inalienable rights” was nothing more than “nonsense
on stilts.” From a strictly utilitarian point of view, he was, of course, quite right. For a philosophical defense of the notion of human
rights, see Madison The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights, in which I seek to spell out what can, and what cannot,
properly be said to be a “human right.” The modern notion of human rights has, it may be noted, its roots in the Stoic philosophy of the
Greco-Romans.
19
Ignoring as they do the intrinsic moral worth of having a “good will” (“holiness of will”) and the notion of an action that is right for no
other reason than that it is the expression of a virtuous state of mind, the following works of Seneca could be directed at the utilitarians:
“The ignorant…take note only of what meets the eye, what can be handed over and held in possession, while attaching little value to what
is dear and precious in itself” (On Favors I, 5).
20
Seneca, Letters XVIII.
21
Wing-Tsit Chan, ed., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1969), 17.
22
As Cicero points out, early Sophists like Protagoras were not “mere” rhetoricians, for, as he says, they combined “with their theory of
rhetoric the whole of the study and the science of everything that concerns morals and conduct and ethics and politics” (De oratore III,
19, 72 [trans. H. Rackham]). They were indeed philosophers (see De oratore III, 16, 60). On the relation between rhetoric and philosophy,
see my Politics of Postmodernity, chap. 4.
23
Confucianism is very much less of a “religion” than is Buddhism, although the Buddha himself shunned such speculative questions as
to whether or not the world is eternal, finite or infinite, whether the soul and the body are distinct entities, whether the truth-seeker exists
or not after death, and what the after-life might be like, supposing that there is any such thing—metaphysical issues (a “poisoned arrow”)
which he considered to be diversions from the urgent practical task of seeking tranquility and self-awakening (see Majjhima Nikaya, Sutra
63).
24
M. Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas (Chicago, 1982), 2:22. H.G. Creel puts the matter this way: “The religion of Confucius
consisted only of a faith that somewhere in the universe there is a power which is on the side of right. He divorced ethics and politics
from every kind of religious dogma” (“Chinese Philosophy” in V. Ferm, ed., A History of Philosophical Systems [Philosophical Library,
1950], 45).
25
W.K.C. Gutherie, A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1969), 3:65.
26
Confucius’ remark should in no way be confused with Marx’s dictum, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man” (in
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Confucius was most definitely not an atheist and had no desire to deny
Heaven (Tien) its due; following the Way of virtue is in fact the greatest tribute man can render to Heaven.
27
By Will Durant in The Age of Louis XIV (The Story of Civilization, vol. 8), (Simon & Schuster, 1980), 66.
28
H.S. Kushner, How Good Do We Have to Be? (Little, Brown and Co., 1997), 23.
29
Terms like “soul” or “spirit” are generally not much in fashion these days and are easily capable of being grossly misconstrued, as
referring to something “supernatural.” In this book I have used them only with a considerable amount of reluctance and only for want of
better alternatives, for there is “something more” to the human being than just the physical body, materialistically conceived. For the hard-
core materialist, any account of a given phenomenon must be either materialistic or “supernatural,” meaning spooky and mystifying,
which is a simplistic, epistemologically naïve way of viewing the matter. Moreover, I have not attempted to differentiate carefully
between the two terms, even though they generally carry different connotations: “Spirit” connotes height and lightness or aboveness (fire,
air), whereas “soul” connotes depth and weightiness or belowness (water, earth).
30
In this passage Pascal perhaps had in mind Seneca’s remarks on the weakness and frailty of man (“Quod est homo?”) in his De
consolatione ad Marciam (XI, 3).
31
M. de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford-Flitch (Dover, 1954), 261. All subsequent references to Unamuno are to this
text.
32
Pensée no. 201. For a masterful account of how, at the beginning of modern times, the new scientific notion of an infinite universe
displaced the medieval notion of a finite, closed, hierarchically organized, and anthropocentric world and, in doing so, provoked a “crisis
of European consciousness,” see Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Johns Hopkins, 1957).
33
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, 173 (sec. 29); henceforth BT.
34
Cf. Montaigne: “Pareillement, les hommes ayant tout essayé et tout sondé, n’ayant trouvé en cet amas de science et provision de tant de
chosess diverses rien de massif et ferme, et rien que vanité, ils ont reconneu leur condition naturelle….[I]l n’y a aucune constante
existence, ny de nostre estre, ny de celuy des objects. Et nous et nostre judgement, et toutes choses mortelles, vont coulant et roulant sans
cesse. Ainsin il ne se peut establir rien de certain de l’un à l’autre, et le jugeant et le jugé estans en continuelle mutation et branle / So
too, with men who have assayed everything, sounded everything, within those piles of knowledge and the profusion of so many diverse
things, they have found nothing solid, nothing firm, only vanity. They thus renounce arrogance and recognize their natural condition….
[T]here is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgment and all mortal things are
flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever
shifting and changing” (Essais II, 12). This last observation of Montaigne’s is one that Pascal incorporated into pensée 199.
35
A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), vol. 2, bk. 1, chap. 17. Tocqueville said that Pascal was someone with whom
he lived every day a little (Tocqueville to Louis de Kergolay, Nov. 10, 1836).
36
W. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., 2:313. The description quoted of James is that of psychologist Rollo May; see May,
ed., Existential Psychology, 6.
37
Cf. Seneca, On Anger I, 3: “Without speech, animals are without human emotions, though they have certain impulses that are similar to
them.” It is not only from the “virtues” of man that animals are “debarred” but also, Seneca appropriately notes, “from his vices as well.”
On the language-mediated or interpretive nature of those emotions that are specific to humans, see C. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals”
in Human Agency and Language (Cambridge, 1985). Cicero remarks (On Duties, I, 50): “We admit that [animals] may have courage
(horses and lions, for example); but we do not admit that they have justice, equity and [moral] goodness; for they are not endowed with
reason or speech.”
38
See Aristotle, Ethics I, 7, 1097a39.
39
Pascal said: “[T]he sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (Pensées, 136). In the
new electronic “Information Age” this is no longer true, however; one need no longer venture out of one’s room in order to “access,” in
the infinite realms of cyberspace, an unlimited, mind-boggling supply of mind-numbing divertissements.
40
On the deleterious effects of drug consumption (and the simulacrum of satisfaction or gratification they offer) on one’s ability to
achieve a genuinely creative and meaningful existence, see. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 168-70. Reliance on drugs in order to achieve
conscious well-being or “peak experiences” is, as a Buddhist would say, “profoundly disempowering for the individual” (see B.A.
Wallace, “The Buddhist Tradition of Samatha” in F. Varela and J. Shear, The View from Within [Imprint Academic, 1999], 186).
41
See Voltaire’s entry on “Fanatisme” in his Dictionnaire philosophique.
42
H.-G. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 52.
43
See Dionysius, De divnia hierarchia I; this is a point Karen Armstrong rightly insists on in A History of God (Knopf, 1993). As
Erasmus very aptly said, “Holy Scripture knows how to adjust its language to our human condition” (Free Will I, 7).
44
Just as it makes no sense, as Saint Augustine pointed out, to ask what God was doing before He created the world, i.e., time. What came
before the beginning of time and what will come after the end of time are, for obvious reasons, questions devoid of meaning. In his City
of God, bk. XX, Augustine, who believed that biblical literalism was “foolishness,” said of the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation (much
talked about these days) that some Christians so construe passages in this book as to fall into “ridiculous fancies.” Arguing against
“millenarianism” (the Chiliastic notion that at the “end of time” Christ will return and set up a glorious earthly kingdom to last a 1000
years, followed afterwards by the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, and the ascent of the faithful and just into Heaven),
Augustine maintained that this text should be understood allegorically or spiritually, not literally. Earlier in the third-century, Dionysius,
Bishop of Alexandria and disciple of Origen, had likewise insisted that this fantastical text should be read allegorically and not literally—
and even doubted, because of what he considered to be the “crude” style of Greek in which it was written, that its author could have been
the John of the Gospels (a doubt he shared with a number of other Eastern Christians, as well, it seems, by Saint Jerome).
45
P. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 156-58.
46
“Je vais chercher un grand peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée / I am going to seek a great perhaps; draw the curtain, the farce
is played” were Rabelais’ last words before he died. “Perhaps” or “maybe” was a key word in the vocabulary of the Pyrrhonians whose
philosophy I shall discuss in chap. 5.
47
Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II, 54; Aristotle, Physics I, 4, 187b7.
48
As Saint Thomas said of our attempt to achieve a knowledge of God: “Tunc enim solum Deum vere cognoscimus quando ipsum esse
credimus supra omne id quod de Deo cogitari ab homine possible est / For then only do we know God truly when we believe Him to be
above everything that it is possible for man to think about Him” (Summa contra gentiles 1, 2, 30).
49
This is not to imply that orthodox evolution theory—“neo-Darwinism”—is beyond reproach. It is in fact a rather simplistic view of
things and is replete with conceptual confusions and fundamental flaws that merit serious criticism. As the well-known philosopher of
science, Michael Ruse—who has long specialized in Darwinian evolution theory and who describes himself as “an ardent Darwinian”—
has perceptively observed (The Evolution-Creation Struggle [Harvard, 2005]), both evolutionist and creationist thinking share a common
mentalité. In his search for a simple, straight-forward, universal theory capable, in a metaphysical sort of way, of explaining every-thing
(“evolutionism”), the materialist neo-Darwinian or “Darwinian fundamentalist” is just as much an ideologue and religious-like fanatic as
is his fundamentalist-evangelical opponent. (A fine example of this sort of scientistic and evolutionist fundamentalism is the recent book
by Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon [Viking, 2006].) When for their part religious fundamentalists
assert that religious faith must be on a par with science and possess the same type of certainty, they are making a mockery of the religion
they profess to believe in and are (as Saint Augustine pointed out) turning it into an object of derision in the eyes of the educated. The
Bible, José Gabriel Funes, S.J., director of the Vatican observatory, has remarked, “is not a science book.”
50
In his Courage to Be (Yale, 1952), Tillich said of providence that it “is not a theory about some attributes of God; it is a religious
symbol of the courage of confidence with respect to fate and death” (168). And of faith he said that it “is not a theoretical affirmation of
something uncertain; it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state”
(172-73).
51
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 407; henceforth PP. For a concordance correlating the pagination in the different
English translations of the PP currently in circulation, see <http://www.treant.ca/philosophy/dmorris/pontyprog. htm>.
52
PP, 216-17. See also Montaigne: “[T]oute humaine nature est toujours au milieu entre le naistre et le mourir, ne baillant de soy qu’une
obscure apparence et ombre, et une incertaine et debile opinion” (Essais II, 12). Montaine was one of Merleau-Ponty’s favorite authors.
53
Life passes away, Seneca said, “before we know it is passing” (On the Shortness of Life [De brevitate vitae], 1-2); henceforth SL.
Seneca, a native of Spain (Cordoba), where to this day he is regarded as the first great Spanish writer, was born at about the same time as
was Jesus of Nazareth, at the very beginning of the present era; in 65 A.D. he was condemned to death by Nero in the same manner as
Socrates had been, by being forced to take his own life (see Tacitus’ moving account of Seneca’s execution in his Annals, XV, 60-64).
Like Socrates, Seneca spent his final hours conducting a conversation with his friends on the immortality of the soul.
54
Thoreau, “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied.”
55
E. Cassell, The Healer’s Art.
56
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2. bk. 1, chap. 17.
57
This is the refrain that runs through François Villon’s Ballade des dames du temps jadis (1461). Compare with Marcus Aurelius:
“Where is it all now? Smoke and ashes… a story forgotten” (XII, 27).
58
The quasi-universal belief of “primitive” peoples (remarked upon by anthropologists like Sir James Frazer and Paul Radin) in a kind of
soul-substance and in some form or other of reincarnation—combined with a mythic, cyclic view of time—notwithstanding.
59
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, no. 9: “Einmal jedes, nur einmal. Einmal und nicht mehr. Und wir auch einmal. Nie wieder. Aber
dieses einmal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur enimal: irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar.”
60
Sophecles, Antigone, 350-60, in Heidegger’s translation (see his Introduction to Metaphysics, 147).
61
R.W. Emerson, Nature, VII; see Emerson’s remarks on Montaigne, whom he referred to as “Saint Michel de Montaigne,” in his
“Montaigne; or, The Skeptic” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4 (Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904). “It seemed to me,”
Emerson says, “as if I had myself written the book [Montaigne’s Essais] in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and
experience” (162).
62
A.E. Housman, “Tell me here, it needs not saying.”
63
Matthew Arnold, “To Marguerite” in Switzerland.
64
C.R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 21.
65
See Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926).
66
J. Hollis, When Good People Do Bad Things (Gotham Books, 2998), 100.
67
Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, “Bêtes.”
68
Seneca, who greatly admired Virgil and quoted abundantly from him, quotes this line from the Georgics in one of his letters (CVIII)
and says in Letters CXXIII, “The days are slipping by and life is running out on us, never to be restored.”
69
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus.”
70
Essais II, 12: “All the pleasures [happiness] of mortals are mortal.” In saying this, Montaigne perhaps had Seneca in mind; see Seneca,
Letters, XCI: “All the works of mortals lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.”
71
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy II, 3.
72
In the words, respectively, of chansonnier Georges Brassens (“Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux”) and Seneca (Letters, XCI).
73
I am alluding here to the lines in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII (1624): “No man is an island, entire of
itself…”
74
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV, 48. See also X, 34: “soon there will be others mourning the man who buries you.”
75
K. Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Knopf, 2005), 1. The sentence which follows in the text reads: “But the Neanderthal graves
show that when these early people became conscious of their mortality, they created some sort of counter-narrative that enabled them to
come to terms with it.”
76
Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 74-75. For a detailed study of the kinship unique to humans that exists between the living and
the dead, see R. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, 2003).
77
See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, 1992), 279: “Existence constitutes the highest interest of the existing
individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality.” As Cicero observed, even though no theory as to the immortality of the
soul can be proven, all humans are nonetheless greatly concerned to know what will become of them after their death (Tusculan
Disputations I, 31). See also Pascal (Pensées 427): “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us
so deeply, that we must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.” This is also what Kant believed.
78
See pensée 978: “Man is…nothing but disguises, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want
to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his
heart.”