What is suffering?

[Игорь Николаевич]

Если кому интересно:

In order to begin talking about such an extensive and important meaning of passion as suffering, first we need to define the term itself. I would like to leave aside the physiological part of the concept (in a physiological sense, it is obviously an organism's painful reaction to external aggressive stimuli) and focus on the mental understanding of suffering: a set of emotional experiences that leave a person with certain memories, defined by David Hume as the direct passions: grief rather than joy, fear rather than hope, aversion rather than desire. Assuming that suffering is a sense that is more a negative than a positive, it is necessary first to identify its source, with the purpose of being able to analyze this form of passion from all its angles.

From a variety of possible causes, such as unsatisfied ambitions, envy, conscience or memory, I would like to highlight the source that has been associated with mental pain since ancient times, and that is love. The ancestor of fixing the suffering of love in literature was poetess Sappho. The significance of her works is in having laid the foundation for many artistic interpretations of this kind of suffering, starting with noble literature reflection of unrequited or undisclosed love as in "The Sorrows of Young Werther", and up to folk art in the form of a cycle of folk songs, such as the so-called "love sufferings" in Russian folk poetry.

In her works, Sappho demonstrates not only the beauty of love, but also its serious consequences, down to their dangerous physicality: "Artfully adorned Aphrodite....I beg you please don't hurt me.." . As if obeying the will of the gods, full of a sense of paternalism, she connects suffering with love, calling love «that sweet, bitter, impossible creature» . Sappho's poems are full of passion, and among the many passions, it is easier to find a place for suffering.
«..that ...sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since
once I look at you for a moment, I can't speak any longer.....
....and appear to myself to be little short of dying.»

Sappho's poetry is so simple, the female essence of love so clear, that the short forms of the poetry, having survived through the centuries, claim to be universal and applicable in today's world.
The fact that love is accompanied by suffering or likely has penalties as consequences is also mentioned by Lucretius:
"Nor doth that man who keeps away from love
Yet lack the fruits of Venus; rather takes
Those pleasures which are free of penalties."

But in contrast to Lucretius, who would rather paint a philosophical or scientific - meaning an objective - picture of the world, and even presents the concept of the necessity of love as purely due to the physiological necessity of reproduction, Sappho sees this important part of human passion through a more artistic point of view, determining that even gender differences can cause suffering and asking whether the suffering of a man is more justified than those of a woman. Sappho even describes love itself as a mail warrior «in red mantle». While teaching young girls at her school, Sappho tries to prepare them for adulthood. She emphasizes to them that an unconditional submission to love involves certain consequences, including physical suffering.

If, for Sappho, there is no prescription against the suffering of love, and the only choice seems to be its endurance: "But all must be endured...." , for Lucretius, suffering is a complete and necessary part of the human experience in perception of the surrounding world. Lucretius tries to narrow the distance between reason and passion, explaining the phenomenon of suffering, pain, and death as an entirely normal aspect of human life that must be reasonably and deliberately accepted:
"But mind is more the keeper of the gates,
Hath more dominion over life than soul."

Aristotle called suffering a positive feeling, seeing it as a mechanism or tool to gain knowledge and life experience: "We must take as a sign of states the pleasure or pain that supervenes on acts". He indicates that passion is still an important part of our soul, at the same time suggesting that it is not particularly useful and is something that we must learn to control.

Assuming that suffering is only a tool for exploring the world, is it inevitable? According to Aristotle's cosmology, what we see is real: we need to absorb the different elements and have the ability to calculate their interrelations. In the process of world perception, the mind should prevail over feelings, as it is the mind that you rely on for analysis of perceived reality, in this case, feelings, including suffering, have secondary importance. However, Aristotle does comment on the significance of suffering: "...excellence will be concerned with pleasure and pain."

Aristotle also reveals another possible source of suffering - desire. For Aristotle, desire is a problem, that concerns the individual as well as the community. The group, he argues, needs to learn to control the desire of individuals, since if the desire causes suffering in one person, it has the potential to cause suffering in the entire community as well.
If we consider the question of suffering in the context of the relationship between an individual and a group, which quality of suffering will prevail: voluntary or compulsory?
Aristotle answers this question in his postulate of happiness. If suffering is linked with the knowledge of reality, the purpose of such knowledge, and therefore of suffering, is to be happy. Thereby suffering is one of the ways to happiness: "....happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with complete excellence..." . According to Aristotle, happiness is a quality everyone can undoubtedly attain, albeit he does not argue for the necessity of suffering in the fulfilling of this condition, as, for example, Dostoevsky did, in presuming that a man must suffer for an extended length of time in order to become truly happy.

When love, as an intense personal feeling of one individual for another as well as the suffering associated with love implies duocentric relations, we can ask whether the notion of suffering should be understood as an individual or a communal process? This is not an issue of understanding the suffering of many people in different political circumstances. History knows examples, such as the Holocaust or the emancipation of the Jews, that are associated with public suffering. In this case, though, the question is more about the egocentrism of the source of suffering. Because if suffering is egocentric, and hence subjective, it means that we can control it.

If life for Aristotle means striving for happiness, the question then becomes, where is the balance between suffering for the benefit of oneself as opposed for the benefit of society? History has shown that attempts to implement utopian ideas of universal happiness through suffering resulted in great turmoil and suffering of entire nations. There is a hope that our civilization has passed by and will never return to such social and political forms of existence as fascism, Nazism and Communism, developing a sort of vaccine in the realization that forced suffering of the individual to ensure happiness of the masses will bring nothing but social anguish.

But I would like to go back to the question of individual voluntary suffering. Based on Aristotle's premise of the necessity and importance of suffering in order to comprehend the world, I believe that over the centuries people have wondered whether suffering is a way to get closer to something as sacred and unattainable as God. We will not examine the extremes of these attempts, which led in time to the appearance of such historical phenomena as flagellantism. However, let us consider the religious and spiritualistic meaning of suffering.

From a Christian point of view, man was created for happiness. In Genesis, God, creating another object of the world, repeatedly says that it's good. Suffering, as part of an abnormal condition of man, appears in Genesis only with the appearance of the sin. As such, suffering is an inevitable part of the world where there is sin. From this stems the Christian scaling, as the more sin there is in the world, the greater is the suffering of humans. The sin, and with it the suffering of people, begins in Genesis with the fall of man. Expulsion from Paradise is the alienation of people from direct communication with God, which correlates with the death of the soul and man's greatest misery. God condemns man to suffering: "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children" . "And unto Adam he said ..... cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.... in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"

In Genesis, suffering is presented as a consequence of improved human autonomy, hence a consequence of a choice. Freedom of choice remains in the Christian philosophy with the transition to the New Testament, where Jesus Christ redeems the entire human race from sin and eternal damnation through own suffering and death on a cross. Interestingly, in accordance with the dogma of the New Testament, at the end of days God will rescue humanity from suffering: «….and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes».

The theme of suffering was always present in Christianity, because in order to achieve salvation one must endure involuntary afflictions, which monks, with the goal of achieving a greater level of Christian perfection, voluntarily escalate through fasts, vigils, prayers, celibacy, and so on. The purpose of Christian suffering is excessive mortification of the flesh and its submission to the spirit to achieve a higher spiritual state. We can see a voluntary acceptance of suffering in order to achieve an ultimate goal, though rejected by a worldly sense, down to staurophobia.

An interesting parallel example of voluntary suffering in order to achieve the highest moral purpose can be found in the poem of Sophocles' Antigone. In this poem, the protagonist is consciously willing to attain death for the sake of achieving the highest moral purpose, attempting to provide a funeral for her brother against the will of the emperor. Although the poem has no direct religious context, and rather shows a process of choosing between two kinds of laws (on the one hand, the state law, on the other, the natural moral obligation: "Antigone: Zeus did not announce those laws to me" ), this is an example of self-sacrifice for a higher purpose. It strangely repeats in real history as an execution of another high-status noblewoman, Boyarynya Feodosia Morozova, follower and leader of the Old Believers in Russia, who was punished by the Russian tsar for refusing to give up the old ancestry faith and was placed in a pit where she died of starvation. Both women, Antigone and Morozova, chose death rather than compromise with the state force: both were loved by the people, both were mourned by the people, and both uttered almost the same words before their death: Antigone: "...see what I suffer, ..... , because I feared to cast away the fear of Heaven!"; and Morozova, "See, I am dying...I suffer in the name of God and to God I go".

Suffering is such a vast and inexhaustible subject. One can ask such questions as whether the suffering is a sign of ignorance or whether the fear of suffering symbolizes the fear of death, and find appropriate responses in, for instance, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. A separate topic in itself is definitely the question of measuring spiritual pain and suffering in the context of self-evolution, or the idea of purification through suffering by Dostoevsky. But I, as a teacher, would like to take the example of Phaedrus from Plato's Symposium and ask what suffering teaches us, or rather, what do great ancient poets and philosophers teach us when they tell us about suffering. The answers may be the importance of voluntarily changing our state of mind and what consequences this can have, as we derive from Sappho. From Lucretius we learn about the naturalness of suffering and the possibility of its control. Aristotle teaches us patience and willingness to accept suffering as a reward on the way to the study of the world, and from Antigone and Genesis, we are enlightened of the possibility of voluntary suffering in the name of a higher moral purpose or own conscience.

Vancouver, October 2013

[Шэф]

про suffering

[mikei]

Если кому интересно:

Хорошо. Хоть кто-то тут есть еще живой и может сказать по существу. А почему такой произвольный выбор первоисточников? Это все самодостаточно или из контекста?

[Sheen]

И во всей это бла-бла-бла ни разу не упоминается Виктор Франкл??? Лектор может идти лесом.

[Игорь Николаевич]

А почему такой произвольный выбор первоисточников? Это все самодостаточно или из контекста?

Здесь только греки. Отполируем их, перейдем на средневековье и ид.

[Victoria]

Здесь только греки. Отполируем их

бедные греки :)

[mikei]

А почему такой произвольный выбор первоисточников? Это все самодостаточно или из контекста?

Здесь только греки. Отполируем их, перейдем на средневековье и ид.

Я бы пошел в обе стороны. Когда Богом было Солнце, было ли это тогда. Или это приобретенное. Аристотель впечатляет здравостью и свежестью мысли. В тем времена похоже еще оставались следы незазомбированного сознания.

[Игорь Николаевич]

Аристотель впечатляет здравостью и свежестью мысли. В тем времена похоже еще оставались следы незазомбированного сознания.

Да, хороший аргумент. Интересно наблюдать, как в 14-м веке "внезапно" стали находится манускрипты Аристотеля и Лукреция. Общество перенасытилось Платоном, он уже не мог дать ответы на новые вопросы цивилизации, приходилось искать другие источники мудрости. Тем самым Аристотель как бы подготовил эпоху Возрождения.

Показательно то, что Платон до сих пор более уважаем русской православной церковью, чем Аристотель - средневековое мышление?

[mikei]

Аристотель впечатляет здравостью и свежестью мысли. В тем времена похоже еще оставались следы незазомбированного сознания.

Да, хороший аргумент. Интересно наблюдать, как в 14-м веке "внезапно" стали находится манускрипты Аристотеля и Лукреция. Общество перенасытилось Платоном, он уже не мог дать ответы на новые вопросы цивилизации, приходилось искать другие источники мудрости. Тем самым Аристотель как бы подготовил эпоху Возрождения.

Показательно то, что Платон до сих пор более уважаем русской православной церковью, чем Аристотель - средневековое мышление?

Они же вроде недалеки по возрасту. А так довольно эксайтинг откуда растет хвост, если капнуть даже одно слово. Православная Церковь - мне кажется это маска, которой пришлось прикрыться, чтобы выжить, а вся традиция на самом деле осталась дохристианская. Православные люди явно менее механистичны и техногеничны, чем католические. При этом наука развивалась также. Даже большевики не смогли остановить. Теперь через 100 лет уже и историческая роль большевиков просматривается. И все это в контексте страдания.