Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

PART V On Suffering and Its Uses Or: Why Pain Is the Most Abused Resource in the History of Thought

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Problem of Suffering Suffering is the one philosophical problem that every human being encounters not as a theoretical proposition but as a bodily fact. You do not need to be told about suffering. You have been inside it. You are, periodically, inside it still. This gives suffering a peculiar authority among philosophical problems: it cannot be dismissed as abstract, cannot be set aside for later consideration, cannot be made to wait while you attend to more comfortable questions. And yet the thing that suffering demands — not just that it be endured but that it be made to mean something — is precisely the thing that honest philosophy cannot straightforwardly provide. There is no logical path from the existence of suffering to the existence of a meaning that justifies it. The path has been constructed, many times, by religion and by secular philosophy, and each construction has rested on premises that cannot be established and conclusions that cannot be derived without the conclusion already being present in the premises. Let us look at the constructions honestly. The demand that suffering have meaning is not a philosophical claim. It is a psychological need. The philosophical systems that answer it are not describing the structure of reality. They are performing a service for people in pain. The distinction between these two things is the most important distinction in the history of thought, and it is the one that is most consistently obscured.

7.1 The Religious Use of Suffering Every major religious tradition has a theodicy — a justification of suffering in the context of a good and powerful God. The problem is ancient: if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, why does suffering exist? The answers are various: suffering is the consequence of free will and its exercise; suffering is the medium through which the soul

is perfected; suffering is a test; suffering is incomprehensible to the finite mind but coherent from the perspective of the infinite; suffering, rightly received, is redemptive. These answers share a common feature: they require the sufferer to reframe their experience in a way that serves the theological system rather than the sufferer. The child dying of cancer is not simply a child dying of cancer. The child is, within the theodicy, either exercising the freedom that a good God granted (though the child has exercised no freedom in contracting the disease), or being perfected (though the death precedes any visible perfection), or presenting a mystery that will be resolved from the perspective of eternity (which the dying child cannot access). The theodicy does not address the suffering. It addresses the philosophical problem the suffering creates for the theological system. These are different projects. The second is being sold as the first. When the consolation offered to the person in pain is primarily useful for preserving the logical consistency of the system that offers the consolation, the consolation is not for the person in pain. It is for the system. The suffering human being has been instrumentalized by the philosophy that claims to comfort them.

7.2 The Secular Redemption Narrative The secular world, having largely abandoned the religious theodicy, has not abandoned the demand for suffering's meaning. It has produced a secular equivalent: the redemption narrative. The suffering was necessary. It made you who you are. The person you became could not have become that person without the pain that preceded it. The suffering, therefore, was meaningful — retroactively, in terms of the outcome it produced. This narrative is ubiquitous. It organizes memoir, therapy, self-help, the TED talk, the motivational speaker's personal story, the recovery narrative. It is the dominant meaning-framework for suffering in the post-religious West. And it has a problem: it is

only available after the suffering has resolved into something the sufferer can recognize as an outcome. During the suffering, it provides nothing. And for the suffering that does not resolve — for the chronic pain, the permanent loss, the grief that does not lead anywhere recognizable as growth — it provides less than nothing, because it suggests that the failure to find meaning in the suffering is itself a kind of failure. Nietzsche's account — what does not kill me makes me stronger — is the most famous version of this secular redemption, and it is the version that has been most thoroughly misread. Nietzsche did not say that suffering automatically produces strength. He said that the person of sufficient will can use suffering as material — can convert it, through the application of a will that is itself the product of prior strength, into something generative. This is very different from the self-help version, which promises that suffering, simply endured, transforms you. The transformation is not automatic. It is an achievement. And not everyone achieves it. The redemption narrative fails the person for whom the suffering does not redeem. It fails them twice: first in the suffering, by providing a false promise of meaning; and second after the suffering, by suggesting that the failure to find meaning represents a failure of the sufferer rather than the absence of what the narrative promised.

7.3 The Productive Use of Suffering None of the above is an argument against the attempt to use suffering productively. It is an argument against the claim that suffering is inherently meaningful — that meaning is its natural product rather than a possible achievement in relation to it. The distinction matters practically. The person who knows that suffering is not inherently meaningful is free to ask: what do I choose to make of this? The question is genuinely open. The person who has been told that suffering inherently leads somewhere — to God's plan, to personal growth, to the redemption narrative — is not free to ask the question, because the answer has been pre-supplied. The pre-supplied answer may, in some cases, function as a consolation. It may also prevent the asking of

the question, which is the only question through which the sufferer can become the author of their response rather than the passive recipient of a meaning they did not make. To make meaning from suffering is a creative act, and creative acts require freedom — the freedom to make or not make, to make this meaning rather than that one, to decide that no meaning is available and to live honestly in the absence of it. The religions and ideologies that pre-supply the meaning have not served the sufferer. They have pre-empted them.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the concentration camps — from suffering that made every comfortable theodicy look obscene — did not say that suffering inherently produces meaning. He said that the freedom to choose one's attitude toward unavoidable suffering is the last freedom that cannot be taken. This is the honest version of the argument. The freedom to choose is not the certainty that the choosing will succeed. It is the possibility that it might.