Some Thoughts on Suffering

The engine of ethics.

I’ve been thinking about suffering recently—what it is and what it isn’t, and what it has to do with ethics or action generally. It may turn out that suffering is the engine of ethics, the thing that makes us take action and helps us choose between possible courses of that action. We can perhaps even think of suffering as the opposite of entropy: in the physical world, entropy is the trend of all things toward dissolution and disorder, and it is as irreversible as (is perhaps the same as) the flow of time. But in the “spiritual” world, insofar as we can talk about it separately from the physical world, suffering is the force that drives us all toward greater states of perfection.

But what actually is suffering? There are many different kinds and degrees of suffering, but what do they all have in common? I think the answer may be surprisingly simple. Suffering is not pain, for as the saying goes, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Rather, suffering is the belief that the present moment should be other than it is. I think there’s a fair amount of complexity hidden in this simple definition though, and much of it is contained in the word “should.” This is a word that can have many different implications depending on its context, but I think we’re primarily concerned with two: one meaning of “should” is evaluative and amounts to the claim that the situation would be better if things had occurred differently. Such a claim would seem to be ambivalent about whether or not things could actually have been otherwise: it accepts that its claim may be perfectly hypothetical. 

Opposed to this evaluative meaning of the word “should” is the much more forceful, moralistic meaning of the word, which creates a space for other moralistic words such as “wrong,” “evil,” or “sin.” When we use this meaning of the word should, someone or something is in the wrong for the way things have turned out. There seems to be an unavoidable implication of agency here too, a claim that someone or something chose to do something wrong, even when such a claim would seem to be ridiculous on reflection, like blaming your computer for not working the way you expect. This is because moralistic thinking is inextricable from the possibility of choice: only freely chosen acts can be good or evil as those words are typically understood.

Because of this insistence on the necessity of free choice, the moralistic meaning of the word “should” also makes a much stronger claim about the nature of possibility than the evaluative meaning: according to the moralistic meaning, things absolutely could have happened differently because it was possible for different choices to have been made. Without that possibility, that is, if everything that happens is predetermined, there is no possibility of free choice, and thus the moral force of the word vanishes.

What does this have to do with suffering? The belief that things could be otherwise is only possible if we mistakenly believe we live in a universe of separate, disconnected things, because in a connected universe that expresses itself as a whole, to change one thing is to change everything, and any one thing that happens is caused by everything else. In short, without separation, there is no space for blame. Just so, it is only the belief in a universe of separate things that allows one to believe in a separate self that is suffering as a result of the “free” actions of some other separate being. We can see then that suffering has an even simpler meaning than the belief that things should be otherwise: suffering is just the belief that one has been wronged by another, whether it is another person, some inanimate thing, or the universe, or God. Curiously, this other may even be, and often is, one’s own self.

Most of us will therefore attempt to alleviate our suffering by righting these perceived wrongs and/or putting ourselves in a position to avoid being wronged in the future. This latter is the drive to empower ourselves, to make ourselves more capable of resisting others, expressing ourselves, and achieving our desires. In other words, we are all caught up in a process of fleeing suffering while pursuing empowerment. I don’t mean this as a value judgment, but rather as a purely descriptive statement of what it means to be any kind of living being; to flee suffering and pursue empowerment is as natural and inevitable as the flow of time. However, as we attempt to alleviate our suffering, both personally and collectively, we must eventually realize that suffering will be inevitable so long as we maintain an identity in opposition to others, a separate self. In other words, an ego. Because so long as any “other” remains, there will be a limit to our empowerment and an incessant return of suffering. The failure to realize this has caused us to treat the earth and other people as potential threats to our ego, our power, or our “freedom.” We have therefore tried to dominate these others, in some cases to literally consume them, and to transform them into extensions of ourselves. This drive, and the misconception on which it is based, is ancient, but its modern form is, of course, capitalism.

But as I’ve said, the futility of this attempt to avoid suffering by destroying or consuming the other will eventually become unavoidable for each of us individually and for humanity as a whole. So long as there is a separate self, an ego, there must be an other against which the ego can define itself. This is the moment of negative relatedness I’ve written about before that is necessary for there to be separate, intelligible things at all. Without this negative relationship, also called “duality,” there would be only an infinite indistinctness. But this negativity also binds the things it opposes together into this relationship in which neither can be what it is without the other. This explains some common and apparently contradictory behavior, namely, the tendency of nearly everyone from time to time (and some people very often) to wallow in their own suffering, even and especially instead of doing anything to alleviate it. This is because most of us identify ourselves with the ego, the self that is defined by its separateness. Suffering actually strengthens this sense of self that’s based in separateness because it sharpens the opposition between self and other—again, curiously, even when the other who’s supposedly wronged us is our own stupid self. This probably also does a lot to explain why even those people who are least persecuted by others nevertheless claim to be among the most persecuted: the opposition, imagined or not, strengthens their separate, exclusive identity. Most importantly, though, this shows that suffering and the ego cannot exist without each other because the ego needs the other for its existence, but the other is also the cause of its incessant suffering.

Earlier, I said that suffering may be the engine of ethics, of action in general. This is true even once we realize the futility of trying to abolish suffering by dominating everyone and everything around us. Because once we begin to despair at this futility, something or another will make us realize that the only way out of suffering is to dissolve the sense of our separate self, such that there is no more absolute difference between that self and the other. There will then be no more other to wrong us and no more self to be wronged. This of course does not mean we should try to pretend that there are no differences at all between things, but rather that we must realize that all difference is only self-difference, that every particular thing only is what it is as part of a whole and in relationship to every other thing, like the organs in a body. The separate self, the ego, does have an important role to play in allowing us to differentiate and objectify the elements of our experience; as I said, without separateness and negativity, there is a sense in which things as such don’t even exist. But that separate self is also the source of suffering, and that suffering will remain until it forces the ego to overcome itself and reclaim the rest of the universe as its own essence, its own body.