Evil, part 5: making sense of suffering

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/12/evil-making-sense-of-suffering

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The prevalence of evil and suffering within human experience surely presents the most serious challenge to belief in God. On the other hand, though, this same evil and suffering is also an important reason why so many people feel a need for religion. Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously announced the death of God, was acutely sensitive to this issue. Nietzsche did not have much time for the classic problem of evil. A vehement critic of Christian morality, he thought that the concepts of good and evil were invented in the course of an elaborate power-game, as a way for weaker people to undermine the natural drives of their more powerful oppressors.

However, suffering remained for Nietzsche one of the central problems of philosophy. Under the influence of his fellow German Arthur Schopenhauer – a notorious pessimist who wrote that "the longer you live, the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat" – Nietzsche saw suffering and tragedy as intrinsic to life. But for human beings, he argued, what is really intolerable is not suffering itself, but senseless suffering. One of the basic purposes of our culture is to interpret suffering, to make it meaningful and therefore bearable. Myth, art and religion all do this job.

According to Nietzsche we created God, and not the other way around. We invented first gods, and then a single God, to provide both explanation and consolation for our suffering. Theism allows us to believe – as Augustine did – that suffering is a punishment for sin. God also functions as a great cosmic witness to our pain, whose unfathomable purposes somehow make it worthwhile, and who will, perhaps, take our pathetic struggles into account in a final reckoning. Bizarrely, God might even reward us for our pains.

Nietzsche thought that by the end of the 19th century, the idea of God had finally become untenable. Scientific explanations had replaced religious ones – and as faith in science grew stronger, faith in God declined. But of course the need to give meaning to suffering remains as urgent as ever. So for Nietzsche the "problem of evil" in the modern era was not about defending religious belief or explaining the existence of evil, but a matter of finding creative sources of meaning in a nihilistic world. And it is perhaps right that the question "Why?", so often posed in the midst of suffering, expresses a desire for meaning rather than for an explanation.

What would Nietzsche have made of the 21st-century response to suffering? No doubt he would have complained that much contemporary culture is geared more to avoiding suffering, or compensating for it, than to making it meaningful. Creativity – which Nietzsche saw as our salvation – has become a lucrative business. Advertising executives and Hollywood film-makers channel their creative powers into persuading us that we can escape suffering by gaining wealth, accumulating possessions, and finding love.

It is true that "triumph over adversity" is a common cultural theme – as we see in TV talent shows, for example. Here we find a very dim echo of Nietzsche's view that suffering which doesn't kill you can make you stronger. A more edifying version of this idea underlies the exaltation of sporting heroes who overcome pain, injury and disability in their rise to victory. But does this make suffering itself more meaningful? Can it transform the suffering of those who fail to become pop stars, professional footballers, or Olympic medallists? It isn't clear how.

More promising, perhaps, is the contemporary western turn to Buddhist teachings, which offer an atheistic interpretation of suffering. With regard to the problem of evil, Buddhism takes an opposite approach to Christianity. Instead of starting with the essential goodness of a divinely-created world, the Buddhist worldview takes suffering as its basic principle. The Buddha summarised his teaching by outlining four "noble truths", and the first of these is that suffering is the universal character of existence. This means that while Christian theology has to contend with a "problem of evil", Buddhists need to explain why life is not only worthwhile but even, at times, enjoyable. And interestingly enough, their response is similar to the Christian idea that evil has no reality in itself. The ordinary sources of happiness in the world are, Buddhists claim, illusory.

According to Buddhist teaching, the first noble truth gives meaning, value and shape to human life, since human beings are singularly able to free themselves from suffering. The details of this are filled out in the other three noble truths, which concern the cause of suffering, the possibility of ending it, and the way to accomplish this liberation. The Buddha found that he could fulfil his true human potential only through a deep and intimate acquaintance with his suffering.

Nietzsche, who heard about Buddhism from Schopenhauer, knew very little about it. He regarded the Buddhist worldview as thoroughly life-denying and nihilistic – just like Christianity. But although Nietzsche is probably the most radical of all the western philosophers, both Jesus and the Buddha were more radical still. While Nietzsche mounted a formidable intellectual challenge to established beliefs, these two religious teachers emphasised that freedom from suffering involved something beyond the intellect. The Buddha in particular found that the habit of thinking is part of the trap we find ourselves in, and so he argued that we cannot think our way out of suffering. And Jesus, too, preached a transformation of the heart and not a transformation of ideas or values.