Suffering and Hedonism
“That which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act, and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.20
Quite naive is the view that some hold with regards to morals–the hedonist and utilitarian view–which takes reduction of suffering and increase of pleasure as the standard by which to judge the morality of actions, although some would phrase it differently as sadness and happiness instead of suffering and pleasure, but in essence what they mean by those is the same thing.
This naivety becomes evident, as I will argue, when we examine the good that comes and whose only path is through suffering, and in fact most of what is good to be had from life entails suffering in one way or another and that suffering in so far as it has an end (telos) and meaning in the good must be good, serving as an instrumental cause for good, and that suffering is only evil insofar as it is arbitrary and meaningless.
Now the most appropriate question at this point is what in fact constitutes meaningful suffering, I will give few examples of this.
Concerning health for instance, it is evident that to build a healthy and strong body one has to train and thus go through physical discomfort to achieve that and that there is no other healthy way to do it, since artificial means that serve as shortcuts incur more serious side effects in the long run, most of which lead to deterioration of health. Also one has to abstain from excess in pleasures whether they be of food, drink or sexuality in order not only to serve one’s physical health but also to keep a sober mind and these as well involve suffering especially since our instincts are to have all these comforts by abundance and therefore one experiences discomfort and suffering through acting against one’s carnal instincts although to ends which will grant us good results ultimately.
As for the mind it is also the case that if one is to acquire valuable skills and knowledge (valuable in themselves or for human flourishing, not merely as means to pleasure), one must go through trials and intense study often exactly at the expense of what is more pleasurable in terms of entertainment and leisure, which itself involve suffering both through self-deprivation of pleasure and through hardship of study on account of the mental effort required.
On the social level, in order to build a family that is stable and strong, one is required to sacrifice some of his own selfish desires, his own time and income, and also the carnal instincts which demand pleasure for one’s self as much as possible, and this is also the case for friendships and partnerships which demand a level of looking outside of ourselves and sustaining some level of inconvenience, since they require a level of selflessness and sacrifice in order to be sustained and to be fruitful, and without such selflessness and sacrifice most relationships become shallow merely transactional—a fact that leads to much of the alienation witnessed nowadays.
These examples, and many others which I have not mentioned for brevity’s sake, show that suffering is integral to attaining anything rightly esteemed to be good. Such goods attained through suffering contribute to happiness in life, since goodness constitutes true happiness, and suffering also makes the good attained more meaningful than that which is attained without it, whether physical, social or intellectual. This requirement also holds for all human endeavours and not only on the individual level but also for groups whether families, societies, nations…etc. The reason why things are this way though is beyond this investigation’s scope.
But as for those who have an inverted sense of good, or that object by saying that these things are not necessarily good and it depends on the particular, I would say that each of their opposites leads to degeneration not only of the individual himself but also of his surrounding.
Given that historically most of the ethically conservative societies that put the interest of the whole body of the nation over the interest of the individual are successful in maintaining order and promoting sustained cohesion. Consider, for instance, the Roman Republic which maintained centuries of stability through the concept of pietas (piety)—duty to family, community, and the deities—which effectively subordinated individual desires to the collective good. Yet this same republic collapsed when powerful individuals, the ones who were so-called Optimates (as opposed to Populares), although some of the later figures would blur the lines between both, prioritized personal ambition and gain over republican virtue, which led to alienation of the native Romans who now saw themselves driven out of public agricultural work due both to the high import of slaves due to the immense success of Rome in war and the powerful nobility gobbling up public land. This also demonstrates an important nuance that the relationship is not merely unidirectional, since the whole body of the nation is made up of the individuals which would entail that a balance needs to be maintained.
That is to say, the nation’s interests should not contradict the individual interests of the people to the point of being polar opposites, although some would say that individual freedoms are lacking in such societies, that would depend on the freedom one seeks and whether it is coherent to the finality of it.
If it is the libertine kind of freedom, then its finality, which we are in the process of experiencing, is fragmentation and a sense of alienation that plagues each one of us in the modern climate that is due exactly to our self-centeredness, and ultimately the finality of this will come to complete abolition of structure and a reign of anarchy if taken to its extreme.
Now if one would counter by saying that this degeneration itself is not necessarily bad, especially those who by virtue of their nihilism see life in some sense as an evil, I would say that if they were honest about their opinion they would not be straining to argue intellectually but rather they would retreat to a beastly life, to crime, or even to suicide according to their whims and their evaluation of this life, given that they are part of this human life which, by their own account, should not be. But they do not act in this arbitrary manner, showing them to be intellectually and morally inconsistent.
What this shows is that they live according to the contrary of the moral conclusion they have reached and that they stand no ground of moral authority to argue against the proper ordering of human life and society. If they accept this contradiction, then it is also a waste of time to consider their critiques since they are on a level of double incoherence.
Overall, I would say that our limited capacity and lack of clairvoyance prevents us from accounting for the future consequences of actions, which leaves long-term attempts of utilitarianism vulnerable given that we cannot know if an action prevents actual long-term suffering. As well, it is not to be considered solely as a basis of ethics on account of that and on account of the incomputable nature of suffering and pleasure as well.
And also, rejecting finality in ethics is paramount to rejecting the whole concept of ethics itself since they rely on having a goal in mind which we work towards, and it is due to this that utilitarian accounts of ethics fail because generally the notions of suffering and pleasure are taken for granted and not rigidly defined since in essence they are personal experiences that cannot be fully abstracted.
My speculation is that these currents of thought in ethics rely on slogans that superficially sound good but are practically meaningless, as well as they are reactionary to previous tradition which one wants to break away from.
It is also worth noting that the problem of the human being is especially that he is locked in a cycle of pain and pleasure and that he is ceaselessly looking for a way out. To reduce morality to that dimension is to trap the man in his own prison, cycling ceaselessly from pleasure beyond bound leading to suffering beyond bound which compel man to look again for pleasures which will throw him over again to the pits of suffering which leave one empty of any semblance of fulfillment and in a state of exhaustion and dissatisfaction which are indeed at work with addictions and overall with consumer culture and the newly introduced technological tools which fuel endless scrolling.
Unity of Love: The Glue of All
What then are we seeking as the highest good that is worth suffering for? And why should we seek it at all? And where might we be going exactly, if we do not cease to merely look at ourselves, not that deeper inward look of examination but the superficial one, where the self screams for more and more benefits of itself at the cost of others? What other than Love can be the force which extends the self beyond itself and unifies the other into itself? This we shall explore now.
Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror. Dono tuo accendimur et sursum ferimur; inardescimus et imus.
“My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne. We are inflamed, by Thy Gift we are kindled; and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly, and go forwards.”
— Augustine, Confessions XIII.9.10
Love is not a mere feeling or passion, for feelings are reactive to events or demand satisfaction such as reacting to an event with anger, or demanding sustenance with hunger. Passions are fleeting impulses that inflame and captivate the soul and they decay as fast as they are kindled, but love is a state of the soul—an ontological state, a state of being, of the person.
It is not a feeling but a constant tendency upwards and outwards, to more lofty places, transcending all that is corruptible and dying, and toward the other beyond the self. The confusion is when one conceives of it as desire or mere lust, which is indeed a passion of all things downwards and inwards that has the appetite to consume all, including its subject.
Now love, when directed towards other living beings, should be the kind that contributes to their elevation and to unshackle them from the bondage of the corruptible passions and of the self-negating self-referential orientation which characterizes the ego, and not the one that drowns both of them in these—which is not love but the all-devouring lust.
To give a good definition then of what love is so as to make it clearer, although I would rather not define love, since it is more well defined through the negation of what it is not, but since most would prefer clarity, this definition is good enough for this. I would say that love is the ontological orientation of the subject who loves, stemming from his will, towards other personal beings with the good of both being the end of such orientation—negating the good in this orientation gives us hate, and negating the other gives us self-love or rather selfish-love.
And it is forgiveness, animated by charity and motivated by mercy for all, that is the means through which love is authentically expressed in relationships between people. To be specific, it is forgiveness that heals all the wounds of the world. Its opposite, which is retribution and vengeance, are whips that one lashes himself with first, even before striking the person who wronged him. It consumes the soul of the one that holds it and destroys everything around him also. It is this that isolates people, and it is by love that they are glued together as a unit which works in harmony. This forgiveness is the means of restoring the end of love to the good instead of holding onto strife which results in hatred.
And as such, it is the mark of an unhealthy and ailing society that its attitude towards love is that of disdain or that sees it as a fantasy that is only told of in myths and stories, or that it is to be a taboo or something that one should be ashamed of. Or when the society divorces the sacred character from love, it falls into disarray and people begin to tear at each other like ravenous beasts that are thirsty for blood.
Love binds all, and without it the soil in which virtues grow is barren, and that soil would only bring forth the weeds of vice and destruction. It is the beginning and end of virtues, from which they spring and towards which they strive, since one who despises love or is moved only by self-love has nothing moving him to be good to others and in fact sees it as a burden to be charitable to others without expecting a benefit for himself.
When one is as such, which is quite common in these times, he does not see himself as someone who has a responsibility to others but only that others have one towards him—how can they serve him, not how can he serve others, which is the only true way of serving both oneself and others.
For this kind of expression of love is not exhausted from one the more he gives it, but the more it is given the more it is gained.
Besides this, we see on the opposite spectrum a corruption of what love should be, as it is made to be a vague and undiscerning tolerance to all and for all things, which is another mark of self-love—of seeming to be loving only insofar as one can be loved, without giving authentic love himself. While it is the case that forgiveness is an expression of love, its separation from truth and it being a tool for affirming delusions and letting the other, whom we should care for, stagnate and sink in his own faulty character, it is no longer love, but rather an encouragement of decadence and of egoistic tendencies both in the one and the other, since the one avoids confronting vices and the other accepts infantilization and conservation of his weaknesses.
This seems to be an uncritical reaction to the cynical nature of self-interest opportunism which harbors strife, though that reaction even carries artifacts of its own opposite since this unconditional tolerance has self-interested motivation in most cases.
The current reality is that the world operates, dysfunctionally so, on mutual self-interest and gain in a way as to replace the binding power of loving compassion which is seen as more demanding on the soul and more risky.
This reliance on mutual benefit is the most spread disease that one is exposed to in dealing with the world, in that it strips human beings of their humanity and makes them into utilities and means to an end which one is forced to cooperate with out of inconvenience only when shared benefit can be gained.
This is why most people see civilized modern life as a dehumanizing and soul-destructing process of humiliation because instinctively all know that the world forces upon us the pragmatic approach for interacting with people and not the one founded on compassion and authentic self-sacrificial love, which is the only way to true fulfilling existence and which everyone yearns for and desires.
Now I do recognize that it is not easy to turn this around in one’s life, as a particular, since in such an environment, if one were to apply these principles, he would be subject to injustices and abuses, but then one must evaluate whether it is worth it to lose his vitality and spark over utility. I might argue that a man who lives in such a dignified way as this is more content and fulfilled even in the presence of injustices from those who don’t see a human in the face of the other.
It is no wonder that most people have lost sight of their own souls and do not even think that they have one for which they are responsible. It is that this self-centeredness blinds one not only to others but also to himself, putting an end to the life of the spirit of his soul which is only energized and animated by extending outside of itself, and in that way I say that the self-referential orientation of egoism is self-negating, as persons are not supposed to be seen in isolation but that a person is defined in relation to the other and not as absolute.
It is of course good to be practical and realistic but it should never come at the cost of dignity, which is what is so ubiquitous and what deserves correction.
Not that I expect anything to be solved, but I believe that this is the way to have a healthy life on the small scale and a healthier society on the larger scale, this concerning the particular, but the principle is far more cosmic and universal than what most recognize.
💬 Comments