Non-Useless Suffering (original) (raw)
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Useless Suffering, moral injury, Zarathustra, Levinas
For the Christian interpretation, the Original new beginning, first movement, world outcast; is Eve. Originally outcast as a rib, a 'Holy Aye,' she is the original Child, mother, and moral spectator of the world. An embodiment of the feminine that encapsulates, for the game of creating, a forgetfulness that allows every spirit, from origin unknown, to willeth its own will. A new modality of responsibility, where humans are divorced from the normatively untamed nature of Beasts. To a State of Being conscious of, informed by, and demarcated from, its own nature. The meanings engendered, and the knowledge imbued, from the human language game, became powerful abstraction from which questions could emerge and which humans problematized to develop 'Ought.' With Beasts, there were no questions. With Adam, why is there 'something,' rather than 'nothing' emerged. But with Eve, the original moral spectator, the question shifted from why, to what; what to do with 'something'. With Eve came humanities' consciousness of itself, an original question, an enlightened question, one pragmatic about Divinity, and the first question of humanity, by humanity. Thrown out from the world, and along with it, communion with God, Original Sin was to follow thereafter and inform the Christian narrative that buttress the justification of theodicy. The existence of suffering in a world created by an all knowing, all loving God. A pure moment of suffering birthed, its meaning enshrined and defined by separation from original sublimity. The worlds outcast is also, therefore, the original suffering one. The one conscious of her own consciousness, the first to receive the human metric of suffering as a replacement to lost communion with original meaning. The Judaeo-Christian tradition problematizes suffering with meaning. The original ascetic ideal of a human will, turned utterly against itself, for its own sake; a sacred game that wards off existential nihilism. Suffering is the condition that all religions must attend to, and which in so doing, harness its power to provide balsams for existential and social afflictions. Yet unlike the Outcast, the Original moral spectator and sufferer, whose will now willith the spirit; one cannot willith suffering, in fact suffering is the very abrogation of willing itself.
hurt, misery, sorrow, trouble, vexation, and a litany of other things. Essentially, Job is asking, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive suffering?" Suffering as we know it was birthed from the original sin of man. When God discovered the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He laid a curse upon them: Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children … And unto Adam He said, because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life … (Gen. 3:16-17, KJV). The Hebrew word used here for "sorrow" is the word ʻetseb which signifies pain, hurt, toil, sorrow, labor, and hardship. 2 The curse of Adam is that of suffering. And yet, as image bearers of God, we are not alienated from His likeness due to suffering, in fact suffering is sine qua non to a Christian's Christlikeness. However, many philosophers from a variety of backgrounds have expounded upon the purpose that suffering serves, and it would do well to have an understanding of their arguments. For C.S. Lewis, the purpose of suffering is twofold: to produce divine humility within mankind and to break men of their will in order that they may submit said will unto God. "The first answer, then, to the question why our cure should be painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain." 3 He notes that for mankind to surrender one's will, one's sense of selfgovernance, is all but impossible. When people are forced to surrender their will, they do not take it lightly. He goes on to say that "to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death. We all remember this self-will as it was in childhood: the bitter, prolonged rage at every thwarting, the burst of passionate tears, the black, Satanic wish to kill or 2
A Redemptive Analysis of Suffering
Philosophy Study, 2015
The notion of suffering carries with it aspects which are private and individual on the one hand, and social and lingual on the other. I would pay attention to the latter part of the suffering notion, where the notion of suffering is recognized to be primitive by almost all the theories of human values. This primitive character allows a commensurable basis on the basis of which most plural theories share something in common to talk objectively to each other. In this paper, I would like to offer three arguments in order to advance a thesis that one's suffering is redemptive of others. First, the conservation law of mass says that matter of a closed system can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be differently rearranged. This may be applied to the experience of suffering, to allow the conservation law of suffering: My unjust self-interest costs pains in others to the level of the same amount but if I voluntarily suffer a sacrifice, others will have their pains lightened to the analogous level. Second, notion of yin-yang helps to support the redemptive thesis of suffering. The notion says that all things in the reality consist of two complementary opposite capacities that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system. Then, my acceptance of suffering and the decrease of other's pain are two complementary capacities of one reality. Third, any person is responsible for his own act, so is a society as a whole. Then, as an individual restores his damaged person, when he commits a crime, by being suffered or punished, a society restores itself to its own proper state, when any member of the society is wronged, by suffering communally in one way or other.
Problems of Suffering. The Philosophical Perspective compressed (1)
International Journal of Religion and Culture, A Journal of the Association of the African Theologians, 2015
Abstract This work aims at looking at suffering and the problems of suffering from a philosophical perspective. Suffering or pain in a broad sense is an individual basic affective experience of unpleasant things and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. It might be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity from mild to intolerable. The work has at the same time, looked at what causes suffering from the point of view of religion and cultural beliefs to back up the philosophical beliefs on this. The implications and or impacts of suffering on the sufferer and the society have been highlighted. Another interesting aspect of this work that is given attention to is the reason why suffering persists; whether God is unable to avert suffering in a world He created and then seek for ways it can be mitigated or eradicated. Also, suggestions are n1ade where necessary.
Suffering and the Emergence of Meaning in Life
2021
Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists pose deep and difficult questions about pain and suffering and try to provide answers to these questions: What is pain? Is pain in the brain? Is there meaning in suffering? What makes pain unpleasant? This article provides a rich and wide-ranging exploration of these questions and offers important new insights into the philosophy of pain. To complement the author's reflection on pain, suffering and the emergence of meaning in life, he has gathered information about the said topic from various sources that could enrich the article and have reflected some concepts that help us understand the topic better.
The Problem of Suffering: The Exemplarist Theodicy
Studies in Christian Ethics, 2023
This article aims to provide a response to the problem of suffering through an explication of a new theodicy termed the Exemplarist Theodicy. This specific theodicy will be formulated in light of the moral theory provided by Linda Zagzebski, termed the Exemplarist Moral Theory, the notion of transformative experience, as explicated by L.A. Paul, Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd, and the virtue-theoretic approach to suffering proposed by Michael Brady, which, in combination with some further precisifying philosophical concepts-namely, compensation, total empathy, and infinitely valuable connections-will provide us with a possible, morally sufficient reason for why God allows individuals to experience suffering.
2011
AbstractThe University of ManchesterSally NelsonDoctor of PhilosophyConfronting ?meaningless? suffering: from suffering-as-insult to suffering-as-ontological-impertinence2010From the personal contemporary pastoral experience of caring for dying people, and with particular attention given to the psychospiritual anguish often associated with the perceived failure of death, I argue that suffering is primarily identified in the modern West as an insult to normality, often expressed in various forms of the question: ?Why me??. I challenge this view of ?suffering as insult? by selectively identifying and critiquing some culturally embedded views of the nature of reality, taking note of the influence on suffering persons of the dialogue between science and faith in the UK, and by introducing dialogue with the process thought of Whitehead as an alternative to traditional theistic models of God. Such a dialogue also affects the nature of the person conceived in imago dei, and so I examine th...
In a theological framework, the problem of suffering is heightened to fundamental, relational questions between God and his creatures. At issue are: what essentially is the problem of suffering, how should it be understood and how close is God to his suffering creatures? The contemplation of these queries plunges the philosopher into the realm of the incomprehensible. Daily, the Christian must grapple with the reality of a God who is the fullness of being - in whom is the perfection of all that is good and a world which is fallen from that perfection. In this, man encounters mystery.