Abstract
The issue of human suffering is approached through three questions: (1) What is the relation between suffering and temporality; (2) What is the relation between suffering and the singularity of the person, and (3) What is the relation between suffering and a humane politics? Underpinning these questions is a fundamental concern to explore the nature of the relation between suffering and human being. The exploration of this connection not only reflects on our understanding of suffering and the human, but also directs our attention to the importance of compassion, as well as enabling some brief consideration of the extent to which politics and political decision-making can ever take proper account of, or respond to, the fact of human suffering.
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Notes
- 1.
That non-human animals can suffer seems clear even if their suffering is not, in all respects, identical to human suffering. One might argue, in fact, that there is a distinction between suffering and mere pain or discomfort that holds in the case of adult human experience, but that does not hold in the case of the experience of non-human animals or human infants. The suffering of animals is an issue that I do not address in the discussion below, although it undoubtedly introduces further complications for any attempt to articulate an ethical and political stance that is indeed attentive to the fact of suffering. In particular, one of the questions that my account here immediately raises is whether the refusal of suffering must also entail a refusal of the suffering of non-human animals, and if so, what the implications of this would be (would it not imply the alignment of the position outlined here with some of the stronger animal rights positions?) While I agree that this is an important and pressing issue, it is not one that I have time properly to address here.
- 2.
The man was Martin Bryant, later condemned to life imprisonment in Hobart’s Risdon jail.
- 3.
Cassell (2004, p. 35).
- 4.
While the connection is not made explicit in the text, the account of personhood that is presented here clearly resonates with the account of the ethical relation to be found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas—particularly in its emphasis on the singularity of the ethical relation and its character as given in the face-to-face encounter with another—see, for instance, Levinas (1969). Although there are important features of the Levinasian account that are replicated here, there are also aspects of Levinas’ approach that I would contest—particularly his emphasis on the ethical relation as preceding anything ontological. In fact, on the account sketched here, and also I would argue in Levinas’ own account (in spite of his own claims to the contrary), the ethical and the ontological converge: ethics is ontology and any adequate ontology is also an ethics.
- 5.
See Camus (2005) written shortly after the end of the Second World War, and originally published in 1946 in the Resistance newspaper Combat.
- 6.
On the nature of dignity, and the manner of its relation to concepts of the human, as well as to the relational understanding developed here, see the discussions contained in the volume to which this is a successor, Malpas and Lickiss (2007), including my own essay in that volume, ‘Human Dignity and Human Being’.
- 7.
One might argue, in addition, that the insistence on the refusal of suffering of the sort found in Camus can never be satisfied—is not to live already to be enmeshed in a system that involves suffering as an inevitable part of it?—and enjoins us to do what cannot be done. The refusal of suffering cannot mean, however, that we are committed to the attempt to eradicate every instance of suffering by our own efforts nor can it mean that we should refuse our own lives (rather as Schopenhauer, but not Camus, argued that the only properly ethical course available was the suicide of the ascetic who simply ceases to will the means to live). Not only would such courses of action fail to achieve their ends, but they are more likely to contribute to suffering rather than diminish it. What the refusal of suffering requires, more than anything else, is a willingness to take seriously the singularity of our own lives, as well as the singularity of those whose lives connect with our own, and to act in ways that are attentive to that singularity, within the capacities available to us and in a way that accords with our own situation. Camus’ own position is one that stands against excess—whether the excess of the one who does nothing or of the one who attempts to do everything. What is absolutely refused is the turning away from the singular, the concrete and the lived that is the necessary accompaniment of all forms of excess.
- 8.
The tension that is evident here is apparent in many aspects of contemporary organizations, and particularly organizations whose primary concern is human welfare—organizations concerned with matters of social welfare, health, and education. It is significant that not only does this tension have an impact on those whose welfare is supposed to be the focus of such organizations, but also on those who work within the organizations in question. Thus Thomas R. Cole and Nathan Carlin, for instance, have written of ‘the suffering of physicians’ as this arises due to the way in which medical practitioners increasingly find themselves unable to live up to the ideals and obligations of their profession because of the limits imposed by the organizational situations in which they find themselves—see Cole and Carlin (2009). The ‘dehumanization’ of medicine to which Cole and Carlin refer is, I would argue, directly linked to the inability of contemporary medical policy and modes of organization to respond to the singularity of suffering.
- 9.
The work of Michel Foucault provides us with a detailed elaboration of the rise of what he referred to as ‘bio-power’—a shift in the character of governmental operation towards the management not of individuals, but of populations, a shift made possible because of the rise of new actuarial practices and managerial techniques. See, for instance, Foucault (1976).
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Malpas, J. (2012). Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics. In: Malpas, J., Lickiss, N. (eds) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_2
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