Abstract
The main point of this chapter is the defense of the cognitive character of suffering: suffering reveals something, a limit, or a violence, and the knowledge involved in it is important for the physical and ethical survival of the individual. Through a discussion of the way Nietzsche and Marx conceived of suffering—as a sign of weakness or as a sign of a misrecognition, i.e. as a “biological” fact or as a “political” fact—the text aims at denouncing that “principle of coercion” on which every totalitarianism is founded, and which is surreptitiously present also in some religious conceptions of suffering. Power is actually confirmed by making suffering unconscious through the anesthetization of suffering and its repression. Against what Nietzsche affirmed, the forgetfulness of suffering is not a sign of the Overman, but the hidden strategy of every domination.
Suffering opens up the path that leads to the truth. Alice Miller, Dein gerettetes Leben. Wege zur Befreiung
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Notes
- 1.
‘The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being.’ (Hegel 1970b, p. 172)
- 2.
As given in Simplicius: “And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’”, in Kirk et al. (1983, p. 117).
- 3.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 177, in Aeschylus (2009)
- 4.
See Apel et al. (1971). Against the charge of political conservativism we should remember that according to both Gadamer and Heidegger, acknowledging finitude means at the same time acknowledging the radical historicity and contingency of existence, and then the transformability of every human construction.
- 5.
About this ‘mythicization’ of the animal by Nietzsche see Lemm (2009, p. 88): ‘Nietzsche’s approach to the animals is not that of a scientist who desires to know about the animals, but that of a poet who imagines the life of the animals, whose thoughts on the animals are imaginary, illusory, and fantastic rather than scientific, rational, and true.’
- 6.
Voegelin (1959) pointed out some Gnostic elements in Marxian political theory (the alienation, the perfectivism, the eschatology etc.), but what is completely unconvincing in his reconstruction is the idea that Marxism is founded on an uncritical knowledge, which moreover would unite it to the Nietzschean doctrine of the Overman (is really the Overman basically characterised by knowledge?) and even to Nazism. The main point of gnosticism, however, is neither the ‘irrational’ nor the ‘aristocratic’ nature of knowledge, but the general idea that liberation can come only from knowledge. We need knowledge, in order to free ourselves, and under given conditions knowledge is even the most democratic concept. So, if Marxism is after all not a science, it is also true that there is no Marxism without science.
- 7.
“Of course, as I said, a good temperament would be necessary—a secure, mild, and basically cheerful soul; such a disposition would not need to be on guard for tricks and sudden explosions, and its expressions would have neither a growling tone nor sullenness – those familiar bothersome traits of old dogs and men who have lain a long time chained up.” (Nietzsche 1999e, p. 34)
- 8.
Women and children do not belong to the history of spirit, at most they belong to a natural history of the moral: so by Nietzsche the ethical principle (neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva), on which Schopenhauer thought all people could agree, is only a ‘children’s and old silly women’s chatter’ (see Nietzsche (1999d, § 186)).
- 9.
On this topic see. Chiurazzi (2007).
- 10.
A. Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, cit., Chap. I.
- 11.
This is what the psychotherapist Alice Miller has, in a very upsetting way, tried to show: according to Miller, violence which adults commit is nothing but the reaction to a violence they suffered as children and they are made unaware of. In texts such as Die Revolte des Körpers (2004) and Dein gerettetes Leben. Wege zur Befreiung (2007), Alice Miller shows that the most destructive side of the violence, which we suffered as children, is not in the violence as such, but in the repression of suffering that its ‘educational’ justification involves: an impossible repression, because suffering remains on a somatic level, like a physical memory, and this is why it can always reactivate the awareness of its origin, presupposition of every real liberation.
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Chiurazzi, G. (2012). Pathei Mathos: The Political-Cognitive Value of Suffering. In: Malpas, J., Lickiss, N. (eds) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_3
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