Abstract
This chapter explores Kierkegaard’s conception of suffering and a Levinasian response through a reading of the latter’s ‘useless suffering’. Kierkegaard identifies suffering as a temporal moment to be actively passed through on the way to eternal salvation. It is argued, therefore, that Kierkegaard determines suffering as necessarily a means to an end, operative according to a logic of utility. The subject is therefore solitary in its suffering. For Levinas, suffering is useless, rendered useful only through the maintenance of a logic of utility and therefore an autarkical subject. It is argued that Levinas transforms the locus of the ethical by re-locating suffering in an economy conditioned by the ‘interhuman order’ and thus a self-other relation that undermines any logic of utility. Through suffering, the subject, the ‘I’, reaches the limits of its mastery, opened up to the grounding, ethical relation with the Other.
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Notes
- 1.
See the comments below on Kierkegaard’s affinity with Christian teachings on suffering.
- 2.
For example, John Paul II (1984) outlined the parameters for understanding the way that God bore suffering as His Son, imbuing suffering with a structure of His gift, Love, and eventual salvation: ‘Human suffering has reached its culmination in the Passion of the Christ… it has entered into a completely new dimension and a new order: it has been linked to love… which creates Good, drawing it out by means of suffering’ (John Paul 1984, Part IV). As John Paul II sees in suffering the ‘price of Redemption’, so Kierkegaard announces man’s victory ‘on the day of suffering.’ Furthermore, the distinction drawn by Kierkegaard between real and useless suffering and suffering as a step to eternal victory is latent in the Pope’s words: ‘Man ‘perishes’ when he loses ‘eternal life’. The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life… The only begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering’ (John Paul 1984, Part IV).
- 3.
Theodicy—[Greek] theos: God; and dike: Justice. See Leibniz (1952).
- 4.
‘The Moment’ (Øieblikket—literally ‘the glint of an eye’) was Kierkegaard’s final publication. Not only did Kierkegaard refer to the ‘moment’ as such an intersection of time and Eternity, but used the publication as a platform to undertake his own intervention in Church politics.
- 5.
‘Temporality itself, the whole of it, is a moment; eternally understood, temporality is a moment, and a moment, eternally understood, is only once … Eternity is the very opposite. It is not the opposite of a single moment in temporality (this is meaningless); it is the opposite of the whole of temporality, and with all the powers of eternity it resists temporality’s becoming more’. (Kierkegaard 1997, p. 98).
- 6.
Schopenhauer sees suffering as two-fold: the battle of all against all [Kampf aller gegen alle] is painful [leidvoll], and, given all individuals are but expressions/objectifications of the one substance, the Will [der Wille], such a battle is essentially self-destruction [Selbstzerfleischung]—see Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (see Schopenhauer 2009). The absurdity of such self-destruction stems from the contradiction between the motivating drive to preserve oneself, which is one of the central forces of the all-encompassing Will, and the resulting destruction of oneself. In fact, Schopenhauer argues that our task is to free ourselves from the chains of necessity, that is, to rid ourselves of the Will. This can take place on three levels: aesthetics, ethics, and religion (or soteriology), in order of efficacy/profundity. In this way, Schopenhauer is situated within a framework of Christian soteriology (suffering/grace), to which Nietzsche offers a response. (There is danger of equating Schopenhauer’s push for asceticism as a form of soteriology with Christian soteriology. The point here is not to equate the two, rather to indicate a structural affinity.) Interestingly, Nietzsche seems to follow an ascetic ideal, in the Schopenhauerian spirit, in his Unzeitgemäßige Betrachtungen (Nietzsche 1999, vol. 1): suffering is to be overcome through abstinence, withdrawal, leading eventually to redemption [Erlösung].
- 7.
In this way, the anti-Christo-theological thinker Nietzsche is found to be espousing an understanding of suffering potentially subsumable under a logic of utility. It can be argued that Nietzsche does not see a use in suffering, especially in his arguments against the legitimation of suffering by Christo-Judaic theology in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Nietzsche 1999, vol. 5) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (Nietzsche 1999, vol. 5). It is moreover difficult to claim that Nietzsche offers a response to ‘why?’ [wozu?]. However, Nietzsche certainly seems to position suffering in relation to resistance and overcoming, under the rubric of the will to power.
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Benjamin, A., Cuff Snow, S. (2012). Economies of Suffering: Kierkegaard and Levinas. In: Malpas, J., Lickiss, N. (eds) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_4
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