When we think of suffering in the world (or possibly closer to home), we typically don't wonder what a philosopher would say about it all. Perhaps we'd think of a psychiatrist, a politician, or a man of the cloth. So when I read Scott Samuelson's Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, a review of what seven philosophical traditions say about the topic, I was not only surprised at the relevance, but also at how much I enjoyed reading what in another writer's hands might be dull, philosophical arcana.
Let me state upfront, Samuelson has a rare gift for making philosophy accessible (especially for one whose philosophy study stopped with Bishop Berkeley's tree in the forest), One reason Samuelson excels at getting concepts across is that his students (he is a college professor) include a group in the distinctly nonacademic setting of Oakdale Prison in Iowa, a convince-me lot if there ever was one.
For example, Samuelson examines the Book of Job in the light of pointless suffering. For the prisoner-students, he gets the gist of this tale of woe across by putting on a readers-theatre performance of his paraphrase of Job. The convicts perform assigned parts in the play, which is written in contemporary language.
Any definition of pointless suffering, as Samuelson relates, is troublesome, given its ubiquity in the world and persistence through the millennia. Whereas in earlier times, calamities like earthquakes, floods, and the bubonic plague might have been assigned to incomprehensible "acts of God," the twentieth century has piled on “acts of man”--Hiroshima and the Holocaust being two.
Looking at suffering through seven different approaches, Samuelson identifies the essential paradox about suffering: It makes us human. The paradox being without suffering, we'd lose our humanity; we'd live in a state of boredom, without the spark of creativity that keeps us from becoming the walking dead.
Briefly, the seven ways include John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, the aforementioned Book of Job, Epictetus, Confucius, and a surprise: Sidney Bechet, the legendary blues and jazz musician.
Working with the text of Bechet's autobiography and what the blues tells us, Samuelson traces how this art form arose out of the ground of pointless suffering--slavery in America. No, the creation of a treasured art form doesn't redeem the suffering of slavery, but a “blues-understanding” reveals once more how our humanity is stubbornly bound up with suffering.
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering by Scott Samuelson, The University of Chicago Press, 2018, 270 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40708-1
Image credit: press.uchicago.edu
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection (and feel free to share with a friend) The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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