Suffering and experience – thinking about suffering this morning it struck me that part of our problem with suffering is that we, inevitably I suppose, make too much of it. This arose out of a conversation yesterday when talk turned to suffering and the man suffering from motor neurone disease who went to Switzerland for an assisted suicide. Suffering is inevitable. All creatures suffer and the higher we are on the evolutionary scale the greater our capacity for suffering which extends from something purely physical to include the emotional and psychological. The problem with suffering, especially physical suffering, is that it is centripetal, pulling us into ourselves, into the body. The contrary – joy, happiness, emotional well being – is centrifugal, expansive, opening us out to be inclusive of others and the world. Suffering therefore provokes a self-centred destructive tendency, acting against our true nature to be open, inclusive and loving. The younger the person the greater is the power of suffering to do lasting damage to the psyche.
The sad thing about the centripetal nature of suffering, especially physical suffering, is that it pulls the person into the experience so that the worse the experience the more it becomes the primary factor which determines meaning. Eventually life comes to mean suffering and therefore ceases to be worth living. The implied corollary of this is that, to be worth living, life has to mean well-being, joy and happiness. Neither of these viewpoints fits in with a Christian worldview, nor with a Buddhist one.
In neither the Christian nor the Buddhist worldview is the meaning of life determined by experience. Life is not about undergoing or having experiences but about being. Both Gabriel Marcel and Eric Fromm have spelled this out.
It is difficult to put what I want to say into a structured argument. I need to sit down and think it all out. Briefly – it is that because we assume that life is all about having and experiencing that we find ourselves constantly lurching back and away from the precipice of tragedy. The Three Brute Facts of Existence lurk at the edges of awareness, constantly reminding us of our frailty in the face of the incipient dangers on every side. Our grasp of ourselves, our happiness and well-being, is uncertain and will remain uncertain as long as awareness is focused on self.
[Fromm, E., To Have or To Be, Sphere Books, London, 1979; Marcel, G., Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper & Row, New York, 1965]