On the Sufferings of the World
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of
life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd
to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds
everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities
inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose
at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate
misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something
exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.
I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by
most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative
in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes
its own existence felt. Leibnitz is particularly concerned
to defend this absurdity; and he seeks to strengthen his
position by using a palpable and paltry sophism.[1] It is
the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and
satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state
of pain brought to an end.
This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to
be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very
much more painful.
The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the
pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the
two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement
is true, let him compare the respective feelings of
two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any
kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still
worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation
open to every one. But what an awful fate this means
for mankind as a whole!
We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under
the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then
another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we
are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in
store for us--sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or
reason.
No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that
Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take
breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with
a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only
when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom.
But misfortune has its uses; for, as our bodily frame would
burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere was removed,
so, if the lives of men were relieved of all need,
hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand
were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance
that, though they might not burst, they would present the
spectacle of unbridled folly--nay, they would go mad.
And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or
pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A
ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.
Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble , form
the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all
wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would
men occupy their lives? what would they do with their
time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease,
a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack
obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men
would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there
would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end
mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has
now to accept at the hands of Nature.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are
like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting
there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play
to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is
really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are
times when children might seem like innocent prisoners,
condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious
of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every
man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of
life of which it may be said: “It is bad to-day, and it will
be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an
amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the
sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would
be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the
sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if,
here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode,
disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in
any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably
well, the longer you live the more clearly you will
feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a
cheat.
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again
when they are old, after being separated for a life-time,
the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other
will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole;
because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier
time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before
them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much--and
then performed so little. This feeling will so completely
predominate over every other that they will not even consider
it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will
be silently assumed, and form the ground-work of all they
have to talk about.
He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man
who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and
witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession.
The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when
they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their
effect is gone.
While no man is much to be envied for his lot, there are
countless numbers whose fate is to be deplored.
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus
est ; it means that the man has done his task.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure
reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?
Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the
coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?
or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden
upon it in cold blood.
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is
comfortless--because I speak the truth; and people prefer
to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good.
Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace!
At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines
to the lessons you have been taught. That is what those
rascals of sham philosophers will do for you. Ask them
for any doctrine you please, and you will get it. Your University
professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is
an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.
I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare,
every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character;
that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is
the positive element of existence. It follows, therefore,
that the happiness of any given life is to be measured, not
by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it
has been free from suffering--from positive evil. If this
is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy
a happier destiny than man. Let us examine the matter a
little more closely.
However varied the forms that human happiness and misery
may take, leading a man to seek the one and shun the
other, the material basis of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily
pain. This basis is very restricted: it is simply health,
food, protection from wet and cold, the satisfaction of the
sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things. Consequently,
as far as real physical pleasure is concerned,
the man is not better off than the brute, except in so far
as the higher possibilities of his nervous system make him
more sensitive to every kind of pleasure, but also, it must
be remembered, to every kind of pain. But then compared
with the brute, how much stronger are the passions
aroused in him! what an immeasurable difference there
is in the depth and vehemence of his emotions!--and yet,
in the one case, as in the other, all to produce the same
result in the end: namely, health, food, clothing, and so
on.
The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what
is absent and future, which, with man, exercises such a
powerful influence upon all he does. It is this that is the
real origin of his cares, his hopes, his fears--emotions
which affect him much more deeply than could ever be
the case with those present joys and sufferings to which
the brute is confined. In his powers of reflection, memory
and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine
for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows.
But the brute has nothing of the kind; whenever
it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first
time, even though the same thing should have previously
happened to it times out of number. It has no power of
summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid
temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection
comes in, with all the emotions to which it gives
rise; and taking up the same elements of pleasure and pain
which are common to him and the brute, it develops his
susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a degree
that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to
a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to
the depths of despair and suicide.
If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that,
in order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally
added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in
their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy
than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms;
delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous
liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things than
he considers necessary to his existence.
And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar
source of pleasure, and consequently of pain, which
man has established for himself, also as the result of using
his powers of reflection; and this occupies him out of all
proportion to its value, nay, almost more than all his other
interests put together--I mean ambition and the feeling of
honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about
the opinion other people have of him. Taking a thousand
forms, often very strange ones, this becomes the goal of
almost all the efforts he makes that are not rooted in physical
pleasure or pain. It is true that besides the sources of
pleasure which he has in common with the brute, man
has the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of
many gradations, from the most innocent trifling or the
merest talk up to the highest intellectual achievements;
but there is the accompanying boredom to be set against
them on the side of suffering. Boredom is a form of suffering
unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state;
it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces
of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of
man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of
miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their
purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers
a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their
wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to
misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will
rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and ev3
erywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they
are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as
though they were beggars asking where they could receive
a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles
of human life. Finally, I may mention that as regards the
sexual relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement
which drives him obstinately to choose one person.
This feeling grows, now and then, into a more or less passionate
love,[2] which is the source of little pleasure and
much suffering.
It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of
thought should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure
of human happiness and misery; resting, too, on the
same narrow basis of joy and sorrow as man holds in
common with the brute, and exposing him to such violent
emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much convulsion
of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written
and may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when
all is told, he has been struggling ultimately for the very
same things as the brute has attained, and with an incomparably
smaller expenditure of passion and pain.
But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering
in human life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and
the pains of life are made much worse for man by the fact
that death is something very real to him. The brute flies
from death instinctively without really knowing what it
is, and therefore without ever contemplating it in the way
natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his
eyes. So that even if only a few brutes die a natural death,
and most of them live only just long enough to transmit
their species, and then, if not earlier, become the prey of
some other animal,--whilst man, on the other hand, manages
to make so-called natural death the rule, to which,
however, there are a good many exceptions,--the advantage
is on the side of the brute, for the reason stated above.
But the fact is that man attains the natural term of years
just as seldom as the brute; because the unnatural way in
which he lives, and the strain of work and emotion, lead
to a degeneration of the race; and so his goal is not often
reached.
The brute is much more content with mere existence than
man; the plant is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in
it just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly,
the life of the brute carries less of sorrow with it,
but also less of joy, when compared with the life of man;
and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom
from the torment of care and anxiety , it is also due
to the fact that hope , in any real sense, is unknown to the
brute. It is thus deprived of any share in that which gives
us the most and best of our joys and pleasures, the mental
anticipation of a happy future, and the inspiriting play of
phantasy, both of which we owe to our power of imagination.
If the brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense,
without hope; in either case, because its consciousness
is limited to the present moment, to what it can actually
see before it. The brute is an embodiment of present impulses,
and hence what elements of fear and hope exist in
its nature--and they do not go very far--arise only in relation
to objects that lie before it and within reach of those
impulses: whereas a man’s range of vision embraces the
whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future.
Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes
show real wisdom when compared with us--I mean, their
quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. The tranquillity
of mind which this seems to give them often puts
us to shame for the many times we allow our thoughts and
our cares to make us restless and discontented. And, in
fact, those pleasures of hope and anticipation which I have
been mentioning are not to be had for nothing. The delight
which a man has in hoping for and looking forward
to some special satisfaction is a part of the real pleasure
attaching to it enjoyed in advance. This is afterwards deducted;
for the more we look forward to anything, the less
satisfaction we find in it when it comes. But the brute’s
enjoyment is not anticipated, and therefore, suffers no deduction;
so that the actual pleasure of the moment comes
to it whole and unimpaired. In the same way, too, evil
presses upon the brute only with its own intrinsic weight;
whereas with us the fear of its coming often makes its
burden ten times more grievous.
It is just this characteristic way in which the brute gives
itself up entirely to the present moment that contributes
so much to the delight we take in our domestic pets. They
are the present moment personified, and in some respects
they make us feel the value of every hour that is free from
trouble and annoyance, which we, with our thoughts and
preoccupations, mostly disregard. But man, that selfish
and heartless creature, misuses this quality of the brute
to be more content than we are with mere existence, and
often works it to such an extent that he allows the brute
absolutely nothing more than mere, bare life. The bird
which was made so that it might rove over half of the
world, he shuts up into the space of a cubic foot, there to
die a slow death in longing and crying for freedom; for in
a cage it does not sing for the pleasure of it. And when I
see how man misuses the dog, his best friend; how he ties
up this intelligent animal with a chain, I feel the deepest
sympathy with the brute and burning indignation against
its master.
We shall see later that by taking a very high standpoint it
is possible to justify the sufferings of mankind. But this
justification cannot apply to animals, whose sufferings,
while in a great measure brought about by men, are often
considerable even apart from their agency.[3] And so we
are forced to ask, Why and for what purpose does all this
torment and agony exist? There is nothing here to give
the will pause; it is not free to deny itself and so obtain redemption.
There is only one consideration that may serve
to explain the sufferings of animals. It is this: that the will
to live, which underlies the whole world of phenomena,
must, in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself.
This it does by forming a gradation of phenomena,
every one of which exists at the expense of another. I
have shown, however, that the capacity for suffering is
4
less in animals than in man. Any further explanation that
may be given of their fate will be in the nature of hypothesis,
if not actually mythical in its character; and I may
leave the reader to speculate upon the matter for himself.
Brahma is said to have produced the world by a kind of
fall or mistake; and in order to atone for his folly, he is
bound to remain in it himself until he works out his redemption.
As an account of the origin of things, that
is admirable! According to the doctrines of Buddhism ,
the world came into being as the result of some inexplicable
disturbance in the heavenly calm of Nirvana, that
blessed state obtained by expiation, which had endured so
long a time--the change taking place by a kind of fatality.
This explanation must be understood as having at bottom
some moral bearing; although it is illustrated by an exactly
parallel theory in the domain of physical science,
which places the origin of the sun in a primitive streak
of mist, formed one knows not how. Subsequently, by a
series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse
and worse--true of the physical orders as well--until it assumed
the dismal aspect it wears to-day. Excellent! The
Greeks looked upon the world and the gods as the work
of an inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we
may be content with it until we can get a better. Again,
Ormuzd and Ahriman are rival powers, continually at war.
That is not bad. But that a God like Jehovah should have
created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice,
and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have
clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared
everything to be very good--that will not do at all! In its
explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior
to any other form of religious doctrine professed by
a civilized nation; and it is quite in keeping with this that
it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any
belief in the immortality of the soul.[4]
Even though Leibnitz' contention, that this is the best of
all possible worlds, were correct, that would not justify
God in having created it. For he is the Creator not of
the world only, but of possibility itself; and, therefore, he
ought to have so ordered possibility as that it would admit
of something better.
There are two things which make it impossible to believe
that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, allgood,
and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly,
the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly,
the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who
is a burlesque of what he should be. These things cannot
be reconciled with any such belief. On the contrary, they
are just the facts which support what I have been saying;
they are our authority for viewing the world as the outcome
of our own misdeeds, and therefore, as something
that had better not have been. Whilst, under the former
hypothesis, they amount to a bitter accusation against the
Creator, and supply material for sarcasm; under the latter
they form an indictment against our own nature, our own
will, and teach us a lesson of humility. They lead us to
see that, like the children of a libertine, we come into the
world with the burden of sin upon us; and that it is only
through having continually to atone for this sin that our
existence is so miserable, and that its end is death.
There is nothing more certain than the general truth that
it is the grievous sin of the world which has produced the
grievous suffering of the world. I am not referring here
to the physical connection between these two things lying
in the realm of experience; my meaning is metaphysical.
Accordingly, the sole thing that reconciles me to the Old
Testament is the story of the Fall. In my eyes, it is the only
metaphysical truth in that book, even though it appears in
the form of an allegory. There seems to me no better explanation
of our existence than that it is the result of some
false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty. I
cannot refrain from recommending the thoughtful reader
a popular, but at the same time, profound treatise on this
subject by Claudius[5] which exhibits the essentially pessimistic
spirit of Christianity. It is entitled: Cursed is the
ground for thy sake .
Between the ethics of the Greeks and the ethics of the
Hindoos, there is a glaring contrast. In the one case (with
the exception, it must be confessed, of Plato ), the object
of ethics is to enable a man to lead a happy life; in the
other, it is to free and redeem him from life altogether--
as is directly stated in the very first words of the Sankhya
Karika .
Allied with this is the contrast between the Greek and
the Christian idea of death. It is strikingly presented in a
visible form on a fine antique sarcophagus in the gallery
of Florence, which exhibits, in relief, the whole series of
ceremonies attending a wedding in ancient times, from
the formal offer to the evening when Hymen’s torch lights
the happy couple home. Compare with that the Christian
coffin, draped in mournful black and surmounted with a
crucifix! How much significance there is in these two
ways of finding comfort in death. They are opposed to
each other, but each is right. The one points to the affirmation
of the will to live, which remains sure of life for all
time, however rapidly its forms may change. The other,
in the symbol of suffering and death, points to the denial
of the will to live, to redemption from this world, the domain
of death and devil. And in the question between the
affirmation and the denial of the will to live, Christianity
is in the last resort right.
The contrast which the New Testament presents when
compared with the Old, according to the ecclesiastical
view of the matter, is just that existing between my ethical
system and the moral philosophy of Europe. The Old
Testament represents man as under the dominion of Law,
in which, however, there is no redemption. The New
Testament declares Law to have failed, frees man from
its dominion,[6] and in its stead preaches the kingdom of
grace, to be won by faith, love of neighbor and entire sacrifice
of self. This is the path of redemption from the evil
of the world. The spirit of the New Testament is undoubtedly
asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists
5
may twist it to suit their purpose. Asceticism is the denial
of the will to live; and the transition from the Old Testament
to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of
Faith, from justification by works to redemption through
the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal
life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition
from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the
will to live. My philosophy shows the metaphysical foundation
of justice and the love of mankind, and points to
the goal to which these virtues necessarily lead, if they are
practised in perfection. At the same time it is candid in
confessing that a man must turn his back upon the world,
and that the denial of the will to live is the way of redemption.
It is therefore really at one with the spirit of the
New Testament, whilst all other systems are couched in
the spirit of the Old; that is to say, theoretically as well as
practically, their result is Judaism--mere despotic theism.
In this sense, then, my doctrine might be called the only
true Christian philosophy--however paradoxical a statement
this may seem to people who take superficial views
instead of penetrating to the heart of the matter.
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and
to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it,
you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard
this world as a penitentiary, a sort of a penal colony, or
[Greek: ergastaerion] as the earliest philosopher called
it.[7] Amongst the Christian Fathers, Origen , with praiseworthy
courage, took this view,[8] which is further justified
by certain objective theories of life. I refer, not
to my own philosophy alone, but to the wisdom of all
ages, as expressed in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and in
the sayings of Greek philosophers like Empedocles and
Pythagoras ; as also by Cicero , in his remark that the wise
men of old used to teach that we come into this world to
pay the penalty of crime committed in another state of
existence--a doctrine which formed part of the initiation
into the mysteries.[9] And Vanini --whom his contemporaries
burned, finding that an easier task than to confute
him--puts the same thing in a very forcible way. Man ,
he says, is so full of every kind of misery that, were it not
repugnant to the Christian religion, I should venture to affirm
that if evil spirits exist at all, they have posed into human
form and are now atoning for their crimes .[10] And
true Christianity--using the word in its right sense--also
regards our existence as the consequence of sin and error.
If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate
your expectations accordingly, and cease to look
upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its
sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or
irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should
be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence
in his own peculiar way. Amongst the evils of a
penal colony is the society of those who form it; and if
the reader is worthy of better company, he will need no
words from me to remind him of what he has to put up
with at present. If he has a soul above the common, or if
he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some
noble prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys
with common criminals; and he will follow his example
and try to isolate himself.
In general, however, it should be said that this view of life
will enable us to contemplate the so-called imperfections
of the great majority of men, their moral and intellectual
deficiencies and the resulting base type of countenance,
without any surprise, to say nothing of indignation; for
we shall never cease to reflect where we are, and that the
men about us are beings conceived and born in sin, and
living to atone for it. That is what Christianity means in
speaking of the sinful nature of man.
Pardon’s the word to all ![11] Whatever folly men commit,
be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us
exercise forbearance; remembering that when these faults
appear in others, it is our follies and vices that we behold.
They are the shortcomings of humanity, to which we belong;
whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those
very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because
they have not yet appeared in ourselves. They are
faults that do not lie on the surface. But they exist down
there in the depths of our nature; and should anything call
them forth, they will come and show themselves, just as
we now see them in others. One man, it is true, may have
faults that are absent in his fellow; and it is undeniable that
the sum total of bad qualities is in some cases very large;
for the difference of individuality between man and man
passes all measure.
In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something
that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill
us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this
point of view, we might well consider the proper form of
address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr , but my fellowsufferer,
Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres ! This may
perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts;
it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that
which is after all the most necessary thing in life--the tolerance,
patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which
everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man
owes to his fellow.
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