{"id":602,"date":"2013-06-29T14:23:31","date_gmt":"2013-06-29T12:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/filosofille.wordpress.com\/?p=602"},"modified":"2026-05-12T09:12:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T08:12:46","slug":"qa-42-notes-on-useless-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/qa-42-notes-on-useless-suffering\/","title":{"rendered":"QA 42. Notes on \u201cUseless suffering\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Levinas\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A brief reading of the essay by Emmanuel Levinas<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phenomenology<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the lived experience of suffering? To an extent, it\u2019s like any other sensory experience, like seeing green or tasting sweet. What sets suffering apart is the way it is too much to bear. We can\u2019t get on top of it or get hold of it. It\u2019s an experience of frustrated revulsion or rejection. Levinas describes it a \u201cquasi-contradictory structure\u201d \u2013 suffering is given to us as a sensation that we can\u2019t take \u2013 which is categorically ambiguous: suffering is \u201cat once what disturbs order and this disturbance itself\u201d. Suffering shows the profound vulnerability and passivity of our sensibility: all we can do is undergo it (and we can\u2019t even do<\/i> that). Suffering is \u201cprecisely an evil\u201d for the way it rips into us and overwhelms our humanity. It is an impasse, an absurdity. It is utterly useless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cIs not the evil of suffering\u2026 also the unassumable, whence the possibility of a half opening that a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh slips through \u2013 the original call for aid, for curative help, help from the other me whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation? \u2026For pure suffering, which is intrinsically senseless and condemned to itself with no way out, a beyond appears in the form of the interhuman.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The interhuman order is the place of ethics. It opens between those who cry out and those who hear and attend. The experience of being-called is exactly the same as suffering \u2013 it\u2019s given to me without asking and I can neither refuse nor apprehend it \u2013 except<\/i> that it takes on meaning as \u201ca suffering for the suffering of someone else\u201d. It\u2019s not useless. From the interhuman perspective, suffering can thus be \u201cmeaningful in me\u201d even as it is \u201cuseless in the Other\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our attention to the suffering of others elevates us. It is the \u201cthe very nexus of human subjectivity, to the point of being raised to the level of supreme ethical principle \u2013 the only one it is impossible to question\u201d. And we are required so urgently, we can\u2019t even wait for God without letting ourselves down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theodicy and The End of Theodicy<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/i><\/b>Isn\u2019t suffering sometimes useful? Isn\u2019t it the price we pay to get what we desire? Don\u2019t we learn from our painful mistakes? And doesn\u2019t the fear of punishment help to keep us in line?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Levinas calls this kind of reasoning \u201cpolitical teleology\u201d, which takes one\u2019s own wellbeing, or society\u2019s, as the ultimate goal. When used to explain away other people\u2019s misery, things gets nasty fast. Think of the politician or preacher who says you must suffer now for future rewards, or the moraliser who declares your suffering to be proof of past wrongdoing. Such theodicy, whether Christian, Jewish or secular, tries to vindicate the goodness of God (or nature or history) in the presence of evil. Levinas has some sympathy with this. Belief in a greater good can comfort our own suffering, and in \u201cthe harshness of exile\u201d, even a cruel meaning may be preferred to none at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the political violence of the twentieth century \u2013 \u201c[s]uffering and evil inflicted deliberately\u201d, without limits, beyond reason, and \u201cdetached from all ethics\u201d \u2013 marks the end of the possibility of theodicy. For Levinas, the Holocaust is paradigmatic of this barbarism and the \u201cdisproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity\u201d. You can\u2019t make annihilation reasonable or explainable. You can’t say the victims got what was coming to them. It can\u2019t be part of God\u2019s (or nature\u2019s) plan, unless God or nature is more monstrous than all the murderers combined. Theodicy has become unthinkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This refusal of theodicy, which is a refusal to justify the suffering of others \u2013 what lies behind it? It reveals an ethical subjectivity and sensibility. The \u201chuman morality of goodness\u201d \u2013 compassion and love, \u201csuffering for the suffering of others\u201d \u2013 is still standing and still meaningful. But goodness now depends on our lived commitment to keeping faith with the others, with no metaphysical assurances and only our own resources of openness and responsiveness to draw upon. It\u2019s a high calling to a difficult faith and a difficult freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Levinas, E. 1998. \u201cUseless suffering<\/a>\u201d, in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other<\/i>, translated by Michael B Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, pp 91-\u2013101)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A brief reading of the essay by Emmanuel Levinas Phenomenology What is the lived experience of suffering? To an extent, it\u2019s like any other sensory experience, like seeing green or tasting sweet. What sets suffering apart is the way it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,111],"tags":[52,125,126],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-philosophy-as-emancipation","tag-emmanuel-levinas","tag-theodicy","tag-useless-suffering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2342,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions\/2342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.further.co.za\/helen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}