The experience of suffering can take many forms. Consider the following fragment of Andrew Solomonās description of his major depression:
I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldnāt expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I ā¦ In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.
(Solomon 2001, 18, 29)
Or consider, for contrast, my experience when a wisdom tooth got infected a few years ago. At first, there was just a soreness in the gums. When it started getting painful, I took a painkiller, thinking that the feeling would soon pass, as had happened before. But it didnāt, and I booked a dentist for a few days later, taking another pill. Alas, it had no effect. Soon I could think of nothing else. I couldnāt sit, or stand, or lie on the floor. The kidsā everyday requests ā help with this, give that ā irritated me no end. I tried to lock myself in my room and listen to music, but I couldnāt concentrate. Only one topic fit in my mind. It was getting late, and in panic, I went online again to find a dentist who would be on call. After a few failures, I got through to one who was at home with his kids, but agreed to meet me at his clinic in half an hour. I drove there in a hurry, and he gave me a shot of anaesthetic and booked me for an operation in the morning. I could have fallen on my knees to thank that beautiful man.1
Given that suffering comes in many forms, from Solomonās depression and my mercifully short-lived agony to grief and loneliness and hunger, itās a good question to ask what unifies them ā what makes them all instances of suffering, and as such prima facie bad for the sufferer, with further motivational and normative consequences down the line. As Michael Brady (2018) has recently persuasively argued, it wonāt do to appeal to simply to the unpleasantness of the experiences, since we need not suffer even if we undergo an unpleasant experience, even if it is an intense one. But Bradyās own proposal, on which suffering is roughly a matter of having unpleasant experiences we occurrently desire not to have, has a problematic inward focus, or so Iāll argue. I claim that what is essential to suffering is instead that what we suffer from negatively transforms the way our situation as a whole appears to us. To spell this out, I introduce the notion of negative affective construal. It involves three key components: practically perceiving or conceiving of our situation as calling for change, registering this perception with a felt desire for change, and believing (or perceiving) that the change is not within our power. It is thus simultaneously a matter of how the world appears to us and how we are poised to act with respect to it.
As many have recently pointed out, it can be an intrinsically unpleasant experience to desire that not p and to believe that p; itās worse yet to desperately wish that not p and see no way to bring it about that not p, especially when this involves construing oneself as faulty in some way. In experiences of suffering, negative affective construal is pervasive, either because it colours a large swath of possibilities or because our attention is narrowed to what weāre averse to. Forms of what Iāll call attitudinal suffering, such as depression or grief, are themselves constituted by specific kinds of negative affective construal. In contrast, sensory suffering is pervasive negative affective construal caused by experiences like toothache or hunger. Sensory suffering is pain that has a meaning for the subject in this sense. In effect, Iām going to claim that sensory suffering is a special case of attitudinal suffering, a negative transformation of the experienced self and world caused by unpleasant bodily experience. Pain that doesnāt cause such a transformation doesnāt make for suffering, however intense it is.
Approaching suffering
When I talk about suffering in this chapter, I mean it in the experiential sense, in which some experiences constitute suffering. As Brady (2018) notes, this is important to emphasize, since the term is also used more broadly for any kind of harm that might occur to something, for example when we say that a car suffered damage from a collision.
As a kind of experience, suffering is always psychological (or mental). It is strictly speaking a misnomer to talk about āphysical sufferingā, although some suffering obviously has bodily causes. (I will instead speak of sensory suffering below.) So what makes a mental experience one of suffering? Here are some platitudes that can serve as tentative fixed points:
- Suffering is unpleasant.
- Suffering is intrinsically bad for the sufferer, though not necessarily all-things-considered bad for her.
- Anyone has a pro tanto reason to relieve anyoneās suffering, if they can.
- Animals and children can suffer, not only adult humans.
- It is possible for a person to desire that she herself suffer, for example because she thinks that itās a fit punishment.
- We can suffer from many kinds of things, including pain, hunger, exhaustion, the loss of a loved one or a job, lack of promising future prospects, lack of friends, injustice, or lack of meaning.
I think all these platitudes are correct. First, suffering has a hedonic dimension. Second, it is bad for you to suffer, as far as it goes, even if without suffering, you would miss out on something of great value, so that putting everything together, the state of affairs in which you suffer is better than its alternatives. Third, and related, everyone has some reason to relieve your suffering, though the strength of the reason varies considerably depending on their relationship to you and their possibilities, among other things, and it may be outweighed by other reasons for action. Fourth, in coming up with an account, we should not overintellectualize, since the range of suffering subjects is broad. Fifth, even though suffering is intrinsically bad and you have reason to avoid it, it is nevertheless something you might intelligibly seek in special circumstances ā indeed, on some first-order views, it might be merited.
The last item on the list calls for some clarification because of the slippery grammar of āsuffering fromā. Iām using it here to indicate the source of the suffering, the thing that makes us suffer and that weād rather not be the case. When you suffer from a significant loss, you might be grieving, and we could also say that you suffer from grief. When you suffer from lack of promising future prospects, you might be depressed, and we might then say you suffer from depression. But in the latter use, the āfromā indicates something different. Grief and depression arenāt sources of suffering, but ways of suffering. They may constitute it. This distinction will be important in my argument.
Considering these platitudes makes it very plausible to maintain that suffering is not identical with pain. The first reason is that as is now widely accepted, not all experiences pain are unpleasant or bad. It is common in pain science to distinguish between sensory-discriminative and affective-motivational aspects of pain (e.g. Grahek 2007). Cases of pain asymbolia, in which a person reports feeling pain in response to bodily damage while not finding it painful, are often seen as evidence of this. Second, as Brady (2018) points out, some forms of suffering, such as exhaustion or anxiety, are not aptly described as painful (although they are unpleasant). Third, bodily pain is a bad model for experiences like depression or ennui, which lack the kind of localizable focus that bodily pain has, and donāt strictly speaking hurt, though they are certainly unpleasant. Finally, not all pains that do hurt amount to suffering ā if I step on a Lego block the kids left on the floor, it sure hurts, but I couldnāt claim Iām suffering.
As Brady (2018, 23) observes, some of these considerations generalize to the broader category of unpleasant experiences. You can be tired or hungry or lonely, for example, without suffering. Brady successfully dismisses suggestions that suffering is determined by the intensity of unpleasantness or the importance of the object of negative affect for the person. For example, boredom can amount to suffering in spite of not being intensely unpleasant. Instead, he develops the thought that we suffer when we have unpleasant feelings and mind having them. Here is a more precise definition:
Suffering as undesired unpleasant experience
Suffering [ā¦] involves two essential elements: (i) an unpleasant feeling or experience of negative affect, which is a central part of our experiences of pain, grief, loneliness, hunger, and the like; and (ii) an occurrent desire that this unpleasant feeling or negative affective experience not be occurring.
(Brady 2018, 29)
In the light of what follows, itās important to take note that Brady defines occurrent desire in functional rather than phenomenal terms, by reference to effects on attention, motivation, and deliberation (ibid.)
Does this account meet all the desiderata for a theory of suffering? While it certainly makes progress, I donāt think it does. The core problem is that it is inwardly focused. In particular, the key elements are unpleasantness of a feeling and a desire directed at oneās inner state. This model arguably better fits experiences like bodily pain. (Iāll return to this below.) But it is problematic when it comes to negative emotions, which are world-directed. Consider here the case of grief. Brady himself observes that someone who grieves a loved one can suffer experientially. But must such a person have an occurrent desire that they donāt have this unpleasant experience in order to suffer? Surely not. It would be curious if a mother who lost her child in a tragic accident wanted her unpleasant state to end. She may well not want that ā insofar as she focuses on her grief, she finds it the right response to her situation.2 (Indeed, oneās grieving is interrupted when one reflects on oneās own state rather than focusing on oneās loss.) She does, to be sure, have an occurrent desire, or rather a wish, that her child miraculously came back unharmed, or something of the sort. Quite possibly, everything around her may seem to cry out for the child to be climbing and dancing and playing again, and nothing she casts her eye on affords fun or even work. What she wants is for the world to be different, to go back to what it was, not that her own experience of the world is different. When the grief pervades the way she experiences the world, I believe this suffices perfectly well for suffering.
What we need, then, is an account that captures both sensory and world-directed suffering. I think that John Hickās proposal is a good starting point. He says: āI would suggest that by suffering we mean that state of mind in which we wish violently or obsessively that our situation were otherwiseā (Hick 1966, 354). I think this nearly gets things right when interpreted suitably. As I will myself put it, to suffer is, in rough terms, to affectively construe oneās whole situation negatively, which is registered by a pervasive felt aversion towards it.
Suffering and felt aversion
To begin unpacking the suggestion that suffering should be understood in terms of affective attitudes towards oneās situation, letās consider what is and what isnāt part of oneās āsituationā in the relevant sense. The key to a principled distinction is the difference between my own take or perspective on things and what I take a stand on. Facts about the world independent of me, such as the fact that a loved one died, are clearly part of my situation. (Perhaps what makes them part of my situation is that they bear on the satisfaction of my concerns, or the things I care about.) But so is my pain. The pain I feel when I bang my knee doesnāt constitute my take on banging my knee.3 Itās just an unfortunate fact about my situation. This is important, because it allows for a unified account of sensory and thought-dependent suffering along Hickās lines. In each case, thereās an aspect of our situation that we fervently wish was different, whether itās the searing pain resulting from an infected wisdom tooth or the fact that we seem to lac...
