Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All by Scott Samuelson (review)

The author, an academic philosopher, draws from seven sources, six philosophical and one artistic, in an attempt to develop a kind of epistemic instrument, more idiosyncratic than systematic, for rehabilitating what he believes to be a perennial but forgotten approach to suffering, "paradoxical" he calls it, whereby we (humans, the sufferers) grow to a mature acceptance of suffering, even in a qualified sense a befriending of it, while at the same time never giving up the fight to overcome it.

The seven sources in textual order include the philosophy of J. S. Mill and utilitarianism, of Nietzsche and of the challenge to embrace the "eternal return," of Hannah Arendt's conception of the "banality of evil," of the Book of Job's picture of how suffering reveals God, of Epictetus and the Stoic conception that suffering atones us with nature, of Confucius on the relationship between suffering and empathy, and of how the life of the great blues musician Sidney Bechet illustrates suffering's potential for stimulating artistic creativity.

Samuelson exhibits an admirable grasp of his subject matter and a rare facility for rendering difficult concepts intelligible to a nonspecialized reader. Although he plays the agnostic toward all the seven ways, his least favourite is obviously utilitarianism, which proposes the elimination of pointless suffering by any means necessary to maximize the happiness of the many. He seems most to sympathize with Stoicism's view that life here and now is a gift and suffering an unavoidable part. If we reject suffering, we reject the gift. If we pine for some counterfactual vision of the happy life, we are doomed to unhappiness. But if we wish things to happen as they do, then even the worst happenings will not destroy happiness. Thus he admires Nietzsche's idea of life as an artistic work, where the canvas of our face is set bravely and grimly toward pain, aiming to create an aesthetic masterpiece, as well as Walt Whitman's preoccupation with "the starry system," that is, with wonder and reverence for the here and now (since that is all there is).

Much of the book is written in narrative form with the author reflecting on his years of experience teaching philosophy to inmates at a medium security prison in Iowa. The literary technique is on the whole effective. When introducing us (his readers) to great texts and thinkers on suffering, he recounts how his student inmates received the same material. The freshness of some of their responses, especially from a man named Simon, offers the text an effectual ground wire, and, frankly, makes for a more interesting read. A weakness with the method is its assumption that prison sufferings are a fit paradigm for all pointless suffering, something the author seems to believe, but that some readers are likely to question. The author is strongest when he assumes the role of philosophical pedagogue, and weakest when he descends into his frequent political commentaries on how penal reform ought to be undertaken in the U.S.

The text's great flaw in my mind is what I expect the author believes its greatest strength, namely, its syncretism. It assumes that the leading protagonists of the perennial conversation about the meaning of pointless suffering, however logically contradictory their accounts—atheist, nihilist, amoralist, monist, Christian theist—are all equally valid shareholders of history's still-developing response to humanity's greatest problem, or to change the metaphor, equal chair-holders at history's table of discussion: Nietzsche, Darwin, Lewis, Mill, Chesterton, Aquinas, Kafka, Foucault, Pliny, Sartre, Singer, Nussbaum, Marx, Merton, Pascal, Voltaire, Eliot, Epictetus, O'Connor (Flannery), Confucius, Solzhenitsyn, the Budda, and Jesus. All together, like the proverbial lion and lamb. From every page the distinctively modern plaintive complaint can be heard: why can't we all just get along? [End Page 400...