-Essay-
BUENOS AIRES — We live in times of an “emphatic self,” as the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out in one of his best books, The Palliative Society. We live in a political, social, economic and fundamentally cultural environment that viscerally rejects all pain and suffering as irrelevant — worse, useless to our lives.
Or put another way: For our utilitarian epoch, uselessness is a form of wickedness.
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If pain is a sign of the unfathomable limits of the human condition, today we frenetically avoid anything that weakens our self-perception based on a sense of absolute control over the inner and outer worlds. The song “We Are the Champions,” from Queen’s 1977 album News of the World, is symptomatic of all this, eloquently announcing the only news we’ll listen to: That we’re in charge of it all.
Free to or from?
The French thinker Pascal Bruckner observed much the same in his book Perpetual Euphoria (L’euphorie perpétuelle) on the modern imperative to be happy at any price — without a thought for what happiness might be and what truly leads us to it.
We long to be free of all restrictions, and suffering certainly is one.
We long to be free of all restrictions, and suffering certainly is one of them. It deserves to be eliminated as the cause of a nonsensical impediment to our passion for “freedom of the moderns,” discussed by the Swiss-French thinker Benjamin Constant in the early 19th century. For the modern individual then, it is not so much a case of being free to do this or that, as to be free from whatever limits us.
Yet with our aching emphasis on an identity that cannot conceive of limits, that itself becomes our only response to the delicate question of who we are. And paradoxically, this freedom has a cost, namely to make us prisoners of a dogmatic desire that is nothing short of dictatorial. This sense of freedom and “the me” become one and the same, rejecting (often with hostility) anything other than itself.
Suffering is part of existence
Material goods and their benefits are precarious, like life and happiness no doubt. As American philosopher Martha Nussbaum recalls after reading the ancient Greek tragedies, suffering is an intrinsic part of existence.
And while it may not be the most agreeable part, it is a pointer to the fact that we all need compassion and consolation, which cannot come from individuals hell-bent on self-confinement.
An inner dictatorial self, in its indifference to the plight of others, cannot see how perpetual euphoria is more a nightmare than a dream and how selfishness will narrow our choices, leading to emptiness, and loneliness.
It is not in vain that the words company and companionship come from the Latin cum panis; companions are those who share bread, those who have finally discovered that the secret of life lies in going out of oneself and choosing, not so much not to be alone, as not wanting to leave others alone ever.
