Darwinian Evolution The discussion — sometimes heated, sometimes half- whispered, always charged — went back and forth. Evil is manifest in the gross injustice and disparity of wealth and standards of life around the world. Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. The chain is that the will cannot will backwards. excerpted from Making Sense Out of Suffering. Dualism Christianity, he once wrote, was “Platonism for the masses”, a religion that has dominated Western culture for some two thousand years and that was “the most extravagant set of variations on the theme of ethics ever produced.” But the result was an illusion that was hostile to life itself, a hostility cleverly concealed by the doctrine of another, better life after death. Required fields are marked *, abortion (If you have … You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. "What is God's Answer to Human Suffering?" Oord, Thomas Jay (2015), The Uncontrolling Love of God. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. transcendent order When we do see it exist we commonly ask ourselves, "Does human suffering have meaning?" Evil and human suffering – Philosophical/theological problem or human tragedy? In later chapters, I will have examples from stories about suffering and statis-tics showing the spread of suffering, both national and global. View Philosophy of Human Suffering Research Papers on Academia.edu for free. Philosophy and Ideas. Everyone has encountered and experienced them in their various forms in his life. ), “God destroys both the guilty and the innocent. So, driven by a desire to eliminate suffering entirely, some people have shockingly advocated taking the rest of nature with us. He remarks that even if someone were to prove that children’s suffering was a necessary condition for achievement of ultimate harmony, he would reject that ‘truth.’ The suffering of one innocent child cannot be justified by a higher purpose or harmony to be achieved. “The first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. burden of proof You can take a glimpse of his philosophy from the following quotes: What does it mean to say that every event will recur again and again? Throughout the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali offers multiple tools for developing a clearer perception so that you can suffer less from all causes. Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering Van Harvey on the metaphysical aspects of an anti-metaphysical philosophy. The question that both the believer (in a deity) and the non-believer asks: Can’t we imagine a better world? But what if the Will could say of the regrettable, even horrible past, “this is precisely what I willed”? But the ‘evil’ does not result from failure to find perfection, from our not having a perfect season. One principle is present in virtually all the … Eschewing any grandiose solution he, like Camus, argues that we must simply face the realities of suffering and death honestly, be more open to life and others, and then “fashion something – an object or ourselves – and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.” (p.285). X. I'm sure your all familiar with most of the ways of suffering, so there's no point of listing them. In both cases, suffering is not merely presumed to have philosophical value, but is offered as the key to understanding human life. This is the case in the following three examples, two from world literature and one from a contemporary drama. Existential problem: Given human experience of evil, how do we make rational sense of evil? Stoicism Stoicism is way more than the quotes you will find on the Internet nowadays. And is it the case that one can only truly affirm life if he or she can say that they also will or would will the horrible events of the past? In some cases, the message of literature and art implies a rejection of the intellectual “solutions” as mostly ineffective. But the second best for you is – to die soon”. This cosmic Will has no purpose but to perpetuate itself in individual beings who are also in the grip of a need to perpetuate themselves. Abortion Issue Why Suffering? earthquakes), hurricanes, Flu Epidemic of 1917, Tsunami near Indonesia in 2004, the Haiti earthquake, and the 2011 massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan. And it is this knowledge that he like all others must die that is the occasion for him to doubt his love of life. ———————————, From Plato: Socrates raises a philosophical dilemma for theists. They have fused the idealism of Plato with Jewish-Christian moral ideals. It is necessary because the finite world is the result of a creative life force or Will that pours itself out into individual organisms that persist for a while but then perish. genocide, Jewish holocaust, slavery of Africans, conquest and destruction of native Americans, oppression, hunger, death from preventable disease in ‘developing nations’; death and suffering from wars) is but a sampling of the suffering of people throughout history. Even worse, He allows the evil doer to prosper, and destroys the righteous.”. science and morality We must learn to become ‘yea sayers’ to life. . The answer, to anyone who notices what human history and current reality are like, is that obviously one can imagine a better world, for example, one in which children do not suffer unnecessarily. What moral order remains? It was a religion that only cared for ‘moral values’ and Nietzsche confessed that this “had always struck… [him] as being the most dangerous, most sinister form the will to destruction can take.”. While it is relatively easy for those who live in the small comfortable bubbles created by a peaceful culture to affirm moments of joy, it is quite another for a bound African slave in the hold of a ship to will the countless moments he must endure during the Atlantic crossing. I am not the mouth for these ears.”. Biblical Story of Job: Job suffers overwhelming loss and affliction. The myth of Eternal Recurrence simply means that you should affirm every moment as if you wanted it to exist eternally. This episode explores the nature of human suffering or the nature of the human condition. free will Nietzsche believed that one of the possible responses a culture could make to this terror of life was to cast a veil (Schleier in German) of illusion over the structures of existence, and that this is what the theologians and metaphysicians of Western culture have done. Evil results when everyday is one of profound suffering and loss, as is the case for the majority of people on the earth. There are two categories of suffering: suffering caused by human beings, which we call moral evils, and suffering caused by nature, for instance, earthquakes or cancer. But humans aren’t the only beings to feel pain. Then we shall make you a gift of the Overman!” And Zarathustra becomes sad and says “They do not understand me. The screen play written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and probably inspired by Eli Wiesel’s account of his experience in Nazi concentration camp and his book The Trial of God. 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