Lament is a Christian practice modeled for us by Jesus. In this article, I argue that lament is a spiritual discipline that assists the sufferer to reconstruct meaning after the disorienting effects of the suffering. Drawing on the psychological literature on stress-related growth, I show how the structure of the psalms of lament facilitates the process of growth through meaning-making. Lament is a stylized form of speech consisting of five common elements that define a specific trajectory. The elements (...) are an address to God, complaints, request, motivation, and confidence in God. The trajectory of lament involves a psychological move from distress to praise, and from disorientation to new orientation. I argue that the meaning that is achieved is not primarily rational or propositional, but instead is anchored in the intimate, dialogical relationship with God. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain (...) thinking activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of literature, in Anglo-American philosophical milieus, is largely aimed (...) at sketching a specifically Christian or Christianity-inflected theodicy that would reconcile animal suffering with the existence of an omni-God. In contrast, there are few, if any, systematic attempts to put forth a Hindu theodicy that aims to offer morally justifiable reasons that God has for allowing animal suffering. In this article, we address this scholarly lacuna by illustrating how a Hindu perfect being theist might respond to the problem of animal suffering. (shrink)

As evidenced in literature, physicians vary in their emotional devotion to patients. John Steinbeck's physicians are aloof. The doctors of William Carlos Williams and Richard Selzer form strong, complicated, emotional attachments to their patients. These attachments allow them to live fuller, more sensuous lives, without interfering with their proper functioning as healthcare providers. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Dr. Diver overly commits himself to a patient and suffers the consequences. The present-day physician can help modulate his own emotional connections to patients (...) by examining these literary models. (shrink)

The intriguing issue of pain and suffering in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs), particularly in Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome/Vegetative State (UWS/VS) and Minimally Conscious State (MCS), is assessed from a theoretical point of view, through an overview of recent neuroscientific literature, in order to sketch an ethical analysis. In conclusion, from a legal and ethical point of view, formal guidelines and a situationist ethics are proposed in order to best manage the critical scientific uncertainty about pain and (...) class='Hi'>suffering in DOCs and ensure the best possible care for the patient. (shrink)

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore (...) how this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself. (shrink)

"The goal of this volume is to revise Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of divine suffering, that is, his disputed discourse on the descent of Christ into hell and its implications for the Triune God, according to a robust contemporary Catholic theology. In order to accomplish such an appropriation, I have recourse not only to twentieth-century Thomistic theology, but also to the thought of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope St. John Paul II. I seek to engage the best (...) of the vast relevant secondary literature on Balthasar and to offer a balanced assessment of his work on the topic of divine suffering, both critical and appreciative in different respects. I argue for a peculiar interpretation of Balthasar's take on Holy Saturday and for a more refined use of language in theological discourse than is typical of his sometimes-hyperbolic style. Recognizing his laudable attempt to integrate mystical spirituality and systematic theology, I seek to distinguish valid insights from confused mixtures of metaphorical, meta-symbolic, and philosophical discourse on God, particularly, with respect to the classical problem of how the Creator who willed to become incarnate may be said to suffer. Truly, "One of the Trinity has suffered," and yet this is mystery of faith that ought to be carefully explained and understood in conformity with sustained Catholic reflection on divine immutability and simplicity, the dual nature and unique personhood of Christ, the Trinity of divine subsistent relations, the freedom of God in creating and becoming man, the analogy of being, the problem of evil, and the immensity and infinite value of Christ's redemptive suffering"--. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pleasure and Pain in LiteratureOliver ConollyWhy do we enjoy the depiction, in imaginative literature, of situations that typically arouse negative emotions such as pity, sadness, and horror? One view, which aims to dissolve rather than solve the problem, is that we do not enjoy them at all. According to this theory—the pure pain theory—the problem does not arise in the first place. But the theory must explain why (...) we chose to undergo such painful experiences. Are we simply aesthetic masochists? The pure pleasure theory, by contrast, denies that there are any painful aspects to our experience of such literature. This theory must explain how we can take pure delight in the literary depiction of suffering. Are we simply aesthetic sadists? Lying between both extremes is the hybrid theory, which asserts that there are both painful and pleasant aspects of such experiences. The hybrid theory must specify which aspects of the experience are painful and which pleasant. In this paper a version of the hybrid theory is advanced and defended.IThe pure pleasure theory denies that we feel painful emotional identification with fictional characters. Why take this view? One reason is that it is a way of resolving the paradox of fiction, as formulated by Colin Radford.1 The paradox asserts that there is an inconsistency between the propositions that: (1) we have emotions for fictional characters, (2) we know that they do not exist, (3) it is irrational to have emotions for non-existent objects. Each proposition seems plausible, yet one must be false. Whilst most of the participants in the debate have attacked the notion that feelings for fictions are irrational, some have [End Page 305] denied that we have such feelings in the first place. One intuition guiding this denial is that the depiction of a fictional horrible event is likely to be less painful than the depiction of an identical but real event. In other words, the mere fictionality of an event is liable, by itself, to diminish the pain we are liable to feel at its depiction in comparison with a real event: I label this the fictionality gap. If the fictionality gap exists, it applies across the board, to the sufferings of Pip in Great Expectations as well as those of King Lear. The characters in those works are fictional, and so the lessening of the pain we feel at their fates must, if the fictionality gap holds, hold merely in virtue of the fact that they are fictional.It has often been noted—rather than argued, but this is question of impression rather than logic—that one would feel more affected were the stories real rather than fictional. The kinds of events depicted in King Lear—ugly struggles for power, the manipulation of the naïve, the impotence of the good, inconsolable grief—are not in themselves other-worldly, and can be imagined taking place in reality. However it is much more difficult to imagine King Lear in its full particularity taking place in the real world, given the theatricality of its form and language. In order to imagine King Lear as real, one would have to rob it of Shakespeare's poetry, which is other-worldly in its eloquence. French proponents of the Three Unities thought that theatre should aim at, among other things, verisimilitude, but never overcame the problem that the fact that characters in French theatre speak in rhyming couplets might detract from that verisimilitude, which it clearly does. This worry about the transplantability of King Lear into the real world appears to be less of a problem in relation to realist novels, which, as their appellation suggests, are easier to imagine taking place in the real world. Not only is the language used in realist novels less exalted than that used in tragedies, the situations such novels depict tend to be more likely to occur. Clearly, the realist novel is capable of depicting horrible or unpleasant events. About such novels, say, Madame Bovary, it seems to make sense to ask ourselves how we would feel about them if we read them as true stories.I would like however to question the very intelligibility of the... (shrink)

Part of the greatness of great literature consists in the profound, philosophic ideas the works contain. These ideas may not be unknown to philosophy but, when rendered in literary form, they gain an aesthetic force often lacking in the philosophic treatise with its careful train of reasoning.In this insightful study, Burton Porter explores the philosophic content of some outstanding literary works, analyzing and evaluating the ideas that drive the narrative.Porter first examines the concept of free will and determinism in (...) Melville's Moby Dick, placing the quest for the white whale within the context of foreordination, hubris, prophecy, and defiance of divine power. Connections are also drawn to Euripides' Medea and Shakespeare's King Lear as well as the Old Testament.The good and the right are traced in Anouilh's Antigone and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, showing the philosophic antagonisms in the literature and in the conflicted minds of the authors.Voltaire' Candide and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov are then explored insofar as they express the problem of evil--the tension between human suffering on earth and belief in a benevolent, wise, almighty God.Finally, the nature of the self is investigated in Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Kafka's The Metamorphosis, focusing on identity and the mind-body problem.Porter makes philosophy come alive by showing its expression in art and revealing the depth of ideas that make literature compelling.Burton Porter (Springfield, MA) is currently professor of philosophy at Western New England College and a visiting professor of philosophy at Mt. Holyoke College. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Philosophy Through Fiction and Film, The Voice of Reason, and Reasons For Living. (shrink)

Evil remains a primary source of inquiry in contemporary literature of French expression, even among its most secular writers. In considering French-speaking authors from France, Belgium, the United States, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this collection delineates a rich international perspective on some of the most disturbing events of our time. Each essay testifies to the urgency expressed in works of fiction to give an account of human catastrophes, from the Shoah and the Rwandan genocide to the terrorist attacks (...) of September 11, and the ongoing oppression of women in Islamic nations. Themes underlying this volume include an investigation into the origins of evil, its representations in writing, and the ethical responsibilities of authors who write on human suffering. Contemporary fiction on evil confronts us with fundamental questions: Can evil be attributed to intentionality, is evil "subconscious," or is it the result of impersonal forces? Which styles of writing are ethically appropriate or effective for depicting evil? Can we speak of a veritable "poetics of evil" shared by contemporary authors? When does a literary text on evil become "evil"? In providing informed and nuanced answers to these important questions, the scholars engage in crucial theories of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, address a number of issues raised by trauma and genocide studies, and draw from critical frameworks in literary theory on testimony, the limits of representing the extreme, and "transgressive" writing. (shrink)

In Sin Sick, Joshua Pederson draws on the latest research about identifying and treating the pain of perpetration to advance and deploy a literary theory of moral injury that addresses fictional representations of the mental anguish of those who have injured or killed others. Pederson's work foregrounds moral injury, a recent psychological concept distinct from trauma that is used to describe the psychic wounds suffered by those who breach their own deeply held ethical principles. Complementing writings on trauma theory that (...) posit the textual manifestation of trauma as absence, Sin Sick draws argues that moral injury appears in literature in a variety of forms of excess. Pederson closely reads works by Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment), Camus (The Fall), and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Brian Turner's Here, Bullet; Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds; Phil Klay's Redeployment; and Roy Scranton's War Porn), contending that recognizing and understanding the suffering of perpetrators, without condoning their crimes, enriches the experience of reading—and of being human. (shrink)

Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges have presented 20th century literature with a distinctive gallery of solitary figures who suffer from a series of physiological ailments: invalidism, decrepitude, infirmity and blindness, as well as neurological conditions such as amnesia and autism spectrum disorders. Beckett and Borges were concerned with the dynamics between illness and creativity, the literary representation of physical and mental disabilities, the processes of remembering and forgetting, and the inevitability of death. This article explores the depiction of (...) physically and mentally disabled characters in Borges' Funes the Memorious (1942)—a story about an Uruguayan gaucho who has been left paralysed after a fall from a horse which simultaneously endowed him with an infallible memory and perception—and Beckett's Trilogy: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). It examines the prodigious memory of Funes and the forgetful minds of Molloy and Malone with reference to influential neuropsychological studies such as Alexander Luria's twofold exploration of memory and forgetfulness in The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968) and The Man with a Shattered World (1972). The article demonstrates that in contrast to Beckett's amnesiacs and Luria's brain-damaged patient, who are able to transcend their circumstances through cathartic writing, Borges' and Luria's mnemonic prodigies fail to achieve anything significant with their unlimited memories and remain imprisoned within their cognitive disabilities. It reveals that medical discourses can provide invaluable insights and lead to a deeper understanding of the minds and bodily afflictions of literary characters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:14 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Melissa Oliver-Powell Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Unechante,l’autrepas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France In the spring of 1971, three years after the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 in France, 343 women put their names to a courageous manifesto announcing that they were criminals of a particularly gendered nature. The authors of (...) Manifeste des 343 (Manifesto of the 343) comprised a large group of culturally eminent French women and activists declaring that they had all illegally undergone abortions, which at this point, despite growing decriminalization throughout much of Western Europe, were still outlawed within their republic. Though many of the revolutionary fires had now eased to embers, French feminists demonstrated that reproductive rights were still a vital and unresolved topic of social justice. Including names as weighty as Simone de Beauvoir, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, the manifesto brought together exceptional women from the fields of academia, law, theater, film and literature, alongside grassroots activists. Their action was a bold challenge to the French authorities, daring them to arrest some of the country’s brightest thinkers and cultural innovators under a law the signatories felt was deeply unjust, sexist, and antithetical to the values of individual liberty and citizenship. It was a case of those with the broadest shoulders weaponizing their privilege to present a robust front line in the wider struggle for women’s rights. One of the signatories was filmmaker Agnès Varda. Her name, like those of several others on the list, demonstrates the symbiosis between Melissa Oliver-Powell 15 cultural production and gender politics that has often characterized French feminist thought. From the multidisciplinary writings of Beauvoir, to the novels of the écriture féminine movement, to the lyrical academic prose of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, French and Francophone feminist writers have tended to connect art and politics with a great deal of fluidity. As a committed activist and a filmmaker, Agnès Varda falls very much within this tradition, often adopting and developing feminist practices within her cinema. This article examines how Varda’s 1977 film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) interacts with and participates in the feminist political project of reproductive rights as well as the ongoing intellectual and moral debates over abortion taking place in France throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I look particularly at the adversarial construction of abortion narratives within these debates and the location of victimhood therein. Within mainstream cultural representations in and beyond France, abortion is typically constructed as either a traumatic or a transgressive moment. The same is often true on either side of political and social debates on abortion, which have tended either to characterize the women who get abortions as irresponsible and amoral or as sympathetic victims in need of protection. Though the transgressive element persists, it is the interaction with representations of trauma that interests me here. In approaching discussions of gendered injustice, it is common for feminist writers and activists to leverage pathos as a rhetorical strategy. While suffering can be a highly effective and galvanizing expression of oppression, such discourses also run the risk of producing excessive depictions of victimhood, which can displace the capacity for action from the subject of hardship onto the privileged oppressor. This risk is particularly at stake within the cultural form of film, as its visuality and identificatory mechanics have the potential to spectacularize the female victim and make her relatable only through suffering. This was often the case in earlier French films that featured abortion such as Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956), Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965), and Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966), all of which made their subjects sympathetic by entwining them in long narratives of victimization ending in death or disgrace. This article looks at how Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas disengages from the spectacle of suffering that so often characterizes representations of women’s experiences 16 Melissa Oliver-Powell and rejects the idea that abortion narratives must... (shrink)

"The work is on an important topic that has been oft debated but rarely systematically studied – the political, cultural, and moral effects of distant news coverage of suffering. [The book] is extremely well steeped in the relevant literature, including semiotics, discourse analysis, meda and social theory and makes a fresh methodological contribution by looking at the codes and formats of news about suffering. It has a fresh vision and answer to some of the stickiest moral and (...) media problems of our time … and deserves to find its place among important books about the moral aspects of media and society in our times." —John D. Peters, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor, University of Ohio This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? The question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. They address the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibility towards the distant sufferer. (shrink)

BackgroundThis article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them are critically discussed with such purpose.MethodsA philosophical methodology is used, based on the review of existent literature on the topic and the argumentation in favor (...) of what are found as better definitions of suffering and pain.ResultsPain can be described in neurological terms but cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors have a decisive influence on pain perception. Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level. Pain and suffering are considered unpleasant. However, the provided definitions neither include the idea that pain and suffering can attack and even destroy the self nor the idea that they can constructively expand the self; both perspectives can b e equally useful for managing pain and suffering, but they are not defining features of the same. Including the existential dimension in the definition of suffering highlights the relevance of suffering in life and its effect on one’s own attachment to the world. An understanding of pain and suffering life experiences is proposed, meaning that they are considered aspects of a person’s life, and the self is the ever-changing sum of these experiences.ConclusionsThe provided definitions will be useful to the identification of pain and suffering, to the discussion of how to relieve them, and to a better understanding of how they are expressed and experienced. They lay the groundwork for further research in all these areas, with the twofold aim of a) avoiding epistemological mistakes and moral injustices, and b) highlighting the limitations of medicine in the treatment of suffering and pain. (shrink)

Despite our moral misgivings, retributive canons of justice-the return of evil to evildoers-remain entrenched in law, literature, and popular moral precept. In this wide-ranging examination of retribution, Marvin Henberg argues that the persistence and pervasiveness of this concept is best understood from a perspective of evolutionary naturalism. After tracing its origins in human biology and psychology, he shows how retribution has been treated historically in such diverse cultural expressions as law codes, scriptures, drama, poetry, philosophy, and novels. Henberg considers (...) retributive thought in light of contemporary moral theory and current social and political concerns and advances his own theory of the morality of legal punishment."Retribution is no single doctrine or unified set of doctrines, but rather a sprawling variety of doctrines, many of them at odds with one another," observes Henberg. He suggests that understanding retributive thought as the quest for solace in the face of suffering helps to explain its variable nature. Since there is no single defensible moral criterion for identifying exact retaliation, culture is more important than nature in selecting among retributive practices. Typically, some forms of retribution are culturally approved, while others are disapproved. In place of the mistaken tendency to think of legal punishment as morally justified, Henberg maintains that legal punishment should be thought of as morally permitted. Author note: Marvin Henberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of Idaho. (shrink)

Canada has followed the pattern of Benelux nations by legislating sufferingSuffering as the pivotal eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for euthanasiaEuthanasia/assisted death without requiring terminal prognosis as is needed in most permissive jurisdictions. This chapter will explore the relationship between sufferingSuffering and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and the ways in which sufferingSuffering is understood in the Supreme Court of Canada, the federal Criminal Code legislation and by health care assessors. Based on this analysis, we will argue that the resulting sufferingSufferingeligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion leaves the law (...) open to unintended forms of interpretation, thus instituting perhaps the most unbounded and risk-prone form of assisted death in the world. A review of the literature on sufferingSuffering, the wish to dieWish to die, and reasons for MAIDReasons for MAID requests found sufferingSuffering of severe illness to be frequently associated with unstable mental health, social, and existentialExistential variables that are often amenable to therapy or remediation. While sufferingSuffering remains a powerful motivating force to seek opportunities to relieve distress, its use as an eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for MAID has significant ambiguity in its’ characterization of ‘enduring’ and ‘irremediable’ and thus fails to protect against abuse for the vulnerable. (shrink)

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of Emile that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that “to suffer is the first thing [Emile] ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know.” Through a discussion of Rousseau's argument for the importance of an (...) education in suffering, Avi Mintz contends that the reception of Rousseau by progressives suggests a detrimental misstep in the history of educational thought, a misstep that we should recognize and correct today. We ought to revive the progressive tradition of distinguishing the valuable educational pains from the harmful ones, even if we disagree with the particular types of pain that Rousseau identified as educationally valuable. (shrink)

In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffering experiences can be articulated as transformative, (...) although suffering experiences are not the type mostly discussed in the transformative experience literature. We correct for this here by developing a taxonomy of negatively valenced transformative experiences. We suggest three features that make such experiences ones of suffering, following Michael Brady’s definition: intensity, novelty, and attentional focus. Finally, we suggest that one possible explanation for the edifying capacity of suffering comes from it requiring more transformation than positive experiences. (shrink)

The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the (...) angel of death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo-Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a widespread effect on the thoughts, emotions and behavior of millions of people all around the world. In this context, a large body of scientific literature examining the mental health impact of this global crisis has emerged. The majority of these studies have framed this impact in terms of pre-defined categories derived from psychiatric nosology, such as anxiety disorders, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. These constructs often fail to capture the complexity of the actual (...) experiences of the individuals being studied; more specifically, they describe these experiences exclusively in terms of disease, while neglecting their potentially adaptive or “salutogenic” aspects. Similarly, discussion of psychological assistance for these individuals has largely been confined to a reiteration of “evidence-based” psychological or pharmacological techniques which can be delivered using remote access technology. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, these approaches are likely to be of mixed efficacy. Conversely, “negative emotions” or distressing psychological experiences may actually be functional in the setting of a disaster or crisis, serving to minimize harm, maximize social coherence and compliance, and facilitate adherence to safety measures. The limitations of the “conventional” approach are, to a certain degree, inherent to the prevailing medical model of mental health. Beyond these considerations lies the concept of “salutogenesis,” a term which refers to the innate capacity of individuals to create and maintain health and well-being in the face of adversity. Using principles derived from the second wave of positive psychology, particularly its emphasis on the totality of human experience and the possibility of deriving meaning and character growth from suffering, this paper conceptually analyses the relevant aspects of salutogenesis and PP2.0, and proposes an alternate approach for addressing mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such an approach, while acknowledging the utility of the conventional medical-psychotherapeutic model in specific cases, reduces the risk of medicalizing human experience, and provides individuals and communities with opportunities for growth and adaptation. The benefits of this proposal could potentially extend far beyond the current crisis, offering an opportunity for the field of psychiatry and mental health research to move away from a purely “disease-centered” model. (shrink)

Merriness and suffering seldom accompany each other. Looking at Samuel Beckett's dramas we find human beings whose suffering is both primordial—simultaneous with their conception—and final, allowing no culmination or relief. The sufferers have become indifferent toward their suffering because of a palpable lack of an alternative. They have grown accustomed to their misery, since their life was never anything but misery. Needless to say, in Beckett this ubiquitous misery and suffering never appear in themselves. The extremities (...) of human calamities presented in various startling ways—Winnie's gradual sinking into the mound in Happy Days perhaps the most baffling—call for a legitimating dose of fitness, vitality, and... (shrink)

This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt : Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a (...) cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes. The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics. (shrink)

Today, there are different understandings of the first article on the content of the Christian faith, for which an analysis from a theological perspective is necessary. This research sought to reveal the meaning of the first article on the content of the Christian faith in recent theological works that have been produced, through the use of a hermeneutic exercise, conducting a bibliometric and categorical analysis and using NVivo software to analyse the qualitative data. We concluded that the recent theological (...) class='Hi'>literature addresses the meaning of the first article of the Christian faith based on the existence, concept and definition of God and his attributes, as well as his power, behaviour, creation, revelation and reign. Although there is little extant material compared to other topics or areas of knowledge that can be explored using these tools, this fact is explained because, normally, theologians are not interested in publishing in high-impact journals. The way of approaching God in contemporary literature can be enriched by taking into account specific contexts, such as poverty, discrimination, suffering, violence, human trafficking, immigration and political realities, in such a way that it is not only a metaphysical reflection of God but also a historical and immanent and even an interreligious research that broadens the concept of the Christian God and answers questions that contemporary society asks in daily life. (shrink)

Greek literature prior to Plato featured two conceptions of education. Learning takes place when people encounter “teacher-guides”—educators, mentors, and advisors. But education also occurs outside of a pedagogical relationship between learner and teacher-guide: people learn through painful experience. In composing his dramatic dialogues, Plato appropriated these two conceptions of education, refashioning and fusing them to present a new philosophical conception of learning: Plato’s Socrates is a teacher-guide who causes his interlocutors to learn through suffering. Socrates, however, is not (...) presented straightforwardly as a pedagogical success story. Socrates’ failures are, paradoxically, part of what makes him an ideal literary model for a philosophical teacher-guide. Plato requires his readers to question why Socrates’ interlocutors are not converted to philosophers. (shrink)

In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffering experiences can be articulated as transformative, (...) although suffering experiences are not the type mostly discussed in the transformative experience literature. We correct for this here by developing a taxonomy of negatively valenced transformative experiences. We suggest three features that make such experiences ones of suffering, following Michael Brady’s definition: intensity, novelty, and attentional focus. Finally, we suggest that one possible explanation for the edifying capacity of suffering comes from it requiring more transformation than positive experiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Euthanasia in Utopian LiteratureLyman Tower Sargent (bio)The word euthanasia, meaning a peaceful, gentle, or easy death, has been traced back to Roman times. But the "good" in a good death is obviously open to interpretation. Good for whom? The individual? The family of the individual? The society? And, who decides? The individual? The doctor? The family of the individual? The legal system? These questions are constantly raised throughout the (...) literature with diametrically opposed answers given from the earliest times to the present. And, unfortunately, one word is used for all the positions, with two subcategories, voluntary and involuntary, both of which are perceived as good for someone.Death is universal but whether or not a person should have a choice about when to die or voluntary euthanasia is deeply controversial.1 Inducing such a death, primarily in cases of a painful terminal disease, appears to be largely a nineteenth-century invention while, of course, existing as a concept well before that.2 Also, discussions of voluntary euthanasia raise related issues, suicide, involuntary euthanasia, and how eugenics has determined the criteria for involuntary euthanasia. Also, the fear of someone [End Page 238] being putting to death for the convenience or advantage of the living has been the most prominent issue, and one must wonder if involuntary euthanasia, at least when consent was possible but not given, ever constitutes a "good" death. As simply a peaceful and painless death, the earliest use of the word was by Suetonius in the early first century, where in his life of Augustus he reports Augustus's position on death as that "on hearing that anyone had died swiftly and painlessly, he prayed that he and his might have a like euthanasia, for that was the term he was wont to use."3 In his De Augmentis Scientiarum [Advancement of Learning], Francis Bacon refers to this statement, commenting, "For it is no small fidelity which Augustus Caesar was wont so earnestly to pray for, that same Euthanasia … was not so much like death as like falling into a deep and pleasant sleep." And Bacon continued: "In our times the physicians make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after he is given up, whereas in my judgment, if they would be wanting in their office, and indeed to humanity, they ought to acquire the skill and to bestow the attention whereby the dying may pass more easily out of life. This part I call the inquiry concerning outward Euthanasia, or the easy dying of the body (to distinguish from that Euthanasia which regards the preparation of the soul)."4The most explicit statement, generally ignored for sixty years, was that made in an 1870 speech to the Birmingham Speculative Club by Samuel D. Williams Jr., about whom little is known. Williams proposed:That in all cases of hopeless and painful illness, it should be the recognized duty of the medical attendant, whenever so desired by the patient, to administer chloroform or such other anæsthetic as may by-and-bye supersede chloroform—as to destroy consciousness at once, and put the sufferer to a quick and painless death; all needful precautions being adopted to prevent any possible abuse of such duty; and means being taken to establish, beyond the possibility of doubt or question, that the remedy was applied at the express wish of the patient.5This was not, though, the usual practice and many doctors saw no need to act. In an 1887 book one doctor contended that "as long as there was proper medical care, there was no need to speed up death to relieve suffering."6 Still, Williams's position is in almost all respects the position taken by advocates [End Page 239] of voluntary euthanasia since then, although it did not get much of an airing again until C. Killick Millard, the Medical Officer of Health of Leicester, gave the Presidential address to the Society of Medical Officers of Health in late 1931. There he said, referring to Bacon, thatthe proposition merely is that individuals, who have attained to years of discretion, and who are suffering from an incurable and fatal disease which usually... (shrink)

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average (...) man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

In seventeenth-century Germany art and reality stood in a contradictory relationship to one another, and this contradiction was a fruitful one: it contained, in an undeveloped and indistinct form, the paths that art was to take in the centuries that followed. From the point of view of the history of culture, it is important to feel the basic contradiction of this period, the pledge of the developments of the future, even though the period itself perhaps suffered from this contradiction. We (...) ourselves will be helped in this direction—that is, towards the elucidation of the central contradiction of seventeenth-century art—by a few isolated comments and observations on the literary texts of the time. (shrink)

This paper constructs the theological polemic among Near Eastern Christian sects and the encounter with the new religio-political regional power: Islam. Focusing on the period from around the first Muslim conquests in the mid-seventh century until the ninth centure C. E., a list of East Syriac Church Fathers and their writings are selected as representative voices in the continuing Christological debates. In particular, the paper is concerned with how theological arguments were first used and reinterpreted to address conversion to Islam (...) and later used to emphasize, in an ironic twist, the proximity between Nestorianism and Islam contra other Christian “heresies”. This historical development is important to understand how Nestorian literature was later used by Muslim theologians well after the ninth century, such as Ibn Abī Ţālib al-Dimašqī in the fourteenth century, to defend Islam and debunk Christianity. For Nestorian apologetics the immediacy of addressing the issue of Christian conversion to Islam was clear. Letters from Nestorian clergy, such as Katholikos Īšō’yahb III. and Katholikos Georg, recount the old debates among Nestorians, Miaphysites, and Melkites concerning the nature of Christ. In order to explicate best the erroneous attraction of Islam, these two men contextualized Islamic theology as similar to a Christian heretical sect. Yet over time, appealing to Islamic overlordship became necessary. With the rise of the Abbasid caliphate and the establishment of its capital in the historical heartland of the Nestorian Church, the polemic was reversed. Hereafter, Nestorian dyophysite doctrine was used as an appeal to the Islamic conception of Christ’s divinity. For example, Katholikos Timotheos I. and the theologian Theodor Bar Koni underlined the blasphemy of the Miaphysite and Chalcedonian Christology. This very tactic, however, was easy for Muslim scholars to appropriate in Islamic apologetics. Well before al-Dimašqi, the words of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi to Timotheos are distinct: the Nestorians understood correctly that God could not have suffered and died, but that they all were still wrong that Jesus is the Son of God. (shrink)

In recent years a large empirical literature has appeared on suffering at the end of life. In this literature it is recognized that suffering has existential and social dimensions in addition to physical and psychological ones. The non-physical aspects of suffering, however, are still understood as pathological symptoms, to be reduced by therapeutical interventions as much as possible. But suffering itself and the negative emotional states it consists of are intentional states of mind which, (...) as such, make cognitive claims: they are more or less appropriate responses to the actual circumstances of the patient. These circumstances often are such that it would rather be a pathological symptom not to be sad and not to suffer. Suffering, therefore, is sometimes and to some extent a condition to be respected. Although I do not dispute that the alleviation of suffering is the main aim of palliative care, in pursuing that aim we should acknowledge a constraint of realism. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative (...) attitudes, showing that a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

The history of women's status in British Society is the "story of a quest" a long seemingly endless one. Women seeking a better, more acknowledged life have suffered, then gone forward, then retreated and so on. Women have sought "--- entry into the world, of education, and of growth, including growth in power ---". In this paper I propose to trace the history of the social status of British women from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, as it (...) was reflected in their literature as well as from historical social documents. (shrink)

This book exploits the power of phenomenological methods to access and describe lived moral experiences of pain and suffering for patients, their families and the wider community. Creating new fields of communication for patients, their family members and health professionals in shared decision making processes, this book builds on knowledge about suffering to help and guide correct action in preventing and relieving chronic pain and improving systems of care. It offers a new phenomenology for understanding moral experience in (...) serious illness and suffering, and its implication for policy, practice and research. A series of applied chapters, looking at individual experiences of suffering and care experiences, present some areas of ethical inquiry, including: pain and suffering maternal care ethics evaluation and moral deliberation about treatment options decision-making and moral agency end-of-life experiences of care. Exploring how moral phenomenology could provide fruitful alternatives to traditional frameworks in bioethics, this is an important addition to the literature. It will be of interest to scholars and students of bioethics and phenomenological methods in the health and human services. (shrink)

This article offers a reflection upon The Brothers Karamazov, interpreted as a theological and philosophical contribution to the debate over humanity’s practical relationship to suffering and vulnerability. The relationship is practical insofar as the questions with which Dostoevsky struggles all relate to human agency: How should we live in the continual presence of suffering? The article reconstructs a theology of suffering in The Brothers Karamazov as a form of anti-theodicy. Further, the theology of suffering in The (...) Brothers Karamazov is counterposed to Leo Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murat. How does Dostoevsky’s “theology of suffering” fare in a comparison with one of the most perceptive portraits of power and powerlessness in world literature? In the proposed reading of the story, the elderly Tolstoy seeks to challenge the Christian theology that views responsibility for suffering and injustice primarily as an individual struggle with the metaphysical conditions of existence. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the theology of suffering from a biblical perspective by using literature review as methodology. Methodology: One of the foundational evangelical presuppositions for theological research is that Scripture is divinely authored and is therefore without error, and authoritative for our faith and practice. Findings: The study found that suffering is biblical and should be expected by all Christians as they are not exempted from it, unlike prosperity teaching. Suffering (...) has the purpose of refining and maturing our faith. Further, it is to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God. Unique Contribution to theory and practice: Therefore, it is recommended for Christians to depend on God at all seasons by asking for wisdom and grace from him. So in this paper, the relationship between suffering and the sovereignty of God and its implication to the church will be discussed with a particular focus on John Piper's work. (shrink)

_From Illiteracy to Literature_ presents innovative material based on research with ‘non-reading’ children and re-examines the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, through the lens of the psychical significance of reading: the forgotten adventure of our coming to reading. Anne-Marie Picard draws on two specific fields of interest: firstly the wish to understand the nature of literariness or the "literary effect", i.e. the pleasures we derive from reading; secondly research on reading pathologies carried out at St Anne’s Hospital, Paris. (...) The author uses clinical observations of non-reading children to answer literary questions about the reading experience, using psychoanalytic theory as a conceptual framework. The notion that reading difficulties or phobias should be seen as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, allows Picard to shed light on both clinical vignettes taken from children’s case histories and reading scenes from literary texts. Children experiencing difficulties in learning to read highlight the imaginary stakes of the confrontation with the arbitrary nature of the letter and the "price to pay" for one’s entrance into the Symbolic. Picard applies the lesson "taught" by these children to a series of key literary texts featuring, at their very core, this confrontation with the signifier, with the written code itself.. This book argues that there is something in literature that drives us back, again and again, to the loss we have suffered as human beings, to what we had to undergo to become human: our subjection to the common place of language. Picard shows complex Lacanian concepts "at work" in the field of reading pathologies, emphasizing close reading and a clinical attention to the "letter" of the texts, far from the "psychobiographical" attempts at psychologizing literary authors. _From Illiteracy to Literature_ presents a novel psychodynamic approach that will be of great interest to psychotherapists and language pathologists, appealing to literary scholars and those interested in the process of reading and "literariness.". (shrink)

Our current society seems to require a sharp separation between what can be tolerated in public and what must remain hidden. There is explicit and implicit censorship of both the subject of death and of the crying and suffering of surviving relatives and friends. Medieval literature and literary studies, however, show how the experience of dying and its appropriate manifestations of grief seemed to be more integrated into everyday life, as opposed to the apparent “disintegration” of nowadays. It (...) is possible to begin to detect this evolution already in medieval Hispanic literature itself, from an apparently more public, visible and integrated death in 13th-century Hispanic literature to a more private, concealed and disintegrated death in 15th-century Hispanic literature. This process will continue its journey to the present society of eternal springs and summers from which we have eradicated autumns and winters, seasons as necessary for the cycle of life – for personal, psychological and social balance – as the first two. Keywords: death; mourning; crying; medieval literature. Resumen Nuestra sociedad actual parece presentar una tajante separación entre lo que puede ser tolerado en público y lo que debe permanecer oculto. Hay una censura explícita e implícita tanto del tema de la muerte como del llanto y el sufrimiento de los familiares y amigos supervivientes. Sin embargo, la literatura medieval y los estudios literarios sobre la misma muestran cómo la experiencia del morir y sus apropiadas manifestaciones de dolor parecían estar más integradas en la vida cotidiana en contraposición a la aparente “desintegración” actual. Es posible comenzar a detectar esta evolución ya en la propia literatura hispánica medieval, desde una muerte aparentemente más pública, visible e integrada en la literatura hispánica del siglo XIII hasta una muerte más privada, oculta y desintegrada en la literatura hispánica del siglo XV. Este proceso continuará su recorrido hasta una sociedad actual de eternas primaveras y veranos de la que hemos erradicado los otoños e inviernos, estaciones tan necesarias para el ciclo de la vida —para el equilibrio personal, psicológico y social— como las dos primeras. Palabras clave: muerte; duelo; llanto; literatura medieval. (shrink)

Nowadays, the major depressive disorder is a common disease that negatively affects the life quality of many people around the world. As MDD symptoms are closely related with the changes in food and eating, the relation between patients’ emotional responses and food tastes could be used as criteria for diagnostic. Until now, studies on the emotional response to different food tastes for patients affected by MDD have been poorly described in literature. Therefore, the aim of this study was to (...) evaluate the emotional response of patients suffering from MDD to the imagined different food tastes and to compare the results with a control group. Emotional responses in tested participants were induced by using cards with words of basic food tastes such as “sweet,” “salty,” “bitter,” “sour,” and “neutral.” The assessment of emotional response was performed with FaceReader 6 software. The outcome of this study showed that participants with MDD expressed lower “happy” and “contempt” and higher “surprised” emotions, along with a higher negative valence mean, in comparison with controls for all tested basic tastes of food. When Likert scale was used, significant differences in response were only found for “sour” and “salty” imaginary tastes between healthy group and patients with MDD. The findings of this study provide the additional data on food–associated emotion analysis of MDD patients and could be useful for the further development of the contactless method for early diagnosis of MDD. (shrink)

While the evidential problem of evil has been enormously influential within the contemporary philosophical literature—William Rowe’s 1979 formulation in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” being the most seminal—no academic research has explored what cognitive mechanisms might underwrite the appearance of pointlessness in target examples of suffering. In this exploratory paper, we show that the perception of pointlessness in the target examples of suffering that underwrite Rowe’s seminal formulation of the problem of evil is (...) contingent on the absence of broader context. In other words, we show that when such suffering is presented alongside broader contextual information, the appearance of pointlessness, on average, significantly diminishes. In §1 we briefly elucidate Rowe’s formulation of the problem of evil and the thought experiment that motivates a key premise. In §2 and §3 respectively, we briefly explain our hypothesis regarding Rowe’s case and our methods for testing these hypotheses. In §4, we elucidate our results, and in §5 we explore some of the philosophical implications of our findings and gesture towards some areas for future research. Finally, in §6, we briefly connect our research to some of the established philosophical literature on suffering and narrative before concluding. (shrink)

Scholars have long grappled with the nature of Heracles’ νόσος and his consequent feminization in Sophocles’Women of Trachis(=Trachiniae). Despite being triggered by a poisonous garment, which acts by means of magic incantation, the evolution of Heracles’ symptoms is described as a clinical case. Yet, making sense of his feminization from a scientific perspective has proven hard. In this paper, I investigate the symptoms experienced by Heracles, which Sophocles generically refers to as νόσος. The first part focusses on Sophocles’ description oferôsas (...) a disease inTrachiniae. I then move on to dividing Heracles’ symptoms into two categories, which I will call νόσος1and νόσος2. The erotic passion for Iole which Heracles naturally experiences in the first part of the tragedy will be denoted by νόσος1, whereas νόσος2will refer to the magic-induced symptoms from which he suffers in the second and final part. In the final section of the paper I will seek to provide a scientific explanation for νόσος2and, ultimately, to describe the medical reasons behind Heracles’ feminization. (shrink)

Empirical research shows the significant negative effects inequality has on aspects such as public health, vulnerability to violence, and social trust. While the majority of researchers agree that there exist specific social determinants of health as well as a distinct social gradient in health , there is wide disagreement both over what the exact causal relationship between social inequalities and health is, and what the adequate policy responses especially to the SGH are. For policy-oriented theorists, the question arises which normative (...) implications these empirical findings offer for philosophers working on equality.This paper argues that the first lesson philosophers should take away from the empirical literature is that the issue that needs to be addressed is harmful social inequality, rather than unequal material distributions, or unequal opportunities and starting gates as such. That is to say, inequality with respect to a specific feature X is not—in itself—the problem, but the problem are the negative effects of certain harmful forms of complex social inequalities. For our normative analysis this entails that we should focus on the conceptualization of the ideal of social equality, and the kinds of relationships and institutional arrangements compatible with it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 46-58 [Access article in PDF] In Defense of Trimming Eugene Goodheart I In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams disparages a class of English politicians as "trimmers." They are "the political economist, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers of Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were timid--and with good reason--and timidity, which is high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies (...) the whole cast of thought in action." 1 Timidity in action, but high wisdom in philosophy. Adams's ambivalent characterization is, relatively speaking, kind to the trimmer, for in the prevailing view he has a reputation for cowardice, lack of integrity, unprincipled behavior. Dante did not know the word, but the "neutrals" (in Sinclair's translation) whom the poet consigns to limbo have been retroactively called trimmers. Virgil regards them as beneath contempt: "Let us not talk of them; but look thou and pass." Sinclair explains why: "These innumerable seekers of safety first, and last, who take no risk either of suffering in a good cause or of scandal in a bad one, are here manifestly, nakedly, that which they were in life, the waste and rubbish of the universe, of no account to the world, unfit for Heaven and barely admitted to Hell. They have no need to die, for they 'never were alive'. They follow still, as they have always done, a meaningless, shifting banner that never stands for anything because it never stands at all, a cause which is no cause but the changing magnet of the day. Their pains are paltry and their tears and blood mere food for worms." 2The dictionary defines trimming as the "modif[ication] of one's attitude in order to stand well with opposite parties; also to accommodate oneself to the mood of the times," and gives 1685 as the date of provenance. By the late nineteenth century trimming becomes opportunism: [End Page 46] "to modify according to expediency." So it was something of a surprise to find a defense of trimming in Macaulay's famous History of England in his eulogy of one of Charles the Second's ministers, Viscount Halifax (Charles Savile). "Halifax," we learn, "was a trimmer on principle. He was also a trimmer by the constitution of his head and his heart." Macaulay sums up Halifax's defense in his essay "The Character of a Trimmer." "Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims between the climate in which men are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice." Behind trimming lies Aristotle's golden mean.What of the character of the trimmer? Macaulay provides an admirable and admiring portrait of Halifax. "His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined, his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration." Charming and agreeable, but where is the integrity or courage, attributes that we associate with character? He had nothing in common with those who fly from extreme to extreme, and regard the party which they have deserted with an animosity far exceeding that of consistent enemies. His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community.... The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his lasting honor it must be mentioned that he attempted to save those victims whose fate... (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing jurisprudential and philosophical literature on the concept of harm, in particular, what it means to suffer harm. This paper defends the most unpopular acc...

Contemporary literature on the divine im/passibility debate has been concerned, among other things, with the intellectual and cultural context in which twentieth century passibilism arose. Foremost among the cultural and intellectual factors cited as occasioning the rise of passibilism are the moral evils and consequent suffering that have occurred during the twentieth century and which have become focal for both theology and the philosophy of religion. This paper seeks to clarify the way in which the modern experience of (...) and response to suffering has affected modern theology and philosophy of religion with respect to the im/passibility debate. The paper begins by establishing the unintelligibility of the claim that the rise of passibilism is due to an increase in suffering, and criticising other models of the relationship between the rise of passibilism and the experience of suffering. Having concluded that existent models of the relation between passibilism and suffering are unsatisfactory, the paper suggests that belief in a suffering God has arisen as a response to the psychological need, in the face of suffering, for a transcendent fellow sufferer, previously fulfilled by prayers to the saints and reflections upon the particular sufferings of Christ. In so doing, the paper highlights some of the frequently overlooked deep-rooted issues inherent in the im/passibility debate, and points to essentially Protestant qualities found in passibilist theology and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Madness and Modernism is undoubtedly one of the most profound and perspicacious treatments of an illness that is utterly baffling to most laypersons and academics alike. Sass artfully brings together two obscure, complex, and unnerving realms -- the schizophrenic and the modern and postmodern aesthetic -- into mutual enlightenment. The comparisons between schizophrenic symptoms such as loss of ego boundaries, perspectival switching, and world catastrophe with modern literature and art is so adroit that it is almost eerie. The reader (...) finds herself peering into a borderline incomprehensible realm with increasing levels of clarity, by which she gains insight into the utterly chaotic, confused, and bizarre. The lucidity Sass brings to the obscure and confused is a reflection of the many contradictions he introduces to his readers as being entirely paradigmatic of both madness and modernism: that of desiring human contact but also shunning it entirely, of being both afflicted by disease but also exercising a sort of agency, and indeed, an ideal intellectual freedom within the confines of such an affliction, of moving both towards an objectifying materiality of the external world and a total subjectivization of perception, of the tendency towards the hyperabstract and the utterly concrete (between being too "far away" or "too close," respectively). Sass is able to make sense of a world in which these contradictions exist side by side simultaneously, and the disconcerting confusion this causes is palpable to the reader. Sass demonstrates not only his penetrating intellect, but also his unwavering patience and empathy, both in the treatment of the subject matter and the treatment of the subjects suffering from this extraordinary illness. The book is required reading for anyone interested in phenomenological psychiatry, or even psychiatry more generally. (shrink)

Phenomenology has attended often to the theme of pain, but less to suffering. Careful study of the latter leads to results that correspond with observations appearing in the philosophy of medicine and in literature. The difference between pain and suffering exposes the fact that in some instances the latter defies conceptions of subjectivity widely accepted in phenomenology. The subject who suffers is a subject who struggles to give meaning to his or her experience, and in some instances (...) loses the capacity entirely. A phenomenological account of these possibilities sharpens the challenge brought to the theology that, under the heading of theodicy, defends the unitary meaning of all experience. The theology that abandons theodicy may thereby recover a strong sense of its own biblical roots, which nurture a love of the God-man who suffers out of love for us. (shrink)