Concept

Suffering

Overview

Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness or aversion, possibly associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena. The opposite of suffering is pleasure or happiness.

Suffering is often categorized as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of occurrence usually compound those of intensity. Attitudes toward suffering may vary widely, in the sufferer or other people, according to how much it is regarded as avoidable or unavoidable, useful or useless, deserved or undeserved.

Suffering occurs in the lives of sentient beings in numerous manners, often dramatically. As a result, many fields of human activity are concerned with some aspects of suffering. These aspects may include the nature of suffering, its processes, its origin and causes, its meaning and significance, its related personal, social, and cultural behaviors, its remedies, management, and uses.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Suffering is discussed.

The difference, which we have represented as two paths, consists in whether that knowledge is called up by suffering which is merely and purely _known_, and is freely appropriated by means of the penetration of the _principium individuationis_, or by suffering which is directly _felt_ by a man himself. True salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
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It is misleading to call the suffering that we experience at such a sight, and which may be of a very different kind, commiseration. For in all cases it is a suffering from which the suffering person before us is free: it is our own suffering, just as his suffering is his own.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
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What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering; such a _senselessness_, however, existed neither in Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naive ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in suffering from the standpoint of the spectator, or the inflictor of the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
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This faith they do not know at all, and give up, thinking that God has forsaken them and is become their enemy; they even lay the blame of their ills on men and devils, and have no confidence at all in God. For this reason, too, their suffering is always an offence and harmful to them, and yet they go and do some good works, as they think, and are not aware of their unbelief. But they who in such suffering trust God…
Martin Luther, A Treatise on Good Works
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The only difference lies in the degree of suffering necessary to bring about the fatal act, a degree which will be high in the case of a cheerful, and low in that of a gloomy man. The greater the melancholy, the lower need the degree be; in the end, it may even sink to zero.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
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Suffering

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Suffering

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition