An essential part of the teachings and directives of the great religious and philosophical thinkers the world over has been on the meaning o f
pain and suffering. Based on these teachings, invitations and instruc
tions were issued to encounter suffering correctly— to suffer properly (or to move suffering to another plane).
Neither the interpretation of suffering nor the way of responding to it would be meaningful if the life of the emotions were exclusively rest less, mute, and blind. If emotions were produced solely according to the principle of causality, they would operate merely as conditions that control us. However, our emotional life does not work in this way. Our emotions are organized into a highly differentiated system of nat ural disclosures and signs. By means of these signs we are made aware o f ourselves. A given emotion occurs in experience already as some thing with a “ meaning,” a “sense.” This emotion presents objective evaluations of states of affairs, of an activity or certain fate that may befall us, or of an anticipated value of such an event. In these antici pations, the emotions urge us to do something or caution us to stop. In the feeling of fatigue there is a warning that may be expressed in the language of common sense as “ stop working” or “ go to sleep.” The vertigo we experience when we stand before an abyss urges us to “ step back.” The warning in this feeling seeks to save us from a fall by pre senting the image of the fall in advance of its possible actuality. A dread announces to us a possible damage to life as a “ danger” before such a thing occurs. Because of this dread, we are better able to cope with this possibility.1 A hope drives us to act and promises us some good before we possess it. A shame preserves intact, and in public, one’s affection for the body and mind o f a person deemed worthy o f
This essay was originally published in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, “ Vom Sinn des Leides,” Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, ed. M aria Scheler, (Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1963), pp. 3 6 -7 2 . A literal translation of this essay into English by Daniel Liderbach appeared in Max Scheler (1874-1928): Centennial Essays,
ed. Manfred S. Frings (The Hague: M artinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 121-63. Although helpful at several points, I found this translation to be rough and have retranslated Scheler’s essay entirely.
The Meaning of Suffering 83 this, as well as commitment to that person.2 An appetite or a loathing clarifies for us emotionally the use or harm of a food. A repentance relieves us of our past and frees us for a new good because it purges the past, perhaps in a painful manner, and discards what was a bur den.3 All these examples show that emotions can have, in our experi ence of them, an inherent meaning. This meaning distinguishes itself clearly from its causal origin and purely objective purposefulness in daily life. Indeed, this meaning may relate to many kinds of pain ap parently lacking in meaning.
Ju st as feeling is not devoid of meaning and sense, so is feeling not merely a state. Emotions can also be expressed in a variety of ways:4 pain and suffering, not simply the stimulus that causes them, can be felt differently in functionally distinct levels. The stimuli that cause physical pain to which the emotions react are constant in history. But the capacity for enduring and tolerating pain, which is different from its stimuli, has varied in the history of civilization. The same is true for the capacity to be joyful. The capacity to be joyful is greater as the sensation of pleasure is smaller and more fleeting. The emotional func tion of “ enjoying oneself” puts this sensation into play. Also, the emotional-functional acceptance of the same feeling can vary in the following ways: we can “ give ourselves up” to suffering or pit our selves against it; we can “ endure” suffering, “ tolerate” it, or simply “ suffer” ; we can even “ enjoy” suffering (algophilia). These phrases signify styles of feeling and of willing based on feeling, which are clearly not determined by the mere state of feeling.
One level above these “ functions of feeling” consists of acts of our
spiritual personality. These acts, in which the whole of our life is inte
grated into the world, give an entirely different character to the size, place, meaning, and fruitfulness of our feelings. Here one can find dif ferences of several kinds: of attentiveness, e.g., in being sensitive and insensitive to emotions; o f mental movements, in which pain and suf fering are sought or efforts made to escape them (for pain and suffering can actually be “ overcome” only by being “ suppressed” into the sub conscious); of evaluation, in which suffering is seen as a penalty or atonement, a means of purification or correction, etc.; and finally, of religious and metaphysical interpretation, by means of which our emotions are integrated, beyond their immediate meanings, as a part is connected to the totality of the world and to its divine ground. Every philosophical doctrine of suffering thus conveys a special symbol of our palpitations of heart and attributes meaningful or meaningless powers to guide us in interpreting the play of our emotions.
are equally factual for every living person, and this is the inescapable destiny of all. Nevertheless, in spite of this blind reality, there is a sphere of meaning and a sphere of freedom in which the great doc trines of salvation are rooted.
All suffering and pains of creatures have at least an objective mean ing. As Aristotle already recognized, pleasure of any kind, and its op
posite, express either that life is enhanced or inhibited. This statement remains correct in principle in spite of apparent exceptions. We can certainly drink a mouthful of ice water, which quenches our thirst pleasurably, although, in a flushed state, we run the risk of dying; there are painful operations, which save the life of the body; there are sweet, tasty poisons and bitter medicines in the literal and figurative senses. The degree of harm to life and pain appear only slightly to mirror one another: the tearing out of a fingernail causes great pain, although it is irrelevant to one’s continued living, whereas the destruction of a part o f the cerebral cortex, which is fatal, is painless. These and similar objections can be overcome by introducing three other truths along with Aristotle’s principle:
1. Meaningful feelings of warning and attraction are directed only tow ard damaging or enhancing influences typical for the species of an organism as these influences are encountered in nature. If a part of the organism is normally protected from intrusions, as the cortex is pro tected by the skull, then pain is not alarming. Pain is the normal me dium of communication between every organ and the brain concern ing threats to the organ (the organ doesn’t wait until damage has already occurred to warn the brain). But nature cannot take into con sideration changing stimuli and combinations of stimuli caused by civ ilization and history. N or can nature consider rare, artificial opera tions on the organism.
2. Pleasure and displeasure are symptoms and psychic reflections of the enhancement or inhibition of life. However, not all feelings may be taken as involving the entire life of the organism. Feelings mostly per tain only to the life activity of that part of the organism and its imme diate state in direct contact with the stimuli. The lower, peripheral emotions, principally the sensations, do not err concerning the value they find in the stimuli. But they are completely particularized wit nesses and, at the same time, generally shortsighted, i.e., the drink of water does enhance briefly the life activity of the immediately stimu lated organ in spite of the terminal harmfulness to the whole organism by the stimulus in the long run.
The Meaning o f Suffering 85 with the doctrine of deep levels o f feeling, as I have developed this in another writing.5 1 referred to the following levels:
a. Sensations, which are localized throughout the organism— pain, sensual pleasure, itching, and tickling.
b. Vital feelings, which are restricted to the whole of the organism and its particular life center— weakness, vigor, weak and strong life feeling, restfulness and tension, fear, sense of health, sense of sickness. These feelings are not experienced as a kind of grief, sadness, or joy. They are not qualities of the spiritual “ self” “possessing” a body, but are spread diffusely throughout the whole of the lived body. These feel ings are self-relating because of the self-relatedness of the whole body.
c. Psychic feelings, which are immediately self-relating and, at the same time, relate functionally to prominent fantasy items, to persons of the environment, and to external or personal things. These relations are mediated primarily by one’s imagination. On this level, emotion is “ intentional” and values are grasped cognitively. One is able to feel the same thing again that was once felt. One can also respond to others sympathetically or compassionately. The sensations and vital feelings, in contrast, remain “ static” because it is of their essence to be always merely “ topical” and to belong only to the subject that feels them; they are not communicable as are the deeper feelings. Indeed, sensations are not communicable at all; vital feelings are communicable only to a limited extent. However, spiritual feelings are “ static” in a different sense. In the changing feelings of the lived body, the higher feelings shift only slightly since they draw their meaning from processes repre sented independently of the body whose value they simultaneously lay hold of.
d. Purely spiritual, religious-metaphysical feelings, the “ feelings of salvation,” which relate to the core of the spiritual person as to an indivisible whole— happiness, despair, security, pangs of conscience, peace, etc. One who carefully studies both the levels of feeling and the many rich and lawful ways in which feelings are interrelated will soon learn that the experiences of “ enhancement” and “ inhibition,” grasped either in the opposition between pleasure and displeasure or as something objectively announced, do not always refer in man to the “ same thing” at each level. The life of the whole organism is experi enced as enhanced or inhibited only in vital feelings. Actually, the or ganism experiences its life in vital feelings as being “ hindered” or “helped.” The particular, near sighted sensations must first be pro cessed in the spiritual life center— the drive center. They must be “per ceived” and “ appreciated” in the interplay of feelings by the higher
synthetic functions, so that the sensations become biologically mean ingful for the felt vitality of the whole organism. Spiritual and intellec tual feelings, however, do not chiefly announce the enhancement and inhibition o f the “ life” that we humans share essentially with the higher animals. Rather, these feelings are intended to make known to us the perfection and depreciation of our intellectual-spiritual person whose moral destiny and individual direction are largely independent of our animal life. This orientation to our spiritual person is true es pecially for the religious-metaphysical and moral feelings— for ex ample, in each feeling of conscience.
The most formal, general concept under which all suffering may be subsumed, from sensations of pain to religious-metaphysical despair, appears to me to be the idea of sacrifice. Death, in the objective mean ing of the word, is “ sacrifice.” It is a sacrifice the organic individual has to endure for the procreation of the species. In addition, the origin o f death is closely linked with procreation and its related loss of sub stance and vitality. Nevertheless, death’s natural approach and the length o f life of the species are dependent upon procreation. Death is, morphologically, a sacrifice for the sake of a certain type of organiza tion and differentiation (Minot), which appears for the first time in the world o f the M etazoa. All suffering and pain are, according to a meta physical and most formal meaning, a sacrifice of the part for the whole and o f relatively lower values for higher ones.
However true Aristotle’s basic thought is concerning pleasure and displeasure as signs of the enhancement and constraint of life, the soul, and the person, nevertheless this idea cannot make understandable the meaning of the existence of suffering and pain in the world. What Ar istotle explains is simply the meaningful and purposeful relation of pleasure and pain to stimuli and reactions of the organism when stim uli augment or moderate life. These relations are meaningful and pur poseful as a system of signs, of attractions and warnings, for a definite behavior of the organism. All kinds of “ training” of animals and hu mans, insofar as they use nonmoral rewards and punishments, merely make use of these natural relations of feelings to specific life processes. Thus, “ self-training” is the proper name for one’s own experiences of learning, which the organism undergoes on the basis of success and failure of originally merely arbitrary movements— such as reflexes or play. On the other hand, any training that is artificial and externally imposed uses only the natural system of rewards and punishments of the organic life of feeling for situations, deeds, and goals not typical of the natural way of life of the organism. However, the question must be raised, if there is indeed a signal system of warnings and attractions
The Meaning o f Suffering 87 for life-enhancing and life-damaging behavior, why does this system take pain and suffering exclusively as signs? Why not other kinds of signals? Why not signals that do not hurt— as pain does? Why did the divine cause of the world, since he is so reasonable and wise, not use a less barbaric and intense remedy to provide for his creatures a system of natural signals to warn or attract them concerning what should be avoided or done for their self-preservation and self-help? And why were goodness and love, which higher religions assign exclusively to the Cause of the world, so little in keeping with his judgment that he chose pain and suffering to Warn his creatures of a danger to life? The Aristotelian idea, which has often been used in a theodicy, is theologi cally insufficient. I proclaim boldly; if I had wanted to come to the idea of the existence of God by means of a cause-effect connection starting from nature and the existence of the world as known to me empiri cally, and not from an original, personal, and experiential contact of the core of my personality with a divine goodness and wisdom as found in a religious act,6 then, even if the rest of the world shines in peace, bliss, and harmony, the existence of a single sensation of pain in a worm would completely suffice to destroy my belief in an “ infinitely good” and almighty creator of the world.
Only when one sees pain and suffering in light of the idea of sacri
fice is it, perhaps, possible to come closer to a more profound theodicy
of suffering. This was the understanding of suffering early Christianity took originally with the powerful idea of the sacrificial suffering of God who, in Christ, was born out of love and died as a representative for humankind.
The ambiguous idea of “ sacrifice” must first be clarified. One can only speak of an objective sacrifice when the attainment of a good of comparatively “ higher value” appears to be necessarily related to de struction or lessening of a good of comparatively lower value— assum ing there is an evil or a misery in such a lower value. This objective sense is distinct from freely sacrificing oneself or sacrificing something of which only free and wise persons are capable. When one admits merely positive and negative values and different quantities of each, but does not also acknowledge objective scales of value, one can speak only of costs but not of sacrifice. Whoever prefers a greater pleasure to a lesser one, or a longer-lasting future pleasure to a passing present one of the same kind, or lesser suffering to greater ones, does not thereby make a “ sacrifice.” He is only carefully estimating the “ costs.” The notion of sacrifice encompasses much more: not only a calculus of pleasure and displeasure, or an estimate of goods and miseries, but an irrevocable elimination of goods and pleasure that cannot reappear in
other forms. Furthermore, sacrifice embraces a final establishment of misery and pain. Each sacrifice is, subjectively and objectively, always also necessarily a sacrifice for something. Mere positing of a misery or a suffering by itself as an objective event is meaningless. If suffering is freely pursued and intended it is absurd, pathological, as in algophilia, the passion for the gruesome, the negativity of purely destroying one self and others. However, sacrificing “ for” always implies a positive value of a higher level or the avoidance of an evil of a higher level— higher, that is, than the level on which the sacrificed good is found. “ Sacrifice” is necessary when conformity among things and events that carry value inexorably links the realization of a higher positive value, or the avoidance of an evil of a higher range, to the establish ment and realization of an evil of a lower range.
From the point of view of this formal notion of sacrifice, I assert that each kind of pain and suffering, regardless of how the person who suffers behaves toward any of them, is the subjective reflection in the psyche of sacrifice. Each suffering is correlated to objective events of sacrifice in which a good of a lower order is surrendered for a good of a higher order.
The fundamental ontological relationship here is between part and whole. However, the whole is not artificial. It does not exist only by the grace of our comprehensive understanding. It is real. And it is more than the sum of its parts. The whole in which suffering occurs is one whose being, effect, and value are independent of the being, effect, and value of its parts. Only when this whole, this totality, works and lives in its parts, while the parts are not only in but also work “ for” the whole, can there be talk of sacrifice of a part for the whole. And only then does the possibility of any kind of suffering persist. In such cases the parts of the whole are also called its “ members” in which the rela tion between whole and part is a “ connection in solidarity.” Here the whole rules, leads, and guides “ for” the parts, and the parts specifi