Jung is wrong. It’s not integration or understanding the archetypes or anything like that. It’s meaning. Those who found some meaning in their suffering survived, even though all the other indicators predicted that they wouldn’t. And those who didn’t— didn’t.
He writes, “To live is to suffer. Therefore, if life has meaning, suffering has meaning, too.” That seems to me to be utterly logical. The corollary is that if suffering does not have meaning, then life does not have meaning, because to live is to suffer.
He observed that different people had different answers to the question “Why are we suffering this absurd and agonizing thing?” But all the answers had one thing in common: They all turned a corner from asking the question “Life, what is your meaning?” to realizing that life was questioning them by name, “What is your meaning?” They could answer the question only by action, not just by thought, and those who believed in a God behind life asked the same question of God: “God, why me? What are you doing, and why?” Those that turned the corner realized that God was questioning them, which is exactly what happened to Job. When God showed up, he didn’t give answers; he gave questions. How Socratic God is!
A second thinker who takes suffering very, very seriously is Buddha, one of the greatest psychologists of all time. He based an entire— well, we can’t quite call it religion;
His whole religion— if you want to call it that— is geared toward salvation from suffering, and his startlingly simple diagnosis is that to end suffering, you must end its cause. Its cause is egotism, or selfish desire, but in his psychology, the ego or ego-consciousness and egotism are inseparable, and therefore, you must see through the ego as an illusion and transform consciousness.
Let’s contrast Buddha to Christ, who also takes suffering very seriously and claims that he comes to address this problem. But his solution, like that of Frankl, is more a deed than a thought like Buddha’s, and contrasting to Buddha, his way is a way into suffering, not out of it. Christ also claims to be a way of salvation, but the problem for him is not so much suffering but sin. It’s a different sort of thing. That vaguely has something or other— philosophers like to be vague at first, before they hone in on exact definitions— to do with the whole moral order, and that brings us back to Socrates, who famously taught in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.
In other words, suffering isn’t so bad. Sin is worse. It is much worse to do evil than to suffer it. That sounds hopelessly idealistic. If you had the choice between doing something a little wicked— let’s say, cheating the IRS on your income tax or being tortured and roasted over a barbecue spit for thirteen hours straight— unless you’re very unusual, I can predict what you would choose. What in the world could he possibly have meant by saying, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it”?
Well, Socrates had this notion that at the essence of a person was this thing called the soul or the self, rather than just the body. He taught, almost with his last words, that no evil can ever happen to a good man, whether in this life or in the next— a very strange thing to say, because clearly he is a good man and he has just been unfairly condemned, misunderstood, sentenced to death, put into prison, and his life is taken from him. That’s as bad a thing as we can do to people. So, what could he mean by “no evil could happen to a good man”? He’s in the middle of evil happening to a good man, and he says, “It doesn’t really happen.”
To the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Socrates’s answer is “They never do.” What in the world could he mean by that? It sounds absurd— a person is the soul, and evil never happens to the soul. It happens to the body.
You know that two-word bumper sticker that summarizes all of human history with such eloquence: It happens. By the way, do you know where that came from? There’s a real story behind that. Sometime in the sixties, there was a farmer walking across a cornfield in Kansas, minding his own business. It was a nice June day; somewhere out of the sky came something that crashed into his head, blew his brains out, and killed him. It was a two-foot square of frozen detritus, which had worked its way loose from a rusty airliner toilet. I can just imagine that family tradition: “Mommy, how did Grandpa die?” “Well, you know, kid, it happens.”
But that only happens to the body. It doesn’t happen to the soul. “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Oh, great evil can be done to the soul, indeed, but I am the agent of it. I am the agent and responsible for folly and vice, not you.
Once Socrates realized that, he could die with a smile. Jesus said something a bit similar, although, as a Jew, Jesus takes the body much more seriously, because it’s part of the image of God and God created it and Jesus doesn’t have this dualism that the Greeks had between body and soul. But Jesus too said— what seems, to me, the single most practical sentence uttered in the history of the world— “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own self?”
None of the aforementioned remarks are meant to be a solution to the problem of suffering. They are meant to hone in on its centrality. There are two parts, or forms, to the problem of suffering— one is practical, and one is theoretical.
The practical one is what can we do about it, and we have come up with a number of answers, all of which are inadequate. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud raises the wonderful question “Why, now that we have become gods, aren’t we happy?” He says we don’t need gods or God anymore, because we’ve got technology. Technology has attained the wishful thinking that produced religion. We would like to be above the thunder and lightning, knowing it and controlling it like Zeus. Instead, we cower in superstitious fear in caves, thinking that the thunderstorm is the wrath of an angry God. We’ve become God; so, we need not fear. We are Mercury sending messages through space at will. Since we’ve become gods, since these natural human desires have been attained, we certainly should be happier, because happiness is the fundamental desire, but we’re not. The more civilized we are, the more happy we are? Oh, no, not at all.
Freud even toys for a while with Rousseau’s notion that the more civilized we are, the more unhappy we are, and that we would be happier to go back to being a noble savage, which, of course, is impossible. It’s a great question, and Freud confesses honestly, as a good scientist, that he doesn’t know the answer to it.
So, practically speaking, we have not come up with an answer to the problem of suffering. The only thing we can do about suffering is to live through it. To live is to suffer.
So, let’s look at the theoretical problem, the logic of the problem: Why must we suffer? Explain it. Maybe you can’t solve it, but at least let’s explain it. It makes a difference whether God is thrown into the equation. Suppose you’re a Marxist. What’s the cause of suffering? Inadequate social structures, class conflict. What can be done about it? They can be modified. Something like a heaven on earth can be attained by a bloody revolution, but you still have to die and you still have pain nerves all over your body.
Theoretically, the problem comes in much greater if you believe in God. If suffering just happens, then it just happens; but if the whole of our selves and our lives and our universe is a design— a deliberate design, not an accident— a novel written by God, then why does he write such a lousy novel? Thus, Job, the classic sufferer, the classic philosopher in suffering, would not have nearly the passion, including the intellectual passion, if he didn’t have God to get angry at. Perhaps one of the things God wants us to do is to get angry with him, because
