Ivan Ilyin reflects on Pain and Suffering:

“The minute we feel that we are suffering, physically or spiritually, we must immediately remember that we do not suffer alone – and that every suffering, without exception, has some higher purpose. We will immediately feel relief.”

The concept of “not suffering alone” has important consequences if one was to imagine a world devoid of pain and suffering.

“Such is life, such is reality. And could it have been otherwise? And would it be correct if we began to desire and demand another way?

Free from suffering

Let us imagine for a moment another, inverted portrayal of the world. Let us imagine that earth’s creatures have been freed from all pain and suffering, completely and forever, that some mighty voice said to them: ‘Creatures, do what you will. You are set free of suffering. From now on, you will not know dissatisfaction. No bodily pain will strike you. Neither sorrow, nor anguish, nor spiritual fragmentation will come to you. No spiritual anxiety will come near your soul. From this point on, you are sentenced to eternal and absolute contentment. Go and live.’ 

Let us imagine that man has forever lost the gift of suffering. Nothing threatens him with dissatisfaction, hungering thirst, those primary sources of effort and suffering, have ceased altogether, as well as dissatisfaction with oneself, with other people and the world. The sense of imperfection has vanished forever, and with it the desire for perfection. Every possible trace of deprivation, which before had urged man forward, has fallen away.

Bodily pain, which warns man of impending danger to his health and awakens his adaptability, resourcefulness, and inquisitiveness, has been taken away. Every aberration of nature is now protected and goes unpunished. Any ugliness and abomination of life are of no concern to the new man. Moral indignation, previously arising from contact with ill will, has disappeared. Painful reproaches of conscience have been forever silenced.

Spiritual thirst , which before led people to the desert, to great asceticism, has ceased for good. Everyone is content with everything: everyone likes everything; everyone indulges in everything without measure or choice. Everyone lives in promiscuous, primitive hedonism – yet this hedonism is neither passionate nor(for passions tormenting), nor intense (for intensities possible only where strengths are not wasted), but rather accumulated due to abstinence.

Anthropoids

How can I describe the terrible, devastating consequences that would fall upon mankind once it has been doomed to absolute contentment?

The world would see the rise of a new , despicable breed of ‘anthropoids” – a breed of indiscriminating hedonists surviving on the very lowest of spiritual levels. These would be non-repentant, lazy idlers, irresponsible loafers with no interests, no temperament, no fire, no drive, no flight; lovers of no one  and nothing – for love is first of all a sense of deprivation and hunger.

They would be amoral, tasteless idiots, self-satisfied fools, lecherous Lemures. Imagine their undifferentiated , expressionless faces, those flat, low foreheads, those dead, shallow gazers that used to be eyes, those pointlessly smacking mouths… Do you hear their inarticulate  speech, that indifferent mumbling of eternal satiety, their hapless laughter of idiots? It is frightening to think of their lost spirituality, their dumb turpitude, the denigration of these half-men who exclude nothing, who have been cursed by God and doomed never to deal with suffering…

The Gift

And when you imagine this scene, you see and feel  what the gift of suffering gives to us; and you want to beg all heavenly and earthly doctors, for God’s sake, to never deprive people of this gift. For without suffering, a quick and tragic end would come to us all – to our dignity, our spirit, and our culture.”

[Lemures or larvae: in Roman mythology, these were vengeful spirits, ghosts of the dead buried without rites, who wandered the earth at night and drove people to insanity.]

About Hedonism

“The word ‘hedonism’ comes from the ancient Greek for ‘pleasure’. Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that only pleasure or pain motivates us. Ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value and only pain or displeasure has disvalue or the opposite of worth. Jeremy Bentham asserted both psychological and ethical hedonism with the first two sentences of his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure.

It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do”. Debate about hedonism was a feature too of many centuries before Bentham, and this has also continued after him. Other key contributors to debate over hedonism include Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aquinas, Butler, Hume, Mill, Nietzsche, Brentano, Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, Broad, Ryle and Chisholm.

In general, pleasure is understood broadly below, as including or as included in all pleasant feeling or experience: contentment, delight, ecstasy, elation, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, exultation, gladness, gratification, gratitude, joy, liking, love, relief, satisfaction, Schadenfreude, tranquility, and so on. Pain or displeasure too is understood broadly below, as including or as included in all unpleasant experience or feeling: ache, agitation, agony, angst, anguish, annoyance, anxiety, apprehensiveness, boredom, chagrin, dejection, depression, desolation, despair, desperation, despondency, discomfort, discombobulation, discontentment, disgruntlement, disgust, dislike, dismay, disorientation,

dissatisfaction, distress, dread, enmity, ennui, fear, gloominess, grief, guilt, hatred, horror, hurting, irritation, loathing, melancholia, nausea, queasiness, remorse, resentment, sadness, shame, sorrow, suffering, sullenness, throb, terror, unease, vexation, and so on. ‘Pain or displeasure’ is usually stated below just as ‘pain’ or just as ‘displeasure’. Further economy is sometimes secured by stating, just about pleasure or just about displeasure, points that do or might apply to both. Whether such pleasure-displeasure parallels actually hold is a significant further issue, touched upon only briefly in the present entry.

What sort of entity is pleasure or pain? Candidates include: state, state of affairs, thing, event and property. Second, is it a first-order entity or a higher-order entity? For example, is your pain your toothache, its naggingness, or both? When you enjoy the cityscape below your viewpoint, is your pleasure your view, your enjoyment of it, the pleasurableness of your enjoyment of it, or all three?

And so on. Third, does pleasure essentially have a ‘feel’ or phenomenology, a ‘something it is like’ (Nagel 1974). Fourth, does it essentially have directedness or ‘aboutness’ or intentionality? These issues about the nature of pleasure and displeasure are discussed below (see also the entry for pleasure) as they bear on the nature and merits of various forms of hedonism.” (source)