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ity who administers punishment for wrongdoing. Schadenfreude, a social
emotion, says something about the milieu in which it circulates. People
habitually seek meaning in suffering.
In the final section of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche tells us
that mankind s curse is not suffering itself but rather the meaninglessness
of suffering. We believe we could bear a great deal of suffering, provided
it served some good purpose. Whether thinking about our own or others
suffering, we grope for some comprehensible purpose for it, such as patri-
otism, foolishness, or ignorance. The suffering or pain of a soldier
wounded in war, for example, is easier to bear both for him and for his
family and friends than the suffering of the same soldier seriously hurt
by an injury during basic training or through foolish behavior.
Ecclesiastical penance, at least in its original form, institutionalized
meaningful suffering. The distress incurred and then released by penance
atoned for sin. The satisfaction of penance signified extinction of sins and
thus made reconciliation possible. Priests tailored penance to fit given
sins. This practice triggered considerable anxiety, for it was only a matter
of chance whether a precisely equivalent penance was found for any given
sin. Believers feared God s wrath more than any earthly penance and thus
accepted a penitential system of draconian severity on the theory that the
harsher the penance in this world, the smaller would be the punishment in
The Meaning of Suffering 61
the next. Penance evolved from and enforced a belief that bad people will
get what they deserve.
Nietzsche takes issue with the practice of penance, or ascetic ideals,
in On the Genealogy of Morals, reasoning that it is pointless to make life
worse by voluntarily increasing what persons would otherwise try to
avoid. Nietzsche does not miss the difference on which penance turns:
meaningless suffering is unendurable, but suffering we inflict upon our-
selves comes with a clear meaning on its face, a meaning that can be ex-
tended to the rest of life. What is that meaning? That we are the cause of
our own suffering:
Human beings, suffering from themselves in one way or other . . .
uncertain why or wherefore, thirsting for reasons reasons re-
lieve thirsting, too for remedies and narcotics, at last take coun-
sel with one who knows hidden things, too and behold! they
receive a hint, they receive from their sorcerer, the ascetic priest,
the first hint as to the cause of their suffering; they must seek it
in themselves, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, they must un-
derstand their suffering as punishment. (GM III, Section 20)
The ascetic priests cannot eliminate suffering, but they can explain why it
is inevitable. The suffering they prescribe gives adherents a sense of con-
trol over the rest of life s suffering. In The Varieties of Religious Experi-
ence William James articulated from a quite different perspective the great
attraction of a sense of control over suffering: There are saints who have
literally fed on . . . humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering
and death their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their
outward state grew more intolerable. No other emotion than religious
emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. 14 James and Nietzsche
both view asceticism as a function of religious devotion. Nietzsche
thought the love of ascetic ideals masked a pathological fear of happiness
and beauty. For him asceticism was akin to cruelty, insofar as it entailed
taking satisfaction in the creation of suffering. Because Nietzsche deplored
all suffering, self-imposed suffering seemed to him perverse. Nietzsche fur-
ther opposed attributing the cause of suffering to divine justice. He af-
firmed that religious believers preferred feeling guilty to feeling helpless.
62 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
Despite the enormous differences among various examples of suffer-
ing, one aspect remains constant: he who suffers believes that he has to
some extent lost control of his world. Even suffering out of sympathy for
another person or cause can cause us to lose grip of our self-identity. Suf-
fering signals that the rules we live by are somehow inadequate or no
longer valid. Suffering challenges the vision and the assumptions upon
which identity is based.15 The suffering of a mean-spirited or hypocritical
person might be considered good, insofar as the rules by which he or she
lives seem unfair or uncharitable. The suffering of an ostensibly kind-
hearted person is another matter entirely. What is immediately at issue is
how we judge a person s moral worth, which in turn colors our ideas of
what a person might deserve.
Nietzsche offers us a final, crucial insight into the meaning of suffer-
ing. Emotional identification with the alleged perpetrator of the suffering
of others can explain why the injury of another person would afford us
any satisfaction at all. Because of the competition between belief systems,
we identify with the force we imagine to have caused another s suffering.
This force may be God, reason, or the invisible hand of natural justice.
Whatever we perceive this force to be, we identify with it and celebrate its
strength. This emotional identification that Nietzsche nods to in various
writings would seem to reveal justice and not suffering as the object of
Schadenfreude; however, Nietzsche is careful to leave room for both ob-
jects in the experience of Schadenfreude. In fact, he says explicitly that to
observe suffering causes pleasure, but to cause it delivers an even greater
pleasure.
Schadenfreude, an emotional corollary of justice, offers us something
for nothing, as does the Roman Catholic notion of grace. Like grace,
Schadenfreude testifies to a higher power. Nietzsche does not need a
higher power than himself; not surprisingly, he also has no need of grace.
In Beyond Good and Evil he tells us: The concept grace has no meaning
or good odor inter pares; there may be a sublime way of letting presents
from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirstily like
drops but for this art and gesture the noble soul has not aptitude (Sec-
tion 265). Our investment in a system of belief may be so strong that the
desire to find meaning in suffering drives us to conclusions that surprise
and infuriate others. At this level of social interaction, Schadenfreude
The Meaning of Suffering 63
thrives. Although Nietzsche wants to say that he is above this, he cannot
really be, for he espouses a system of belief about desert as well, albeit one
that he takes to have created himself.
Religious thinkers have remarked on Nietzsche s idolatry; their skepti-
cism produces Schadenfreude. Of course, one need not be religious to ex-
perience Schadenfreude: utilitarians, vegetarians, and humanitarians may
well search for the kind of external justification for their beliefs that
Schadenfreude represents. Nietzsche s response to anyone who would in-
clude him in the cycle of this kind of Schadenfreude pierces to the heart of
the matter. In one of his most famous passages Nietzsche says:
For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash,
and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject
called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from
expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum be-
hind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to
do so. But there is no such substratum: there is no being behind
doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to
the deed the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact dou-
bles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a
deed: it posts the same event first as cause and then a second time
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