Existentialism and Compassion

   Image Credit: Kevin Carter – The Vulture and the Little Girl (1993)            

“Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?”

- Walt Whitman

The questions bleed into one another while their essentially unanswerable nature confounds us – What are the secrets of the universe? Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? What is a good life? How do I become good? Where do I begin, what do I do? We can axiomatically begin with a form of “the good” that, perhaps, leaves the strongest impression and arguably forms the bedrock of all ethics – freedom from suffering. Metaphysical concerns devolve into endless speculation and linguistic hair-splitting, but what remains undeniable is the felt experience of one’s own suffering and the truth that all sentient beings experience suffering. 

Negative ethics or suffering-focused ethics argue that minimizing negative outcomes holds precedence over maximizing positive outcomes. Someone, for example, requiring urgent medical attention would be less concerned over winning a year’s supply of free pizza than they would getting their burst appendix removed – after which they can enjoy said pizza. Suffering asserts itself with an urgency that pleasure, though essential to one’s happiness (under certain conditions), simply cannot. “The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” The author Jorge Luis Borges wrote about the transformative and transmutative nature of suffering in his collected lectures, Seven Nights, that the bad things that would happen to him would be transformed into words, as opposed to happiness which is its own end. A bridge that each individual has to construct in their hearts is the one connecting their own suffering with the suffering of others. Compassion and selfishness naturally ebb and flow but if we are not to be rendered slaves to our own desires, we are compelled to take account of the needs and pains of others. Attempts at conceiving oneself existentially atomized ultimately fail because we are constructed through our being in the world with others. To negate others consistently one may become a curmudgeonly hermit, a hyper-religious ascetic, or dedicate oneself obsessively to a craft. The options are plentiful. The individual who lives amongst others alienated from their humanity is, however, alienated from their own humanity and capable of monstrous acts. 

A question can be asked about how central ethics should be in one’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world. The truth of prescriptive ethics is that it necessarily runs into a wall after a point, as a function of one’s survival instincts if nothing else. Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, for example, struggled to resolve issues of comparative suffering (in the context of animals) – whether the suffering of one can be justified if it leads to great benefits for a number of individuals. In fact, it may be argued that a life that categorically minimizes suffering is impossible due to the intrinsic place suffering has in sentient existence and how modes of production under capitalism make us inextricably complicit in the suffering of others. If an individual abstains from eating meat or consuming animal products due to ethical reasons, they would still need to contend with, for example, life-saving medical products that only exist due to being tested on and thereby causing the suffering of countless animals. Or, how simple pleasures such as chocolate bars and cell phones have almost certainly involved slave labour from other parts of the world. One can argue that harm reduction as a way of living in the world has to acknowledge a fundamental truth about suffering – that we are complicit in the suffering of others. We cannot live in willful denial of this truth, nor do we need to fool ourselves into believing that our lives are benign and ethically sterile.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes, “Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.” The sacred task of trying to be a “good person” must boldly look in the face of one’s complicity in the sufferings of others. In matters where this can be addressed by the individual as an individual, one is left better equipped to take the right decisions. In matters where the individual is obviously limited, collective change and socio-political restructuring are required if the frail bird of justice is to ever sing in our garden. That depends on how much stock you put on our collective capacities, dear reader. I'm off to lie down. Tomorrow, we save the world — or at least try not to make it worse.

Author

Asad Dhaumya

Instagram: @atwindmills

"I found philosophy a most agreeable way of parsing life rather than directly living it. Theoretical analysis would give me a filter to preempt experience or make sense of it in hindsight. 

Philosophy is the greatest nothing I have engaged in--and nothingness is a presence more than an absence. 

My interests have primarily been in political philosophy, philosophical pessimism and Buddhism. I did a double major in philosophy and history from The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. My major's seminar was on "The Philosophy of Psychiatry". I explored my interests in philosophical pessimism more in my masters in philosophy at JNU where I wrote my thesis on Anti-Natalism, arguing that we have a moral obligation to not procreate."

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