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What I mean is that the necessary struggles related to suffering keep people from thinking about whether there is ultimate meaning. If we eliminate these strug
by yters 7y ago
What I mean is that the necessary struggles related to suffering keep people from thinking about whether there is ultimate meaning.
If we eliminate these struggles of necessity, then people can reflect that all the voluntary struggles you mention are meaningless, and so despair (unless the question of ultimate meaning is resolved).
So, elimination of physical suffering perhaps will increase the psychological suffering due to meaninglessness.
On the other hand, if someone has ultimate purpose locked in their mind, then perhaps even the sufferings of necessity can become more bearable and even easier to overcome.
- playing_colours 7y agoA very good point. We are both blessed and cursed that we do not have any ultimate purpose pre-programmed, we even can question and reject the call of the fundamental instinct to reproduce. Although, through our history most humans lived in conditions where existential questions could not arise, plus religions did their best to spread their answers.
- yters 7y agoIt seems existential questions must have arisen, otherwise why would people care about religions and their answers?
- homonculus1 7y agoAre those really suffering of the same degree though? Surely the ennui of unexamined comfort is preferable to the agony of war and starvation--and an individual has almost total power to solve the former, effectively nil against the latter.
- yters 7y agoI totally agree with you. Comfortable suffering certainly seems preferable to unbearable pain, but maybe is not preferable to a daily struggle. My point is eliminating physical suffering does not eliminate existential suffering, whereas eliminating existential suffering with ultimate meaning can in a certain way eliminate physical suffering. For example, many Christians, and people in other religions and philosophies, in the past and even today voluntarily undergo tremendous torture and painful executions because they've found a profound relief for the existential suffering.