Louis Quintana Gularte

The puzzle I take up in this paper — what I call the puzzle of better-because-worse suffering — is that there seem to be cases in which allowing ourselves to suffer more feels, in a hard-to-characterize but striking and sometimes even transformative way, better. The three cases I consider are (i) so-called 'acceptance-stage' grief-experiences, (ii) aesthetic experiences with strongly negative emotional content, and (iii) certain experiences of suffering in 'open-monitoring' meditation. The cases are puzzling because, unlike ones in which suffering has instrumental, epistemic, moral, constitutive, 'realizer,' or 'signatory' value, these seem to involve almost nothing more than an increase in suffering. What makes them different seems to be something intrinsic to the increased-suffering experience itself, taken on its own and experienced just as suffering. Theories of the nature of suffering, I argue, together with theories on grief, the paradox of tragedy, and the nature of mediation, would do well to join forces and address this challenge. My own proposed solution is that better-because-worse suffering-experiences, in contrast to just-plain-bad suffering-experiences, have a very different attentional profile: while both kinds of suffering feature affectively negative attitudes with a great deal of control over our attention, better-because-worse suffering also features a highest-order attitude of attentional receptivity that robs our suffering of some of its worst effects, somewhat paradoxically, just by giving it un-resisting attentional space. I close with a discussion of ethical implications, guided by a philosopher with strikingly parallel views of suffering and receptivity: Simone Weil.

Subtitle: "Experiential understanding and the impossibility of intrinsically valuing suffering." Suffering, I argue, is bad. This paper supports that claim by defending a somewhat bolder-sounding one: namely that if anyone—even a sadistic ‘amoralist’—fully understands the fact that someone else is suffering, then the only evaluative attitude they can possibly form towards the person’s suffering as such is that of being _intrinsically against_ it. I first argue that, necessarily, everyone is disposed to be intrinsically against their _own_ suffering experiences, holding fixed their specific overall degree of emotional aversiveness, because any evaluative attitude other than ‘being against’—including mere indifference—would in certain key circumstances make our suffering less emotionally aversive and thus different from the suffering experience (stipulatively) at issue. Second, fully understanding that someone else is having a given experience—Mary’s experiencing a vividly blue sky, say, or Job’s experiencing heart-rending grief—requires that we represent _experientially_ their very instance of that experience-type (it requires, in other words, token phenomenal concepts). The result is that what goes for our own suffering goes for others’, too: maintaining an accurate experiential representation of the fact that someone else is having a suffering experience with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness is only compatible with coming to be intrinsically against their suffering. So suffering is—‘objectively’—bad: it’s only possible to respond with indifference towards anyone’s suffering if we don’t fully understand that they are suffering in the first place.