Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
Suffering
View through CrossRef
Some people feel that life is meaningless because there is so much suffering in the world. The chapter criticizes three arguments by Schopenhauer for the painfulness of life: the argument from the analysis of pleasure (pleasure is always the satisfaction of a need, but the displeasure in experiencing the need is always greater than the pleasure felt when the need is satisfied); the argument from the subjective passage of time (time passes more slowly when we are suffering than when we are enjoying ourselves); and the argument from our enhanced sensitivity to suffering. The chapter claims that many lives are not painful and many that are could be improved. Moreover, painful lives need not be meaningless.
Title: Suffering
Description:
Some people feel that life is meaningless because there is so much suffering in the world.
The chapter criticizes three arguments by Schopenhauer for the painfulness of life: the argument from the analysis of pleasure (pleasure is always the satisfaction of a need, but the displeasure in experiencing the need is always greater than the pleasure felt when the need is satisfied); the argument from the subjective passage of time (time passes more slowly when we are suffering than when we are enjoying ourselves); and the argument from our enhanced sensitivity to suffering.
The chapter claims that many lives are not painful and many that are could be improved.
Moreover, painful lives need not be meaningless.
Related Results
Suffering in Art
Suffering in Art
Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as o...
Compassion Collapse
Compassion Collapse
In the current chapter, I will discuss a phenomenon known as “compassion collapse”: people tend to feel and act less compassionately for multiple suffering victims than for a singl...
Talking Tools, Femina narrans, and the Irrepressibility of Women
Talking Tools, Femina narrans, and the Irrepressibility of Women
This concluding chapter looks at what happens in Maithil women's folktales when stories of women's suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by...
Slavery’s Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834
Slavery’s Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834
This chapter focuses on the abolitionist movement and the rise of physical sensation as a rhetorical theme. It interprets the term “image” in its post-nineteenth-century sense as i...
Costa Rica
Costa Rica
This chapter analyzes the trajectory of the major political parties in Costa Rica: PLN, PUSC, PAC, and, more briefly, ML and Frente Amplio. The chapter reviews the critical effect ...
Parodying Shakespeare’s Euripides in Bartholomew Fair
Parodying Shakespeare’s Euripides in Bartholomew Fair
Chapter 6, “Parodying Shakespeare’s Euripides in Bartholomew Fair,” argues that Shakespeare’s fascination with Greek tragedy’s female icons led his contemporaries to identify him w...
Palliative Sedation
Palliative Sedation
This chapter examines palliative sedation and the advanced practice registered nurse’s (APRN) roles and responsibilities when caring for patients with intractable suffering at the ...
Ghost Words and Invisible Giants
Ghost Words and Invisible Giants
In Ghost Words and Invisible Giants, Lheisa Dustin engages psychoanalytic theory to describe the “language of suffering” of iconic modernist authors H.D. and Djuna Barnes, tracing ...