Meaningful and meaningless suffering

Introduction: the problem of suffering

The problem of suffering crucially focuses on meaninglessness. Meaningful suffering—suffering having some “point” or function—is not even nearly as problematic as absurd suffering that cannot be rendered purposeful. This issue, to which the present paper is devoted, is more specific than the problem of the “meaning of life” (or “meaning in life”), yet obviously highly relevant, given the obvious fact that human lives are often full of suffering experienced as serving no purpose whatsoever—indeed, suffering that may threaten to make life itself meaningless.

These are topics to be pursued not only by philosophical but also by artistic means. Indeed, some philosophers—e.g., D. Z. Phillips (1991) and John Cottingham (2014)—have persuasively argued that the standard analytic methods of philosophy of religion ought to be enriched by literary reading and interpretation. In my own work with Sari Kivistö (see Kivistö and Pihlström, 2016), the problem of evil and suffering is explored from a perspective thoroughly entangling literary and philosophical approaches. This double methodology, in which critical examination of fictional literature does not merely function as an illustration of philosophical arguments but is inextricably intertwined with philosophical inquiry itself, will in this paper be applied to the problem of evil and suffering by considering an example drawn from Holocaust literature.

More specifically, Primo Levi’s work will be analyzed as developing an essentially ethical argument, with a philosophical-cum-literary structure, against theodicies seeking to render suffering meaningful. By means of such a case study, I hope to shed light on the problem of meaningless suffering, especially regarding the moral critique of theodicist attempts to interpret all suffering as meaningful. This examination will lead us to appreciate the power of imaginative literature in the analysis of evil and suffering.

In general, literature may of course deal with types of suffering that are not real but imagined—yet could be real—and hence enhance our abilities to critically reflect on the kinds of suffering human beings can inflict on one another. However, the suffering represented in Levi’s writing is fully real, yet its depiction is literary and thus utilizes not just testimonial memory but also its author’s creative capacities of imagination. By writing on real suffering, Levi succeeds in not just imagining but representing the unimaginably horrible in its sheer meaninglessness, and that is part of his lasting legacy. By so doing, Levi and other antitheodicists succeed in arguing that a transcendent point of view from which we could view all suffering as meaningful is itself merely imagined—and ought to be rejected as ethically unimaginable.

In classical theology and philosophy of religion, theodicies have been formulated in order to account for apparently meaningless suffering. However, in recent philosophy of religion antitheodicist approaches have also been proposed (see, e. g., Betenson, 2016; Gleeson, 2012, 2018; Sachs, 2011; Trakakis, 2008, 2018). Generally, antitheodicies seek to acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering without forcing any meaningfulness upon experiences of suffering. While the tension between theodicies and antitheodicies goes back to the Book of Job, it was more than two millennia later that Immanuel Kant emerged as a crucial turning point in the history of antitheodicist thinking; indeed, a number of apparently rather different twentieth-century philosophical—and literary—formulations of antitheodicism can be traced to Kant’s 1791 “Theodicy Essay” (Kivistö & Pihlström 2016).

I have argued in earlier work that the key to antitheodicism is the fundamental ethical demand to acknowledge the other, especially other human beings’ sincere experiences of the utter meaninglessness of their suffering. Such an ethical demand can be seen to be present, for instance, in Emmanuel Levinas’s resolutely antitheodicist moral thought, according to which the justification of another’s suffering is the very beginning of immorality (see Levinas, 2006). ^[1] Through our case study, we will see how this idea figures in Levi’s writing, and on the basis of a brief analysis of his work, I will draw a more general critical moral concerning antitheodicism.

An example of antitheodicist acknowledgment: Levi’s Holocaust testimony

We may view Primo Levi’s writings on the Holocaust as exemplary regarding the acknowledgment of meaninglessness and antitheodicy, yet contributing to our appreciation of the value and meaning of human life in general—that is, refusing to succumb to any form of nihilism, despite the devastating meaninglessness of suffering. As also observed in Raimond Gaita’s (2000, 2004) insightful comments on Levi, morally admirable action—rendering life in some sense more meaningful—may take place in entirely meaningless circumstances, even at Auschwitz. For example, Gaita (2004) draws attention to Levi’s account of a prisoner helping a dying man at the sick ward with no realistic hope of saving his life. Goodness can, thus, be meaningless—there is a sense in which it must be meaningless—and it may suffer from the pursuit of meaningfulness, or from our pursuing any specific meanings. This might happen especially if our being good to others is instrumentalized into the service of the search for meaning in our own lives. One need not be an orthodox Kantian to argue that morality obligates us irrespectively of whether it makes our own lives meaningful or meaningless. Thus, we may learn from Levi a very important lesson: we should firmly reject the idea of grounding moral motivation in the pursuit of meaningfulness (let alone happiness) in our own lives. Goodness subordinated to external meaningfulness self-destructs. ^[2]

Levi’s contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust reject (without using these terms) all theodicist construals of the kind of suffering the Holocaust involved for its victims. ^[3] From Levi’s ethical perspective, we should refuse to even tolerate a theodicy failing to recognize the sufferer’s experience. We should, rather, acknowledge the meaninglessness and absurd excess of the victims’ suffering, including their shame and guilt caused by the demonic Nazi tendency to make the victims themselves complicit in the evil brought upon them. Levi’s writings on this topic, based on his first-hand testimony while carrying a universal human message, have for good reason been standard references also among philosophical commentators of the Nazi horrors. ^[4]

Levi has repeatedly emphasized that the Holocaust left an irrecoverable injury that “cannot be healed” and “would never again be able to be cleansed” (Levi, 1988, pp. 12, 66; see also p. 52; cf., e.g., Alford, 2009, p. 3). He quotes approvingly Jean Améry’s statement that anyone who has been tortured “remains tortured” and, having lost their faith in humanity, “never again will be able to be at ease in the world” (Levi, 1988, p. 12). One (but presumably not the only) reason for this irrevocability is that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were able to shift the burden of guilt on to the victims, too, destroying not only their lives but their innocence as well by creating a “grey zone” between the guilty and the innocent (Levi, 1988, chapter 2)—thus in a sense destroying not just their bodies but their souls as well (Levi, pp. 37, 42). Moreover, this kind of shame and guilt concerns everyone, not just those directly involved; this is “the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things” (Levi, p. 54; cf. p. 65; see also Agamben, 1999, pp. 87-88; Woolf, 2007, p. 48). ^[5] Such shame and guilt that even the survivors can never get rid of are readily comparable to the shame that remains after Josef K. at the end of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. ^[6]

While Levi offers us little in the way of explicit theorizing about theodicies, he is absolutely clear in his moral rejection—with horror—of any idea of “Providence” (see Alford, 2009, p. 143; Levi, 1988, p. 117; 1996, pp. 157-158; cf. Woolf, 2007, p. 41). After the Holocaust, there is no way we could continue using that concept. Levi would thus be morally horrified about any attempt to take philosophically or theologically seriously, say, medieval philosophers’ (or contemporary Christian thinkers’) faith in providence and their attempts to solve the problem of evil in that context. Accordingly, the idea that he might have been somehow “destined” to survive in order to be able to write his books, for instance, “seemed monstrous” to him, because those who survived (“the saved”) were not at all the best but “the fittest”, in some sense even the worst (Levi, 1988, pp. 62-63; see also Agamben, 1999, p. 60)—hence, we may say that they were, ironically, not “the saved”, after all, but rather “the drowned”.

He reflects further: “My religious friend had told me that I survived so that I could bear witness. I have done so, as best I could, […] but the thought that this testifying of mine could by itself gain for me the privilege of surviving […] troubles me, because I cannot see any proportion between the privilege and its outcome” (Levi, 1988, p. 63; see, however, also p. 143). This could, I suppose, be rather naturally read in the context of Levinas’s (2006, p. 97) insistence on the sheer disproportionality of Holocaust suffering in comparison to any explicit or implicit theodicy. There is nothing that could be so valuable that it would render the Holocaust suffering acceptable or justified, or indeed meaningful, in any sense. C. Fred Alford (2009, p. 101) explicitly argues—in the context of Levi’s reading of the Book of Job (see Levi, 2005, pp. 61-62)—that, from Levi’s point of view, to even ask the theodicy question, “Why do the innocent suffer if God is all good and all powerful?”, amounts to a misunderstanding of “one’s place in the universe”.

Levi rejected not only the theology of providence but religion generally—but not because the Holocaust would have functioned for him as a manifestation of the “argument from evil” or any other theoretical argument against theism. Rather, because he was not religious when he entered Auschwitz, he felt (he explains) that it would have been wrong for him to “change the rules of the game at the end of the match” (Levi, 1988, p. 118). In a sense, that would have been an ethically wrong way of pursuing meaningfulness. When faced with the “selection” and thus imminent mortal danger, he once felt the temptation to pray but rejected it: “A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable” (Levi, 1988, p. 118). This attitude, one may suggest, was possible for him because he “took seriously what he didn’t believe” (Alford, 2009, p. 146). More generally, serious philosophical antitheodicism, whether religious or non-religious, takes seriously both religious and non-religious ways of responding to human suffering.

An example of what Levi regarded as blasphemous prayer—and thus as a failure to acknowledge the suffering other—is provided by him in his first book, If This Is a Man (1958; also known by the title, Survival in Auschwitz), where he tells us what happened after a selection in 1944, that is, after some prisoners had been selected to be murdered in the gas chambers and others to continue their desperate lives in the camp until the next selection. A prisoner called Kuhn had avoided death (this time) and thanked God by praying aloud, while another much younger one, Beppo, was lying in the next bunk in the same barrack, knowing he had been chosen to be murdered. Levi’s moral condemnation of Kuhn’s attitude is harsh: “Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty—nothing at all in the power of man to do—can ever heal?” And he adds: “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer” (Levi, 1996 [1958], pp. 129-130).

This passage in Levi’s early work has been insightfully discussed not only by Alford (2009, pp. 145-146), whose reading of Levi was already cited above, but also by Jonathan Druker (2009, pp. 32-33), whose reading I will comment on shortly, as well as more recently by Jennifer L. Geddes (2018). She notes how outraged Levi is “at the theodical logic implicit in Kuhn’s prayer” (Geddes, 2018, §2). Kuhn fails to see Beppo as a fellow human being—thus failing to acknowledge him. But his failure is much broader: “By ascribing responsibility to God for not being selected, Kuhn’s prayer of thanks implicitly ascribes responsibility to God not only for Beppo’s selection, but by extension, for the whole genocidal system of which it is but one moment”, thereby actually liberating the Nazis from their guilt and ignoring the full human responsibility for the horror (Geddes, 2018, §2). Accordingly, Kuhn’s prayer is, Geddes maintains, blasphemous in obscuring human responsibility and by invoking the idea of a supra-meaningful divine providence that Levi so forcefully argues against. As “Levi’s critique strikes to the heart of theodicy itself”, it can, Geddes shows, be usefully compared to Levinas’s account of the uselessness of suffering (Geddes, 2018, §§2-3; cf. again Levinas, 2006). From Levi’s perspective, theodicies are thus deeply problematic both ethically and religiously. We may also say that Levi is opposed to, indeed horrified by, Kuhn’s attempt to see the selection—and hence Auschwitz and the Holocaust generally—as religiously meaningful. Acknowledging moral and religious meaninglessness is part of our acknowledgment of the other, he seems to be arguing.

We might suggest that Levi thus argues against a certain morally reprehensible practice of theodicism manifested by even a merely theoretical commitment to a theodicy (though Kuhn’s behavior certainly isn’t “merely theoretical”). Above all, what theodicists like Kuhn fail to recognize is another person’s experience of the meaninglessness of suffering. Their blasphemous prayers try to fit everything, even the unthinkable, such as the murderous selection, into a coherent narrative rendering the world meaningful—even in the “black hole” (cf. Levi, 2005) of sheer meaninglessness.

However, Geddes (2018, §4) also plausibly suggests that just as we should not impose a theodicist claim of meaningfulness on another person’s meaningless suffering, we must not violently impose meaninglessness on the suffering of someone who does believe in a theodicy and construes the meaning of their own suffering along theodicist lines. Even if our antitheodicism is strongly morally motivated by the kind of horror that Levi feels at the failure of acknowledgment exemplified by Kuhn’s neglect of Beppo in the next bunk, we cannot, for analogous ethical reasons, impose our antitheodicism on the suffering other who does find genuine comfort in theodicies (a point also made, independently of Geddes’s work, in Kivistö & Pihlström (2016, chapter 6). The (Levinasian) “ban on theodicy” rightly emphasized by Levi cannot thus be absolute or symmetrical. It is primarily a moral demand set for us, or for me, in our relations to others.

Even so, we should maintain the moral right to be horrified at the kind of failure of acknowledgment that is inherent in a theodicist construal of even the most absurd and disproportional suffering as manifesting an imagined providential logic of meaningfulness. Such non-acknowledgment should be ethically rejected, and this is forcefully argued by Levi in his literary work. Nor should, conversely, the forced attempt to “recognize” meaningfulness in the most meaningless suffering be left without critique. Even our private engagements in theodicist thinking—such as our prayers, at least if spoken aloud—do not remain private (or merely theoretical) but have practical implications regarding our attitudes to others around us, as the case of Kuhn and Beppo strikingly illustrates.

Thus, the distinction between merely “first-personal” attempts at theodicist meaningfulness and “second- or third-personal” theodicism intended to be public may in the end collapse. It would be against the moral duty to acknowledge others’ meaningless suffering to suggest that we can at a purely theoretical level accept theodicist thinking (or praying), or that we can do so in first-personal cases (allegedly only interpreting our own suffering in a theodicist manner), while having to reject theodicism only when it concerns our relations to others. Our moral puzzlement at the face of suffering—others’ or our own—cannot be easily removed. How we interpret our own case has implications on how we interpret the world generally. Accordingly, while we should also avoid imposing antitheodicism (any more than theodicism) to others, we do have a moral responsibility to be extremely cautious in engaging in theodicist accounts of meaningfulness in general, even when they concern our own situation.

Jonathan Druker (2009, especially chapters 1 and 4) draws on Levinas and Adorno, among others, in his treatment of Levi as a critic of theodicies who nevertheless problematically remains at least partially stuck within the tradition of humanistic ethics in Western thought. One manifestation of theodicism (not Druker’s exact word) is, he argues, the tendency to place everything at the ontological level—something famously criticized by Levinas, in particular. “The ontological position is repeatedly interrupted by the ethical call of the other”, Druker reminds us (2009, p. 75), approvingly citing Levinas’s idea that ethics is “against nature” as it tells me not to “put my own existence first” (Druker, 2009, p. 75).

Where Druker goes wrong, in my view, is in his move from this legitimate attack on the primacy of ontology (and epistemology) to the allegedly Levinasian wholesale rejection of “Kantian ethics” and humanism more generally—a move that, he claims, Levi does not fully succeed in making. Because the representation of the inhumanity of the Holocaust as an utter limit of humanity leads us beyond any reciprocal ethical recognition, Druker seems to maintain that the only way of properly “acknowledging the other” in our post-Holocaust world is by rejecting, in a “posthumanist” manner, the humanistic tradition and especially the Kantian ethical subject (see, e.g., Druker, 2009, p. 85). Pace Druker, the Levinasian rejection of all theodicies as “attempts to justify suffering or find a purpose in it” (Druker, 2009, p. 86) can be seen as a moral duty precisely for the (humanistic) subject committed to acknowledging the other—and to viewing the world in an appropriately ethical light based on this commitment. ^[7]

I find Druker’s reading of Levi valuable for its antitheodicist resistance to the kind of “objectification of humans” (Druker, 2009, p. 133) that not only makes theodicism possible but arguably also contributed to making the Holocaust possible (see Druker, 2009, p. 133). Where I disagree with Druker is in his understanding of (especially Kantian but more generally “Western” or “Enlightenment”) humanism. I do not think that the “new Humanism” required by our taking seriously the task of acknowledging the other without reducing them to the ontological level of objectification leads us to a posthumanist rejection of Kantian critical philosophy. On the contrary, I believe critical philosophy is exactly what we need here. Preserving what is valuable in critical philosophy while being fully committed to the fundamental antitheodicist moral duty of acknowledgment can, it seems to me, only take place within the broad tradition of the Enlightenment. Critical philosophy itself operates within that overall tradition.

Concluding remarks on critical distance and critical philosophy

Levi draws serious moral attention to our on-going practices of writing and remembering, and therefore his representation of the moral horror of the Holocaust is exemplary precisely in its refusal to operate in terms of any theory vs. practice dichotomy that may be argued to be a problematic background assumption in many theodicists’ reactions to antitheodicist ethical critique (e.g., in van Inwagen, 2006; cf. Pihlström, 2013, 2014).

The concept of critical distance is fundamental to the implicit (never fully explicit) antitheodicism we find in Levi. Keeping such a distance also involves a continuous self-critical reflection on whether the kind of distance or detachment we are (or I am) maintaining “regarding the pain of others” is correct or ethically appropriate. ^[8] Am I too close or too far? That’s a question that never disappears. Reflecting seriously on this question concerning appropriate distance itself requires distance (detachment) at the meta-level. ^[9] This is a never-ending spiral of critical reflection. Asking oneself these critical questions is to pursue truth about suffering, meaning, and otherness—in a deeper sense than mere propositional correspondence truth, i.e., a sense incorporating something like ethical sincerity or truthfulness. Truth itself requires distance. ^[10] In this sense, the project of antitheodicy should be based on the kind of critical philosophy emphasizing the continuous reflexivity of human inquiry and reason-use. In particular, the Kantian transcendental subject is thoroughly critically self-reflective—never naively “immersed” in its world-involvement—and therefore it engages in a continuous reflexive critique of its own capacities.

This leads me to a final critical comment on Druker’s reading of Levi. Druker attacks the Enlightenment humanist way of conceptualizing the subject as complicit in the guilt of the Holocaust, partly because the humanist tradition does not leave room for the Levinasian “humanism of the other”. Levi’s work, Druker argues, is ambivalent in this regard: it is antitheodicist, as Levinas’s, yet committed to humanism, which Druker proposes to replace by “posthumanism”. This critique of humanism (comparable to and partly based on not only Levinas’s but also, e.g., Adorno’s and Agamben’s criticisms) in my view fails to capture the sense in which a critical transcendental version of the humanist subject in the Kantian tradition is itself needed for the Levinasian humanism of the other. The transcendental subject is continuously self-critically aware of the deeply ethically (and hence ontologically) problematic nature of its world-involvement. It is never naively immersed in its world but maintains critical distance to its own viewing of the world.

The educational relevance of these issues is enormous. How can we teach the appropriate kind of critical distance? How to teach acknowledgment (while necessarily failing in one’s own pursuit of it)? Acknowledging a “pupil” as a potential “adult” capable of taking critical distance and capable of ethical truthfulness is, I suppose, a necessary step on the way to a full appreciation of the educational significance of these ideas. Yet, the educational impact of all this is also rather problematic and needs to be examined further. We teach the young that it “pays” to be good. Being good leads to a more meaningful life—for others to be sure, but also for oneself. How then can we teach them that when we really get serious about ethics, it doesn’t, or even can’t, “pay” to be good, that goodness, like suffering, is pointless? How to educate the young into antitheodicism? That is a puzzle to be reflected on further.

Our examples in any event show that philosophy and literature can share the joint pursuit of meta-level meaning through acknowledging meaninglessness. Now the self-critically reflexive thinker finally needs to ask whether this is a problematic pursuit of meaning, after all. Is there a self-reflective incoherence involved here? This, again, is one of those questions that the self-critically reflective thinker can never avoid. We are invited to go on reflecting on the appropriate distance to our own fragile attempts to maintain such distance and to search for meaningfulness while (or even by) acknowledging meaninglessness.