Suffering and Philosophy...What?

So I know that the last couple of posts have been of an almost spiritual nature, and if that actually is the case, my apologies. What has become very interesting to me as of late would probably be called philosophy of suffering, if you will. Now there is a grey area here, for there really is not a philosophy of pain, although I believe that it is a topic of primary importance, especially when we consider that with all of the technological advances we have created in the past 100 years with the sole purpose of increasing leisure and efficiencieny. This rise of technology seems to be couterproductive however.

I was surfing the JAMA website and stumbled across this little beauty of an abstract: Several recent, large epidemiologic and family studies suggest important temporal changes in the rates of major depression: an increase in the rates in the cohorts born after World War II; a decrease in the age of onset with an increase in the late teenaged and early adult years; an increase between 1960 and 1975 in the rates of depression for all ages; a persistent gender effect, with the risk of depression consistently two to three times higher among women than men across all adult ages; a persistent family effect, with the risk about two to three times higher in first-degree relatives as compared with controls; and the suggestion of a narrowing of the differential risk to men and women due to a greater increase in risk of depression among young men (http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/261/15/2229).

What the f&*$%? So in an era of purported freedom and prosperity what we have instead is an era where people are more depressed? This is why we need a philosophy of suffering: I believe that the time has come to clarify the nature of suffering? Is it perhaps essential, a component of the human psyche which provides a check on unfettered joy? Might this be a sign of the hidden implications in a leisure era? What is suffering defined, and is there a way to escape it?

This is not an issue that I will even attempt to settle in this post. This is a very interesting topic, and actually I intend to write an academic paper on it soon. But what I will do is attempt to give some insight into the philosophical process so that folks might one day stop thinking that what I know & love is mere wordplay, or opinion, or not relevant (Sorry for that misleading intro, I realized that the blog post needed to hash out the questions I raised would take far too long and be far too dry to read today and here).

First we need a focus. Now suffering has many facets, and there are more potentially relevant topics than one might think. We might attempt to define what suffering is: that is, under what particular circumstances is one said to rightly suffering? This leads to other questions such as the depression/suffering disctinction, the agony/suffering distinction, discomfort/suffering: essentialy this is the facet of philosophy that deals with concept clarification. People bandy about the word suffering, but when does one cross the line of say, dolor and is to said to suffer. Might none of those words capture what it is to suffer? Or are all of the aforementioned words necessarry to figure out what suffering means?

Another related topic. We might try to say what is necessarry and sufficient for one said to be grieving. Now the necessary/sufficient distinction is one that has book written about it, so I will try to do in a couple sentences what authors do in 400 pages. Given two statements something is necessary when the second statement cannot be true while the first is false. So I have a guinea pig is a necessarry condition of the further statement My guinea pig is sick. A condition is sufficient when the first claim cannot be true while the second is false, for example The levees broke when Hurricane Katrina came through is a sufficient condition for New Orleans is under water.

Macabre example aside, I could understand if there is still confusion, and never be afraid to ask: it took me 4 years to have clue, I'm not sure that a paragraph will all that enlightening. But back to the program.

Another option might be to conclude that suffering is an essential component of life and attempt to determine what place a proper amount of suffering has in the day to day life of humans. Thus, are those that do not suffer lacking an essential component of humanity? Would suffering be essential as the yang to joys ying so that we do not grow complacent? Or, as the Buddhists and many other sprititualities claim is suffering nothing more than a pox on humanity, a pernicious agent of perhaps society which is used as a control? And so on.

Another way to look at what is going on is to ask about the origins of suffering? If you are Catholic than you say that Eve ate the apple and gave it Adam. Those with a slightly more curious nature might peg it to the rise of rationality. For example, back when we were simian, would we claim that we suffered? Was it only when we became rational and began having self awareness. Is suffering today the same as suffering 1000 years ago, or mightthe rise of technology put a new aspect to suffering that our ancestors could have never dreamed?

I could go on like this for awhile, but I will spare you pages of questions. Suffice to say that I hope that I could give a little overview of what a philosophical problem is and is not, but if you have been zoning out, a recap. A quick and dirty definition of a philosophical problem is one which involves questions of meaning, truth and logical connections of fundamental ideas that resist solution by the empirical sciences. Although this little expansion glosses over much of what is going on (essentaily, there is alway smore to learn in philosophy), but a philosophical problem would not be that suffering exists (look at anyone crying, unless they are a good actor), or what parts of the brain light up during suffering (leave that to the psychologists) or whether or not any given agent or group is suffering (it depends on sociological factors). I hope that I shed a little bit of light on the method and purpose of philosophy with regards to suffering, and feel free as always to post questions comments and concerns, for when dealing with philosophy and philosophers, intial confusion leads to fundamental misunderstanding to outright chaos very quickly, which would lead to unnecessary suffering, and no one wants that right?