The Tragedy of the Human Condition
Oba Yozo, a kindhearted and sensitive artist who spent his days striving to obtain just one pure source of acceptance and happiness from the world around him, didn’t actually live as a happy man in the slightest. In fact, he spent his entire life drowned in abject misery, failing to realize that his impossible search for satisfaction remained the very thing that prevented him from obtaining it. He craved unadulterated love, unfettered recognition, and unshaken devotion from others so much that he drove himself mad in the process of trying to find it. His inability to obtain such seemingly uncomplicated, pleasant, copacetic essences of human sentiment eventually propelled him into a bottomless pit of depression, vice, and tragedy.
He committed suicide at the age of 25.
Yozo lived quite the contradiction, did he not? Osamu Dazai – a post-war Japanese writer whose bitterly dismal yet oddly endearing works epitomized the metaphysical struggles of navigating through a life plagued by depression, betrayal, and grief – communicated through characters like Yozo a belief in the inevitability of human suffering. Although Yozo’s story may seem obscure or extreme upon first observation, one could make the argument that within this tragic portrayal of a young, once-virtuous man’s devolution into a life of madness, there lies a representation of a contradiction that all humans – and not just Yozo – remain characterized by: we exist as a species that strives for happiness, comfort, and love above all else. However, we so often find ourselves in the face of misery.
What explains this? Does ‘suffering’ perhaps exist as an inherent trait of the human condition?
The answer to this question undoubtedly varies with each person’s respective opinions, experiences, and environment; nonetheless, one could justly argue that, as exemplified by the story of Oba Yozo, the inclination to desire more – more love, more happiness, more money, even – binds all humans to suffering.
Furthermore, if this very inclination to desire pervades humanity- if it characterizes at least some small part of every human being in existence, then perhaps, as once expressed in ancient Buddhist doctrine and later agreed upon by some of the wisest figures in philosophy, to live truly is to suffer.
The Four Noble Truths – a sort of “contingency plan” devised by the Buddha himself for the purpose of dealing with the suffering that humanity faces – state that the craving of “pleasure, material goods, and immortality (all of which are wants that can never be fully satisfied)” lie at the root of suffering. Although this doctrine lays forth a very plausible and compelling postulation, it of course cannot receive any merit if not justified in some way, meaning that one central question now prevails above all else: how does one prove that desire begets suffering in the first place? Emil Cioran – one of the most notable existentialist philosophers in modern history – believed that the answer to this question simply lies within our own sense of feeling- our own perceptions of happiness and sadness, hope and despair. In an attempt to explicate this belief, he brought into discussion the topic of suicide, something widely viewed as the ultimate act of desperation– a sentiment which can only arise from a sense of desire, to begin with.
“To be obsessed with suicide,” he once wrote, “there must be such inner agony that all self-imposed barriers break and nothing is left but a catastrophic dizziness, a strange and powerful whirlwind. How could suicide be an assertion of life? They say that it is caused by disappointments, which implies that you have desired life, that you had expectations which it did not fulfill” (Cioran 70).
He perhaps used a rather extreme example as a means of illustrating his outlook on the relationship between desire and suffering; however, Cioran ultimately articulates an undeniable truth: that desire leads to suffering because it sets us up for disappointment- it without fail ends up imbuing within us an insatiable eagerness, a yearning which, regardless of whether or not our desires actually come into fruition, never fails to leave us in desire of more.
Simply put, we hope- but that is why we suffer.
We reside in a world where fact and evidence most often triumph over religious and philosophical conjecture. Given this, the claim that all humans possess some sort of insatiable sense of ambition and desire that involuntarily condemns each and every one of us to unavoidable suffering may not have much credence in the minds of most if not substantiated with some sort of scientific data as well. Luckily, in recent years, this very topic of discussion has branched out into the biopsychological field of research, sparking up an interesting debate regarding the relationship between humans’ sense of emotion and the presence of an innate psychological inclination to suffer.
Our hearts possessing just as much power as our brains do, we humans have always experienced emotional pain just as severely as we have physical pain. According to Joseph E. Ledoux, researcher for the U.S National Library of Medicine, the human heart feels greater sensitivity towards not only physical but also emotional pain due to the fact that we possess such an evolved sense of perception (Ledoux). This heightened sense of emotion allows us to perceive not only joy, excitement, heartbreak, anguish, etc., but also a sense of desire, greed, hate, and delusion- the three sentiments that, as stated by the University of West Alabama Psychological Encyclopedia, lie at the root of all suffering. Therefore, even in a biological sense, it holds true that living begets suffering.
In opposition to the beliefs expressed by Buddhists, Ciroan, and psychological researchers like Ledoux, many still view suffering as a choice, rather than an innate emotional and psychobiological disposition. For example, Brenda Shoshana once famously stated that “we turn pain into suffering by adding on all kinds of beliefs, interpretations, and judgements to it”, indicating the belief that we possess complete control over where we draw the line between pain and suffering. Although her overall argument has its flaws, she did get one part right: that humans possess the ability to choose between what we consider mere “pain” and what we experience as “suffering”. The issue with her argument, however, stems from the fact that by expressing that we convert pain into suffering upon our own volition, she implied that pain and suffering exist as one interchangeable entity. However, suffering ties in directly with our sense of emotion and originates from non-physical sources, whereas pain, both physical and emotional, correlates strictly with our brain and originates from its perceptual capacities. Therefore, it becomes clear that ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ exist as separate biopsychological entities, meaning the argument that ‘suffering, just as pain, can willingly be avoided upon our own volition’ has little merit.
From the fictional story of Oba Yozo to the doctrine of the ancient Buddhists to the findings of philosophers and psychologists alike, the topic of suffering very clearly has pervaded creative, religious, and scholarly thought for centuries. Maybe this perennial fascination in and of itself serves as evidence that suffering truly does exist as an innate feature of the human condition, regardless of whether or not we believe so.
Works Cited
“Basics of Buddhism.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/edens/thailand/buddhism.htm#:~:text=By%20desire%2C%20Buddhists%20refer%20to,world%20as%20it%20actually%20is.
Cioran, E. M. On the Heights of Despair. Quartet Books, 1995. http://www.edarcipelago.com/freebooks/CioranHeightsofDespair.pdf
LeDoux, Joseph. “Rethinking the emotional brain.” Neuron vol. 73,4 (2012): 653-76. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.02.004
Posted June 27, 2019 by UWA | Psychology and Counseling News. “The Science of Emotion: Exploring the Basics of Emotional Psychology.” UWA Online, 22 June 2020, https://online.uwa.edu/news/emotional-psychology/.