essay about beauty and pain

A Beautiful War: An Essay on Pain and Beauty

“This is a beautiful war,” she said with her eyes, as we stood in the hallway, both saying goodbye.

And I realized this was how we live our lives.

There is a Beautiful War raging inside of us. It is the story of our world, the story of our lives.

It's worry and wonder, awe and impulse. It's the first day of school and the final breath. A baby's strained peas and a killer's last meal.

It's the pain we are trying to escape, the suffering we are trying to numb.

We see it; we sense it. And yet, it eludes us: the conflict of heaven and earth crashing together on this glorious battlefield, a playground of bruised and battered dreams — all in a climax of grace and redemption.

When we were young, we were told that Evil would be vanquished, that Good would prevail. In innocence, we believed that Good was enough.

But no one ever told us this would hurt, that it would cost us our lives. That there'd be no going back.

No one ever told us about the War . The beautiful calamity. The tragic victory.

It's tectonic plates and midnight brawls. Laughter and lies — and somersaults.

It's a walk in Central Park, lonely hikes down haunted highways.

It's anxious thoughts and baited breath; white hoods and chocolate faces — and blood stains on a wedding dress.

It's a chuckle through a sneer and bravery through tears.

This is our War. This great epic, unceasing drama.

And here we are — caught in the middle, with God on one side and the Devil the other. They whisper truth and lies and we can't tell which is which.

The skies rage; the seas scream. And our souls search for beauty.

Lightning crashes in a starless void, while we wait for something true. Somewhere deep within the Mystery.

This is the War we cannot see — that gets ignored by sitcoms and reality TV. This is the scene we all must notice — with open eyes and hearts, willing to break.

We must choose:

To ignore the fight.

Or to stop, pause, reflect. And dare to dream again. To imagine a world without the War.

Maybe. Some day. But not now. We sigh and scoff — all in the same breath.

If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit. We are more than spectators in this War.

This battle is one we're fighting not only on the outside.

This is a travesty we're causing and contributing to. We, the soldiers. We assassins of Beauty.

This brokenness lives inside . It's what breaks hearts and destroys love. It's what makes life horrible and beautiful at once.

It's the apparition of our days and the dreams of our night.

Because out of ashes broken wings fly. Out of the furnace comes gold — dripping with dross and shining with glory.

And light begins to dawn in the dark.

Maybe, just maybe, this is not all there is: this wonderful War of beauty, this glorious tragedy.

Maybe our vision is clouded by cannon smoke. Maybe our wounds are more than cruel scars. Maybe the War is, in fact, a story.

Maybe there is yet more to see.

To share your own essay on pain and beauty, leave a comment and use the Twitter hashtag #abeautifulwar.

What is your Beautiful War? Share in the comments .

*Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos (Creative Commons)

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Susan Sontag on Beauty vs. Interestingness

By maria popova.

The essay was in part inspired by Pope John Paul II’s response to the news of countless cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: He summoned the American cardinals to the Vatican and attempted to rationalize the situation by stating that “a great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.” In this concerning assertion as a springboard for a broader reflection on our confused attitudes toward beauty, Sontag set out to transcend the common social definition of beauty as “a gladness of the senses” and instead “to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility.”

Sontag writes:

However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated—fixed—in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

Arguing that beauty has ceased to be a sufficient standard for art, that “beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment,” Sontag notes:

The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

And yet there is more to beauty than a lackluster cultural abstraction:

Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called “political correctness,” but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.)

Sontag traces the paradoxical and convoluted cultural trajectory of our relationship with beauty:

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and its appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with a social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude. What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as — on the contrary — excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself. The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty — and the caring about beauty — was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was “interesting.”

To call something “interesting,” however, isn’t always an admission of admiration. (For a crudely illustrative example, my eighth-grade English teacher memorably used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby.”) Turning to photography — perhaps the sharpest focus of Sontag’s cultural contemplation and prescient observation — she considers the complex interplay between interestingness and beauty:

[People] might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where “the interesting” first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

(Curiously, Francis Bacon famously asserted that “the best part of beauty [is that] which a picture cannot express.” )

What we tend to call interesting, Sontag argues, is that which “has not previously been thought beautiful (or good).” And yet the qualitative value of “interesting” is exponentially diminished with the word’s use and overuse — something entirely unsurprising and frequently seen with terms we come to apply too indiscriminately, until they lose their original meaning. (Contemporary case in point: “curation.” ) She writes, echoing her meditation on the creative purpose of boredom from nearly four decades earlier and her concept of “aesthetic consumerism” coined shortly thereafter:

The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring — understood as an absence, an emptiness — implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality. In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience — of feeling — one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

With her strong distaste for unnecessary polarities , Sontag observes:

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments.

She counters this with a more real, more living definition of beauty:

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console… From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.” Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

Echoing young Virginia Woolf’s insight about nature, imitation, and the arts , Sontag elegantly brings her point full circle:

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent… Beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous. Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

All the essays and speeches collected in At the Same Time are treasure troves of timeless wisdom on culture, art, politics, society, and the self. Complement them with Sontag on writing , boredom , sex , censorship , and aphorisms , her radical vision for remixing education , her insight on why lists appeal to us , and her illustrated meditations on art and on love .

— Published April 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/22/susan-sontag-on-beauty-vs-interestingness/ —

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High Country News

A nonprofit independent magazine of unblinking journalism that shines a light on all of the complexities of the West.

Beauty is always bigger than the pain

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Women need women. Feeling that need, I got up and went outside.  

It felt like the pride and the joy inside of me were validated. And I’d let my body and brain sing, knowing my auntie was behind me.

I noticed the willows to my right, gleaming with a hint of frost. The light shining over and kissing the ocean, yellow and gold, warm and welcoming. I walked downhill, back toward the house, the well-trodden trail open and free of trees, snow crunching underneath my boots. I saw Nuthlook, the long hill that welcomes you to the Unalakleet River and all she gives after you boat past the tundra flats. I saw the clean, quiet whiteness of winter. The snow and cold telling me to rest. To stay warm. To take care. The life, light and simple beauty of our home. And I said it to myself, from my belly, knowing: Beauty is always bigger than the pain. And along with the grief I still carried, there was a glimmer of joy. In my belly. And a lightness in my lungs and load.  

Where land meets ocean, I again felt that elder kindness from the beach line. Fondness, even.

This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Rise above .

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by Laureli Ivanoff, High Country News November 1, 2023

This <a target="_blank" href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/55-11/essays-beauty-is-always-bigger-than-the-pain/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.hcn.org">High Country News</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cropped-HCN_Logo-Monogram_White_Sq-2.png?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://www.hcn.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=225770&amp;ga4=G-0NS3WVPPTN" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Laureli Ivanoff

Laureli Ivanoff is an Inupiaq writer and journalist based in Uŋalaqłiq (Unalakleet), on the west coast of what’s now called Alaska. Her column “The Seasons of Uŋalaqłiq” explores the seasonality of living in direct relationship with the land, water, plants and animals in and around Uŋalaqłiq.

Know the West.

The Idea That ‘Beauty Is Pain’ Is Total BS—Which Is Why I’m Never Getting a Bikini Wax Again

I wound up on that table because everyone swore up and down that waxing was “the only thing that would get rid of my ingrown hairs ,” and promised it would hurt less the more I did it. After my waxer ripped off the first strip, though, I was ready to bolt—It felt as if I was being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles. The pain felt like a hum of heat over my vulva and pelvis, and hurt so much I couldn't even put my underwear back on.

For centuries, women have been conditioned to believe that beauty should come with a certain level of suffering. Throughout history, we’ve repeatedly seen them sacrifice their comfort for the sake of what society deems beautiful— drinking arsenic for the sake of clearer skin , swallowing tapeworms to lose weight , or using lead powder to cover up acne , to name a few examples. All of these practices have (understandably) fallen out of style, yet painful hair removal processes have stood the test of time.

Women have been removing their pubic hair since ancient Egyptian times, when they used everything from flint stones to sugar paste to get the job done. This set a standard that carried through to the Greek and Roman empires, where hairless bodies (which were often achieved by burning or tweezing individual follicles) were immortalized in stone, and has transcended into our modern world. A 2016 study found that 84 percent of women in the U.S. between 18 and 65 remove some or all of their pubic hair—and I can only imagine many of them repeating “beauty is pain” on the waxing table every four to six weeks, just like I did.

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Yet according to dermatologists, there's good reason to embrace " big bush energy ," despite what society may have you believe. "The hair that's in our armpits, groin, and legs is actually evolutionarily serving its own helpful purpose," Rachel Nazarian, MD , a board-certified dermatologist with  Schweiger Dermatology , previously told Well+Good . "Hair prevents skin from irritation when it rubs against itself, protecting from chaffing in many areas of our body, especially in the underarm area. Hair also prevents different pathogens from invading our body, such as in the pubic area."

Thankfully, in the last decade, the painful dedication to being “bare down there” has—slowly, but surely—started to change. In 2015, FUR launched a line of products specifically designed to care for pubic hair, and in the years since brands like Bushbalm and Truly have followed suit with pubic-care offerings of their own. Just this year, razor brand Billie recently published a children’s book titled A Kids Book About Body Hair  (which came on the heels of its 2018 " Project Body Hair " campaign), and Venus launched its viral “Say Pubic” campaign along with a line of pubic-care products as a way to destigmatize the conversation around women’s body hair.

The queer community—which was talking about pubes long before they came trendy—has also helped push this movement forward. Body hair is central to gender expression, and LGBTQ+ celebs like Amandla Stenberg , Miley Cyrus , and Halsey have proudly showcased their body hair in public. They've made it clear that suffering through a bikini wax (or any other form of hair removal) is entirely up to me.

“For years, as women, we have been conditioned to make choices for our partner or what would make us more attractive to someone else,” says Angelica Sele, founder of Angelica B Beauty , a body-hair positive salon in Los Angeles. “We want to break the mold on the idea that ‘beauty is pain,’ [so that women] can make choices based on what they like. It is high time for women to stop living according to the beauty standards of others.”

What you decide to do with your body hair is your choice—but my singular experience getting waxed made me decide once and for all I will no longer subscribe to the idea that “beauty is pain.” Getting hair ripped out of my genitals for the sake of living up to a certain societal standard of beauty? No thank you. Because when it comes right down to it, beauty is who you are—and that should be painless.

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Essays About Beauty: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Writing essays about beauty is complicated because of this topic’s breadth. See our examples and prompts to you write your next essay.

Beauty is short for beautiful and refers to the features that make something pleasant to look at. This includes landscapes like mountain ranges and plains, natural phenomena like sunsets and aurora borealis, and art pieces such as paintings and sculptures. However, beauty is commonly attached to an individual’s appearance,  fashion, or cosmetics style, which appeals to aesthetical concepts. Because people’s views and ideas about beauty constantly change , there are always new things to know and talk about.

Below are five great essays that define beauty differently. Consider these examples as inspiration to come up with a topic to write about.

1. Essay On Beauty – Promise Of Happiness By Shivi Rawat

2. defining beauty by wilbert houston, 3. long essay on beauty definition by prasanna, 4. creative writing: beauty essay by writer jill, 5. modern idea of beauty by anonymous on papersowl, 1. what is beauty: an argumentative essay, 2. the beauty around us, 3. children and beauty pageants, 4. beauty and social media, 5. beauty products and treatments: pros and cons, 6. men and makeup, 7. beauty and botched cosmetic surgeries, 8. is beauty a necessity, 9. physical and inner beauty, 10. review of books or films about beauty.

“In short, appreciation of beauty is a key factor in the achievement of happiness, adds a zest to living positively and makes the earth a more cheerful place to live in.”

Rawat defines beauty through the words of famous authors, ancient sayings, and historical personalities. He believes that beauty depends on the one who perceives it. What others perceive as beautiful may be different for others. Rawat adds that beauty makes people excited about being alive.

“No one’s definition of beauty is wrong. However, it does exist and can be seen with the eyes and felt with the heart.”

Check out these essays about best friends .

Houston’s essay starts with the author pointing out that some people see beauty and think it’s unattainable and non-existent. Next, he considers how beauty’s definition is ever-changing and versatile. In the next section of his piece, he discusses individuals’ varying opinions on the two forms of beauty: outer and inner. 

At the end of the essay, the author admits that beauty has no exact definition, and people don’t see it the same way. However, he argues that one’s feelings matter regarding discerning beauty. Therefore, no matter what definition you believe in, no one has the right to say you’re wrong if you think and feel beautiful.

“The characteristic held by the objects which are termed “beautiful” must give pleasure to the ones perceiving it. Since pleasure and satisfaction are two very subjective concepts, beauty has one of the vaguest definitions.”

Instead of providing different definitions, Prasanna focuses on how the concept of beauty has changed over time. She further delves into other beauty requirements to show how they evolved. In our current day, she explains that many defy beauty standards, and thinking “everyone is beautiful” is now the new norm.

“…beauty has stolen the eye of today’s youth. Gone are the days where a person’s inner beauty accounted for so much more then his/her outer beauty.”

This short essay discusses how people’s perception of beauty today heavily relies on physical appearance rather than inner beauty. However, Jill believes that beauty is all about acceptance. Sadly, this notion is unpopular because nowadays, something or someone’s beauty depends on how many people agree with its pleasant outer appearance. In the end, she urges people to stop looking at the false beauty seen in magazines and take a deeper look at what true beauty is.

“The modern idea of beauty is taking a sole purpose in everyday life. Achieving beautiful is not surgically fixing yourself to be beautiful, and tattoos may have a strong meaning behind them that makes them beautiful.”

Beauty in modern times has two sides: physical appearance and personality. The author also defines beauty by using famous statements like “a woman’s beauty is seen in her eyes because that’s the door to her heart where love resides” by Audrey Hepburn. The author also tackles the issue of how physical appearance can be the reason for bullying, cosmetic surgeries, and tattoos as a way for people to express their feelings.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about fashion .

10 Helpful Prompts To Use in Writing Essays About Beauty

If you’re still struggling to know where to start, here are ten exciting and easy prompts for your essay writing:

While defining beauty is not easy, it’s a common essay topic. First, share what you think beauty means. Then, explore and gather ideas and facts about the subject and convince your readers by providing evidence to support your argument.

If you’re unfamiliar with this essay type, see our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Beauty doesn’t have to be grand. For this prompt, center your essay on small beautiful things everyone can relate to. They can be tangible such as birds singing or flowers lining the street. They can also be the beauty of life itself. Finally, add why you think these things manifest beauty.

Little girls and boys participating in beauty pageants or modeling contests aren’t unusual. But should it be common? Is it beneficial for a child to participate in these competitions and be exposed to cosmetic products or procedures at a young age? Use this prompt to share your opinion about the issue and list the pros and cons of child beauty pageants.

Today, social media is the principal dictator of beauty standards. This prompt lets you discuss the unrealistic beauty and body shape promoted by brands and influencers on social networking sites. Next, explain these unrealistic beauty standards and how they are normalized. Finally, include their effects on children and teens.

Countless beauty products and treatments crowd the market today. What products do you use and why? Do you think these products’ marketing is deceitful? Are they selling the idea of beauty no one can attain without surgeries? Choose popular brands and write down their benefits, issues, and adverse effects on users.

Although many countries accept men wearing makeup, some conservative regions such as Asia still see it as taboo. Explain their rationale on why these regions don’t think men should wear makeup. Then, delve into what makeup do for men. Does it work the same way it does for women? Include products that are made specifically for men.

There’s always something we want to improve regarding our physical appearance. One way to achieve such a goal is through surgeries. However, it’s a dangerous procedure with possible lifetime consequences. List known personalities who were pressured to take surgeries because of society’s idea of beauty but whose lives changed because of failed operations. Then, add your thoughts on having procedures yourself to have a “better” physique.

People like beautiful things. This explains why we are easily fascinated by exquisite artworks. But where do these aspirations come from? What is beauty’s role, and how important is it in a person’s life? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging piece of writing.

Beauty has many definitions but has two major types. Discuss what is outer and inner beauty and give examples. Tell the reader which of these two types people today prefer to achieve and why. Research data and use opinions to back up your points for an interesting essay.

Many literary pieces and movies are about beauty. Pick one that made an impression on you and tell your readers why. One of the most popular books centered around beauty is Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon , first published in 1993. What does the author want to prove and point out in writing this book, and what did you learn? Are the ideas in the book still relevant to today’s beauty standards? Answer these questions in your next essay for an exiting and engaging piece of writing.

Grammar is critical in writing. To ensure your essay is free of grammatical errors, check out our list of best essay checkers .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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What does it mean by beauty is pain?

November 17, 2022

Who said beauty is pain quote?

Wynter Gordon Quotes

There’s beauty in pain, and everyone experiences it – and it’s a lesson.

Is the saying beauty is pain a metaphor?

One of my all-time favorite metaphors is that of the rose. It has beauty and delicateness, but also thorns. My interpretation is that with beauty comes pain.

Is beauty is pain a paradox?

The ultimate paradox is the relationship between beauty and pain . Pain can result in beauty by transforming people into stronger individuals, but we strive to eliminate most of the suffering in the world.

What does it mean by beauty is pain? – Related Questions

What is Gabby Douglas famous quote?

Always be courageous and strong, and don’t fear . Gospel music always relaxes me and calms my nerves. You know, God has a plan for me, and I’m going to follow in his footsteps and just rejoice and be happy. Gold medals are made out of your sweat, blood and tears, and effort in the gym every day, and sacrificing a lot.

What did Oscar Wilde say about beauty?

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly . No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art.

What does Socrates say about beauty?

It was Socrates who first attempted to explore the definition of beauty, and he felt that aesthetics was a form of purity . (Greenwald) His theory was if you found pleasure in objects, there were to be found beautiful. This idea can be considered a form of beauty, but can be restricted.

What did Nietzsche say about beauty?

Beauty is False, Truth Ugly : Nietzsche on Art and Life | Nietzsche on Art and Life | Oxford Academic.

What Plato says about beauty?

According to Plato, Beauty was an idea or Form of which beautiful things were consequence . Beauty by comparison begins in the domain of intelligible objects, since there is a Form of beauty. The most important question is: what do all of these beautiful things have in common?. To know that is to know Beauty.

What did Plato believe about beauty?

The fundamental datum in understanding Platonic beauty as part of Plato’s aesthetics is that Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and the goals of philosophy. Plato mentions no other Form in the Symposium; the Form of beauty is Form enough.

What Aristotle says about beauty?

Aristotle: beauty is symmetry

For the Ancient Greeks, beauty was no woolly matter of personal taste. According to Aristotle, beauty could be measured. Literally. “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree,” he says in Metaphysics.

What is Aristotle’s famous line?

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than he who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.

What is the beauty paradox?

But for career-driven women, beauty is a no-win situation: The public wants you to be attractive, but, at the same time, not so beautiful that it’s distracting . This is the “beauty paradox” that women leaders face.

What does Thomas Aquinas say about beauty?

Aquinas has defined beauty, provisionally, as “ that which pleases when seen .” This study is structured around the three key components of the definition: (1) the things themselves, including the formal constituents of beauty found in things, (2) Aquinas’ philosophical psychology of perception, and (3) desire and

What did St Augustine say about beauty?

For St. Augustine, even the beauty of sensible things is perceived intellectually and not merely by the senses . Aesthetic contemplation, by which beauty is perceived, is not an affair of the senses or the emotions alone, but is essentially the delightful contemplation of the intellect.

What did Augustine say about beauty?

In “Confessions,” Augustine famously writes of “ Beauty, ever ancient, ever new .” He laments that he loved this Beauty only late in life. It was with him, but he did not know it, and he took it for granted.

What did David Hume say about beauty?

According to David Hume, beauty is an impression rather than an idea . It is not a quality of the object or person to which it is attributed, instead, beauty is a descriptive quality formed by the mind of the observer.

What is David Hume’s most famous quote?

“ Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. ”

What philosophers say about beauty?

Philosophers have not agreed on whether beauty is subjective or objective (big surprise). The ancient greats, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus all agreed that beauty was primarily objective —beautiful things really are beautiful regardless of what one or another individual may think or feel (Sartwell, 2016).

What is David Hume’s theory?

According to Hume’s theory of the mind, the passions (what we today would call emotions, feelings, and desires) are impressions rather than ideas (original, vivid and lively perceptions that are not copied from other perceptions).

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An argument about beauty

Susan Sontag has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1993. Best known as a novelist and essayist – her books have been translated into thirty-two languages – she has also written stories and plays, written and directed movies, and worked as a theatre director in the United States and Europe. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for her novel In America , and in 2001 received the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. Last year, a new collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls , was published. Her next book, Regarding the Pain of Others , will appear in early 2003, and she is also writing another novel.

Responding at last, in April of 2002, to the scandal created by the revelation of innumerable cover-ups of sexually predatory priests, Pope John Paul II told the American cardinals summoned to the Vatican, “A great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.”

Is it too odd that the Pope likens the Catholic Church to a great – that is, beautiful – work of art? Perhaps not, since the inane comparison allows him to turn abhorrent misdeeds into something like the scratches in the print of a silent film or craquelure covering the surface of an Old Master painting, blemishes that we reflexively screen out or see past. The Pope likes venerable ideas. And beauty, as a term signifying (like health) an indisputable excellence, has been a perennial resource in the issuing of peremptory evaluations.

Permanence, however, is not one of beauty’s more obvious attributes; and the contemplation of beauty, when it is expert, may be wreathed in pathos, the drama on which Shakespeare elaborates in many of the Sonnets. Traditional celebrations of beauty in Japan, like the annual rite of cherry-blossom viewing, are keenly elegiac; the most stirring beauty is the most evanescent. To make beauty in some sense imperishable required a lot of conceptual tinkering and transposing, but the idea was simply too alluring, too potent, to be squandered on the praise of superior embodiments. The aim was to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility, with the metaphorized uses (‘intellectual beauty,’ ‘spiritual beauty’) taking precedence over what ordinary language extols as beautiful – a gladness to the senses.

The less ‘uplifting’ beauty of face and body remains the most commonly visited site of the beautiful. But one would hardly expect the Pope to invoke that sense of beauty while constructing an exculpatory account of several generations’ worth of the clergy’s sexual molestation of children and protection of the molesters. More to the point – his point – is the ‘higher’ beauty of art. However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of ‘inner’ (as opposed to ‘outer’) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated – fixed – in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

The best theory of beauty is its history. Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities.

Communities dedicated by their leaders to stemming what is perceived as a noxious tide of innovative views have no interest in modifying the bulwark provided by the use of beauty as unexceptionable commendation and consolation. It is not surprising that John Paul II, and the preserve-and-conserve institution for which he speaks, feels as comfortable with beauty as with the idea of the good.

It also seems inevitable that when, almost a century ago, the most prestigious communities concerned with the fine arts dedicated themselves to drastic projects of innovation, beauty would turn up on the front line of notions to be discredited. Beauty could not but appear a conservative standard to the makers and proclaimers of the new; Gertrude Stein said that to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead. Beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment.

Elsewhere, beauty still reigns, irrepressible. (How could it not?) When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying , “Nobody of any real culture ever talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,” sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux-arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up-to-date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

Even when Beauty was an unquestioned criterion of value in the arts, it was defined laterally, by evoking some other quality that was supposed to be the essence or sine qua non of something that was beautiful. A definition of the beautiful was no more (or less) than a commendation of the beautiful. When, for example, Lessing equated beauty with harmony, he was offering another general idea of what is excellent or desirable.

In the absence of a definition in the strict sense, there was supposed to be an organ or capacity for registering beauty (that is, value) in the arts, called ‘taste,’ and a canon of works discerned by people of taste, seekers after more rarefied gratifications, adepts of connoisseurship. For in the arts – unlike life – beauty was not assumed to be necessarily apparent, evident, obvious.

The problem with taste was that, however much it resulted in periods of large agreement within communities of art lovers, it issued from private, immediate, and revocable responses to art. And the consensus, however firm, was never more than local. To address this defect, Kant – a dedicated universalizer – proposed a distinctive faculty of ‘judgment’ with discernable principles of a general and abiding kind; the tastes legislated by this faculty of judgment, if properly reflected upon, should be the possession of all. But ‘judgment’ did not have its intended effect of shoring up ‘taste’ or making it, in a certain sense, more democratic. For one thing, taste-as-principled- judgment was hard to apply, since it had the most tenuous connection with the actual works of art deemed incontestably great or beautiful, unlike the pliable, empirical criterion of taste. And taste is now a far weaker, more assailable notion than it was in the late eighteenth century. Whose taste? Or, more insolently, who sez?

As the relativistic stance in cultural matters pressed harder on the old assessments, definitions of beauty – descriptions of its essence – became emptier. Beauty could no longer be something as positive as harmony. For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely ‘the ineffable.’

The failure of the notion of beauty reflects the discrediting of the prestige of judgment itself, as something that could conceivably be impartial or objective, not always self-serving or self-referring. It also reflects the discrediting of binary discourses in the arts. Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called political correctness, but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.) The point is to find what is beautiful in what has not hitherto been regarded as beautiful (or: the beautiful in the ugly).

Similarly, there is more and more resistance to the idea of ‘good taste,’ that is, to the dichotomy good taste/bad taste, except for occasions that allow one to celebrate the defeat of snobbery and the triumph of what was once condescended to as bad taste. Today, good taste seems even more retrograde an idea than beauty. Austere, difficult ‘modernist’ art and literature have come to seem old-fashioned, a conspiracy of snobs. Innovation is relaxation now; today’s E-Z Art gives the green light to all. In the cultural climate favoring the more user-friendly art of recent years, the beautiful seems, if not obvious, then pretentious. Beauty continues to take a battering in what are called, absurdly, our culture wars.

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude.

What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as – on the contrary – excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself.

The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty, and the caring about beauty, was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting.’

Of course, when people said a work of art was interesting, this did not mean that they necessarily liked it – much less that they thought it beautiful. It usually meant no more than they thought they ought to like it. Or that they liked it, sort of, even though it wasn’t beautiful.

Or they might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where ‘the interesting’ first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

What is interesting? Mostly, what has not previously been thought beautiful (or good). The sick are interesting, as Nietzsche points out. The wicked, too. To name something as interesting implies challenging old orders of praise; such judgments aspire to be found insolent or at least ingenious. Connoisseurs of the interesting – whose antonym is the boring – appreciate clash, not harmony. Liberalism is boring, declares Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political , written in 1932 (the following year he joined the Nazi Party). A politics conducted according to liberal principles lacks drama, flavor, conflict, while strong autocratic politics – and war – are interesting.

Long use of ‘the interesting’ as a criterion of value has, inevitably, weakened its transgressive bite. What is left of the old insolence lies mainly in its disdain for the consequences of actions and of judgments. As for the truthfulness of the ascription – that does not even enter the story. One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness). The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things that become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring – understood as an absence, an emptiness – implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality.

In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience – of feeling – one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

Beauty can illustrate an ideal; a perfection. Or, because of its identification with women (more accurately, with Woman), it can trigger the usual ambivalence that stems from the age-old denigration of the feminine. Much of the discrediting of beauty needs to be understood as a result of the gender inflection. Misogyny, too, might underlie the urge to metaphorize beauty, thereby promoting it out of the realm of the ‘merely’ feminine, the unserious, the specious. For if women are worshiped because they are beautiful, they are condescended to for their preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful. Beauty is theatrical, it is for being looked at and admired; and the word is as likely to suggest the beauty industry (beauty magazines, beauty parlors, beauty products) – the theatre of feminine frivolity – as the beauties of art and of nature. How else to explain the association of beauty – i.e., women – with mindlessness? To be concerned with one’s own beauty is to risk the charge of narcissism and frivolity. Consider all the beauty synonyms, starting with the ‘lovely,’ the merely ‘pretty,’ which cry out for a virile transposition.

“Handsome is as handsome does.” (But not: “Beautiful is as beautiful does.”) Though it applies no less than does ‘beautiful’ to appearance, ‘handsome’ – free of associations with the feminine – seems a more sober, less gushing way of commending. Beauty is not ordinarily associated with gravitas. Thus one might prefer to call the vehicle for delivering searing images of war and atrocity a ‘handsome book,’ as I did in the preface to a recent compilation of photographs by Don McCullin, lest calling it a ‘beautiful book’ (which it was) would seem an affront to its appalling subject.

It’s usually assumed that beauty is, almost tautologically, an ‘aesthetic’ category, which puts it, according to many, on a collision course with the ethical. But beauty, even beauty in the amoral mode, is never naked. And the ascription of beauty is never unmixed with moral values. Far from the aesthetic and the ethical being poles apart, as Kierkegaard and Tolstoy insisted, the aesthetic is itself a quasi-moral project. Arguments about beauty since Plato are stocked with questions about the proper relation to the beautiful (the irresistibly, enthrallingly beautiful), which is thought to flow from the nature of beauty itself.

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. From a Nietzschean (or Wildean) point of view, this may be improper, but it seems to me unavoidable. And the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such.

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console. The beauty of face and figure torments, subjugates; that beauty is imperious. The beauty that is human, and the beauty that is made (art) – both raise the fantasy of possession. Our model of the disinterested comes from the beauty of nature – a nature that is distant, overarching, unpossessable.

From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December of 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotions and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience. . . .” 1

Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

The beauty of art is better, ‘higher,’ according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit. But the discerning of beauty in nature is also the result of traditions of consciousness, and of culture – in Hegel’s language, of spirit.

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent. As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature. (He was thinking of poetry and painting. Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.) What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

A happy by-product of this insight, if insight it is: beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.

Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

• 1 Quoted in Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 130.

On beauty (2002)

The Pain-Beauty Paradox

Rachel usala.

Beauty Standards and Their Impact Essay

Introduction.

Beauty generally refers to the mixture of aesthetic qualities such as form, shape and color that pleases the eyesight. Beauty is divided into two broad branches, that is, human beauty and beauty in things around us. Human beauty can also be classified into physical beauty and beauty of the soul. Beauty in things around us entails architecture and physical features.

Society at large has always put emphasis that beauty being admired and looked after trait. A good example in a society is a Marketing and Advertisement Industry that sells all everything by showcasing its beauty. Some countries however hold beauty more highly than others. Such countries include The U.S is the leading.

The physical beauty of a person opens ways for the person to get their soulmates without struggle. It is usually the first impression that makes the attraction to a mate much easier. It smoothens the bumps that life gives during the search for a soulmate. However, you should take into account that its importance fades away quickly with time. As you go through life, you realize that what you thought was beauty fades away. During this period, people tend to embark on the other kind of beauty which is the beauty of the soul. The beauty of the soul entails traits such as personality, sense of humor, intelligence and other factors that entail a person’s character.

The beauty of the things around us such as the works of architecture such as unique buildings, bridges and others and physical features such as mountains and water bodies are very important as they bring happiness and joy to our eyesight. They are used as sources of recreational facilities for both children and adults. Children go to places rich in physical features to break class monotony. Adults go to beautiful places while depressed or just while they need some refreshment. They are also used as sources of learning facilities for persons of all ages. Children go to learn new things in their environment and that is the same with adults.

All people need beauty but it depends on which type of beauty is in question. To explain this, children only find beauty in things such as toys and also in places they go. Adults on the other hand see the world clearly and thus they need beauty in everything they do and places they go. Some people however need beauty more than others. Women for example tend to be more obsessed with beauty in almost everything. They always look for perfection in their body and also in everything they do on a daily basis. This has consequently made them turn to cosmetics in order to look more beautiful. Some are now even doing surgery to modify their faces and other parts of their bodies. People always need beauty in their lives. This is always largely contributed by things around them. Take, for example, a beautiful compound with a wonderful house and a beautiful garden in the backyard that will always bring happiness and improve the lives of people living there.

As the say goes, beauty is in the beholder’s eyes. The perception of people on beauty is influenced by cultural heritage. For instance, American culture perceives youthfulness as beauty and European perceives flawless skin as an ideal beauty. In Africa, however, a filled-out large figure is referred to as beauty. In today’s society, beauty is people are beginning to relate beauty to be prosperous and happy. Many cultures have fueled the obsession with women being pretty and that in turn led to the introduction of cosmetics among different cultures. Almost all the cultures in the world value beauty so highly that many quantitative measures of beauty are constructed socially.

There are some types of beauty that the media have long forgotten and no longer classify as types of beauty. These include architecture and music. The media nowadays classify architecture as more of a science than art while the music on the other hand is long forgotten when they talk about those categories. Through the help of the media, our concepts about beauty can be globalized more so through social media networks as almost all the young people in this new generation are using social media networks and the information can travel faster.

There are many controversies about beauty in nature compared to that in human form. It is important that we consider all as having beauty but the one has more beauty than the other. Human being has a beauty that fades away with time while nature has a permanent beauty that never fades away. For example, take a look at the sky, the moon, the river and so on, their beauty last forever. Men are interested in the beauty of other things than that of their own while women always tend to be self-centered when it comes to beauty. Concerning your appearance is normal and understandable. In today’s society, everywhere you go be it at work, school, or interview, your personal appearance will always influence people’s impression of you.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the standards that society has put on women have enabled some women to thrive and become successful. Let’s take America for example, a country that produces many models and enables women to develop their careers in terms of beauty. It has led to many other opportunities such as selling cosmetics and fashion design.

The physical beauty of human beings fades away with time. The beauty of nature and of the soul is permanent. Society has set some unrealistic standards for women in terms of beauty which are vague and should be overlooked.

Skivko, M. (2020). Deconstruction in Fashion as a Path Toward New Beauty Standards: The Maison Margiela Case. ZoneModa Journal , 10 (1), 39-49.

McCray, S. (2018). Redefining Society’s Beauty Standards.

Capaldi, C. A., Passmore, H. A., Ishii, R., Chistopolskaya, K. A., Vowinckel, J., Nikolaev, E. L., & Semikin, G. I. (2017). Engaging with natural beauty may be related to well-being because it connects people to nature: Evidence from three cultures. Ecopsychology, 9(4), 199-211.

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1. IvyPanda . "Beauty Standards and Their Impact." July 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Beauty — What Is Beauty: Inner and Physical

What is Beauty: Inner and Physical

• Categories: Beauty Physical Appearance

About this sample

Words: 1078 |

Updated: 23 November, 2023

Words: 1078 | Page: 1 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Aristotle. (1999). Poetics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (pp. 1453-1492). Modern Library.
• Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press.
• Eagan, D. J. (2017). The Social Psychology of Facial Appearance. Springer.
• Etcoff, N. (2000). Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Anchor Books.
• Kant, I. (2009). Critique of Judgment. Oxford University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249-291.
• Platon. (2005). The Symposium. In S. R. Slings (Ed.), Plato Complete Works (pp. 461-512). Hackett Publishing Company.
• Scruton, R. (2009). Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• Sontag, S. (1978). The Double Standard of Aging. Saturday Review, 5-7.
• Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. Harper Perennial.

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Conceptualizing suffering and pain

• Noelia Bueno-Gómez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8764-6549 1  

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine volume  12 , Article number:  7 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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This article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them (the mind-body dichotomy, Cassel’s idea of persons as “intact beings”) are critically discussed with such purpose.

A philosophical methodology is used, based on the review of existent literature on the topic and the argumentation in favor of what are found as better definitions of suffering and pain.

Pain can be described in neurological terms but cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors have a decisive influence on pain perception. Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level. Pain and suffering are considered unpleasant. However, the provided definitions neither include the idea that pain and suffering can attack and even destroy the self nor the idea that they can constructively expand the self; both perspectives can b e equally useful for managing pain and suffering, but they are not defining features of the same. Including the existential dimension in the definition of suffering highlights the relevance of suffering in life and its effect on one’s own attachment to the world (including personal management, or the cultural and social influences which shape it). An understanding of pain and suffering life experiences is proposed, meaning that they are considered aspects of a person’s life, and the self is the ever-changing sum of these (and other) experiences.

Conclusions

The provided definitions will be useful to the identification of pain and suffering, to the discussion of how to relieve them, and to a better understanding of how they are expressed and experienced. They lay the groundwork for further research in all these areas, with the twofold aim of a) avoiding epistemological mistakes and moral injustices, and b) highlighting the limitations of medicine in the treatment of suffering and pain.

Introduction

This article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Such definitions will be useful to the identification of pain and suffering, to the discussion of how to relieve them, and to a better understanding of how they are expressed and experienced. The provided definitions lay the groundwork for further research in all these areas, with the aim of avoiding epistemological mistakes and moral injustices such as the exclusion of certain experiences from the definition of suffering. Definitions are not inconsequential, since the way in which we define concepts has epistemological, ontological and practical dimensions.

Classical evidence-based medicine understands pain from a naturalistic point of view, and persons as beings are divided into two different entities: the body and the mind. Even if this perspective has led to great success in the relief of pain, certain problems have remained partially or entirely unresolved and/or unexplained, for instance the placebo effect, chronic pain and non-somatic pain. Moreover, classical evidence-based medicine has been increasingly criticized from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. This paper will begin by explaining the conceptions of pain and person used by evidence-based classical medicine and their Cartesian roots, followed by a critical discussion of the contributions made by the humanistic turn (represented by Cassell), and finally, the phenomenology and narrative conceptions of the self and the person.

An alternative to the mind/body dichotomy is assumed, consisting of an understanding of persons as psychophysical, socioculturally situated beings. Both pain and suffering have bodily, psychological and sociocultural dimensions. Pain (like pleasure) has been defined as a process resulting from a somatosensory perception, subsequently present in the brain as a mental image and followed by an unpleasant emotion as well as changes in the body [ 1 ], but such a process cannot be described exclusively in these neurological terms. Cognitive awareness [ 2 ], interpretation [ 3 ], behavioral dispositions [ 1 ], cultural [ 4 ] and educational factors [ 1 ] influence the perception of pain – for example, pain tolerance or the pain threshold. Footnote 1 Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience which severely affects a person at a psychophysical and an existential level. Even when suffering is not caused by biological or observable circumstances (like the pain associated with tissue damage), it is an embodied experience which we cannot but feel in the rhythm of our hearts, the clenching of our stomachs, the sweat on our hands, our (in)ability to sleep, or the position of our shoulders, just to provide a few examples. Even if suffering does not originate from illness or pain, it can make us feel ill and can even cause us to develop various ailments. Pain can be a source of suffering, but it is not the only one. Social problems like poverty, social exclusion, forceful social inclusion (like peer pressure), forced displacement and uprooting; existential and personal problems like grief and stress; conditions like nausea, paresthesia, a non-painful illness, anxiety or fear can likewise be a cause of suffering. Although pain and suffering are unpleasant, they are not per se either destructive or constructive forces which tear down or build up the self. Rather, they are part of a person’s life, and the self is the result of various experiences including pain and suffering, which have an existential dimension inasmuch as they depend on the person’s attitude, resources for their management, as well as choices and commitments related to that person’s attachment to life and the world. Such personal options are influenced by social [ 5 , 6 ] and cultural [ 7 , 8 ] patterns.

The mind/body dichotomy

Even if the “problem of consciousness” – “how consciousness arises from matter or, more cautiously, how it is related to matter” [ 9 ] – is far from a definitive solution, there is a generalized agreement in literature (particularly in sociology and the philosophy of medicine) regarding the need to question the traditional Cartesian distinction between the body and mind [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Kügler argues for the impossibility of conclusively solving the problem of consciousness, concluding that philosophy must continue working on this topic. However, such difficulties (or even impossibilities) may be due to the fact that we continue to use the classical concepts: We cannot resolve this dualism if we still think in dualistic terms. In order to reframe the mind/body problem, we need to think in terms of “embodying the mind” and “minding the body.” Footnote 2

After questioning the mind/body dualism, the concepts of suffering and pain need to be reconsidered, even if a new conceptualization is indeed difficult [ 10 , 11 ]. Simply put, it is no longer acceptable to consider pain only in physical and suffering only in psychological terms. The Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa is the driving force behind the whole structure of thinking in and the organization of medical sciences and psychology. Once we question this distinction, we need to reconsider this structure of thinking and organization, as well.

Questioning the distinction between the body and mind is not a new idea, despite its persistent prevalence in Western thought. The materialistic understanding of the mind (one of the alternatives to the mind/body dichotomy) can be traced as far back as the philosophy of Epicurus. Footnote 3 In fact, there exists a whole alternative perspective, parallel to the Cartesian conception of the body and mind, developed by Spinoza and continued by Nietzsche and the American pragmatists (particularly William James), as pointed out by Johnson [ 10 ].

For Descartes, the body and mind are two different substances with a different ontological status: The body is like a mechanism that exists in time and space, it can be measured and so can its reactions and processes; however the mind lacks these spatial and temporal dimensions and can exist without a corresponding body. Accordingly, pain is something which occurs in the body and which can be described in terms of visible, physical, measurable damage (for example, tissue damage). In a period of increasing importance of the natural sciences, the Cartesian conceptualization of the res extensa presupposes a knowable world, organized according to certain natural laws [ 12 ]. It assumes that it is possible and desirable to intervene in the world scientifically to further the progress of humanity, which includes medicine, in particular. By using scientific methodology, it is considered possible to repair a body in the same way in which we can repair a machine (or an animal, inasmuch as Descartes considers animals part of the res extensa ). Descartes himself is engaged in the enterprise of knowing the world in order to turn humans into “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature” (“masters and possessors of nature”) [ 12 ], proposing a scientific method and using it to improve living conditions. He trusts in human reason to the point of believing that progress in medicine will be able to relieve us of illness and even the weakness associated with old age, thus showing the first signs of an attitude which reaches its peak during the Enlightenment and declines (in a certain sense) in twentieth century, when the risks of scientific and technological intervention started to become apparent. The Cartesian perspective drove the development of clinical medicine as an empirical science based on evidence.

However, for Descartes, it was clear that our states of mind (“esprits” in the original French) depend on the “disposition of the organs of our body” [ 12 ]. Hence, medicine should contribute not only to the physical, but also to the spiritual and mental wellbeing, and ultimately result in “wiser” humans, both because medicine is able to provide scientific knowledge about human body (which constitutes a contribution to wisdom), and because medicine provides useful knowledge about the body which might allow humans to be free of illness and weakness, thus enabling them to develop and apply their intelligence to increase the knowledge of humanity. In short, it is not true that the body does not matter to Descartes, who was a rationalist but not an idealist, in the sense that he was not willing to risk his “corporeal” existence in order to defend his ideas (he preferred to accept rules and laws of his time that were incompatible with his own ideas in order to avoid imprisonment and other legal consequences, even though he supported the autonomy of reason). In this sense Cartesian dualism does not imply a dismissal of the body. Still, Descartes argues for the existence of an immortal soul which can stand on its own, without a body. Herein Damasio sees Descartes’ “mistake”: in the idea that the mind can exist or even operate independently of the body [ 1 ].

The conceptualization of pain and suffering in classical evidence-based medicine

Pain and suffering cannot be treated exclusively in naturalistic, scientific terms, at least under a certain view of what science is. Medicine became a science at the end of the eighteenth century with the emergence of clinical, evidence-based medicine. In the context of such medicine, suffering and pain were dissociated from the context of a theodicy [ 13 ] and to be treated scientifically. Medicine started to be systematically organized in clinical environments, where patients could be observed and the symptoms and diseases compared and described as neutrally as possible: As explained by Foucault, the physician must distance himself from the diseased in order to learn the truth of the pathological fact [ 14 ]. Disease and pain started to be considered as being situated in bodies, since bodies and their processes came to be viewed in standardized, universalizeable terms. Knowing the medical, scientific truth about pain required both abstracting the body from the person, and the pathological fact from all normal bodily functions. These developments gave rise to the modern problematic approach to dealing with pain and suffering. According to Rey,

“At the dawn of the 19 th century, physicians were looking for a pure sign which would remove the ambiguities inherent in symptoms. They wished to find a sign, the meaning of which would be as certain as that provided by the lesion found at dissection. However, they were to be confronted not only with the multiple signs fundamental to pain, but also by that special exchange between physician and patient in which, whether consciously or not, the latter adopts a distinctive attitude in relating the details of his painful symptoms” [ 4 ].

The challenge of medicine based on observation, objective description of symptoms and diseases Footnote 4 and experimentally proven treatments is dealing with a phenomenon like pain, which may or may not correlate to physical symptoms, whose relief may or may not be affected by the administration of certain drugs, but not always and not to the same degree, and which is definitely modulated by circumstances which are difficult or impossible to measure scientifically, like educational factors moral or religious beliefs, or personal attitudes. Pain is not a kind of spring, and bodies are much more than mere mechanisms, as phenomenologists have striven to show in the 20th century. Abstracting the “pathological fact” from the body and the body from the person facilitated a number of impressive results, treatments and medical progress. However, it proved to have its limitations too.

Pain has not been at the center of medical interest for the whole history of medicine. Of course, pain, like suffering, has always concerned medicine, but treating diseases in the search for healing and accumulating the necessary knowledge and expertise to do so more effectively in the future may be a better definition of the general goal of medicine in all times [ 4 ]. The Hippocratic moral maxim of “primum non nocere” has frequently been interpreted in this sense: To inflict pain (iatrogenic pain) can be considered “non nocere”, that is, not harmful, if it is done for the ultimate goal of curing the patient. In fact, the idea that greater pain can erase lesser pain is also of Hippocratic origin. This principle was particularly used during the nineteenth century by physicians who believed that pain can be useful for the purpose of healing [ 15 ]: The “moxa” procedure (direct moxibustion) consisted of placing a burning cone on the skin of a patient suffering from an ailment in order to infuse the body with external energy and stimulate the healing process. The pain resulting from the burn sore was seen as essential in swaying the body to combat the illness or pain the patient was suffering from in the first place [ 4 ]. We are usually willing to accept certain nuisances or even strong, painful secondary effects of medical treatments if we take them to enhance the recovery process or our quality of life. More questionable is the damage inflicted in order to prevent a more or less probable future disease, and an entirely different discussion concerns the damage inflicted in order to improve the knowledge of the discipline. In any case, the fact of the matter is that medical treatments and healing can – and usually do have – painful consequences, and they can cause suffering.

The attitude of trying to view the ills in the abstract in order to know the scientific “truth” of the pathological fact, and the empirical methodology, combined with the idea that healing is the ultimate goal of medicine, were precisely the focus of the criticism leveled against medicine, the new demands of patient and professional organizations, as well as the discipline of bioethics beginning in the 1960s. All these demands for a “more human” form of medicine were developed in a social context of alarm about the risks of techno-scientific progress and the general questioning of authority on many fronts [ 16 , 17 ]. This criticism came to be known as the “humanistic turn” and it emerged from different fronts: the hospice movement [ 18 ], women’s rights movements which advocated a more active role of women in childbirth [ 19 ], Christian humanistic criticism against medicalization [ 20 ], bioethics and its criticism of medical paternalism [ 21 ], postmodern criticism of medicine [ 22 ], the “medical humanism” exemplified by Cassell’s work [ 3 ], and phenomenological as well as narrative approaches to the practices of medicine and the experiences of the patients, not to mention the contributions of the history, philosophy and sociology of medicine, which placed an emphasis on its fallibility and limitations, its historical and sociological dimensions, and, last but not least, its ontological assumptions. Due to this intense, yet unfinished debate and criticism, clinical medicine has begun to change, incorporating more or less parsimoniously any of the required reforms, while simultaneously increasing its techno-scientific dimension [ 23 ].

These theoretical critical approaches and the parallel social activism challenged the methods, goals and consequences of medicine in different ways. For example, the hospice movement is particularly relevant concerning the aforementioned predominance of the “healing goal” instead of the “palliative goal” of medicine. Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered this movement by emphasizing the necessity of taking care of patients even if their diseases are incurable. Displacing the goal of healing and situating “care” in itself as a focus of healthcare assistance involved increasing interest in the phenomena of pain and suffering in all their dimensions, as well as the research dedicated to improving and implementing analgesia.

All these critical approaches coincide in a demand for the resituation of the ill person in medical contexts. The patient should not be considered a “patient” anymore – a passive being patiently waiting for treatments and medical examinations. The modern patient expects to negotiate the medical decisions concerning them, because medical decisions are never strictly “scientific”, but also moral and/or political. For example, the decision to accept or reject a medical treatment in order to prevent a possible disease cannot be taken “objectively” because this is not a purely objective decision; it involves issues like the evaluation of the secondary effects of the treatment, the personal values and priorities of the affected person, or his/her ability to assume the risk. The scientific dimension of the decision is certainly only one among many. So the challenge mentioned previously still persists, since the physician is now required not to make an abstraction of the ill person, not to look at the body as if it were a mere mechanism to repair, not to take into account only somatic pain, but also to consider non-somatic pain, secondary effects of treatments, personal circumstances, etc. This situation requires the reconceptualization of pain and suffering, and a serious debate about the goals of medicine and its role in society.

Cassell’s medical humanism

The work The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine was first published in 1982 and has had considerable influence on the ensuing debate regarding the medical conceptualization and management of suffering and pain. In fact, this debate has not yet ended [ 24 , 25 , 26 ]. This work can be classified among the theoretical works of the “humanistic turn” in medicine. Cassell criticizes clinical, evidence-based medicine, its dependence on Cartesian dualism, its conceptualization of pain and suffering, its management of them, as well as the goals of medicine. He criticizes exactly those characteristics of medicine which transformed it into a science in the first place, that is, the abstraction processes mentioned above, the fact that “doctors are trained to focus on diseases and to keep their similarities in mind, not their differences”, and that “the diagnostic methods are designed to see the same thing in each case of a disease” [ 3 ]. For him, the anachronistic division between body and non-body, and the focus on the cure of bodily disease, leads medicine to do things which cause the “patient as a person” to suffer. In other words, it not only treats pain inadequately (understanding and treating it only in relation to its measurable, observable and generalizable signs, in the context of a disease) but it also produces suffering, which persists undiagnosed and unrelieved, as is the case in the terminal phase of a chronic disease, which is progressively lengthened due to the availability of new treatments. In contrast, Cassell’s conceptualization of pain and suffering emphasizes their meaningful dimensions and the negative consequences of abstracting the pain from the person in pain. It takes into consideration that it is always an individual who feels pain or suffering, and that such experiences are modeled and strongly determined by personal assumptions, cultural patterns, cognitive activities and even religious beliefs.

Cassell defines pain not only as a sensation, but also “as an experience embedded in beliefs about causes and diseases and their consequences”, and suffering as “the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of person”. Both pain and suffering are considered to have physical and psychological dimensions, and in this sense, it is true that Cassell avoids the classical association between pain and body, suffering and mind. Footnote 5 His definition of pain is in line with the definition offered at the beginning of this article: Pain is a phenomenon which includes both nociception – “the mechanism involved in receiving painful stimuli” – and the subsequent attachment of meaning to such sensation. He recognizes the universality of nociception (“certain kinds of stimuli elicit the sensory response of nociception in every culture, now and forever”), but does not consider pain to be the same as nociception; for him, pain includes the meaning which the subjects ascribe to nociception, and such meaning changes from culture to culture, from person to person.

According to Cassell, suffering starts when “the sick person will believe that his or her intactness as a person is in danger”. So pain does not necessarily entail suffering, and suffering (a threat against the “intactness of a person”) can be caused by other experiences. Cassell proposes that medicine should be more sensitive to the person and the meanings he or she attributes to his or her pain/illness, and that it should specifically treat suffering, thus involving particular “subjective resources” like “feelings, intuition, and even the input of their senses” in order to deal with the suffering of patients. Other authors have also emphasized the importance of particular capacities such as sensitivity and empathy in a physician [ 27 ], developing an “affective mode of understanding” [ 25 ] in the context of trying to humanize medicine. But Cassell also thinks that it is possible to develop a methodology which is able to turn the subjective dimensions of pain and suffering into transmissible information that physicians can use in order to develop more holistic treatments (not only designed to cure a disease, but to palliate the suffering of the ill person). In this manner, the goals of medicine ought to be reformulated.

However, at least two problems arise from Cassell’s conceptualization of suffering. The first one is that his definition of suffering depends on a questionable understanding of the person and it is too restrictive. Defining suffering as a threat against the “intactness” of a person entails an assumption of what an “intact” person is. Cassell’s normative definition of “person” includes a number of dimensions like their perceived future, personality and character, body, past experiences and memories, cultural background, behavior, relations with others, a political dimension and a secret life [ 3 ]. This “intact” person would have developed a kind of equilibrium, or coherence and integrity, among all these dimensions.

Svenaeus [ 24 ] recognizes this difficulty inherent to Cassell’s proposal, the problem of thinking of “the person as a kind of whole” (or how it is possible to formulate a kind of integrity among all these dimensions), and offers an alternative: understanding life as a narrative and “stressing the experiential dimension, the holding together of states of consciousness making up the self”. However, the narrative explanations of the continuity of the self and life can be criticized, too. Although human beings have narrative experiences and dimensions, neither the selves nor life are completely and definitely unified by a single narrative. The stories we tell ourselves about our own experiences are certainly important resources which we use to relate to ourselves, to develop our selves . But such stories are not the only resource we use for such purposes. For example, we also engage in dialogue with our selves – the process of thinking has been defined as a kind of inner dialogue [ 28 ] – and a dialogue is not a story. Moreover, such inner stories are always pluralistic: They interpret our past experiences in the light of present interests or experiences. Hence we do not tell ourselves the same story about our past during our whole life, simply because our past changes every day as we gain new experiences which can easily modify the interpretations of previous experiences, and we need/want to understand our past differently according to our present and our prospects. Much more malleable and uncertain are our stories about the future: The future is unknown territory that slowly becomes present and then past, surprising us again and again.

In parallel, life is not “a narrative”, one single narrative from birth to death [ 29 ]. Different versions and interpretations about the life of a person are continuously written from different points of view; there is never a definitive history. Stories about life are always fragmentary, partial, and they cannot be told but from a certain perspective, depending on the intended emphasis. They do not guarantee the wholeness among our several dimensions.

Thus, the narrative explanation of the “wholeness” of the person does not support Cassell’s definition of “person”. Indeed, such a definition is a non-existent ideal which incorporates the idea that persons are transparent for themselves (they know themselves completely), coherent, able to design a kind of unique personal past and future story, and well balanced. This definition is far from being up to date regarding the contemporary theories of the self. Albrecht Wellmer [ 30 ] mentions two crucial contributions that contradict Cassell’s definition. Freudian psychoanalysis challenges the idea of an autonomous subject: Human beings do not always know exactly and completely what they want, what they do or why they do it, since they are influenced by psychological, social and power-relations forces. Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language challenge the idea that the subjects are the last authors and judges of what they say. Our meaningful expressions are not completely transparent to ourselves. Moreover, postmodern theories emphasize the contradictions among various social roles of the same person [ 31 ], our irrational dimension, our contingent nature and the fact that our actions are not predictable (even by ourselves). A person is never fully coherent, a person cannot be “intact” because touching and being touched is intrinsic to life. It may still be possible to define suffering as a threat to what a person considers to be his integrity at any given moment. However, this is an essential definition of suffering, which is too far-reaching and causes problems when trying to determine the boundaries of what is and is not suffering. Suffering can be experienced in different ways, not necessarily as a threat against one’s integrity, as I will show later. So this definition is unable to properly identify what is common to all experiences of suffering. Moreover, suffering has been seen and is often used to enhance identity (as in the case of the deliberate search for suffering, like self-inflicting pain, and other risky behavior). This stands in direct opposition to Cassell’s definition because seeking out suffering (or using non-deliberate suffering) is used to build or enhance identity, to affirm the self or to identify oneself with certain values like strength or courage.

The second problem of Cassell’s definition of suffering is discussed by Braude [ 25 ]: The experience of suffering may have a truly subjective element that cannot be explicitly communicated through language and “can and should never ultimately become an object, medical or otherwise”. Medicine can pay more attention to the aforementioned subjective, symbolic dimensions of suffering and pain, physicians can be trained to be more empathetic towards ill persons and more sensitive to their real needs. This “humanized medicine” provides a better management of pain and suffering, and it should reconsider its ultimate goals. However, the question remains whether suffering can really be treated solely by medicine and with purely scientific methods, considering this ultimately incommunicable dimension, the fact that not all kinds of suffering are related to pain or disease, and the existential dimension of suffering, which includes personal choices related to the attachment of the person to life and the world. Medicine does indeed have its limits.

The phenomenological approach

The phenomenological conceptualization of suffering and pain offers an attractive alternative to dualistic theories and the mechanical understanding of the body. Footnote 6 Contrary to the scientific approach, in which the body is seen from a third-person perspective, phenomenological proposals assume the perspective of the experience lived by a subject [ 32 , 33 ]. This is a kind of first-person perspective that aims to be meaningful and relevant to others. A good phenomenological approach is not merely a subjective narrative of a personal experience, but is able to capture crucial elements of such an experience which are useful as meaningful resources for other persons trying to understand similar experiences.

A very good example of such a perspective can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s text L’Intrus , in which he aims to understand his own “lived experience” of heart transplantation, the associated severe medical treatments and their acute secondary effects, like lymphoma, philosophically and phenomenologically [ 34 ]. Nancy conceptualizes his experience not merely by telling his story, but by understanding it theoretically through the use of the concept of the “intrus” (intruder) and the idea of “intrusion” to understand the experience of receiving a new organ, its rejection by his immune system, of being treated “medically” (measured, tested, monitored), and finally the cancer and the subsequent treatments. His described strangeness of himself and his experience of liminality are far from unique, and his reflection about the moral consequences of organ transplantation and the increasing technological and scientific medical options all raise important points for further debate. In short, phenomenology is not merely subjective (although it incorporates personal experience) and good phenomenological approaches are powerful philosophical tools. Inasmuch as they are able to incorporate the first-person perspective, the “lived experience”, they possess a high potential for studying suffering and pain from a perspective which is not purely scientific or medical in nature.

With notions like “embodiment” and “living body” – the English translation of the German term “Leib”, in opposition to the “Körper” or “physical body” [ 11 ] – phenomenologists have contributed to “embodying the mind” by emphasizing the crucial role of the body in human experience and by assuming that we experience the world through our living bodies [ 32 ]. This assumption entails different consequences for the understanding of pain and suffering, such as the idea that if we are in pain or we suffer, we feel this displeasure in our bodies, thus influencing partially or totally how we experience the world. A transparent, silent or even an “absent” body [ 32 ] can become painfully present, so we experience the world from this painful perspective. Footnote 7

Phenomenological approaches have contributed to “minding the body” too, as is the case with the phenomenological explanation of the “placebo effect”, one of the phenomena which challenge classical explanations of medical science. Frenkel [ 35 ] formulates this challenge as follows: “How could a private subjective expectancy associated with taking a placebo pill ever manifest as an observable, public change in the physiologic body?” The placebo effect particularly challenges the mind/body distinction and the consideration of the body as a mere “measurable object.” The explanation offered by Frenkel is convincing: The body itself is able to respond meaningfully to a demanding situation, since “we have a sentient body, capable of responding to the world without having to invoke any reflexive activity.” It is even possible to go one step further: If we conceive a person as a psycho-physical whole, it is not implausible to think of the body reacting in meaningful ways, that “a patient perceives affordances of healing in a particular situation and his body thus responds to the solicitation made upon it in the same way that our unreflective motor activity unfolds in the world.” Cultural, social and psychological factors are believed to affect the affordances (solicitations of response for a subject in a particular situation) of healing.

As already mentioned, Svenaeus [ 24 ] has combined phenomenological tendencies with narrative conceptions of personal identity in order to conceptualize pain and suffering. He puts together different definitions of suffering provided by other authors in an attempt to encapsulate “the whole of suffering.” However, uniting these different approaches to suffering does not guarantee a good definition of suffering, Instead, it guarantees a good overview of the studies or conceptualizations of suffering. A good definition should be general enough to include all instances of suffering. This does not mean that particular descriptions of cases of suffering are not useful or meaningful to other sufferers, scientists and simply persons interested in understand the phenomenon of suffering. To put it in other words, the alienation of the self described by Nancy can capture one essential dimension of one kind of suffering, but it does not define all kinds of suffering. Definitions of suffering as a threat against an “intact person”, as an alienation of the self, as an “alienated mood” or “unhomelike being in the world” [ 33 ] express different experiences of suffering, but these are not universal descriptions, so they are not good definitions. As Kleinman states, “It is important to avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or sentimentalizing suffering. There is no single way to suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering.” [ 7 ].

Losing the self or finding the self?

As stated before, it is still a challenge for medicine to deal with these subjective, unmeasurable dimensions of suffering and pain – and, moreover, their possible “unshareability” [ 6 ], although there have been crucial contributions like the Gate Control Theory, which has been decisive in including both the physiological and the psychological dimensions of pain as intrinsic parts of the phenomenon. Still, pain and suffering do not only concern medicine, but also the social sciences and humanities, which contribute substantially to the clarification of their cultural, social and cognitive dimensions. If we attach importance to these dimensions in the experiences of pain and suffering, then we need to recognize the relevant role which said disciplines can play in making sense of them as well as in the provision of resources to relieve suffering. This ties back to the previous statement of medicine having its limits: There are types and dimensions of suffering whose management does not concern medicine (or at least, not exclusively). For instance, we cannot manage social problems that cause social suffering, like poverty, with medical resources. But as stated above, this does not mean that medicine cannot improve its management of pain and suffering: On the contrary, efforts to do so are already being made, even though a complete revolution will require truly overcoming the classical mind/body dichotomy. Footnote 8 A real, coherent assumption of the person as a psychophysical instead of a dualistic being demands not only partial reforms in dealing with suffering and pain, but a total paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn [ 36 ]. Footnote 9 In the meantime, interdisciplinary approaches are being put into practice; for example, the treatment of chronic pain in the long term now incorporates conductist therapies to manage its emotional and cognitive consequences [ 37 , 38 ], or the treatment of non-somatic pain (for example, fibromyalgia) is now supported by psychotherapy [ 39 ].

The alienation (or even “loss”) of the self or the “unhomelike being in the world” can undoubtedly be consequences or expressions of suffering. Kathy Charmaz [ 40 ] describes the “loss of the self” in chronically ill persons and contributes to the understanding of suffering as not limited to a mere “physical discomfort.” In his recent, posthumous novel Paris-Austerlitz , the writer Rafael Chirbes describes the last phase of a man’s mortal illness in the following words:

“Rather, I had the impression that the man lying there wasting away became a stranger in both my eyes and his own – someone unknown to me, of course, but also to himself, and so Michel himself expressed it to me on days when he experienced a moment of lucidity. [...] Michel was being extinguished, fading just the same as each day of my visit, the dim light of the winter afternoon was fading in the frame of the hospital window.” Footnote 10 [ 41 ].

Like Nancy, Michel cannot recognize himself anymore, and neither can his friend. For Svenaeus, suffering alienates us from our own body, from our engagements in the world with others, and from our life values [ 24 ]. “Alienating” means “making alien”, thus suffering is found to be equivalent to the feeling of being strangers to ourselves, to others, or to fitting into the world in an strange way – and it can impede us in living the lives we wanted. The alienation of the world can also be categorized as “unhomelike” in a way similar to Arendt’s concept: “Unhomelike being in the world” means that we exist in an uncomfortable way, in a strange, uneasy environment where we cannot rest or find our place [ 42 ].

These various contributions to understanding different experiences of suffering have not necessarily been proposed as essential definitions of suffering. For example, Charmaz’s work assumes a clearly situated perspective; she analyzes “a fundamental form of suffering” of chronically ill persons in America in the 1980s [ 40 ] However, there does exist a risk in taking such descriptions of suffering as universal, essential definitions, since doing so may have undesirable epistemological and moral consequences.

The idea of an “alienated self” presupposes the idea of a kind of “authentic self” with an “authentic life story”. Suffering can alienate us from our previous concerns and can even displace us into a state of liminality, where we do not feel at home in the world or in our bodies as we once used to. However, as stated previously, these are not definitive consequences of suffering, and persons are not static, unchangeable beings. Alongside the possible “loss of the self” exists the possibility of “reconstructing the self” (we were not our “definitive self” before “losing ourselves” due to suffering and we cannot recover something like a “definitive self”). Instead, we are the result of our experiences, including suffering and pain.

The proof that essentialist definitions of suffering do not hold is that two contradictory answers to the problems of pain and suffering can be equally valid and useful to managing them: the struggle to differentiate oneself from one’s pain, suffering, or illness, and the identification with one’s own pain, suffering or illness [ 11 ]. One of Stonington’s patients surprised him by saying, “I want to be here for this, even for the pain. Not really being here would make me suffer” [ 43 ]. The pain of childbirth has been claimed by women as an element of self-construction for their own identities as mothers and women in the sense that they wish to be the ones in control of the technology used to alleviate pain, and not to be controlled by such technology [ 19 ]. Attitudes like choosing pain or accepting suffering can be a way of affirming the self. For Viktor Frankl [ 44 ], accepting unavoidable suffering can even be a way of finding a sense in life; suffering and facing suffering bravely can be a way of affirming one’s own identity, an achievement, a noble cause, instead of a degradation of the self. Suffering can in the end be considered a characteristic of one’s own identity; after so much suffering, the poet Rosalía de Castro finds in herself an empty space that cannot be filled with anything but suffering:

“That at the bottom, the very bottom / of my insides / there is a desert wasteland / unfillable with laughter / or contentment / but with the bitter / fruits of pain!” Footnote 11 [ 45 ].

It may be possible to “feel at home in suffering” – not in a masochistic sense, but as a way of dealing with it. As an alternative to the essential definitions, I propose to understand suffering as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience which can severely affect a person on a psychophysical and even existential level.

Conceptualizing suffering as an experience emphasizes the fact that it is something a person experiences (both what Dilthey calls a “lived experience” (Erlebnis), an immediate, unreflected experience and an “ordinary, articulated experience” (Lebenserfahrung) [ 46 , 47 ]. We should not look at suffering as an abstract phenomenon, but as something experienced by somebody.

Suffering, like pain, is unpleasant or even anguishing: Even if we do not accept an essentialist definition and we reject the understanding of suffering as a “loss of the self” or as a “reaffirmation of the self”, a definition is still necessary. “Unpleasantness” defines suffering and pain. Leknes and Bastian [ 48 ] propose “to move beyond a view of pain as simply unpleasant” because “it can also be experienced as pleasant, produce pleasant experiences or motivate us towards pleasant experiences”. They offer a number of advantages and benefits of pain: it represents a possibility for redemption after a transgression, it can highlight bravery, motivate us, enhance sensation, offer temporary relief from other pain and offer “an effective contrast to many non-painful experiences, which can appear relatively pleasant if they occur after pain has ended.” However, such benefits or advantages exist only because pain is unpleasant (if it were not, it would no serve as a redemption, etc). The only convincing argument against the “unpleasantness” of pain is the “pain asymbolia” condition where patients feel pain but not unpleasantness. As I already mentioned, pain consists of a somatosensorial perception followed by a transitory mental image of the local change in the body (nociception) on the one hand, and an unpleasant emotion on the other hand. For Leknes and Bastian, a condition like “pain asymbolia” proves that pain is not necessarily unpleasant. However, I argue that people suffering from such a condition do not have a complete experience of pain, but only of one of its parts. In any case, pain asymbolia is a medical condition rather than a usual experience of pain. Footnote 12

Suffering is not always extreme. Sometimes it is a bearable, short, inconsequential experience. However, it is important to include in our definition the possibility that suffering can affect us at an existential dimension, meaning that it can have an impact on crucial matters regarding one’s personal life, matters that affect our existence in the world, like the desire to continue living, the decision of whether or not to have children, or even how to live life – choices that have to be seen in the context of our attachment to the world. This possibility indeed characterizes suffering too and helps us to perceive its (possible) relevance in life. Moreover, the inclusion of the existential dimension of suffering emphasizes the individual’s capacity for dealing with their unpleasant circumstances/experiences, as well as the crucial impact of their attitude and choices on the whole experience of suffering.

Naturalistic and essential conceptualizations of pain and suffering are not adequate because they can have undesirable epistemological, ontological and moral consequences. The naturalistic approach of classical evidence-based medicine incorporates a particular view of human beings based on the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, in which the body is understood as a mechanism that works according to universalizeable, manipulable processes. Even if the “humanistic turn” in medicine has started to vindicate more holistic views of the human being, medicine and its disciplines still depend on the idea that the different parts of the body can be treated independently. Moreover, symbolic, subjective and meaningful dimensions of pain and suffering are still not sufficiently taken into consideration. Negative epistemological and practical consequences of such an approach are the impossibility or difficulty of identifying and managing these dimensions of pain and suffering, the fact that unrecognized pain and suffering are inflicted to further particular goals (healing, information gain, prevention), as well as the lack of consideration of concrete phenomena like chronic pain, non-somatic pain or the placebo effect.

Cassell’s medical humanism tries to respond to these problems of classical evidence-based medicine and offers a good conceptualization of pain, concurrent with the results of neurological, sociological and anthropological studies. However, this article criticizes Cassell’s definition of suffering because, despite the fact that it is able to overcome the mind/body dualism, his idea of personhood is still inadequate. The idea that suffering threatens the integrity of a person entails an idea of the person as an autonomous, rational, coherent and well-equilibrated human being – a view which has been rejected by psychological, philosophical and sociological theories in the twentieth century – and an essential definition of suffering. Cassell’s conception of the person can also not be sustained with the help of narrative theories of the self, because the way in which stories concern the construction of personal identity and the way in which they are incorporated into our understanding of our own lives and the lives of others do not support an idea of wholeness; rather, the stories we tell ourselves are always partial, fragmentary and never definitive. Moreover, the fact that suffering can contribute to the creation of identity instead of its destruction contradicts Cassell’s definition.

Phenomenology has contributed to “embodying the mind” and “minding the body” by emphasizing the crucial role of the body in our experience, as can be seen in the explanation of the placebo effect, according to which the body is able to respond meaningfully to a demanding situation (even if we are not conscious of it). However, some phenomenological definitions of suffering (for example, "suffering as an alienation of the self", "suffering as unhomelike being in the world") may suggest essential and universal characteristics of suffering, thus excluding from it other unpleasant or anguishing experiences that the affected themselves indeed consider suffering. A more open definition should be able to incorporate the subjective dimension of suffering, and even the difficulties or impossibility of expressing very extreme experiences, the fact that a person may be suffering without knowing why, or even that he/she may be partially or totally unaware of his/her suffering. Such dimensions of suffering follow from the fact that human beings have irrational and incoherent dimensions which are not transparent to themselves. A person is the ever-changing result of his/her daily struggles, including his/her management of suffering and pain. We have to focus not only on what we “lose” when we suffer, but also on the various cultural, personal and social adaptations and resources to manage suffering.

Defining suffering substantively turns it into a normative concept, which results in epistemological mistakes and moral injustices. Not all suffering is alienating and it is unfair to deny the suffering of others; for instance, the categorical affirmation that childbirth pain does not entail suffering, as stated by Svenaeus [ 24 ], can be unfair. At the same time, not all aspects of suffering can be objectified.

A definition of pain cannot be based only on the neurological understanding of it, but has to incorporate other relevant factors such as cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors beyond the medical sphere. Hence, a formal, non-essential and non-naturalistic conceptualization of both terms is proposed. Suffering is an unpleasant or even anguishing experience which can severely affect a person on a psychophysical and even existential level. Like suffering, pain is also unpleasant. Both are experiences which affect the whole person (not merely their “body” or “mind”), and a crucial aspect of them is the personal attitude and choices which are in turn influenced by cultural and social patterns. Not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and humanities play a crucial role in understanding all the dimensions of these phenomena. Additionally, the view of a person as a psychophysical instead of a dualistic being demands a total paradigm shift in medicine and new research approaches which are able to challenge the boundaries of various disciplines.

“Pain tolerance” is defined as “the maximum intensity of a pain-producing stimulus that a subject is willing to accept in a given situation” and “pain threshold” as “the minimum intensity of a stimulus that is perceived as painful” by the International Association for the Study of Pain ( http://www.iasp-pain.org/Education/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1698#Nociception , consulted on 10.02.2016).

“Minding the Body” is the title of a paper by Antonio and Hannah Damasio [ 49 ].

The hedonistic and materialistic Epicurus argued in the fourth century BC for the human being as an entirely material entity. Although he distinguished between the body ( sarx ) and mind ( psyché ), he did not consider them to be different ontological substances (as Descartes did), arguing that they were simply made up of different kinds of atoms. For Epicurus, sarx and psyché are two parts of a single, whole organism [ 50 ], and the mind cannot exist without the body. This distinction parallels the Epicurean distinction between the “pains of the body” ( ponos ) and the “sufferings of the soul” ( lype ). Their opposites are aponía (absence of physical pain) and ataraxía (absence of spiritual suffering). Total happiness ( eudaimonía ) is possible only when we enjoy both aponía and ataraxía .

I use the term “disease” in the sense of the medically diagnosed pathology, leaving the term “illness” for the subjective experience of the disease by the ill person [ 27 ].

Van Hooft [ 26 ] suggests that Cassell maintains such a distinction; however, this is not the case [ 25 ].

Not only phenomenological theories have developed alternative conceptualizations of the body. See for example Schicktanz [ 51 ] on the different conceptualizations of embodiment in bioethics and their corresponding interpretations of autonomy.

According to Leder [ 32 ], the body has a tendency of self-concealment, of performing its normal processes and functions without them being “present” for us (i.e. they – and the body in general – are essentially “absent”). However, when we feel pain, the body is no longer “absent”; instead, it is vividly perceived, “present”.

Previous interest in psychogenic pain in the history of medicine has been reported, at least since the second half of nineteenth century, as it can be seen in the work of Otto Binswanger [ 15 ]

For Kuhn, a “paradigm shift” occurs during a scientific revolution. A scientific paradigm is defined as a constellation of facts and theories (assuming that the theories are not exactly developed in order to explain previously given facts, but that facts emerge together with the theories explaining them). In other words, a scientific paradigm includes its own scientific problems, instruments and criteria for solving them, a whole view (Gestalt) of the world.

My translation.

My translation. “¡Que. no fondo ben fondo / das entrañas / hai un deserto páramo / que non se enche con risas / nin contentos, / senón con froitos do dolor / amargos!”

Grahek [ 52 ] distinguishes between pain asymbolia and other circumstances in which the painful stimulus seems to be felt without the subsequent unpleasant emotion, like for example lobotomized, cingulotomized and morphinized patients. Only in the case of pain asymbolia do persons not fell the painful stimuli. The other conditions may include cases of indifference to the painful stimuli, but in order to be indifferent to pain, one needs to be able to feel it.

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This article is a partial result of the research project entitled “The Experience of Suffering. From the Mystic-Ascetic Christian Tradition to the Techno-Scientific Approach”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; M2027-GBL).

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Bueno-Gómez, N. Conceptualizing suffering and pain. Philos Ethics Humanit Med 12 , 7 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-017-0049-5

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Beauty is Pain

“Pain is beauty and beauty is pain” is an old saying often used to explain the trouble women goes through to maintain their looks. Compared to men, women spend a greater amount of time and money on their appearances. Between makeup, nail care, hair care, and clothing (just to name a few), you’re looking at a lengthy daily routine and an empty wallet for the average woman.

In August, Cosmopolitan published an article about Kim Kardashian’s daytime makeup routine, which costs over $1,700 in products and hours worth of time. Kim Kardashian may seem like an extreme case, but she’s actually not far off from the average woman. In 2013, InStyle reported that women spend upwards of $15,000 on beauty products in their lifetime, and in 2012, Jezebel noted that the cost of the average woman’s health and personal hygiene upkeep totaled over $2000 per year.

The debate if it’s more expensive to be a woman has been argued before. As a woman, I thought about what I spend on myself monthly. First, I wrote down everything I buy for myself: Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, dry shampoo, face wash, Clarisonic, tea tree oil, razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, Chi serum, rose water, glycerin, body lotion, face lotion, primer, foundation, blush, highlighter, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, lip gloss, eyebrow palette, eyebrow gel, hairspray, perfume, manicure, pedicure, makeup setting spray, nail polish, and makeup brushes. And then I thought…well shoot.

I decided to take the debate to the students to see what they thought by surveying ten men and ten women. I asked, “How much do you spend monthly on your appearance (this includes anything you spend money on to maintain or enhance your appearance)?” and gave four options to choose from: A. $0-100, B. $100-250, C. $250-400, D. $400 or more. 60 percent of the women surveyed answered D, meaning they spend $400 or more on maintaining their appearance each month. 80 percent of the men surveyed answered A, meaning they spend up to $100 a month on maintaining their appearance.

When asked how long their daily routine is when getting ready, 90 percent of women surveyed answered with an hour or longer. Only 20 percent of men surveyed said they spend an hour or more on their daily routine.

Madison Dorn, a junior communication student, said, “It’s hard to give an exact amount because some months, like when the seasons start to change, I spend well over $500 between clothes, nails, hair, and skin care. I don’t spend that every month but I don’t think I spend much more than my guy friends.”

Ashley Chavez, a health studies student said, “If I’m presenting myself well that day, I spend about an hour and a half to get ready. I mean that includes showering, doing my hair, doing my makeup, and getting dressed. Monthly I spend way more than $400 on my appearance, which is probably a problem.”

When asked in the survey about money and time spent on appearances, Joe Lozito a junior, said, “Does toothpaste count as supplies for maintaining appearance?”

There are several women out there that spend much less than the average woman on appearance, and there are men that spend much more than the average man on their appearance. But for now, it is true that it is more expensive to be a woman.

IMAGE TAKEN from cheloveche.ru

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• Most people are caught in a chronic state doing.
• Few of us ever stop to take in the beauty that is always there in the moment.
• Being bored matters because it allows us to tap into the stillness of the moment and touch our true nature.

Let’s face it, we live in a very chaotic world. At any given moment there are hundreds of entities vying for our attention — whether they are people we are close to, workplace associates, email accounts, social media , popular culture, marketing and advertising , and global events.

Many of our interactions with our external environment are necessary during our daily lives, but very few serve us. Think of all the social media posts and videos you scroll through that you learn nothing from. Think of the hundreds of emails you receive in a day, only a few of which really matter to you. Think of all the marketing and advertising you are bombarded with for products and services that you do not need.

Everything is vying for our attention to fulfill someone else's agenda and get us off track from what really matters to us. What truly matters is very personal and individual for each of us and it is not my place to tell you what you should focus on. However, it is quite clear that many of us are distracted most of the time and easily deviate from the path we should be on.

This leaves us with very little free time in our day to savour the beauty of simply being. This is where boredom comes into play. Most of us fear being bored because we do not want to be left alone with our thoughts and emotions, so we let external distractions get the better of us. However, in a world that seems to have gone mad, this matters more than ever.

Boredom seems to have a negative connotation, but it is more than that. When you are bored it means that there is nothing that needs your attention in that moment. You are momentarily free from external distractions. You are free to contemplate your existence. You are free to simply be with no expectations from the world around you.

Few people experience this kind of boredom. I have heard of criminals who state that, paradoxically, when they were imprisoned and had nothing to do, they had their first taste of freedom. This is because they were liberated from the shackles of the incessant, constant "doing" of their previous lives. They could now simply be. How sad is it that this truth can only be realized inside a jail cell for some.

However, we do not have to be jailed to become free from the chains of always having to do something in reaction to the external world. We can learn to simply be and experience what boredom can bring, which is liberation from the demands of this world.

How do we do this you may ask? You don’t have to meditate; you don’t have to find a secluded place in nature, and you don’t have to retreat to an ashram in the Himalayas. You simply must stop right where you are, no matter what you are doing.

Now, this may not always be practical, especially if you are at work and have deadlines to meet and superiors breathing down your neck. Or if you are at home and have young children that really need your attention and dinner that needs to be prepared. You can be in countless situations that demand your immediate attention, but you need to ask yourself a simple question:

What do I have to lose by simply stopping for one minute? There are many times in the day that we can do this, but few of us reap the benefits for even brief moments of stillness. Ask yourself this question and realize what you are missing by simply not stopping. This is more important now than ever when most people are stressed out, overwhelmed, and burnt out from the endless "doing" of their daily lives.

So, ask yourself, what is really keeping you from simply stopping right now in this moment? In most cases it is simply your aberrant thoughts that keep you on the hamster wheel of always doing something. Try doing absolutely nothing, even if it is for brief moments throughout the day, and make this a regular habit.

Embrace boredom and stillness in your life and watch yourself transform into a grounded, peaceful, and happier human being.

Nauman Naeem, M.D., is a pulmonary and critical care specialist, author, mentor, and speaker in the intersection of flow, awareness, peak performance and optimizing physiology.

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Modern Love

My Twisted Path to a Meaningful Life

A bad night of partying left my body broken and nearly paralyzed. I let the pain shape me for the better.

By Grayson Zulauf

I lifted the sheets to look at my right ankle. Bruised, maybe broken. My back hurt, too. I called my friend Danny to take me to the emergency room. We laughed about our big night out while limping down the stairs, driving south on I-91 and sitting in the waiting room — until the doctor said I may have broken my cervical spine and could become paralyzed.

When the doctor pulled on a latex glove for the anal muscle exam, Danny stepped behind the curtain to call my mother. She asked him what happened. Danny told her he didn’t know. I had passed out on the couch of the third floor of the fraternity house, but I woke up in a bed on the second floor. Everything in between was a blank.

Suspecting that Danny was lying to protect either me or himself, my mother got in her car and drove to the hospital to find out. From Colorado. To New Hampshire.

A week later, she wheeled me from the hospital to an extended stay hotel to recover. My tibia-fibula and lumbar spine fractures were immobilized in hard white casts — and I was 40 pounds lighter. But not paralyzed.

Our first night there, at 1 a.m., the fire alarm went off. In the rush to safety, my wheelchair got stuck in the doorway; it couldn’t summit the lip of the door frame. My mother rescued me with a pair of backup crutches. I hobbled to the parking lot, nightmares of a fiery death looping in my head.

We returned the wheelchair and refilled the painkiller prescription. A few days later, I went back to my senior year of college on crutches, hazy and housed in a room with special accommodations.

And that’s how I started my last year of college, a year I had thought would be full of partying, girls and just enough school to get a job. Now I was facing a year of pain, crutches, recovery and self-pity. Twice a week, I went to physical therapy to relearn how to sit up straight. Every day, my mother called and said, “How are you doing? What happened that night? Stop lying to me.”

For the first time in college, I slowed down. I traded late nights out for long meals in the cafeteria with friends who were kind enough to carry my food tray. I treasured my classes and professors, signing up for faculty dinners and actually doing the reading.

One of my courses was drumming, an easy “A” for science majors who needed to fulfill an art requirement. To start every class, our professor would ask us to rate how we were doing on a scale of 1 to 10. It was rumored that you did better in the class if you ranked yourself high, so I was always an eight or above, despite my full-upper-body brace, leg brace, crutches and painkiller haze.

When a pre-med student rated himself low because of a bad grade in organic chemistry, the professor pointed at me and said, “Look at him. He’s an eight! How can you be a three because of a test?”

There was one other person on campus using my situation for a boost. Near the food court one day, I saw a pair of soccer teammates, Kim and Emma, whom I barely knew. Kim was also on crutches with a torn ACL.

Seeing me, Emma said something to Kim, and they both laughed.

Later I learned why: To cheer Kim up about her missed soccer season, Emma had said, “At least you’re not that guy!”

Hobbled or not, I was responsible for planning our quarterly fraternity formal party. I went dateless since I could barely walk, much less dance. But I still needed to find designated drivers for the night. My friend Annie offered to drive, and she invited Emma along.

Annie and Emma came early to drive Danny and me to the venue so we could set up. I rode with Emma. We started talking about her philosophy class on free will. Free will is an illusion, she had decided. Or not.

The next morning, I emailed Emma to see if she wanted to go to dinner. Emma told Annie, who knew me better, about the invite.

Annie said, “He’s always in it for the wrong reasons.”

She was right. Emma still said yes.

We sat by the window. I wore sweats since real pants didn’t fit over my cast. I left Danny at the library, in disbelief that I had nearly finished my final paper and that I had an actual date, my first ever. Never had I asked a girl out to dinner or coffee or on any sort of respectable outing. Everything had been casual hookups, fraternity and sorority mixers, drunken encounters.

Unsure how it would go, I prepared three questions on a notecard to ask at conversational lulls.

Emma ordered a goat cheese pizza. I had macaroni-and-cheese. We talked about her upcoming internship back home in Michigan and my injuries. At the first pause, I got nervous and went to my notecard: “How was your soccer season?”

At our parting point on the college green, we paused to say good night. Emma was holding her leftover pizza with both hands and saying something important, or long-winded. I interrupted with a kiss. She kissed me back, as much as one can while clutching a to-go box.

I crutch-ran back to the library. With the addition of a kiss to my now-successful date, Danny was even more incredulous: “There was no date! Show me the email!”

I emailed Emma to ask if she would like to watch a movie in my room. She said yes. I showed Danny that email and left him for the second time that night.

We graduated and got our first jobs. Two years to the day after my injury, a college friend, Jonny, fell down a flight of stairs after a night out in New York City and died. At 23, from a traumatic brain injury. When I heard the news, I thought of his mother. Then I thought of my mother, knowing that could have been me, and stopped feeling sorry for myself.

Over time, my leg healed, and my back mostly healed. Every few months, my back locks up and I can hardly move. When that happens, I take a week off and tell my co-workers that I injured myself skiing. At only 33, I can’t help but wonder how much worse and frequent these episodes will get as I age.

When the pain is unbearable and my guilt and self - pity return, Emma runs me ice baths. She strokes my hair and kisses my face while I lie on the couch after a day of sitting. She “camps” with me in our living room, where the stiff floor provides more back support than a bed. She tries to ease the pain with an amateur massage, or at least wields the massage gun with gusto. She moves our couches and books and picks up whatever I drop. She tells me to do my physical therapy and to exercise. She reminds me about everything I love and can still do.

We cook, with Emma standing and me sitting. We binge shows while lying on the floor. We travel on long flights with seat cushions and foam rollers and lacrosse balls, and Emma always takes the middle seat. We talk about how we were fated to be together because free will is a lie. And two years ago, we got married.

Our lives are shaped by pain, but more by love. I told Emma in my wedding vows that my life story is the story of the luckiest boy in the world. We laugh and love and play like puppies, as Danny calls us, through and around and during the pain. Even as it gets worse with each year, the pain is what I make of it: a footnote to the love story.

Last year, 12 years after our first date, we found ourselves back in our college town and went to the same restaurant for dinner. The goat cheese pizza was no longer on the menu, so we split the mac-and-cheese. Then we walked to the green to finish the re-enactment of our first kiss. Except that Emma was sure it happened under the tree in the corner, and I was sure we were on the sidewalk across the road. We pleaded our cases but never kissed, unable to agree, and then walked back to the car.

For my mother, the truth: I never knew, and I still don’t know, how I broke my back and leg, but I have stopped caring. I do know this: That night, I fell into a lifetime of both pain and love. And I would choose it again — if the choice ever existed at all.

Grayson Zulauf, who lives in Burlington, Vt., builds companies that fight climate change.

Modern Love can be reached at [email protected] .

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