Session 11: Suffering and Anguish

Session 11: Suffering and Anguish
Chair: Mena Mitrano

Ensimismamiento and the Anguish of Self-Reflexivity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”
Tahia Thaddeus Reynaga
Department of English, Quinnipiac University, U.S.A.

Schopenhauer observes that the disruption of our will’s intent, that is, the frustration of the action we seek to impose on the world, is what impresses us as evil. For the reason that we apperceive the disruption and not the steady flow, evil, in his estimation, is a positive force, not a negative one as it is commonly assumed to be. Still, such recognition of the positivity of evil – in its physical manifestation, pain, and in its mental, anguish – is perforce predicated upon the interpretive powers of the intellect. Though suffering frustrates the will, it is not revealed to the body as such until the mind formulates knowledge of it, even though knowledge, Schopenhauer tells us, is painless.
Consider, then, Ortega y Gasset’s theory of “ensimismamiento,” or “within-one-self-ness.” Thought, he proclaims, is a faculty man employs strictly for the generation of action. When man perceives himself lost among “things,” he retreats into himself (“ensimismarse”), and upon further reflection, he formulates a plan of action which he executes when he returns to the world of things. However, when man is fraught with strife and relies upon the fallacy of thought divorced from executable action, he cannot properly retreat into himself. Such a reliance on impotent thought, such “idolatry of the intelligence,” engenders the social malaise in which Ortega y Gasset found western civilization steeped.
Thought, then, is valid only when it is conceived with an eye on action (Ortega y Gasset), and action – or the will in Schopenhauer’s terms – is the point of contact at which evil manifests itself. Knowledge, more appropriately self-regarding knowledge, is the fulcrum of the system. That is, the apperception of suffering is only possible when there is an intellect suitably meditative to register a disruption of the will. We deduce, then, that the heightened self-consciousness of man (which both philosophers mark in contrast to the more deadened mentality of the animal) is a more sensitive barometer of suffering. But yet, if we follow Ortega y Gasset a bit further, we discover that evil may equally threaten thought as it does action, and it is at this point that we may question how certain thoughts are by their nature maleficent, and how we potentially harbour within us the germ of our self-destruction.
This paper proposes to investigate the question of self-destructive thought and self-engendered suffering through the lens of Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse.” This short but devastatingly trenchant work proposes that a faculty overlooked by phrenologists of the period, the titular “perverseness” of the story, compels man to act wilfully in spite of himself and, most often, to his own detriment. That self-reflexive meditation and resulting action may beget life-threatening suffering is made clear by the author, but the mechanism behind such a nebulous system is potentially explicated by the theories of Schopenhauer and Ortega y Gasset as detailed above. Furthermore, as literature, by its nature, straddles the poles of thought and action (the author’s reflections inhabit the realm of Ideas, while the work produced is loosed upon the realm of Things), it is critical to elucidate the murky interstices between thought and action. Poe’s piece confronts these depths, and thus constitutes a valuable testimony to the poisonous potential of self-reflexive thought.

Mavis Gallant’s short story “The Moslem Wife” is fundamentally concerned with the difficulties inherent to articulating human suffering during times of war. The story portrays the experience of an innkeeper in southern France, Netta, whose home and life are invaded by the Second World War. The story centres around Netta’s post-war attempt at composing a letter, a coherent narrative of her experience under Fascist rule, to her husband, Jack, who has spent the war years living in safety in the United States. Netta attempts to narrate her experience of the occupation and her witnessing of acts of human brutality, including the hanging of partisans in the village plaza and the execution of innocent hostages, civilians she knows selected at random, in response to resistance to the occupation. In attempting to integrate her war experience into the narrative of her marriage, Netta realizes that any account she can give of her experience will be so entirely incommensurate with the greater narratives of her life that her husband, ignorant of her suffering and protected from the evils of war, will be completely unable to understand. The divide between her experience in Vichy France and that of her husband serves, in Netta’s eyes, as an insurmountable barrier to understanding. Making reference to the writings of short story theorists Charles E. May and Thomas M. Leitch, I will suggest that the short story has a unique ability to represent the experience of the witness of totalitarian evils, one that is in many ways discordant with the perspective presented by the realist novel. In addition, I will argue that Gallant’s exploration of the challenge of narrativizing rupture and suffering is articulated largely through her use of the short form.

The Challenge of Suffering and Evil: A Process Literary-Philosophical Approach
Santiago Sia
Carlow College, Ireland

This presentation will be an interdisciplinary one. Starting with a reading from the author’s novel, The Fountain Arethuse, of selected passages dealing with the challenge of suffering and evil, the presentation will then unpack philosophically the issues explored in these passages. The novel has been inspired by process thought and the philosophical discussion of the themes explored in that work will be done from the perspective of process philosophy.
The line of thought followed in the reading and the discussion is first of all to point to the need to look at the problem of evil differently from the way it had been traditionally conceived by Epicurus and Hume and in theodicies. Secondly, it will suggest—and defend—an image of God which differs from the classical theistic conception of God which has led to the difficulties highlighted by atheism. Thirdly, it will unpack the moral implications of such an approach to the problem of suffering and evil.
By a process approach is meant the methodology and metaphysical vision developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Their philosophy is described as ‘process thought’ because it regards the categories of becoming, relativity and event as more fundamental and inclusive than their contraries (being, absoluteness, and substance). There is also an insistence that the metaphysical vision which emerges from reflecting on experience must be in dialogue with the sciences and other disciplines.
Process thought, particularly as presented by Charles Hartshorne, has contributed much to the debate regarding the problem of evil. This presentation seeks to evaluate that contribution.