location on or in the body. By contrast, most suffering involves unlocated emotions. Emotional suffering can be either psychological or biological (as with clinical depression, which is linked to chemical imbalances in the brain), although it tends to be the former. Pain can be mild or moderate, acute or chronic. Emotions can be blameworthy or praise-worthy, and can center on large and small objects.
It would be misleading to link pain to the purely physical and suffering to the purely mental. In a widely lauded study, Mark Zborowski has tied ethnicity to how we respond to pain.1 He found that Jewish-American patients voiced existential, philosophical concern about the pain they experienced and tended to be pessimistic about the course of their pain. Protestant patients, on the other hand, displayed optimism about the course of their illnesses and felt quite confident about the abilities of physicians to help them. Italian-American patients differed from Jewish-Americans in that they did not seem to care much at all about the larger meaning or significance of their pain; Italian-Americans simply wanted quick relief from pain. Pain, like suffering, prompts different responses in different cultures.
Although the common-sense view is that pain entails some degree of awfulness, pain can be separated from our response to it. It is well known that masochists profess to enjoy pain and humiliation and that prizefighters and soldiers will occasionally report that they were totally unaware that they had been severely injured until after the struggle concluded. Because leprosy can destroy the microscopic fibers that carry the sense of pain, someone stricken with leprosy will feel no pain at all if he or she places his or her hand on a burning kitchen stove. These perhaps obscure examples make it hard to say that pain is always or necessarily unpleasant.
As for suffering: do we always want to avoid it? Apparently not, given that people frequently reject relief from grief, remorse, guilt, or unrequited love. This is more serious than simply noting that what distresses others may differ from what distresses us. It won’t do simply to declare anyone who enjoys feeling pain or who dislikes himself or herself neurotic and therefore anomalous. Too many characters from books, theater, film, comic strips, and television, whose troubles in love, honor, and fortune have long held us rapt with attention, testify to the appealing underside of some disagreeable emotional trials. The same may be said of guests on many television talk shows or of many a magazine interviewee. If pain and suffering are not always or thoroughly unpleasant, then, how can it be said that we reasonably seek to avoid them? Given that we might simply be mistaken about our presumption of unpleasantness, Schadenfreude might appear either an irrational or an unintelligible response to the suffering of another person.
Schadenfreude is neither irrational nor unintelligible. For although it may be that some pains are either pleasant or at least not unpleasant, anyone who objects that pains are not necessarily unpleasant must turn to the marginal cases to prove the point. That so many people seek treatment for or consolation from their physical pain or emotional suffering indicates the reasonableness of the premise that we dislike pain and suffering. That there is a problem both with verifying statements about pain and suffering (we cannot be sure about the accuracy of another’s report of pain) and with the idea that pain and suffering are awful (we cannot be sure how bad a person feels) means that it is difficult to agree on what kind or degree of unpleasantness Schadenfreude celebrates.
How much can we really know about the pain of another person? Afflicted people will often complain about the difficulty of communicating their anguish. We may find ourselves perplexed even at the sound of another’s pain, as Proust did:
...one never understands precisely the meaning of an
It would be misleading to link pain to the purely physical and suffering to the purely mental. In a widely lauded study, Mark Zborowski has tied ethnicity to how we respond to pain.1 He found that Jewish-American patients voiced existential, philosophical concern about the pain they experienced and tended to be pessimistic about the course of their pain. Protestant patients, on the other hand, displayed optimism about the course of their illnesses and felt quite confident about the abilities of physicians to help them. Italian-American patients differed from Jewish-Americans in that they did not seem to care much at all about the larger meaning or significance of their pain; Italian-Americans simply wanted quick relief from pain. Pain, like suffering, prompts different responses in different cultures.
Although the common-sense view is that pain entails some degree of awfulness, pain can be separated from our response to it. It is well known that masochists profess to enjoy pain and humiliation and that prizefighters and soldiers will occasionally report that they were totally unaware that they had been severely injured until after the struggle concluded. Because leprosy can destroy the microscopic fibers that carry the sense of pain, someone stricken with leprosy will feel no pain at all if he or she places his or her hand on a burning kitchen stove. These perhaps obscure examples make it hard to say that pain is always or necessarily unpleasant.
As for suffering: do we always want to avoid it? Apparently not, given that people frequently reject relief from grief, remorse, guilt, or unrequited love. This is more serious than simply noting that what distresses others may differ from what distresses us. It won’t do simply to declare anyone who enjoys feeling pain or who dislikes himself or herself neurotic and therefore anomalous. Too many characters from books, theater, film, comic strips, and television, whose troubles in love, honor, and fortune have long held us rapt with attention, testify to the appealing underside of some disagreeable emotional trials. The same may be said of guests on many television talk shows or of many a magazine interviewee. If pain and suffering are not always or thoroughly unpleasant, then, how can it be said that we reasonably seek to avoid them? Given that we might simply be mistaken about our presumption of unpleasantness, Schadenfreude might appear either an irrational or an unintelligible response to the suffering of another person.
Schadenfreude is neither irrational nor unintelligible. For although it may be that some pains are either pleasant or at least not unpleasant, anyone who objects that pains are not necessarily unpleasant must turn to the marginal cases to prove the point. That so many people seek treatment for or consolation from their physical pain or emotional suffering indicates the reasonableness of the premise that we dislike pain and suffering. That there is a problem both with verifying statements about pain and suffering (we cannot be sure about the accuracy of another’s report of pain) and with the idea that pain and suffering are awful (we cannot be sure how bad a person feels) means that it is difficult to agree on what kind or degree of unpleasantness Schadenfreude celebrates.
How much can we really know about the pain of another person? Afflicted people will often complain about the difficulty of communicating their anguish. We may find ourselves perplexed even at the sound of another’s pain, as Proust did:
...one never understands precisely the meaning of an
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