22. Can your suffering be sanctified?

This week on the Will to Joy podcast – Can suffering be more than something to endure? Nietzsche thought so. 

In a world obsessed with comfort, safety, and minimising pain, he argued for the discipline of great suffering as the forge of strength, depth, and creativity. We explore the difference between meaningless and meaningful pain, the dangers of a life anaesthetised from hardship, and how struggle feeds the will to power. From Greek tragedy to modern grief, we ask: can suffering be not only accepted, but honoured—even made sacred?

Transcript

“Whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man, creature and creator are united: in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day – do you understand this antithesis? And that your pity is for the ‘creature in man’, for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined – that which has to suffer and should suffer?” (BGE 225)

News update:

This week – suffering: its value according to Nietzsche; whether suffering is ever really good; whether suffering can not just be welcomed, but honoured, even made sacred – jumping off from our explorations of self-overcoming in the last shows.

Intro: What is Suffering?

Many years ago, I knew someone – who shall remain nameless – who lost a child, suddenly and tragically…

Life is full of suffering: physical, mental, emotional, existential – ageing, illness, injury, exhaustion, and death; regret, shame, guilt, worry about the future; struggle, strife, fear, disappointment, rejection, humiliation, heartbreak, and grief.

It’s part of life, though understandably we try to limit it.

So suffering is not just inevitable – it’s inescapable. As Nietzsche puts it, man is:

“The unsatisfied, unsatiated one […] the eternally future one who no longer finds any rest from his own pressing energy, so that his future digs inexorably like a spur into the flesh of every present.” (GM III:13)

The future… desire, need, craving for something better.

Consider that even someone whose every need and every whim is met is still not guaranteed happiness. People get bored very quickly. Think of your own experience: you might enjoy your two-week vacation sitting by a pool and sipping cocktails, but by the end of that fortnight, it already starts wearing thin… Imagine if you were doing that same thing month after month – it would probably turn into a kind of hell.

Good or bad, humans can get used to just about anything.

As a civilisation, we expend enormous efforts to eliminate suffering – really, that’s what science principally aims at, especially in medicine and health, and in our political and social policy too.

But what if it’s not just that at least some suffering is inescapable – something we just have to suck up – but that there’s something actually valuable in the suffering itself?

This is what Nietzsche contends, and he actually diagnoses our obsession with its elimination as something pathological. This seems counterintuitive.

Can suffering be valuable? Can it be sanctified?

• Our modern, secular hypersensitivity and attempts to expunge suffering and discomfort.

• “Owing to the universal inexperience of both kinds of pain, and the comparative rarity of the spectacle of a sufferer, an important consequence results: people now hate pain far more than earlier man did, and calumniate it worse than ever; indeed, people nowadays can hardly endure the thought of pain, and make out of it an affair of conscience and a reproach to collective existence.” (JS 48)

Resignation / nihilism: Schopenhauer, Buddha.

Cycle of desire–satiation–boredom condemned existence as evil – resignation.

Buddha condemned the world when he said all life is suffering – renunciation.

Both preached detachment from desire, as did the Stoics. They all sought to alleviate the suffering of life through detachment.

Nietzsche disagreed that suffering was a problem per se and saw in those who resigned, renounced, or detached themselves a craving for stasis in a world characterised by becoming. A Schopenhauer might say, “I’m hungry, but what’s the point in eating?”

There’s a kind of unrealistic desire to achieve a static and unchanging state of satisfaction. But to be static and unchanging is to be dead. The world doesn’t work like that, and as it’s the only world we have, to condemn it is, for Nietzsche, the most basic form of nihilism.

For Nietzsche, it was not suffering that was the problem but meaningless suffering:

“Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse which has so far blanketed mankind.” (GM III:28)

The meaninglessness of suffering has been brought into sharper focus by the death of God.

The religious have their theodicy – explanations for why suffering exists in a world created by a perfect and benevolent being. These provided real meaning: suffering was a test, or a penance, or a punishment – and it was temporary if you played your cards right. Your trust and faith in the Big Man meant that this was all part of a plan, and so everything would be redeemed in the end.

In a godless world, we’re all dead in the end, fated to fall like blossom. Seas rise and fall, as do mountains, as do civilisations. Milk sours, flowers wilt, swords rust, bones crumble to dust, and every human triumph, no matter how spectacular, is utterly effaced from memory. An unremarkable infant unexpectedly matures into extraordinary beauty or phenomenal ability, like a new star lighting up the night sky – so ephemeral – doomed to be ravaged by time, a wonder that will ultimately trace an unswerving downward trajectory towards ugliness and decrepitude, becoming in the end nothing more than a feast for worms. Even the stars themselves, unimaginably vast, diminish, smoulder, and are completely extinguished in the fullness of time. The seasons turn inexorably, and everything falls apart.

Dionysian Greek tragedy offered a healthy approach to the reality of suffering that didn’t rely on assurance of eternal life in some afterlife – oneness, connection, absorption in the whole of existence: not in the world, but of the world. Always at home. Living and then returning to the great womb of being from which you sprang – existential comfort.

Nietzsche commends an approach similar to the Greeks – not a theodicy (suffering explained and justified by God moving in mysterious ways), but a cosmodicy: suffering explained and justified as an inalienable condition of a glorious whole.

Valuable for growth

So let’s look at the value of suffering.

Certainly, it seems to be part of growth and aspiration to something better. That doesn’t mean it is a good in itself – but it is instrumentally good. By it and through it, we attain our goals. Pain, discomfort, adversity – these are not the enemies of a flourishing life, but its conditions.

You might recall that in episodes 7 to 11, we dug into Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power – as it manifests not just in political or social dominance, but as a psychological, existential principle. The will to power is not about sitting atop a mountain; it’s about the ascent. It is the drive to overcome resistance, to master oneself and the world in ever more refined and subtle ways. And this drive – because it always seeks something to overcome – entails struggle. It means friction. It means pain.

In this light, suffering is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. It’s the engine that turns the wheel. Joy requires suffering. Imagine you get a cable car to the top of the mountain: no stress, no struggle, no effort. Enjoy the view from the top. Take a few snaps, maybe. Now compare that to the feeling of having climbed to its summit – the peril, the strain, the doubts about whether you can make it. It’s easy to see how that last case entails the joy of achievement, whilst the former does not. You challenged yourself and you rose to that challenge. Like Nietzsche says, weak pains mean weak pleasures.

Nietzsche asks us to radically rethink suffering – not as something to be minimised or eliminated, but as something to be accepted, endured, and, where possible, transfigured. The modern ethos of comfort, security, and avoidance is antithetical to this. The will to power needs adversity. It feeds on it. Because to overcome is to face down ordeals that will test you. The greater the trial, the greater the likelihood of failure – but the greater the triumph if you succeed.

And there’s an evolutionary logic to this. Natural selection, indifferent and brutal as it is, bestowed us with dissatisfaction as a spur to survival and reproduction. Creatures that were contented, unperturbed, easily pleased – they didn’t make it. We did. Because we suffer. And because we do something about it.

“For the creator himself to be the child new-born he must also be willing to be the mother and endure the mother’s pain,” Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra, in his myth of the three metamorphoses. The camel bears the burden. The lion slays the dragon. And only then can the child – symbol of creative innocence – be born. But it is not born painlessly. Creation is agony. You must bear the burden. You must face the dragon and vanquish it. To bring forth something new, you must first destroy something old – often yourself. This is self-overcoming.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of the hero’s journey – that transcendence to a new octave involves a crisis. That truth – and it is a truth – is summed up beautifully in this little adage: In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek. How profoundly true is that modest proverb.

“All becoming and growth, everything that guarantees the future, involves pain,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. It’s not just that pain accompanies growth; it is growth, in its rawest form.

And the great danger of a society obsessed with wellness, with safety, with comfort at all costs, is that it forgets this. It forgets the alchemy of suffering. It wants to eliminate the very conditions of strength, of growth, of transformation.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls this out with ferocious clarity:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering… was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?”

Notice the verbs: enduring, persevering, interpreting, exploiting. These are not passive acts. They are creative responses to pain. The stronger soul is not the one who avoids suffering but the one who makes something of it. Suffering becomes the forge. A sword is tempered by fire.

And Nietzsche doesn’t shy away from the harsh implication. In BGE 225, he writes:

“You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ – to abolish suffering; and we? It really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been!”

Strong stuff. But remember: this is about suffering that can be made meaningful. There are some sufferings that defy this – terrible afflictions that it is difficult to view as anything but senseless. And yet, even here, Nietzsche thinks that the higher type might be able to find something to leverage, to value.

And I should say that here we are talking about the individual’s approach to their own suffering. We are not advocating for the suffering of others. We are not suggesting that famines in developing countries are a good thing – not at all. It is in your attitude to your own struggles that there might be opportunities.

Suffering raises the stakes. It heightens the drama. It increases the value of the prize. The higher the mountain, the more dramatic the view. And the more bitter the winter, the sweeter the spring.

This, too, is why Nietzsche mocks the shallow hedonism of scientific humanism in The Joyous Science 12:

“The ultimate purpose of science is to give people as much pleasure and as little pain as possible? But suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other?”

He pushes the point:

“Even today you have a choice: either as little pain as possible – in short, analgesia – or as much pain as possible, as the price of a luxuriance of subtle and seldom-tasted joys and pleasures! Should you decide in favour of the former… you must also moderate and diminish the human capacity for joy.”

This is the cost of anaesthesia: a dull life. Numb the pain, and you numb the joy. So much of our suffering is about contrast. So much of our joy is hard-won. If you want rejoicing to heaven, be prepared for grieving unto death.

Or as he puts it elsewhere in The Joyous Science:

“Oh, how little you know about human happiness, you comfortable and good-natured people – for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and twins which grow tall together, or, in your case, remain small together!”

That’s the choice. Grow tall, or stay small.

And we mustn’t forget: suffering is part of who we are. It’s constitutive. To affirm life is to affirm suffering – not as just or fair, but as real. As necessary. As ours. “The greater the trial, the greater the triumph” – this isn’t greetings card sentimentality. It’s the logic of overcoming.

Nietzsche again in Twilight of the Idols, section 19:

“Test the life of the best and most productive men and nations… whether a tree which is to grow proudly heavenward can dispense with bad weather and tempests: whether disfavour and opposition from without… do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great growth even in virtue is hardly possible?”

He sees it as selective pressure. This reminds me of something I read about rose bushes – that if they are not battered by wind, they don’t put their roots down very deep. Then, if an ad hoc storm comes along, there’s a good chance they will be uprooted and swept away. The bush needs to be buffeted around while growing to develop its strength. And that reminds me of Nietzsche’s notion that a person is only ever as strong as they need to be – i.e., easy living makes you soft. The rugged pioneer can bear more adversity than the wealthy, urbane, cosseted man of leisure. Of course, this all makes perfect sense.

Often, that which crushes the weak strengthens the strong. Suffering can be a crucible. The higher type endures the vicissitudes of a hard life and becomes stronger thereby, but as Nietzsche argues, it’s not enough to just take the rough with the smooth – one has to love it. Nietzsche deplores those who denigrate the world because life is hard. It’s the only world we have and, as such, it is to be revered. Knowing that the world can be tough and cruel whilst remaining faithful to the earth, Nietzsche calls a “pessimism of strength.”

We get a glimpse of this pessimism of strength – this celebration of difficulty – in The Birth of Tragedy, where he writes:

“Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence?”

It’s not masochism. It’s resilience with a dash of cheerfulness. The desire to be tested and to love the world even with all its apparent evils is to have passed the test.

And yet, not all suffering is chosen. Not all pain is noble. What, then, do we make of grief, of loss, of trauma? The death of a child, the senseless ruin of something beautiful, the slow decay of the body? These cannot be justified. But just maybe they can be transfigured.

In the face of meaningless pain, we construct meaning ourselves. This is the power of the human to impute meaning. Think of bereaved parents who, having lost a child to some terrible disease, set up foundations, social movements, scholarships, charities – in honour of that child. There is no given meaning in a godless world. But meaning can be forged – even post hoc. Your child’s life, a loss that seems so meaningless, gains meaning once more through saving the lives of other children.

But not all meaning is good meaning: there are instances of false and unhealthy meaning – the ascetic ideal we find in Christianity is the signature case for Nietzsche. Here we find the unhealthy worship of suffering, rooted in resentment, self-hatred, and contempt for the body. Christianity at its worst sanctifies pain as punishment, as purification by self-negation. Nietzschean asceticism is entirely different. It is not hatred of the self but the cultivation of the self. It is a reverential, life-affirming asceticism – not to mortify, but to strengthen. Not to deny life, but to command it.

As he writes in The Will to Power, 915: "It is my desire to naturalise asceticism: I would substitute the old intention of asceticism, "self-denial," by my own intention, self-strengthening: a gymnastic of the will." 

So we honour suffering not because we deserve it as some kind of punishment – no – we honour it as an inevitable part of life and a schooling for the spirit. When Nietzsche says, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” this is not a claim of fact. It is more like an affirmation – a statement of intent.

And this is not just theory for Nietzsche. His own life was a prolonged experiment in suffering. Already in 1880, he wrote:

“My existence is a fearful burden. I would have thrown it off long ago if I had not been making the most instructive tests and experiments on mental and moral questions in precisely this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation.”

He used his pain. He mined it. Every philosophical insight he had came through affliction. Remember Nietzsche’s words from one of his private letters: I must learn the alchemists’ trick of turning even filth into gold.

And in The Joyous Science, he makes a staggering claim:

“In the end the great question might still remain open: whether we could do without sickness for the development of our virtue… whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge would not especially need the sickly soul as well as the sound one?”

Could it be that suffering sharpens us? That health itself is a prejudice? That illness, pain, spiritual crisis – these are not errors, but teachers?

He answers with brutal clarity:

“It is great pain only, the long, slow pain… that compels us philosophers to descend into our deepest depths… I doubt whether such pain ‘improves’ us; but I know that it makes us profound.”

Profound – not in spite of pain, but because of it.

“One emerges from such long, dangerous exercises in self-mastery as another person… more ticklish, more mischievous… with a more blithesome disposition, with a second and more dangerous innocence… more childish and a hundred times more sophisticated than before.”

This is the Nietzschean rebirth. Not a moral improvement, but a transformation. A deepening. A shedding of illusions. An intensification of life.

And Nietzsche credits his illness with everything. In Ecce Homo, he declares:

“I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others… As for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe my health? I owe it a higher health… I also owe my philosophy to it.”

And perhaps most shockingly:

“Never have I felt happier with myself than in the sickest and most painful periods of my life.”

That’s not the voice of comfort. That’s the voice of conquest.

In the absence of gods, we do not have to explain suffering. We have to face it. And make something of it. We do not have to find meaning in pain – but we can create meaning from it.

The tragic nature of human life – its mortality, its frailty, its vulnerability – demands a heroic attitude: a refusal to go quietly and be cowed by the tribulations of life. A dignity in resistance. And only humans, so far as we know, can be heroic – because only we can choose our own pain.

So take the hard road when the easier one is available. That is what heroism is. That is what courage is.

If you are interested in exploring your own orientation to suffering and experimenting with more detached perspectives on it, check out the practice of Via Dolorosa, which is an extra for De Profundis members on Patreon. Via Dolorosa means “the way of sorrow,” which should give you a clue as to what’s involved.

Now, all this is not to fetishise pain and suffering. It’s to have a positive and practical attitude to an inalienable part of life. Suffering is a means, not an end in itself.

That said, as something necessary and useful, it is possible to make our own suffering sacred. We honour it as a teacher and a transfiguring force – but can we do this without any trace of regret or resentment, and affirm it wholly? Even feel real gratitude for it? This seems like a tall order.

But consider that we already view some kinds of suffering as sacred. Recall the bereaved woman from the start of the show. The doctor tried to help her outrun her grief, but in the end that wasn’t possible.

Think about this: if you were able to flick a switch that prevented you from feeling any sense of pain or distress at all – even if your child had been killed – would you want that? Sure, the pain of such a bereavement would be terrible, but would you really want to go about your business unperturbed, as if nothing had happened in such a scenario? I’m sure most of us would find this idea perverse. The pain of grief in the wake of such a tragedy feels like the appropriate response – the human response.

This is suffering of the worst kind, and yet only by accepting it and undergoing that pain do we honour the love we had for our child. I think here, perhaps, we see how sometimes suffering is sanctified – suffering that is far from pleasant, but is, in the truest sense, right.