Understanding Suffering and the Feeling of Emotional Agony

Suffering as we know it is an emotional agony that runs deeper than physical pain. All through the world almost every living individual will endure suffering in any event at least once in their life. When there is joy, there is pain waiting to happen and as humans we try to avoid the pain. People are constantly looked with hardships throughout their life, and alongside those hardships come emotional distress and torment. Humans endeavor to comprehend the reasoning for suffering, the delivering agony and stress that they must persevere. As humans we will continue to question the meaning behind suffering. I’ve explored to get a better insight on the meaning of suffering through Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophies and the story of Job.

Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher in the 1800’s and his outlook regarding to human suffering and the reason it exists are related to the religion of Christianity. Kierkegaard recommends that as opposed to keeping away from or denying suffering, you should be eager to stand up to it and explore it. Kierkegaard respects we endure in these manners simply because we have some mindfulness that we are profound creatures who are identified with God, and that from various perspectives we neglect to be consistent with this strict relationship. Kierkegaard recommends that when we're not devoted to our God-relationship, we are unfaithful to ourselves. He proposes that we will in general lose ourselves and this misfortune, together with the enduring it brings. He additionally proposes that our inclination to lose ourselves is bound up with a propensity to abstain from misery, to overlook our otherworldly being and rather given ourselves a chance to be devoured by 'the world'.

In Kierkegaard's view, this procedure of shirking is destined to fall flat, since we are profound creatures, and our very hesitance just affirms this reality. Kierkegaard's accentuation on the goodness of courage. Courage means standing up to what one feelings of dread, rather than escaping from it. A valiant individual is set up to suffer when one realizes this is expected of them. In Fear and Trembling, for example, he applauds the boldness of Abraham, who didn't endeavor to maintain a strategic distance from the suffering engaged with taking the choice to slaughter his child. Kierkegaard recommends that the moral is incommensurable with the strict, slaughtering your very own kid can't be interceded with obeying God. In this manner, Abraham needed to play out an act of pure trust when he obeyed God yet at the same time kept up confidence that Isaac would live. In the story of Job, Job had suffered horrible things and could not find the reason why, but he still managed to remain strong didn’t change his faith towards God for he knew that he it would all make sense in the end.

Since suffering is simply unavoidable, it is a matter of responding to it in the right way. In fact, Kierkegaard suggests that by courageously confronting suffering, a person can find great content in life. Kierkegaard points out that one way of maintaining religious belief in the face of suffering is to give up hope of happiness within this life, deferring such hope to an afterlife and he acknowledges that it is possible, but not easy to relate to God in this way (The Guardian). Numerous individuals view suffering as an obstruction to religious conviction, they ask how we can accept that an adoring, all-ground-breaking God made a world like this one, so brimming with anguish. For instance, Job was a blameless and upright man, yet he suffered more than he could even fathom. Through of all Job’s torment he would question why God would allow for him to suffer so badly, he wanted to know the reason for his torture. Kierkegaard argues that the Christian's highest and most difficult task is to endure suffering while continuing to believe that one is loved by God that God cares about the smallest details of their life and to regard this painful, difficult life as a gift from a loving God (The Guardian).

Maybe we suffer because God wants to test us on his faith and love towards him. It could be possible to love others and not suffer for them, but if we are not willing to suffer for them do we really love them? It difficult to understand why God would allow us to suffer. We as humans will always question “why do I have to suffer?” Maybe we hope that, if we can understand why we suffer, we might be able to lessen the pain. The unpredictable idea of human suffering is hard to get a grip on because of its unbounded structures, which makes it difficult to escape from.