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By adapting to the weaknesses of the oppressed, one confirms in such weaknesses the prerequisite of domination, and develops in oneself the measure of barbarity, thickheadedness and capacity to inflict violence required to exercise domination. For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form
in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity.
One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.
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You want, if possible—and there is no more fantastic “if possible”—to do away with suffering. What about us? It does seem that we would prefer it to be even higher and worse than it ever was! Well being, the way you understand it—that is no goal.
To us that looks like an end, a condition which immediately makes human beings laughable and contemptible—something which makes their destruction desirable! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don’t you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering which has created every
enhancement in man up to now? That tension of a soul in misery which develops its strength, its trembling when confronted with great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and using unhappiness, and whatever has been
conferred upon it by way of profundity, secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been given to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
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I have an image of objective happiness and objective despair, and I would say that for as long as people are unencumbered as they are now, and are not expected to take on full responsibility and full self-determination,
then for just as long their welfare and happiness in this world will be an illusion. And it will be an illusion that will one day burst. And when it bursts it will have dreadful consequences.
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Interestingly, I am a critic of relief while you are a proponent of relief: the distress that drives people to seek out such forms of relief is precisely the distress that is put on them by the institutions – that is,
from the arrangement of the world that is alien to them and omnipotent over them. And that seems to me to be an ur-phenomenon of anthropology today, that people flee precisely to the power that is causing them the harm they are suffering from.
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Suffering is not an evil in itself; it becomes evil only when it is not endured consciously or when it exceeds our capacities for comprehension or endurance.
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