Hermeneutics of Suffering

The author argues that William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, presents a hermeneutics of suffering that treats suffering as both a source of and a challenge to openness to understanding, rather than complying with a promise of experiential openness. Through a comparative reading of James, Ralph Waldo Emerson's struggle with his son's death, and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, the author contends that suffering marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, yet conditions the sufferer's reconnection with the social world. James, Emerson, and Gadamer use literary and philosophical imagination to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that entails the conditions of its own overcoming.

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Abstract

William James dedicates two lectures of his Varieties of Religious Experience to what he calls “The Sick Soul.” In these lectures, William combines pragmatist insights, anecdotal commentary, and examples from literary history to explore the phenomenon of human suffering. James, I argue, stresses a hermeneutics of suffering that does not inevitably comply with the promise of an experiential openness towards understanding. Rather, he treats suffering both a source of and a challenge to such an openness, and he thus offers an understanding of suffering that is indicative of a larger discourse in philosophical thinking. In a comparative reading of James’s Varieties , Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle with the death of his son Waldo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method , I will discuss suffering as a way of understanding that allows us, in turn, to make suffering accessible to understanding as such. James, Emerson, and Gadamer remind us that suffering is neither self-serving nor self-sufficient. As it marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, hermeneutics of suffering expresses a failed sense of connectivity and conditions the sufferer’s reconnection with the social world. Both in reading and in writing, James, Emerson, and Gadamer recurrently turn to literary and philosophical imagination to test the limits of action and passion, of doing and enduring, to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that may be unavoidable in the human experience, but that always already entails the conditions of its own overcoming.