Suffering becomes unbearable only once a better alternative is conceivable
Evidence
In so far as man is immersed in the historical situation, he does not even succeed in conceiving of the failures and lacks in a political organization or determined economy; this is not, as is stupidly said, because he “is accustomed to it,” but because he apprehends it in its plenitude of being and because he can not even imagine that he can exist in it otherwise. For it is necessary here to reverse common opinion and on the basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a situation or the sufferings which it imposes, both of which are motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1068
Categorization
- DEFINE: Lays out the double nihilation through which the for-itself detaches from a situation to see it as unbearable.
- XREF: Directly anticipates Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of situated freedom and the possibility of revolt; also evokes the Marxian notion of false consciousness as a limit of imagination rather than mere habit. — connects to: Progress discourse divides suffering into punishable gratuitous pain and necessary pain; Genuine hope rests on disrespect for entrenched, durable suffering, not on guarantees.; A rotting social system can still sustain humanity’s existence at a cost of suffering — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 473