But They Are Full of Forgiveness

A Critical Examination of the Role of Suffering in Cultivating the Unencumbered Moral Self and the Empathetic Political Society

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 481

Lost in the heavy dark, it is not easy to match our demon’s gaze, to offer it an embrace, or a kiss on the cheek, and tell it that we understand it. This aversion to what we perceive as evil comes from a deep-rooted fear that, in our attempt to show this ugly thing kindness, we will instead be destroyed by it. But the fear of destruction, the unrelenting anxiety that warns us not to lose ourselves, is rendered inconsequential when we understand that if we choose to love what we fear, we no longer fear it. This is why Socrates drank the hemlock (Plato, The Apology 23), and why Dante made his journey through Hell (Alighieri, The Inferno). Reaching the point of self-cultivation at which we can say that we love our darkness as one equal part of ourselves, provides us with the opportunity to do the same for the body politic.[1][2]

This paper argues that the active exercise of empathy in recognizing, understanding, and responding to suffering is essential to the survival of political societies. This is because the process of recognizing, understanding, and responding to our darker facets provides the basis for creativity that the body politic needs to adapt. In line with the Romantic tradition of transcendental Idealism, I contend that the critical point of philosophy is the recognition and understanding of “immoral images” by the unencumbered moral self (Schlutz 212). I argue that if we are able to reach a point at which we can marry the “productive imagination” (Schlutz 163) with the imagination of our dreams, i.e. the reasonable or ‘light’ imagination with the wild or “dark” imagination (Coleridge in Schlutz 240), then we can attain the ability to understand and guide the body politic in whatever direction we see fit (Schlutz 253). We gain, in effect, the ability to champion our species’ progress.

It is the ancient struggle over whether or not we ought to allow reason or emotion to triumph which sets the stage for this exploration into the usefulness of suffering. The German movement of Romantic transcendental Idealism arose in response to Immanuel Kant’s Rationalistic lauding of reason as superior to all other forms of understanding (Schlutz 80). Kant’s line of thinking views the “unconstrained freedom” of emotion with some degree of fear, and warns against the triumph of nature over the “higher moral aspects of the reasonable self” (Schlutz 162, 193). This argument is itself an echo of Plato’s distinction between reason and emotion, where the latter is regarded as destructive and in need of guidance from the former. This guidance is, in turn, the duty of the philosopher-ruler, who would guide political societies using his knowledge of the Forms, or the Good (Plato, The Republic, Book VII) (Schultz 257). In distinguishing reason from emotion, Kant and Plato divorce the mind from nature as if the two are not compatible or mutually reinforcing.

The Romantic Idealists view the dissociation of reason from emotion as mistaken. One of Kant’s contemporaries, Friedrich von Hardenberg[3], argued for a balance between “unconstrained freedom” and “the complete control of the law of reason” (Schlutz 162–3). Hardenberg, expanding upon Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s work on poetic subjectivity (Schlutz 162), ultimately intimates that the “goal of philosophy” is the “awakened consciousness of the moral self, a truly free subjectivity unencumbered by the illusory limitations of ordinary consciousness” (Schlutz 212). This freedom, he maintains, depends upon the banishment of “immoral images” (Schlutz 212), which rob a “reasonable subject” of his control because “they might hold a truth that [he] is unable to accept or contain” (Schlutz 213). In other words, we may permit emotion to triumph only insofar as it reflects those aspects of ourselves that we consider to be Good.[4]

Regardless of what side one takes here, whether Rational or Romantic, the common theme is that we strive toward the attainment of the Good and concurrently ostracize the Evil. The problem that I will attempt to address with this argument is its inherent duality, which stems from the belief that Good and Evil are absolutes. We believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and so we choose to ostracize the Evil because we see no worth in it. After all, if something were entirely detrimental to us, why would we desire it? Good and Evil cannot be absolutes, however, because they are unattainable (Plato, The Republic VII). Ostracizing the Evil therefore pulls us further away from the Good, because we deny what good can come from the evil parts of ourselves. I argue that accepting the good that is born from evil is one step closer to the attainment of the Good. As we shall see, empathizing with this evil-based good also creates opportunity for the proliferation of even more empathy via what Fichte terms the “productive imagination” (Schlutz 163). This union of art and politics represents the “unity of subjectivity”, or the ability of the individual to understand the nuances of the community through understanding themselves, which can serve to form the basis of a society (Schlutz 218).

What sort of society, and how can we achieve it? In exercising this degree of empathy, what we end up achieving is a harmony of reason and emotion. The implications for this are unknowable, because they unravel the very categories that provide the foundation for our society: race, class, and gender, among others. These categories in turn play off of dualities and, more broadly, power relations. In a political society that shows empathy to those who have committed the greatest evil, even the smallest, most victimized individual would carry the same authority as the strongest, freest one. This is a state of nature based upon forgiveness, where the weakest does not choose to kill the strongest to take his food, but to make friends and share it with him (Hobbes, Leviathan 76). All of this is realized through the process of self-cultivation or spiritual Bildung[5], which is itself the product of recognizing our shared suffering. In the contemporary world, where political communities are set upon destroying one another based upon the categories they have created to diminish others, this type of thinking is revolutionary — and vital to our survival.

In order to answer the more difficult question of how we might achieve this empathetic political society, it is necessary to turn to the instruments that provide the underlying basis of morality for most contemporary political societies: religions. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes, “religion […] is the ultimate aim of philosophy […]. We proceed from the self, in order to lose and find all self in God” (Schlutz 221, 227). Throughout this paper, I will perform political philosophical analysis alongside a light exegesis of five sacred texts: the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The interplay of dark and light in these sacred texts provides guidance to the reader, regardless of their religiousness or irreligiousness, as to how human beings might accept and work with our suffering. This is crucial, because in order to understand the actual power in marrying the symbolic dark to the light, we must first understand the nature of our darkness.

The paper is divided into three sections[6]: the origin of suffering (i.e. recognizing it), the character of suffering (i.e. understanding it), and the good of suffering (i.e. responding to it), all aimed at answering the following question: what will happen on that day when all of us are able to acknowledge our demons, and offer them a kiss on the cheek?[7]

A MEANINGFUL MEANINGLESSNESS: WHAT IS SUFFERING AND WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

In order to understand the importance of recognizing suffering, let us begin by taking a look at a single case involving a man[8] who is experiencing trauma relative to his own life. This man is our representative of the body politic. In keeping with the traditions of political theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, let us call him our rights-bearer, for as a rights-bearer, he is guaranteed protection by the state and necessarily maintains social contract with other human beings (Rousseau 1, 8). This rights-bearer seeks to understand why he must suffer and what good can come of it, but in order to do so he must first understand where his suffering comes from. A sense of isolation — a false sense, because the social contract necessitates that he is part of a community, but a sense nonetheless — propels him toward religion, and he first seeks solace in the Old Testament.

The first realization that our rights-bearer makes about his pain is that it comes from an ostensible nothingness. This is conspicuous immediately in Genesis, as the chapter begins by describing that which comes before life as an unformed nothingness. More specifically, it is a “formless void and darkness [covering] the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). This nothingness suggests that the possibility of suffering has always existed, because God goes on to use his Word in combination with the void to create everything that will follow it (Gen. 1:3). All levels of suffering must therefore exist, yet unmade, in that darkness. Likewise, the darkness is a necessary prerequisite to the light, and the forms that will follow it and exist henceforth alongside it. It cannot, then, be a wholly negative (no)thing, for its presence or lack thereof allows the act of creation to take place via the Word of God. Pain and pleasure, and all other ‘things’, therefore originate in this same dark place.

What is this place?[9] Such a state of nothingness may sound familiar to a Rousseau-inclined rights-bearer, as it carries a striking resemblance to Rousseau’s state of nature, wherein a human being is a tabula rasa. The void and the state of nature bear similarities that are worth our attention because both precede the productive imagination: the imagination that “produces […] knowledge of the world, albeit unaware that it does so, in virtue of the (finite) self’s positing of the absolute self, its infinite ideal” (Seidel 214). Essentially, what we imagine of the world according to our experiences, the world becomes. While we exist in the void, however, we know nothing, because we have not yet created what we know.

Suffering is thus just as much an act of creation as God’s creation of man. This suggests that there is a great importance to the idea of God as Creator, in terms of what this role demonstrates to us as human beings who are made in His image. If God can create pain and pleasure from the same place, and human beings are able to wield the productive imagination, might we do the same? When we are in a state of suffering, can we examine the void and create for ourselves some pleasure to counteract it? It is not so simple for human beings as it is for a god, perhaps, but the idea of recognition goes a long way. In recognizing that our pain and pleasure originate in the same place, we can learn not to distinguish between the two. We can learn to understand our pain as nothingness, if we so wish.

The void thus promises that its creations will have a degree of malleability. What they become after they are created is determined by their creation, which is itself the product of choice. Pain in the void, or in the state of nature, therefore, will not carry the same power as it does in a society formed subsequent to the state of nature. As such, there is no guarantee that life in the state of nature will be brutish (Hobbes 78): any way of living, whether good or brutish, must derive from contact with other beings (Rousseau 1). What this says for our rights-bearer, is that his suffering occurs in part as a result of the type of society in which he lives, and what that society values.

In this way, the origin of our suffering also informs us that the values of society are not representative of any one truth; they are merely structural methods of maintaining large groups of people. The rights-bearer’s suffering is necessarily linked to his society as both are creations of the void, and yet, if one considers that suffering itself is a separate creation of the nothingness, then it is disconnected from society, as well. In either case, the two are essentially creations, inventions of the productive imagination, and as a result, are malleable.

The rights-bearer might be tempted to suggest, then, that we attempt to create societies in which suffering is diminished, or avoided. The physical introduction of suffering, in its primordial form with the fall of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3), would nevertheless seem to suggest that this is a mistaken conclusion to draw. The existence of political society necessitates suffering. This is because suffering is not only associated with the act of creation, but also with the thirst for knowledge. In order for our rights-bearer to say that he knows a thing, he must therefore be able to suffer. Our ability to wield the productive or ‘light’ imagination thus depends upon our darkness or ‘dark’ imagination.

The God of the Old Testament drove Adam and Eve out of Eden because they “became like one of [God]” in pursuit of the first knowledge, the knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 3:22,24). To be like a god, then, is to know suffering — to recognize that both the Good and the Evil exist. Adam and Eve’s mistake is in permitting the Evil to control their actions — for instance, they become ashamed of their nakedness (Gen 3:8). Where God understands Evil, and allows it to exist in the form of the serpent (Gen 3:1), the first human beings experience it but do not recognize it for what it is, and so they are punished (Gen 3:24). They see Evil as the opposite of Good, and therefore the opposite of God — but both Good and Evil carry the seeds of God — or the void or the state of nature — from which they came. In order to understand the Evil, Adam and Eve must first understand why they suffer, which they are not yet prepared to do. However, the knowledge that Evil exists offers them the opportunity to do so eventually.

The punishment of Adam and Eve is therefore a punishment for being fearful of what they cannot yet understand. It is not, more basically, a punishment for merely pursuing knowledge. The acceptance of what one cannot understand is an exercise in the expansion of the mind, whereas action based upon the fear of what cannot be understood is an exercise in hubris (Mihell 5). This suggests that eschewing the darker aspects of self and society, including those aspects that cause suffering, is not only the guarantee of further suffering, but also the reinforcement of ignorance.

This returns us once again to the danger of dualities, because choosing not to recognize goodness in evil ensures that we remain within the categories of us and them. Consider, for example, that the ability to mobilize behind a political cause as a rights-bearer is an indication of an awareness of the self in relation to others (Taylor 26). This mobilization serves to unify and divide all at once. The unification occurs as a result of shared suffering mustering similar individuals toward a particular goal, and the division occurs when that suffering is acknowledged, but misunderstood. In such cases, rights-bearers who choose not to be empathetic toward sufferers may be aware of the social conditions that have engendered the suffering, but because they are fearful of further suffering — because they are fearful of the unknown — they refuse to imagine the suffering of others, and therefore refuse to know the suffering of others. In other words, they choose not to take a bite of the apple, and to remain ignorant (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 193).[10]

This is not something for which they can necessarily be faulted. For as our rights-bearer reads on through the Old Testament, he finds that once it is created, suffering takes on a multitude of harsh forms. For instance, God, acting through Moses, causes “festering boils on humans and animals” throughout Egypt (Exod. 9:9). God’s fire burns and consumes Job’s servants and sheep (Job 1:16), and His wind kills his children (Job 1:19). The extent of physical suffering in the Old Testament is moreover not disconnected from mental suffering; the former is typically symbolic of the latter (Berkowitz, Katz, and Keenan). The possibility of suffering obviously inspires a great deal of fear, which is itself a motivator for survival. What, then, do we choose: survival and ignorance, or suffering and understanding?

The union of fear and suffering reappears throughout the Bible, as well as in the Qur’an, and paradoxically is often the tool that is used to separate believers from nonbelievers. Believers will have pleasure in the afterlife, whereas nonbelievers will go to Hell and experience eternal pain. For instance, in the Qur’an, those who do not follow the straight path are said to “wander blindly”, and because they are deceived, Allah “prolongs them in their transgression” (Al-Baqarah 2:15). Indeed, the amount of punishment dolled out to the nonbelievers in the Qur’an is extensive: “[storms] of stones” (Al-Qamar 54:34), expulsion and the destruction of homes (Al-Hashr 59:2), and fires to burn in (Al-Masad 111:3). To what extent are these punishments in fact representative of the fury of Allah? Are we supposed to believe that in submission to Him we are freed? Are we freed through ignorance?

As our rights-bearer turns to Al-Falaq (The Daybreak), he reads the following: “I seek refuge in the Lord of daybreak; From the evil of that which He created” (Al-Falaq 113:1–2). Once again, we find the human hiding from the Evil, just as Adam and Eve hid due to their shame. Here, even though evil is recognized as a creation of Allah, it is still divorced from His goodness. This is a dissonance that is created based upon the fear of the unknown, and the inability to find the good in evil. If one imagines that there is good in darkness, then neither Heaven nor Hell exist. It is all just God (Schlutz 225).

Fear, then, is not the domain of suffering. It is a creation of the void, just like suffering, that discourages one from viewing their darkness as an essential part of them. Why, then, does fear exist? Clearly suffering is unpleasant, and we are not gods; we are mortal creatures that, more often than not, do not wish to feel pain, and do not wish to die. The Bible and the Qur’an would seem to suggest that we are meant to fear suffering and, by extension, evil, as long as we do not understand it, and this understanding can only come from choosing to recognize the origin of our suffering.

In recognizing the origin of suffering, our pain can act as passage to the relief of further suffering and the attainment of knowledge. When the origin is recognized, the person experiencing its creations can manipulate them, as an artist would manipulate his artwork, or an individual in the state of nature might make his first choices. Pleasure can become pain can become pleasure. The fury of God or Allah informs us ultimately that we ought not to fear what we do not understand. The process of learning not to fear something is difficult because we are mortal and unwilling to endure pain or death, but the choice to recognize the inherent voidness[11] of being (Sambhava 50) ultimately supports us in our journey. We can now examine how further suffering is abated by looking at the importance of understanding suffering. This means addressing the character of suffering itself.

INGRESS TO PROGRESS: ON THE NATURE OF SUFFERING AS PASSAGE

To understand the character of suffering, we might begin by taking a look at the shape of it. One need only look to Hannah Arendt’s work on the intersection of darkness and public discourse (Berkowitz, Katz, and Keenan 3) to understand that the innumerable “immoral images” (Schlutz 212) of our dark imaginations are products of the pain we endure in so-called reality, and therefore have the ability to inform us about that pain. What do these images represent to us? What does our suffering truly look like? Why does it take on the forms it takes, and what can these forms teach us about how we can unite the darkness and light inside of us to create our empathetic political society?

According to Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary, the transitive verb ‘to suffer’ carries a number of different meanings, including: “to submit or to be forced to endure [something distressful]”, “to feel keenly”, and “to allow especially by reason of indifference” (Merriam Webster). The first of these definitions is the most readily recognized, as it is not difficult to imagine that most of us would associate suffering with pain. “To feel keenly” is interesting — it highlights the enormous role that our emotions play in the act of suffering, but it does not necessarily imply that what we feel is pain. The last definition suggests not the typical place of submission that we would expect of one who suffers, but permission given to the pain-doer due to the inconsequential nature of the pain itself. This permission is given when the sufferer augments his internal authority or surrenders his power to an external being, or does both of those things.

In all of these definitions[12], we are given to understand three things: first, that there is an inherent movement to suffering. As a verb, it relies on us doing something, whether submitting, feeling, or allowing. Second, suffering necessitates a power differential. On a cursory level, it seems to take on a Hegelian master-slave dynamic where the sufferer is at the mercy of the pain-doer, or more accurately, the pain (Taylor 26).[13] Lastly — and this is one point that carries over from our discussion of recognition — for suffering (not merely pain) to exist, one must choose to suffer.

Let us first examine the nature of suffering as a form of movement, recalling as we do so our rights-bearer, who is an emblem of the body politic: the self and the political community as one and the same. Suffering acts as passage toward ‘something better’. On an individual level, the suffering our rights-bearer endures presupposes the relief of itself. In much the same way, our rights-bearer gains his rights over time as a result of ethical-political movement, which is itself the result of suffering (Wilkinson 2). The notion that suffering encourages progress, or movement toward ‘something better’, is essential to understanding its role in political society. What is the character of this movement? What can it accomplish for the rights-bearer? In other words, if suffering is a path to progress, what is progress?

This claim assumes that there is such a thing as a ‘better world’ in the first place, and indeed there must be, for if the productive imagination creates knowledge of the world (Seidel 214), and all creations come from the void, then we can undoubtedly imagine a world that is better.[14] Under this assumption, progress is illusory because all things are illusory (Nietzsche, On Truth para. 4), but because they are all illusory, they are also actual and achievable.[15] If everything is a creation, then everything is at once both real and unreal.

If it is true that progress, just like suffering, is a creation of the void, then whatever ‘something better’ is must also be a creation of the void. The void itself therefore cannot be ‘something better’, because ‘something better’ is created out of it. It contains a piece of the void, but is not in and of itself the void. In this way, we might think of ‘something better’ as a piece of artwork that replaces its artist in importance and capacity: artwork that outdoes its artist. But where, then, amidst all of the void’s creations, can this ‘something better’ be found? When we move toward it, are we moving forward? Backward? Outward or inward?

The imagery of the sacred texts suggests that ‘something better’ does not lie in any one direction, because the form of movement that suffering takes on is cyclical.[16] Cycles are often presented to us in images that compel characters to move from dark to light to dark again: suffering to liberation to suffering. For example, in order for the Israelites to be free, thousands of people have to be slaughtered by the sons of Levi at Moses’s command after he comes down from Mount Sinai (Exod. 32:28). In order to prove the superiority of believing, Allah exacts “humiliating punishment[s]” on disbelievers (Al-Mujadila 58:16). Krishna tells Arjuna that people may die, but that their deaths will be followed by rebirths (Bg. 2.27). The Tibetan Book of the Dead makes it clear that, if we choose to continue suffering, we will be reborn elsewhere on the wheel of life (Sambhava 157). This sort of movement is naturally unending, which suggests that the aspects that make us up, introduced in our origin stories — our states of nature — are not only subject to change, but are expected to change. If we desire to achieve progress, are we required to remain in these cycles?

One might first be tempted to answer this question with a resounding no. Consider that these cycles reach an abrupt end in the Bible and the Qur’an with the heavenly and hellish realms. These are extremes that exist outside of the cycles. We have already spoken to the inherent wrongness in this duality, but the question remains: what is the reason for their existence? We find similar themes in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna informs Arjuna that “no one is able to destroy the imperishable soul” (Bg. 2.17) — it is “eternal, unborn and immutable” (Bg. 2.21) — and in Buddhism, where we are given days to choose whether or not to be reborn as another form of life, or else opt for enlightenment and choose to pass on to a place beyond suffering (Sambhava 157). What are we to make of this choice to exist outside of the cycles of suffering?

We can answer this question by asking another: to what extent is suffering unfavourable? More precisely, what is the worth in suffering? Let us consider the Old Testament example of Job, who retains his faith in God in spite of his suffering (Job 42:2). Job cannot comprehend the vastness of the universe, and once he understands how small he is in the incalculability of all things, he truly has no reason to feel pity for himself (Job 42:6). Even with his faith, Job’s suffering caused him to question the value of his own life. As a result of this, God taught him humility. Through humility, Job learned dignity, and integrity. We can take from this that the worth in suffering is the ability to walk through life with humility and dignity, and consequently, the ability to withstand future suffering. Once again, we can note that the act of suffering presupposes the relief of suffering.

The idea of accepting the “evil that the Lord [brings] upon [us]” (Job 42:11) is emblemized in the New Testament with Jesus Christ. Following an echo of Job’s journey, Christ endures immeasurable pain and dies on the cross (Matt 27:35), becoming a symbol of strength, perseverance, and martyrdom, and then is resurrected (Luke 24:34). This is the symbolic journey of the sufferer: no matter how much pain he might endure, if he has integrity, then he will prevail. Resurrection, in this way, is a form of reconstruction of the self: a type of self-healing. What might happen to the body politic if it chooses to undergo this same journey?

The choice to have integrity grants the rights-bearer a sort of individual freedom. As Rousseau noted when speaking to his rights-bearer, the ideas of will, liberty, and morality are inextricably linked. If it is true that “to remove all freedom from his will is to remove all morality from his actions” (Rousseau 4), then when our rights-bearer suffers there exists in him a sense of morality. He has the ability to understand that the pain he bears is wrong, in some sense, even if he does not understand why it is happening or to whom, if anyone, he can attribute blame. Thus, the very presence of his suffering reminds him of his inherent dignity as a human being. It is worth noting that this return to integrity and dignity automatically rids the sufferer of any sense of powerlessness. If they have integrity, then they have a sense of internal authority that cannot be quashed by any superficial means of exercising power.

This ability to wield integrity, to walk through and then rise above our suffering, is the “eternal living entity” to which Krishna speaks when he consoles Arjuna (Bg. 2.18). We see it again in the First Noble Truth of Buddhism — “life is suffering” (Erickson) (Sambhava 37)[17] — and the subsequent idea that upon one’s death, if one abandons the idea of suffering, one can transcend the wheel of life and become one with the void. This means, however, that we first must embrace our suffering. We must choose to be crucified — not to glamourize our suffering, but to walk through it. We must choose a symbolic death.[18]

The subsequent return to voidness (Sambhava 50), and so a return to integrity and dignity, brings us to a sort of stillness within the movement of the cycles (Erickson) (Sambhava 35). From this place, we may choose to use our productive imaginations for what we see fit. After all, if we recall, in our recognition of suffering, we learned that our creations come from the void, pain and pleasure and everything in-between. This is a place of perpetual work for the betterment of all those who exist outside of the void. Otherwise, the void would be no different from the god realm of Buddhism, wherein life is based upon the ego (Erickson) (Sambhava 49). Nor would it be like the heavenly realms spoken to in the Bible and the Qur’an, because a life lived for one’s self is not a life lived for God or Allah (Erickson). Existing in the void, embracing both the light and dark outside of the cycles, therefore means servicing others. It is therefore possible to achieve societal progress without breaking free from the cycles of suffering altogether, but rather choosing to inhabit both the perpetuity of the cycles and the stillness within them at once (à la the Boddhisattva[19]) (Erickson) (Kawamura).

Let us look at this another way. Consider the format in which these sacred texts are communicated: purposefully spoken aloud or sung (as through cantillation[20]).[21] Song, which also often makes an appearance in the imagery of the sacred texts (Song 1:1) (Bg. 1), is especially suggestive of a connection between the individual and the divine. It promotes unity and togetherness, as individual voices work through the dissonance — suffering — of a written score to reach the consonance — relief of suffering — peppered throughout it, culminating in the final cadence.[22] Discord leads to harmony. Each voice or instrument is different, but each one is imagining what they will create, and creating it, all the while working with all other voices. When these voices are in tune, the result is something that has the power to move us immeasurably. This is the ability to work through suffering and achieve progress as a result of it. Song thus allows humanity to know both the earthly and unearthly, and in this way, provides us with a method of exploring not only that which we have in common, but that which transcends us.

In song and, more broadly, art, we therefore have a symbolic means of carrying out our integrity by working within our suffering. This understanding of suffering as passage to progress repeats itself in a multitude of ways throughout our lives. We can see it in everything from the undulations of the throat while singing a sustained note to the rhythmic motions of intercourse. These are movements felt within the body and yet which can also produce ‘things’ external to it, namely music and a baby, respectively. These two things are both creations; an expansion of the self into the other, and a testament to our imaginative (or divine) power (Schultz 255). There exists always a fundamental connection to us as creator of the ‘thing’, whether song or child. However, any ‘thing’ we create will inevitably and necessarily exist separate from us. It is from this place that we can understand ourselves as both godly and submissive at once (Al-Fatihah 1:5), for when we perform we sing to serve the song and through the song, the audience; and when we have a child we must devote ourselves to that child and through that child, the world. In this way, the self and the other become one, and unity is achieved.

This alignment of thought, choice, and action is one understanding of an effective political society: one that expands, boundlessly, by creating and parenting those creations. This is not the same as being master over the ideas you put forth, but putting them into practice with the knowledge that not only will you be responsible for guiding them, but for letting them go in part once others adopt them. In all of this it is clear that suffering is not a path to reaching an absolute ‘something better’, because ‘something better’ can never be absolute. As progress is ever expanding, the trick is in learning how to use one’s individual suffering to pursue it, but never to catch it because it can never be caught. If we follow the message that the movement of suffering suggests to us, it is conceivable that the pursuit of ‘something better’ is in fact the attainment of it. In order to come near to this understanding, one must choose to suffer, with the intent of healing through it. In this choice, every person has the capacity to know the Good.

In his journey to recognize and understand his suffering, our rights-bearer has thus learned that suffering is malleable. It is as deserving of existence as pleasure and other ‘things’ that are associated with light and goodness. It exists because of society and yet it is distinct from society. It can and ought to be recognized in order for one to call himself a creator, and in order for one to say that he truly knows a thing. Suffering generates fear, but it also a path to knowledge, humility, and dignity. It is nuanced, and its various forms and purposes are difficult to pin down, but in all cases, it can be a useful tool of creation if the individual who bears it does so with integrity. If it is lived in, it can be a tool of unending creation. As a result of this, it is a path to progress.

Understanding that suffering is key to expanding a society’s knowledge and creative ability, our rights-bearer must begin to see his own suffering as a vehicle for ethical-political movement. Once he has reached a place of integrity, where he can say he knows suffering and does not fear it, then it is his responsibility as a citizen to support the same sort of liberation in his peers (in the same manner as the Boddhisattva). Suffering, as it exists in its abiding form, is, in effect, ingress to progress.[23]

EMANCIPATION THROUGH EMPATHY: RESPONDING TO THE GOOD IN SUFFERING

The willingness to walk through the “negative and malevolent influences beyond our control” (Schlutz 260) allows us to reach a point of access to both our reasonable and natural facets. Accessing this willingness is the product of recognizing and understanding our suffering. Let us say that our rights-bearer has managed to do these things quite well, and now lives in a place of integrity within his suffering. How, now, does he respond to what he has learned? What does this look like for the body politic he represents? What comes out of the sort of unity that leads to an ever-expanding, perpetually creative political community?

First, one of the key aspects to note about the choice to walk through suffering is that, by virtue of being a common theme to several religious texts, it becomes not so religious as ‘human’. Those who choose to live this way are just as similar to Christ as they are to Arjuna, as they are to Mohammed or one of the Buddhas. This morality system hence underlies all political communities. In this way, we might think of the idea of living within our suffering as a step toward easing the tension that has existed between politics and morality since Plato’s suggestion of the Noble Lie, globally (de Wijze 189) (Wiley 101).

Indeed, if we understand that suffering paves the way for creation, then Plato’s mistake is assuming that only a select number of people can be philosopher-rulers (Plato, The Republic, Book X). There is no need to divide knowledge-based power on the basis of class or privilege, if the capacity for trauma and ability to demonstrate empathy is not limited by either of these things. Thus, regardless of any prescribed political category, every person is inherently a philosopher-ruler. It is also worth noting that Plato’s argument to “banish the poets” and thereby rid the Republic of “harmful and illusory” imaginative literature loses its steam here too: after all, as we recall, the ability to recognize the inherent illusoriness of our suffering and subsequently live within it provides us the ability to respond to it without fear (Horton and Baumeister 9).

As a result of its compromise between reason and nature, a society in which all individuals have the capacity to become philosopher-rulers straddles the line between classical understandings of both Marxism and capitalism. This is because in such a society every individual would be equal in his or her pursuit of ‘something better’: the ideal of empathy. Power relations in the traditional sense would be nonexistent, replaced by our state of nature, and the perpetual self-creation of this state would spark empathy, which would in turn spark further self-creation, and further empathy, and so on. The resulting political society fits within the “mainstream” Idealist camp of political science (Wiley 89), and adopts a system of ethics à la Paul Ricoeur that “begins with the self and its freedom and derives the ethical injunction to respect the freedom of others from recognizing the other as like ourselves” (Wiley 89).

It is, however, questionable whether or not this society is definable as a state at all. Hegel viewed the state as “reason realized in man”, or a “rational, universal organization of freedom” (Wiley 93). From the understanding our rights-bearer has gleaned, however, freedom in such a state is necessarily false, because a state formed only of reason traps us within a cycle of suffering. What comes after the state? What sort of political community represents the union of dark and light, the simultaneous movement and stillness that comes from living within our suffering?

The answer might be found in the process of ever-expanding creation itself. The ability to work through suffering, as we have noted, is epitomized in artwork, such as song, or the literary format of the sacred texts we have been examining. We might consider books describing residential school experiences in Canada as a means by which nonindigenous peoples could begin to understand, and even empathize, with the indigenous experience, for example. We could therefore begin by imagining that our rights-bearer is, in a sense, a political artist. This does not mean that he creates art that is inherently political, à la Banksy, for instance. It means that, in the same way the artist pours his very being into his art, the rights-bearer pours his very being into his political community. His unencumbered moral self interacts with the “immoral images” (Schlutz 212) that are a fact of his political existence. His life, which he lives in dedication to others, becomes his art.

In our empathetic political society, the line between the literal and the literary becomes blurred. We are charged with distinguishing what they share in common. This elucidates an interesting point about not only the current ethical-political systems that govern our communities, but also the state of political philosophy itself, which, as it stands now — largely as a result of Plato — is highly critical of imaginative literature and, especially, of incorporating imaginative literature into its work (Horton and Baumeister 10). Why else would Plato want to exile the artists from his Republic (Horton and Baumeister 9)? However, it seems clear that adopting an approach that unites the dark and light imagination rids us of this problem, allowing political philosophy to become “less inward-looking” and more prepared to (perhaps ironically) “confront the realities of political life” (Horton and Baumeister 13).[24] What underlies the acceptance of the illusory in communicating truth, a process that itself results from the union of dark and light imaginations? What instrument is it that exists in this place between, this void (Sambhava 16)?

The creative power shared by both art and politics can be boiled down to narrative (Horton and Baumeister 14). Political thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and Susan Mendus have all addressed the intersection of narrative and political theory. Taylor searched for capital-T Truth, Rorty for the lack thereof, and Mendus for rules for creation and elucidations on human self-construction in imaginative literature (Horton and Baumeister 16). Along these same lines, Horton and Baumeister highlight Lucy Sargisson’s work on Thomas More’s Utopia to discuss a new Utopianism, which focuses on “process rather than perfection” (Horton and Baumeister 23), as well as George Orwell’s use of Dystopia to demonstrate the threats posed by hierarchy and imperialism (Horton and Baumeister 24). Each of these stories addresses a political issue through an artistic lens using narrative that works through suffering, and each narrative is a microcosmic way of healing an individual member of the body politic.[25] Arguably, then, Utopia and Animal Farm are each a way in which an individual, the reader, becomes closer to recognizing and understanding their own suffering. But in order to be a political artist, it is worthwhile to look for the art in our politics, rather than the politics in our art.[26]

A political society based upon the unity of the dark and light imagination is one that governs itself based upon the pursuit of empathy through creation. Such a society is in the process of constantly recreating itself through self-cultivation: it focuses on developing an overarching, ever-changing narrative, based upon the countless narratives of suffering belonging to the groups that reside within it. As such, in order to achieve this ultimate empathetic political society, the products of the dark and light imagination must be infused into preexisting political structures, as the simple overlay of a new state or new political structures would be incompatible with the idea of suffering as movement. Any political society that derives from the united dark and light imagination will be in a state of constant evolution. In striving toward empathy as the ideal, we forgo the traditional power differentials associated with politics in favour of a slower, more compassionate approach to socio-political relations, and allow ourselves to create a society with integrity for all, based upon the type of future we desire. We could call this society a narrative democracy: a democracy that focuses upon interweaving various societal narratives based upon the active exercise of empathy.

Narrative democracy, in one sense, ends up looking like an extension of radical democracy, in which all parties focus upon the recognition of difference and realize the intrinsic “[messiness of] a pluralistic society” (Amsler 73):

Radical democracy is the name for political commitments to liberate possibilities from the imposition of all ‘false necessity’; to maintain an anarchic scepticism towards both truth and power, and to facilitate the practical work that these commitments require. All concepts are based on a ‘working faith in the possibility of human nature’ to enable the organization of collective flourishing (Dewey 1939, p. 229), and on an understanding that these possibilities too must be developed through learning and practice (Amsler 73).

This is a form of emancipatory politics that promises endless possibility (Amsler 73). Beyond the guarantee of self-determination and individual autonomy that radical democracy provides, however (Amsler 74), the idea of narrative democracy ensures that the authority held by the individual within a radical democracy is used in working toward the Good for the self and the other. The intention to work within suffering respects the experience of the other, acknowledges their suffering, and therefore permits the process of healing to begin for both listener and speaker, or for both governed and governor. In such a system, our rights-bearer would be able to know that he is an essential part of the political community because he has an empathetic duty to others as they do to him. This is social contract based upon compassion.

It should be noted that this is not the same as mustering around identity politics or pursuing errant forms of nationalism. It ought to be clear that, when empathy is the intent of all parties, suffering may be lived in without concern about false intentions. This is because, as mentioned previously, in recognizing the illusoriness of suffering, we are able to attain a sort of fundamental truth, which subsequently allows us to blur the line between self and other and forsake absolutisms. The suffering inherent to our narrative democracy is meant to be walked through by all, so that everyone may offer his or her demon a kiss.

Paul Ricoeur would counter this argument by stating that the examples stated throughout this paper, most especially the example of Christ, is an “extravagant ethic”. It is a “socially disruptive” form of ethic that could “never become a widespread ethical practice” (Wiley 105), because no one would ever be so willing to “go the extra mile” (Wiley 105). Ricoeur argues that the “extravagant ethic” is not meant to be practiced by all so much as it is meant to allow us to imagine all of the “previously unconsidered possibilities” (Wiley 105–6) in the realm of ethics. I reject that such an ethic is socially disruptive — except perhaps in the way that an ever-transforming society must continually disrupt itself — and submit that, in a society formed on the basis of empathy, the “extra mile” is not so extra, and the “extravagant ethic” itself is not so extravagant (Wiley 105).[27]

The complexities of what a narrative democracy might entail in all aspects of politics are far too broad for the scope of this paper, but in addressing the importance of recognizing, understanding, and responding to suffering, there are, perhaps, some key ideas that the reader might glean in order to one day achieve it. It is worth now mentioning just a few of these as a starting point. If I had more space to contribute to this topic, I would begin by exploring those areas in which suffering is especially prominent. To find these areas, one need merely look at the categories that we have developed to discuss them: race, gender, and class, among others. These are instances in which power relations are conspicuous, and therefore should alert the discerning individual right away to the presence of a cycle of suffering.

We might ask how, for example, one might pursue the ideal of empathy in a situation where one individual knows in their very bones that they are a woman, even though they were born male? If we remember that we pursue the ideal of empathy, then our first inclination must be to listen to this person’s story, and to try to see ourselves in them. At the heart of it, they might say that they suffer because society will not allow them to be who they truly are. This is a reason that one might not agree with, but one must respect, because it is their truth. What of an individual who believes that because they were born with white skin, they are superior to others? Pursuing the ideal of empathy means understanding the insecurities behind this belief. Ideally, granting this white supremacist the gift of empathy will permit them to attempt to exercise the same active empathy toward others. Ultimately, it is important that the exercise of empathy is active. It must be held up as an ideal for such a political society to be plausible.

If we do not pursue empathy as an ideal, we risk remaining in the same cycles of suffering that we have long accepted without integrity — without the sense of stillness needed to progress. This is not healthy for the rights-bearer, and it is not healthy for the body politic, which requires adaptation to survive. We may yet persist in these cycles for years to come, but unless we adapt, we face an endgame of self-destruction in our traps of dualities, power relations, and hubris (Erickson 11, 127, 164), rather than self-cultivation through empathy.

Suffering is not merely a condition of being alive. We are not condemned to suffer, and we are not like masochists, addicted to our suffering — not unless we choose to be. Rather, suffering exists because without it we would have no reason to love. We would have the capacity to love, but it would be a superficial love, with each party devoid of an understanding of what it is to triumph in spite of personal loss. Suffering is therefore passage to empathy. Through the unity of the dark and light imagination, we can step fearlessly into the unknown, and choose to continually recreate a better world for ourselves and for others.

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Works Cited
(I obtained some of the books and articles listed below via direct links, and so some of the websites they are attached to may not be all too savoury… Peruse at your own risk).

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Amsler, Sarah. The Education of Radical Democracy. Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z. Routledge, London; New York, 2015.

Baum, Bruce D. The Post-Liberal Imagination: Political Scenes from the American Cultural Landscape. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2015.

Berkowitz, Roger, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Fordham University Press, New York, 2010; 2009.

DiCenso, James. Kant, Religion, and Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; New York, 2011.

Erickson, Chris. “Politics and Spirituality.” Topics in Political Theory (POLI449A 002). University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Jan-Apr. 2018.

Erickson, Chris. The Poetics of Fear: A Human Response to Human Security. Continuum, 2010. Web. January 2016.

Fisher, Joseph P., Brian Flota. The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror. Ashgate Pub, Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT; 2011; 2016; 2013; doi: 10.4324/99781315554310.

Fremantle, Francesca, and Chögyam Trungpa. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. Shambhala, Berkeley, Calif. 1975.

Friedrich Nietzsche. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873. Found online at Nietzsche.holtof.com. Jack Miller, Paul Douglas, Ed Maupin, Douglas Thomas. 2018. <http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_lies.htm>.

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Edit. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, 1967. Found online at NewForestCentre.info. 2018. <http://www.newforestcentre.info/uploads/7/5/7/2/7572906/nietzsche_-_the_will_to_power.pdf>.

Horton, John, and Andrea Baumeister. Literature and the Political Imagination. Routledge, London; New York, 1996.

Hutnyk, John. Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics, and the Culture Industry. Pluto Press, London; Sterling, VA, 2000.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract. Found online at EarlyModernTexts.com. Jonathan Bennett, 2017. April 2018. <http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf>.

Kawamura, Leslie S., et al. The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhism, vol. 10. Published for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion by Wilfred Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ont., Canada, 1981; 1980.

Klein, Adam I. “The Cyclical Politics of Counterterrorism.” The Washington Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2017, pp. 95.

Mihell, Natasha. “Shields, Stability, and Songs: An Examination of How to Become the Artist”. Written for POLI342A. Dr. Chris Erickson. UBC. April 15, 2016.

Milanovic, Branko. “Income Inequality is Cyclical.” Nature, vol. 537, no. 7621, 2016, pp. 479–482.

Padma Sambhava. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Discovered by Karma Lingpa. Trans. Robert A. F. Thurman. Found online at Promienie.net. Bantam Books: New York, NY, 1994. 2018. <http://promienie.net/images/dharma/books/padmasambhava_tibetan-book-of-the-dead.pdf>.

Plato. The Apology. Found online at San José State University. Dr. James Lindahl, 2015. April 2018. <http://www.sjsu.edu/people/james.lindahl/courses/Phil70A/s3/apology.pdf>.

Plato. The Republic. Found online at The Internet Classics Archive by Daniel C. Stevenson, 2009. March 2016, 2018. <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html>.

Rahn, John. “Centers; Dissenters (Music, Religion, and Politics).” Current Musicology, vol. 56, no. 56, 1994, pp. 72.

Schlutz, Alexander M. Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2009; 2010.

Seidel, George J. “The Imagination in Kant and Fichte, and some Reflections on Heidegger’s Interpretation.” Forum Philosophicum, vol. 21, no. 2, 2016, pp. 213–223.

Sørensen, Asher. “From Critique of Ideology to Politics: Habermas on Bildung.” Ethics and Education, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 252.

“Suffer”. MerriamWebster.com. Merriam Webster, 2018. Web. March, 2018.

Sutton, Adam, and Adrian Cherney. “Prevention without Politics?: The Cyclical Progress of Crime Prevention in an Australian State.” Criminology & Criminal Justice, vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 325–344.

Taylor, Charles, Amy Gutmann, and Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection. Multiculturalism and “the Politics of Recognition”: An Essay. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1992.

The Holy Bible. “Old Testament” and “New Testament.” Found online at Devotions.net, 1995. Accessed 2018. <https://www.devotions.net/bible/00old.htm> (Old Testament) and <https://www.devotions.net/bible/00new.htm> (New Testament).

The Noble Quran. Found online at Quran.com, 2016. Accessed 2018. < https://quran.com/>.

Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. Found online at McMaster University Faculty of Social Sciences: Economics. 2018. <https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf>.

Wijze, Stephen D. “The Challenge of a Moral Politics: Mendus and Coady on Politics, Integrity and ‘Dirty Hands’.” Res Publica, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, pp. 189–200.

Wiley, James. Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination. Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z. Routledge, New York, NY, 2016.

Vyasa. The Bhagavad Gita. Found online at Vedabase.com. 2018. <http://www.vedabase.com/en>.

Wilkinson, Iain, Arthur Kleinman, and University Press Scholarship Online. A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering. vol. 35, no. 35; University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2016.

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[1] The ‘body politic’ is a medieval term that examines the political community as representative of the individual self. In the traditional sense, the arm might represent the army, the head the government, etc.. I use the body politic here in a less rigid way, meaning merely to intimate that the relation between the self and the political community is, in many ways, indistinguishable.

[2] The title of this essay comes from a poem inscribed on the novel Die Schuldlosen by Hermann Broch, dedicated to Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher (Berkowitz, Katz, and Keenan 3).

[3] Hardenberg was also known by his pen name: Novalis.

[4] Nietzsche performs an exceptional exploration of the tension between reason and nature in his On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Consider the following quote in its reading of how little we know of ourselves as a result of our inability to know our own nature: “Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous — as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation, where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?” (Nietzsche, On Truth para. 3)

[5] I use Bildung here not in its historical sense, which has been manipulated into an ideological weapon for classist and elitist purposes, but in its classical sense (Sørensen 252). I also make one caveat, and that is to define Bildung not as the “ideal of human self-perfection” but as the perpetual refinement of oneself (Sørensen 254). This definition loses the sense of absolute that is the necessary companion to a conception of perfection.

[6] Given the limited size of this paper, I will not be able to explore the breadth of this topic to the extent that it deserves. However, I hope to provide at least a few steps toward understanding the worth of suffering, and the importance of empathy, in growing our political societies. The focus on suffering here is the first step of many.

[7] Using one’s nuanced imagination, with both its light and dark facets, to design a new type of political society all sounds rather esoteric if we continue to consider the imagination limited, or else as a tool that should exist only in the realm of children. But this process of limiting our imaginations is itself illusory, because in order to believe that such a society is possible we must first imagine it to be (Schlutz 165). Thus, the practical application for this political philosophy must occur as a transformation in the ethos of the political society.

[8] Or woman, or person. Man is used here for continuity’s sake, taking into account the influence of a patriarchal history on the sacred texts I am addressing.

[9] The void in Christianity is, in this way, the same as the void in Buddhism, which refers to “an infinite objectivity, an infinite subjectivity, nothingness, and an infinite indefinability” (Sambhava 50).

[10] The form of morality created in such circumstances is what Nietzsche terms the “poisoner of life” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 193).

[11] Voidness is defined in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as “the relativity of all things and states”. See Footnote 9.

[12] It is clear that what it means ‘to suffer’ covers a broad range of experiences, beyond what is defined in Merriam Webster’s dictionary. It is precisely because of the diversity of these experiences that I do not offer one specific definition for the reader to hold to throughout this paper. I have the privilege of speaking to this topic from the ivory tower of academia, and I am therefore not embroiled in the thick of a great trauma that prevents me from applying rationality to an obviously emotional subject. Nevertheless, suffering is as pervasive as it is multifarious. It is experienced differently by every individual, but is common to all. It is for this reason that it must be given attention: because in addressing what we share, even if that means looking at the darkest aspects of what we are, we are permitted the ability to recognize ourselves in others. We can, in essence, blur the line between the false dualities of the self and the other, and become a unified human race. In a contemporary political climate that is caught up in traps that have existed since time immemorial such as false dualities and hubris (Erickson 11), imaginative thinking, especially when it reaches into dark and uncomfortable places, is vital to the survival of the human race. If something better can be thought up, it can happen.

[13] This type of relationship acquires symbolic proportions when it is featured in religion and religious texts, for it allows readers and listeners to relate to the position of sufferer. This same symbolism is mirrored in sweeping political movements, where observers — in contemporary cases, across the globe — are able to empathize with those who are at their most vulnerable, to explore what it means to have faith alongside those individuals, and to see just how compassionate they are able to be in times of trauma.

[14] Whatever ‘better’ might mean. This claim becomes complicated when we realize that we are dealing with the productive imaginations of billions of people all longing for a better world.

[15] For this to be true, what we consider to be ‘progress’ must not take on a linear structure, but should flexible and adaptable. In this way, backward motion can be perceived as opportunity for learning, new ways of thinking can be addressed and explored, and society can reflect upon the values it chooses to uphold.

[16] Cyclical progress is not an unusual trend in politics, and whenever it is highlighted, this typically indicates a desired end to a destructive monotony. Observations of cyclic patterns have been observed in counterterrorism in the USA, criminal justice in Australia, and in income inequality across China and Russia (see Klein, Sutton and Cherney, and Milanovic, respectively).

[17] When citing Dr. Chris Erickson throughout this paper, it is in reference to both his class POLI449A 002 Topics in Political Theory at UBC 2018W and his book, The Poetics of Fear, found in the Works Cited at the end of this paper. Dr. Erickson’s theories are explained in further detail in his book, but were explicated with more specific relation to the subject of this essay in the aforementioned class. When Erickson is mentioned without an adjacent number, it is in reference to his class. When Erickson is referenced with a number, it is in reference to both his class and his book.

[18] The final two sentences of this paragraph are meant to be entirely metaphorical and to fit within the context of what has been previously said, and not intended in any way to persuade the reader to actually choose to be crucified or die.

[19] A Buddha that is “actively involved with humanity”, and specifically, in spreading compassion and wisdom to them (Kawamura 13).

[20] As with the Torah, but it is also quite common for chapters of the Bible and surahs of the Qur’an to be sung aloud. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is meant to be read aloud to a dying or dead individual (Erickson) (Fremantle and Trungpa). All of these texts were traditionally shared from speakers to listeners.

[21] The Tibetan Book of the Dead means, literally, “Liberation Through Hearing In The Intermediate State” (Fremantle and Trungpa).

[22] The author of this paper spent seven years in a professional choir.

[23] Interestingly, both ingress and progress are terms that also carry meaning in astronomy and astrology.

[24] Creating imaginative literature, or other forms of ‘art’, is a slower, though no less substantial path to delivering ethical-political meaning than politics, as it carries the same messages, but is open to greater interpretation.

[25] Approaching Utopia from a feminist perspective, Sargisson is adjusting the narrative to best serve the healing of the traditionally disenfranchised sex. Orwell addresses his own personal trauma in rejecting totalitarianism (Horton and Baumeister 23, 24).

[26] Certainly, art helps us to do just this.

[27] This is undoubtedly a challenge to the realist (and rationalist) view of politics. It challenges the need to remain in the cycles in which our suffering places us. It is, however, not necessarily incompatible with either. It acknowledges that suffering still exists; the dark must exist, in order for it to join with the light. Once again, where it differs from these theories is that it treats suffering not as an end, but as passage to ‘something better’.