James Baldwin: Suffering Can Become a Force for Good

In a 1962 talk entitled The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity (collected in the anthology The Cross of Redemption), the writer James Baldwin suggests the artist’s struggle to create is an instructive metaphor for the broader human struggle to live. From the raw material of our lives, even our pain and angst and boredom, our task is to salvage beauty and promote connection.

“Everybody’s hurt,” Baldwin reminds us. “What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive…”

The great Jorge Luis Borges makes a similar point in Twenty-Four Conversations With Borges:

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

In dark times, Baldwin implores us to keep the faith. Better days lie ahead, and in fact we can help make them for ourselves and others.

Emphasizing the attitude he thinks it prudent to adopt, Baldwin draws on a number of great thinkers:

[This is] a time … when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make. Conrad told us a long time ago..: ‘Woe to that man who does not put his trust in life.’ Henry James said, ‘Live, live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.’ And Shakespeare said — and this is what I take to be the truth about everybody’s life all of the time — ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion…

Advising how indeed we might better bear the uncertainty and instability of the world, Baldwin continues:

One survives, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

You are alone with your own particular constellation of pain, Baldwin says, but so is everybody else.

Your friends, your family, members of the community — what lessons has your own pain taught you that might help connect you with theirs?

Not all of us will liberate private feelings with grand public artworks, but we each impact our own small corners of the world every single day.

As Aldous Huxley notes, while we can never experience each other’s ‘island universes’, attempting to build bridges is essential. Iris Murdoch urges us to ‘unself’: to deflate our egos, put aside our prejudices, and pay proper attention to whichever vulnerable human being happens to be in front of us. Echoing this sentiment, Maya Angelou writes:

Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.

Baldwin’s comments perhaps also bring to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that suffering is compounded by triviality or meaninglessness. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes:

The meaninglessness of suffering, and not suffering as such, has been the curse which has hung over mankind up to now.

Hence Baldwin’s suggestion that we find a use for our pain through connection to others: by making our suffering meaningful, we dispel the curse and lighten the load.

Nietzsche goes a step further, claiming we can use suffering to forge not just intimacy, but greatness.

Indeed, while Stoic philosophers think suffering should ultimately be rationalized away, Nietzsche thinks it’s an inevitable and necessary part of a full human life.

As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science:

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit…. I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound.

What do you make of Baldwin and Nietzsche’s comments?

• Do you think pain can lead to greater connection, which can then liberate us from pain?
• Has suffering ever deepened your own connections to others?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Amor Fati: the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s Different Takes on Loving Fate
• Iris Murdoch on the Morality of Attention, and the Hostile Mother-in-Law
• Aldous Huxley: Other People’s Lives are Ultimately Unknowable
• The Stoics on What to Do When the World Feels Broken
• Nietzsche On Why Suffering is Necessary for Greatness

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