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of the problem; and fourth, try to solve it.

      I titled my book Making Sense out of Suffering. What is sense? Sense means an explanation. Unlike the animals, we don’t simply accept things as they are, unless we’re pop psychologists. We ask, we question, we wonder. We ask especially the question “Why?” When we’re adults, we usually ask it only once. That’s why adults are not philosophers.

      Little children ask it infinitely, and that’s why they’re philosophers: “Mommy, why?” “Because . . .” “Because why?” They keep going.

      Aristotle, the master of those who know, the most commonsensical philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, gave us one of the ideas that no one should be allowed to die without mastering— one of the ideas that is a requisite for a civilization— the so-called theory of the four causes. All possible answers to the question “Why?”— all possible becauses— fit into four categories.

      I assume that you are all civilized, and therefore, I will insult you, but I have the privilege of insulting you for thirty-five minutes and making you sit through a purgatory of listening to a lecture, which is always dull. This way, you can get to the heaven of a longer question-and-answer session, which is always much more interesting, at least in my experience. Poor Socrates! The only time they made him make a speech, it cost him his life.

      Number one, we can ask, “What is this thing?” Define it. What is its form, essence, nature, species? That’s the formal cause. Second, we can ask, “What is it made of, what’s in it, or what’s the content of it?” That’s what Socrates called the material cause. Third, we can ask, “Where did it come from? Who made it?” That’s what he calls the efficient cause. The fourth and most important and most difficult question we can ask is “What is it for? Why is it there? What purpose does it serve?” That’s what he called the final cause.

      When we talk about suffering, there is not too much difficulty about the formal cause. We know what it is. The material cause is made of different things for different people. It’s made of the Yankees for Red Sox fans, or it’s made of the Red Sox for Yankees fans. But the efficient and the final causes are the mysteries— where did it come from, and what good is it, if any? These are absolutely central questions and can be seen by comparing a couple of thinkers.

      Let’s start with Viktor Frankl’s wonderful book Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the half dozen books I would make everyone in the world read at gun-point, if I possibly could, for the survival of sanity and civilization. Frankl is a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz but didn’t just survive it. He played Socrates at Auschwitz. He asked questions, for example, “What makes people survive?” And his answer is: Freud is wrong. It’s not pleasure. Adler is wrong. It’s not power. Even Jung is wrong. It’s not integration or understanding the archetypes or anything like that. It’s meaning. Those who found some meaning in their suffering survived, even though all the other indicators predicted that they wouldn’t. And those who didn’t— didn’t.

      He writes, “To live is to suffer. Therefore, if life has meaning, suffering has meaning, too.” That seems to me to be utterly logical. The corollary is that if suffering does not have meaning, then life does not have meaning, because to live is to suffer.

      He observed that different people had different answers to the question “Why are we suffering this absurd and agonizing thing?” But all the answers had one thing in common: They all turned a corner from asking the question “Life, what is your meaning?” to realizing that life was questioning them by name, “What is your meaning?” They could answer the question only by action, not just by thought, and those who believed in a God behind life asked the same question of God: “God, why me? What are you doing, and why?” Those that turned the corner realized that God was questioning them, which is exactly what happened to Job. When God showed up, he didn’t give answers; he gave questions. How Socratic God is!

      A second thinker who takes suffering very, very seriously is Buddha, one of the greatest psychologists of all time. He based an entire— well, we can’t quite call it religion; we can’t quite call it philosophy (Buddhists don’t quite find familiarity or comfort in those two terms)— but he based his entire religion-philosophy system upon four noble truths, the first of which is that to live is to suffer— the trauma of birth, the trauma of disappointment, the trauma of pain, the trauma of death. Life is trauma.

      His whole religion— if you want to call it that— is geared toward salvation from suffering, and his startlingly simple diagnosis is that to end suffering, you must end its cause. Its cause is egotism, or selfish desire, but in his psychology, the ego or ego-consciousness and egotism are inseparable, and therefore, you must see through the ego as an illusion and transform consciousness.

      Let’s contrast Buddha to Christ, who also takes suffering very seriously and claims that he comes to address this problem. But his solution, like that of Frankl, is more a deed than a thought like Buddha’s, and contrasting to Buddha, his way is a way into suffering, not out of it. Christ also claims to be a way of salvation, but the problem for him is not so much suffering but sin. It’s a different sort of thing. That vaguely has something or other— philosophers like to be vague at first, before they hone in on exact definitions— to do with the whole moral order, and that brings us back to Socrates, who famously taught in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.

      In other words, suffering isn’t so bad. Sin is worse. It is much worse to do evil than to suffer it. That sounds hopelessly idealistic. If you had the choice between doing something a little wicked— let’s say, cheating the IRS on your income tax or being tortured and roasted over a barbecue spit for thirteen hours straight— unless you’re very unusual, I can predict what you would choose. What in the world could he possibly have meant by saying, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it”?

      Well, Socrates had this notion that at the essence of a person was this thing called the soul or the self, rather than just the body. He taught, almost with his last words, that no evil can ever happen to a good man, whether in this life or in the next— a very strange thing to say, because clearly he is a good man and he has just been unfairly condemned, misunderstood, sentenced to death, put into prison, and his life is taken from him. That’s as bad a thing as we can do to people. So, what could he mean by “no evil could happen to a good man”? He’s in the middle of evil happening to a good man, and he says, “It doesn’t really happen.”

      To the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Socrates’s answer is “They never do.” What in the world could he mean by that? It sounds absurd— a person is the soul, and evil never happens to the soul. It happens to the body.

      You know that two-word bumper sticker that summarizes all of human history with such eloquence: It happens. By the way, do you know where that came from? There’s a real story behind that. Sometime in the sixties, there was a farmer walking across a cornfield in Kansas, minding his own business. It was a nice June day; somewhere out of the sky came something that crashed into his head, blew his brains out, and killed him. It was a two-foot square of frozen detritus, which had worked its way loose from a rusty airliner toilet. I can just imagine that family tradition: “Mommy, how did Grandpa die?” “Well, you know, kid, it happens.”

      But that only happens to the body. It doesn’t happen to the soul. “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Oh, great evil can be done to the soul, indeed, but I am the agent of it. I am the agent and responsible for folly and vice, not you.

      Once Socrates realized that, he could die with a smile. Jesus said something a bit similar, although, as a Jew, Jesus takes the body much more seriously, because it’s part of the image of God and God created it and Jesus doesn’t have this dualism that the Greeks had between body and soul. But Jesus too said— what seems, to me, the single most practical sentence uttered in the history of the world— “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own self?”

      None of the aforementioned remarks are meant to be a solution

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