ABSTRACT
Nietzsche claimed, in the late nineteenth century, that violence must be understood as a way of responding to pain, particularly the pain of anguish, torment, loss.1 The quest for the person tormented becomes to know the cause of the pain, as if by knowing (or imagining one knows) the cause of the pain, some relief can be obtained by unleashing anger and venom against that target (or a proxy target if necessary). I suffer-it must be someone’s fault. He made the point that to react with anger and violence against the perceived cause of pain acts like a kind of narcotic whereby the expression of an excess of emotion deadens the pain, even if only temporarily. Further, we seek to impute meaning and purpose to our suffering. Nietzsche observes that the force and desire motivating the question: “to what purpose do I suffer?” reveals that it is not suffering that is the problem, but senseless suffering. To have a purpose, a reason, a cause, an explanation, is to make suffering possible to endure.2 Nietzsche is of course critical of this desire for a reason or cause. In his view, the person(s) deemed guilty of causing pain can never be understood as an agent whose conscious intention is the ‘cause’ of his or her deeds; thus the ‘cause’ presents an endlessly receding horizon.
