(Assuming I am understanding you), at least at the bodily level, this seems obviously false to me. If someone is stabbing me, or I am dying from a painful disease, or whatever the case may be, I find it very hard to claim that I am merely experiencing a lack of bodily comfort. I am experiencing an actual, positively present feeling of pain - perhaps very intense pain.
**I see what you mean…I think its a tough question…I’ll give my thoughts using your example of stabbing. There are two ways I look at it: 1) The evil here exists primarily in the stabbing, i.e. what the stabbing does to the body (or any cause of pain, Im just gonna use the example for ease). So the stabbing maybe causes a rupture in the skin or some other bodily problem. One could say there is a presence of awound but in reality I think on a deeper level a wound is just a lack of what the body should have or be. So a skin wound for example is the lack of a complete covering of skin over my internal organs…The pain I experience wouldn’t be an evil itself but more of the human experience of an evil. Now the human experience manifests itself as suffering and we could say that the pain is evil insofar as it is connected with an evil (the stabbing)
- I have thought more about the pain issue and I do not think pain itself can be considered an “evil.” There is nothing evil (as far as I can tell) in the firing of neurons in teh response to some stimuli…the evil comes in with the [Isuffering* one experiences due to the pain…but this is essentially mental (although experienced through the medium of the physical…one suffers because mentaly one does not like the sensible experience of the neurons’ work) Now with this concept…I am not sure if it changes anything but maybe it helps us look at it differently? **
The notion of suffering as privation seems to me to be possibly more defensible in the case of psychological pain, such as in the examples you give here. At the same time, I still am skeptical - when I experience anxiety, or sorrow, for instance, it still seems reasonable to say that I am experiencing a specific feeling, not merely that I am failing to experience a certain feeling. Isn’t there a feeling of sadness which is more than the absence of feeling happiness? **I think it is true that often we look at it this way, but we say the same thing in the cold…we say I am experiencing cold or “im freezing” never “i am lacking warmth” yet in reality cold is the absence of heat…and that isn’t really faith based statement its I think just the reality that coldness is the lack of the type of energy that causes heat (particle motion)…Now this is just an anlogy to show that sometime we speak of the nonexistence of things (cold) as ‘beings’ or existent ‘realities’ when really they are not.
That said, If we look at something like anxiety or sadness I cannot say I know
for sure…but I think even though we experience what we feel to be a “reality” Its more likely the lack of a reality…i’ll do my best to show why for anxiety (just as example)
anxiety- this is either the presence of some feeling or the lack of peace of mind. If we call it the presence of some thing I think its hard to define. We can describe physical effects (heart rate, sweat, etc.) or even what I “feel” (nothing is right, something bad will happen, etc.) but I think we have a hard time saying what anxiety IS. Now if we call anxiety lack of peace of mind I think can say what peace of mind is, depending on the specific thing (peace of mind about the future or about whatever…ill use future as an example) Peace of mind about future=the presence of knowledge about future events that lead one to believe nothing bad or unexpected will happen OR it = the trust based on knowledge possessed that the future holds nothing problematic. OR it = the presence of the willpower to accept what the future holds whatever it might bring.
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