Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s provocation is that “the problem of suffering” is rarely a problem in lived psychological terms; it becomes a problem mostly when a favored theory of the world gets threatened. The line is almost clinical in its deflation: most people, he suggests, aren’t pacing at 3 a.m. over theodicy. They already inhabit a “world picture” sturdy enough to file pain into a familiar drawer - divine plan, moral education, karma, bad luck, character-building, biology. Suffering doesn’t shatter reality because reality has been pre-built to include it.

The intent is not to trivialize anguish but to puncture a certain philosophical self-image: the modern intellectual as the one uniquely scandalized by suffering. Kaufmann implies that outrage is often less “pure” than it sounds. It can be a symptom of metaphysical entitlement - the expectation that the world ought to be legible, just, and narratively coherent. Ordinary life, by contrast, is full of inherited interpretive scripts that metabolize misfortune quickly, sometimes too quickly.

Subtextually, he’s also warning about the seductions of system-building. A “world picture” that “takes suffering into account” can be humane (it helps people endure), but it can also anesthetize (it helps people explain away injustice). Read in the shadow of mid-century catastrophes and Kaufmann’s broader suspicion of grand consolations, the sentence lands as a challenge: before arguing about suffering as an abstract “problem,” ask what story you’re already telling to make it tolerable - and what that story costs.