Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s line refuses the comfort of grand, foggy theodicies and drags the discussion back to the bruises we can actually point to. Not “Why is there suffering?” in the abstract, as if pain were a metaphysical weather pattern, but “the suffering we know” - particular, witnessed, remembered, historically situated. That phrasing is a philosophical scalpel: it cuts away speculative answers that float above lived experience and demands an account that can face hospitals, war footage, and the private humiliations that never make it into scripture or system.

The intent is also corrective. Kaufmann spent a career resisting the impulse to convert anguish into proof of a plan - whether that plan is divine providence, dialectical progress, or some cosmic lesson in character-building. By narrowing the target to “we know,” he exposes how often the “problem of suffering” is discussed at a safe distance, with suffering treated as raw material for doctrine rather than as an affront. The subtext is almost accusatory: if your explanation can’t deal with the specific kinds of cruelty and randomness we recognize - not just the existence of pain but its distribution, its excess, its apparent pointlessness - then your explanation is aesthetic, not ethical.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of the 20th century, Kaufmann is speaking after mass death has made metaphysical optimism sound like bad taste. The sentence is short, plain, and insistent because it’s meant to be: a refusal to let philosophy outsource horror to abstraction, and a demand that any serious thinking start where suffering is most undeniable - in the forms of it we can name.