Whether physical or mental, pain is linked to feeling: we feel, we suffer.
It is from this that we have tried to ennoble or ignore the pain: the beauty of suffering (or the suffering that gives beauty) on the one hand and on the other the 'no pain': I don't feel anything, you think you've hit me but you actually didn't do anything to me because I don't feel anything.
As often happens, the Greeks, with a simple dry expression, had already said it all:
pathei mathos, wisdom comes from pain
.
Here we are right at the origin of our culture and therefore of Western thought which will then be innervated, vivified, perhaps genetically modified by Christianity.
The phrase is contained in
Aeschylus' Agamemnon
: 'To Zeus - says the chorus in the tragedy - who initiated mortals to be wise, who established 'wisdom through suffering' as a valid law.
Even in sleep, an anguish reminiscent of pain drips before the heart: wisdom comes to those who do not want it too.
In reality it is not exactly the beginning of Greek culture and mentality: we are in the fifth century BC and this is already a turning point, a passage from the idea that suffering was the consequence of the envy and anger of the gods to that according to which it is at the origin of profound knowledge of oneself and therefore of wisdom.
All great Western literature is linked to this, for example in
Dostevsky's Memoirs from the Underground
we read: «I am convinced that man will never renounce true, authentic suffering... Since suffering is the true origin of consciousness... In reality I continue to ask myself an idle question: what is better, cheap happiness or sublime suffering?
Come on, what's better?"
The most successful coming-of-age novel of this century,
One day this pain will be useful to you
, published in 2007 by
Peter Cameron
, an American writer now sixty years old, takes up a motto from Ovid: 'Endure and resist, one day this pain will be useful to you' is one of the lines contained in a poem from
Ovid's Loves.
In short, it is the idea that bitter medicine is good and heals.
The philosopher
Michel Onfray
, who we have already met in these podcasts dedicated to words and who is an enemy of academic philosophy, so much so that he founded a popular university which hosts philosophy courses for everyone, and is therefore opposed to the philosophical mainstream, wrote a
counter-history of philosophy
in different volumes to take away the thought from a history written, as he says, by the winners.
In the first of these books, Ancient Wisdom, he dedicates a paragraph of the chapter on
Epicurus
to what he calls the 'good use of pain'.
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Good and evil do not exist, for Epicurus, explains Onfray, we can only talk about good and bad.
The good is the absence of suffering or its suppression.
And suffering does not have a reason, that is, a foundation, in a guilt that should be atoned for: it is rather an existential condition that should be eradicated.
If you are hungry, you eat;
if you are thirsty, you drink.
Epicurus, underlines Onfray, is perfectly aware that it is not always so simple but even in the most intense and complex pain, the dynamics is always the same and, translating Epicurus in his own way, Onfray uses the term 'information' to explain the relationship between the body and mind through pain.
Feeling, which is the territory of pain, is in this case, explains
Massimo Arcangeli
in
The Magnificent 100-Dictionary of Immaterial Words
, a communication aimed at action, the famous alarm bell, 'and it breaks an indifference and a 'insensitivity'.
This is why pain is essential to our survival.
As psychotherapy teaches, pain must be metabolized, digested and, so to speak, used well rather than being overcome.
The wound, as a psycho-star of the web
Luca Mazzucchelli
said , quoting, perhaps unconsciously,
Leonard Cohen
, must be transformed into a slit, that is, something through which light passes and from which we can see a new path, a road, a passage that takes us beyond the pain.
Maybe until you don't hear any more.
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