Pàthei màthos. The experience of pain between stagnation and self-trascending. A look on Viktor E. Frankl

Abstract

The experience of pain, as unavoidable and inescapable aspect of life and the human condition, appears also an indispensable subject of pedagogical nature, insofar that suffering refers to the image of a being in the world where the dimension of suffering, as expressed in the ancient concept of Pàthei màthos, contributes, in its very particular way, to the formation of the person in its entirety, in the peculiar form an of learning through pain. From the Jewish culture of the «qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem», (he who increases knowledge, also increases pain), we come to the Greek tradition which proposes the opposite conception of the «qui auget dolorem, auget et scientiam», (learn through suffering), something that must be considered not only in its tragic aspect, but also because of its pedagogical value. The formative process that comes true, is of a self-training that perpetually confronts with the risk, with the crisis and with suffering, with the rupture of the old paradigms and the creation of new existential categories they inevitably expose the individual to uncertainty and risk of fragmentation, but that is recompose in the matured ability to re-establish the balance and to reconstruct new forms, when life then takes shape from chaos. An indispensable reference to the discourse around pain and trascendence is the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and philosopher of Jewish origin, Viktor E. Frankl, a testimony capable of spiritually raising the experience of pain and its brutality in a donation of meaning that transcends the drama and tragedy of a wounded existence. Education, therefore, has the task of illuminating consciences with the proposition of questions useful to research and the conquest of a genuine sense of living, independently of any adverse situation or condition, educating to thought and reflection.