Arquivo para March 6th, 2025
Beyond pain: choosing life
06
Mar
No to war, hatred and indifference means
going beyond pain. It is often difficult to go through differences of opinion, conflicts of culture and even ideologies, but this is exactly what pain implies as a normal contingency of life.
Byung-Chul Han, in his analysis of painkillers, describes permanent anesthesia as one that limits not only feelings: “Pain is stopped before it can set a narrative in motion” (p. 72), and also: “Hell is just like a palliative well-being zone” (p. 73).
“Today, we are not willing to expose ourselves to pain. Pain, however, is a midwife to the new, a midwife to the entirely other” (p. 73), so it leads to an encounter and to life, ‘it allows only the prose of well-being, that is, writing in the sunlight’ (idem).
In the inability to understand pain as a process of change, it is often replaced by resilience, which can make sense with great obstacles or a great effort to overcome a certain circumstance of pain, but in many cases, it is just a stubbornness with situations that lead to true happiness, what Sloterdijk calls a “society of exercises”, efforts that do not lead to overcoming.
The Greeks had the myth of Sisyphus (we’ve already posted about this, see the image), a cunning king who defied Death and Hades, resulting in his being condemned to eternally push a stone to the top of the hill, Albert Camus has a book that talks about this and updates the theme.
True resilience understands that there is a new path, a pain that “midwives the new”.
When the people complained about the passage from Egypt to the promised land, saying that they missed the onions and leftovers they ate as slaves to Pharaoh, Moses rebuked them and said (Deuteronomy 30:19): “I take heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose life, that you and your descendants may live…”, indicating the path to freedom and the building of their nation.
Facing difficulties, pain and even afflictions in difficult times certainly requires resilience, but it cannot be confused with error, sheer stubbornness or “exercises” that lead to nothing and do not favor finding happiness.
Han, B. C. (2021) Paliative Society: pain today. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.
