Paradoxes of Pain: A Dialogue between Plato and Contemporary Phenomenology

Abstract

The paper presents a dialogue between contemporary phenomenology and Plato on the nature and complexity of pain. Taking as a departure point Drew Leder's "The experiential paradoxes of pain" the article delves into the essentially liminal character of pain. It focusses afterwards in two paradoxes that these experiences reveal. The first one is the one that describes the pain as a sensation and also as an interpretation. The second is the one that describes the pain as a destructive but also productive experience. We discuss throughout the article how the Platonic approach, although being much more holistic (in the sense of always combining the personal, ethical, political, and cosmological perspective), is not far from the phenomenological one. And we conclude that both methods try to limit and to describe an experience that escapes all limitations and determinations.