Über den »Hohen Schmerz« Überlegungen im Blick auf die Dialoge Platons
On "High Pain". Reflections on Plato’s Dialogues

Summary/Abstract: The “higher pain” means being able to suffer for the highest goal, the outmost that actually gives our lives a determination. In the German phrase “Leidenschaft für etwas” (passion for something), one can always hear the suffering, the being afflicted with something. This talk focuses on Plato’s sentence from Phaedrus (274b) and interprets it in a certain relation between “paschein and poiein” (274b): „Someone who wants to fulfill or explicate the (idea of) beauty daringly, also suffers in a beautiful way, whatever one has to suffer from”. This sentence, however, has one premise: The single person who accepts the pain of carrying something out needs to be amazed by something beautiful, needs to make an experience as being befallen by something. The “pain of carrying something out “grounds in an initial “joyful pain”. This initial joyful pain in turn gives birth to a pleasure that is able to suffer from carrying something out. The latter grounds in this pleasure aiming at suffering for the thing itself and is upheld by it. The higher pain as a pain for the grand itself requires a metabolé tes psyches to the (idea of) beauty itself respectively the (idea of the) good itself. This metabolé alone grants the access to the outmost. The difference between the Doxophilia and Philosophia in the Republic V (476b and 479d – 480a) is in our context decisive and explicates the overall context. Doxophilia – referring to something beautiful and also being able to undergo pain for something – remains in the picture without knowing or recognizing that it is a picture of the (idea of) beauty itself. Philosophy alone is capable of answering to the entireness of that something.

• Details
• Contents