Abstract
Since everyone knows pain, it seems to be the most familiar one. But philosophy, which, according to the legendary account in Plato and Aristotle, is born of wonder, which is an attitude where the usual turns out to be unusual, can lead us to doubt precisely what is seemingly most familiar and confront us with ignorance and unawareness.
The three chapters offer a reflection on the being or nature of pain from the three different, complementary positions of metaphysics, other-origin thinking, and philosophical anthropology, represented by authors Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, and Frederik J. J.
Buytendijk. For each, pain is essential in understanding the human being and his or her relationship to the world and to other people.
All of them oppose the reductive medical conception of pain and build around their conception the respective determination of man: Jünger as a worker, Heidegger as a mortal standing in address to the truth of Being from seeing, Buytendijk as an embodied trust humbly and patiently accepting and bearing the sign of Christ's cross. Reflecting on the nature of pain is also an attempt to determine what philosophy itself is, which also seems to be as self-evident as and known as pain, but like it, philosophy is ultimately the useless thing that is paradoxically most needed.