De vlucht uit het paradijs. Pijn als begin en einde van de geschiedenis

Abstract

Abstract: The flight from paradise. Pain as beginning and end of history. In the beginning the bible tells us, there was no pain. Pain entered the lives of Western men after man tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. By eating this fruit, man became aware of his nakedness and through this he became aware of himself. Along with this new state of consciousness, pain came into being. To exist is to suffer and to suffer is to exist. Pain and life are inseparable. At the present time, however, the biblical history of pain is generally overlooked. People fear pain and want to alleviate it as quickly as possible. Pain has become both an individual and a social problem. Yet historians and anthropologists claim that this was not always the case. These changes in the conceptualisation of pain were to some extent an effect of the decline in Christian faith from the Enlightenment onwards. Likewise, with the rise of medical science including anesthetic in the nineteenth century, pain has become a yet greater problem whereas before these developments, it was considered a burden to be endured, a punishment or a test for which one was rewarded in the hereafter. In this article the author focuses on different forms of fear and representations of pain as well as the fascination with it in literature (Alphonse Daudet and Chuck Palanhiuk) and medical science (Paolo Mantegazza and F.J.J. Buytendijk) from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century.