Pain
idea · 4 works · 7 mentions · 12 anchored passages
pain · concerning pain · distress · dolor · grief · pains · the pain · this evil · trouble
in the texts
Nicomachean Ethics
Treated as an evil or impediment to activity, and analyzed as the logical opposite of pleasure.
If so, why are the pains opposed to them evil?
That pain moreover is an evil and to be avoided is admitted;
We have now discussed the nature of Self-restraint and Unrestraint, and of Pleasure and Pain, and have shown in either case in what sense one of the two is good and the other evil.
Tusculan Disputations
The sensation of bodily harshness or distress, and the philosophical question of whether it constitutes the highest evil.
Therefore, granted that pain be not the highest evil, an evil it certainly is.
Wherefore, if, as you granted at the outset, baseness is worse than pain, pain is plainly nothing.
Their chief, both in authority and in antiquity, the Socratic Aristippus, did not hesitate to call pain the highest evil.
Meditations
Physical or mental suffering, treated as bearable and not corrupting the ruling faculty
what is unbearable carries us off, and what lasts is bearable.
In most pains, indeed, let the saying of Epicurus come to your aid:
Pain is either an evil to the body — let the body then declare it — or to the soul;
On Moral Ends
Suffering or distress, of mind or body, treated as the opposite pole to pleasure in the Epicurean calculus.
We do not hold, however, that when pleasure is taken away distress straightway follows, unless by chance pain has succeeded into the place of pleasure;
There are added distresses, troubles, griefs, which gnaw at and waste away the minds of men with cares — men who do not understand that the mind ought to feel no pain that is severed from present or future pain of the body.
For since assuredly nothing can be better for a man than to be free of all pain and trouble and to enjoy to the full the greatest pleasures of mind and body, do you see how nothing is left out that may help our life, so that we may the more easily attain the proposed end, the highest good?