Patico venir al mondo: linguaggio e arte alla prova del dolore tra Colli e Masullo

This essay brings Giorgio Colli’s and Aldo Masullo’s philosophies into dialogue through the question of pain. Despite their different intellectual backgrounds, both place affective experience at the centre of philosophical reflection. They understand the logos not as neutral or autonomous, but as embodied and emotionally situated. Pain emerges as a limit-experience between individual consciousness and a pre-personal dimension of existence. In Colli, this dimension is called “immediacy”; in Masullo, it is the “Arcisenso” or original sense. The essay compares their accounts of lived experience, consciousness, and the formation of the individual self. It examines pain’s double function as both a testimony to life and a possible interruption of consciousness. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between the need to express pain and its ultimate incommunicability. The analysis also explores the relationship between pain and time, understood as separation, loss, and discontinuity. In both thinkers, artistic expression offers a way of confronting solitude without eliminating it. Poetry and art give form to what cannot be directly communicated, making shared meaning possible. The essay concludes by highlighting the philosophical and therapeutic significance of art as a response to pain.