Beyond the essences: the pathos

by Maria Odete Madeira

The term pathos can mean: event, experience, suffering, emotion, attribute.

In general terms it means: something that happens, that can have by reference that which is the cause, or that which is the effect of that which happens.

In Aristotle, the pathos is the logos of the contingence, it is the logos of the event, it is the logos of the attributes acquired by the subjects, it is the logos beyond the essences.

Pathos is the place of the difference subtracted to the identity, the mark of the asymmetry that prevails in the proposition and that determines it, as such.

Destined to be surpassed in the identity and by the identity of the subject, the pathos is, simultaneously, all that the subject is not, and all that the subject sees.

Rotatively displaced by a fundamental ambiguity, the pathos trajects and projects a (co)condition of constitutive irreducibility that, simultaneously, imposes that a subject cannot be its attribute and that its attribute cannot be a substance.

In Aristotle, the identity of the logical subject supports itself in the pathos, resending towards the origin of a propositional order whose contradictory character allows the unveiling of a presence of an identity inscribed in an order of permanent reason that has in itself an active principle of becoming, as an active principle of the being, itself, as potency, that makes it come to the presence, from itself, as eksistente dasein (Heidegger), or act.