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results that follow from the natural, social, and human sciences, either one can strictly adhere to the fundamental phenomenological principles, or one can build on the basis of the results obtained in the sciences of the natural attitude. It seems that these are the two approaches between which one must choose.

      Admittedly, phenomenology cannot, and should not, accept the insights derived from these highly diverse sources as straightforward validities. However, one has a full right to incorporate these insights into the phenomenological field by transforming them into possibilities, which in their own turn would enable the researcher to expand the horizons of eidetic variation. Insofar as one accepts the results from diverse sciences as possibilities, one does not treat them as matters of fact or as reliable conclusions that follow from sound arguments. If accepted as mere possibilities, scientific discoveries can enlarge the horizon of those imaginative possibilities, which the phenomenologist must take into account while employing the method of eidetic variation. In this sense, and in this sense alone, dialogical phenomenology’s openness to the results that stem from other fields of research does not compromise its methodological orientation.

      The fact that scientific findings can be accepted in phenomenology only as possibilities means that factual variations should not be conceived of as an independent method alongside the method of eidetic variation. Rather, the coupling of these procedures enables one to give up a certain conception of the method of eidetic variation as illegitimate; it enables one to reject the view that eidetic variation closes off all possibilities of opening a dialogue between phenomenology and other sciences and that therefore, presumably, a phenomenologist must be an intellectual hermit, whose research must unfold in methodological and thematic solitude. By supplementing imaginative variations with factual variations, one liberates phenomenology from its insularity and opens the way to pursue a dialogue between phenomenology and other sciences.¹⁶

      The coupling of imaginative variations with factual variations is especially needed when one turns to such complex phenomena as pain. Especially then the need arises for dialogical phenomenology, which would be open to descriptions and analyses we come across in other fields of research. Consider in this regard Dan Zahavi’s following observation about thought experiments:

      It might, occasionally, be better to abandon fiction altogether and instead pay more attention to the startling facts found in the actual world. . . . If we are looking for phenomena that can shake our ingrained assumptions and force us to refine, revise, or even abandon our habitual way of thinking, all we have to do is to turn to psychopathology, along with neurology, developmental psychology, and ethnology; all of these disciplines present us with rich sources of challenging material. (2005, 141–42)

      Many other disciplines besides the ones mentioned here can also oblige us to revise our cognitive habits. To repeat, revisions of this kind can also be triggered by the resources provided in fine arts, literature, poetry, cinema, or any kind of (auto)biographies. In principle, any instituted framework can provide the resources to supplement imaginative variations with factual variations and thereby enable us to obtain more reliable access to the essence of the phenomenon. In general, the more complex the phenomenon, the less reliable the merely personal imaginative variation and the greater the need to enrich it with factual variations. To follow up on Zahavi’s analysis, “If we wish to test our assumptions about the unity of mind, the privacy of mental states, the nature of agency, or the role of emotions, far more may be learned from a close examination of pathological phenomena such as depersonalization, thought insertion, multiple personality disorder, cases of apraxia, or states of anhedonia than from thought experiments involving swapped brains or teletransporters” (2005, 142). As we will see in chapter 3, a lot is to be learned about the essence of pain from pain dissociation syndromes, such as congenital insensitivity to pain, threat hypersymbolia, or asymbolia for pain. By incorporating such themes into phenomenologically oriented pain research, we can supplement the analysis built on personally motivated imaginative variations with phenomenological reflections that rely on factual variations.

      To repeat, we should not think of factual variation as a separate method that is set alongside the method of eidetic variation. Rather, it is an addendum, or qualification, that enables one to liberate oneself from a certain—to my mind, illegitimate—conception of eidetic variation. By supplementing imaginative variation with factual variation, we are in a good position to respond to the hermeneutical critique, which suggests that phenomenology does not sufficiently acknowledge its own embeddedness in the structures of particular languages. This critique runs along the following lines: the phenomenologist who employs the method of eidetic variation cannot help but do so while using a particular language. Yet languages have their own particular grammatical and syntactical structures, which tacitly determine the style and limits of phenomenological descriptions. Such being the case, just as eidetic intuition can never be pure, so also, phenomenological descriptions can never be pure descriptions.

      To appreciate the significance of this critique, we could think here of the notorious critiques of Descartes that highlight the philologically questionable employment of the concept of the ego in Descartes’s account of the “ego cogito.” We could also think of Nietzsche’s contention that the philosophical distinction between substance and attribute is not as innocent as it might seem. Presumably, this distinction is of philological origins: it derives from the distinction between the subject and the predicate that is characteristic of Indo-Germanic languages, although this distinction is missing in many other languages that belong to other language groups. Philological critiques of such kind bring into question the possibility of pure descriptions. They suggest that all intuitions and experiences are always already shot through with structures that derive from particular languages. We are thereby invited to concede that the seeing of essences, which is meant to result from eidetic variation, is also predetermined by these structures. Presumably, we can never reach the assurance that these structures do not disfigure the phenomenological descriptions of the alleged essences of the phenomena.

      Dialogical phenomenology, which is willing to supplement imaginative variations with factual variations, is in a good position to answer this critique. A concrete phenomenological analysis that is built upon the methods of the epoché, the reduction, and eidetic variation (conceived only in terms of one’s own imaginative variation) might indeed fail to provide us with reliable insights into the essence of the phenomena, and the reasons for this failure might concern the grammatical and syntactical structures of language. Precisely, therefore, dialogical phenomenology must be open not only to research undertaken in other disciplines, but also to research undertaken in other cultural settings and in other languages. Besides being cross-disciplinary, dialogical phenomenology also needs to be cross-cultural—open to the possibility that descriptions of the phenomenon undertaken in other cultural settings and other languages might provide the incentive to refine and revise the results obtained in one’s own eidetic analysis.

      We can say about eidetic variation what Merleau-Ponty (1962, xiv) famously said about the reduction: the greatest lesson of the eidetic variation is the impossibility of a complete eidetic variation. Insofar as dialogical phenomenology is open to descriptions offered in other disciplines and other languages, it is never in the position to foreclose its own analysis of the phenomenon. As a phenomenologist, one must risk making eidetic claims, yet one cannot foreclose the possibility that these claims will have to be refined and revised. A phenomenologist is a perpetual beginner.

THE GENETIC METHOD IN PHENOMENOLOGY

      Although indispensable for phenomenologically oriented pain research, the methods outlined above do not exhaust the methodological resources of the phenomenological standpoint. We could qualify these methods as the fundamental methodological principles of static phenomenology, and to this we could add that they need to be supplemented with the fundamental methodological principles of genetic phenomenology.¹⁷ It is, however, extremely difficult to qualify the fundamental methodological orientation that makes up the core of genetically oriented analyses.¹⁸ We can avoid serious confusion if we recognize that genetic phenomenology is meant not to replace, but to supplement, the static method. More precisely, the genetic method is meant to clarify some of the fundamental presuppositions that underlie static methodology. In this section, I will take a detour to the fundamental

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