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The Phenomenology of Pain. Saulius Geniusas
Читать онлайн.Название The Phenomenology of Pain
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isbn 9780821446942
Автор произведения Saulius Geniusas
Жанр Социология
Серия Series in Continental Thought
Издательство Ingram
Fourth, to provide this view with further support, one could point to the disruptive effects of intense pain experience. As Scarry (1985) puts it, pain obliterates all intentional contents of consciousness, leaving one with a nonintentional experience. Indeed, the more intense one’s pain, the more it forces one to withdraw from any intentional object one might have been contemplating. Admittedly, only in exceptional cases do such annihilating powers of pain bring about a complete obliteration of consciousness. Yet as Agustín Serrano de Haro insightfully points out, “In regard to the whole field of consciousness, a pain experience either takes full possession of the conscious foreground, or it strives to actually do so” (2011, 390). Put otherwise, any experience of pain, no matter how weak or intense it might be, manifests a tendency to obliterate and take possession of consciousness, and this tendency can manifest itself in a more or less pure form. Insofar as one resists this tendency and retains the capacity to contemplate the intentional object one was contemplating, one transforms pain into what it is not, namely, into a mere uneasiness or discomfort. Insofar as this tendency wins over one’s resistance and one succumbs to pain, one experiences a growing distance from all intentional objects, which leaves one with affective sensations as the sole experiential content. In the extreme case, pain is all there is.
Pain would not be pain if it did not unsettle other feelings, perceptions, thoughts, or activities. Moreover, pain disrupts not only wakeful consciousness, but also consciousness that is asleep. When pain intrudes, it forces consciousness to withdraw from any intentional content it had been contemplating, no matter if this content was perceived, contemplated, imagined, or just dreamed. This obtrusive nature of intense pain casts another shadow of doubt over the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Stumpf and his followers claim that pain is a sensation. Yet sensations do not enter the field of consciousness as objects in the foreground. They do not appear, but are lived through; they are not perceived, but experienced. However, while one can objectify one’s sensed contents only through reflective acts, pain emerges in the thematic field of consciousness as though in a flash and forces one to immediately objectify it. Indeed, pain intrudes the field of experience very much like other events in our surroundings, such as sudden noises that interrupt calmness, or unexpected movements that disrupt stillness. Does this fact not compel one to admit that pain is not a feeling-sensation, but an object of intentional consciousness? Using Husserl’s terminology from Ideas I, one can ask: Should one not abandon the view that pain is a hyle and replace it with the realization that it is a noema, conceived of as the objective correlate of an intentional act?3
Stumpf’s followers have the resources needed to answer this objection. We say that the pain in the abdomen is dreadful, or that the headache is unbearable. The language we employ suggests that pain is an intentional object. Yet one should not be misled by the grammatical structure of such descriptions. As Stumpf observed (1907, 9), everybody knows that the sentence “Sugar is sweet,” means that sugar tastes sweet, and when it comes to pain, the situation is no different. Whatever else pain might be, it is first and foremost a feeling, and therefore, to clarify what pain is, one must clarify not the nature of an object, but the nature of a feeling. Admittedly, such a response leaves it undecided whether the feeling in question should be determined as an intentional act or as a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Yet, as the foregoing analysis has shown, the structure of pain is essentially different from the structure of intentional acts. If this is accepted, one has to admit that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.
Arguably, one of the reasons why Stumpf qualifies pain as a unique kind of sensation, namely, as a feeling-sensation, is so as not to lose sight of the obtrusive nature of pain experience. Other sensory contents do not impose themselves upon us by stealing our attention. So as to distinguish between the obtrusive and the nonobtrusive sensations, Stumpf identifies the former as feeling-sensations. One can thus respond to Brentano and his followers by pointing out that the obtrusive nature of pain does not contradict the fact that it is a sensation. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, there are obtrusive sensations; they are called feeling-sensations.
Let us turn to the fifth reason that supports the view of Stumpf’s followers. Those who suffer from pain live through their pains indubitably. As Scarry puts it, “For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’” (1985, 4). To be in pain means, among other things, to have no doubt that one is in pain. Yet indubitability is a mark of inner rather than outer perception. This means that such an intentional object as one’s own body cannot be given indubitably. Moreover, this also means that insofar as pain is marked by indubitability, it cannot be qualified as an object of experience but must be either an intentional act, which intends an object, or a nonintentional content of experience. Yet, as we already know, pain cannot be an intentional act. If so, one has to conclude that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.
One might object that Stumpf’s followers build their case by paying attention only to the most gruesome forms of intense pain, which obliterate all other forms of consciousness. Would one not be led to different conclusions if one focused on milder and much more common forms of pain? With this question, we are led to the sixth reason that underlies the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. No matter how mild or intense pain might be, it is experienced not as an object but, to use Hermann Schmitz’s (2009, 23–27) fitting expression, as an atmosphere that colors intentional objects. Consider, for instance, how, after a sleepless night, one experiences a migraine while nonetheless being forced to engage in regular activities. Under such circumstances, one does not relate to the pain in one’s head as an intentional object of one’s consciousness. Rather, pain creates a particular atmosphere, which “is without place, yet nonetheless spatial,”4 and thus embraces and affects any object one might perceive or be contemplating. Consider the pain in one’s eyes, of which Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, 309) speaks in Being and Nothingness. If I experience this kind of pain while reading a book, then the object of my consciousness is the book, while pain is neither to the right nor to the left of it, nor is it one of the truths enclosed in it. Rather, pain manifests itself as the quivering of the letters on the page or as the difficulty in understanding their meaning. Thus, as Sartre explicitly puts it, “Pain is totally void of intentionality” (1956, 308), by which we are to understand that pain is not an intentional object among others. Nonetheless, I experience it as a “contingent attachment to the world” (Sartre 1956, 309), or, to return to Schmitz, as an atmosphere that covers my act of reading. One thus lives one’s pain as a pure affective state, which refuses to be characterized as intentional.
To what has been mentioned above, let us add a seventh and last reason that supports the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. This reason concerns what Scarry (1985, 15) has called the “as if” structure of the existing vocabulary for pain. We qualify our pains temporally as quivering, pulsing, throbbing, or beating; we qualify them spatially as jumping or shooting; with an eye on their pressure, we speak of them as cramping, cutting, drilling, gnawing, pinching, pressing, pricking, pulling, or stabbing. Yet the primary meanings of these and many other terms, which are employed in the McGill Pain Questionnaire with the aim of identifying the sensory, affective, and cognitive contents of pain experience, are related to objects and not to any kind of experience, including pain experience. These terms can be meaningfully employed in characterizing pain only because of the metaphorical transference of sense, that is, only because of the “as if” structure of the vocabulary for pain. But why does this transference provide us with the only available vocabulary for pain? Arguably, here we are in need of metaphors precisely because language is designed to name what is referential. As Scarry puts it, “Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently, we often call on them to convey the experience of the pain itself” (1985, 15).5 In short, to speak of pain, one must objectify pain with the help of those terms that do not apply to it, which, by implication, means that to speak of pain, one must objectify what is not an object at all.