The Phenomenology of Pain - Saulius Geniusas Series in Continental Thought

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a name, we falsify and misrepresent a nonintentional experience as an intentional object. We must keep our guard up so as not to become “victims to the seduction of language” (Husserl 1970, 362).

      Such, then, are the central reasons that underlie the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Pain has no referential content; it does not share the same structure with other kinds of intentional consciousness; its disruptive effects are such that in the extreme case, pain empties consciousness of any intentional content; the indubitable evidence characteristic of its givenness is essentially different from the evidence that applies to the givenness of intentional contents; it covers all intentional relations as a nonintentional atmosphere; last but not least, the language we employ to characterize our pains is yet a further testament to the nonintentional nature of pain experience. These reasons make it understandable why the perspective that was first introduced by Stumpf retains its credibility to this day. Nonetheless, this fact need not be conceived of as an invitation to abandon the Brentanian position. In the following section, we will consider the reasons that underlie Brentano’s standpoint.

      There are three fundamental ways in which one can understand pain as an intentional experience. First, one could argue that pain is neither a nonintentional feeling-sensation, nor an object of feelings, but a particular way one is conscious of one particular object, namely, of one’s own body. After all, one never experiences pain in midair: one cannot simply “be in pain.” One can feel pain only in one’s head, neck, abdomen, and so on. We can feel pain only in our bodies, conceived of as intentional correlates of our feelings. The experience of pain thereby proves to be an instance of our acquaintance with intentionally constituted reality.

      As we saw in the previous section, Stumpf’s followers reject this line of reasoning by pointing out that pain experience does not share the same structure with perceptual consciousness. While seeing is always seeing of something, and hearing is always hearing something, feeling pain is not a matter of intending something through pain experience, but a matter of living through a particular feeling. Even more: the very way we live through intense pain tends to block our access to any intentional object we might have been contemplating. Small wonder, then, that Stumpf and his followers consider pain to be a nonintentional experience. Yet Brentano’s followers consider such a response an instance of a misplaced criticism. One does not need to think that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of perception in order to recognize pain as an intentional experience. It is much more significant to highlight the fact that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of other intentional emotions. Consider such emotions as pride and shame, attraction and disgust, or joy and sorrow. In the case of each, the subject of experience is absorbed more in one’s own feelings than in their intentional correlates. Nonetheless, this structural difference between emotions and perceptions does not imply that emotions are bereft of intentionality. Clearly, we are proud or ashamed over something, attracted or disgusted by something, overjoyed or sorrowed by something. So also, just because those who suffer from pain are first and foremost absorbed in their experience, and only secondarily conscious of their bodies, does not imply that the experience of pain is nonintentional. Quite on the contrary, just like the above-mentioned emotions, the experience of pain is intentional through and through. For this very reason, Brentano and his followers invite us to concede that pain is an intentional emotion.

      Second, besides identifying pain as an intentional feeling, one can also thematize it as an intentional correlate of feelings. That is, besides thematizing pain noetically, one can also address it noematically. Serrano de Haro has referred to such a conception of pain as the “pure intentional model” and qualified it as the view that conceives of pain as a “disturbing event that one notices in some part of one’s body and which monopolizes one’s attention” (2011, 392). One could single out two central reasons to support such a view. First, without recognizing pain as a noema, one could not make sense of pain’s obtrusive characteristics. Only what appears can obtrude consciousness and obliterate all of its other contents. Yet, by definition, whatever appears is the correlate of one’s intentional experiences.6 Second, without recognizing pain as a noema, one can only partly make sense of the bodily nature of pain. If it is indeed true that pain has bodily localizability, then it must be given in our bodies, conceived of as intentional correlates of experience.7

      Third, one can also conceive of pain as a feeling, through which one intentionally relates not only to one’s body, but to all possible experiential objects. While this view is especially strongly defended by Merleau-Ponty and his followers, the phenomenological origins of this conception can be found in Husserl’s reflections on sensings (Empfindnisse) that we come across in Ideas II.8 As far as the philosophy of pain is concerned, Abraham Olivier’s (2007) Being in Pain provides the most elaborate analysis of such a conception of pain experience. Building his case against both the materialists and the dualists, who either directly (materialists) or indirectly (dualists) privilege the physiological conceptions of pain (see Olivier 2007, 2–6), Olivier thematizes pain as a “disturbed bodily perception bound to hurt, affliction or agony” (2007, 6). Relying on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Olivier (2007, 27) understands perception in a remarkably broad way, which covers all intentional acts, and identifies the subject of experience as a perceiving body. Within such a conceptual framework, to argue that pain is a disturbed perception is to suggest that pain disturbs how the subject of experience senses, feels, and thinks. Thus, pain affects not only the sufferer’s body; it also disturbs anything that emerges in the field of sensations, perceptions, or thoughts.

      Such a conceptual framework invites us to reinterpret Sartre’s and Schmitz’s contributions to the phenomenology of pain as clarifications of the intentional nature of pain experience. Although Sartre explicitly qualifies the most basic experience of pain as nonintentional, one can conceive of the pain-in-the-eyes of which he speaks as an illustration of the intentional structure of pain experience. Pain covers each and every object one might be sensing, perceiving, or contemplating. So also, with regard to Schmitz, one can conceive of the atmosphere of pain as a horizon that covers all of pain’s intentional effects. Itself being without place, pain covers everything that emerges in perceptual, imaginary, or conceptual spaces. In this sense also, pain proves to be irreducibly intentional.

      Thus, even though there are good reasons to hold on to the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers, there are also strong reasons that support the Brentanian view. It is not enough to state that pain can be conceived of as an intentional experience. One must stress that it can be so conceived of in no fewer than three ways: either as an intentional feeling, or as an intentional object, or, finally, as an intentional atmosphere that covers all intentional feelings and intentional objects. Since both the Stumpfian and the Brentanian positions are grounded in phenomenological descriptions, it is hardly surprising that the question concerning the intentional structure of pain experience remains to this day without a definite resolution.

      We seem to be faced with two incompatible standpoints. If the position of Stumpf’s followers is correct, then it seems that the standpoint of Brentano’s followers must be mistaken, and vice versa. Nonetheless, there is a way to resolve the obvious divergences between the Brentanian and the Stumpfian positions and, as I have already argued elsewhere, such a way is not unprecedented. Section 15 of Husserl’s Fifth Logical Investigation, which offers the first explicitly phenomenological analysis of pain (Brentano’s and Stumpf’s accounts being protophenomenological), is nothing other than an attempt to reconcile Stumpf’s and Brentano’s positions (see Geniusas 2014a). However, since in the Logical Investigations Husserl is only marginally interested in clarifying the intentional structure of feelings and emotions, the resolution he offers is nothing more than a blueprint. My goal here is to develop this blueprint further by building on the basis of Husserl’s schema “apprehension–content of apprehension” (Auffassung/Auffassungsinhalt).

      Husserl introduced this schema in the Logical Investigations with the aim of clarifying the structure of intentionality. In this schema, the content refers to sensible materials, which Husserl defines as real (reel) experiential contents.

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