The Phenomenology of Pain - Saulius Geniusas Series in Continental Thought

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tone-data, touch-data, or algedonic-data, to use Husserl’s own illustrations). By contrast, intentional contents are identified as “irreal”: they are not the contents consciousness lives through, but phenomena consciousness intends. Otherwise put, they are not given in consciousness, but appear to consciousness.

      According to Husserl of the Logical Investigations, experience obtains intentional character by means of “apprehension,” “interpretation,” or “animation” (these are all English renditions of the German “Auffassung”), which bestows sense upon the real (reel) contents of consciousness. This does not mean that apprehension objectifies real contents of consciousness. For Husserl, apprehension does not transform either sensations or acts of apprehension into objects of consciousness. Rather, through apprehension, consciousness reinterprets its own sensations as particular acts that are intentionally directed at their intentional correlates. Thus, according to the view Husserl endorses in the Logical Investigations, what appears to consciousness as an object is based upon the prereflective application of the apprehension–content of apprehension schema. The function of this schema is to enable consciousness to grasp the meaning of the intended object (see Gallagher 1998, 45).

      Husserl’s followers, as well as Husserl himself, have repeatedly questioned the validity of this conceptual model. Aron Gurwitsch (1964, 265–73) famously maintained that Husserl’s doctrine of the contents of consciousness is equivalent to the Constancy Hypothesis, which the Gestalt psychologists had already shown to be false. Presumably, by this Gurwitsch meant that Husserl had no right to maintain, as he did, that the same nonintentional contents can lend themselves to different kinds of apprehension, since nonintentional data display no structure at all and thus cannot be said to remain constant in the stream of experience. So also, Sartre maintained that “in giving to the hyle both the characteristics of a thing and the characteristics of consciousness, Husserl believed that he facilitated the passage from one to the other, but he succeeded only in creating a hybrid being which consciousness rejects and which cannot be a part of the world” (1956, lix). Quentin Smith provided yet another influential critique of this schema when he argued that no consciousness could ever access its own nonintentional contents. In order to thematize them, one would need to separate them from intentional apprehensions while simultaneously subjecting them to such apprehensions (see Smith 1977, 356–67). Besides these three established critiques, it is also worth pointing out that Husserl himself questioned the schema’s legitimacy. Nonetheless, despite this seemingly radical critique, the question concerning its legitimacy remains to this day an unsettled issue.9

      Even though Husserl subsequently questioned the legitimacy of this schema, and especially in the frameworks of his phenomenological analyses of phantasy and time-consciousness, in other frameworks of analysis he continues to endorse its legitimacy (see Lohmar and Brudzińska 2011, 119). For our purposes, it is important to see that this schema provides much-needed resources to reconcile the controversy over the intentional structure of pain experience. How does the apprehension–content of apprehension schema help us understand pain experience? I would like to flesh out an answer to this question by first turning back to §15 of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. If only because this section provides us with the first explicitly phenomenological analysis of pain in phenomenological literature in general, it deserves our careful attention.

      In §15 of the Fifth Investigation we come across Husserl’s first explicit analysis of pain. In this analysis, Husserl does not strive to articulate an unprecedented philosophical approach to pain but to resolve the controversy between Stumpf and Brentano. It is this controversy, taken along with Husserl’s attempt to resolve it, that constitutes the origins of the phenomenology of pain.

      The position Husserl ends up endorsing comes close to the one that Stumpf defended in his analysis of feeling-sensations. Stumpf aimed to situate his position between two extremes—the Jamesian view, which reduces all emotions to sensations (see James 1980, 442–86), and the Brentanian view, which suggests that all feelings, including pleasure and pain, are not sensations, but emotions. In contrast to both James and Brentano, Stumpf draws a distinction between intentional emotions and nonintentional feeling-sensations. In this regard, Husserl follows Stumpf. On the one hand, he suggests that there is a group of essentially intentional feelings. Taking over Brentano’s terminology, Husserl calls such feelings feeling-acts. For instance, “Pleasure without anything pleasant is unthinkable”; “The specific essence of pleasure demands a relation to something pleasing” (Husserl 2000, 571). On the other hand, Husserl also maintains that there are nonintentional feelings. Taking over both Stumpf’s distinction and terminology, Husserl labels such feelings feeling-sensations. Just as for Stumpf, so also for Husserl, pain constitutes the chief example of such feelings: “[The] sensible pain of a burn can certainly not be classed beside a conviction, a surmise, a volition etc., but beside sensory contents like rough or smooth, red or blue etc.” (Husserl 2000, 572). Thus, Husserl’s central thesis in §15 of the Fifth Logical Investigation echoes Stumpf’s position: the notion of feelings is equivocal. Some feelings are intrinsically intentional, while other feelings lack this property. This fundamental distinction lends itself to a twofold clarification.

      First, one could distinguish between intentional and nonintentional feelings on the basis of ascription. When we describe the landscape as beautiful, or the weather as gloomy, we ascribe feeling-qualities to the objects of experience. By contrast, in the case of such feeling-sensations as pain, we ascribe feelings not to objects, but to the subject of experience. In the first case, we are dealing with intentional feelings, and in the second case, with nonintentional feelings.

      Second, the distinction in question is also structural. Intentional feelings are logically and epistemologically founded experiences. When a politician is delighted about the election results, his joy, which is itself an intentional experience, is founded upon a more basic intentional presentation—the hearing of the news that he has won the election. By contrast, although nonintentional feelings might be founded “ontologically” upon more basic intentional presentations, they are not founded upon them logically or epistemologically.10 This means that feelings such as pain are to be conceived of as the immediate givenness of sensory content in the absence of more basic sensory acts.

      Thus, in the debate between Stumpf and Brentano, Husserl seems to take Stumpf’s side. Such is the view defended by both Denis Fisette (see especially Fisette 2010) and Agustín Serrano de Haro (2011) in their notable contributions.11 Here I would like to develop an alternative interpretation, which would demonstrate that Husserl’s goal in the Logical Investigations is not to reiterate Stumpf’s standpoint, but to resolve the conflict between his most important teachers. Husserl does not resolve this conflict by contending that pain is nothing more than a feeling-sensation, as Stumpf had put it, and as many others were later to repeat. Rather, Husserl maintains that not only the notion of feelings, but the notion of pain is equivocal as well: it can be conceived both as a feeling-sensation and as an intentional experience.

      An analogy drawn between pain and tactile sensations can help explain how pain can be conceived of as both a nonintentional feeling-sensation and an intentional experience. When I wake up in the middle of the night in a pitch-dark hotel room and when my hand searches for the light switch, I grasp a number of unfamiliar objects. Insofar as I refrain from asking what objects my hand has just touched, I experience purely tactile sensations. However, I can also interpret these tactile sensations as properties of particular objects. I can recognize the object my hand has just touched as a glass of water that I left on the bedside table before falling asleep. In this manner, the tactile sensations function as presentative contents of particular acts of consciousness. Due to such acts of “taking up,” I transform pure sensations into intentional experiences. Just as tactile sensations, so pain sensations, too, can be transformed into intentional objects of experience. Insofar as I do not objectify my pains, I experience them as pure sensations. Yet, according to Husserl of the Logical Investigations, pains can be also apperceived, or taken up, within an intentional interpretation.12

      One could object that this analogy between pain and other

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