The Phenomenology of Pain. Saulius Geniusas

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

APPREHENSION–CONTENT OF APPREHENSION

      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. Here the term “real” (reel) stands for what is immanently given in consciousness (color-data, 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 СКАЧАТЬ