The Phenomenology of Pain. Saulius Geniusas

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СКАЧАТЬ pain in phenomenological literature in general, it deserves our careful attention.

HUSSERL’S ANALYSIS OF PAIN IN THE LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

      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 tactile sensations conceals an important difference. I can experience tactile sensations just at their sensory level, or, alternatively, I can apperceive them as presenting tactually intended objects, such as the bedside table or the glass of water on it. Yet, clearly, pain does not present any object the way these other tactual sensations do: it does not make any sense to suggest that through my pain, I intend the bedside table, or the book lying on it. Nonetheless, how exactly should we understand the difference in question? Is it the case that while tactual sensations are objectifying, pain sensations are not? Or, alternatively, is it the case that both tactual sensations and pain sensations can be objectifying, although in significantly different senses of the term? I consider the first alternative unacceptable. If pain sensations were not objectifying in any sense of the term, we would not be in the position to point at the pain in our bodies, nor could we say that we are suffering, say, from a toothache or from the pain in the abdomen. Of course, to this one could still object that pain’s bodily localizability need not be conceived perceptually: we can simply feel our pain’s bodily location (we will still return to this issue in chapter 5). Yet, clearly, besides being felt, pain’s bodily location can also be indicated (when I find myself in the dentist’s office, I can point at the tooth that hurts). This basic capacity to indicate our pains and speak about them expresses in the most direct way our capacity to apprehend our pains intentionally. We can objectify our pains, although in a fundamentally different sense than we objectify other tactual sensations. Most of the pains that we suffer from are precisely such objectified pains—the kinds of pain that bother us, that limit our capacities, that enslave us. These are the kinds of pain that we have already transformed into intentional objects while at the same time we continue to feel them sensuously.

      The notion of pain turns out to be equivocal. Building on the basis of Husserl’s analysis, one could clarify this ambiguity as follows: while pain conceived of as a feeling-sensation is a simple experience, pain taken up in an objectifying interpretation is a complex experience. Moreover, when pain is conceived of as a complex phenomenon, it turns out to be a stratified phenomenon that entails both sensory and intentional components. When it comes to such experiences as pain, while the sensory stratum is the founding one, the intentional stratum is founded upon the sensory one.

      The interpretation I propose here suggests that, in contrast to Stumpf, for whom pain’s sensuousness signals its nonintentional essence, for Husserl, pain’s sensuousness forms pain’s pre-intentional character. To qualify pain as pre-intentional is to suggest that it can undergo an objective interpretation (although, admittedly, it need not—we can feel our pains without apprehending them), due to which we can localize a particular pain in our bodies, conceived of as intentional objects of experience. The intentionality of pain is founded upon pain’s pre-intentional givenness.¹³

      How, then, does Husserl resolve the controversy between Stumpf and Brentano? He does this on the basis of the realization that the intentionality of feelings can be understood in СКАЧАТЬ