On Naturalism in Pain Research: A Phenomenological Critique

Phenomenological Reviews: https://reviews.ophen.org, 2020

Published in Phenomenological Reviews, 2020-07-12. In his recently published study The Phenomenology of Pain Saulius Geniusas sets himself the task of developing precisely that-a phenomenology of pain-on the basis of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. According to Geniusas, in Husserl's work (including the posthumously published manuscripts) we find all the resources needed to develop such a phenomenology. Husserl took the first steps himself in developing a phenomenology of pain and by following in his footsteps, proceeding by way of the phenomenological method and concepts he developed, we can achieve this important goal. Why is it important to develop a phenomenology of pain? Apart from the general impetus of exploring all phenomena relevant to human life, we may in this case also point towards the mission of helping those who suffer from severe and chronic forms of bodily pain. Pain is from the experiential point of view generally something bad to have, even though it may guide our actions and call for changes of life style that are in some cases beneficial for us in the long run. The definition that Geniusas develops in his book and defends in comparison with other suggestions and conceptions of what pain consists in is the following: "Pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can be given only in original firsthand experience, either as a feeling-sensation or as an emotion".

We naturally seek to avoid pain, so it is a subject we tend to avoid. The problem is it remains cloaked in misunderstanding, and unknowing. This results in fear, which results in further avoidance, which results in a cyclic process. The investigation which follows is one person's attempt to remove the cloak of misunderstanding and unknowing, to reveal pain for what it is, and gain some understanding, then show this to the reader. The discussions present in the investigation delve into such things as the definition of pain, types of pain, historical conceptions of pain, pain's societal aspect, pain assessment, the psychology of pain, and finally the philosophy of pain. Each of these subjects attempts to gain an understanding of the subject from a different perspective. The purpose, to illuminate pain, so the reader may gain a greater understanding.

Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy , 2017

Here I distinguish three fundamental ways in which the naturalistically oriented science of pain has critically engaged phenomenology. The science of pain has either denied any role phenomenology could play in scientific pain research, or it has aimed to correlate phenomenological findings with neurological processes, or it has pursued a genuine dialogue with phenomenology, yet only insofar as phenomenology is conceived in line with the principles of static methodology. I argue that genetic phenomenology of embodied personhood offers a fourth and most promising way to pursue a dialogue between phenomenology and the science of pain. By drawing a distinction between the naturalistic and the personalistic attitudes, genetic phenomenology invites one to reinterpret the neurological conceptions of pain as modifications derived from a more basic understanding of pain experience.

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2016

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2013

ABSTRACTWhat is pain? This article argues that it is useful to think of pain as a ‘kind of event’ or a way of being-in-the-world. Pain-events are unstable; they are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language systems, social and environmental interactions and bodily comportment. The historical question becomes: how has pain been done and what ideological work do acts of being-in-pain seek to achieve? By what mechanisms do these types of events change? Who decides the content of any particular, historically specific and geographically situated ontology?

Forthcoming in The Philosophy of Pain, edited by D. Bain, M. Brady, and J. Corns. London: Routledge

Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...

The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness: Toward a Science and Theory. Ed. Steven M. Miller. John Benjamins Publishing Co., pp. 310-329, 2015

This paper argues in unprecedented empirical and philosophical detail that, given only what science has discovered about pain, we should prefer the materialist hypothesis that pains are purely material over the dualist hypothesis that they are immaterial. The empirical findings cited provide strong evidence for the thesis of empirical supervenience: that to every sort of introspectible change over time in pains, or variation among pains at a time, there corresponds in fact a certain sort of simultaneous neural change over time, or variation at a time. The empirical supervenience of pain on the neural is shown in turn to favor the hypothesis that pains are, in a sense that is made precise, purely material.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2020

An analysis of arguments for pain eliminativism reveals two significant points of divergence between assumptions underlying biomedical research on pain and assumptions typically endorsed by eliminativist accounts. The first concerns the status of the term 'pain,' which is a description of a phenomenon, rather than an explanatory construct. The second concerns reductive explanation: pain is explained causally, in terms of mechanisms or factors that produce or determine it, rather than by identifying it with a physical structure, process or mechanism. These discrepancies undermine several arguments for pain eliminativism.

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2012

Throughout history, pain has been understood to be a universal yet intensely personal experience. For the eighteenth-century faithful, the agonies arising from a cancerous tumour might have been interpreted as a divine gift, an opportunity to submit fully to God's will, or even to be purged of sin. For the worn out mill-worker of the nineteenth century, the pain of a mangled arm caused by malfunctioning machinery could have been understood as an unjust punishment. Today's marathon runner may view pain as an endurance test, a barrier to be pushed through and past; a necessary means to a triumphant end.

The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry's analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern context: the parallel processes of the decline of a tran-scendental and the emergence of a medical interpretation of pain is introduced, along with the marginalization of violence. Thirdly, the era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance (Foucault); it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames. Keywords Pain · Phenomenology · Biopower · Early modernity · Late modernity · Medicalization Physical pain is one of the most elementary human experiences. On the one hand, it is a physiological state of the body; on the other hand, an unignorable impression demanding interpretation. Such dual nature locates pain at the borderland of the biological and the cultural. 1 Due to its uncomfortable or in some cases unbearable impact, every society develops ways to deal with it. These include interpretative frameworks (describing its origins), technologies of treatment and moral economies (defining the related normative order). However, pain is not only a pre-given phenomenon originating from external sources implying countermeasures. It is also * Domonkos Sik

This chapter defends an axiological theory of pain according to which pains are bodily episodes that are bad in some way. Section 1 introduces two standard assumptions about pain that the axiological theory constitutively rejects: (i) that pains are essentially tied to consciousness and (ii) that pains are not essentially tied to badness. Section 2 presents the axiological theory by contrast to these and provides a preliminary defense of it. Section 3 introduces the paradox of pain and argues that since the axiological theory takes the location of pain at face value, it needs to grapple with the privacy, self-intimacy and incorrigibility of pain. Sections 4, 5 and 6 explain how the axiological theory may deal with each of these.

The Open Pain Journal

Based on a research and clinical work conducted in a pain treatment centre in France, the author shows that the conceptual dichotomies of psyche-soma that dominate the current discussion of the phenomenon of pain cannot ultimately account for its clinical realities. Although pain manifests in the body, it cannot be reduced to organic causes. The psychoanalytic approach to the body on the other hand allows us to make sense of the reality of pain, of the objectivity and certainty that mark its experience for the suffering subject and, in parallel, of the cases where no organic substrate has been identified. The body is not only organic. It is then up to the clinician, whether a physicalist or a psychoanalyst, to know how to work with this sign – one that does not call for interpretation -- regardless of its presumed aetiology.

2005

When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thought I might finally get to display some of my philosophical training, but alas, the correct answer was: " Pain is whatever she says it is. " The coach's " sufferercentric " definition echoes the one offered by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)— " Pain is always subjective " —as well as the definition of pain offered by the philosopher Saul Kripke in his argument against identity theory— " Pain. .. is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality " (1972/1980, p. 152). These subjective conceptions of pain pose problems for the scientific study of pain, as Price and Aydede point out in the introduction of their chapter. If the essence of pain is its phenomenological quality, then it seems the only way to study it directly is through introspection and subjects' verbal reports...

Filozofia, 2024

The aim of this article is to show how the inseparability of its objective and subjective dimensions renders pain such a complex phenomenon that it poses a challenge for both the biomedical sciences and philosophy. Neurophysiology has ascertained the variability of the relationship between damage and pain, showing that it is the result of interaction between the sensory and affective-emotional constituents of the human being. However, the process of defining the clinical concept of suffering appears comprehensively laborious and ongoing. Philosophy, while declaring the impossibility of identifying the essence of pain, makes a valuable contribution to the discovery of the singularity of the experience, thanks to the phenomenology of the homo patiens. Finally, we examine the debate on the possibility and the different ways of narrating and appraising suffering, a need with obvious ethical implications, perceived more and more within the field of care, also given the chronicity of many medical conditions.