On Pain and the Privation Theory of Evil

Gestalt Theory, 2017

Summary This paper develops a phenomenological approach to the concept of pain, which highlights the main presuppositions that underlie pain research undertaken both in the natural and in the sociohistorical sciences. My argument is composed of four steps: (1) only if pain is a stratified experience can it become a legitimate theme in both natural and sociohistorical sciences; (2) the phenomenological method is supremely well suited to disclose the different strata of pain experience; (3) the phenomenological account offered here identifies three fundamental levels that make up the texture of pain experience: pain can be conceived as a prereflective experience, as an object of affective reflection, or as an object of cognitive reflection; and (4) such a stratified account clarifies how pain can be a subject matter in the natural and sociohistorical sciences. Arguably, the natural and sociohistorical sciences address pain at different levels of its manifestation. While the natural sc...

The Unpleasantness of Pain, 2018

In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the unpleasantness determinable. According to this theory unpleasant pains feel bad, and this explains why we are motivated and justified in avoiding them. This explains, for example, why we are motivated and justified to take painkillers. This theory allows us to account for the heterogeneity of unpleasantness, i.e., we can explain how different unpleasant experiences feel unpleasant even if they feel so different. The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, where I analyse two reductive accounts of unpleasantness: the content theories and the desire theories. I deal with the second theme in the third and fourth chapter, where I analyse different theories that try to account for the phenomenal property of unpleasantness. In the fifth and sixth chapter, I focus on the third theme, where I consider different cases that suggest the existence of pains that are not unpleasant. In the final chapter, I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain.

The Berlin Review of Books, 2012

Review of A.J. Vetlesen, 'A Philosophy of Pain'. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Veltesen offers an eclectic study of pain, mixing philosophical and cultural analysis. I divide his chapters roughly into three overlapping parts. These make sense of pain as an isolating experience, a shared aspect of the human condition, and a cultural phenomenon. Part I probes the pain which results from torture, chronic illness, and psychological trauma. Through these, Vetlesen provides a conceptual analysis of how pain changes our normal connections to the world, including to other humans. Part II is a phenomenological description of how pain is experienced. From it, he draws existentialist conclusions about our responsibility and vulnerability in the world. Part III develops a model of how pain circulates within society and how culture transforms this pain. He uses it to interpret two aspects of western culture: its violence and valorisation of choice. The published version of this article is available at: http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/phiccf

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011

Pain, crucially, is unpleasant and motivational. It can be awful; and it drives us to action, e.g. to take our weight off a sprained ankle. But what is the relationship between pain and those two features? And in virtue of what does pain have them? Addressing these questions, Colin Klein and Richard J. Hall have recently developed the idea that pains are, at least partly, experiential commands—to stop placing your weight on your ankle, for example. In this paper, I reject their accounts. Against Klein, I use dissociation cases to argue that possession of ‘imperative content’ cannot wholly constitute pain. Against them both, I further claim that possession of such content cannot even constitute pain’s unpleasant, motivational aspect. For, even if it were possible to specify the relevant imperative content—which is far from clear—the idea of a command cannot bear the explanatory weight Klein and Hall place on it.

The Philosophy of Suffering, eds. D. Bain, M. Brady and J. Corns, 2019

The popular view on which unpleasant pain consists of two dissociable components, and on which there may be pains that wholly lack affect, is the product of a theoretical deference to consciousness. The same is true of the thesis that suffering is exclusively a conscious phenomenon. Pain researchers defer to consciousness, but in my view they do not properly heed its message regarding pain, painfulness, and suffering. I will argue that consciousness actually gives us a double-edged message about these phenomena. Introspection reveals pain and painfulness to be essentially kinds of qualia, or qualitative character, (§1)—a thesis I defend from the ‘heterogeneity problem’ (§2). But introspection also prompts a conception of pain and painfulness on which these are capable in principle of unconscious existence (§3, §5). This implies, in turn, that suffering may well occur unconsciously (§§4-5), something I argue for in part by criticising rival models of suffering (§4). Taking consciousness seriously as an epistemic source for the natures of pain, painfulness, and suffering, thus has the surprising result that consciousness is removed from the metaphysics of pain, painfulness, and suffering.

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?

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".

In Jennifer Corns (ed.) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Pain, 2017

Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” or encountering a sense-datum, but of your having an interoceptive experience representing (accurately or inaccurately) that your toe is in a particular experience-independent condition, such as undergoing a certain “disturbance” or being damaged or in danger (Armstrong 1962; Tye 1995). But even if such representational content makes an experience a pain, a further ingredient seems required to make the pain unpleasant. According to evaluativism, the further ingredient is the experience’s possession of evaluative content: its representing the bodily condition as bad for the subject. In this chapter, I elaborate evaluativism, locate it among alternatives, and explain its attractions and challenges.

Scientia et Fides, 2024

Contrary to the commonly assumed opinion that Christianity sees pain as intrinsically evil – where evil is defined as the lack of something good – Aquinas defines pain not as a privation but rather a passion of the soul, i.e., an emotion that depends on sensual and/or intellective cognition of something evil, is good in itself, and may serve a purpose. This article offers a formalized version of the Thomistic definition of pain and related negative (unpleasant) emotions experienced by humans. It also compares and contrasts this view with some contemporary scientific and philosophical models of pain.

Utilitas, 2009

It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain’s badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this paper, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain’s badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value.

2006

Chapter 1 Introduction If anything is intrinsically bad, pain is. Even the staid skeptic should accept this conditional. For anyone who cares about the nature of value, consequentialist, Kantian, virtue ethicist, and even those who deny the intelligibility of mind-independent value, an account of the putative intrinsic badness of pain is compulsory. If one believes that moral evaluations attach only to agents, she must explain why pains, which seem to be mental states, are bad. If she holds that nothing is intrinsically bad, she must account for the seeming wrongness of my stomping on your gouty foot. And if she agrees that pains are, in fact, intrinsically bad, she must at least say what she means, if not why this is the case. I believe all existing accounts of pain's intrinsic badness are false. Their mistake has two sources. First, these views assume a virtually universal but false conception of what pains are. Second, accounts of pain's intrinsic badness are usually developed in tandem with accounts of the intrinsic goodness of pleasure. But there are some important disconnects between the source of pain's intrinsic badness and the source of pleasure's intrinsic goodness. At the least, assuming that we can seamlessly transpose claims about pain's intrinsic badness to pleasure's intrinsic goodness, and vice-versa, obscures what is distinctive about pain and its intrinsic badness. Thus in this dissertation I shall focus solely on understanding pain and its intrinsic badness. This will yield new insights that extend to other areas of value theory. In particular, I shall argue that when we correctly understand the nature of pain and its intrinsic badness we must revise the existing theories of the nature of intrinsic value. In this chapter, I'll sketch the main claims and arguments of this dissertation. I'll start with a quick overview and then sketch the content of each chapter. Before I begin, one note about terminology. I shall use 'intrinsic value' and 'value' to include the positive, neutral, and negative valences-thus pain's intrinsic badness will be an intrinsic value. Many prefer to reserve 'value' for the positive valence, and use 'disvalue' for the negative. But the difference in terminology does not reflect a substantive difference. §1.1 Synopsis Let me begin with a quick synopsis of the arc of this dissertation and its main claims. I'll then discuss each chapter in a bit more detail. Nearly everyone believes that pain is just a sensation. More specifically, they believe that everything normatively significant about a pain is contained in the way it hurts. The nature of a stubbed toe's pain is exhausted by the way it stings and throbs. This is the kernel view of what pains are.

2012

What is pain, what does it mean that the subject has a relationship with it, and how does this affect his identity and existence? My definition of pain is derived from that proposed by scientists such as Melzack and Wall, and Freud. Pain is a dynamic, multilayered, diverse collection of experiences which impact and influence the subject throughout life. Pain is a kind of conglomerate of past, traumatic, neurobiological, psychological and emotional imprints-pain as in suffering or being in pain. The aim of this thesis is to argue that it is not pain, as such, but the relationship of the subject to (his/her) pain which is most significant to his/her processes of life. In examining the combination of two theories of pain, namely, Freud's psychosexual theory of development and Melzack's theory of the Neuromatrix, my thesis endeavours to evidence my theory by using case study methodology. The similarities in the theories which are a hundred years apart have sparked my interest to propose that there is the distinct possibility for the existence of what I have named a Psychomatrix-patterns of pain (loss-abandonment, grief, rejection, desire) imprinted from infancy within an innate matrix that are specifically translated by their own 'psychological and emotional neural loops' and therefore, similar to the neuromatrix concept. As pain is triggered these 'loops' become more ingrained as information is analysed and coded to create a continuous (subjective) experience of suffering or being in pain. This is also true for positive emotions, such as love and joy, however I suggest that pain is the primary, and most significant emotion that needs to be understood in order to understand the others which are triggered by the same neuralpsychological and physicalpathways as incidental emotions of the quality of existence. A vast spectrum of (on-going) research has identified the impact of cultural, religious, social and political factors on pain and pain management. I suggest that all of these figure in the conglomerate. Using a psychoanalytical frame of reference this is a theoretical and conceptual thesis. My final conclusion is that pain becomes an object that compels the subject to respond accordingly and consequently, from birth to death, defining his/her identity and existence.

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...

Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2018

In this paper the complex phenomenon of pain is discussed and analysed along different theoretical paths: cognitivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology. The neuro-cognitive approach is exemplified through Paul and Patricia Churchland's writings; then H.-G. Gadamer's hermeneutical approach is evaluated. While apparently opposite, they share a common assumption, namely that the body is basically to be conceived of as not really different from the Cartesian Res extensa. Some problems thus arise: in particular, the aspect of reflexivity implied in any experience of pain is overlooked. Accordingly, an adequate approach to feeling pain must take the phenomenological path. This means to discuss Husserl's but also Scheler's and Heidegger's contributions, in order to bring to the fore the complexity of the phenomenon of pain, which shows a particular and paradoxical structure: exposing the subject feeling pain to its own internal exteriority.

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.