Читать книгу The Phenomenology of Pain - Saulius Geniusas - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

PAIN AND INTENTIONALITY

A STRATIFIED CONCEPTION OF PAIN EXPERIENCE

Having clarified the fundamental methodological commitments that must underlie phenomenologically oriented pain research, we are now ready to turn to our second task. We are ready to raise the fundamental question: What is pain? According to the definition proposed by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), “Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (Merskey and Bogduk 1994, 209). This established definition, however, cannot be accepted at face value in phenomenology. We know one reason for this from the introduction. Although this definition admits that pain is an experience, it does not clarify the nature of pain as experience. It is not enough to qualify pain experience as sensory, emotional, and unpleasant since many other experiences, such as nausea, bodily exhaustion, various kinds of bodily illness, and psychological suffering could also be qualified the same way. The IASP definition does not give us an account of the explanandum, which could then be provided with further explanans.

One can single out additional reasons why this definition cannot be relied upon in phenomenology. With the performance of the phenomenological epoché, one can no longer clarify the nature of pain experience on the basis of associations with actual or potential tissue damage. The claim that pain experience is associated with actual or potential tissue damage relies on the assumption that the body that experiences pain is composed of tissues—body cells that are organized in accordance with a specific structure and function—and that the experience of pain either is, or derives from, damage that affects these tissues. Such a conception of pain is grounded in pain biology. Yet, as we know from the methodological investigations offered in chapter 1, pain phenomenology cannot rely on pain biology. There are, thus, not only thematic but also methodological reasons why the IASP definition of pain cannot be relied upon in phenomenological research.

What, then, is pain, when conceived in accordance with the fundamental phenomenological principles? The answer that I wish to offer runs as follows: pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can be given only in original firsthand experience, either as a nonintentional feeling-sensation or as an intentional feeling. The legitimacy of such an answer must be established on the basis of phenomenological descriptions, which would rely on the methodological principles outlined in chapter 1. To offer such descriptions and thereby justify the phenomenological legitimacy of the proposed conception of pain, one must proceed by asking seven questions, which I will list here in the order in which I will pursue them in this study. What does it mean to claim (1) that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation; (2) that it is an intentional feeling; (3) that it can be given only in firsthand experience; (4) that this feeling is fundamentally aversive; (5) that it has a unique experiential quality; (6) that it is an original experience; and (7) that it is localized in the body? This chapter will be concerned with the first three questions. Chapter 3 will turn to the fourth and fifth questions, and chapter 4 will offer an analysis of the sixth one, while in chapter 5 we will complete the analysis by turning to the seventh question. At the end of chapter 5, we will have justified the phenomenological conception of pain proposed here.

PAIN AND INTENTIONALITY

Few other questions are as germane to the phenomenology of pain as the question concerning the intentional structure of pain experience. Should pain be qualified as an intentional feeling, namely, as a “consciousness of something,” or should it be characterized as a nonintentional feeling-sensation, a mere “experiential content,” or a pure “affective state,” which does not intend anything? This is the oldest question in the phenomenology of pain. We come across this question in a controversy between two of Edmund Husserl’s teachers: Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.¹ While Brentano was committed to the view that pain is an intentional feeling, Stumpf argued that pain is a nonintentional sensation, which he called a “feeling-sensation” (Gefühlsempfindung). As Stumpf (1924) was subsequently to observe, although in virtually all other regards he considered himself Brentano’s follower, the question concerning the intentional status of such feelings as pain marked an uncompromising disagreement between him and Brentano.

This unresolved controversy had far-reaching repercussions for the subsequent development of the phenomenological analyses of pain. Three sets of illustrations should suffice as a clear confirmation that the oldest question in the phenomenology of pain never reached a clear resolution. First, consider Max Scheler’s reflections on pain. In his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Scheler (1973, esp. 328–44) sides with Stumpf when he argues that pain is a nonintentional feeling state. However, in his later works, most notably in “The Meaning of Suffering,” Scheler (1992) conceptualizes pain as a particular form of suffering, conceived of as an intentional experience. In “The Meaning of Suffering,” Scheler takes over the Brentanian point of view and interprets pain through the prism of intentionality. Second, consider Frederik J. J. Buytendijk’s (1962) and Michel Henry’s (1973) reflections on pain. Much like the later Scheler, Buytendijk also follows Brentano when he argues that pain cannot be conceived of as a nonintentional feeling-sensation, which, allegedly, affects only the body-self. According to Buytendijk, to clarify pain’s personal significance, one must address the meaning that pain has for the sufferer. To do so, one must address pain in various intentional frameworks that bind the sufferer to his or her body, to others, and to the sociocultural world at large. By contrast, Michel Henry radicalizes Stumpf’s position and argues that pain is the paradigm of worldless self-affection, conceived of as a purely immanent feeling that living beings have of the concrete modes of their lives. No other experience exemplifies auto-affection as purely as the experience of pain.² Third, consider Elaine Scarry’s (1985) and Abraham Olivier’s (2007) studies of pain. On the one hand, Scarry provides one of the strongest defenses of Stumpf’s view. As she puts it in her classical study, The Body in Pain, “Desire is desire of x, fear is fear of y, hunger is hunger for z; but pain is not ‘of’ or ‘for’ anything—it is itself alone” (Scarry 1985, 161–62). On the other hand, in direct contrast to Scarry, Olivier presents us with a concept of pain as a “disturbed bodily perception bound to hurt, affliction or agony” (2007, 198). Conceiving of pain as a form of perception, Olivier defends the Brentanian line and argues that pain is an intentional experience.

Thus, in the phenomenological literature on pain, the question concerning the intentional status of pain experience remains to this day unresolved. One might be tempted to interpret this seemingly endless controversy as a failure on the part of phenomenology to determine one of the central issues that lie at the heart of the phenomenologically informed pain research. Yet one can also interpret it as a clue that the question concerning the intentional status of pain simply cannot be answered unequivocally.

Such, indeed, is the view that I wish to present in this chapter: there are good reasons why the question concerning the intentional status of pain could not reach a clear resolution. I will defend two interrelated claims. First, pain is a sensory feeling. The qualification of pain as sensory relies upon Stumpf’s determination of pain as a feeling-sensation. Yet pain is also a feeling, which means that pain also entails emotive dimensions. In this regard, the qualification of pain as a feeling already relies on Brentano’s claim that pain is an intentional emotion. However, the conception of pain as a sensory feeling only sharpens the question: How can pain be both a nonintentional feeling-sensation (Gefühlsempfindung) and an intentional feeling? To resolve this apparent contradiction, it will be necessary to supplement the first claim with a second one, which will suggest that pain is a stratified experience. This claim means that the experience of pain is composed of two fundamental strata: while its founding stratum is nonintentional, the founded stratum is marked by intentionality. I will maintain that such a stratified conception of pain provides the necessary basis to reconcile Stumpf’s and Brentano’s standpoints.

PAIN AS A FEELING-SENSATION

What phenomenological evidence underlies the claim that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation? I do not raise this question as a preamble to an exegetical study. Rather than limiting myself to Stumpf’s analysis, I will strive to present the view that pain is a nonintentional experience as a live option. Arguably, there are at least seven reasons to interpret this position as a living possibility.

First, as the proponents of the Stumpfian standpoint have always maintained, just try to offer a phenomenological description of pain experience, and you will see that pain has no referential content. Elaine Scarry formulates this point especially forcefully. She does not doubt that most of our feelings are intentional. Thus, “love is love of x, fear is fear of y, ambivalence is ambivalence about z” (Scarry 1985, 5). Yet, according to Scarry, no matter how extensive the list of intentional feelings might be, physical pain interrupts it. While intentional feelings are feelings for somebody or something, physical pain is “not of or for anything” (1985, 5). Physical pain takes no referential content; rather, it “resists objectification in language” (1985, 5).

Is it true that physical pain is not “for or about anything”? Brentano and his followers disagree with this characterization and argue that the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers is built upon a fabricated phenomenological description. They argue that pain is an intentional feeling, whose correlate is one’s physical body. Thus, if I have abdominal pain, the intentional correlate of my feeling-intention is an area in my stomach; if I have a migraine, the intentional correlate of my pain is an area in my head. Pain has the structure of perceptual consciousness: just as seeing is seeing of x, and hearing is hearing of y, so having pain is related to z. One could say that the intentional correlates of physical pain are surface or nonsurface bodily areas (see Janzen 2013, 864).

However, according to Stumpf’s followers, the structure of pain experience is by no means identical with the structure of perceptual consciousness. Here we come across the second reason that supports their position. In the case of perception, consciousness is first and foremost absorbed in the intentional object and only secondarily conscious of its own experiential contents. In the case of pain, the situation is reversed: one is first and foremost absorbed in one’s experience and only secondarily conscious of one’s body, conceived of as the object of pain experience. This absorption in experience itself, rather than in the objects of experience, intimates that in the case of pain, we are faced not with intentional consciousness, but with a feeling-sensation.

Stumpf’s followers do not deny that pain can be interpreted as a way of being aware of an object, namely, of one’s own body. However, they assert that this interpretation is an accomplishment of reflective consciousness. They claim that prior to reflection, pain is experienced neither as an intentional feeling nor as an object of this feeling, but as a nonintentional experiential content. At this basic experiential level, pains do not appear, they are just lived through.

Third, one could point out that there is an essential structural difference between intentional consciousness and pain experience. Intentional consciousness is marked by the distinction between the intentional act and the object of this act. In the case of pain experience, one cannot draw an analogous distinction. While we distinguish between the seeing and the seen, the judging and the judged, the loving and the loved, we do not distinguish between the “paining” and the “pained.” Being a feeling-sensation, pain does not lend itself to the same kind of structural analysis as do intentional experiences.

Fourth, to provide this view with further support, one could point to the disruptive effects of intense pain experience. As Scarry (1985) puts it, pain obliterates all intentional contents of consciousness, leaving one with a nonintentional experience. Indeed, the more intense one’s pain, the more it forces one to withdraw from any intentional object one might have been contemplating. Admittedly, only in exceptional cases do such annihilating powers of pain bring about a complete obliteration of consciousness. Yet as Agustín Serrano de Haro insightfully points out, “In regard to the whole field of consciousness, a pain experience either takes full possession of the conscious foreground, or it strives to actually do so” (2011, 390). Put otherwise, any experience of pain, no matter how weak or intense it might be, manifests a tendency to obliterate and take possession of consciousness, and this tendency can manifest itself in a more or less pure form. Insofar as one resists this tendency and retains the capacity to contemplate the intentional object one was contemplating, one transforms pain into what it is not, namely, into a mere uneasiness or discomfort. Insofar as this tendency wins over one’s resistance and one succumbs to pain, one experiences a growing distance from all intentional objects, which leaves one with affective sensations as the sole experiential content. In the extreme case, pain is all there is.

Pain would not be pain if it did not unsettle other feelings, perceptions, thoughts, or activities. Moreover, pain disrupts not only wakeful consciousness, but also consciousness that is asleep. When pain intrudes, it forces consciousness to withdraw from any intentional content it had been contemplating, no matter if this content was perceived, contemplated, imagined, or just dreamed. This obtrusive nature of intense pain casts another shadow of doubt over the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Stumpf and his followers claim that pain is a sensation. Yet sensations do not enter the field of consciousness as objects in the foreground. They do not appear, but are lived through; they are not perceived, but experienced. However, while one can objectify one’s sensed contents only through reflective acts, pain emerges in the thematic field of consciousness as though in a flash and forces one to immediately objectify it. Indeed, pain intrudes the field of experience very much like other events in our surroundings, such as sudden noises that interrupt calmness, or unexpected movements that disrupt stillness. Does this fact not compel one to admit that pain is not a feeling-sensation, but an object of intentional consciousness? Using Husserl’s terminology from Ideas I, one can ask: Should one not abandon the view that pain is a hyle and replace it with the realization that it is a noema, conceived of as the objective correlate of an intentional act?³

Stumpf’s followers have the resources needed to answer this objection. We say that the pain in the abdomen is dreadful, or that the headache is unbearable. The language we employ suggests that pain is an intentional object. Yet one should not be misled by the grammatical structure of such descriptions. As Stumpf observed (1907, 9), everybody knows that the sentence “Sugar is sweet,” means that sugar tastes sweet, and when it comes to pain, the situation is no different. Whatever else pain might be, it is first and foremost a feeling, and therefore, to clarify what pain is, one must clarify not the nature of an object, but the nature of a feeling. Admittedly, such a response leaves it undecided whether the feeling in question should be determined as an intentional act or as a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Yet, as the foregoing analysis has shown, the structure of pain is essentially different from the structure of intentional acts. If this is accepted, one has to admit that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.

Arguably, one of the reasons why Stumpf qualifies pain as a unique kind of sensation, namely, as a feeling-sensation, is so as not to lose sight of the obtrusive nature of pain experience. Other sensory contents do not impose themselves upon us by stealing our attention. So as to distinguish between the obtrusive and the nonobtrusive sensations, Stumpf identifies the former as feeling-sensations. One can thus respond to Brentano and his followers by pointing out that the obtrusive nature of pain does not contradict the fact that it is a sensation. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, there are obtrusive sensations; they are called feeling-sensations.

Let us turn to the fifth reason that supports the view of Stumpf’s followers. Those who suffer from pain live through their pains indubitably. As Scarry puts it, “For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’” (1985, 4). To be in pain means, among other things, to have no doubt that one is in pain. Yet indubitability is a mark of inner rather than outer perception. This means that such an intentional object as one’s own body cannot be given indubitably. Moreover, this also means that insofar as pain is marked by indubitability, it cannot be qualified as an object of experience but must be either an intentional act, which intends an object, or a nonintentional content of experience. Yet, as we already know, pain cannot be an intentional act. If so, one has to conclude that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.

One might object that Stumpf’s followers build their case by paying attention only to the most gruesome forms of intense pain, which obliterate all other forms of consciousness. Would one not be led to different conclusions if one focused on milder and much more common forms of pain? With this question, we are led to the sixth reason that underlies the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. No matter how mild or intense pain might be, it is experienced not as an object but, to use Hermann Schmitz’s (2009, 23–27) fitting expression, as an atmosphere that colors intentional objects. Consider, for instance, how, after a sleepless night, one experiences a migraine while nonetheless being forced to engage in regular activities. Under such circumstances, one does not relate to the pain in one’s head as an intentional object of one’s consciousness. Rather, pain creates a particular atmosphere, which “is without place, yet nonetheless spatial,”⁴ and thus embraces and affects any object one might perceive or be contemplating. Consider the pain in one’s eyes, of which Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, 309) speaks in Being and Nothingness. If I experience this kind of pain while reading a book, then the object of my consciousness is the book, while pain is neither to the right nor to the left of it, nor is it one of the truths enclosed in it. Rather, pain manifests itself as the quivering of the letters on the page or as the difficulty in understanding their meaning. Thus, as Sartre explicitly puts it, “Pain is totally void of intentionality” (1956, 308), by which we are to understand that pain is not an intentional object among others. Nonetheless, I experience it as a “contingent attachment to the world” (Sartre 1956, 309), or, to return to Schmitz, as an atmosphere that covers my act of reading. One thus lives one’s pain as a pure affective state, which refuses to be characterized as intentional.

To what has been mentioned above, let us add a seventh and last reason that supports the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. This reason concerns what Scarry (1985, 15) has called the “as if” structure of the existing vocabulary for pain. We qualify our pains temporally as quivering, pulsing, throbbing, or beating; we qualify them spatially as jumping or shooting; with an eye on their pressure, we speak of them as cramping, cutting, drilling, gnawing, pinching, pressing, pricking, pulling, or stabbing. Yet the primary meanings of these and many other terms, which are employed in the McGill Pain Questionnaire with the aim of identifying the sensory, affective, and cognitive contents of pain experience, are related to objects and not to any kind of experience, including pain experience. These terms can be meaningfully employed in characterizing pain only because of the metaphorical transference of sense, that is, only because of the “as if” structure of the vocabulary for pain. But why does this transference provide us with the only available vocabulary for pain? Arguably, here we are in need of metaphors precisely because language is designed to name what is referential. As Scarry puts it, “Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently, we often call on them to convey the experience of the pain itself” (1985, 15).⁵ In short, to speak of pain, one must objectify pain with the help of those terms that do not apply to it, which, by implication, means that to speak of pain, one must objectify what is not an object at all. We cannot help but find the means to speak about pain. Yet, as soon as we give it a name, we falsify and misrepresent a nonintentional experience as an intentional object. We must keep our guard up so as not to become “victims to the seduction of language” (Husserl 1970, 362).

Such, then, are the central reasons that underlie the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Pain has no referential content; it does not share the same structure with other kinds of intentional consciousness; its disruptive effects are such that in the extreme case, pain empties consciousness of any intentional content; the indubitable evidence characteristic of its givenness is essentially different from the evidence that applies to the givenness of intentional contents; it covers all intentional relations as a nonintentional atmosphere; last but not least, the language we employ to characterize our pains is yet a further testament to the nonintentional nature of pain experience. These reasons make it understandable why the perspective that was first introduced by Stumpf retains its credibility to this day. Nonetheless, this fact need not be conceived of as an invitation to abandon the Brentanian position. In the following section, we will consider the reasons that underlie Brentano’s standpoint.

PAIN AS AN INTENTIONAL FEELING

There are three fundamental ways in which one can understand pain as an intentional experience. First, one could argue that pain is neither a nonintentional feeling-sensation, nor an object of feelings, but a particular way one is conscious of one particular object, namely, of one’s own body. After all, one never experiences pain in midair: one cannot simply “be in pain.” One can feel pain only in one’s head, neck, abdomen, and so on. We can feel pain only in our bodies, conceived of as intentional correlates of our feelings. The experience of pain thereby proves to be an instance of our acquaintance with intentionally constituted reality.

As we saw in the previous section, Stumpf’s followers reject this line of reasoning by pointing out that pain experience does not share the same structure with perceptual consciousness. While seeing is always seeing of something, and hearing is always hearing something, feeling pain is not a matter of intending something through pain experience, but a matter of living through a particular feeling. Even more: the very way we live through intense pain tends to block our access to any intentional object we might have been contemplating. Small wonder, then, that Stumpf and his followers consider pain to be a nonintentional experience. Yet Brentano’s followers consider such a response an instance of a misplaced criticism. One does not need to think that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of perception in order to recognize pain as an intentional experience. It is much more significant to highlight the fact that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of other intentional emotions. Consider such emotions as pride and shame, attraction and disgust, or joy and sorrow. In the case of each, the subject of experience is absorbed more in one’s own feelings than in their intentional correlates. Nonetheless, this structural difference between emotions and perceptions does not imply that emotions are bereft of intentionality. Clearly, we are proud or ashamed over something, attracted or disgusted by something, overjoyed or sorrowed by something. So also, just because those who suffer from pain are first and foremost absorbed in their experience, and only secondarily conscious of their bodies, does not imply that the experience of pain is nonintentional. Quite on the contrary, just like the above-mentioned emotions, the experience of pain is intentional through and through. For this very reason, Brentano and his followers invite us to concede that pain is an intentional emotion.

Second, 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 provides us with the first explicitly phenomenological analysis of 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 two different ways. Besides being founded on presentations, it can also be founded on feeling-sensations. Arguably, both Brentano and Stumpf overlooked the second possibility, and precisely because they both overlooked it, they found themselves in a seemingly irresolvable controversy. Husserl’s proposed solution derives from the realization that pain sensations can function as presentative contents that can give rise to pain as an intentional object of experience.

The proposed conception of pain as a stratified phenomenon relies upon two distinctions. On the one hand, there is the distinction between intentional and nonintentional feelings, which Husserl defends in the Fifth Logical Investigation. On the other hand, there is the not so visible distinction between simple and complex experiences. Pain is not an intentional experience, insofar as intentionality is conceived in line with the Brentanian model, which suggests that all intentional feelings are founded on presentations. In this regard, Husserl’s opposition to Brentano cannot raise any doubt.¹⁴ This does not mean, however, that pain should be characterized as an essentially nonintentional experience. To be sure, insofar as pain is conceived of as a simple experience, it is a pure feeling-sensation. Nonetheless, pain can also be conceived of as a complex experience—an intentional object, founded upon pain sensations.

According to the view I defend here, we should not interpret the central distinction between intentional and nonintentional feelings in §15 of the Fifth Logical Investigation as a suggestion that alongside essentially intentional feelings, there is a group of essentially nonintentional feelings. Rather, these nonintentional feelings, understood as feeling-sensations, can be taken up in an objectifying interpretation and transformed into components of intentional consciousness. There are two essentially different types of feelings: essentially intentional feelings, which are founded upon presentations; as well as nonintentional feelings, which are not founded on other presentations, yet which can found complex feeling-presentations. Husserl’s conception of pain as primarily a feeling-sensation, which can also become a complex intentional feeling, is to be understood as a critique, which is simultaneously directed at Brentano’s and Stumpf’s views, a critique that provides a viable resolution to a seemingly irresolvable dispute.

Consider Husserl’s observation in one of the appendixes that accompany his Logical Investigations: “The perceived object is not the pain as experienced, but the pain in a transcendent reference as connected with the tooth” (2000, 866). The distinction Husserl draws here between pain-as-experienced and pain-as-an-object-of-experience is a clear indication that pain can be conceived not only as a sensed content but also as an intentional object. Husserl introduces this distinction with the aim of qualifying the type of evidence that accompanies one’s pain experience. Husserl’s goal here is to replace Brentano’s distinction between internal and external perception with the distinction between adequate and inadequate evidence. While for Brentano, only acts of consciousness can be given through internal perception (and thus, given indubitably), for Husserl, not only conscious acts, but also nonintentional contents of experience can be said to be given adequately. According to Husserl, insofar as pain is conceived of as a lived-experience, it is given adequately (that is, given indubitably). By contrast, insofar as pain is conceived of as an object of experience, its evidence is inadequate (one can therefore easily mistake the tooth that hurts for the one that does not hurt).¹⁵