Abstract
In this paper, I explore how our experience of pain and suffering structure our experience over time. I argue that pain and suffering are not as easily dissociable, in living and in conceptual analysis, as philosophers have tended to think. Specifically, I do not think that there is only a contingent connection between physical pain and psychological suffering. Rather, physical pain is partially constitutive of existential suffering. My analysis is informed by contemporary thinking about pain and suffering as well as Indian Buddhist philosophy.
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Notes
A note on the differences between ‘homeostatic’ and ‘homeodynamic’ is in order. They refer to the same process. 'Homeostasis' puts emphasis on the fact that an organism survives by aiming for a kind of steady-state that allows it to persist in the face of an unstable world. The organism withstands the onslaught of environmental perturbances by maintaining a balance. This balance is what the ‘stasis’ in ‘homeostasis’ refers to. This process of self-regulation is also 'homeodynamic' because perturbations born of self-world contact are constant. Perfect balance is asymptotic. Persistence is achieved when those fluctuations occur within a permissible range of excitation; organismic stability is really meta-stability. The organism is not aiming at a steady state but at preservation of dynamic flexibility that keeps it robust across a variety of self-world interactions. Therefore, I use the term 'homeodynamic' to refer to this most basic level of bodily affect. It is a more accurate description of the regulatory micro-dynamics of the organism.
It is important to distinguish between commitment to the view that pain has a type-identity of being a homeodynamic affect (which I defend) and that tokens of this type have content which is formatted imperatively rather than descriptively. I am friendly to the view that pain content is formatted in this way, but this is consistent with pain’s having a complex formatting which admits of other dimensions to it’s content. Klein (2015) defends pure imperativism. I have no such commitments. See Corns (2014) for an astute and critical analysis of the possibility of any unified account of pain. She notes that, "Philosophical accounts of pain traditionally focus on three mental state types: emotions, perceptions, and sensations" (2014, 356), thus, leaving out a consideration of pains as having imperative content. I think this omission is a mistake. But I agree with her that, "…paradigmatic pain experiences also have thoughts and motivational responses as components. A paradigmatic pain feels like something, is about something, includes a perception of something, and makes us want to do something" (Corns 2014, 356).
Here I want to acknowledge a potential objection from Leder’s excellent work The Absent Body (1990). Leder might object that the disappearance of the body from awareness is precisely a structural attribute of our phenomenological horizon. That is the surface of the body disappears from awareness in the ekstasis of embodied perception through the latter’s engagement with its world, and it disappears in terms of visceral depth because of the irrelevance of bodily depth of the ordinary practice of everyday activity. Leder refers to these modes of bodily disappearance as ‘corporeal primitives’ (1990, 19). However, in a footnote he also acknowledges that there is “a certain body-awareness that ceaselessly accompanies activity” (ibid, 177–8 fn. 27). Thus, I think we should read ‘disappearance’ not as an absence from consciousness but as a receding into the tacitly experienced phenomenological background.
This is because the body is vulnerable. Here I agree with Russon that: “to the extent that the meaningfulness of our world depend on the determinateness of our (mortal) bodies, that meaningfulness is inherently vulnerable. More precisely, ‘to be meaningful’ and ‘to be vulnerable’ cannot be separated, with the result that suffering is inherent to the developed forms of our meaningful human lives” (206, 184). I will have occasion to return to these themes, and to Russon’s treatment of them, below.
Phenomenological philosophers concerned with pain have glossed this phenomenon as obviously sensory in nature (e.g. Geniusas 2020, 44) and justify this through adverting to a Husserlian approach to phenomenological description that, “is possible only if it places in brackets the accomplishments we come across in the science of pain” (Geniusas 2020, 14). By understanding pain’s biological role through its type-identification as a homeodynamic (rather than sensory) affect, we come to understand its phenomenal character as a component of the existential predicament of an embodied milieu. This kind of disagreement about methodology will also bear on my positive characterization of pain’s intentionality, for which see below (§3).
This extended network of nerve fibers that innervate the entire body sends afferent signals of many sorts to the brain, pain being only one.
I will interpret Buddhist philosophers as arguing that the very process of homdeodynamic self-regulation is itself a subtle and pervasive form of suffering. If that is so, then it looks like local pains are themselves specific and obvious instances of a more general existential predicament, one that situates the embodied subject in a world of suffering. See §4.
Obviously, there is more that could be said here. I am unable to go into more detail on account of space. For a nice overview of these and other related issues, see the chapters and responses in Aydede (2005).
When Buddhist philosophers of different stripes reject the existence of a soul or self (ātman), they do so by explaining that anything the self might do in terms of the activities of the aggregates (Smith 2021).
Here my analysis should be contrasted with Russon’s who claims of the deepest level of dukkha that it indicates the presence of more “active attitudes rooted in our beliefs and desires” (2016, 184). As should be clear from my reconstruction of the three levels, on the basis of the commentarial literature, this more active way of understanding the third level of dukkha is to over-intellectualize its nature.
While the example here is predominantly perceptual, Husserl later on the same page invokes temporal horizons as having an infinite extension from now to the past and future – a topic which he takes up at length later (Husserl 2008). He also invokes the phenomenon of empathy as well as the field of language and meaning as defining horizonal intentionality (Crisis §70, 243 and Appendix IV, 358–9, respectively). I cannot treat of these aspects of Husserl’s examination of horizonal intentionality. For the sake of brevity, I contain my analysis to the perceptual case, which also harmonizes with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. This also makes the connection to pain and suffering more concrete.
For a nice summary of this line of argument, see Zahavi (2003, 96–7). Merleau-Ponty describes this aspect of horizonal intentionality in the following way: “Each object, then, tis the mirror of all the others. When I see the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not merely the qualities that are visible from my location, but also those that the fireplace, the walls, and the table can ‘see’. The back of my lamp is merely the face that it ‘shows’ to the fireplace […] The fully realized object is translucent, it is shot through from all sides by an infinity of present gazes intersecting in its depth and leaving nothing there hidden” (1945/2012, 71).
Geniusas’s work on this subject is exceptional and thorough. For reasons of space, I am only able to address these worries in a preliminary way. Part of the issue here is that Geniusas’s Husserlian analysis is embedded in an attempt to trace the history of Phenomenological analyses of pain’s intentionality; he is sensitive to Husserl’s desire to synthesize the works of philosophers like Brentano and Stumpf. For more, see Geniusas (2014). As should be clear, my reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s account of horizonal intentionality, as applied to pain, shows that we should not think of bodily affect as a non-intentional sensation, but as part of a holistic embodied milieu that orients the subject in a motor-intentional arc towards the world. I think Husserl would agree, but I am framing the point critically here as a response to Geniusas’s way of interpreting Husserl.
My critique of Klein’s imperativism in this section is usefully contrasted with an important phenomenological critique of Klein from Miyahara (2021). Miyahara notes that imperative theories of pain “overcome the objective concept of the body by acknowledging its inherent intelligence” (307). But he complains that this intelligence is still too dualistic on account of, “the body motivat[ing] the disembodied agent into protective actions by communicating with it in terms of mental contents” (ibid). Here we are agreed that “pain-co** does not involve a dualistic separation between the body and the agent […]” Rather, in pain experience, there is a “form of habitual behaviour, i.e., a patterned embodied response to situations shaped through the agent’s history of engagement with the natural and socio-cultural environment (ibid). I have tried to reconstruct my view in a way that anticipates and avoids these kinds of concerns. That being said, I do not agree with Miyahara when he argues that cultural conditioning constitutes a worry for imeprativists like Klein (cf. Miyahara 2021, 306). The fact that we can learn to react to pain in different ways according to cultural scripts is no argument against the fact that pain’s primary biological role is to motivate the subject to protect the part of the body that hurts. For a related line of argument focusing on the role of imagination and metaphor in making sense of pain, see Miglio and Stanier (2022).
Note that the Buddhist philosophers we looked at previously would deny this latter claim. That is, they would claim that it is perfectly consistent to say that a bodily pain (dukkha) hurts but that it does not cause psychological anguish (domanassa). So, the move from pain, to hurt, to suffering seems a bit rushed. Klein collapses the hurtfulness of pains into the category of suffering. The Buddhists give us the conceptual resources to resist that move. For an astute analysis of the category of psychological pain in Indian Buddhism, see Kachru (2021), in particular: “And though the word “domanassa” was available to be used alongside many other words to enumerate and convey the degree and kinds of distress that comprise the suffering criterial of our way of being in the world, we find it very early used pairwise with dukkha to comprehend the totality of possible forms of pain, physical and psychological” (133).
On this point, Adams (2020) helpfully points out that, “For rational agents, pain has unconscious and/or conscious symbolic punch: not only does it signal bodily dysfunction and environmental misfits; it also signifies that the individual in one degree or another falls short of being a perfect specimen, that the individual is not only vulnerable but mortal. Burning pain not only warns us to take our finger off the hot stove; it is also one face of death!” (279).
My thanks to an anonymous referee, Jennifer Nagel, and Danny Goldstick for pressing me to be clearer on this point.
These points are orthogonal to another important line of argument for decreasing the conceptual distance between pain and suffering. By distinguishing between transient, acute, and chronic pain, we can see how feeling pain in a chronic case would entail that feeling pain is a mode of suffering. However, my aim here is to illustrate the implicit way in which existential suffering is present as a background condition of the biological facts of even ordinary non-acute and non-chronic pains. My thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out this line of argument. For more on this, see Leder (1990, Ch. 3) and Geniusas (2020, Ch. 4). Also, see de Haro (2016) for an astute analysis of how different forms and intensities of pain shape the structure of attention.
This argument builds on the one we explored earlier in §2 on the physical suffering of the poor and the mental suffering of the privileged (CŚ II.8 and CŚ-ṭ §135, Lang 2003, 139).
Though, I think Buddhist philosophers – and here I am inclined to agree with them – would argue that this anxiety is precisely masterable. More on this briefly in the conclusion.
Here my view should be contrasted with Geniusas’s (2020). I disagree that “pain isolates the sufferer within the field of presence, which the suffer experiences as disconnected from the past and the future” (98). On the contrary, what I am arguing is that our experience of pain marks out the articulation of time in the course of a life narrative not only at the end, thus motivating the paradox pointed out by Adams (2020) but that temporal features of the phenomenology of chronic pain conditions are also implicitly present in the way that ordinary pains represent the inevitable march of time in the course of a fragile life. Pain marks the passage of biological time (cf. Miglio and Stainer 2022 for some remarks in this direction couched at the socio-cultural – rather than, biological – level).
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Acknowledgements
For help with this paper, I thank my friends and colleagues from ANU who came to spend time in Hawai’i for a workshop in Spring of 2023 and who offered invaluable feedback. Here I thank, in particular, Colin Klein, Esther Klein, Koji Tanaka, and Szymon Bogacz. I am also very much indebted to the friends and colleagues of my alma mater, the University of Toronto, who welcomed me back for a colloquium talk where I had the opportunity to give this paper. Special thanks to Jennifer Nagel, Christoph Emmrich, Jack Beaulieu, Juha Minarik, Tony Scott, Danny Goldstick, and Elisa Freschi who organized the event.
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Smith, S.M. Pain, suffering, and the time of life: a buddhist philosophical analysis. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09961-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09961-2