pain as experience, yet it does not clarify what kind of experience it is. This definition places pain in the genus of sensory and emotional experience, yet it does not provide us with the differentia.3
Although it is undeniable that at its core, pain is an experience, our current knowledge of pain is marked by the failure to understand pain as experience. This failure is not accidental. The dominant methodological standpoints in pain research do not provide us with a suitable methodological framework to conceptualize pain as experience. Broadly speaking, naturalism and social constructionism constitute the two dominant methodological standpoints in pain research (see Geniusas 2013). While the naturalist focuses on the specific neurological mechanisms that trigger pain experience, the social constructionist traces the social, cultural, and historical influences that shape the experience of pain. In different ways, both the naturalist and the social constructionist conceptualize pain experience as a psychological effect that is activated by different kinds of mechanisms. What both methodological standpoints are interested in is not pain experience as such (they both presuppose that we already know what pain as experience is), but the various neurological mechanisms that trigger it and the particular sociocultural influences that shape it. Yet clearly, if one claims that pain is triggered by these mechanisms and shaped by these influences, then one must have some kind of understanding of what pain as such is. We are thus forced to ask: What can we say about pain as experience, considered independently from the mechanisms that trigger it and the influences that shape it? Contemporary pain research does not have the methodological basis to answer this question.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
In light of these circumstances, the following study contends that phenomenology is indispensable for pain research. Neither pain biology nor pain sociology can clarify the nature of pain experience, and, therefore, they must be supplemented with pain phenomenology. In a general and preliminary way, we can conceive of phenomenology as a method designed to study experience and the different ways in which phenomena manifest themselves in experience. Thus, the often-cited phenomenological refrain, “Zurück zu den Sachen selbst” (Back to the things themselves), must be understood as a solicitation to return to the field of experience, conceived of as the fundamental field within which phenomena manifest themselves and their multifaceted meanings originate. According to one of the central phenomenological claims, in the natural course of life, as well as in the sciences, we misconstrue phenomena by transforming them into what they are not, and we do so precisely because we misunderstand how they manifest themselves in experience. Phenomenology’s chief ambition is to liberate us from falsifications, which consciousness itself gives rise to in virtue of its absorption in the world of things and its inherent self-forgetfulness, which manifests itself through its tendency to misunderstand itself as a thing among other things. The goal of phenomenology is to liberate consciousness from its self-opacity, to clarify the fundamental structures of experience and recover the lost world of concrete life. Phenomenology proves to be indispensable for pain research because it offers a highly useful methodology to determine the nature of pain experience, irrespective of the specific natural causes that might trigger it and the specific cultural influences that might shape it.4
Phenomenology is neither the first nor the only philosophical tradition to be qualified as a philosophy of experience. Various brands of empiricism and pragmatism also merit the same qualification. Are there any reasons to privilege phenomenology over these other philosophical traditions, as far as the philosophy of pain is concerned? Arguably, the reasons are methodological. First and foremost, the phenomenological method is designed to study experience from the first-person point of view. In this regard, it is exceptionally well-suited for pain research, since pain itself is conceivable only as firsthand experience (a pain that is not experienced could be qualified as a painless pain—an expression that is no less self-contradictory than a square triangle). The science of pain is thus in need of phenomenology, for with its help it can inquire into the compatibility in the findings obtained using the first-person and the third-person methodologies (see Price and Aydede 2005). Still, one might object that such a clarification does not fully answer the question, since it leaves the possibility open that introspectionist psychology might fit the bill. In this regard, one should stress that not any description of phenomena from the first-person point of view is to be qualified as phenomenological. There is no phenomenology without the epoché and the phenomenological reduction, conceived of as the two complementary methods designed to provide the researcher with access to experience that is purified of naturalistic misconceptions. These sophisticated methods, unique as they are to phenomenology, are designed to suspend the natural way of considering phenomena so as to let them appear without any bias, distortions, or manipulations. As far as pain research is concerned, these methods prove indispensable for any attempt to conceive of pain as pure experience, by which we are to understand the experience of pain, considered independently from pain biology and pain sociology.
In light of my foregoing remarks, one cannot help but be surprised by the scarcity of phenomenologically oriented book-length studies of pain. All in all, one can single out just two studies. Christian Grüny’s Zerstörte Erfahrung: Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes was published in 2004. Abraham Olivier’s Being in Pain appeared in print a few years later, in 2007. Besides Olivier’s and Grüny’s studies, there are no other book-length investigations that have exclusively focused on the phenomenology of pain.5 Strangely, a philosophical tradition that prides itself on being attentive to lived-experience, on returning to the things themselves and thereby taking distance from meaningless abstractions that it finds at the heart of many other traditions of thought—this tradition has been remarkably silent as far as the nature of such embodied feelings as pain is concerned. It has certainly contributed less to our understanding of pain than other philosophical traditions, which never claimed that they were striving to offer a reliable account of the nature of experience.
The central ambition of the following study is to break this regrettable silence and to show that phenomenology has an important contribution to make in the framework of pain research in general, and the philosophy of pain in particular. With this in mind, the following investigation will present a philosophical study of pain, which relies upon the phenomenological method. Besides delimiting a phenomenological approach to pain, this study also aims to open a dialogue between the phenomenology of pain and other types of pain research, which we come across in such fields as the analytically oriented philosophy of pain, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, cultural psychopathology, and psychoanalysis. Such a methodological commitment and dialogical orientation carries the demand to situate oneself within the phenomenological tradition, while at the same time being attentive to the developments in other fields of research.
The fundamental goal of this study is thereby delineated: this study aims to demonstrate why phenomenology is indispensable for pain research. Admittedly, there are different kinds of phenomenology, and the complex relation between them continues to raise doubts about the unity and coherence of the phenomenological movement. In the framework of this study, it is not my goal to provide a detailed analysis of the reasons why, despite far-reaching disagreements, the phenomenological tradition as a whole retains its overarching unity.6 My goal, rather, is to focus on one particular phenomenological tradition, namely, the Husserlian tradition, and to demonstrate why it is of great importance for the philosophy of pain. In such a way, I will aim to complement Olivier’s and Grüny’s above-mentioned studies, which rely mainly on the resources of Martin Heidegger’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies. Unless otherwise stated, in this study the concept of phenomenology will be employed as synonymous with Husserlian phenomenology.
Some readers might wonder, Would it not be more appropriate to proceed on a different phenomenological basis and rely on more existentially and less epistemologically oriented phenomenological resources? One of my goals is to show that such stereotypical rejections of Husserlian phenomenology are far from convincing. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Husserlian phenomenology provides a remarkably solid methodological basis for the philosophy of pain. One can single out eight fundamental reasons that make Husserlian phenomenology highly fitting for pain research. Only in Husserlian phenomenology do we encounter the full configuration of these reasons, although, admittedly, some of them can be also found in other philosophical frameworks:
1.