The Phenomenology of Pain. Saulius Geniusas

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