The Phenomenology of Pain. Saulius Geniusas

and eidetic variation are indispensable for phenomenologically oriented pain research.

      1. We can answer the first question by opening a brief dialogue between the phenomenology of pain and the phenomenology of illness. In her recent study, Havi Carel bemoans philosophy’s indifference to illness. She speaks of the “philosophical tendency to resist thinking about illness” (Carel 2016, 5) and offers an original and highly valuable phenomenological response to this indifference. One should not, however, overlook just how common it is to begin phenomenologically oriented studies of illness with a confession concerning the author’s personal experience of pain and/or illness. What exactly is the role of confessions of such nature? To be sure, nobody is a stranger to pain and illness, be it personal or interpersonal. Moreover, any phenomenological account is always grounded in experience. Nonetheless, as far as phenomenologically oriented studies of pain and illness are concerned, one shoots oneself in the foot when one argues, whether openly or discreetly, that only those who suffer from severe forms of illness and/or pain have the right to address these themes philosophically. We face here a crude form of psychologism, conceived of as an illegitimate form of reductionism,⁸ which one could describe either as the incapacity to raise one’s own personal experience to the eidetic level, or as a matter of diminishing eidetic unities of meaning to the level of psychological experiences. In light of Husserl’s sweeping critique of psychologism in the Prolegomena to his Logical Investigations, anyone in phenomenology who reflects on what such a view implies will be led to discard it.⁹

      A phenomenologically oriented study cannot consist of a set of reflections on the idiosyncratic nature of one’s own personal experiences, no matter how fortunate or unfortunate they might be. It is not just a question of personal justification that might underlie a phenomenological investigation of such phenomena as pain. What is at stake here is the very nature of an investigation that would make it phenomenological. We face here a deep confusion that continues to haunt phenomenologically oriented pain research. This confusion derives from the misunderstanding of the nature of phenomenologically oriented research. In light of the analysis undertaken in the previous section, we can say that this confusion derives from neglecting the eidetic nature of phenomenological investigations. The stream of pure experiences is not just a Heracleitean flux, which means that the phenomenology of pain is not pain autobiography and it should not be misconceived of as a code word for personal accounts of experience. To be sure, a phenomenologist has a full right to begin the analysis by focusing on first-person experience. Yet only insofar as one’s analysis involves some kind of epoché and reduction, and only insofar as it leads to insights into essences, does one have the right to qualify one’s account as phenomenological. With this in mind, let us once again stress that a phenomenologically oriented investigation is concerned with the eidetic structures of pain experience.¹⁰

      2. Just as phenomenology is not psychologism, so also it is not introspectionism. This is another implication that follows from the analysis offered in the last section. Here we touch on a confusion that is widespread in the contemporary philosophy of pain, which is marked by a general willingness to enter into dialogue with phenomenology. Such openness to phenomenology relies upon the conjecture that phenomenology can fill a significant void in pain research. One presumes that pain is both physiological and experiential, and on this basis one further claims that the science of pain is in need of both a third-person experimental and a first-person experiential methodology. Within such a framework, one further conceives of phenomenology, along with Eastern meditative practices (see Price and Aydede 2005, 14), as a peculiar type of introspective method.¹¹ One thus presumes that phenomenology can fulfill an important yet partial task in the science of pain: it can clarify pain’s experiential dimensions (what Price and Aydede identify as the horizontal dimension), which then need to be further linked to their neurological underpinnings (what Price and Aydede refer to as the vertical dimension).

      While appreciating the general openness toward phenomenology, I would nonetheless claim that we face here a highly misleading appropriation of phenomenology.¹² The confusion in question derives from a misunderstanding of the privilege phenomenology accords to reflection and intuition. One reasons as follows: since phenomenology is a reflective discipline whose fundamental concepts are established intuitively, what else can it be if not introspectionism—a first-person examination of one’s conscious thoughts and feelings, which can be given only reflectively and intuitively? But if so, then the devastating critique of introspectionism, and especially in behaviorist psychology, must also apply to phenomenology. This critique has demonstrated that first-person reports appear to rest only on immediate self-givenness, while in truth they entail inferences drawn from overt behavior and from the judgments of others. The recent critiques in the philosophy of mind, which reproach phenomenology for being naively reliant on introspectionist methodology and for failing to find a single universalizable method (see Dennett 1991, 44; Metzinger 2003, 591), thereby become understandable. Supposedly, since phenomenology relies on introspectionist methodology, it inevitably generates inconsistencies, which it has no means to resolve.¹³

      We face here widespread confusions. Francisco J. Varela (1996, 334) is fully justified when he maintains that one mixes up apples and oranges when one puts phenomenology and introspectionism into the same bag. Even though it privileges reflection and intuition, phenomenology is not introspectionism. While introspection is focused on individual instances of subjective experience, phenomenology is concerned with experiential essences, that is, with invariants. As Shaun Gallagher has it, “Phenomenology is not simply about subjective experience understood as an internal felt sensation or phenomenal consciousness” (2012, 58). Or as Dan Zahavi maintains, “All the major figures in the phenomenological tradition have openly and unequivocally denied that they are engaged in some kind of introspective psychology and that the method they employ is a method of introspection” (2013, 25–26).¹⁴

      This should not be taken to mean that introspectionism and phenomenology do not have anything in common. Both introspectionism and phenomenology could be qualified as methods designed to examine one’s thoughts and feelings as they are given through the first-person perspective. So also, both could be qualified as analyses of essentially nonextensive phenomena, which can be given only reflectively and intuitively. Yet these significant affinities should not overshadow fundamental differences between them, which are both methodological and thematic. Put in the language common in the philosophy of mind, one could say that both introspectionism and phenomenology obey the mentality condition: both are concerned with generating knowledge about conscious experience, and not about physical events that lie presumably outside one’s conscious experience. Yet phenomenology does not obey two other important conditions that introspectionism obeys, namely, the first-person condition and the temporal proximity condition. First, we need to draw a clear distinction between what in phenomenology is called the first-person perspective and what in the philosophy of mind is called the first-person condition. Introspection meets the first-person condition in that it is a process that is aimed at generating knowledge or beliefs about one’s own mind only, not anyone else’s. By contrast, phenomenology is not concerned with the idiosyncratic nature of anyone’s experience, be it my own or anyone else’s; it is not meant to offer a description of anyone’s mind in particular, but is exclusively focused on generating knowledge about the eidetic structures that must underlie any experience whatsoever. Second, introspectionism obeys the temporal proximity condition insofar as it is a process of learning about one’s own currently ongoing, or very recently past, mental states or processes. By contrast, phenomenology is not concerned with a particular group of temporal experiences, but with the temporality of experience as such.

      To this twofold distinction between phenomenology and introspectionism, one can add a third point of divergence. It concerns the breadth of introspective and phenomenological research. Introspectionism has been employed to study only relatively simple phenomena (for instance, the responses of different subjects under the same and/or different conditions to the same stimulus), while much more complex phenomena (for instance, those that concern mental disorders and personality) could not be addressed introspectively. By contrast, the phenomenological method is meant to enable the researcher to address the essences of any experience, irrespective of how simple or complex it might be.

      3. What does it mean to assert