Excessive Pain I

Excessive Pain

Dr. Michael Gillan Peckitt

This Version amended 23/01/09

In chapter two of World, Flesh and the Subject Professor Paul Gilbert presents us with a problem. Current philosophy of mind - he names John McDowell, one could add Robert Brandom, all too aware of the theoretical pitfalls of ‘the myth of the given’ espouse an account where ‘experience’ is to be understood as conceptual, determinate, and as providing reasons to act, a theme he has looked in his article ‘Immediate Experience’. ‘Experience’ is not exhausted when treated as possible reasons for the agent to act. Or as Gilbert states:



“The problem which confronts accounts of experience like those of Heidegger and the early Merleau-Ponty is that, in rejecting “contents” of experience which are given prior to conceptualisation, they fail to capture the way that that experiences are something over and above what we make of them in treating them as reasons for action. For they are only that because they somehow exceed their role in our purposive activity by revealing a world in which this activity is not just successful or unsuccessful, but a response to something beyond its subject which, through experience, controls her acts. This problem of how experience can possibly point to something beyond itself in giving us reasons for action continues to pre-occupy philosophers, like McDowell.” (Gilbert and Lennon in Malatesti and Peckitt, 2006)


For Gilbert, experience is something beyond just being ‘that which gives reasons’, indeed are only ‘reason-giving’ in virtue of being something more than that. What that ‘more’, amounts to ironically, was almost lost whilst trying to avoid the myth of the given, that sensations have a bruteness to them, a ‘just thereness’ to them, in other words a certain type of givenness, and that this givenness has been lost in the quest to avoid the myth of the given . He then goes on to outline three theories which have tried to treat experience as this something more by outlining with work of the later Merleau-Ponty and la chair, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of the event and Emmanuel Levinas’ work on pain:

“What I shall be doing in what follows is to explain how continental thinkers have tried to expose the linkage between experience and life in virtue of which our thoughts are intelligibly constrained by what experience reveals to us. Each tries, in a different way, to escape the problems inspired by Kant - the problem of seeing our experience as something more than simply what we make of it through constituting its intentional objects without falling back into a myth of the given that turns it into apprehension of bare presences.” (Gilbert and Lennon, 2005, p29)



I will be focusing on Levinas in Useless Suffering, before going on to critique. Before I do either, I wish to clear that I appreciate that that authors of The World, Flesh and the Subject do not claim do be advancing a theory per se of their own, but presenting their views on certain topics. However, certain topic used certain thinkers instead of others, and presented a particular argument on a certain theme instead of another. In this case that Levinas has been presented at all, smacks of endorsement. My critique will go toward the use of Levinas, since his particular picture of pain pushes the argument of the topic in a certain direction. However, first I will re-present Levinas.

Passivity, as Gilbert highlights is a ‘key theme’ in Levinas’ account. Despite its passivity, or rather because of it, it is not reducible to an object presence-at-hand. Nor is pain or suffering is not a thing upon which we can act, there is nothing one can do with pain. Pain can merely be experienced and endured consciousness . Thus pain is not ‘the performance of an act of consciousness’ but:

“…in its adversity, a submission; even a submission to submitting, since the ‘content’ of which the aching consciousness is conscious is precisely the very adversity of suffering, it’s hurt. (Levinas in Bernasconi & Wood, 1988:157)

All we can do is feel it. The problem with pain is that because what pain is - hurt, it cannot be an object of knowledge, indeed useful, one can be pre-reflectively conscious of it, one can be aware of the hurt, but one certainly cannot, to use Kantian language as Levinas does, synthesise it into knowledge. One cannot allow pain into one conceptual apparatus because the very nature of the sensation - the painfulness of pain makes such an act impossible. Pain is not an act of consciousness because as suffering it makes conscious acts impossible.

The Sufferer is passive, and yet this passivity Levinas passionately impresses on, is not because suffering has struck ‘…a blow against freedom’. (Levinas in Bernasconi & Wood, 1988:157:p157) rather Suffering is an “..evil which renders the humanity of the suffering person, overwhelms his humanity otherwise than non-freedom overwhelms it: violently and cruelly, more irremissibly than the negation which dominates or paralyzes the act in non-freedom.” (Levinas in Bernasconi & Wood, 1988:157: p157).

All of which sounds very depressing, however there is some optimism in Levinas’ ideas. Suffering, despite its violence to one’s consciousness and its theological implications that Levinas raises brings a possibility of salvation of a sort. For what pain locates is to quote Paul Gilbert himself:

“…an experience of something other, of alterity, but also what he takes to be our basic relation to things,
jouissannce - enjoyment. It is here that departs most fundamentally from Heidegger.” (Gilbert & Lennon, 2005, p40)

Levinas departs from Heidegger through viewing our relation to objects not merely as a means to ends, thus, a spade is for digging, paper is for writing on, and a tongue for eating with and speaking, tools for existence. Rather for Levinas they are objects of enjoyment, not for existence but for the enjoyment of life. Our tongue is not just for eating but for enjoying for, tasting the flavour, it is not merely means to end but something to which we are emotionally related.

That something other, may also be human, as Levinas states:

“Is not the evil of suffering - extreme passivity, impotence, abandonment and solitude - also the unassembled and thus the possibility of a half opening, and more precisely, the possibility that wherever a moan, a cry, a groan, or a sigh happen there is an original call for the aid, for curative help from the other whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation?” (Levinas in Bernasconi & Wood, 1988::158).

Thus Gilbert presents Levinas as offering account of pain where pain is contra Heidegger, neither present or ready. Never completely grasped or indeed graspable by the subject, since pain’s very nature is to destroy the possibility of comprehension, of cognition; it remains ‘out there’, exterior to the subject.

Critique of the ‘use’ of Levinas


Again I wish to emphasise that I am not attacking Paul Gilbert’s account of Levinas, inasmuch as it is an accurate presentation of the ideas expressed in Useless Suffering. I do, however, have reservations about the account Levinas offers of the phenomenology of pain.


Professor Paul Gilbert stated:

“What I shall be doing in what follows is to explain how continental thinkers have tried to expose the linkage between experience and life in virtue of which our thoughts are intelligibly constrained by what experience reveals to us.” (Gilbert and Lennon, 2005, p29)

The criticism is as follows: I find the phenomenology offered in Useless Suffering counter-intuitive. He offers a picture where pain is passive, is received or given to ‘me’ the sufferer. So far I agree, what I find suspect is what follows: Because by its very nature it makes conscious acts impossible. Thus pain can never made an object of knowledge in that we can never completely ‘know’ pain, some aspect of pain will remain always exceed our grasp - or as Levinas puts it ‘unassumable’. Once this criticism is articulated we can further argue: why accept this phenomenology any more that Husserl’s or Henry who I shall briefly outline.

Levinas, is not alone in holding to this idea of the excess. Jean-Luc Marion, mentioned above similar view, what he calls Saturated Phenomena. Saturated Phenomena, like Levinas account is the idea that certain experienced can never be fully grasped or synthesised as knowledge because the experience exceeds our ability to conceptualise to understand such phenomena (in quite awful Husserlian terms):

“[t]he intention (the concept or the signification) can never reach adequation with the intuition (fulfillment), not because the latter is lacking but because it exceeds what the concept can receive, expose and comprehend…According to this thesis, the impossibility of attaining knowledge of an object, comprehension in the strict sense, does not come from a deficiency in the giving intuition, but from its surplus, which neither concept, signification, nor intention can forsee, organize or contain.” (Marion in Caputo and Scanlon1999,p37)

I have had episodic mechanical pain in the past, and being episodic most likely will do again. I can attest to pain’s ability to destroy the possibility of conscious acts. But I have never be completely convinced by Levinas’ account because it gives the impression that whilst in pain, clutching my back, feeling the hurt and the helplessness of feeling that some how there is something ‘out there’, that exceeds my knowledge, something that I may be unaware of and can never understand.

It simply is not phenomenologically sound to refer too much to alterity. In pain you are experiencing a sensation, mostly not of your own choosing, but it is you or rather ‘I’ or ‘me’ that is experiencing.

“Physical pain makes us aware of the body as object to perceived, one of the few occasions that the body appears to us in that fashion. “Yet at the same time pain effects a certain alienation” (Leder,1990,p76). Most sufferers of chronic or episodic pain “...describe their pain as an “it”, separate from the “ I. “. The painful body is often experienced as something foreign to the self.” (Leder,1990,p76). To think of the body in this fashion is of course an error. Pain is not some separate entity, a foreign ‘invader’, as Samuel Todes says, “we do not “have” a pain out there in some body area..” (Todes,2001,p60). Rather pain is you.” (Peckitt unpublished work 2001,p25)

Before concluding, I would like offer an alternative theories that can be used to give an account of pain or suffering, one based on phenomenological insights of my own. Firstly, the Phenomenology of Husserl and his idea of the epoche offers some clues for an alternative analysis of pain.