heart of the phenomenologically informed pain research. Yet one can also interpret it as a clue that the question concerning the intentional status of pain simply cannot be answered unequivocally.
Such, indeed, is the view that I wish to present in this chapter: there are good reasons why the question concerning the intentional status of pain could not reach a clear resolution. I will defend two interrelated claims. First, pain is a sensory feeling. The qualification of pain as sensory relies upon Stumpf’s determination of pain as a feeling-sensation. Yet pain is also a feeling, which means that pain also entails emotive dimensions. In this regard, the qualification of pain as a feeling already relies on Brentano’s claim that pain is an intentional emotion. However, the conception of pain as a sensory feeling only sharpens the question: How can pain be both a nonintentional feeling-sensation (Gefühlsempfindung) and an intentional feeling? To resolve this apparent contradiction, it will be necessary to supplement the first claim with a second one, which will suggest that pain is a stratified experience. This claim means that the experience of pain is composed of two fundamental strata: while its founding stratum is nonintentional, the founded stratum is marked by intentionality. I will maintain that such a stratified conception of pain provides the necessary basis to reconcile Stumpf’s and Brentano’s standpoints.
PAIN AS A FEELING-SENSATION
What phenomenological evidence underlies the claim that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation? I do not raise this question as a preamble to an exegetical study. Rather than limiting myself to Stumpf’s analysis, I will strive to present the view that pain is a nonintentional experience as a live option. Arguably, there are at least seven reasons to interpret this position as a living possibility.
First, as the proponents of the Stumpfian standpoint have always maintained, just try to offer a phenomenological description of pain experience, and you will see that pain has no referential content. Elaine Scarry formulates this point especially forcefully. She does not doubt that most of our feelings are intentional. Thus, “love is love of x, fear is fear of y, ambivalence is ambivalence about z” (Scarry 1985, 5). Yet, according to Scarry, no matter how extensive the list of intentional feelings might be, physical pain interrupts it. While intentional feelings are feelings for somebody or something, physical pain is “not of or for anything” (1985, 5). Physical pain takes no referential content; rather, it “resists objectification in language” (1985, 5).
Is it true that physical pain is not “for or about anything”? Brentano and his followers disagree with this characterization and argue that the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers is built upon a fabricated phenomenological description. They argue that pain is an intentional feeling, whose correlate is one’s physical body. Thus, if I have abdominal pain, the intentional correlate of my feeling-intention is an area in my stomach; if I have a migraine, the intentional correlate of my pain is an area in my head. Pain has the structure of perceptual consciousness: just as seeing is seeing of x, and hearing is hearing of y, so having pain is related to z. One could say that the intentional correlates of physical pain are surface or nonsurface bodily areas (see Janzen 2013, 864).
However, according to Stumpf’s followers, the structure of pain experience is by no means identical with the structure of perceptual consciousness. Here we come across the second reason that supports their position. In the case of perception, consciousness is first and foremost absorbed in the intentional object and only secondarily conscious of its own experiential contents. In the case of pain, the situation is reversed: one is first and foremost absorbed in one’s experience and only secondarily conscious of one’s body, conceived of as the object of pain experience. This absorption in experience itself, rather than in the objects of experience, intimates that in the case of pain, we are faced not with intentional consciousness, but with a feeling-sensation.
Stumpf’s followers do not deny that pain can be interpreted as a way of being aware of an object, namely, of one’s own body. However, they assert that this interpretation is an accomplishment of reflective consciousness. They claim that prior to reflection, pain is experienced neither as an intentional feeling nor as an object of this feeling, but as a nonintentional experiential content. At this basic experiential level, pains do not appear, they are just lived through.
Third, one could point out that there is an essential structural difference between intentional consciousness and pain experience. Intentional consciousness is marked by the distinction between the intentional act and the object of this act. In the case of pain experience, one cannot draw an analogous distinction. While we distinguish between the seeing and the seen, the judging and the judged, the loving and the loved, we do not distinguish between the “paining” and the “pained.” Being a feeling-sensation, pain does not lend itself to the same kind of structural analysis as do intentional experiences.
Fourth, to provide this view with further support, one could point to the disruptive effects of intense pain experience. As Scarry (1985) puts it, pain obliterates all intentional contents of consciousness, leaving one with a nonintentional experience. Indeed, the more intense one’s pain, the more it forces one to withdraw from any intentional object one might have been contemplating. Admittedly, only in exceptional cases do such annihilating powers of pain bring about a complete obliteration of consciousness. Yet as Agustín Serrano de Haro insightfully points out, “In regard to the whole field of consciousness, a pain experience either takes full possession of the conscious foreground, or it strives to actually do so” (2011, 390). Put otherwise, any experience of pain, no matter how weak or intense it might be, manifests a tendency to obliterate and take possession of consciousness, and this tendency can manifest itself in a more or less pure form. Insofar as one resists this tendency and retains the capacity to contemplate the intentional object one was contemplating, one transforms pain into what it is not, namely, into a mere uneasiness or discomfort. Insofar as this tendency wins over one’s resistance and one succumbs to pain, one experiences a growing distance from all intentional objects, which leaves one with affective sensations as the sole experiential content. In the extreme case, pain is all there is.
Pain would not be pain if it did not unsettle other feelings, perceptions, thoughts, or activities. Moreover, pain disrupts not only wakeful consciousness, but also consciousness that is asleep. When pain intrudes, it forces consciousness to withdraw from any intentional content it had been contemplating, no matter if this content was perceived, contemplated, imagined, or just dreamed. This obtrusive nature of intense pain casts another shadow of doubt over the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Stumpf and his followers claim that pain is a sensation. Yet sensations do not enter the field of consciousness as objects in the foreground. They do not appear, but are lived through; they are not perceived, but experienced. However, while one can objectify one’s sensed contents only through reflective acts, pain emerges in the thematic field of consciousness as though in a flash and forces one to immediately objectify it. Indeed, pain intrudes the field of experience very much like other events in our surroundings, such as sudden noises that interrupt calmness, or unexpected movements that disrupt stillness. Does this fact not compel one to admit that pain is not a feeling-sensation, but an object of intentional consciousness? Using Husserl’s terminology from Ideas I, one can ask: Should one not abandon the view that pain is a hyle and replace it with the realization that it is a noema, conceived of as the objective correlate of an intentional act?3
Stumpf’s followers have the resources needed to answer this objection. We say that the pain in the abdomen is dreadful, or that the headache is unbearable. The language we employ suggests that pain is an intentional object. Yet one should not be misled by the grammatical structure of such descriptions. As Stumpf observed (1907, 9), everybody knows that the sentence “Sugar is sweet,” means that sugar tastes sweet, and when it comes to pain, the situation is no different. Whatever else pain might be, it is first and foremost a feeling, and therefore, to clarify what pain is, one must clarify not the nature of an object, but the nature of a feeling. Admittedly, such a response leaves it undecided whether the feeling in question should be determined as an intentional act or
