the structure of pain is essentially different from the structure of intentional acts. If this is accepted, one has to admit that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.
Arguably, one of the reasons why Stumpf qualifies pain as a unique kind of sensation, namely, as a feeling-sensation, is so as not to lose sight of the obtrusive nature of pain experience. Other sensory contents do not impose themselves upon us by stealing our attention. So as to distinguish between the obtrusive and the nonobtrusive sensations, Stumpf identifies the former as feeling-sensations. One can thus respond to Brentano and his followers by pointing out that the obtrusive nature of pain does not contradict the fact that it is a sensation. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, there are obtrusive sensations; they are called feeling-sensations.
Let us turn to the fifth reason that supports the view of Stumpf’s followers. Those who suffer from pain live through their pains indubitably. As Scarry puts it, “For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’” (1985, 4). To be in pain means, among other things, to have no doubt that one is in pain. Yet indubitability is a mark of inner rather than outer perception. This means that such an intentional object as one’s own body cannot be given indubitably. Moreover, this also means that insofar as pain is marked by indubitability, it cannot be qualified as an object of experience but must be either an intentional act, which intends an object, or a nonintentional content of experience. Yet, as we already know, pain cannot be an intentional act. If so, one has to conclude that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation.
One might object that Stumpf’s followers build their case by paying attention only to the most gruesome forms of intense pain, which obliterate all other forms of consciousness. Would one not be led to different conclusions if one focused on milder and much more common forms of pain? With this question, we are led to the sixth reason that underlies the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. No matter how mild or intense pain might be, it is experienced not as an object but, to use Hermann Schmitz’s (2009, 23–27) fitting expression, as an atmosphere that colors intentional objects. Consider, for instance, how, after a sleepless night, one experiences a migraine while nonetheless being forced to engage in regular activities. Under such circumstances, one does not relate to the pain in one’s head as an intentional object of one’s consciousness. Rather, pain creates a particular atmosphere, which “is without place, yet nonetheless spatial,”4 and thus embraces and affects any object one might perceive or be contemplating. Consider the pain in one’s eyes, of which Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, 309) speaks in Being and Nothingness. If I experience this kind of pain while reading a book, then the object of my consciousness is the book, while pain is neither to the right nor to the left of it, nor is it one of the truths enclosed in it. Rather, pain manifests itself as the quivering of the letters on the page or as the difficulty in understanding their meaning. Thus, as Sartre explicitly puts it, “Pain is totally void of intentionality” (1956, 308), by which we are to understand that pain is not an intentional object among others. Nonetheless, I experience it as a “contingent attachment to the world” (Sartre 1956, 309), or, to return to Schmitz, as an atmosphere that covers my act of reading. One thus lives one’s pain as a pure affective state, which refuses to be characterized as intentional.
To what has been mentioned above, let us add a seventh and last reason that supports the standpoint of Stumpf’s followers. This reason concerns what Scarry (1985, 15) has called the “as if” structure of the existing vocabulary for pain. We qualify our pains temporally as quivering, pulsing, throbbing, or beating; we qualify them spatially as jumping or shooting; with an eye on their pressure, we speak of them as cramping, cutting, drilling, gnawing, pinching, pressing, pricking, pulling, or stabbing. Yet the primary meanings of these and many other terms, which are employed in the McGill Pain Questionnaire with the aim of identifying the sensory, affective, and cognitive contents of pain experience, are related to objects and not to any kind of experience, including pain experience. These terms can be meaningfully employed in characterizing pain only because of the metaphorical transference of sense, that is, only because of the “as if” structure of the vocabulary for pain. But why does this transference provide us with the only available vocabulary for pain? Arguably, here we are in need of metaphors precisely because language is designed to name what is referential. As Scarry puts it, “Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently, we often call on them to convey the experience of the pain itself” (1985, 15).5 In short, to speak of pain, one must objectify pain with the help of those terms that do not apply to it, which, by implication, means that to speak of pain, one must objectify what is not an object at all. We cannot help but find the means to speak about pain. Yet, as soon as we give it a name, we falsify and misrepresent a nonintentional experience as an intentional object. We must keep our guard up so as not to become “victims to the seduction of language” (Husserl 1970, 362).
Such, then, are the central reasons that underlie the view that pain is a nonintentional feeling-sensation. Pain has no referential content; it does not share the same structure with other kinds of intentional consciousness; its disruptive effects are such that in the extreme case, pain empties consciousness of any intentional content; the indubitable evidence characteristic of its givenness is essentially different from the evidence that applies to the givenness of intentional contents; it covers all intentional relations as a nonintentional atmosphere; last but not least, the language we employ to characterize our pains is yet a further testament to the nonintentional nature of pain experience. These reasons make it understandable why the perspective that was first introduced by Stumpf retains its credibility to this day. Nonetheless, this fact need not be conceived of as an invitation to abandon the Brentanian position. In the following section, we will consider the reasons that underlie Brentano’s standpoint.
PAIN AS AN INTENTIONAL FEELING
There are three fundamental ways in which one can understand pain as an intentional experience. First, one could argue that pain is neither a nonintentional feeling-sensation, nor an object of feelings, but a particular way one is conscious of one particular object, namely, of one’s own body. After all, one never experiences pain in midair: one cannot simply “be in pain.” One can feel pain only in one’s head, neck, abdomen, and so on. We can feel pain only in our bodies, conceived of as intentional correlates of our feelings. The experience of pain thereby proves to be an instance of our acquaintance with intentionally constituted reality.
As we saw in the previous section, Stumpf’s followers reject this line of reasoning by pointing out that pain experience does not share the same structure with perceptual consciousness. While seeing is always seeing of something, and hearing is always hearing something, feeling pain is not a matter of intending something through pain experience, but a matter of living through a particular feeling. Even more: the very way we live through intense pain tends to block our access to any intentional object we might have been contemplating. Small wonder, then, that Stumpf and his followers consider pain to be a nonintentional experience. Yet Brentano’s followers consider such a response an instance of a misplaced criticism. One does not need to think that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of perception in order to recognize pain as an intentional experience. It is much more significant to highlight the fact that the structure of pain experience is analogous with that of other intentional emotions. Consider such emotions as pride and shame, attraction and disgust, or joy and sorrow. In the case of each, the subject of experience is absorbed more in one’s own feelings than in their intentional correlates. Nonetheless, this structural difference between emotions and perceptions does not imply that emotions are bereft of intentionality. Clearly, we are proud or ashamed over something, attracted or disgusted by something, overjoyed or sorrowed by something. So also, just because those who suffer from pain are first and foremost absorbed in their experience, and only secondarily conscious of their bodies, does not imply that the experience of pain is nonintentional. Quite on the contrary, just like the above-mentioned emotions, the experience of pain is intentional through and through. For this very reason, Brentano and his followers invite
