LanguagePangs:OnPainandtheOriginofLanguage IlitFerber
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I am grateful to my family for their love that is and always was everything to me. Most of all, I thank my husband Roy for his support and for being there for me in all the happy as well as painful moments that accompanied my writing. (p.x)
Without his love this book would not have been possible. To my children who listened to the story of Philoctetes at bedtime so many times: I thank Ori for our conversations and her beautiful questions, Adam for his unique sensitivity and ability to make me laugh also in painful moments, and Yotam whose insights about empathy accompany this book.
The work was written amid many conversations with Werner Hamacher. I am grateful for his attention, generosity, and belief in the project. Werner passed away just a few months before the manuscript was completed and our last meeting was devoted to discussing its final details. It is a great sadness that he did not live to see it in print. This book is dedicated to him.
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Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. In Werke: Bd. 1: Frühe Schriften 1764–1772, ed. Urich Gaier, 697–810. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985.
Treatise
“Treatise on the Origin of Language.” In Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster, 65–164. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Versions of Philoctetes
Gide, Philoc.
André Gide. “Philoctetes; or, the Treatise on Three Ethics.” In Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy: Documents, Iconography, Interpretations, ed. and trans. Oscar Mandel, 158–178. University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Herder, Philoc.
Johann Gottfried Herder. “Philoktetes: Szenen mit Gesang.” In Nachlaß veröffentlicht, Sämmtliche Werke. [Abt.] Zur schönen Literatur und Kunst 6. Theil, ed. J. G. Herder, 113–126. Cotta, 1806. Müller, Philoc.
Heiner Müller. “Philoctetes.” In Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy, trans. Oscar Mandel in collaboration with Maria Kelsen Feder, 222–250. University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Sophocles, Philoc.
Sophocles. Philoctetes. trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Work by Rousseau
Essay
“Essay on the Origin of Languages.” In Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music (Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7), trans. and ed. John T. Scott, 247–299. University Press of New England, 1998.
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fully expressed in language, something we can never entirely communicate or share with others. Its unmediated nature tends to be deemed private, inasmuch as any attempt to articulate it publicly is doomed to fail. Along these lines, language seems to be everything that pain is not. Its underlying principles are those of shareability, communication, and various forms of the self’s extension into the world and toward others.
Regardless of our theoretical orientation toward language—whether analytical, continental, or logical—this configuration of language, and the various ways by which it refers, represents, expresses, and communicates, is common to them all. Language not only challenges the private and solipsistic structure of pain, but it also constitutes itself as inherently distinct from everything that is of-thebody, somatic, or nonsymbolic. In this sense, physical pain and the body as such must be overcome in order for language to emerge. If the emergence of language marks humans’ departure from the bestial, then the violence and intensity of cries of pain are precisely what can turn us back into animals, or at least—momentarily—expose the animality that saturates our linguistic being.
Language Pangs challenges these already familiar conceptions and proposes a reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness rather than the common exclusive opposition. My premise is both that we cannot truly penetrate the experience of pain without taking account of its inherent relation to language, and, vice versa, that the nature of language essentially depends on our understanding of its inherent (p. 2) relationship with pain. I question the assumption that the experience of pain puts a basic limit to our linguistic abilities, neutralizing us as linguistic beings. On the contrary, the exploration of the nature and origins of language reveals a very strong kinship to pain. It is therefore necessary to shift away from considering this relationship in terms of essential rivalry and opposition and turn toward a notion of inherent interconnection and profound intimacy between pain and language, an abiding intimacy. Although it might be irrefutable that in states of extreme pain, language seems to crumble or collapse, depriving us of words, considering this characterization in itself is problematic and partial, stemming perhaps from the way in which pain and language are conceptualized and defined in the first place.
Although I concentrate mainly on physical and not psychic pain or suffering, my discussion is not limited to the physical aspects and implications of pain (if it is at all possible to treat pain as having merely physical implications). The prevalent use of the word “pain” in the context of mental suffering (the pain of loss, longing, or even love) reveals the kinship between physical and mental pain. It is moreover difficult, perhaps impossible, to find philosophical discussions of physical pain that do not “spill over” into its mental, psychological effects. Discussions that remain within the boundaries of the merely physical aspects of pain are, generally speaking, disciplinary and therefore rather limited
(medical discussions for instance). I am interested in the ways in which the experience of pain affects (destroying as well as constituting) our sense of being and self, our experience of others and of the world as such, and finally, our linguistic existence. My understanding of suffering is not limited to its interpretation as what is sometimes treated, in categories of the philosophy of mind, as a “judgement” of pain, or even as one of pain’s “aspects.” In my discussion, pain is not “transformed” into something else that transcends the merely physical, nor is pain viewed, here, as a mere “cause” of mental suffering. I characterize the experience of pain as an experience of boundaries, by its being on the boundary: always between the physical and psychic, both internal and external, undifferentiated from our very identity but at the same time emerging as our utmost negation.
There is therefore a double register at play in my use of the term “pain.” Even when I delve into a detailed phenomenology of the experience of physical or mental pain, what I refer to is not pain as a discrete event or feeling. I will move, in this sense, rather freely between physical pain, mental suffering, and a more general sense of suffering. Pain is so important precisely because of its unmatched ability to transcend itself, to be suggestive of so much more than a headache or open wound. Its significance is fully achieved when, to use Cioran’s beautiful words, “wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being.”1 I regard (p.3) pain, therefore, as a philosophical figure. This, however, should not remove pain from its bodily experience and, more generally put, its somatic setting and implications. Pain’s uniqueness inheres precisely in the distinct way in which it allows for this intersection between the most basic, coarse bodily sensation, on the one hand, and its philosophical purport, on the other. These implications, as I will show, are not invariably known or cognitively perceived, but they are nevertheless deeply felt. The experience of extreme pain is always coupled with an inherent transcendence of its physical aspect to an encounter with and redefinition of the conditions of experience as such: an experience not only of the body in pain, but also and foremost, a sense of our very being, world, and language—having opened up in ways that are not open to us otherwise, that is, without pain.
Although pain’s revelatory power is abundant, this book concentrates on one crucial dimension enfolded in the experience of pain, namely, language and expression. Pain is famously discussed as a force utterly destructive to language; it is conceived as undermining our ability to communicate our suffering, threatening the very possibility of our relationship to other human beings. Pain’s intensity has undeniably crucial bearing on our language and communicative abilities but it would be problematically restrictive, to say the least, to view these effects as merely destructive, robbing us of our very humanity and the possibility to feel for others. This book’s approach suggests a different view on their relationship. When pain encounters language it tears it apart, and in doing
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so its very essence is laid bare. Importantly—and pain’s uniqueness, over and beyond that of other feelings or emotions, is located here—it reveals language’s innermost being as inseparable from bodily feeling, suffering, and sympathy. It is in its intercourse with pain that language can be thought of as transcending the binaries of human and animal, inside and outside, man and object.
The encounter between pain and language is deemed destructive only insofar as we conceive of language as a mere instrument with which we refer to pain or try to communicate it—say something about it. When we consider language, rather, as an expressive apparatus stretching beyond this merely propositional structure, a variety of ways emerge in which pain encapsulates the very conditions of possibility of expression and language.2 Pain is, therefore, not only about the failure or collapse of language. It is also, and more powerfully, a vigorous force demanding expression. From this point of view, pain does not work against language; instead, it realizes its inclination and drive to express and gets language to work. Pain, therefore, manifests something of the strength of language, its boundlessness rather than weakness or collapse; it brings forth the possibilities of language as such, the very conditions that make it what it is.
(p.4)
A Phenomenology of Pain
The intensity of the experience of extreme pain is almost unmatched. Pain seems to invade us like an omnipotent, invincible force, overtaking us completely, engulfing us. Pain is not simply something we “have” or “feel”; it does not merely “color” our world or our physical experience. It soon becomes the dominant mode of our very being. We experience pain as an all-consuming force, embracing and devouring us at the same time. When it strikes, we do not merely undergo an agonizing bodily sensation: pain directly affects our very sense of self. Instead of feeling ourselves in pain, we become our pain, united with it so that there is nothing but pain. With the emergence of pain, our most basic sense of self is violated, posing a fundamental challenge to our fragile, composite existence as our unity of self is utterly devastated.3 It is in this sense that any understanding of pain as a physical, determinate, and well-defined “event” is insubstantial.
Pain harbors the potential of transfiguring our very being. Living in the reality of intense pain (whether acute or chronic, physical or psychological) is neither an event nor a state; it is not even a quality of our customary, familiar existence. The experience of pain violently thrusts us into a unique existential state in which it becomes the consummate foundation of our very being, its organizing principle. Even when pain is chronic, a pain that is always there but never acute or intense, our mode of being is constituted by it, profoundly marked and distinguished by its ever-present constraint. About this, Emily Dickinson writes that “Pain—has an Element of Blank—/It cannot recollect/When it begun—Or if there were/A time when it was not—/It has no Future—but itself—/Its Infinite contain/Its Past—enlightened to perceive/New Periods—Of Pain.”4 For Dickinson,
admitting pain enforces acceptance of its rule over time and space, over us and our world. There is nothing but pain: neither past nor future, and especially no reference point to “when it is not.” This is yet another of pain’s hallmarks: it completely fills us, condensing our identity, temporal experience, and relationship to everything outside us and outside it. And everything indeed is outside it. There is nothing but pain.
Pain forces itself on us as our one and only center, the crux of our being. It is not only the body that becomes dominated by it: pain seems to draw and gather every inch of our attention and energy into its whirlpool motion. At first, we feel as if pain, like an uninvited guest, enters from the outside, invading us, striking with all its force until we disintegrate. This quality of foreignness, however, turns out to be not that simple. Given the relentless power of its grip, pain has a transformative impact, which also affects our initial relation to it, especially the sense of its foreignness. Pain is thus transfigured: appearing at first as though it was (p.5) external, an alien “agency” that confronts us, it almost unnoticeably becomes uniquely internal and intimate. Once it has become an inseparable part of us, we cannot remove ourselves from pain and its intensity even if we wanted nothing more dearly: we might as well choose to withdraw from our very selves.5
Enduring pain is indeed an experience of utter privacy and isolation: we experience our pains alone. The totality with which pain isolates us is not only singular insofar as it completely embeds us; it also uniquely reconstitutes, perhaps even re-creates, the foundations of our relationship to everything else: self, body, world, and language. The experience of utter separation and segregation so inherent to pain opens a chasm between the before and after of pain. It is now the sufferer alone, confronting himself or herself in a wholly different manner: in the utter absence of anything but pain—a bare, sensitive body, with nothing external to refer to, feel for, or relate to. The overwhelming retreat that pain forces on us compels us to face pain, from a minimal distance, from within an enclosed space that permits no withdrawal.
The conception of pain as isolating can also be found in psychoanalytic theory, first and foremost in Freud’s early work.6 Although he rarely discusses physical pain in his works (“We know very little about pain,” he writes),7 Freud provides us with a suggestive understanding of physical pain in terms of a solipsistic retreat, a withdrawal from the world: being in pain, he writes, is always coupled with a fundamental relinquishing of interest in the outside world, in everything that does not concern our suffering.8 He perceptively describes pain as an “indrawing” occurring in the internal, mental sphere, an “internal haemorrhage,” operating just like a wound.9 With the metaphor of the internal, bleeding wound, Freud offers us an economic model of the total withdrawal that is so distinctive of physical pain.10 Pain literally sucks us in, preventing us from being invested in anything else but pain. The excessive nature of pain is coupled here with the
impoverishment so characteristic of melancholic withdrawal from the world: the first is too much, the other, barely enough.11
Among the many facets and implications of pain’s breach, standing out is its ability to devastate any possibility we have to respond to it or to act against it. Whereas one of the foundations of subjectivity (at least in its modern conception) refers to agency, when we are in pain we face ourselves as downright passive.12 Pain’s inexorable demand for total submission leaves us defenseless. But this powerful clench of pain is not simply overwhelming; it is, more importantly, an experience from which we cannot withdraw, a state from which there is no refuge. Emmanuel Levinas’ description of physical pain is especially suggestive here: “Physical suffering, in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instance of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being [l’être]. The content of suffering merges with the impossibility of detaching (p.6) oneself from suffering. . . . The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. . . . In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness.”13
Unable to act against pain, we are forced to submit to it, take it upon ourselves, and become one with it. This submission, however, also means that we cannot absorb the experience of pain into our world and existence by assuming it into a meaningful structure. The fundamental interruption exercised by pain, in other words, is not merely and discretely experienced in the body of the suffering individual but affects his or her most basic ability to signify pain. Pain is therefore often experienced and conceived of as unintelligible, constantly challenging our very ability to assimilate and integrate it in our lives.
The way in which pain strikes, undermines, and even rejects the possibility of maintaining a fixed structure of sense or meaning profoundly interferes with our ability to synthesize. This is not because of, as Levinas explains, the excessive intensity of the experience of pain, its “too muchness”; it is, rather, an excess that penetrates the dimensions of meaning which, when not suffering, we take to be open to us. There is, then, a fundamental denial of meaning that is inherent to pain, a unique form of an unbearable experience. Levinas points out the paradoxical coexistence of the unbearable nature of pain with the fact that there is simply no question of not bearing it. That is, while we are compelled to bear our pain, it is at the same time the epitome of the fundamentally unbearable.14 Blanchot follows a similar line when he characterizes physical suffering as what we can neither suffer nor cease to suffer, an experience that places us at time’s point of suspension, where the present is an ongoing moment, without either future or projection, “an impassable infinite, the infinite of suffering.”15 Jean Améry’s description of his harrowing experiences in the Nazi camps reveals a similar approach when he refers to the senselessness of any attempt to describe his experiences of pain since “qualities of feelings are as incomprehensible as they are indescribable.”16 For Améry it is not enough to point at the
disintegration of language; there is a more profound understanding here that the collapse of linguistic capabilities marks a deeper collapse: that of the logical possibility of our very existence.
There is a plethora of literary works that look at the fundamental discordance between pain and our ability to express it, all pointing at language’s collapse in the face of intense pain.17 Pain has often been described as a watertight barrier to language, in front of which the latter slowly, or at times suddenly, crumbles. This failure is felt all the more strongly because the experience of intense pain is so compellingly tied to the need to express it. Pain seems to demand expression, as if internally pressing us to voice it, insisting that it be poured out in facial expressions, bodily contortions, sounds, and cries. It seems then rather plausible to argue that along the spectrum of feelings and sensations, pain most forcefully (p.7) and immediately demands its own expression, while it is distinctly when we are in pain that we so markedly fail to do so. The irreconcilable nature of these two characteristics—the striving toward expression and the impossibility of actualizing it—is what makes physical pain stand out as unique. It marks the height of our yearning to express but at the same time confronts us with the impossibility of doing so. When pain strikes, there is no room for words, only howls. Language can function again only when the overwhelming effect of pain is replaced by its faint memory.
The opposition between pain and language is frequently portrayed in terms of the impotence of language in its encounter with the ferocity of pain. Virginia Woolf famously writes that “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache . . . but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other . . . so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.”18 Elsewhere she observes that “for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space.”19 What is so striking for Woolf is the disparity between the richness and profusion of language’s ability to express extremely complex thoughts and feelings and its collapse in the face of pain. Linguistic plentitude runs dry when one finds no words for a shiver or headache—that is, for the most basic, everyday experiences. For these, there are only sounds and cries, “a lump of pure sound,” but no words, let alone a communicative comprehensive account.
As cogent and telling as it is, this description presents us with a difficulty. We feel that we know what pain is: we have all experienced it in one way or another, whether a suffocating all-encompassing pain induced by violence, or a mere, passing headache. Insofar as we are human, we are sensitive to pain and subject to its power. We know the suffering inherent to it at first hand; we have felt its constraints and have all, to some extent, been lost for words in the face of
intense pain. It is by instinct, physical as well as psychological, that we fight against pain, make every effort to avoid it, or if there is no other option, cure it or make it go away. Thus we instantly connect to philosophical, and especially literary, descriptions of how the experience of pain feels and what it causes: it is as if these put words to what we deeply but wordlessly know. However, our immediate sense of recognition of these phenomenological descriptions all too often tempts us to assume they capture something of the singular nature, heart, and depth of pain. I use the word “temptation” to draw attention to how this sense of recognition may also narrow down our perspective on the issue at hand, revealing it exclusively under the narrow beam of its stark, dangerously blinding light.
(p.8) The Two Paradigms
The recent literature on pain clarifies something about this temptation. This can be demonstrated by way of two primary intuitions prevalent in the literature about pain. First, the emphasis on the destructive nature of pain: pain destroys our bodies, souls, linguistic abilities, and the possibility to communicate with others. Second, pain isolates us, opening up an unbridgeable gap between the experience of our own suffering and everything else: world, objects, others. It would be safe to say that these two postulates have by now crystallized into two key paradigms that have become almost inextricable from the way we think about pain, even feel it. According to the first paradigm, pain is fundamentally characterized by its destructiveness; according to the second, pain is violently isolating, turning us into enclosed, solipsistic entities. Pain dismantles our world and being and our ability to actively exercise our subjectivity, not only because it literally destroys our bodily integrity, but more important, as a consequence of its impact on our linguistic, communicative capabilities, it renders them virtually powerless.20
Both paradigms play a central role in Elaine Scarry’s acclaimed The Body in Pain. Although since its publication in 1985, Scarry’s work has become a reference point for any examination of pain, her book suffers from some weaknesses sometimes found pioneering research. Among the first books to emphasize the far-reaching political implications of the experience of pain and violence, it presents a fundamentally partial and biased account that fails to do justice to her subject, the body in pain.21 The main reason for this, I assume, is that Scarry’s book focuses on a discussion of war and torture, that is, extreme cases of pain inflicted in the context of political enmity. For these cases, Scarry’s analysis is no doubt valid,22 but it leaves out many other contexts, degrees, and configurations of pain. That said, I will refer to Scarry in order to establish my argument for the existence of the two paradigmatic portrayals of pain (which she largely developed), while presenting her position with a critical eye.
Although her discussion claims to address both the “making” as well as the “unmaking” of the world when it is affected by pain—Scarry emphasizes the second aspect, namely, the ways in which pain shatters and destroys the world and subjectivity as we know it. Scarry skillfully draws a picture of a fierce confrontation between pain and, generally speaking, human existence (or the world), with pain featuring as an overwhelming, destructive force. Thus Scarry conceives of pain as a “pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of ‘against,’ ” to the point of there being a “simple and absolute incompatibility of pain and the world.”23 But even more distinctive about Scarry’s account is her emphasis on the metaphoric language we usually use when describing pain as a form of agency, as though it attacked us intentionally (p.9) and purposefully acted upon us. Her rhetoric is consequently dominated by metaphors that support such a notion of pain: “It feels as though a hammer is coming down on my spine”—where there is no concrete hammer; or “It feels as if my arm is broken at each joint and the jagged ends are sticking through the skin even where the bones of the arms are intact and the surface of the skin is unbroken,”24 and so forth. Extreme physical pain, according to Scarry, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it” and is “monolithically consistent in its assault on language.”25
Susan Sontag analyzed the rhetoric and imagery of medical accounts of pain, identifying images comparable to those Scarry uses. Sontag demonstrates that the dominant metaphors of illness and pain are often borrowed from the language of warfare. She shows, for instance, that cancer is often described as “the barbarian within”; cancer cells do not simply multiply but are “invasive,”26 and the disease and its effects are being “magnified and projected into a metaphor for the biggest enemy . . . a form of demonic possession.”27 Sontag continues to demonstrate that the descriptions of medical treatments “fighting” pain and disease use similarly military language: “radiotherapy uses the metaphors of aerial warfare; patients are ‘bombarded’ with toxic rays. And chemotherapy is chemical warfare, using poisons.”28 These characterizations of disease and the pain that accompanies it as obstructive enemies not only depict the representatives of the medical system as salvaging benefactors struggling against pain and vanquishing it, but also and perhaps foremost, they portray pain as a menacing threat, our worst enemy. Pain invades our bodies and lives, shatters our linguistic abilities, and accomplishes the absolute, perfect disruption. Depleting language, pain takes an antagonistic, aversive role and eventually triumphs by rendering itself, in Scarry’s terminology, “unshareable”: “Whatever pain achieves,” she writes, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”29 In order to make sense of this argument, which is perhaps the cornerstone of her book, it is necessary to closely consider some of Scarry’s other key points.
According to Scarry, most of our states of consciousness refer to external objects (we love someone, fear something, are ambivalent about something, etc.). This configuration is interrupted, she writes, “when, moving through the human interior, one at last reached physical pain, for physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”30 Pain, then, may have an objective reason (it can be brought about by illness or an armed attack), but this does not mean that the experience of pain itself has a referential structure. It is obvious where Scarry wants to take her argument: since it has no object (i.e., it is not about or for something) pain has no objective, public presence. It remains private and cannot (p.10) thus be configured into an objective, referential structure that can be shared with others. Pain is unsharable in principle, doomed to an everlasting, profound privacy which renders it nonlinguistic. Hannah Arendt considers similar ideas in a political context, arguing that pain deprives us of the possibility to reach out from the private to the public realm. This is not only because of our inability to transform its utter privacy into content suitable for public discourse but also because it violently detaches us from anything we can call a world. If we conceive of reality as a world we all see and hear concomitantly, Arendt argues, then pain marks the passage into a shadowy, uncertain form of existence and is hence automatically deemed a “private matter.”31
This has far-reaching implications: primarily it means that pain is a threat to our very humanity. If being human is understood as having a language, being a speaking creature, and pain is the experience that destroys language, then pain is constituted, in Scarry’s account, as obliterating the very possibility of our being human. This deprivation of humanity is twofold: first, those in pain are bereft of their humanity because they are deprived of their language—the very foundation of their humanity; and second, those witnessing pain become inhuman by contagion, since in the encounter with the other’s pain, they cannot fundamentally feel empathy. In both cases, the deprivation of humanity is inherently connected with a deprivation of language. In Scarry’s account, extreme pain not only destroys language but also brings about “an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”32 When in pain, man loses his every shred of humanity and immediately and fundamentally regresses to literal infantility, left with his mere bodily, animal constituents. Pain deprives us of what makes us human.
Here the two aforementioned paradigms—destructiveness and isolation—come together. Pain is world-destroying, to use Scarry’s term, not only because it destroys the suffering subject’s capabilities, the ones that constitute his or her humanity, but first and foremost, since it destroys the possibility of the sufferer’s relationships with others. The shattering of pain’s referential structure grounds
Scarry’s argument that there is a fundamental incongruence between one’s own pain and the pain of others: pain’s nonreferential structure renders it unsharable, opening up the chasm between one’s own pain and the pain of the other. Using metaphors of geographical distance, Scarry compares the pain of others to “some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.” She describes the painful events taking place in another’s body as “vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation . . . and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.”33 To the sufferer, pain is immediately and “effortlessly” grasped, without a trace of (p.11) doubt. For the one witnessing another’s suffering, Scarry claims, it is precisely the opposite: the unreality, even denial of the other’s pain. This chasm marks the paradoxical nature of pain, an experience we cannot deny and cannot confirm, at one and the same time.34
The problematic nature of the convergence between destructiveness and isolation, the two paradigms of pain, emerges most clearly when we take into account Scarry’s emphasis on the essential discrepancy between our own pain and the pains of others. She grounds her argument in a strictly epistemological perspective, establishing the threatening gap enforced by pain’s paradoxical nature, in terms of the essential disparity between the certainty we have of our own pains and the inevitable doubt we feel toward other people’s pains. This narrow definition is the heart of what the field of the Philosophy of Mind describes as “the problem of other minds.” This problem is premised on the discrepancy between the knowledge we have of our own pain, knowledge that is immediate and certain beyond doubt, and any knowledge we have of other people’s pain, which is of necessity indirect and inherently open to doubt.35 To follow Thomas Nagel’s famous formulation of the problem (which in turn follows Wittgenstein), the crux of the problem has to do with the difference between feeling one’s pain and knowing (or not knowing) the pain of another person. Nagel thus importantly presents the problem of other minds as a strictly epistemological problem. Since pain can only be recognized by introspection (and never knowledge, since I cannot know my own pain, only feel it) and is essentially based on first-person claim knowledge, we can never have substantial enough grounds for knowing, let alone experiencing, other people’s pain. Considering the relationship between our own pain and the pain of others solely in terms of knowledge constitutes an incomplete, limited account of the problem.36
Since we cannot enter other people’s minds, we are left with the only thing that is publicly available: the external, behavioral expressions produced by those in pain. This leads, in the discussion of the “problem of other minds,” to what is standardly called the “argument from analogy.” According to this argument, because we have access only to our own pain, we use our own case as a point of
reference and treat other people’s pain as analogous to our own. Insofar as we are all human, the similarity of our pain is inferred. The weakness here is clear: there is no firm basis to argue for correlation; we can never have more than an assumption, and it follows that we can never have firm grounds for arguing that someone else is indeed in pain. We are always and necessarily certain of our own pain, and inherently in doubt regarding the pain of others. Moreover, the structure of the argument reinforces the problem: a relationship based on analogy necessarily presupposes separation. Even from this short and basic account of the crux of the problem of other minds, it is already clear how its epistemological (p.12) slant paves the way for what appears to be a convincing connection between the experience of pain, our relationship to others, and radical skepticism.37
Pain and Language
The discrepancy between pain’s unmatched intensity and urgency and the inability to thrust it into language is indeed one of its deepest distinguishing marks. It is irrefutable that in states of extreme pain, language seems to crumble or collapse, that its vocabulary dwindles and perhaps stops short at the encounter with this intensity. It is also accurate that extreme pain seems to endanger our very humanity as we cry and scream, paying no heed to how we treat or speak to others around us. In addition, it is reasonable to argue that pain is perhaps the most direct and fierce experience we have of our utter withdrawal from others. On the one hand, when pain overwhelms us, we feel it with all its force and totality so that we very soon become our pain; on the other hand, we are completely helpless when trying to put it into words, describe it, or communicate it to others. These discordances serve, in many senses, as the basis of the firm grip pain has as a unique paradigm among the array of other internal states and feelings, which are all, no doubt, private and inaccessible, yet do not face us with such a degree of discrepancy.
When we reflect on the two aforementioned paradigms, as they take apart pain into its destructive and isolating components, it is important to bear in mind that the understanding of pain these two paradigms yield is not the mere joint product of each trait separately but also suggests something about an inseparability between them. For it is due to its fiercely destructive effect on our bodies as well as our language that pain isolates us, leaving us encapsulated in its a-linguistic, solipsistic realm. The two paradigms not only originate in the experience of pain, but they also fuel one another: there is no isolation without destruction, and vice versa. Moreover, this interdependency between the paradigms of pain is established via pain’s relations with language. In other words, any account of pain as destructive or isolating, even when it does not explicitly discuss language, necessarily implies a strong and incontestable linguistic presence. This paradigmatic account of pain subsequently results in a resolute separation between language and the experience of pain.
We tend to adopt these binary accounts of pain, especially its negative traits, since they seem to correspond to our most natural intuitions regarding the experience of pain with which we are all so familiar (despite differences in context and intensity). This is why the two paradigms though abstract and theoretical, have such a powerful hold on us. But is the story so simple? Does our avoidance and fear of pain alone disclose its full essence? The challenge this book faces is (p.13) to take serious account of our very basic, natural intuitions about pain, but at the same time, not to allow these intuitions to counterproductively narrow our perspective. The challenge is to retain this tension, since it touches on one of pain’s crucial characteristics.
It is my argument that the bifurcation and antagonism between pain and language is rooted in the fact that the two theoretical paradigms fail to encompass the multifarious, complex nature of the experience of pain. In the theories constructed on the basis of these paradigmatic characterizations, pain can either be the essence of humanity or its abyss, either separating us from others or our direct connection to them; and finally, pain in these theories can either go with or against language. It is for this reason that pain “has” to be portrayed as humanity’s most ferocious antithesis and a state that fundamentally threatens everything humanity stands for. It should already be clear, however, that the distinctive nature of pain can hardly be exhausted or done justice to by the impossibilities it harbors.
Let me point out some of the difficulties inherent to these paradigmatic views. First, while pain may leave us speechless, it also constitutes an insistent urge to express. In contrast to other internal or emotional states, pain may obliterate our linguistic abilities but at the same time demands a language. Pain drives us to express it and then demands to be heard and received by another (this demand is, clearly, not conditioned by the contingent question of whether it can or cannot be in fact received). It is therefore specifically in pain, more than in happiness or anger, for example, that we feel the depth of the implications of the discrepancy between the intensity of the feeling and the disintegration of our language. Being in a state of intense pain, hence, reveals itself to be inseparable from the compelling need to express it. Silent, mute pain is almost inconceivable.38
Second, pain does not merely deprive us of our humanity; it is also our vulnerability to pain that makes us human in the first place, that pins our humanity down, so to speak. We cannot fully experience the world and our existence in it without having some level of sensitivity to pain. Finally, while the experience of pain might mark a boundary between our feeling of ourselves and the feeling of others, it is at the same time the most direct and immediate manner by which we connect with other human beings (who all share this vulnerability to pain, regardless of linguistic or cultural differences). It is the pit from whose depths alone we can directly connect with other human beings, by