A Philosophy of Pain

Arne Vetlesen, John Irons

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781861897008
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

"Living involves being exposed to pain every second—not necessarily as an insistent reality, but always as a possibility, " writes Arne Vetlesen in A Philosophy of Pain, a thought-provoking look at an inevitable and essential aspect of the human condition. Here, Vetlesen addresses pain in many forms, including the pain inflicted during torture; the pain suffered in disease; the pain accompanying anxiety, grief, and depression; and the pain brought by violence. He examines the dual nature of pain: how we attempt to avoid it as much as possible in our daily lives, and yet conversely, we obtain a thrill from seeking it.

Vetlesen's analysis of pain is revealing, plumbing the very center of many of our most intense and complicated emotions. He looks at pain within different arenas of modern life such as family and work, and he specifically probes at a very common modern phenomenon, the idea of pushing oneself to the limit. Engaging throughout with the ideas of thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Alice Miller, Susan Sontag, and Melanie Klein, A Philosophy of Pain asks which came first, thinking or feeling, and explores the concept and possibility of empathy.

Vetlesen offers an original and insightful perspective on something that all of us suffer and endure—from a sprained ankle to a broken heart. Although pain is in itself unpleasant, our ability to feel it reminds us that we are alive.

TWELVE
Pain as Compulsive Choice in
a Multi-option Society

In present-day Western societies there is a widespread belief that the individual – and nowadays everything begins and ends with the individual – desires freedom more than anything else, in the sense of individual self-realization. Freedom understood in that way, lived in that way, has many problematic aspects that have much to do with the creation and shifting of pain. The developments we have witnessed over the past couple of decades lead to various forms of social pathologies. What is it that creates such pathologies?

My assertion – which is, of course, only part of the answer – is that an increasing number of the pathologies I am talking about are created by choice becoming compulsory in a multioption society. Pathologies such as burn-out, action paralysis, anxiety and depression can be considered as unintentional consequences of social conditions that are otherwise perceived to be conducive to the individualistic realization of freedom. Key words for the conditions I am referring to are mobility, flexibility and adaptability. Readjustment is at the heart of this, taken as a demand targeted at each individual that he or she needs to internalize and prove loyal to at all times and across the entire social board, as it were. While the prevalent ideology of our time, neo-liberalism, would have the conditions mentioned above represent positive conditions for realizing freedom, my assertion is that the converse applies: because these conditions are imposed on individuals and force them constantly to choose, and constantly to choose right, and constantly to update and thereby annul previous choices, individuals reach an impasse of non-freedom rather than any real freedom – an impasse of exhaustion and self-coercion rather than an expression of creativity and individuality. Furthermore, individual identity is not/no longer seen as an expression of an essence, something that is fixed and constant. Instead, identity – we are told by all sorts of pundits who have their finger on the pulse of things – has to do with something that is completely constructed – something fluid, plastic and staged, something heterogeneous and multi-dimensional (identity is ‘pluralized’ when the roles and arenas are multiplied, etc.). Nevertheless, this newly won ‘freedom’ to constantly recreate oneself comes at a high price – as we shall see.

The consequence of this trend is not that people are becoming increasingly egoistic and less altruistic. This dichotomy misses the point; it misses what is novel here. The simple contrast between egoism and altruism is breaking down, in the sense that the compulsory choices of the multioption society force the individual to ruthlessly exploit himself – something that is bad not only for the individual himself but also for his capacity to show concern for others, to have any kind of surplus of involvement, initiative and strength left for other people – especially those who are striving themselves. Social pressure on the individual – adapt, adapt – is internalized and finds expression in the individual’s merciless and restless pressure on himself, so that healthy self-assertion – mental and emotional ‘taking care of oneself’, paying attention to one’s own vulnerability and the limits for one’s stamina – suffers as a result, as does one’s ability to care for others. The ability to care that we are dealing with here is both for oneself and for others. In the former instance it has to do with how the individual behaves towards himself in a broad psychological sense: what he demands of himself in the form of making choices that indicate mastery and success, which needs he gives priority to, and which he rejects, plays down or represses.

To be happy or successful (can we appreciate the difference?) has become a requirement, something everyone believes is a god-given right. And it is without a doubt a historical fact that people in today’s Western and materially speaking rich societies generally perceive that the possibilities for realizing themselves are constantly improving. The options multiply, the opportunities are literally unlimited – there is a plethora of them and the only thing to make sure of is that I choose the right thing. ‘Only thing’? With the increase in potential choices, the compulsion to choose also increases. The fall is greater, and the safety net increasingly coarse-meshed and fragile. The individual has to take the consequences of his own choice. Doesn’t that sound reasonable? Is there anything wrong in that? Isn’t precisely that a sign of progress when it comes to freedom and responsibility?

In one sense, yes; in other respects, no. For a start, and even though it has become politically incorrect to observe so, the fact is that for an individual agent to realize his de jure freedom, resources in a comprehensive sense – involving economic capital no less than the fashionable cultural one – are required and such material resources still tend to be distributed along lines of class, notwithstanding assertions to the contrary, and according to which radically individualized human resources constitute the only difference that now truly makes a difference – that between winning or losing.⁴³ In a society where the reign of the collective and the great narratives is past, where the individual has been ‘liberated’ from the yoke of tradition and religion, where there is no longer any ‘as father, so son’ compulsion, where the older generation abdicate their authority regarding the younger generation – in such a society the downsides of gaining freedom, in an individualistic sense, are often lost from view, although not clinically lost, not psychosomatically. It is here that the downsides are intercepted, here they are stored – well understood or misinterpreted as they may be by the individual himself and by the current interpretations and values of society at large.

I acknowledge that a great many people tackle the challenges of a societal era of adaptation and freedom/coercion of choice quite well. There is no lack of examples demonstrating that laying aside old competences and acquiring new ones often results in personal enrichment and is a source of growth and wellbeing; in short, a chance that previous ages did not offer people to make use of new facets of themselves. For that reason there is often a good match between what dynamism in working life calls for and what the individual experiences as stimulating. In addition, it is important to point out that many people manage to get through things well if a crisis or a defeat should occur – not only by virtue of their own resources but also thanks to unselfish efforts by friends, colleagues and life-partners. In short, there is a vital in-between area between the individual and the companies or institutions, an area consisting of a network and environments that can help contain individuals about to crash. It is perhaps in the nature of things that this interception and backing-up rarely reaches the front pages of the newspapers or becomes a theme for popular academic study; there is something silent about the phenomenon we are dealing with here, about, say, the continued importance of friendship, unlike the visibility attached to such defined problems as a marked increase in eating disorders among young people or in the use of Prozac among get-ahead 30-year-olds. Everything that is doing well, or is prevented from going wrong, does not really come to light, compared to what really goes awry.

In other words, there is much positive mastery – at both individual and group level – in so-called option society. But my aim in this book is not to dwell on this but instead on where pain is created, shifted and enacted. I turn my attention in that direction – and find a great deal.

I am thinking about the signs of an increase in factors that contribute to the individual experiencing the more rigorous expectations regarding self-realization in the outside world as an ever greater burden, as something that involves major mental strain. When being happy has become a requirement, when being successful is so too, something happens to the gained freedom that previous generations and societies did not have: increased freedom becomes increased strain. It has to do with many simultaneous trends, most of which I cannot do justice to in this discussion: among other things, how we in the space of two decades have gone from welfare as we knew it to minimum effort based on the ideology of self-inflictedness and self-sufficiency, so that the person ending up in unemployment or the dole queue is under pressure to get out of this situation as soon as possible. Fundamental conditions that simply have to do with being a human being, especially dependency and vulnerability, have acquired an imbalance that is unambiguously negative: to be in need, to need the help and care of other people, is seen as morally suspect in itself, a state that ought to be as short-lived as possible and that society at large in general and ‘the public sector’ in particular must not fuel under any circumstances – perhaps avoiding it through propping up those in need with state benefits. Dependency and vulnerability nowadays tend to be associated with shame, with revealing something about oneself that ought not to be displayed and ought not to be there in the first place.

The Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud puts his finger on the relationship between cultural change and a change in the feeling of shame. Traditional shame in the form of embarrassment is on the decline. Nevertheless ‘the story of present-day Western culture [is] not that of a lost shame but rather of a transported shame.’ This formulation accords well with the picture I have tried to present. As Skårderud makes clear, the most important transportation – and change – is from a collective to an individual norm. The transportation of shame towards the individual and his psychological register and resources does not mean that shame disappears, but that ‘we lose a language about it. Shame becomes more silent and more lonely. It becomes less distinct.’⁴⁴ Why less distinct? One of the main reasons is that the premises and ideals of our age’s one-sided preoccupation with self-development are unclear. For what is self-realization when it comes to it? What is authenticity? Are there undisputable and generally valid standards to go by? How can the individual feel certain of having reached the goal?

There are no simple answers here, no answers that remove the individual’s doubt about the tenability of his own efforts and performance, let alone the never really overcome doubt: am I good enough? The situation is indeed confusing and ambiguous. On the one hand, much would seem to indicate that the form of individualization we are talking about has increased with subjectivism and relativism as a result. A striking sign that this is true is how difficult it has become in our society to criticize the choices of action another person makes. What right have I to criticize your choices, your preferences, your values and ideals? Especially explicitly moral criticism, with a tinge of condemnation (other people’s private consumption, for example) constantly runs the risk of being perceived as moralistic, as a paternalistic ‘know-all’ attitude, i.e. something everyone would like to be spared. To have the nerve just to come here and interfere, without being asked, in my private decisions and preferences – who is entitled to such mingling with the affairs of others? What is reprehensible is not the object of the criticism. It has been shifted from the object or issue to the criticizer, or more precisely to a person at all raising any criticism of others’ actions. Individualization in general and the ideal of authenticity in particular are undermining the potential of criticism and correctives, because issue and person are now so intimately interwoven – in terms of both experience and norm – that the former division between them disappears. Correction has almost become synonymous with molestation.

However, this – conventionally culture-critical – picture is far from being the whole story. With the aid of Skårderud, we can see that although the moral practice of criticizing the behaviour of others has become more difficult, this does not necessarily mean the end of shame in our culture. The basic structure of shame remains intact: shame about oneself in relation to the other/others. All the same, what is changing is the three instances that constitute and determine the structure of shame in a lived, psychological sense, namely, the self, others, and the culture that mediates the relationship between the former two. Modern culture is open. Therefore, more possibilities means an endless number of alternatives but at the same time, fewer sheet anchors, less clarity, less unambiguity and objectivity – and limits that become increasingly unclear. Just as in previous ages, shame, as Skårderud says, is ‘an affect that, consciously or unconsciously, is fuelled by the discrepancy between self-ideal and realization. Shame emerges from this tension between how I wish to be perceived and how I feel that I am perceived.’⁴⁵ The radical openness of culture, its porous nature, its quality of being a melting-pot for the new, for all sorts of change, means that the individual is thrown back on himself and his own ongoing choices of cultural yardsticks – knowing full well that all such supra-individual references are themselves in a process of restless change and are therefore unable to provide the individual with a hold, something firm to hold on to in his efforts to ascertain whether he is being successful in his self-realization.

Neither party has the answer. To be thrown back on oneself and one’s own resources, since culture – like the omnipresent market – is constantly supplying new option portfolios rather than answers and yardsticks, means being reminded of one’s own dependency and vulnerability, one’s own aloneness in the throes of choices, because it now becomes apparent that mastery cannot be attained by relying solely on one’s own, individualistically conceived resources from one’s own breast. Independence and autonomy begin to crack, to betray the fact that they are not what is given, but presuppose more profound and underlying fundamental conditions, conditions that reveal that the self-realization project in an individualistic sense is an illusion, and a dangerous one at that. The uncovering of this arrogance causes pain, pain in the form of shame that is fuelled by a sense of sub-optimal performance, by not realizing enough of one’s presumed potential: my shame is more about myself than towards the other/others. Shame takes the form of self-conflict – manifested as self-disgust, as strict self-control regimes such as eating disorders, or sadomasochistic sex, or piercing or other forms of self-injury – more than the conflicts of the individual with others or the major society, a conflict traditionally fuelled by the individual realizing ‘too much’, by way of transgressing limits of behaviour and violating standards of conduct established by tradition and upheld by the ‘collective conscious’ of society (to refer to the perspective of Emile Durkheim’s classic work The Suicide).⁴⁶

In times of violent societal changes that individuals do not perceive they can influence themselves, changes of the type they feel they are subject to and steamrollered by, it becomes a question of finding something at any rate that can be brought under complete control, something that allows the feeling of powerlessness to be replaced by a feeling of power and actual control, where I do the forming rather than being formed – even if the price of gaining such control means, among other things, withdrawing from the big, unsafe world out there to what is close and my own – to I, me, mine: depoliticization and narcissism as two sides of the same process.

What could be more natural in such a situation than to focus on the body? After all, the body is mine, it is myself. The ‘artists of starving’ that Skårderud writes about illustrate an outcome of what I am referring to. The anorexic girl who walks past the outdoor restaurant where all the others are sitting stuffing themselves with rich food, with their bodies distending, can experience this moment, this eminently visible contrast, as proof of her own sovereignty and power and of other people’s weakness. To form the body, to compel it, to conquer one’s needs and their dictates, to let the will decide over or regularly set everything ‘natural’ and biological out of action, is one of the many possible interpretations of people who present it as a choice – against the large backdrop of all that is non-chosen, that which is inflicted or imposed on one’s life – to place everything to do with the body under a particularly strict regime of self-control where the body is punished or rewarded, depending on the nature of the disorder, in its enforced subservience to its lord and master. Interpreted as an extreme exercise in self-control, the need to control manifested here is something that calls for an explanation, that reveals that something has got completely out of control, so that the attempt to control the body compensates for a loss of control – a mastery strategy precipitated by powerlessness.

Applied to the youth violence we mentioned earlier: inconsideration towards others can go hand in hand with inconsideration towards oneself. The lack of care for others can exist side by side with a lack of care for oneself. Hardness towards others – often expressed as cynicism – is fuelled by working hard to be hard towards oneself. More profoundly, it is fuelled by denying, by trying to eradicate one’s own vulnerability. For vulnerability, one’s own no less than that of others, is now looked upon as identical with weakness. And weakness is what this world will not tolerate, because this world is all about each and everyone’s survival, that is to say, being strong and fighting so as always to come out on top. Moral admonishment regarding this way of ‘reading’ our society and claiming that egoism now rules supreme is to miss the point. Of course, I believe that the type of violence we are dealing with here in the examples from Germany must be condemned and punished. Of course, the guilty have a responsibility they must assume and that no analysis of society can alter. Let that be quite clear.

What we have to examine in greater depth, once the condemnation has been voiced and the courts have had their say, is the question of ‘Why?’ Leading on from the perspective adopted in this book, a possible explanation is offered by understanding such violence as the shifting of psychic pain. We know that the young people involved here in many cases indulge in self-injury as well as inflicting violence on concrete individuals. In both cases, limits are being transcended, put out of action; it is possibly the case that only the limits that one has created oneself are respected, those which by an act of will one has chosen. Seen in this way, the young people perhaps illustrate a more overlapping, widespread phenomenon than the one that has directly to do with violent crime and its causes: the fact that we live in a society that generally speaking has a sinking understanding and acceptance of limits of the kind that people – those who clash with and are subject to limits – have not created by a personal act of will, in the sense of having been able to choose. We only want to know about what we can choose for ourselves – and de-choose everything else.

The individuals that the capitalist economy requests in an age of neoliberalism, where the trend is for the whole of society with all its various organized activities to be transformed into a marketplace and arenas for everything that is consigned the nature of a commodity, have, to use a psychological term, weak egos. The individuals requested today are not strong-willed, independent-minded and autonomous, true to their own ideas; rather, they are heteronomous, driven by anxiety and insecurity and so easily manipulated by outside forces. The paradox is not to be denied: though this is often declared the era of individualism, conformism – in the gestalt of the individual’s obsession with adapting to the demands addressing him, especially in the workplace – is tightening its grip.

As convincingly shown in rich detail in C. Fred Alford’s book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, individuals who take the ethos of individualism at its word and who take an independent stand on ethically sensitive issues, for instance by openly protesting against unethical policies practised by their own organization, are typically met with a whole battery of devices of rejection, being frozen out by colleagues and being ignored by those at the top, thus setting in motion a process often ending with the autonomous individual being declared psychologically unsta...