Pain as a category

I’m getting convinced that pain, or even physical pain, is a category that does not cut nature at the joints. Consider that the taste of mouldy bread is more unpleasant than a typical vaccination jab, but the jab is physically painful while the taste is not. So neither are all physical unpleasantnesses pains, nor is it even the case that pains are distingushed from other unpleasantnesses by intensity. (That said, it is likely true that among physical sensations, the very most unpleasant ones are all pains.)

So, pains seem to be a subtype of displeasures. Is it a subtype that cuts nature at the joints? If we could say that pain just is tactile displeasure, then that would help. But not all tactile displeasure is pain. If I have a calloused hand and I move it against a fuzzy cloth and feel the callouses catching on the cloth, that’s definitely unpleasant—but not the least painful. So only some tactile unpleasantnesses are pain.

What unifies the tactile unpleasantnesses that are pains? Is there a common feel that all the pains have and that the other unpleasantnesses don’t? I doubt it. A burning pain and a dull ache feel quite different, and what they have in common appear to be (a) their tactile nature and (b) their unpleasantness. But (a) and (b) do not distinguish pains from other tactile unpleasantnesses.

I suspect that pains are like fish, which are a paraphyletic group. (Coelacanths and lungfish are more closely related to humans than to tuna.) They do not mark a natural kind of sensation. There are many kinds of unpleasant tactile sensations, such as itch, excessive cold, unpleasant roughness, burning pain, stabbing pain, dull achy pain, etc., and the ones that we call “pain” have nothing special in common.

This point is even clearer if we do not limit ourselves to physical pain. For the pain of embarrassment is, if anything, closer to disgusting taste than to stabbing pain.

All this suggests to me that pain is not a useful philosophical category. Unpleasantness or displeasure is a useful category. Specific types of unpleasantness, some of which are pains, are also useful categories. But pain as such is not.

Physical and psychological pain

In English, we have a category “pain” which we subdivide into the “physical” and the “psychological”. But this taxonomy is misleading.

Consider the experiences of eating some intensely distasteful food—once as a kid I added chocolate chips to my tomato soup and it was awful—or of smelling a really nasty odor. These sensations are not pains. But, phenomenologically, the difference between these unpleasantness experiences and the physical pains does not seem greater than the difference between some of the psychological pains and the physical pains.

Reflection on the phenomenology does not, I think, reveal any good reason to classify physical pains and psychological pains in one natural category and the experiences of nasty taste or smell in another.

Nor does there seem to be any good reason to classify this way when one thinks of what the representational content of the experiences is. Physical pains seem to represent our body as damaged. Psychological pains seem to represent complex external states of affairs as bad, particularly in relation to ourselves. And bad taste seems to represent a food as bad for us. There is a common core in all these cases, and there does not seem to be a tighter common core to the physical and psychological pains taken as a unit.

Thus it seems to me that having a category of pain that includes physical and psychological pains but excludes the other unpleasant experiences I mentioned is like having a biological category of bovinoequines that comprises cows and horses but excludes donkeys. It’s just not a natural taxonomy, and unnatural taxonomies can mislead one in reflection.

I propose that the natural category here is the unpleasant, under which fall most physical pains, most psychological pains and a large host of other experiences. But there seem to be such things as pleasant or at least not unpleasant pains.)

One can have suffering without pain—I suffered when I had the soup with cholocate chips, but it didn’t hurt (except my pride in my culinary ideas). One can have pain without suffering. So the tie between pain and suffering is not very tight. But perhaps there is a tighter connection between suffering and the unpleasant. I now have two options that are worth exploring, both quite simple:

• suffering is unpleasantness

• suffering is significant unpleasantness.

We can talk of physical pains and psychological pains, but we need to be careful not to be misled by the repetition of the word “pain” into thinking there is a natural category that includes just these two subcategories of pains but excludes the others.

How do we divide up the unpleasant? One way is to base things on the representational content. Maybe all of the unpleasant represents a state of affairs as bad, but we can subdivide the bads. Here are some potentially natural subdivisions of bads:

• to self vs. not to self (more precisely: qua to self vs. not qua to self)

• non-instrumental vs. instrumental

• intrinsic vs. relational

• actual vs. potential

• past vs. present vs. future

• bodily vs. mental.

We get something a little bit like the English category of “pain” if we consider unpleasantness that represents non-instrumental intrinsic actual present bad to self. But not quite: many psychological pains are backward looking, and some are complex experiences that include components of representing bads to others.

Pain and unpleasantness

I just realized something that probably was obvious to many people: the opposite of the pleasant isn’t the painful, but the unpleasant. Great physical effort can be painful, but it could also just be effortful and unpleasant (though there can also be a pleasure mixed with the unpleasantness). An even clearer case is distasteful food, which is unpleasant but not painful to eat.

While it would sound wimpy to talk about “the problem of the unpleasant” in place of “the problem of pain”, pain isn’t in general worse than the non-painfully unpleasant. For instance, there are distasteful foods to which I would prefer the pain of a flu shot.

It may be that among physically unpleasant events, pains monopolize the top of the unpleasantness hierarchy (test case: extreme bitterness—maybe that’s actually painful?). So while some instances of non-painful physical unpleasantness are worse than some instances of painful physical unpleasantness, some instances of physical pain are worse than any non-painful physical unpleasantness. Because of this, we worry about “the problem of pain” rather than “the problem of unpleasantness”, and we talk of grievous emotions as psychological pain rather than psychological unpleasantness. Talk of “unpleasantness” implicates we are talking about something that isn’t severe.

Even further complicating matters, it seems plausible that there are instances of physical pain that aren’t actually unpleasant. Mild soreness after exercise—that feeling of muscles well-used but not abused—might be in that category. This may even be true of some cases of psychological pain. Someone close to you has died, and you’re too numb to feel grief. Then suddenly the grief floods in, tears flow. It’s painful, but it need not be unpleasant—unlike the numbness, which was definitely unpleasant. It might even be pleasant, the pleasure of emotions functioning properly.

I know that the standard way of analyzing cases like that of exercise soreness or a flood of tears is that there is an unpleasant core but it’s outbalanced by associated pleasures. But I think that may be mistaken. The pain is there, but I am not sure that there need be any unpleasantness. What we have is something that would have been unpleasant in isolation, but in conjunction with the rest of the context we get a complex feeling that is not unpleasant. This unpleasantness is perhaps something like the red, blue and green subpixels in the white areas of your screen—the subpixels each contribute to the color (if the blue weren’t there, the area would look yellow rather than white), and in isolation they would produce their respective colors, but in the context their color is lost. Likewise, it may be better phenomenology to say that in cases like these the pain would be unpleasant in isolation, but in the context its unpleasantness is lost.

If this is right, then philosophers really should be talking about the problem of unpleasantness rather than the problem of pain, simply being careful to cancel the implicature that the unpleasantness isn’t severe.