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The origins of the phenomenology of pain: Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl

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Abstract

The following investigation aims to determine the historical origins of the phenomenology of pain. According to my central thesis, these origins can be traced back to an enthralling discussion between Husserl and two of his most important teachers, Brentano and Stumpf. According to my reconstruction of this discussion, while Brentano defended the view that all feelings, including pain, are intentional experiences, and while Stumpf argued that pain is a non-intentional feeling-sensation, Husserl of the Logical Investigations provides compelling resources to resolve the polemic between his teachers by showing how pain can be conceived as a pre-intentional experience. According to my argument, this largely forgotten discussion is of significance not only because it enriches our understanding of pain, but also because it modifies the phenomenological conception of consciousness. Thus in the concluding section, I show why the Husserlian resolution of the controversy between Brentano and Stumpf is of importance for our understanding of the central phenomenological theme—intentionality.

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Notes

  1. See Husserl (1984); for the English translation, see Husserl (2000). In what follows, I will quote this text following the established custom in phenomenological literature: Hua XIX/1 + page number for the German edition. References to the English translation will be provided separately.

  2. See Stumpf (1924).

  3. Brentanto’s critique of Stumpf can be found in Brentano (1907, pp. 119–125). For Stumpf’s response, see Stumpf (1917, pp. 4–100).

  4. Brentano’s conception of descriptive psychology is articulated especially clearly in Brentano (1982); for the English translation, see Brentano (1995). Husserl’s commitment to descriptive psychology is especially strongly pronounced in the introduction to the first edition of the Logical Investigations (Hua XIX/1 24; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 262). Although Stumpf’s contributions to descriptive psychology are scattered throughout numerous works, the following reference deserves special emphasis (Stumpf 1906, pp. 3–40).

  5. This methodological orientation remained intact throughout subsequent reflections on pain in classical phenomenology, which we find in the works of Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, F.J.J. Buytendijk, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Henry, among others. This very same orientation remains at the core of the more recent phenomenological analyses of pain, as exemplified by the works of by Drew Leder, Christian Grüny, Arne Johan Vetlesen, Agustín Serrano de Haro, and Dermot Moran.

  6. See in this regard Scarry (1985, pp. 3–5, 161–162).

  7. Brentano (1907, p. 121).

  8. Melzack and Casey (1964, p. 423).

  9. Stumpf’s “Über Gefühlsempfindungen” (1907) is the earliest presentation of Stumpf’s position regarding sense-feelings in print. What is curious about this work is the very fact that here Brentano’s name is not mentioned even once. Stumpf’s silence is quite telling: it intimates that his standpoint with regard to such experiences as pain is an implicit critique of Brentano’s position.

  10. Brentano (1907, p. 121).

  11. Brentano (1907, p. 122).

  12. See Stumpf (1917, p. 9).

  13. Stumpf (1917, pp. 6–7).

  14. Thus Stumpf’s earlier reference to the theory of knowledge in “Apologie der Gefühlsempfindungen” is to be understood as a suggestion that sensations are no more objective than feeling-sensations.

  15. See Stumpf (1907, p. 9).

  16. “The sensation of psychology is any sense-process that cannot be further analysed by introspection: every one of the forty thousand lights and colours that we can see, every one of the eleven thousand tones that we can hear, is a psychological sensation. The sensations of psychophysics, on the other hand, are the sense-correlates of the elementary excitatory processes posited by a theory of vision or audition or what not” (Titchener 1973, p. 7).

  17. Titchener (1973, p. 8).

  18. See Brentano (1929); for the English translation, see Brentano (1981).

  19. This should not be taken to mean that Stumpf explicitly denies pain’s indubitability. Rather, Brentano’s provocations notwithstanding, Stumpf refuses to take a stance with regard to it. This is an issue I will return to below.

  20. Similarly, in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano suggests that the structure of pain-experience is analogous to the structure of acoustic experience. It is only by equivocation that we identify particular sounds as pleasant or unpleasant. Reflection on experience makes clear that it is not sounds themselves (which are physical phenomena), but the hearing of sounds (which are mental phenomena) that can obtain emotional characteristics. Analogously, it is not the physical condition of our bodies, but rather the sensing of this condition, that can be experienced as painful or pleasant. While the physical condition is the primary object, the sensing of this condition is the secondary object of pain-experience, and it is to this secondary object that the emotion of love or hate is directed. See Brentano (1874, pp. 101–131, esp. pp. 104–111); for the English translation, see Brentano (1973, pp. 59–77, esp. pp. 61–65).

  21. Stumpf, admittedly, has the resources to respond to Brentano’s view. To be sure, one can love one’s pain just as one can hate it. Yet in Stumpf’s view, this act of love or hate is something added onto a full-fledged experience of pain: pain is painful before we hate it or love it.

  22. Brentano (1907, p. 122).

  23. As Denis Fisette has persuasively shown in his “Love and Hate: Brentano and Stumpf on Emotions and Sense Feelings,” Stumpf had introduced the distinction between emotions and feeling-sensations as early as 1899. “In a lengthy letter dated 18 August 1899, Brentano acknowledges receipt of Stumpf’s paper and reproaches him for departing from the original doctrine…. Brentano blames Stumpf for ignoring his own doctrine regarding affects” (Fisette Fisette 2009a, b, p. 119).

  24. See James (1980, pp. 442–486).

  25. Hua XIX/1 404; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 571).

  26. Hua XIX/1 406; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 572).

  27. See especially Fisette (2010).

  28. As Agustín Serrano suggests, “concerning pain or pleasure we certainly deal with a conscious experience, but it is a non-intentional one, a state of mind in which nothing at all is primarily grasped or represented, in which by itself there is no objective term towards which a conscious intention is directed…. In conclusion, pain is not an intentional object grasped or apprehended, nor is it either an act of grasping and feeling; it is only sensation and affective” (Serrano 2011, p. 388).

  29. See Scheler (2004); for the English translation, see Scheler (1973).

  30. See Sartre (1968); for the English translation, see Sartre (1956).

  31. In Husserl’s words, “our sensations here receive an objective ‘interpretation’ or ‘taking-up.’ They themselves are not acts, but acts are constituted through them, wherever, that is, intentional characters like a perceptual interpretation lay hold of them, and as it were animate them. In just this manner it seems that a burning, piercing, boring pain, fused as it is from the start with certain tactual sensations, must itself count as a sensation. It functions at least as other sensations do, in providing a foothold for empirical, objective interpretations” (Hua XIX/1 406; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 573).

  32. Hua XIX/2 770-771; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 866).

  33. Hua XIX/1 410; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 575).

  34. As Husserl himself puts it in a footnote, “Naturally I reject Brentano’s doctrine that presentative acts, in the term of acts of feeling-sensations, underlie acts of feeling” (Hua XIX/1 408; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 574).

  35. Hua XIX/1 409; for the English translation, see Husserl (2000, p. 574).

  36. Even though Brentano has accused Stumpf that the latter’s analysis of pain is physiological (the very fact that this is an accusation is quite telling), a closer look reveals that for better or worse, Stumpf’s analysis is just as psychological as Brentano’s. For Stumpf, just as for Brentano and the early Husserl, the real subject of pain is consciousness and not the body.

  37. See especially Husserl (1952); for the English translation, see Husserl (1989).

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    Saulius Geniusas

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Geniusas, S. The origins of the phenomenology of pain: Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl. Cont Philos Rev 47, 1–17 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9283-3

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