Pains are soul-ly. They are not part of the matter of us, they are part of our form—our soul—and so they refuse to be contained in our brain. Pain is not “in the body”; rather, pain is a certain kind of life the body may have. For instance, pain is the meaning of some behavior; it is not something that is there in addition to behavior.
Learning (remembering) to think about pain as a form of embodiment can have a remarkable relaxing effect on the philosopher-of-mind’s mind-muscles. It shows us where to look, it soothes the relevant thought-cramps. It is the kind of thing that shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. And I’m not saying it is easy to learn this: For one thing, pain is more obviously the form of some behavior than it is the form of embodiment of someone who keeps perfectly quiet and still. There are also difficulties connected to the differences between the ways in which this form of embodiment feels from a first-person and from a third-person perspective.
Now, even if we can learn to see pain as a form of embodiment, it will not completely eradicate the natural inclination to treat pains (and sensations, and feeling, and experiences in general) as objects; what could? What it does to that inclination is allow us to put it in perspective; it allows us to rethink this inclination, to put it in its proper place. In particular it allows us to put the inclination to treat pains and sensations as mental objects alongside the idea of them as forms of certain actions, behaviors, dispositions, and so on: to view the idea and the inclination in light of each other, and explore the relations between them.
More needs to be said both about the idea and about the inclination. But I’m now more interested in the inclination. The inclination to treat pains and sensations as objects is not just an inclination; it is a justified inclination—even if the justification is of no ordinary type. It is an inclination that is shared by all of us, despite contrasting grammatical commitments, and the reason why it is shared is that it captures the face—the aspect—that pains and sensations have for us.
Sensations and pains feel as if they have an independent existence: they seem like detachable pieces of our mind. Some thoughts that force themselves on us are like that too. We can have relations with them: entertain them, ignore them, be surprised by them, reject them, suspect them, endorse them, and so on. We want to capture a distinction between them and us—between our representations and the “I think” that always accompanies them. Perhaps even, sometimes, we don’t like the fact that the kind of existence these sensations and pains have is in us, through us: that they materialize through us, that they wear us like clothes. – This whole discussion can be taken as a partial answer to the hard problem of consciousness—at least when the problem is formulated in this way: ‘How can pains be objects, when they don’t have the grammar of objects?’
Now, if pains and sensations are truly forms of embodiment, if it is confused to think of them as objects “in” our soul, why do we still have such a strong inclination to think that? – A partial answer might be this: Perhaps this is the face that pains and sensations sometimes have for us, at least partly because, and to the extent that, we have them despite ourselves. We are passive with regard to our sensations; we are not their agents. We don’t sense or feel pain at will. And yet we enact them. We embody them. Perhaps this is why—this is how—it can become strange that they can be the form of our actions and dispositions: It makes it possible for us to get ourselves into a mindset from which this seems genuinely surprising: “How can something be the form of my behavior (pain behavior) while I’m passive with regard to it?”
Some questions:
1. Is the inclination to see pains and sensations as detachable objects a manifestation of the inclination we have sometimes to experience the limits of language as limitations, or might it sometimes be? By maintaining this inclination, are we expressing dissatisfaction with the very conditions that make it possible for us to make pains intelligible for ourselves in the first place?
2. Relatedly, is the inclination surmountable? Do we only experience it when we are in a philosophical mood—is it perhaps so by definition?
3. To the extent that the inclination to regard pains and sensations as objects is justified, does this tell us what pains and sensations are? Or does it merely reveal our attitude towards them? Is the description I gave of the attitude we have to pains, as reflected by the inclination to treat them as objects, is it correct only to the extent that it strikes a chord?
4. Might the idea of pain as a form of behavior, a form of embodiment more generally, although different from the inclination to see pains as objects, yet nourish from it? (Might this be part of the truth of the inclination somehow?) Are there elements of this form of embodiment—primarily perhaps the elements related to pain being forced on us—that not only give rise to the inclination to see pains as objects, but which cannot be accounted for except by employing the language of objects?
5. Two questions in connection with self-knowledge:
a. Is it part of what we need to do if we are to obey the Delphic imperative to know ourselves: to own our mental life, to accept it—not as ours, but as us? That is, are we to accept our pains and sensations and thoughts and wishes and knowledge and so on as the forms of our actions and dispositions and so on, and not as something we have relations with?
b. Is it another part of the task to accept that the principles of some of what we do, disposed to do, intend to do, and so on, are forced on us—that we are constantly forced to enact things despite ourselves?