History of pain in the classical age

A Cartesian conception of pain

What would happen if someone put his hand in a fire without feeling any pain ? In the first book of Search for truth (1674), devoted to the errors of the senses, the Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) endeavors to imagine how an individual would behave with such a capacity. If his soul (because for a Cartesian, it is the soul that smells and not the body)

only realized what happens in her hand, when she burns, if she saw it only the movement and the separation of a few fibers, she would hardly put it in pain: and even she could sometimes by fantasy and by whim, take some satisfaction, like these whimsles who are entertaining to break in their outbursts and in their debauchery.

In other words, in the absence of the pain, this person not only would not be careful to withdraw his hand that he sees burning but, on the contrary, would apply to discover with interest what there is under his skin – as if it were placed in front of a radiography before the hour – and in what way a body, the fire, acts on another, his, until his complete destruction: besides, who never contemplated the spectacle of the spect. Foyer of a fireplace ?

In the work, which will be a date, which she devotes to philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of pain in France of the classical age (1630-1715 approximately), Raphaële Andrault makes this passage of the Search for truthwhich she calls “ transparent hand fiction (Analyzed p. 52-61 and p. 339-340), a typical case of the Cartesian treatment of the feeling of pain ; A treatment whose main characteristic consists in highlighting the fact that the physical pain lives, whether it is an injury, a cut, a bite or precisely a burn, does not teach us anything about the nature of the external bodies, but is above all useful, even necessary, to preserve OUR Body: Without pain, indeed, we simply would not hurt to keep it (p. 58).

The philosophers who adhere to this conception of pain-Malebranche in the first place, but also, among others, Johannes Clauberg (1622-1665), Louis de la Forge (1632-1666), Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) or François Lamy (1636-1711)-are explicitly in the slope The spirit and the body that René Descartes led (1596-1650). On the one hand, for the author of Metaphysical meditations (1641), Sensation (pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, etc.) does not look like To what causes it (the painful sensation, which is a mental state, does not resemble, for example, the triangular form of the arrow which caused it), because the soul and the body are two distinct substances ; On the other hand, from the Cartesian perspective, the soul is not housed in its body “ like a pilot in his ship “(On the fortune of this famous expression, see p. 31-51), but is on the contrary closely united to him, because” If this was not, when my body is injured, I would not feel for that pain, I who am only one thing that thinks, but I would be seen this wound by the only understanding, like a pilot sees by view if something breaks in his ship (…). »Salvating error in passing (we would also say a cunning of God, or of nature ?) that that caused by acute pain, because, as R. Andrault writes, “ By making me believe that “me”, who is a soul, I am my foot or my injured hand, (the pain) leads me to take care of it, and it is a good thing. (P. 49).

Phenomenon and philosophy

But what is this pain that plays a major argumentative role in Cartesians ? One of the great interests of R. Andrault’s book is to focus on the process of making this pain phenomenon (see p. 95-105 for this idea of ​​” manufactures phenomena », Resumption of Gaston Bachelard). Thus the Cartesians take as paradigm of pain what the author calls “ acute exogenous pain », That is to say, lively physical pain, discontinuous and caused by an external object: the burn caused by a fire, the wound by a sword, an arrow or the bite by a pin, among others. Each time an external body comes to divide the flesh, tear tissues and fibers, and it is such a tear – the author speaks of “ continuity solution (P. 105-112)-which causes the mental state of pain. As R. Andrault points out, in Descartes and Cartesians, stabbing injuries are a cause of pain that comes up frequently, especially because they “ exhibit mechanical causation at the origin of our sensations (P. 100).

We understand indeed why it is this acute exogenous pain – which everyone has been able to experience in their life – which is chosen as the archetypical phenomenon of pain: in these cases, everyone agrees to say that there is absolutely no resemblance between felt pain and the physical cause of pain. Built the phenomenon Pain is used to philosophythat is to say as a repertoire of arguments from which any Cartesian can draw at their will (p. 154 and 201). Let us take the famous case of the ghost pain of the amputees, often because of a war injury, which is used to plead in favor of both the dualism spirit-body and the cerebral centralization of pain. Evoking the case of a young girl to whom we had to cut half the arm and who “ However, did not leave to have various pains which she thought was in her hand that she no longer had “, Descartes concludes, in a peremptory way:” And it obviously shows that the pain of the hand is not felt by the soul as it is in the hand, but as it is in the brain (P. 61-76). Nothing is obvious in this conclusion, no offense to Descartes, which does not prevent Malebranche from taking up the same argument by radicalizing it, the reality of pain used this time to derealize our body. As R. Andrault writes, “ The experience of ghost pain leads Malebranche to assert that our sensations present us an “imaginary body” “(P. 79), as shown by this thought experience which requires a certain exercise of imagination:

And if, as it sometimes happens, we assumed (that those who have lost an arm) lose entirely the memory of what they were, and that he does not rest other meanings, than that by which they feel pain in their imaginary arm ; Certainly they could not persuade themselves that they do not have an arm in which they feel such cruel pain.

One could also mention the rapprochement between pain and sensitive qualities which aims to prove that neither of them are in the bodies: it does not look that the pain is in the sword that hurts me, so why do I say spontaneously that the fire is hot ? If the pain is not in the sword, the heat is not there either. The reader is therefore not in lack of evidence to ensure that, far from having obscured or minimized the phenomenon of pain before his serious taking into account in the Age of Enlightenment, Cartesianism, as well as the classical age more generally, have put it well at the heart of their reflection, as “ typical (P. 17), to think, in particular, the relationships between the mind and the body. These are “ Several clichés of the history of ideas and sensitivities (P. 344) which are thus invalidated.

Questions open to Cartesianism

However, the Cartesian paradigm of pain puts aside what is called today “ chronic pain “, By necessarily lively, but recurring, annoying, including migraines, back pain, belly, etc., which can be difficult to envisage as breaks or tears, in other words as” continuity solutions ». However, these chronic pains do not work as warnings, signals, which mobilize us and encourage us to protect our body from a danger. In addition, they are not necessarily caused by external bodies (p. 215-227). Under these conditions, the absence of resemblance between these chronic pain and their causes is not so easy to support. This is why these neither exogenous nor acute pains will be rather privileged by an adversary of Cartesianism about pain, namely Leibniz (1646-1716), according to whom, on the contrary, our pain must represent their causes in one way or another. As Leibniz writes:

It should not be imagined that these ideas as well as color or pain are arbitrary and without relation or natural connection with their causes: it is not the use of God to act with so little order and reason. I would rather say that there is a way of resemblance, not whole and so to speak In Terminisbut expressive, or of report, like an ellipse and even a parable or hyperbola resemble in some way the circle of which they are projection on the plane (…).

Leibniz does not share the approach “ functionalist “Pain specific to Cartesians, according to which” Explain the pain consists in saying what it is used for or is supposed to serve, to state the function of this mental event (P. 199). At home, “ Pain does not shine by its adaptive value for survival and body conservation “(P. 206), which is consistent with the land distrust of the philosopher with regard to the trend, imprint of anthropomorphism, which we have to” assign to certain states of fact an indexed function on our immediate interests (P. 204). In other respects, the opposition is undoubtedly less striking. With regard to the clear Cartesian separation between physical pain (a feeling) and sadness (a passion), Leibniz did not propose any precise articulation of these two dimensions, as R. Andrault points out (see p. 208) ; Their distinction seems to be relevant, within the framework of the Leibnizian system, only with animals (and human beings acting instinctively): they would consciously feel the pain but, having no capacity for reflection, would not be exposed to sorrow (p. 247).

There sentiencedefined as “ A type of consciousness under which animals would have pleasant or unpleasant subjective experiences “(P. 235), is only one of the challenges of the current debate to which the work refers, while remaining very rigorous in terms of historical reconstruction. Let us recall, as such, the joint reading that the author makes arguments on the pleasure and pain that Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) opposes Arnauld, on the one hand, and the article “ Painfulness is not a quale (2005) by Austen Clark, on the other hand. If for Bayle the specificity of pain coincides with its painful character and the latter has only a contingent bond with the state of the corresponding body (an injury, for example), the philosophy of the mind today looks at the reasons for making a dissociation between the displeasure that characterizes pain and any sensory content (see p. 331-337).

Over the pages, the theme of pain in the classical age is therefore extremely rich from a conceptual and completely fruitful point of view because of its philosophical implications. This is all the more remarkable since the study by R. Andrault is intended to be tightened in principle and explicitly takes its distance from long -term stories. There is no doubt Iron or fire constitutes convincing proof of the multiple virtues that “ A story in the thickness (P. 22) is likely to conceal.