Pain (philosophy)
A critical issue in philosophy is the role of pain and pleasure. Two near contemporaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Sade had very different views on these matters. Bentham saw pain and pleasure as objective phenomena, and defined utilitarianism on that principle. However the Marquis de Sade offered a wholly different view - which is that pain itself has an ethics, and that pursuit of pain, or imposing it, may be just as useful and just as pleasurable, and that this indeed is the purpose of the state - to indulge the desire to inflict pain in revenge, for instance, via the law (in his time most punishment was in fact the dealing out of pain). The 19th century view in Europe was that Bentham's view had to be promoted, de Sade's (which it found painful) suppressed so intensely that it - as de Sade predicted - became a pleasure in itself to indulge. The Victorian culture is often cited as the best example of this hypocrisy. In the 20th century, Michel Foucault observed that the biomedical model of pain, and the shift away from pain-inducing punishments, was part of a general Enlightenment invention of Man, a concept that simply did not exist prior to that intellectual shift - the idea of species-wide empathy was literally created, in which, the pain of the punished is itself a pain to the punisher, and so on. The body, of course, remains an object, and so a subject-object problem arises in many cases. Consider the problem of considering the body and its irritation (to use an objective word) as a moral duty: hygiene for instance is something advised and imposed by the culture, which may irritate the child for instance, but may avoid (according to the culture) a greater pain in future. Descartes' Error is one of many works that questions the idea that the mind and body are only linked by imagination, and suggests that they are also much linked by socializations of pain and of pleasure. It is only we who can know the meaning of our individual pain. But it is that pain which gives us the motivation to do something to avoid giving it to others. Empathy itself relies on this very socialization which Foucault identified as having arisen as a cultural norm only in the 18th century. Today, presumably painful experiences are often viewed on television, and we are encouraged by media presentations to identify strongly with pain of "our troops" and sometimes "civilians", but not in general "their troops" or "enemies", whose pain is abstracted and invisible, often not even summed up as statistics.
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