Pain and Sedimentation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ef.355952Keywords:
Pain, Sedimentation, Temporality, Husserl, Phenomenology, Phenomenology of painAbstract
This article explores the notion of pain in relation to temporal experience. I engage in the question of whether pain is necessarily a conscious experience. I begin by clarifying the Husserlian concept of sedimentation, and I show how this concept helps us understand the temporal structures of pain experience. The exploration of sedimented, implicit experiences is first analyzed phenomenologically, drawing mainly on Husserl’s C Manuscripts. It is then applied to different medical cases, highlighting the paradoxical force of the past in the experience of pain. I further show that, in another sense, anticipation also shapes painful experiences. The recognition of these aporetic situations in the experience of pain, analyzed along with two types of consciousness, explicit and implicit, raises the further question of whether it is possible to experience “unnoticed pain” in the present. This phenomenon can be explained based on Merleau-Ponty's distinction between original sedimentations and secondary sedimentations; these first ones, apparently contradictory, can nevertheless be interpreted as conscious in the modality of inattention. While both thematic and co-attended experiences belong to the arc of intentionality, unnoticed pain has a significantly more complex structure.
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