Pathei Mathos: The Political-Cognitive Value of Suffering

Chiurazzi, Gaetano

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_3

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Why? 48 44 See Chiurazzi (2012). 45 A phenomenological version of this argument is found in Madison (2013).…”

Section: Pain Work and The Meaning Of Sufferingmentioning

confidence: 94%

The phenomenology of chronic pain: embodiment and alienation

Svenaeus

2015

Cont Philos Rev

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This article develops a phenomenological exploration of chronic pain from a first-person perspective that can serve to enrich the medical third-person perspective. The experience of chronic pain is found to be a feeling in which we become alienated from the workings of our own bodies. The bodily-based mood of alienation is extended, however, in penetrating the whole world of the chronic pain sufferer, making her entire life unhomelike. Furthermore, the pain mood not only opens up the world as having an alien quality, it also makes the world more lonesome and poor by forcing the sufferer to attend to the workings of her own body. To suffer pain is to find oneself in a situation of passivity in relation to the hurtful experiences one is undergoing. In making the body and the world more unhomelike places to be in, pain also tends to rob a person of her language. Severe pain is hard to describe because it pushes the person towards the borderlines of imaginable experience and because it makes it hard to see any meaning and purpose in the situation one has been forced into. The analysis of chronic pain in the article is guided by the attempts made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger to understand the nature of human embodiment and existence, and also by descriptions of chronic pain found in the Swedish author Lars Gustafsson's novel The Death of a Beekeeper.

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“…Why? 48 44 See Chiurazzi (2012). 45 A phenomenological version of this argument is found in Madison (2013).…”

Section: Pain Work and The Meaning Of Sufferingmentioning

confidence: 94%

The phenomenology of chronic pain: embodiment and alienation

Svenaeus

2015

Cont Philos Rev

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The phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics

Svenaeus

2014

Theor Med Bioeth

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This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things-bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values-and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about (1) my embodiment, (2) my engagements in the world together with others, and (3) my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling (a mood), but as such, it has implications for and involves the person's entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood-as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments-but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person's identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances.

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Hay que Sufrir: The meaning of suffering among former Mexican American migrant farmworkers

Horner

Martinez

2015

Lat Stud

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Pathei Mathos: The Political-Cognitive Value of Suffering

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

The phenomenology of chronic pain: embodiment and alienation

The phenomenology of chronic pain: embodiment and alienation

The phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics

Hay que Sufrir: The meaning of suffering among former Mexican American migrant farmworkers

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