Pain

Serving as the backdrop to issues such as torture and cruelty, political theorists approach pain in terms of its sociolinguistic ambiguity. To political theorists, the central question is not only how to define pain from a physiological perspective, but also how to see pain as a world-altering force that influences our understanding of agency, community, and government.

The first thing to note about these issues is how the meaning of pain has changed throughout the history of political thought. In Ancient Greece, there were as many as six groups of words linked up with pain, stretching from a shooting pain (odunè) to feelings of mourning (penthos) and worry (kèdos). The church fathers, above all Augustine, limited these meanings to a paradigm in which pain was a sign of sin and human finitude. Encouraged by the Cartesian revolution in modern philosophy and science, this paradigm was replaced by the competing visions of liberalism and utilitarianism, which interpreted pain as either a physiological disturbance that one defines on an individual basis or as lack of pleasure that decreases a society's overall happiness.

Contemporary theorists focus on issues of knowledge and politics following from these modern visions of pain. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, for example, Richard Rorty affirms the claim by Judith Shklar that cruelty is the worst thing we do, but goes on to criticize liberals and utilitarians for claiming to know the difference between justifiable and nonjustifiable pain. Such knowledge is groundless, Rorty argues, foregrounding the contingency of our desire to avoid suffering. In another critique, Wendy Brown draws on Nietzsche to identify what she calls “wounded attachments.” Wounded attachments arise when a person or a group blames someone else for the pain they feel from not being their own masters, and in turn bases their identity on the pleasure that arises from this blaming. According to Brown, these attachments define liberal democracies, which undermine the goal of freedom as self-mastery by relying on, and in some cases promoting, cultural and economic inequalities.

A set of themes has emerged from these critiques. First, without a physiological essence, pain is a politicized phenomenon whose meaning depends on issues of culture, economics, and religion. Not only does this view collaborate with neurological studies focusing on chronic pain, it underscores the value of approaching pain in a contextually informed manner. Second, visions of and attitudes to pain help to shape political action. The visions and attitudes do so because they define the limit between the tolerable and the intolerable, and because this limit directs our notion of legitimacy. In an age where torture, cruelty, and genocide remain high on the agenda, pain will thus continue to preoccupy political theory.