Document Type : Original Article
Author
Assistant Professor and Faculty Member, Department of Islamic Studies, Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, Iran
10.22034/api.2024.2020761.1005
Abstract
Pain and suffering are inescapable and in conflict with the concept of health. In a contradictory view, while taking the help of the protective mechanism of pain to understand the tissue defect of the body and trying to repair it, one should also try to eliminate pain at the same time. The aim of this article is to explain the sometimes paradoxical characteristics of pain such as indescribability, invisibility, lack of external object, focusing the subject's attention on the body, certainty and skepticism, changeability and stability, spatiality and non-spatiality, generative and destructiveness, and the unity and duality of the subject and object of pain. The phenomenological approach, due to its attention and emphasis on the mental and internal experience of the person involved in pain, considers it as a way of life, experiencing the world and socializing with other people and does not consider it merely a minor disturbance in the specific biological function of the body. This approach, based on the first-person experience of pain, explains the impact of pain on agency, autonomy, goals, ideals, social relationships, individual freedom, one's perception of time, etc. - all of which are components of the lived, not biological, body of the individual. Merleau-Ponty considers the body to be the fundamental basis and condition of human existence. From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, human existence is embodied through his perceptual experience through the senses of sight, touch, etc., and any change that occurs in the body and physical capacity transforms the subjectivity and subjectivity of the individual and his relationship with the environment. Therefore, the position of humans as embodied consciousness in Merleau-Ponty's thought requires special attention to the concept of physical pain, which this innovative research addresses.
Keywords