by Greg Goode
Unambiguity. The sensations of pain tell me quite clearly what they are and what needs to be done about them. No need for language, culture or any of that stuff.
Immorality. Denying that pain truly exists is immoral! If everyone thought this way, the world would collapse in a moral disaster.
Great! These common objections are now on the table. We’ll respond to all of them below.
But first we need to review what the object of refutation is. We are not refuting the conventional existence of pain or of unpleasant experience in general. We are refuting the idea that pain is pain because of an essence that it carries all by itself. We are pointing to the holistic nature of experience, saying that even pain doesn’t come pre-identified as pain, but depends on other experiences, other designations. Even though pain hurts, it doesn’t have an essence. And because it doesn’t have an essence, pain can morph into other things. In fact, it is the very emptiness of pain that allows for pain to come to an end.
In the following pages, we will answer the objections to the inherent meaning that pain seems to have.
Answer to Intensity. “My pain is truly real, because it’s so intense.”
To say that experiential intensity is a good indicator for realness is like saying playing music more loudly makes it real. The realness of music does not depend on its volume. But if you do believe intensity shows pain is real, then where do you draw the line? Just where does pain switch from being unreal to being real? Where is the threshold? Obviously such a threshold can’t be pinpointed. This shows that intensity is not a good marker to distinguish between real and unreal.
Answer to Persistence. “Physical pain is real and unavoidable. Emptiness can’t talk that away.”
To say that empty pain shouldn’t hurt is like saying that recognizing the color blue as empty implies that we don’t perceive blueness anymore. The latter is obviously neither the case, nor desirable. The Buddhist metaphor of saying the world is like an illusion is a teaching metaphor, not an indicator of non-existence. Pain can be there with its usual phenomenal qualities and appear to be illusion-like at the same time.
We already mentioned that the idea that recognizing pain as empty should make it go away is a misunderstanding. But let’s look at the pain experience in more detail to see if there is anything solid about it or whether it leads necessarily to a particular kind of suffering. First, focusing your attention on your own pain sensations shows that pain is not a solid and constant object, but rather a symphony of changing sensations. On another level, too, the experience of pain is not solid either, and differs widely depending on whether it is experienced as part of a spiritual journey, something I’m entirely helpless about, or something that is sought out, let’s say, in an erotic encounter.
Many people for whom pain is part of a spiritual quest report that it doesn’t induce suffering at all. Thus the pain experience is crucially dependent on the meaning we assign to it. Other dependencies include, for example, the fact that fear intensifies the pain experience and good social support lowers it. The claim that you can get between such an obviously mediated description of pain and its “pure,” inherent content seems to be pure dogmatism and without evidence.
If you’d like to know more about pain’s individual, cultural and historical dependencies, David Morris’ book The Culture of Pain (Morris, 1993) offers a comprehensive review.
Answer to Unambiguity. “The sensations of pain tell me quite clearly what they are and what needs to be done about them.”
On the contrary, pain doesn’t come with a fixed meaning. It doesn’t always hurt. It depends on how we think of it. For example, what if you are an athlete who says, “No pain, no gain”? Back in the 1970’s, I (Greg) used to live in Panama, where I lifted weights at a local YMCA. One of our colleagues was called “Sweet Life Honey.” He loved to do his repetitions with the barbell until his muscles burned with “pain.” When he got to that point, he would drop his barbell, shake his arms, and look around the gym with a big smile, saying, “Sweet life honey!”
Wittgenstein argues that understanding how to use the word “pain” is taught to a child by its parents based on public pain behavior, such as crying. Reference to inner states has no place in this as obviously parents can’t look into our head. To illustrate this point, Wittgenstein introduces the famous analogy of the “beetle in the box”:
Meditation – The Beetle in the Box
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. –But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? – If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
Wittgenstein (2009)
Pure, inherently existing pain sensations hidden within the “box” of our mind seem irrelevant for how we talk and act about pain. So why claim their existence?
Answer to Immorality. “Denying that pain truly exists is immoral!”
Once again, we emphasize that seeing pain as empty doesn’t deny its existence or experiential quality. Seeing pain as empty does not mean we are complacent or cavalier about it. In fact, seeing pain as empty gives us more ways to help address it! When we see pain as empty, we see it as dependent on many other factors, such as general health, economic and social conditions. This gives us more and more ways to work with these other factors to help alleviate pain. Buddhists and others who see pain as empty nevertheless work tirelessly to help others in the reduction of pain and suffering.
So in conclusion, to think of pain as an inherently existent mental state does not accord with our experiences surrounding pain. Our experiences of pain show pain to be a highly flexible state, responsive to conditions. Pain depends significantly on our language about it, on the personal meaning we assign to pain, and the personal, cultural and social environment in which pain is experienced.
How Can Holism Help?
When my meanings depend on other things, so do I. When I depend on other things in a holistic way, the conception of my inherent self dissolves. The felt borders and walls between me and others begin to dissolve. I feel lighter and freer, more expanded. This is a big step in seeing my self as empty.
Holism dissolves the notion of fixed meanings of events in our lives, past, present and future. It also liberates us from the idea that there are rigid rules or uncontestable cosmic laws, because the experiment of radical translation shows that the idea of absolute necessity doesn’t hold water. The dependency of even our inner states on public language helps us break out of the Cartesian theater which is usually the place where we think these mental states reside, potentially disconnected from everything else. Getting out of the Cartesian theater increases your sensitivity to others, lessens your self-absorption and sense of alienation and increases your happiness. Like the notion of dependent arising in the original emptiness teachings, this argument is a master argument that can be leveled against any object perceived to exist inherently within the world, within our self, or even against rationality itself.
Meditation – Is the Past Fixed?
The web of belief changes over time. Therefore meanings of thoughts and memories change over time as well. Take a childhood memory, possibly painful, that has or has had a strong, fixed meaning for you. Consider how your beliefs about psychological theories and other circumstances have changed over time. Now in the light of that, has the meaning of the childhood memory also changed? If yes, does it even make sense to say that any event from your past has any fixed meaning? Can you discover any determined past at all?
Meditation – Is Future Meaning Already There?
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p; Consider that your web of belief will likely undergo some major changes in the future. Can there be any fixed meaning that applies to an event? Can you make any real predictions about what events happening now will mean to you in the future? When looking back at past memories, it is also not possible to predict their future meaning due to the many surprises that will likely happen.
Meditation – Connecting Things
Find any object in the room or imagine any object anywhere. Then go to one of the news channels on TV or the internet. Look at the top story. Then trace as many connections between these two things as you can. Notice that you are also connected to both these points, not as their center, but as another point. Another jewel in Indra’s Net; another intersection in the web of experience.
Meditation – Interbeing
This is Thich Nhat Hanh’s (2009) beautiful and well-known meditation on “Interbeing” (In: The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra):
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. ... If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper...
The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. ... You cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper... As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.
More Quotes for Reflection
The following quotes give you another opportunity to reflect on holism, radical translation and their many surprising consequences:
Davidson on Beliefs:
Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.
Davidson (2001)
Quine on Beliefs:
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer... For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
Quine (1951)
Quine on the Revision of Statements:
If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement – especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein, Newton, or Darwin, Aristotle?
Quine (1951)
Quine on Truth:
In their elusiveness, at any rate – in their emptiness now and again except relative to a broader background – both truth and ontology may in a sudden rather clear and even tolerant sense be said to belong to transcendental metaphysics.
Quine (1968)
Quine on What Really Exists:
What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity. A question of the form “What is an F?” can be answered only by recourse to a further term: “An F is a G.” The answer makes only relative sense: sense relative to the uncritical acceptance of “G”.
Quine (1968)
Indra’s Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.
cook (1977)
The Radical Interdependence of Meaning – Concluding Meditation
This meditation combines several ways of regarding the world in ways that do not assume fixed, inherent meaning. Meaning does not come glued to objects or mental states. Instead, meaning depends on many other things, including other meanings, contexts, attitudes, and ways of thinking, speaking and acting.
Take a few moments and imagine your own web of belief. See it as built from a number of interrelated sentences and beliefs. Now imagine how everything that exists in the (your) world is described within that web. This includes the earth, the stars, your house, your body – all things. It’s not so much that the stars “themselves” are in the web, but that their descriptions are. But there is no inherent difference: the descriptions of stars intimately “touch” the stars, because as we’ve seen, no objects in the world exist independently of our theories (and vice versa). The objects and their descriptions are inseparable. So it is quite reasonable to say that your web of belief intimately touches the whole universe. See if you can feel that.
Notice that you yourself are not an external onlooker. You are not outside of the web of belief looking in. You’re in it. Not in the way that a fly is caught in a spider web, but in a way that every belief you regard as true about yourself is located as a node within your web of belief. Every belief you might have about anything is in there.
Notice how all the sentences that describe the experience of being you are harmoniously contained within this web of belief. Notice that even the thoughts you are having right now are there. All these beliefs that make up “you” are spread out, of course, within the web of belief. There isn’t one single node or belief that is you. Thus in a way, you have dissolved into this centerless web of belief. And through the web’s holistic nature, whatever you are within the web of belief is intimately connected to everything else in the universe, because everything else also touches this web of belief, just as you do. See if you can enjoy this intimate connection with all there is.
Now notice how important language is within this web. But that language in which we describe the world and ourselves, was given to us through our culture. Whatever beliefs we can think and articulate about ourselves are within that language. It is not just the case that we speak our language, our languag
e also speaks and makes us. This is another way we can think of our self dissolving within this web of belief. Our self, given to us by culture, is quite an impersonal thing.
Take again what you are thinking right now and notice how it is already contained within the web of belief. There is another beautiful intimacy you can feel. The language which touches you so deeply has itself been created by all the human beings before you and will in some form touch all the human beings that will ever come. So you are intimately connected to all human beings as well.
We’re never an isolated onlooker to the web, we are always already dissolved within. Perhaps you can think of the future as simply a giant wave moving forward, the wave being made up of all those beliefs. And you’re somehow a significant part of that wave. Impersonal, yet also beautiful.
But we can go even deeper by recognizing that even the tools of the philosophical analysis that we just completed are themselves only a part within this web and not outside as an independent reference point guaranteeing the “Truth.” So even our insights from this meditation dissolve. Having a flash of this all at once can open us to a global sense of emptiness.
References
Heal, Jane (1999). “Radical Interpretation.” In: B.Hale and C.Wright (eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Morris, David (1993). The Culture of Pain. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1968). “Ontological Relativity.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 65, No. 7, pp. 185-212.
Thich Nhat Hanh (2009). The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
CHAPTER 15 – RECOGNIZING THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN
The target in this chapter is the givenness of sense data. In the way that we usually think about perception and knowledge, certain things like a red patch or a hard texture are taken to be “given” to knowledge. They are taken to be basic, context-free examples of irrefutable knowledge of the world. This knowledge is supposed to serve as the foundation for further instances of knowledge. In this way, our knowledge of the world is built up. So givenness is one hopeful palliative for Cartesian anxiety. We will show how this notion of the Given makes no sense when looked into deeply. Our approach is inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, especially Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Sellars 1997).