Delving into the World of "Pain": Understanding, Experiencing, and Reacting to “Pain”

War and Chess Pieces

When one considers howmany such facts - habits, beliefs, - we take for granted in thinking or saying anything at all, how many notions, ethical, political, social, personal, go to the making of the outlook of a single person, however simple and unreflective, in any given environment, we begin to realize how very small a part of the total our sciences - not merely natural sciences, which work by generalizing at a high level of abstractiion, but the humane, ‘impressionistic’ studies, history, biography, sociology, introspective psychology, the methods of the novelists, of the writers of memoirs, of students of human affairs from every angle - are able to take in. And this is not a matter for surprise or regret: if we were aware of all that we could in principle be aware of we should swiftly be out of our minds. The most primitive act of observation or thought requires some fixed habits, a whole framework of things, persons, ideas, beliefs, attitudes to be taken for granted, uncriticized assumptions, unanalyzed beliefs. Out language, or whatever symbolism we think with, is itself impregnated by these basic attitudes. We cannot, even in principle, enumerate all that we know and believe, for the words or symbols with which we do so themselves embody and express certain attitudes which are ex hypothesi “encapsulated” in them, and not easily describable by them…There is no Archimedean point outside ourselves where we can stand in order to take up our critical viewpoint, in order to observe and and analyze all that we think or believe y simply inspecting it, all that we can be said to take for granted because we behave as thought we accepted it - the supposition if a self-evident absurdity. [Sense, 15-16]

The Shadow of the Players
In one of the tales which make up the series of the Mabinogion, two enemy kings play chess while in a nearby valley their respective armies battle and destroy each other. Messengers arrive with reports of the battle; the kings do not seem to hear them and, bent over the silver chessboard, they move the gold pieces. Gradually it becomes apparent that the vicissitudes of the battle follow the vicissitudes of the game. Toward dusk, one of the kings overturns the board because he has been checkmated, and presently a blood-spattered horseman comes to tell him: “Your army is in flight. You have lost the kingdom.” Edwin Morgan [Fantasy, 190]

When we survey our lives and endeavors we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society. The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave. [Einstein, 13]

Contents of this tag: