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The Meaning of Pain and the Pain of Meaning: A Bio-Hermeneutical Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2021

Teodora Manea
Teodora Manea*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
*
teodora@liverpool.ac.uk
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Abstract

My main interest here is to look at pain as a sign of the body that something is wrong. I will argue that there is a meaning of pain before and after an illness is diagnosed. An illness contains its own semantic paradigm, but the pain before the diagnosis affects the pace of life, not only by limiting our interactions, but also as a struggle with its meaning and a reminder of mortality.

My main approach is what I call bio-hermeneutics, an extension of medical hermeneutics branching out from the Continental hermeneutical tradition. As such, I will explore the connection between pain and language, temporality, dialectics, and ontology. Given the centrality of language in constructing the meaning of pain, my analysis is informed by the semantics (looking at pain metaphors), syntax (pain as incoherence), and pragmatics (pain as companion) of expressing pain.

The last section explores the meaning of pain in connection with death, as memento mori. Revisiting an old definition of philosophy as melete thanatou, or ‘rehearsal of death’, I will reflect on the difficulty of finding meaning not only for pain, but also for death as cessation of all existential possibilities.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 90: Death and Meaning , October 2021 , pp. 215 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2021

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