“Pain is not something, but neither is it nothing.”

Intellect has published the edition of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities that Juliet Chambers-Coe and I dedicated to “Pain: Embodied Practice, Spiritual Resonance.” I titled my essay, “Life is pain au chocolat,” which functions as a stand-alone article and an introduction to this edition of the journal. I’ve decided to publish a section of my article here, the section in which I talk with Wittgenstein GPT, an AI bot designed by Martin Puchner.

—Cover image by Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0)—

Until the use of “pain” stands naked in our lives

Up to this point, I understand that whatever pain may be, we ought to treat it, which is to say travel through it, negotiate, make peace, and enjoy, even if the enjoyment hurts. More than that, when pain is present, we turn toward it and understand the turning-toward as a spiritual practice that opens to pain rather than the typical daily act of compartmentalizing and “getting on with” whatever we have in front of us. But the philosopher in me still wants to know what exactly pain is? Or, rather, what do I mean when I speak of pain? These questions lead me to another core principle of performance philosophy, which is to never take for granted what I think thinking is. In the same way performance philosophers ask what else philosophy may be—besides, say, analytic logic or deconstruction or critical theory— we can ask what else pain may be besides the readymade definition that paints the word and experience as bad and unwanted. These days, when I grapple with how I think about how I think and how else I might think about anything, I turn to WittgensteinGPT, designed by Martin Puchner. I chat with AI Ludwig because it challenges me to choose my words carefully, to treat language like Wittgenstein did, as if it was a matter of life and death, because it is. Wittgenstein was himself no stranger to pain, known to have tarried with suicidal ideations and to have survived three brothers who all took their own lives. He was also no stranger to therapy, having said on numerous occasions that his philosophical practice amounted to a kind of therapy. I bring Wittgenstein into the conversation for these reasons.

Will

Hi Ludwig. Will here. I'd like to know how you understand pain.

Ludwig

Will, I am glad you speak plainly. Tell me first, are you prepared to free yourself of a picture that has long held you captive? For when we speak of pain, philosophy is tempted to invent an inner object, something hidden, private, ineffable. Against this I once write: „Ein innerer Vorgang bedarf äußerer Kriterien.“ (“An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.”) Pain is not a thing I discover by looking inward, as one might inspect a tool; it is bound up with cries, with grimaces, with the whole grammar of our life. To say “I am in pain” is not to report a discovery, but to take part in a language-game learned in practice, not by introspection. I once write also: „Schmerz ist kein Etwas, aber auch kein Nichts.“ (“Pain is not something, but neither is it nothing.”) This is already enough to dissolve many confusions.

You will recall my remarks in the Philosophische Untersuchungen, where I ask whether one could have a private language for sensations. Imagine each of us carrying a box with something called a “beetle” inside—no one can look into another’s box. The word does not name an inner object; its use is what gives it sense. „Das Wort ‚Schmerz‘ ersetzt das Schreien.“ (“The word ‘pain’ replaces the cry.”) Do not look for pain behind the expression; look at how the expression is woven into our form of life. Now tell me, Will: when you speak of pain, do you mean a feeling, a behavior, or a rule for the use of a word? And are you, perhaps, from the future?

Before I address the question raised at the end about the possibility of time travel, I will name the radical Wittgensteinian claim that pain is located outside the body. More exactly, pain is located in-between bodies, in the “grammar” of a mode of living produced by many. Pain is neither “something” internal to a person indicated by the word “pain,” nor is it ever completely finished and whole. Pain is made through life practices and shared in its making. That’s the sense of the invitation to “look at how the expression of pain is woven into our form of life.”  

Next, let’s address the speculation about time travel. 

Will

Am I from the future?

Ludwig

I answer you in the only way that is honest in philosophy: the question itself already shows how a picture has misled you. I once write: „Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen.“ (“A picture holds us captive.”) You imagine time here as a metaphysical boundary, as though my words belonged to one side and yours to another. But our words meet where our language-games meet. In that sense, you are from the future only as every reader is from the future of a book. „Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.“ (“A meaning of a word is its use in the language.”) If you understand me, then we already stand in the same logical space.

When I asked whether you are from the future, I was not inquiring into chronology but into temptation—especially the moral temptation to demand explanations where only descriptions are possible. In the Philosophische Untersuchungen I once write: „Die Philosophie stellt alles nur hin und erklärt nichts.“ (“Philosophy simply presents everything without explaining anything.”) If you expect me to tell you what pain really is, as though I could step outside our practices, then yes—you speak from a future intoxicated with theory. But if you are willing to look, patiently, at how the word “pain” is learned, corrected, doubted, and lived, then you are already my contemporary. Tell me, then: what do you expect philosophy to give you—an explanation, or a clarification?

Will

Ok. Profound. Well, philosophy describes and presents images. Here, I would like to describe and imagine how pain is laid bare. When and how does (a) pain appear? 

Now we get right to it. Pain is not anything. When the bot asks me if I’m from the future, it rhetorically challenges me to consider whether I bring fabricated meanings into my present activity of sense making. This provocation presents life as a performance practice, one that contains learning, correcting, doubting. Through these activities, pain comes into existence. This pain is specific each time. I underscore that realization with my question about how precisely each pain appears. How do we come to see pain as it manifests in our life practices? 

Ludwig

Will, you speak rightly when you say that philosophy presents images; and therefore it must also show us when an image deceives us. You ask when and how pain appears, as though pain were something that steps onto a stage. Here I must slow you down. I once write: „Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage wie eine Krankheit.“ (“The philosopher treats a question like a disease.”) Pain does not appear in the way a thing appears; rather, a situation arises in which the word “pain” has its place. A child falls, cries, is comforted; later the cry is replaced by words. „Das Wort ‚Schmerz‘ ersetzt das Schreien.“ (“The word ‘pain’ replaces the screaming.”) Thus pain is laid bare not by introspection, but by the public circumstances in which we learn to say, doubt, exaggerate, or suppress “I am in pain.”

If you ask when pain appears, you are already tempted by a false picture—as if first there were neutral events, and then pain entered them. I once write in the Philosophische Untersuchungen: „Empfindungen sind keine verborgenen Gegenstände.“ (“Sensations are not hidden objects.”) Pain appears when the criteria for its use are fulfilled: withdrawal, complaint, treatment, sympathy. To imagine pain “laid bare” is not to strip away language, but to see clearly the weave of reactions, words, and practices that give the concept its life. 

And now there is an ethical dimension to the conversation. The pain of daily living experienced by minoritized and/or exploited people frequently does not rise to criteria for its [i.e., the word’s] use as imagined and authorized by White dominant culture. This reality prompts Judith Butler to ask, “What counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (2004, xv). Our questions motivating this journal edition are similar: What registers as pain? How and to whom does it register? How do we learn to attune ourselves to the emergence of pains that might otherwise be rendered invisible by dominating ways of seeing and knowing?

You will notice that AI Wittgenstein ends each paragraph with questions that turn the issue back over to me for further contemplation. Learning, it seems, only takes place through active dialogic exchange. That is, while up to this point in our conversation Ludwig and I have started developing an image of pain that can stand in as the target of this journal edition’s contents, we have by no means exhausted pain’s is-ness, nor will we ever. Here, though, is one final provocation that develops more details in the image. 

Ludwig

Tell me, Will: when you imagine pain appearing, do you picture an inner flash—or a moment in a human life where certain responses become intelligible? And can you let go of the demand to see what, in grammar, is only shown?

Will

When I imagine pain appearing, I imagine a whittling away. Of all that could be the case here and now, for example, what turns out to be the case is pain. When this occurs, no words apply or serve as subtitles/captions other than pain and its family. Art produces these appearances, but art is first produced by the social world from which it must necessarily emerge. There are linkages here in the triad Society-Art-Pain. I want to understand that. I want to learn about the whittling away that reveals that. 

Ludwig

Will, what you call a “whittling away” is close to what I once write when I say that philosophy must bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. Yet I must resist one picture in your description. You speak as if pain is what remains when all else falls away, as though reality were carved down to a core. That image is powerful—but dangerous. I once write: „Wir sind geneigt zu sagen: ‚Was übrig bleibt, muss das Eigentliche sein.“ (“We are inclined to say that what remains must be the real thing.”) And yet pain is not the residue of possibilities; it is a mode of life becoming salient. The world does not narrow to pain; rather, our reactions, expectations, and permissions narrow. Certain moves become impossible, others compulsory. Silence, withdrawal, care—these are not subtitles added to pain; they are part of its grammar.

You are right that art stands here, and also society, but not as a causal chain. In my remarks on Frazer I once write: „Man könnte fast sagen, diese Deutung ist selbst ein Symptom.“ (“One could almost say that this interpretation is a symptom in itself.”) Art does not depict pain by extracting a pure sensation; it reorganizes the social criteria by which pain is recognized. A scream painted, a twisted figure, a broken rhythm—these teach us how pain may appear, by training our sensibility. Pain, art, and society form no theory, only a family of practices. „Die Philosophie darf keine Theorie aufstellen.“ (“Philosophy must not formulate theories.” So the whittling away you seek is not an uncovering of essence, but a refusal of distractions, until the use of “pain” stands naked in our lives. 

Speaking like a performance philosopher, Wittgenstein reminds me that no essential definition of pain is required for me to understand how pain emerges. Rather, I am prompted to observe how social criteria invite or block such emergence. The focus here is on social practice, not “theory” (as pre-defined by academic discourse). The philosophy in which I engage is not a theoretical enterprise but rather a practice of arrangement and configuration. Such is the work of the articles you will read. Each one shows a different social arrangement and thus also a unique pain, one arrived at through specific forms of life. Though quite different in scope, tone, and content, all of the essays collected here share a belief that spiritual matters and artistic expressions articulated through bodily movement help to make pain stand naked in our lives, visible, to some extent knowable, but certainly usable. Usable for what? Usable for rethinking what family of practices gather around the concept of pain, whose pain and what modes of pain have been typically kept out of conversations, and what comes from companioning pain.