Understand the pain of the other?: a philosophical approach to the experience of chronic pain

Abstract

This article aims to approach the experience of pain from the parameters of phenomenological philosophy. From this discipline, pain is not considered as something belonging to the person who suffers it, but rather, the person himself has become the pain itself and this becomes his way of communicating with the world. It must be said that this philosophical approach to pain is not considered as unique and indisputable but, on the contrary, it seeks to overcome the tradition that has considered it only as part of the sensory system and to favor the debate with the occasion of improving the knowledge of pain from interdisciplinarity. To do so, we have resorted to what was posed some thinkers of the standing of Merleau-Ponty -above all in his Phenomenology of perception (1945); John Locke -and his Essay on Human Understanding (1689) - or Jean-Paul Sartre -in Being and Nothingness (1944)- to be able to provide a overall picture of the contributions that, from philosophy, have been made to understand pain of himself and, also, the pain of otherness.