Ouch! Another Brief Note on Pain and The Palliative Society

Haroshi: Agony Into Beauty from the solo exhibition Pain

StolenSpace Gallery, London (Oct 10th - Nov 3rd 2013)
stolenspace.com

 

 

According to Byung-Chul Han, algophobia - a generalised fear of pain - is one of the key features of what he terms the palliative society: 

 

"The consequence of this algophobia is a permanent anaesthesia. All painful conditions are avoided. Even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society. Less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. Algophobia also takes hold of politics. The pressure to conform and to reach consensus intensifies." [a]  

Now, as a reader of Nietzsche, I am of course aware that whilst one of the defining achievements of the modern age has been to vastly improve human health thanks to unparalleled advances in medical science, there has nevertheless been a peculiar softening of the species and what might be called a loss of spirit [b].

 

People used to be able to endure - and inflict - great suffering and regarded pain as a form of passion; now they immediately reach for the paracetamol if they even think they might have a headache coming on. Ironically, as our direct experience of severe pain has lessened, our horror of it has increased and intensified.   

 

However, even as one who affirms the tragic fact that life bleeds and is prone to disease and mortal decay, I don't wish to idealise pain, for fear that, in doing so, one ends up returning either to the foot of the Cross or to Romanticism.

 

I'm not sure, however, that this particularly troubles Byung-Chul Han. For he's someone who believes that art "must be able to alienate, irritate, disturb, and, yes, even be painful" [6], and celebrates the Christian mystic Teresa of Ávila for demonstrating how pain "deepens the relationship with God" [21]. 

 

Ultimately, the main difference between Han and myself is that he desperately wants pain (and everything else) to be meaningful, whereas the "persisting meaninglessness of life" [24] doesn't trouble me in the least. 

 

I don't think pain is an incarnation of truth - no matter what Viktor von Weizsäcker might say [c] - and, as a matter of fact, I like the "morality-free, and ostentatiously decorative" [4] art of Jeff Koons ...   

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 1. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] See §48 of The Gay Science, for example, wherein Nietzsche reflects on how nothing separates human beings or ages from each other more than their experience of pain.

 

[c] German physician and physiologist Viktor von Weizsäcker (1886-1957) was a pioneer in the fields of psychosomatic medicine and Gestalt psychology. Weizsäcker argued that if you wish to reliably distinguish between what is genuine and what is fake in this life, then trust to pain; only pain allows us to know what's what, give structure to our life, and find love. 

      Byung-Chul Han discusses Weizsäcker' essay 'Die Schmerzen' in chapter 6 of The Palliative Society, concluding that pain not only evokes reality, it is reality.    

 

This post is a companion piece to an earlier brief note on pain (written whilst waiting to see the dentist): click here.