pain and orientation

I had a bicycle accident yesterday. As a result, I have a bad bruise on my left shoulder, another on my left thumb/heel of hand, and a minor scrape on my knee. I’m also in day three of a relatively minor attack of Ménière’s syndrome.

The scrapes and bruises have different feelings of pain, but none of them is quite like the Ménière’s. The scrapes are most superficial and least constitutive of a sense-perceptual world for me. They are found in a location on the surface of my body, and in that way, phenomenologically, are objective, corporal appearances. The bruises, especially the deep one in my shoulder, appear ambiguously. I can objectify them as such, feel them, delectate in the pain that is “in” “my” shoulder as I might enjoy the sensuous delights of a glass of good whisky. On the other hand, the shoulder moves differently and my motions are changed, not through an objective or mechanical error, but as motions-I-can-make. My range of motility, of intention to move, is limited, and in this way the shoulder bruise appears constitutive of a world for movement, hence subjective.

The Ménière’s symptoms are entirely different. What is objectified as Ménière’s syndrome is a loss or distortion of hearing, loss of balance, vertigo, and feeling of pressure around the ear. From a third-person perspective, that’s somewhat accurate as an account of the symptoms. Subjectively, what’s happening is existentially significant. I realized I was an aurally-oriented more than a visually-oriented person, compared to many people, but that’s not even half of it. I haven’t “lost hearing” or “lost balance.” I have lost a great deal of my sense of spatiality. My orientation to spatiality is not just a matter of (visual) appearance of things having normal up-down fixity (of being “true” or “plumb”). The “pressure in my head” is a loss of my sensitivity to waves of air of all kinds. I have lost the buoyancy of my orientated place in the world. Instead of bouncing along on waves of sound, I’m sunk like a rock under them.

Not enough is said in phenomenological circles about buoyancy as a dimension of flesh and orientation in our perceptual projection into the world. In fact, I don’t recall ever reading about it or hearing anyone talk about it, and I don’t think I would have realized how important buoyancy is to my orientation if it weren’t for Ménière’s.

I’m not thankful.

orientation, habituation, passivity

My favorite stuff Husserl wrote was about what he called "passivity," which is not as passive as it sounds -- it's about the basic receptivity we have through our sense perception. Our sense perceptions, Husserl contends, are not just a collection of data, but are already "given" in a unity -- a unity that we do not actively constitute, hence given by "passive synthesis." In other words, our sense perceptions give us a sort of whole world already, and our conscious, attentive, thinking egos root around in this given world and make judgments about it.

One big-time implication of this is that our perceptual orientations to the world -- what we tend to pay attention to, what we put together as "objects" of perception, what we return to again and again as objects we ought to pay attention to -- are also built up "passively." That is to suggest that we are, as it were, primally orientated to the world in certain ways.

To take this beyond Husserl, and to give a concrete example, I'll recall my first experience of eating Swiss chard. It was in a very strange social setting, and a friend was whipping up a (vegan) stir-fry that included Swiss chard as an ingredient. Never had it before. It was deep green, cooked up quickly, tossed with the rest of the stuff, tossed onto brown rice, and set in front of me.

From the first taste, I liked it. How? The taste attracted me. As we say, it tasted good. How? How did I undergo the experience of it tasting good? At first, I couldn't say what about it I liked, or even identify the Swiss chard itself very clearly out of the mishmash of stuff.

The second time I had it, I was able to start to taste it. There was a dark greeniness, an earthy taste, a rooty bitterness balanced with a clean sweetness. I was developing a taste for it, as we say. I was learning how Swiss chard tastes, learning how to taste Swiss chard, and -- most intriguingly for me -- learning how to enjoy it.

From Husserl's perspective, what's happening here is, I am forming predicative judgments ("I like Swiss chard"; "Swiss chard tastes earthy, and a little bitter if it's undercooked"; etc.), but at the same time, those predicative judgments are forming and shaping my perception of Swiss chard. It's way more complicated than saying that if I tell myself I like it, I'll start to like it. I already was predisposed to it, before I'd ever had it, without knowing it. My first taste revealed that I had a "tendency" toward it. The more I experienced it, the more I followed out this tendency, the more I developed my affinity, and my acknowledgment of my affinity, for chard.

This has by now led me to have a chard-orientation toward the world. If there's chard around, my eyes are drawn toward it instantly. I look at it, and I almost taste it. I want it. I don't even think about it. I have a Swiss chard habit.

In stages:

1. My passive receptivity toward Swiss chard (my being able to taste it) and passive tendency toward enjoying it.
2. My conscious attention to Swiss chard, and my repetition of experiences and alert, deliberate attention to the taste of it... leading to judgments about it (like, "Swiss chard is really good wilted, then steamed, then buttered and seasoned").
3. My orientation toward Swiss chard, my habit of desiring it.

The first and third stages are two stages of passivity, it turns out. This is the cool thing: habituation is a "secondary passivity," where conscious attention fades away. I don't think about it, I just do it.