Pain — The Existential Symptom

Abstract

The attempt to come to an understanding of pain is characteristically met at the doorway by the materialist objection that subjective states can, at best, be allowed only a secondary status in the realm of scientific reality. Somehow one must make one’s way past the materialist’s flaming sword if any progress is to be made. Yesterday, we were treated to Professor Jonas’ brilliant set of arguments on the absurdity of the materialistic position. I would like to add the additional argument — my favorite argument — that the position of materialism characteristically entails a nonmaterialistic assumption [1]. This assumption is that out in that external nonsubjective world there is something more than material, namely, law. Law is, in the materialist’s frame of reference, the ‘ghost in the machine.’ Law is not a property of matter in the primary sense. The materialist, in talking of law, characteristically slips either into an idealism or a subjectivism. In either case he has deviated from a strict materialism. Materialistic science allows itself the free use of mathematics without acknowledging that thereby it has abandoned its fundamental materialistic posture. Mathematics and mathematical relationships are not material. Indeed, mathematics is, at once, the most objective and autistic enterprise that we can engage in. When the materialist allows mathematically formulated law, besides matter, in the universe, he has essentially cheated on his fidelity to materialism. He may not acknowledge his mistress publicly.