Body schema and pain

Abstract

This chapter aims to situate Merleau-Ponty’s notion of body schema within the context of contemporary philosophy of pain. In the first section, the chapter starts by introducing his notion of body schema and its role in his account of the experience of pain. It then briefly reviews current theoretical treatments of pain in the analytic philosophy of mind. It outlines representational and imperative theories of pain by mapping them onto the conceptual distinction between body image and body schema. In the second section, the chapter further argues that they are both deeply entrenched in a Cartesian dualistic picture of mind and body. To be fair, imperativism partly overcomes the Cartesian conception of the body by acknowledging the significance of the body schema. To see how theories of pain can escape the dualistic picture, thus, it will be helpful to examine imperativist explanations. The chapter undertakes this task by closely examining Colin Klein’s imperativist account of a rare pathological condition called pain asymbolia. This account, it suggests in the third section, leads to an unacceptably over-intellectual view of the body because of hidden Cartesian assumptions. It concludes by contrasting this with an enactive approach to pain, deeply inspired by Merleau-Ponty. In the last section, the chapter turns to phenomenological grounds to clarify and support this alternative approach.