Geniusas, Saulius: The Phenomenology of Pain
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Geniusas, Saulius: The Phenomenology of Pain Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020 (Series in Continental Thought). ISBN 978-0-8214-2403-2, 241 pp Agustín Serrano de Haro1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Saulius Geniusas’s fruitful dedication to the task of understanding the experience of pain has now culminated in this remarkable book, renewing and relaunching a phenomenological approach to this decisive fact of human suffering. For almost a decade the Lithuanian philosopher had been publishing sound essays concerning the pain the body suffers in its own flesh; the phenomenological efforts to elucidate it (Stumpf and Husserl, Scheler and Sartre); and the theoretical models currently prevailing in pain analysis. The book that has now come to light is not at all a compilation of these previous texts, but a radical and unitary attempt, newly thought through, at a methodical clarification of this crucial experience. The author’s expositions achieve a high scientific standard and display an admirable familiarity with the enormous literature on the topic, yet without ever losing sight of the phenomenon itself, and he makes himself intelligible to readers who are not specialists in phenomenology. This is certainly not a minor merit of the book. In the Introduction—which actually functions more like an immersion in the themes of the work—the author expresses his amazement that only two previous book-length phenomenological studies have been published on this basic and undoubtedly first-person experience—namely, Christian Grüny’s 2004 Zestörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes and Abraham Olivier’s 2007 Being in Pain. (Buytendijk’s important Dutch monograph, Over de pijn, 1943, can be summed up by mentioning the three subtitles of its Spanish translation: “Psychology. Phenomenology. Metaphysics”—to say nothing of physiology, which he treats as well.) But whereas the monographs by Grüny and Olivier are conceived in a Merleau-Pontyan vein, Geniusas creatively works in the spirit of the founder of phenomenology: “My goal, rather, is to focus on one particular tradition, namely, the Husserlian tradition, and to demonstrate why it is of great importance for the philosophy Instituto de Filosofia, Madrid, Spain (Research Project FFI 2017-82272-P). * Agustín Serrano de Haro [email protected] 1
Instituto de Filosofía, Madrid, Spain
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Husserl Studies
of pain” (p. 6). His eight fundamental reasons “that make Husserlian phenomenology highly fitting for pain research” (p. 6) are not only an anticipation of the spirit of the book, but may also serve as a nice guide for other similar undertakings. Accordingly, the basic methodological principles that will govern the work are set out in the first chapter: epochē of the naturalistic determinations of pain; reduction to lived experience; eidetic variation in imagination; and genetic analysis from the perspective of the lived world. Interestingly, the author pleads for a revamping of the procedure of imaginative variation in order to take
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