Publications

APS Bulletin • Volume 14, Number 6, 2004

Pain as Path

Mark Sullivan, MD PhD, Department Editor

Pain and Ecstasy: From Suffering to Sacrifice to Exaltation

Mark Sullivan, MD PhD

Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), addresses the moral challenge presented to us by photographs of war and all of its atrocities. She asks many interesting questions about the “iconography of suffering” in the book, such as, “What does it mean to protest suffering as distinct from acknowledging it?” But Sontag takes the argument in another direction by making the following comment about the photograph of a Chinese man reproduced in her book:

One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred cuts” on his desk, where he could look at it every day. (Since becoming legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille’s books published during his lifetime, in 1961, Les Armes d’Eros (The Tears of Eros), (1961/ 1989 “This photograph,” Bataille wrote, “had a decisive role in my life. I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.” To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge—a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. For most, the image is simply unbearable: the already armless sacrificial victim of several busy knives, in the terminal stage of being flayed—a photograph, not a painting; a real Marsyas, not a mythic one—and still alive in the picture, with a look on his upturned face as ecstatic as that of any Italian Renaissance Saint Sebastian. As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure in the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.” (Sontag, pp. 98–99)

A picture of a man being flayed alive is unsettling enough. Sontag refers to Titian’s classic image of Marsyas being flayed as an example. Marsyas is the flute player who engaged in a musical contest with Apollo, and having lost, was flayed alive by the god. Having won the contest, Apollo either flayed Marsyas alive while the unfortunate musician hanged on a tall pine tree, or else he let a slave from Scythia do this. And while his skin was stripped off the surface of his body that was but one wound, Marsyas complained: “Why do you tear me from myself? Oh, I repent! Oh, a flute is not worth such a price!” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.385). It is told that the god quickly repented, and being distressed at his horrible deed, he broke the four strings of the lyre that he had discovered. Marsyas thus serves as an example of how unsettling it is to witness an image of someone being flayed alive. But Marsyas did not experience ecstasy. The images of Marsyas show a man in horrible pain.

Sontag explains that this picture of the Chinese man is unsettling because it refutes the modern opposition of pain and pleasure. It provides photographic proof of the compatibility of extreme pain and ecstatic exaltation. We immediately grasp for some way to explain and compartmentalize this image. Bataille helps by providing the following caption to the photograph:

These shots were published in part by Dumas and Carpeaux. Carpeaux claims to have witnessed the torture on April 10, 1905. On March 25, 1905, the “Cheng-Pao” published the following decree: “The Mongolian Princes demand that the aforesaid Fou-Tchou-Li, guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, be burned alive, but the Emperor finds this torture too cruel and condemns Fou-Tchou-Li to death by Leng-Tch’e (cutting into pieces) Respect this!” This torture dates from the Manchu Dynasty (1644–1911). (Bataille, p. 204)

Bataille explains in his text that he believes this to be “the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film.” But anguish is not the only experience evoked by this photograph:

What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish—but at the same time delivered me from it—was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror Religion in its entirety was founded upon sacrifice. But only an interminable detour allows us to reach the instant where the contraries seem visibly conjoined, where the religious horror disclosed in sacrifice becomes linked to the abyss of eroticism, to the last shuddering tears that eroticism alone can illuminate. (Bataille, p. 205)

Bataille’s primary interest in his book is the link between the “little death” offered by eroticism and “definitive death.” But let us not get distracted by eroticism right now, and instead explore the “identity of these perfect contraries.”

As Sontag mentions, the modern view is that pain and pleasure are directly opposed to each other. One excludes the other in a simple zero-sum game. Jeremy Bentham founded that most modern of ethical theories, utilitarianism, on just this hedonic calculus. Utilitarianism calculates the ethical value of an action by summing the pleasure created and subtracting the pain produced. This theory acknowledges that something could be both pleasurable and painful. But the possibility that something could be pleasureable because it is painful throws the theory into disarray. Subsequent modern philosophers have challenged parts of Bentham’s calculus. For example, John Stuart Mill thought some pleasures were higher, or qualitatively better, than others, but he did not challenge the opposition between pleasure and pain. This theme can be found in modern poetry as well. The first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem “125” is:

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

The modern framework rationally balances pain and pleasure in terms of ethical value and of what is deserved. To understand one’s reaction to the photo of the ecstatic tortured Chinese man, one needs to look beyond this framework.

This photograph does not really show the simultaneous experience of pain and pleasure. It shows both pain and ecstasy. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ecstasy as “the state of being ‘beside oneself,’ thrown into a frenzy or stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear or passion.” So it is clear that ecstasy can be produced by unpleasant experiences. As they further explain, “The classical senses of [the Greek word for ecstasy] are ‘insanity’ and ‘bewilderment,’ but in the late Greek the etymological meaning received another application, viz., ‘withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance’; hence, in later medical writers the word is used for trance etc., generally. Both the classical and post-classical senses came into the modern languages, and in the present uses they seem to be blended” (OED Online, accessed 9-22-04). So ecstasy encompasses the mystical “state of rapture where the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things.” The Chinese man does indeed appear as if he might be engaged in the contemplation of divine things.

To help with the understanding of how pain is compatible with ecstasy, Sontag refers us to the ecstasy of martyrs like St. Sebastian. St. Sebastian was an early Christian popularized by Renaissance painters and believed to have been martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian. When it was discovered that he was a Christian who had converted many soldiers, Sebastian was ordered to be killed by arrows. The archers left him for dead, but a Christian widow nursed him back to health. He then presented himself before Diocletian, who condemned him to death by beating (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2004). A martyr’s death brings him to God. This is enough to make the dying process ecstatic. The pain thus endured was thought to provide a cleansing of sins and perhaps thereby to further contribute to ecstasy.

The example of St. Sebastian helps one understand pain as a path to ecstasy. But this Chinese man is not known to be a martyr in the traditional religious sense, so some broader path between pain and ecstasy must be found. Perhaps this man murdered the prince as part of a popular revolt, and thus became a martyr for a political cause. Even if this were true, one still needs to understand the path from pain to ecstasy on psychological rather than purely spiritual terms. Sontag offers us a suggestion of this path: from pain to sacrifice to exaltation. The pain is suffered for the sake of another. The purpose of the pain lies outside of the sufferer. And the experience of pain for this purpose literally takes the sufferer out of himself in ecstasy. This is a view of pain and suffering “rooted in religious thinking,” but perhaps the sense of sacrifice need not be explicitly religious.

One nonreligious modern example of pain and ecstasy is the Ecstatic Birthing program in the United Kingdom. Ecstatic Birth is a system designed to help women give birth consciously, easily, and without medical intervention. “We can give up our devotion to pain and struggle, expand and give birth to our babies, our projects and our lives in ecstasy” (Ecstatic Birth, 2004). This program is similar to other natural birth programs in the United States that focus on relaxation through breathing and visualization as a means to avoid pain medication and other medical intervention (Gaskin, 2002). Although a primary purpose of these programs is to avoid the hospital and medications, the programs also focus on using the pain of uterine contractions as energy that may promote bliss. This is supposed to produce a healthier and happier baby.

What is not modern about this image of the Chinese man, and what makes the viewer cringe, is its picture of “extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration.” This simply does not compute in a secular and scientific world view. In this world, pleasure is good, and pain is bad. The notion that pain and pleasure can fold back onto each other in complex ways is absent. The ways in which pain and pleasure can annihilate the self and liberate one from the bounds of the ego are not included. One exception to this rule is an intriguing study that showed that noxious thermal stimuli produced activation in putative reward circuitry as well as classic pain circuitry. (Becerra, Breiter, Wise, Gonzales, & Borsook, 2001). The authors conclude that their data “support the notion that there may be a shared neural system for evaluation of aversive and rewarding stimuli.” Although this finding provides a possible physiological mechanism for the ecstasy of martyrs, it makes it no less disconcerting.

Here, let us return to the eroticism that was Bataille’s primary concern. He considered eroticism a “little death” precisely because the boundaries of the self are overcome in sexual climax and the edicts of the rational ego often ignored in its pursuit. We dismiss the pursuit of sexual ecstasy through pain, i.e., masochism, as a perversion that has nothing to teach the rest of us. But for Bataille, this was only one example of liberation through surrender, a paradoxical but universal feature of the human psyche.

So, gaze upon this disturbing image of the Chinese man and observe how it makes you feel. Draw your own conclusions.

References

Please direct your comments or suggestions about this article or department to Mark Sullivan, PhD, Department Editor, at sullimar@washington.edu.