Pain resists objectification, according to Scarry. That is to say, when we feel pain, we cannot give it any tangible equivalent. We grasp at ways to describe our pain, using analogies and unintelligible screams. Pain only exists in the person who is experiencing the pain. To outsiders, there may be sympathy for seeing someone in pain, but there is always a shade of doubt as to how severe the pain is, or if it exists at all. How often does a coworker or peer complain of a debilitating pain, only to be accused of laziness?
Others cannot feel the pain that we individually feel unless they, too, have the exact same affliction or are subject to the same torture. Here lies the duality of pain: certainty and uncertainty. When one experiences pain, he or she is certain of her pain, and knows that it exists. The trouble is expressing that pain in terms of an object. The outsider is uncertain of the pain, as the outsider does not feel it. What is significant about this is that people can be fully oblivious to another’s pain, even if that pain is terribly severe. Whatever expression the one in pain uses cannot elicit full empathy because of the difficulty in objectifying pain. As such, horrible things like torture are able to exist.
But what of those who say, “don’t cry in front of your peers, don’t let them see you bleed?” There is a negative quality in expressing pain. No one likes a whiner. My feeling is that everyone has an implicit understanding of what it means to be in pain, and an understanding on the limits of how well we’re able to express our pain. The resistance to the attempts of the one in pain to elicit empathy may be a way of saying “there’s no point in screaming if no one can hear you.”
However, I’m not satisfied with that conclusion, and I want now to describe an environment where pains may be immediately understood by those other than the one in pain. On encountering one with pain, he or she explains his or her pain. A “stabbing, knifelike” pain, or maybe a burning sensation “like a curling iron on my skin.” The idea, in turn, causes us a pain. A physical pain. Now we are as much incapacitated and in need as the person in whom the pain originated. If we are to think about civilized functions in this imaginary scenario, we may see that they would surely come to a standstill. In effect, the relief from pain either by doctor or by ceasing a pain-causing action requires the reliever to be fully immune from the pain of the source. Is it then irresponsible to say that the same antipathy that gives us the capacity for torture also gives us the capacity to heal?