The Power of Pain - Term Paper Example

Philosophy    Topic:  The Power of Pain: How Pain Shapes Us Instructions: Ethics of Health Care  Book - Scarry, Elaine. (1987). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.  After reading the work, write and submit a 5 to 7 page, double-spaced report (using APA style, 6 th ed.). Your report must include the following:  an analysis of the topic addressed in the work in terms of either  its significant historical, political, legal aspects and health policy implications  OR  its humanistic or social significance  a summary and discussion of the ethical/moral issues made prominent by the work Critique of the authors approach  Your report must follow APA guidelines,  Be sure to list the specific references, per APA guidelines.  For example, per Evaluation Criteria 1 of the guidelines, you must provide a thorough introduction of the main topic of the reading and provide a logical and clear discussion of the significance of the work. You should write this introduction as though the reader has not read the book. Per Evaluation Criteria 2 of the guidelines, you must demonstrate mastery of the work by accurately and thoroughly discussing the main ethical and moral issues made prominent by the book. Criteria 3 Critique of Authors Approach (Provides a logical, well-developed and well-defined exploration of the authors underlying assumptions or biases. Exceptionally describes in detail the arguments that the author uses to support the main point(s).Completely and logically describes the evidence the author presents to support those arguments), and criteria 4 Language Conventions.  ***Remember this is not simply a book report; this is an analysis of how a literary work addresses an ethical issue and the extent of the work on society.*** Introduction This book delivers a vibrant ethical note, about the critical correspondence of various classes of vehemence against the human physique. It bids an apparently compound argument that makes numerous rare expectations and influences. It is an argument that might persuade or awe through its inexplicable potentials, or fall flush. The book is divided into two main units, with a closing section that shapes chiefly on the second fundamental fragment. The first division is about pain and Scarry addresses the glitches of voicing pain in oneself and others. She fine-points the use of pain in torment with swarms of examples from twentieth century circumstances strained predominantly from the archives of Amnesty International. Phases in the torture process, coercions and extortions, elimination of normal conduits of communication, plus cross-examination, are discussed in depth. Then the book goes to war, in a lengthier fragment that sets out to demonstrate that inflicting wound is the spirit of war. The second division of the book discusses upholding differences to the war: the inventive muscles of civilization. Weapons can be converted into tools, annihilation into construction. Human mind, the aptitude to envision that which has not occurred, is the optimistic equivalent to the pain, as innovative as the other is hostile and refuting. These common arguments are inspected through de-constructivist exegesis on which Scarry asserts are the two fundamental ends of Western civilization: the Judeo-Christian practice and the desire for quantifiable self-appearance. This senses, in rehearsal and inquiry of the Bible with distinct mention to the formation but also to the countenance of the God in human body, and of Karl Marx this latter as a personification of Western physical vision. In the closing chapter, the nature of pretense is sketched in terms of some broad-spectrum factors of the innovative process mostly concerning material substances (Stearns, 1988). Analysis of Pain: Theology of torture Scarry writes from a virtuously secular standpoint. But she however enunciates why torture should be detestable to each person who believes in a Maker God. Christian examines on torture frequently emphasize on how torture infringes the imago Dei, the appearance of God, in which even the utmost stranded – and even the utmost unlawful and offensive – human being is created. Scarrys examination goes advance. In The Body in Pain, she demonstrates how torture infringes every feature of the generated world: “The contents of the [torture] room, its furnishings, are converted into weapons: the most common instance of this is the bathtub that figures prominently in the reports from numerous countries, but it is only one among many. Men and women being tortured… describe being handcuffed in a constricted position for hours, days, and in some cases months to a chair, to a cot, to a filing cabinet, to a bed; they describe being beaten with "family-sized soft drink bottles" or having a hand crushed with a chair, of having their heads "repeatedly banged on the edges of a refrigerator door."… The room… is converted into a weapon… made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed.” (Scarry, 1987) One Jewish interpretation of "embodiment" is that all substances in the world are words enunciated by God. Scarry demonstrates how torture substitutes Gods making and nourishing fancy with the disparaging minds eye of the torturer – garbling and tarnishing all the words that make the flora and fauna. In torture, each act is used to harm the subject: standing-up, sitting-down, even consuming food and water. (Scarry records that obligated, recurrent swallowing was practiced as torture in Greece, where it was named "making knots"; Only when an individual tosses his head back and swallows three times does he arise to capture what is convoluted in one hundred and three or three hundred and three swallows, what carnages ones individual body, weight, and bone skeleton can perpetrate on oneself. Each bodily task is used to injure and demean. Torture generates a terrible mirror appearance of St. Franciss Canticle of the Creatures. Torture distorts linguistics. Torturers, and their defenders, haven into newspeak phrases like "enhanced interrogation": nonsense to hide the veracity of muscles in pain and anguish after hours of strain situations, or the phantasms of sleep denial. Scarry records, "Standing rigidly for eleven hours can produce as violent muscle and spine pain as can injury from elaborate equipment and apparatus, though any of us outside this situation, used to adjusting our body positions every few moments before even mild discomfort is felt, may not immediately recognize this." Torture pursues to make the victim an abettor in his own anguish. The torturer strives to substitute Gods creation, in the victims awareness, with the torturers realm. In a imprisonment camp nearby Fallujah, one Iraqi man who operated for Reuters news check said, "Every time I mentioned God they would beat me." This is why torture is unresponsive to veracity and truth. An individual hears a too much, these days, about the probability of acquiring information by means of torture. But he no more catches what used to be collective knowledge, that torture is a mechanism for fabricating false declarations. Scarrys analysis has one significant void: She not ever discourses humiliation as a way of torture, when humiliation is essential to torture. Humiliation is the tool that enables torturers to effort to make their victims an accomplice. It is the indispensable first phase of degrading the subject. To define rehearses like forced nakedness and hooding (concealing the most apparently human and discrete specifics, the face, and baring the genitals in disobedience to decorum and modesty) as "only" humiliation is to misapprehend the whole lucidity of torture: Degradation is the explanation of torture, and humiliation is the principal means of degradation. Who can forget the two of the most agonizing snapshots from Abu Ghraib Jail – an American female soldier with an unclothed Iraqi male victim on a tether, and a hooded, masked male victim on a box – portray "only" strain positions and humiliation. Last year, a census by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press discovered that only 29 out of a hundred Americans thought that torture of alleged terrorists possibly will "never be vindicated." The survey didnt use Bush-tenure understatements such as "enhanced interrogation techniques"; it only inquired about torture. Religion didnt appear to make much metamorphosis: Only about third of white core Protestants disparaged torture, just as 28 percent of white evangelicals, 25 percent of "secular" individuals and 26 percent of Catholics. In a state where nearly seventy five percent of Catholics are "refectory Catholics" on this matter, it might take a secular graft to recollect the masses to the faithfulness that pushes out panic and fear (Tushnet, 2008). Summary and Discussion Scarry contends that pain is the most unconditional definer of authenticity. For an individual in pain, there is no reality above and beyond pain and agony; if it aches, it needs to be real. This specific of pain brands it valuable diplomatically and politically. In torture, for instance, the whole sense of existence of the individual being tortured is abridged to a consciousness of pain, whereas the torturer’s reality and world remains completely contemporaneous. This is comprehended most unequivocally when torture is labeled as information-congregation. The torturer asserts on queries that for the tortured are no more of any apprehension. Wars also utilize pain and suffering. In the clash that drives to war, one state’s principals and beliefs are potholed against the others. Both wings’ situations are therefore challenged; if there is discrepancy about the particulars and facts, it becomes ostensible that the evidences and facts are grounded in estimations and opinion, not authenticity and reality. The wounded bodies of combat and conflict re-associate the conqueror’s beliefs and philosophies with the physical world. If the incapacitated or injured body is the definitive in reality, the bruised and battered bodies of combat can be used to imply the reality of the vanquisher’s standing. At the same time, the pain of persons in combat is transported to inorganic substances or huge collections. Therefore, one talks of "Division Eight" being injured or weapons being deactivated. This philology also uses the out-and-out reality and veracity of the body in pain to protect the certainty of a traditional/administrative situation. Scarry deliberates the reality-constructing eminence of pain in Judeo-Christian sacred writings, Marx, and persons’ relations with lifeless objects (Moore, 1998). Critique of Author’s Approach  Scarry’s book is most renowned for placing the body in pain in political-historical standpoint instead of only sending it off in its habitual, non-historical view within customary medication. Pain is not only labeled as a medicinal word, but as a phase of combat, torture, and other overtly political deeds. Scarry’s body in pain is however incorrectly universalized. She doesn’t consider traditional/historical variances in how pain is supposed or utilized. For the entire human race at all periods, she undertakes, pain is the spot of the reality, even if that constant specific is used for various traditional culminations (Moore. 1998). Works Cited Moore, P. (1998). Literature Annotations; The Body in Pain. Retrieved Aug 19, 2011, from Literature, Arts and Medical Database: http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=309 Tushnet, E. (2008, Feb 12). Theology of the Body in Pain. Retrieved Aug 19, 2011, from Catholicity: http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/tushnet/02705.html Stearns, Peter. (1988). The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world by Elaine Scarry. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 499, 91-93 Read More