Elaine asked:

How to lead a philosophical life when we try to go through pain?

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If this question is a practical one from someone who is currently experiencing physical or emotional
pain then I think the correct initial response would be to advise the questioner to seek methods of
pain control from an appropriate qualified medical practitioner. If the questioner is asking a more
general question independently of their current experience or in conjunction with it concerning the
capacity of philosophical analysis to offer something to the current situation then I think consideration
of what it is to be philosophical or adopt a philosophical disposition has something to add that might
be of benefit in general and possibly medically if there is merit in believing in Psycho-immunolgy (The
Body At WarJohn Dwyer p.239).

We can express the essence of a practical philosophical attitude in the slogan or maxim:

'Don't personalise, generalise'.

Supposing I am not feeling too well, I might begin by expressing my feeling unanalytically by
announcing that I am taking to my bed and not going to work. I might be advised later that the source
of my malaise is viral cold. How might I understand this information from a philosophical viewpoint
whilst resting in bed? From the initial sentences describing my condition: 'Neil has a viral cold' I could
construct the extension; ' Neil is being acted against by a virus'. By now I have forgotten how
miserable I am feeling and beginning to enjoy the opportunity to indulge myself in some philosophical
game playing and in fact I am quite grateful to my viral friend for giving me this time out.

I have begun to see that I can take this game to a new level by extracting some of the particulars out
of the last sentence to derive an even more general sentence form: 'something did some act against
someone'. I have now begun to see that I can zoom out from this sentence even more by constructing
a sort of pseudo-sentence in list form where the names are place markers for other names that could
take their place to make the sentence pattern become a sentence like the one we originally began
with. My pseudo-sentence now takes the following shape:

(Person, time, place, act, value, order)

and looks remarkably like a very cryptic form of the pattern of questions that we teach children to use
when analysing or constructing stories, i.e:

(Who, When, Where, What, Why?)

The slight addition comes in the last position with the introduction of a marker for 'order' by which I
am thinking of What lead to, or What follows from?

If we now add a new list of generalising marker words in front of this list in the form of (every, some,)
then we can begin to really start to play some interesting philosophical games once we add the final
marker that kicks the game into play and this has the general form of a question mark (?).

So our philosophical attitude can now be expressed in the sentence generating pattern:

(?)(Every, some)(Person,time, place,act, value, order)

from which we can construct sentences like:

Does everyone, always experience every pain in the same way?

Do some pains have some purpose?

Can I locate my pain in some particular place?

Where does pain go when I do not notice it?

Is my pain something that exists somewhere at sometime?

If pain is a real thing that acts against me can I imagine a real thing that acts for me and against my
pain?

Again, to reiterate I am sure that it is not the place of philosophy to give advice that would prevent the
seeking of medical opinion, but in the realms of self help I think philosophy can offer some practical
techniques to help in the management of everyday experiences.

Neil Buckland