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“No Pain and No Consciousness”

This chapter examines pain’s importance to the sensitized, embodied consciousness valued by William, Henry, and Alice James. All three siblings disdained what Henry once called “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” Yet William insisted that an individual’s higher capacities along with a more profound reality could best be accessed while physicality was numbed and waking consciousness was suppressed. For him anesthesia provided a gateway to the higher reaches of consciousness that his two siblings typically anchored in the feeling, suffering body. Henry and Alice repeatedly represent pain as comparable to an intense aesthetic experience in that it arouses the senses, increases responsiveness to stimuli, and heightens consciousness while still tethering the sufferer to the material world. They both count themselves among the rare few who possess this capacity for an aesthetic aliveness to suffering, which distinguishes them from purportedly less animate humans who in their assessment suffer less and hence invariably live less. Both siblings simultaneously stage the reconciliation of physical discomfort with material comfort at a time when their peers tended to view the two conditions as fundamentally antagonistic.