ABSTRACT
The expression of pain imposes a moral responsibility on the nurse who cares for the patient – a duty to aid. Moreover, all expressions of pain, whether they be minor or debilitating, convey the fundamental unjustifiability of pain. In this chapter, Lawrence Burns explores the work of Emmanuel Levinas and suggests, from a Levinas perspective, that while pain can be given a meaning in this response, it cannot be justified in itself. This, indeed, is Levinas’ core insight and fundamental teaching. Levinas’ ideas about how pain is experienced by the one who suffers and the nurse who responds to that suffering allows pain to be understood as a disruption of experience that reveals the orientation of philosophy around an ethics of obligation rather than a phenomenological account of being or self-knowledge. Such is the original pragmatic contribution of Levinas’ ethics to a rich tradition of phenomenological studies.
