Absorbed activity makes pain present yet un-noticed until reflection.

Evidence

When we say that someone is suffering, we commonly suppose that he or she is not an agent. To suffer (physical or mental pain, humiliation, deprivation) is, so we usually think, to be in a passive state—to be an object, not a subject. One readily allows that pain may be a cause for action (seeking to end the suffering, say), but one does not normally think of it as action itself. Pain is something that happens to the body or that afflicts the mind. Or so, at any rate, we tend to think. Yet one can think of pain not merely as a passive state (although it can be just that) but as itself agentive. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 385 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reflection transforms lived pain into a psychic object at a distance — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 882; Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 385; Intentional affectivity directed at pain differs from pure body-consciousness (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state #expands (0.82) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 385
• The body is apprehended non-thetically as fatigue while consciousness attends to the world #expands (0.80)
• Being reflected upon gives consciousness a sense of having an outside #expands (0.78)
• Intentional affectivity directed at pain differs from pure body-consciousness #complicates (0.75)
• Active forgetting distorts a people’s self-understanding as it blunts pain #complicates (0.72) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 123