Illness: The Cry of the Flesh

Resumen

This book describes the experience of illness from a phenomenological perspective. I found phenomenology – the description of lived experience – to be the most salient approach to the set of issues surrounding illness. Phenomenology privileges the first-person experience, thus challenging the medical world’s objective, or third person, account of disease. The importance phenomenology places on one’s own experience, on the thoroughly human environment of everyday life, presents a novel view of illness. Illness is no longer biological dysfunction to be corrected by medical experts. Illness is a way of living, experiencing the world, interacting with other people; it is a way of accepting a truncated temporal horizon.We are all ill at some point or another. The vast majority of us will die of some kind of illness. Everyone’s life is touched by it to some extent. Illness and decay are universal features of all life, human and non-human. So why is illness – as a woman with bowl cancer wrote to me – ‘a dirty little secret’ sick people share? What are the contents of this secret? What is the experience of being ill like? This book unpacks the dirty little secret of illness, in an attempt to make it less secretive and hopefully, less lonely. The universality of illness, but also its intensely private and isolating nature, is a riddle I hope to begin unravelling in this book.DESCRIPTION OF CHAPTERS:INTRODUCTION: The introduction will set the stage for the theoretical approach that will be used and the philosophical issues analysed by it. The main approach of the book – that of phenomenology – will be introduced and the rationale for using it explained. According to phenomenology, the body is a unique phenomenon, being both an observable material object and an experiencing subject, or mind. The body has a unique ontological status as the only object in nature that also has consciousness, an object that experiences and perceives. With this theoretical approach in place, I then move on to discuss illness as a distinctive bodily phenomenon. It is through the experience of the failure of the body that our embodied nature can be seen at its clearest, I argue. The introduction will also discuss how the personal and the philosophical meet in this kind of project and why linking the two is valuable to philosophy.1. THE BODY: Chapter One will discuss the body and its transformation in illness through a phenomenological perspective. I will use Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body in the Phenomenology of Perception. According to Merleau-Ponty, human existence is embodied and defined by perceptual experience. A change in the body and in physical and perceptual possibility transforms subjectivity itself. I claim that consciousness is embodied and that the human being cannot be understood without seeing it both as embodied and as having a world. This view suggests that the body is not a vehicle of the person but the embodied person herself. We are our bodies; consciousness is not separate from the body and therefore disease can no longer be understood as a mere physiological process that affects the person only secondarily. This is not just the trivial view that our lives and subjective experiences are affected by disease, but a deeper conceptual shift. On the phenomenological view, disease cannot be taken as a mere biological dysfunction, because there is nothing in human existence that is merely biological. We are embodied consciousness, so consciousness is inseparable, both conceptually and empirically, from the body. Therefore the concept of illness must be reconceived to take into account this unity.2. THE WORLD: Chapter Two will continue the phenomenological analysis, discussing changes to the world of the ill person. Two meanings of the term will be discussed: the physical world and the cultural world. Changes to topography and location stem from the changes in bodily abilities discussed in Chapter One. Distances increase, hills become mountains. Stairs become obstacles rather than passageways. The physical world is altered for the ill person. The cultural world is also significantly altered by changes in the ill person’s abilities. I will next bring out the relationship between agency and the body. The possibility of agency is inherently linked to the ability to assert oneself, or perform actions and to carry out activities that promote one’s goals. But the fundamental role of the body and of physical ability in connection to the agency changes in illness. These changes to the physical body curtail the ill person’s actions, her ability to carry out goals and operate effectively in the cultural world. The embodied nature of agency and the modification of agency by bodily limitations will be discussed. Two types of illness will be examined: chronic illness and disability. 3. SOCIAL RELATIONS AND FRIENDSHIP: Chapter Three will discuss the social world and its transformation in illness. The change in self-perception discussed in the previous chapters is mirrored by changed social perception. The chapter will ask how the ill person is seen by various agents in different types of encounters. The encounter with healthcare professionals will come under focus, as will encounters with strangers (using Sartre’s notion of the gaze). The chapter will then turn to the role of friendship and the strains placed on it by illness. The ideas of betrayal and disappointment, how illness poses a threat to intimacy, and fear of the diseased body will be discussed.4. A TRUNCATED FUTURE: Having discussed the spatial world of the ill person, Chapter Four turns to temporal existence and how it is altered. When someone is presented with a poor prognosis, she must change her ideas of her future, abandon life plans and create new ones that are adapted to the new temporal expectation. With modern medicine, we are often presented with statistics that are meant to supply us with some way of assessing the plausibility of various goals.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Carel, H. (2008). Illness: The Cry of the Flesh. University of the West of England. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315197999