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Illness, phenomenology, and philosophical method

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Abstract

In this article, I propose that illness is philosophically revealing and can be used to explore human experience. I suggest that illness is a limit case of embodied experience. By pushing embodied experience to its limit, illness sheds light on normal experience, revealing its ordinary and thus overlooked structure. Illness produces a distancing effect, which allows us to observe normal human behavior and cognition via their pathological counterpart. I suggest that these characteristics warrant illness a philosophical role that has not been articulated. Illness can be used as a philosophical tool for the study of normally tacit aspects of human existence. I argue that illness itself can be integral to philosophical method, insofar as it facilitates a distancing from everyday practices. This method relies on pathological or limit cases to illuminate normally overlooked aspects of human perception and action. I offer Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the case of Schneider as an example of this method.

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Notes

  1. I use the term illness to denote serious, chronic, or life-threatening illness, rather than common and transient illnesses, such as flu. However, less serious conditions can also be philosophically important as they disclose more minor interruptions to the flow of experience. Sartre [22] gives the example of a headache as disrupting reading; Miriam Solomon suggests migraine as a less dramatic, but nonetheless obtrusive, disruption of one’s activity (conversation in San Sebastian, Spain, on November 3, 2011).

  2. Death would not be the ultimate limit case but crossing the limit.

  3. This process underlies research in fields such as disability studies, gender studies, queer studies, black studies, and Deaf studies. Academic inquiry in these fields is, in part, motivated by the need to identify and articulate biases.

  4. Distancing can also arise as a result of other life events, for example, bereavement, divorce, and trauma. However, the distancing in illness is unique because it has such a pervasive effect on the body.

  5. It was thought that Schneider’s pathology was vision agnosia, but recently Jonathan J. Marotta and Marlene Behrmann have argued that his was a case of integrative agnosia [20].

  6. This is a good thing. Modern medicine has made huge progress because of this objective view of the body. But it is important to note that this objective approach impacts on patients' experience of their bodies.

  7. The health professional may also alternate between the sensing (her experience of gazing at the x-ray or examining the arm) and the sensed (the arm or the x-ray), but this oscillation does not involve self-objectification.

  8. This is, to an extent, a characteristic of illness and of receiving healthcare in Western society. It may be that objectification does not feature in illness experiences in other cultures. However, since this is a significant alteration to the way in which the body is experienced, it is nonetheless philosophically relevant, even if it is not a universal feature of illness.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was written during a period of research leave funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to the Trust for awarding me a fellowship. I would like to thank Eran Dorfman, Michael Lewis, Darian Meacham, Samir Okasha, and Matthew Ratcliffe for commenting on the paper. I also thank Antonio Casado da Rocha, Arantza Etxeberria, Jeremy Simon, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences in Durham, UWE, Bristol, and the Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable 2011, San Sebastian, Spain, for helpful comments on this paper.

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Correspondence to Havi Hannah Carel.

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Carel, H.H. Illness, phenomenology, and philosophical method. Theor Med Bioeth 34, 345–357 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-013-9265-1

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