Abstract
Phenomenology can be used to describe the experience of illness by focusing on first-person accounts of what it is like to suffer from a particular illness. By offering a phenomenological framework through which to study illness, this chapter illuminates the experience of illness. The framework consists of four themes that I bring together in order to offer such a phenomenological understanding of illness. The first is Toombs’ analysis of the essential features of illness. The second is Sartre's three orders of the body. The third is the claim that the healthy body is transparent and illness is the loss of this transparency. Finally, using Heidegger's tool analysis, I will suggest that illness is a breakdown of ‘bodily tools.’
This paper was written during a period of research leave funded by the British Academy. It was revised during a period of research leave funded by the Wellcome Trust. I am grateful to the British Academy for awarding me a fellowship and to the Wellcome Trust for awarding me a Senior Investigator Award. I thank Darian Meacham and Greg Tuck for helpful comments on the paper.
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Notes
- 1.
It can be used to understand any type of bodily experience, e.g. Young’s phenomenological analysis of the embodied experience of pregnancy (Young 2005).
- 2.
I use the term “disease” to refer to the objective physiological disease process and “illness” to denote the subjective experience of the disease.
- 3.
It is not clear whether there is an illness to speak of in this case, because there is no subjective experience of the disease (brain damage in this case). This raises the question whether the comatose person is ill if she does not know that she is ill. I think that there is a norm of bodily function against which illness is measured or experienced. So the case of the comatose person would consist of a violation of this norm, even if there is no subjective experience of this violation. I thank Darian Meacham for raising this point.
- 4.
Sartre breaks away from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on this point. For the latter two, the body of the other is also a lived body. As we will see below, I can also see my body as objective, and moreover that it is both is essential to the givenness of my own body. I thank Darian Meacham for raising this point.
- 5.
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty (2012) helpfully terms the latter the “body-subject,” to indicate the inseparability of the body from the subject under this mode.
- 7.
“Objective” in two senses: first as “naturalistic,” the body as natural object. Second, as “external,” I only ever have an external givenness of the other’s internal states.
- 8.
Illness can be seen, from this epistemic point of view, as a process of edification, and potentially as having philosophical value. The split between the two perspectives holds a phenomenological lesson on the duality of the body.
- 9.
The example is meant to illustrate a situation in which one suddenly becomes aware of one’s body in a negative (in this case socially negative) way.
- 10.
But see also Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Sartre’s analysis (2012, p. 378).
- 11.
The machinic model of the body is opposed to the phenomenological one and pushed to its logical conclusions by Cory Shores in Chap. 14.
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Carel, H. (2015). Conspicuous, Obtrusive and Obstinate: A Phenomenology of the Ill Body. In: Meacham, D. (eds) Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 120. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9870-9_7
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