Health and Illness as Enacted Phenomena.
Topoi : an international review of philosophy January 1, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s11245-021-09747-0 via PubMed
Summary
Health is argued to consist in existential feelings that disclose the world with transparency and ease, enabling important life projects. Illness involves unhomelike existential feelings—such as pain, nausea, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, or delusion—that make flourishing harder or impossible. The lived body hurts, resists, or alienates the ill person's activities.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Health consists in existential feelings experienced with transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects, while illness involves unhomelike existential feelings that alienate the lived body and impede flourishing. |
Abstract
In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories - biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial - are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person.