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.
Highlights
In what follows I will investigate the significance of an enacted perspective for theories of health and illness
Husserl’s terminology of intentionality could serve us well in showing how the phenomenological view on action is different from the thirdperson perspective we find in analytical action-based philosophy, such as the health theory developed by Nordenfelt that we explored above
By acknowledging the role played by existential feelings in human being in the world, enactivists could adopt a phenomenological perspective on health and illness and make contributions to the field of medical ethics in a more substantial way
Summary
In what follows I will investigate the significance of an enacted perspective for theories of health and illness. The reason for focusing upon Nordenfelt’s proposal is that the concept of action is central to his health theory; the reason for focusing upon Engel’s proposal is that it has served as a framework for previous enactivist attempts to address health issues, mainly within the philosophy of psychiatry; and the reason for bringing in the phenomenologists of medicine is that they have developed the most thoroughly enacted approaches to health so far, according to the understanding of enactivism introduced above By way of this discussion I will indicate how I think a phenomenology of health could make enactivism even more aware of the A (Affectivity) in the “4Es and an A,” than has so far been the case, and in what way this awareness will have significance for moral issues in medicine. I will end the paper by briefly discussing how an enacted phenomenological view on human nature could be used to develop a slightly different approach in medical ethics than the standard principle-based one (see, further: Svenaeus 2017) Such a view will allow us to take into account the concerns of patients in a more enacted, embodied, embedded, extended and affectively enlightened way
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