The phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics (original) (raw)
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Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1996
organize suffering into categories to help cope with it, but often these categories themselves conceal some forms of suffering, even contribute to them. This latter experience leads some to suspect that suffering is never entirely reducible to any determinate set of categories. To suffer is to bear, endure or undergo, to submit to something injurious, to become disoraanized. Suffering subsists on the underside of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort. It is, therefore, ubiquitous. But there I go.., moving from the agony of suffering to a comforting reflection on it. Appropriating suffering to a reading of the human condition. For severe suffering exceeds every interpretation of it while persistently demanding interpretation. Without suffering, it is unlikely we would have much depth in our philosophies and religions. But with it, life is tough.., and miserable for many. Does the poly-cultural character of suffering reveal something about the human condition? And.how contestable and 3 culturally specific are the medical, psychological, religious, ethical, therapeutic, sociostructural, economic and political categories through which suffering is acknowledged and administered today? Is "sufferingn a porous universal, whose persistence as a cultural term reveals how conceptually discrete injuries, wounds, and agonies are experientially fungible, crossing and confounding the fragile boundaries we construct between them? Or is it a barren generality, seducing theorists into metaphysical explorations far removed from specific injuries in need of medical or moral or religious or political or therapeutic or military attention? Any response to this question draws upon one or more of the theoretical paradigms already noted. A political theorist might focus on power struggles between disparate professionals over the legitimate definition and treatment of suffering. An evangelist might minister instances that fit the Christian model. And a physician might medicate theorists and spiritualists burned out by the projects these faiths commend. Is the bottom line, then, that today people go to the doctor when they really need help? Perhaps. But they might pray after getting the treatment. Or file a malpractice suit. Or join a political movement to redesign the health care system. Sufferers are full of surprises. Among fieid contenders for primacy in the domain of suffering, ethical theory has pretty much dropped out of the running. The reason is clear, even if astonishing. Contemporary professional paradigms of ethics, represented fairly well by John
THE SENSE OF SUFFERING* Better to suffer than to die: that is mankind's motto
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1986
Medical practice is animated by the intention to cure; it aims to relieve the immense variety of sufferings to which human beings are subject in virtue of the conditions of their embodied existence. My purpose here is to demonstrate how a philosophical analysis of the formal structures and kinds of human suffering provides an essential foundation for determining certain ethical dimensions of the physician's relation to his suffering patient. Can paternalism in medical practice be justified by the aim of relieving suffering? What are the scope and limits of the patient's responsibility for his suffering, and what difference does this make in the physician's response to it? How is the suffering that medical treatment itself exacts in the name of cure to be justified? Such questions can be answered only by an analysis of the sense or value of suffering in human life.
Suffering in Contemporary Society
2021
Suffering points in every direction. It unites and separate us, makes us feel alive, yet close to death. Suffering makes us hide and act, love and kill. From the primal scream of the newly born to the oftenpainful last sip of air that we breathe, suffering pervades our entire lives. We feel it through the core nerve of our being, and suffering, in Kierkegaard's words, "nails us to ourselves". There is nowhere to hide and yet there is. The world was always one of others and through them, our lives acquire its form and its bearing. Yet these others cannot be trusted; they betray, grew old, sick and finally, they too must die. The relational shields that protect and mark who we are can alleviate but not protect us from suffering. As Løgstrup (1997) has suggested, it is through the irrevocable unshareability of suffering that the need to attest our inner experiences and articulate these through language or action emerges. It is thus the solitude of suffering that creates the active need to connect with others, and on the one hand, we find ourselves, with Alphonso Lingis' (1994) words, in "the community of those who have nothing in common". On the other, riots and revolutions often testify to the potential of suffering to unite across the borders that otherwise tends to diverge us. As Martin Hägglund (2019) has pointed out, all of us find ourselves thrown into a world that leaves much to wish for-none of us have asked for this life, and yet we are asked to carry it; to "own our lives". Mental states are never identical to brain states (Kripke, 1980) and the agonies that humans undergo always point to us as spiritual beings, to suffering being more than pain. Shortly after the world has begun to make sense, reflexivity kicks in and we all become, as Augustine puts it in his Confessions, "questions unto ourselves". Being human means experiencing that-while our actions are earnest attempts of responding to these questions, final answers remain out of reach, and we find
Transformative Suffering and the Cultivation of Virtue
Forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
Anastasia Scrutton offers an attractive account of two Christian theologies of depression and argues, cogently and compellingly, that forms of potentially transformative theologies are therapeutically and philosophically superior. My double aim here is to try to cash out the operative notion of 'transformation' by focusing on two features: first its multimodal character (ethical, aesthetic, existential, spiritual) and, second, the theme of a realisation of 'dependence', 'grounding', or of being 'anchored' in the world. I suggest that these two themes of multimodality and dependence can be understood, individually and together, if they are placed within an aretaic framework. The transformative effects of suffering consist of the cultivation and exercise of virtues - of being edified - in a way that transforms both one's character and one's relationship to the world. To be transformed by suffering is therefore to be edified and this account shows fidelity to both the case studies Scrutton discusses and to wider features of the Christian tradition. The paper ends by sketching out answers to Scrutton's questions about whether transformative suffering applies to somatic as well as to mental illness, and whether it provides a theodical justification of human suffering.
This essay proposes a critical investigation of the notion of suffering as a premise and warning for the Social and Political domains. Drawing from the writings of the contemporary French philosophers Levinas, Marion, Ricœur and Blanchot, comprising a corpus I refer to as “The Ethics of Suffering”, it treats this issue in four stages of analysis: terminological, phenomenological, ethical and political. The phenomenological analysis first reveals the tension resulting from the double nature of “Suffering”, defined both as a feeling and a long lasting condition. This duality leads then to question our social ability to simply apply suffering based on the fact that it is widespread and known to all, showing that the lack of a permanent substance or single essence causes its political prevention or propagation to remain totally arbitrary. On this account, the positive outcome of the ethical and phenomenological investigations consists in offering a standard ground for bridging between individual and social suffering while sustaining the tension coming from its dual nature. At the same time, their definition of suffering as a basis for solidarity (suffering is always ‘suffering with the others’) while insisting on the solitary mode of torment reveals a problematic double bind. Taking up the work of Adi Ophir on the evil, the essay goes as far as showing how this double bind affects the political thought and action, when exposing its rather limited power of manipulating the human threshold and using suffering as a political instrument. The paper thus seeks to contribute to the social and political discussion by examining our ability to regulate our conduct in the public and the political spheres through the understanding of suffering and by examining whether we can actually protect ourselves and cope with the danger of controlling individuals through the control of their suffering.
Looks in search of the meaning of the human suffering
PURIQ, 2022
This text presents the terms pain and suffering that we often use interchangeably in our daily lives and how both involve, trap, disturb the individual. So, to understand the effects of pain and suffering. It is necessary to know the realms that encompass the human being, and how the individual perceives them. Suffering is perceived in an existential reality that affects the individual. When suffering occurs and continues, it leaves aftermaths in its wake in many cases, and what options are presented to us to face the suffering or let ourselves be dragged by it.