A Hermeneutics of the Body and Place in Health and Illness (original) (raw)

2017, Space, Place, and Hermeneutics

This essay explores the ways in which hermeneutic philosophy has shaped current research on the body. Using the experience of health and illness to frame the discussion and drawing on major figures such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans Georg-Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger as well as a number of contemporary theo-rists, the aim of the essay is to show how hermeneutics challenges core naturalistic assumptions we have about the body by bringing our attention to the situated place of the body as it is lived. By focusing on the 'lived-body' (Leib) rather than the 'corporeal body' (Körper), hermeneutics illuminates the tacit, situated understanding we have of the world, how the experience of illness can shatter this understanding and transform our self-interpretations, and the extent to which our bodies and their various ailments make sense to us only through the public meanings we give to them. In 1986, Hans Georg-Gadamer published a short essay entitled 'Bodily Experience and the Limits of Objectification' describing the ways in which modern science and the practice of medicine in particular have resulted in, what he calls, a " violent estrangement " (1996, 70) from ourselves as situated and embodied beings. Gadamer's aim in this essay is to articulate the inseparability of the 'lived-body' (Leben) from 'life' (Leib) and suggests that modern medicine, rooted as it is in the methodological assumptions of natural science, operates under an objectifying framework that is fundamentally incapable of seeing this connection. By bringing a " hermeneutic awareness " (1996, 71) to the phenomenon of embodiment, Gadamer not only attempts to identify the boundaries or limits of objectification in medicine but also offers a robust, experiential account of 'what it means' and 'what it feels like' to be ill. In this chapter, I try to show how Gadamer, along with a number of key figures in hermeneutic philosophy, has had a significant impact on the ways in which we understand the situated experience of our own bodies and how this understanding challenges a number of core assumptions in mainstream medical practice.