The phenomenology of health and illness

Fredrik Svenaeus

pp. 59-118

in: Fredrik Svenaeus, The hermeneutics of medicine and the phenomenology of health, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

What is health? The answer to this question is by no means obvious. And yet in a way most of us know what it is like to be healthy, since this is the state in which we most often find ourselves in our normal life. Illness to most of us is an exception, a contrast to and interruption of our normal way of being in the world. Merely to experience something and to conceptualize it, however, certainly are two different things, although firmly connected. We can trace the theories of this connection at least as far back as Plato's world of ideas explaining and supporting the world of appearance. The nature of the relation between experience and concept has, in the discipline of philosophy, been a constant source of debate and generated many different theories. This part of my work will take its starting point in one of the philosophical attempts to found a theory about the structure or eidos of experience — phenomenology.