When Life's Richness Is Denied

What Can We Learn From Being Ill?

With impeccable timing, for someone who was brought up celebrating Christian traditions, I’ve spent the last week with flu.

The symptoms have been the usual: a hacking cough, fever, lethargy, and so on. All this would be inconvenient enough, but having to look after children and provide them with an enjoyable Christmas at the same time has been… interesting. 

Perhaps as a way of trying to make the best of a bad situation, I began to think about what illness can philosophically teach us.

This sounds quite strange, I have to admit. Illness is generally understood as physical, something that happens to our bodies and which can often be alleviated, or cured, by medicines that are of course products of the biological sciences. 

Illness certainly is all this – but this isn't all that illness is. Illness is also something that happens to us mentally, even spiritually, if you will. This is why it can also be subjected to a philosophical and not only a biological analysis. In fact, some philosophers have even argued that there are philosophical insights to be drawn from a close examination of illness. 

So what could these be?

Illness vs disease

To begin to make sense of this idea we need a neat way of distinguishing between the physical and the mental dimensions of the topic. To this end, some philosophers use ‘disease’ to refer to the physical level and ‘illness’ to refer to the experiential level. The former is that which medicine addresses, but the latter is what is actually happening in the mind of the unwell person.

To see this distinction clearly, it can help to remember that some people have diseases without being aware of it – and so in the terms used here, they are not ill because the disease has no mental effects. Conversely, it’s possible to be ill, in this sense, without actually having a disease, as cases of hypochondria show. Of course, the two usually align, though, as in the case of my flu: the illness was what was happening subjectively to me, and the disease was the reason why.

At this point, you may well appreciate the distinction, yet wonder what the value of philosophically examining illness is. Surely – one might object – what matters is the diagnosis and curing of disease, not illness (understood in the sense above)? 

I disagree with this, however. For one thing, the better we are at describing our illnesses, the more likely we are to have the diseases causing them correctly diagnosed. If I’m able to explain to a doctor that I have a shooting pain running down the small of my back and into my legs, leading me to struggle to stretch out, walk freely or sit for extended periods, then they might be quicker at recognising that I have sciatica. 

More than that, though, I would challenge the assumption in the above objection that disease has automatic priority over illness. After all – isn’t what we’re directly experiencing more real for us than the processes taking place in our body, even if the latter can be objectively examined and the former only subjectively? In that sense, isn’t the curing of disease largely a means to the end of treating the illness?

If you find this idea persuasive, then it makes sense not only to think of illness as distinct from disease but even to think of it as the ultimate locus of our affliction. Now, we’ve seen that describing a shooting pain is one way of putting an illness into words – but we can go a lot further than that. In fact, we can glean deep insights from an analysis of illness, because illness is a disruptor, with the capacity to show the everyday in a new light – if only we have the eyes to see it. The question, then, is how we develop these eyes. 

Seeing illness afresh

Probably the most common way of philosophically examining illness is through the method known as phenomenology. 

The phenomenological method consists of providing close descriptions of things – of phenomena, hence the name – from a subjective angle. Instead of adopting a detached, objective viewpoint on something, as the scientist wishes to, the phenomenologist tries to turn their attention to their basic encounter with a thing precisely as it occurs for them. Other people are then invited to examine their own experiences of that thing, with the aim of reaching intersubjective agreement, and from there, the phenomenologist can build a theory of the said thing.

What does a phenomenology of illness tell us, then? 

The two main things that we can learn from a phenomenology of illness are the extent to which we live through the body – and take this fact for granted – and the varying ways that things in the world are made present to us in experience.

These are complicated ideas, so bear some explanation – but if my descriptions are correct you should find that your own experience accords with both. To make things clearer we can take a concrete example of an illness: namely, my Christmas flu.

The disease of flu is caused by a virus, which infects the nose and throat. As an illness, though, it affects my whole body. What I mean by this is that normally I can move around with ease and very little effort: if I want to get up, fetch something, or walk around, then I can do so without even thinking about it.

Yet the effect of the flu is to completely upset this whole ordinary way of being embodied. Now my body is sluggish, cumbersome, and hard to move: the effort taken in getting out of bed and doing everyday things is striking, and disconcerting. To be clear, it’s not as though I’m experiencing my body as an unresponsive impediment to my healthy will – on the contrary, my will and presence of mind are weakened along with my body. 

What this tells us, I think, is that provided we enjoy good health the body is for the most part invisible in our lives. It retreats into the background as we focus on what we want to do now, later, tomorrow. It’s typically only when we experience some kind of impediment, through illness, aging, or similar, that it becomes readily apparent – which suggests that we usually take the good health of our bodies for granted.

The second dimension that phenomenology can bring our attention to is the richness of the world. Ordinarily, my experience of the world is full of sights, sounds, and smells, my mind is active, ranging over things that have happened, are happening, or may one day happen, and my encounters with other people are often enjoyable and thought-provoking. When suffering from the flu, however, all this diminishes, as though someone had turned a dial down on my whole experience of the world. Instead, the world becomes for me dull, muffled, and lifeless, while encounters with other people become testing.

What this shows us is that, much like the transparency of the body, the richness of the world is similarly taken for granted – right until it shrinks and diminishes in our experience. When I’m in good health I enjoy a rich perceptual and mental life – but in an odd way which involves not noticing it. Paradoxically, it’s only when such richness is denied to me that it becomes conspicuous by its absence, and then truly appreciated. 

The good in the ill

There is of course much more that could be said – the upshot, though, is that there are useful philosophical insights to be drawn from being ill. Precisely because illness disrupts our usual way of being it allows us to look at that way of being with clarity, and perhaps greater appreciation. 

Clearly, the value of such lessons only compensates for a relatively mild illness, rather than anything severe: I wouldn’t want to suggest that anyone struggling with a serious condition should just look for that cloud’s silver lining. For someone like me, though, merely irked about going down with the flu over Christmas and having to change our family’s plans as a result, it’s a useful reminder that some inconveniences in life carry hidden benefits if only we take the trouble to look. 

Now that I think about it, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to realise over the festive period after all.