The Enigma of Health E-Book

Hans-Georg Gadamer

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 326

Beschreibung

In this book Gadamer discusses the transformations in human self-understanding, focusing on the achievements of modern medicine.

Das E-Book The Enigma of Health wird angeboten von John Wiley & Sons und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Continental Philosophy, Kontinentalphilosophie, Philosophie, Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Sozialphilosophie

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

1 Theory, Technology, Praxis

The Change in the Meaning of Theory

The Impact of Technology on Modern Man

The Primacy of Practice

The Task of a Comprehensive Science of Humankind

2 Apologia for the Art of Healing

3 The Problem of Intelligence

4 The Experience of Death

5 Bodily Experience and the Limits of Objectification

6 Between Nature and Art

7 Philosophy and Practical Medicine

8 On the Enigmatic Character of Health

9 Authority and Critical Freedom

10 Treatment and Dialogue

11 Life and Soul

12 Anxiety and Anxieties

13 Hermeneutics and Psychiatry

Index

This English translation: chapter 1 copyright © Social Research 1977; all other chapters © Polity Press 1996. First published in German as Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993. This translation first published by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996.

Published with the financial support of Inter Nationes, Bonn.

Reprinted 2004

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ISBN 0-7456-1367-5

ISBN 0-7456-1594-5 (pbk)

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Preface

It has always been a particular occasion that has prompted me to speak about problems of health care and the art of medicine. The results are gathered together in this small volume. It should not be a cause for surprise if a philosopher who is neither a doctor nor feels himself to be a patient nevertheless wishes to participate in the discussion concerning the broad range of problems which arise in the field of health in the scientific and technological age. Nowhere else do the advances of modern research enter so directly into the sociopolitical arena of our time as they do in this area. The physics of our century has taught us that there are limits to what we can measure. And in my opinion this fact alone merits strong hermeneutical interest. This is even more the case when we are concerned not just with the quantifiability of nature but with living human beings. The limits of what can be measured and, above all, of what can be effected through human intervention reach deep into the realm of health care. Health is not something that can simply be made or produced. But what then is health itself? Can it become an object for scientific investigation in the same way that it becomes an object for the individual when the balance of health is disturbed? For the ultimate aim after all must be to regain one’s health and thereby to forget that one is healthy.

At the same time, the domain of science constantly extends into the realm of life itself. When it is a question of applying scientific knowledge to our own health, it is clear that we cannot be treated solely from the perspective of science. Here everyone has their own experiences and expectations. This is particularly true for all those disputed marginal areas of medical science such as pyschosomatic medicine, homoeopathy, so-called natural healing methods, hygienics, the pharmaceutical industry and all the ecological aspects involved. And this is also true for the care of the chronically ill and the old in the community. The ever growing costs involved here effectively demand that health care once again be acknowledged and recognized by the entire population as their shared responsibility.

The contributions offered here are not simply addressed to doctors, although most of them were originally presented to them as lectures, or again solely to patients, but rather to each and every one of us who must take care of our own health through the way in which we lead our lives. This particular responsibility which each person bears expands into a much broader dimension of responsibility in our highly complex civilization. Everywhere we find ourselves in possession of intensified human technical capacities which are as astounding as they are disturbing and the task is to integrate these new capacities into the social and political order as a whole. For centuries our entire culture has neglected to face up to these new demands. We have only to recall the humanitarian optimism which animated the eighteenth century and compare that with the general mood at the close of the twentieth century in this our age of mass civilization. We might think here of the immense increase in weapons technology and the destructive potential it harbours; or of the dangers posed to the conditions of human life by the technological progress from which we all benefit; and then again of the arms trade, which is as difficult to control as the drugs trade; and not least of the deluge of information which threatens to engulf our human faculty of judgement.

The enigma of health is just one small example from the range of problems which confront us. Everywhere it is a question of finding the right balance between our technical capacities and the need for responsible actions and choices. Within this whole area the problem of cultivating and caring for health represents something which directly concerns everyone. Thus we are forced to recognize that there are limits to what we can do, limits which are taught to us by illness and death. Care for our own health is an original manifestation of human existence.

Chapter 1 appeared originally in Neue Anthropologie, ed. Paul Vogler and H.-G. Gadamer, vol. 1 (New York and Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 9–37. It was slightly modified by the author for its first publication in English under the title ‘Theory, Technology, Practice: The Task of the Science of Man’, translated by Howard Brotz, in Social Research, vol. 44 (Fall 1977), New York. The publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce that translation here, where it appears with modifications.

Chapter 2 appeared originally in Festschrift für Paul Vogler (Leipzig, 1965) and was also published in vol. 1 of H.-G. Gadamer, Kleine Schriften (3 vols, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1967), pp. 211–19.

Chapter 3 was given as a lecture to a meeting of the Gesamtverband Deutscher Nervenärtze in Wiesbaden in September 1963 and appeared as ‘Philosophische Bemerkungen zum Problem der Intelligenz’, Der Nervenarzt, vol. 7 (Heidelberg, 1964), pp. 281–6.

Chapter 4 was given as a radio broadcast for the Heidelberg studio of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk on 10 October 1983 and appeared in H.-G. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985–), vol. 4, pp. 288–94.

Chapter 5 appeared in Festschrift aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Dr. Margit Egnér-Preises 1986 (Dr Margit Egnér Foundation, 1986), pp. 33–43.

Chapter 6 appeared in Viktor von Weizsäcker zum 100. Geburtstag (Schriften zur anthropologischen und inter disziplinar en Forschung in der Medizin, vol. 1), ed. Peter Hahn and Wolfgang Jacob (Berlin and Heidelberg, 1987), pp. 45–50.

Chapter 7 appeared in Das Philosophische und die praktische Medizin (Brücken von der Allgemeinmedizin zur Psychosomatik, vol. 4), ed. Helmut A. Zappe and Hansjakob Mattern (Berlin and Heidelberg, 1990), pp. 37–44.

Chapter 8 appeared in Erfahrungsheilkunde, Acta medica empirica: Zeitschrift für ärztliche Praxis, vol. 40, no. 11 (1991), pp. 804–8.

Chapter 9 appeared as ‘Über den Zusammenhang von Autorität und kritischer Freiheit’ in Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie, Neurochirurgie und Psychiatrie, vol. 133, no. 1 (Zurich, 1983), pp. 11–16.

Chapter 10 was given as a lecture to a conference on the work of the neurologist and psychiatrist Prince Alfred Auersperg in September 1989 in Oettingen.

Chapter 11 was given as a lecture at the University of Zurich in the summer of 1986.

Chapter 12 was given as a lecture to the Heidelberg Colloquium on the Problem of Anxiety chaired by Hermann Lang in 1990.

Chapter 13 was presented in an English translation before the Conference of Psychiatrists in San Francisco in 1989.

1Theory, Technology, Praxis

The Change in the Meaning of Theory

‘There is no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.’ This famous beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason surely holds too for the knowledge we possess of human beings. To begin with this includes the sum total of the ever progressing results of natural scientific research, which we call ‘Science’. But then there is the empirical knowledge of so-called practice that everyone accumulates in the midst of life – the doctor, cleric, educator, judge, soldier, politician, worker, employee, official. Not only in the professional sphere but also in everyone’s private and personal existence the experience that people develop out of the encounter with themselves and their fellow human beings continually grows. Beyond the domain of this experience, furthermore, there is that vast wealth of knowledge which flows towards each and every human being in the transmission of human culture – poetry, the arts as a whole, philosophy, historiography and the other historical sciences. To be sure, such knowledge is ‘subjective’, that is, largely unverifiable and unstable. It is, nevertheless, knowledge that science cannot ignore. As such, a rich tradition of this knowledge exists from time immemorial, from the days of Aristotle’s ‘practical philosophy’ to the Romantic and post-Romantic age of the so-called Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences. In contrast to the natural sciences, however, all these other sources of experience have a common quality: what we learn from them becomes experience only when actually integrated into the practical consciousness of acting human beings.