Illness as a Crisis of Meaning

In Phenomenological Bioethics: Medical Technologies, Human Suffering, and the Meaning of Being Alive, the Swedish philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus aims to show how the continental tradition of phenomenology can enrich bioethical debates by adding important but often‐ignored perspectives, namely, that of lived experience. Phenomenology focuses not on supposedly objective, scientifically validated facts, but on the “life world” of the individuals affected by a situation. Individuals' life worlds consist of their experience of their own lived bodies (or Leiber) and the meaning structures of their everyday worlds. A phenomenologically informed and oriented bioethics would seek to take those life worlds into account when considering what should be done in a particular ethically challenging situation.Svenaeus reminds us that there is generally more to an illness than just a malfunction of the body that can be causally explained and treated accordingly. The fundamental insight that Svenaeus develops in his new book is that our illnesses are often, if not always, crises of meaning.