Phenomenology, ethics, and the crisis of the lived‐body

mind or abstract body? And how might this understanding figure in the transformation of ethical care? Husserl claims that the life-world (Lebenswelt) and the lived-body (Leib) have been ‘forgotten’, ‘surreptitiously substituted’ (p. 48) by the historical sedimentations of technoculture and tradition, ‘fashionable prejudices and their phraseologies’ (p. 289). If the forgotten life-world and lived-body are themselves foundational, i.e. historically and ontologically prior to the fashionable prejudices and appearances that surreptitiously take their place – such as institutionalized biomedicine and bioethics – Husserl nevertheless acknowledges that a direct return to origins would be too onerous, if not impossible, to carry out (p. 363). We cannot simply reclaim the lived-body and the life-world. Der Traum is ausgeträumt – the dream of origins is over, dreamed-up, dreamed-out (p. 389). So, while he calls for us to ‘re-activate’ and ‘re-vitalise’ these origins, this activity can only occur in medias res, ‘a praxis in which those imperfectly determining thing-representations make up the material’ (p. 345). Husserl takes as his representative example geometry, which figures largely in The Crisis and in its famous appendix, ‘The Origin of Geometry’; this text has been the subject of numerous commentaries, including Derrida’s (1989). Husserl’s guiding question is: ‘how does geometrical ideality (just like that of all sciences) proceed from its primary intrapersonal origin, where it is a structure within the conscious space of the first inventor’s soul, to its ideal objectivity [ideale Gegenständlichkeit]?’ (pp. 357–358). In other words, how is the original ‘intrapersonal’ idea transmitted historically, how does it become ‘objective’ for us, and furthermore, how can we locate this epistemic ‘object’ as it has become increasingly abstract and disembodied across the course of history – much as ‘crisis’ itself has lost its body? Husserl argues that it is the duty of the community of scientists to carry out this task, reflectively, philosophically. While Husserl does not use the term, I would call this a rhetorical and ethical appropriation of the tradition, resisting the blind application of ready-made rules, concepts, and theorems that are transmitted through the ‘seduction of language’ (p. 362). This is a properly rhetorical endeavour because it is in the midst of linguistic representations that the ideal objectivities are to be found: ‘it belongs to their objective being that they be linguistically expressed and can be expressed again and again; or, more precisely, they have their objectivity, their existence-foreveryone, only as signification, as the meaning of speech’ (p. 357n).And it is rhetorical because we must attend to how meaning is transmitted through speech, ‘in the “how” of the manners of givenness and in the onta themselves, not straightforwardly but rather as objects in respect to their “how” . . . throughout the alteration of relative validities, subjective appearances, and opinions’ (p. 144). The ‘how’ is the work of Phenomenology, Ethics, and Crisis 291 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Nursing Philosophy (2012), 13, pp. 289–294 textual ‘explication’: ‘extracting one by one, in separation from what has been vaguely, passively received as a unity, the elements of meaning, thus bringing the total validity to active performance in a new way on the basis of the individual validities. What was a passive meaning-pattern has now become one constructed through active production’ (p. 364). At this juncture in his discussion, Husserl introduces the concept of the Sprachleib, a neologism that might be translated as the ‘linguistic living body’, the ‘lived-body of language’, or even as the ‘lived-body of speech’. Here we touch on the ways that a body might ‘speak’, and how its voice could convey an ethical demand. It is in language that ideal objectivities and history come together, a sort of suprasensible signifier that is established through a ‘linguistic community’ (p. 358), not something that seeks recourse in the private language of an autonomous subject. Here, in the power of language, meaning is constituted through the shared horizons of civilization and history. Husserl’s metaphor of the Sprachleib figures as a chiasmus between the lived-body and language: we can never be certain whether it is the body that speaks in and through language or language itself that speaks in and through the body. It is through language that the body is animated, as a lived-body, not a mere Körper; but conversely, it is in the lived-body that language finds its home, its mode of expression, its meaningfulness (Sinnhaftigkeit). While any given signifier will never quite match up with the signified (i.e. the ideal objectivity in question), the Sprachleib ensures that they appear together for us – not in static concepts, but in living, bodily significance, within a meaningful life-world and a dynamic history, in a place rather than in the abstract coordinates of geometric space. While a detailed examination of Husserl’s last great phenomenological treatise is beyond the scope of this paper, with the figure of the Sprachleib I believe we can begin to reorient ethics toward the body in crisis, toward the address of a body that speaks. It is hoped, then, that with such a figure we might begin to break free from the ossified language of institutional bioethics, with its relatively static principles, to invent a language for ethics that makes sense of lived-bodies, and that animates them ethically. It is time, perhaps, to say farewell to ‘autonomy’ and ‘reason’, to figure ethical subjectivity in terms that speak to and from the lived-body, and that will ensure that its speech, in turn, can be heard as an ethical claim. Phenomenological researchers in nursing and health sciences have already made an ethical choice in their research methods and the kinds of relationships these methods find valuable. While Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative method originally developed for studies in health psychology (Colaizzi, 1978; Smith, 1996, 2004; Reid et al., 2005), in recent years it has become increasingly popular in the human, social, and health sciences (Benner, 1994; Cohen et al., 2000; Larkin et al., 2006; Smith et al., 2009; Chan et al., 2010). Focusing on the body and its perception, IPA offers an alternative to cognitively oriented health psychology, ‘by looking in detail at how individuals talk about the stressful situations they face, and how they deal with them, and by close consideration of the meanings they attach to them’ (Smith, 1996, p. 270). In the field of nursing, Oiler (1982) considers phenomenology to be a good way to understand individuals’ lives and experiences. Using a phenomenological research design to study seclusion in psychiatric settings, Holmes et al. (2004) conclude that not only do patients experience seclusion as a punitive measure, but patient narratives also highlight their intersubjectivity, suggesting that the lack of patient-nurse contact negatively impacts their experience. However, what is missing from the literature, with few exceptions (e.g. Thomasma, 1994; Shildrick & Mykitiuk, 2005), is a robust ethical analysis of bodily perceptions and interpersonal relationships. Rather than seeking recourse in the principle of rational autonomy, phenomenology allows us to locate ethical agency and comportment as relational, incumbent upon the ways that bodies and places interact, informing one another, to provide insight into ‘the structure of subjectivity’ (Malpas, 2003). It might be worth noting, most emphatically, that this research does not imply an ethics of emotions or ‘feelings’, as it does for Kass and Somerville. When Kass (1997) argues for an ethics based on ‘repugnance’ and Somerville (2006, 2007) implores us to heed our ‘yuck reaction’, calling it a ‘moral intuition’, we have entered dangerous and irresponsible territory. An ethico-phenomenological analysis will interrogate the Stuart J. Murray 292 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Nursing Philosophy (2012), 13, pp. 289–294 ‘naturalness’ or ‘biological’ basis of these so-called moral dispositions and feelings; it will expose the political, institutional, and economic investments that underwrite such prejudice. With Heidegger (1971), we might speak of ‘dwelling’ when we consider the life of the body; we might followVarela (1999),and reflect on an embodied ‘ethical know-how’, rather than follow ‘rational’ ethical concepts and rules; or we might invoke Latour’s (2004) understanding of ‘matters of concern’, sharply distinguished from ‘matters of fact’. These thinkers are attuned to the life-world, offering strategies – and a language – to resist the abstract coordinates of bodies and minds, as well as the ‘misguided rationalism’,as Husserl calls it,which is rooted in these abstractions. By affirming its place in the life-worldions. By affirming its place in the life-world and its vital intimacy with the lived-body, Husserl’s Sprachleib is an antidote of sorts to language increasingly conceived as code, and to bodies and life itself conceived as DNA – where ‘nature itself becomes – to express it in a modern way – a mathematical manifold’ (Husserl, 1970, p. 23). Rather than a model of autonomy, then, the lived-body ought to be understood as a site of ‘agency’ (if this is still a viable ethical metaphor – we will need others). We might begin to reorient the body on the plane of significance, as subjects for the world, not merely as objects in the world. This in no way is to suggest that we jettison the technological achievements of biomedicine or rush to the embrace of ‘alternative’ therapies, but that we seriously consider the purpose of our medical technologies, how they both presume and serve to (re)constitute particular understandings of bodily life. For an ethics reflecting on the Sprachleib, the chiasmatic relation between lived-body