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Illness (Art of Living)
 
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Illness (Art of Living) (Paperback)

by Havi Carel (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 147 pages
  • Publisher: Acumen Publishing (18 Sep 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844651525
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844651528
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.5 x 1.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 126,777 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
"A masterpiece. Moving seamlessly between an unsparingly honest personal narrative and philosophical reflections, Havi Carel has fashioned a uniquely authentic account of the lived experience of illness. It should be read by everyone who is professionally involved with illness, who is ill, or is likely to become ill; which is to say, by all of us." --Raymond Tallis

"A genuinely important philosophical work. Carel succeeds in offering a wide-ranging, original, wholly convincing and quite beautiful account of the phenomenology of illness. This is a remarkably insightful book about what it is to be human and how to live. Anybody who cares about who they are and how they live ought to read it." --Matthew Ratcliffe, Reader in Philosophy, University of Durham

Product Description
What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? And can there be well-being within illness? In this remarkable and thought-provoking book, Havi Carel explores these questions by weaving together the personal story of her own serious illness with insights and reflections drawn from her work as a philosopher. Carel shows how the concepts and language used to describe illness today are inappropriate and misleading. Too often illness is viewed as a localised biological dysfunction while ignoring the actual experience of the ill person, their fears, their hopes, the way they interact with others and, ultimately, experience life. By focusing on the impact of illness on the ill person's life and reflecting on the experience of illness as lived from within, Carel shows how illness is a life-changing process rather than a limited physiological problem. Carel's fresh approach to illness raises some uncomfortable questions about how we all -- whether healthcare professionals or not -- view the ill and challenges us to become more thoughtful. The book unravels the tension between the universality of illness and its intensely private, often lonely, nature. It offers a new way of looking at a matter that affects every one of us. For those who are ill, it offers insights on our ability to remain happy within the constraints of illness.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic achievement, 19 Sep 2008
By Christopher D. Bertram (Bristol, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Carel's experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another's catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn't maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Carel was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that's, obviously, a difficult business.

I'm not much of a fan of "contintental" philosophy, because I've often found it obscure to obscurantist. Carel, however, is trained in that tradition and is really good at overcoming the resistance of sceptics like me. She uses Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodied subjectivity throughout the book to explore what illness is like for the sick person and how powers and abilities that are invisible to and taken for granted by the well person become all too manifest to the sick (or disabled or ageing) person. All the time, she is constantly moving backwards and forwards between this theoretical discussion and the fact of her own experience: the first onset of symptoms, "denial", diagnosis, treatment, the foreclosure of plans, projects, possibilities. The phenomenology of social situations gets explored too: how people react, their sensitivities and insensitivities, callous reactions, stupid injunctions from ignorant people to try faddish diets of exercise routines.

The discussions of Heidegger and Epicurus I found a little hard going at times. Carel does a brilliant job, I think, of making Heidegger clear. But in doing so she brings to the surface, of my mind at least, the suspicion that, far from being a radical philosopher, he was often turning into universal truths the parochial facts of European bourgeois life: not everyone has a career, nor sees their life as a structured series of projects. But then I'm not a Heidegger scholar, and perhaps I'm being unfair to him. In a sense, issues of Heidegger interpretation don't matter, because Carel is just using the philosophical traditions most available to her to reflect on the social and personal meaning of the imminence of death.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully convincing book, 8 Nov 2008
By Nr S. Wren-Lewis - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I started reading this book on the way home from work and didn't stop until I went to sleep that night. This is not your usual philosophical work. I was grabbed by the reality of the issues discussed through Carel's poignant first-person descriptions of her experience of illness. However, this does not in any way diminish the philosophical merit of the work. In fact, it is the irreducible importance of this first-person perspective that is the work's whole point.

Carel argues that medicine (and, indeed, everyone) needs to take into account what it is like, moment to moment, day to day, for a patient to live their life within illness. She describes medicine as currently working from an objective, nonvalue-laden conception of disease, thus ignoring the patients subjective point of view. I actually think that this is a bit too strong. I think that medicine, at least implicitly, treats disease as a value-laden concept, and to a certain extent is set up to treat patients in such a way. However, the clever part of Carel's project is that it is impossible to go on and ignore the issue of a patient's lived-experience even if you think you have got the philosophical arguments out of the way. I do not think that phenomenology (a subjective first-person perspective) is the complete answer (I believe that medicine also needs a value-laden objective theory of disease in relation to an individual's flourishing, capabilities and functionings). However, Carel does not just illustrate, but through doing so, proves that it cannot stop there. Medicine will always need to take note of a first-person narrative account of illness. Exactly how a disease effects an individual's life cannot be fully got at in any other way.

Carel points the way towards a more holistic, value-orientated style of medicine. In my opinion, a lot more work needs to be done to show how this could be possible. But, most importantly, Carel shows why this work is a necessity.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Philosophy at its best, 31 Mar 2009
By J. Sokolova (Berlin) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is a fantastic book - it's philosophy at its best.

It is a deep book, born out of own lived experience as well as scholarly labour. It is a book about being alive, about living, about living with the certain knowledge of own death.

AND - it is extremely well written - a real page-turner - something you don't get with many philosophy books.

Make sure you read this book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book
This is a generous book. Carel draws on her own experience of illness to think through her commitments to her own philosophical commitments -- and, equally, tries to think about... Read more
Published 6 days ago by William and Daisy

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving and Iluminating
As someone who is struggling with a chronic illness, I was drawn to this book to try to make sense of what has happened to me. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Sarah

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional - a must read
This is a book that will challenge your view of many things - how we live, how we face, challenge and ultimately cope with illness and death. Read more
Published 9 months ago by M. Jeffreys

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