Moving to a new era in healthcare philosophy
Next week I’m starting a new series of pieces on post-professionalism, but before drawing a curtain on the first series on post-humanism I wanted to point you to this lovely article by Crispin Sartwell on The post-linguistic turn.
In the article, Sartwell explores the changing faces of analytic and continental philosophy over the last century.
Analytic philosophy, he argues, once focused on analyzing and clarifying language as a way to address philosophical problems. It aimed to eliminate speculative metaphysics and emphasized the limits of meaningful language.
At the same time, continental philosophy viewed language as central to human experience and reality. It emphasized the hermeneutical interpretation of texts and the linguistic construction of the world.
But both traditions converged during the 20th century because of their shared interest in language, and so the linguistic turn in philosophy became the dominant approach of the 20th century.
As we look at the world of healthcare today, both traditions are alive and well and remain somewhat distant from each other. (There is a good illustration of this story in this recent paper from Keith Robinson and Miriam Bender Link).
We can see analytic philosophy in the strong focus on diagnostic and definitional precision, logical reasoning, the objective detachment of experimentation, the focus on problem-solving, and the specific aetiology of disease and ill health.
Analytic philosophy can be seen in the emphasis people give to historical, cultural, and societal determinants of health and illness; in the legitimacy of knowledge, truth and power; and in a concern for the ambiguity and liminality of people’s lived ‘being’.
But, as Sartwell says, ‘Even if few worked directly across the border, the wall [has begun] to seem more like a fence. You could see through it here and there, and imagine climbing over” (Sartwell, 2023).
Sartwell suggests that analytic and continental philosophy have become increasingly self-conscious and self-referential and that the questions analytic and continental philosophy raised during the 20th century have come to appear less and less urgent today; leaving us to ask ‘how much deeper or more sophisticated the philosophical treatment of language can go than it had gone by the 1970s on both sides of the water’.
By contrast, the questions being raised today reach far beyond 20th century humanism;
‘In the new millennium, to take one example of the transformed terrain, environmental issues came to be central in a way that seemed to render linguistic constructionism irrelevant or seemed simply to suggest its falsity. Though discourse has many roles in helping create carbon emissions, for example, it’s the material interactions of particles, whether known or unknown to anyone, narrated or not, that is the heart of the problem. Any philosophy that seemed to undermine the reality of the natural world, or make it a malleable human artefact, has come to feel potentially destructive. Indeed, scholars’ obsession with linguistic interpretation, their notion that everyone has always experienced the world as though reading a book, came to seem at a certain point to be an artefact of privilege, as well as fundamentally implausible’ (Sartwell, 2023).
Unlike Sarwell, though, I can’t imagine that the response to these increasingly urgent problems will revivify human narratives. I’m not convinced that seeing life as a story and storytelling as central to constructing reality and understanding human experience will do anything other than remind us that we are human, all too human.
For all the reasons I set out in the series on posthumanism, I think the radical possibilities that arise from moving past analytic and continental philosophy do not lie in a new humanism. I can see the appeal, I just can’t see it telling us anything we didn’t know already.
To that end, I was drawn to this question from Sean Singer’s recent ‘Stack-post Writing Problems: Not Centering the Human;
‘Human-centeredness is common in poems because they’re made by humans. But what if we could contemplate the climate emergency through poems where humans are not centered?’
There have been a lot of attempts in recent years to write qualitative health research by decentring the human voices, but few of them rise to the sheer strangeness and beauty of Aimé Césaire’s surrealist Martiniquean poetry;
with a smear of sky on a hunk of earth
a prophet of islands forgotten like a penny
sleepless wakeless fingerless trawlless
when the tornado passes gnawer at the bread of huts-excerpt from the poem Magic by Aimé Césaire
Alice Oswald put it this way; “I suppose my poetry has always been a growing attempt to encounter something that’s not myself and that’s not like myself” Link.
In some ways, non-human poetry is a search for what Deleuze called the ‘schizoid’ — the smooth, unfiltered, ungoverned, unregulated space that lies at the heart of all things and gives them their untrammeled desire. As Singer suggests, there is;
‘Poetry that prioritizes the human meaning above other meanings in the physical world and poetry that doesn’t are not the same: the latter can be more animal, or more alive in some ways because we are too close to our own experiences’ Link
‘Chimeric citron with excrescence’,* indeed.
Reference
Sartwell, C. (16 May, 2023). The post-linguistic turn. Aeon Link
*From the poem Digitated Lemon, by Emily Wilson.
Image credit
Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art Link - Absorbing the shock tactics engaged by eco-activists, Humphries’ latest works are repeatedly inscribed with motifs of vandalism, with paint apparently flung onto their surfaces as though to disfigure the artwork beneath. Yet Humphries is not simply simulating these marks of defacement – namely pea soup or black liquid splattered across masterpieces in museums. Instead her canvases seem to propose a curiosity about how we may consider these disruptive marks as active agents themselves. Jacqueline Humphries is at Modern Art, 3 June–22 July.