We are body: Towards a hermeneutics of the body for the practice of medicine and religion
Christoffer Grundmann, ThD, ThM, Valparaiso University
The inadequacy of the dominant anthropological model operative in rational-scientific, efficiency minded Western culture has been felt since long, especially when dealing with patients and parishioners. To compensate for the shortcomings in addressing human needs in any such personal encounter with people experiencing existential crisis, ever more specialties and services got added to the panoply of medicine and the pastoral ministry aided by advanced psychological methods and innovative counseling skills. This well-intended diversification of labor and the delegation of tasks accompanying it, however, do not really solve the basic problem; they just reinforce the underlying anthropological concept instead of overcoming it. The main thesis stated by the paper here unfolds against this backdrop. It asserts that what is needed is not an increase in additional disciplines but a different way of practicing medicine and religion altogether.
Perceiving clinical medicine and pastoral ministry as expressions of applied anthropology the paper sketches the outline of a hermeneutics of the body as a promising alternative to success-fully overcome the materialistic-mechanistic reductionism prevalent in Western medicine and the disembodied spiritualism of religious counseling and well-intended pious talk. It surveys the history and contents of attempts at more adequate concepts of the human being, notably by phenomenologists drawing attention to the ‘lived body’ (f.i. D. Leder, ed., The Body in Medical Practice and Thought, Dordrecht, 1992) and phenomenological anthropologists framing scientific research as ‘lived experience’ instead of merely abstract data collection (f.i. C. Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The narrative structure of experience. Cambridge, UK, 1998; Mol, A., The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Durham, NC, 2002) while also considering like developments in the fields of religious studies (f.i. S. Coakley, ed., Religion and the Body, Cambridge, UK, 1997) and theology (f.i. John Paul II, Man and Women He Created Them: A theology of the Body, Boston 2006). Having thus outlined the frame of reference the paper moves on to introduce constitutive elements of a hermeneutics of the body as there are corporeality, limitability, intentionality, sensibility, historicity, personality, individuality, and sociability by briefly characterizing these and highlighting their practical impact on the respective fields of activity. In conclusion some suggestions are made of how best to relate the insights gained in this way to the actual day-to-day work in the hospital, the nursing home, and the various religious ministries as well was in medical schools and religious seminaries.
The inadequacy of the dominant anthropological model operative in rational-scientific, efficiency minded Western culture has been felt since long, especially when dealing with patients and parishioners. To compensate for the shortcomings in addressing human needs in any such personal encounter with people experiencing existential crisis, ever more specialties and services got added to the panoply of medicine and the pastoral ministry aided by advanced psychological methods and innovative counseling skills. This well-intended diversification of labor and the delegation of tasks accompanying it, however, do not really solve the basic problem; they just reinforce the underlying anthropological concept instead of overcoming it. The main thesis stated by the paper here unfolds against this backdrop. It asserts that what is needed is not an increase in additional disciplines but a different way of practicing medicine and religion altogether.
Perceiving clinical medicine and pastoral ministry as expressions of applied anthropology the paper sketches the outline of a hermeneutics of the body as a promising alternative to success-fully overcome the materialistic-mechanistic reductionism prevalent in Western medicine and the disembodied spiritualism of religious counseling and well-intended pious talk. It surveys the history and contents of attempts at more adequate concepts of the human being, notably by phenomenologists drawing attention to the ‘lived body’ (f.i. D. Leder, ed., The Body in Medical Practice and Thought, Dordrecht, 1992) and phenomenological anthropologists framing scientific research as ‘lived experience’ instead of merely abstract data collection (f.i. C. Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The narrative structure of experience. Cambridge, UK, 1998; Mol, A., The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Durham, NC, 2002) while also considering like developments in the fields of religious studies (f.i. S. Coakley, ed., Religion and the Body, Cambridge, UK, 1997) and theology (f.i. John Paul II, Man and Women He Created Them: A theology of the Body, Boston 2006). Having thus outlined the frame of reference the paper moves on to introduce constitutive elements of a hermeneutics of the body as there are corporeality, limitability, intentionality, sensibility, historicity, personality, individuality, and sociability by briefly characterizing these and highlighting their practical impact on the respective fields of activity. In conclusion some suggestions are made of how best to relate the insights gained in this way to the actual day-to-day work in the hospital, the nursing home, and the various religious ministries as well was in medical schools and religious seminaries.