Can you experience health, not only illness?
De Boer rejects the idea that health stays invisible until breakdown. Health becomes present in the not-always-harmonious interaction between the lived body and the body-as-object.
Source
Experiencing objectified health: turning the body into an object of attention
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Phenomenological account of how health becomes present via lived-body/object-body interaction
- N
- Philosophical phenomenology; not an empirical sample
- Population
- Everyday and medical experience of health under increasing bodily objectification
- Outcome
- Health as experientially present in lived/object-body tension, not only as illness breakdown
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Against views that presuppose a smooth alignment of subjective and objective body (so health would be absent), he asks how health is experientially present, using Merleau-Ponty on the subjective body that links us to the world and evades biomedical objectification.
What they found
Everyday healthy experience is often pictured as harmonious alignment, but medicine increasingly objectifies the body. Exploring objectified health matters because that object-attention is part of how health shows up, not only how it disappears.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is a phenomenological essay, not a patient survey. It does not offer a clinical score of ‘objectified health’.
Key terms
- Subjective body
- The lived body that links us to the world and is accessed from the first person.
- Objective body
- The body taken as an object of attention, including biomedical objectification.
- Phenomenological inaccessibility
- The view that health cannot be experienced because it is only the unnoticed background of illness.
- Objectified health
- Health as it becomes present when the body is turned into an object of attention.
Flashcards
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Health is?
Common questions
Is health only visible as illness?
No. He asks how health becomes experientially present, including via object-attention.
What false presupposition?
An overly harmonious alignment of subjective and objective body.
Subjective body vs biomedicine?
It evades biomedical objectification and is first-personal.
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