“I was a prisoner in my body. As my body gradually lost its abilities, my world slowly shrank as well.”” My body has betrayed me and I have become estranged from it—a body that is our intermediary for having a world.”
Kabul 24: Because she studied philosophy, her personal experiences and scholarly work led her to undertake an abstract reflection on health and illness.She considers the phenomenology of illness to be a useful approach and tries to speak about illness as the sick person experiences it and lives with it.
Illness is a small secret that is only exchanged among patients. A person’s ability to be and to become is severely diminished.What is hidden in this secret? What does it feel like to be ill?How does society view the sick person? It sees only the biological aspect of the illness; the patient’s limitations do not matter to society.She examines the geography of illness: how the surrounding world and the way we interact with it change during illness.
To what extent is the individual’s agency transformed due to physical limitations?“Empathy—if I had to name one human feeling whose lack is more evident than any other, I would name empathy. The shortage of this feeling is nowhere as obvious and evident as in times of illness.”
Overview of the BookHavi Carel, a philosopher who herself lives with a serious chronic lung condition (lymphangioleiomyomatosis), wrote Illness (first published in 2008, with a revised edition as Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, and later expanded in Phenomenology of Illness in 2016). She blends personal testimony with phenomenological philosophy to explore what illness truly means—not just as a biological dysfunction, but as a profound lived experience that reshapes the body, the self, values, possibilities, and one’s entire world.
Drawing on thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others, Carel contrasts the medical view (the body as a machine with parts that break) with the phenomenological view (the lived body as our way of being in the world).
In health, the body is transparent—we act through it without noticing. In illness, it becomes opaque, obstructive, and alien: a “prisoner” that betrays us and shrinks our horizons.
