CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Boynton, Zach |
|---|---|
| Title | Being and Health |
| Summary | By relating the existentialist framework with understandings of health and well-being I will claim that health can be held valuable to the existentialist to solve criticisms raised about Sartre’s absolute freedom. I will need to analyse and understand absolute freedom within Sartre’s existentialist system which will help me reveal the inconsistency. In short, there are two types of freedom; Freedom to obtain (practical) and freedom to choose (ontological) and Sartre will try to use this distinction to explain how ones situation, physical or social, can inhibit their practical freedom, but never their ontological freedom. These claims are problematic because they do not consider how empirical evidence undermines our physical states and experiences which, in turn, affects inhibits both our practical and ontological freedom. For this reason, I will argue freedom cannot be absolute. The reason for my thesis is due to an interest in a persons physical state during my time working in a dementia care unit, where I assisted dementia patients in their day-to-day, end of life, living. Dementia is a mental degeneration of the brain impairing our memory and our ability think or make informed decisions. Previous to this experience, I was passionate about the existentialist ethics of Sartre, that advocated for freedom as an intrinsically valuable part of human nature. I still do think this, but after the experience in the care home I came to question it because of this simply question; Can one be truly free if their physical body constraints them? Upon further reading, the same question arose with Simone De Beauvoir, who talks extensively about biology in the Second Sex. For the most part, she considers the body to be part of a persons situation, their reality, which includes both the physical body and societal position. I certainly see the intuitive notion that both the body and society are part of our facticity, yet there seems to be a distinction between the two that Sartre and Beauvoir doesn’t address. The physical body consists of unchangeable features rooted in our very cells whereas the society seems different because it isn’t as concrete as the genome of our cells, that is, we can change society by engaging with it through various means, such as political activism. This distinction becomes clear to me in the case of a dementia patient, who doesn’t appear to have the choice to engage with society at all when their body restricts their mind. The same then applies for other physical and mental conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, cancer, and so on. Neither Sartre, Beauvoir or even Franz Fanon adequately address this in their philosophy despite physical existence being a fundamental aspect of our being. But what would be the alternative to holding freedom as intrinsically valuable? A reasonable place to look would be at the philosophy of health, since health is a phrase used so often to protect the physical, mental and social well-being of individuals. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being. This definition has been engrained into me as a result of my workplace experience in the dementia care home. The connection I will make is that in existentialism, we fundamentally exist, then as a consequence of existence we are free, and our freedom of choice allows us to act and engage with the world and other conscious beings within it. This rather coincidentally lines up perfectly with the WHO definition of health. We exist (our physical body), we are free (our mind/soul or perhaps better defined as ‘the will’) and then we engage with the world (society and the environment). However, the WHO definition is not perfect. Firstly, its extremely broad which results in it being ineffective as a guidance for health practitioners to follow while treating patients. Secondly, the ‘complete’ state suggests an unrealistically high bar that people need to meet in order to be healthy, and we can conceive that a person can be healthy without being in a complete state of physical health. Thirdly, a definition like this is empirically immeasurable, scientists will be unable to compare the difference in the health of two individuals because its broad definition means there are simply too many factors to take into account for ones health. The second part of my thesis will be presenting philosophical ideas of health and then arguing it to be intrinsically valuable to the existentialist. By doing this, the existentialist can account for the physical body while also still holding our ontological and practical freedoms as intrinsically valuable. This allows them to remain consistent with the basic existentialist belief that existence precedes essence while also not maintaining that freedom is absolute. |
| Supervisor | Weberman David |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/boynton_zach.pdf |
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