Heidegger, Medicine and Scientific Method

During the course of the Zollikon Seminars, held with a group of doctors and psychiatrists, Heidegger insisted that the human body was no mere bounded biological "body-object" but a living embodiment of the human being. In doing so, he undermined the very notion that human being or Dasein could be divided into separate entities labelled psyche and soma. As a result, he raised questions that challenged the very foundations of medicine - including "psychosomatic medicine". For all medical explanations of illness has so far avoided the central question of what illness itself essentially is - reducing it either to a "somatic", "psychological" or "psychosomatic" phenomena.

Medard Boss tells us that it was Heidegger's hope that his thinking would "escape the confines of the philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular to a large number of suffering human beings." Attempts to fulfil this hope have focused almost exclusively on bringing Heideggerian thinking to bear in the field of "psychotherapy" and in the understanding of psychological disorders and "mental" illness. The relevance of the Zollikon Seminars for our understanding of "somatic" disorders and "physical" illness - indeed the entire domain of medicine - have been largely neglected. This neglect has perpetuated in practice the very separation of psyche and soma which Heidegger questioned in principle.

The aim of "Heidegger, Medicine and Scientific Method" is to help make sure that the profound implications of the Zollikon Seminars for medical science and medical practice do not remain unheeded. In one short volume Peter Wilberg concisely summarises Heidegger's critique of "scientific method" as this is applied in medicine, redefines the basic principles of the "phenomenological method" and sets out the foundations of a new "field-phenomenological" approach to medicine. Grounded in Heidegger's fundamental distinction between the physical body and the "lived" or "felt" body, field-phenomenological medicine offers a new but highly practical understanding of the relation between a patient's disease "pathology" and the felt dis-ease or pathos that it embodies.

As an "antidote" to the controversy surrounding Heidegger's notorious period of involvement with National Socialism, Wilberg also emphasises that Heidegger's thinking was and remains the only thinking capable of challenging the "scientific" foundations of race-genetic ideology - and with it the whole bio-genetic ideology of modern medicine. This is an ideology which Nazi medical scientists helped to spawn, one which sees no human meaning in illness, and aims at nothing less than finding "final" medical-model solutions to all forms of social and individual dis-ease and distress.

1 Heidegger and scientific method. 2 Dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine: field-phenomenological foundations; principles of field-phenomenological medicine; ontological dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine; metaphorical dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine; diagnostic dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine; pathosophical dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine; psychosomatic dimensions of field-phenomenological medicine. 3 Heidegger, human genomics and health fascism. 4 Organismic therapy as medicine beyond medicine. 5 The principles of the field-phenomenological method: The Phenomenological Reduction; The Phenomenological Rule; Phenomenological Reading; Phenomenological Relation; Phenomenological Realism; Phenomenological Reversal; Phenomenological Reciprocity; Phenomenological Retrieval; Phenomenological Re-embodiment.

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