Professional empathy in health care is a feeling with, about, and for the patient that opens up a world to be explored by way of imagination and dialogue. The concern is professional in nature because it deals with the patient precisely as a person the health care professional has the duty to aid in respect of her education and position. The biomedical paradigm needs to be balanced and combined in the clinical encounter with an empathic perspective, focusing upon the experiences and everyday life of the patient, since the doctor and other health care professionals meet not only with a potentially diseased biological organism, but also with a person who is suffering and in need of professional help.

This paper explores the process of aging from a phenomenological perspective. Supplementing the model of becoming old found in Simone de Beauvoir’s work with a phenomenology of human suffering and flourishing, it asks whether it is possible to lead a good life in the process of becoming old. Is it possible to flourish while experiencing bodily waning? Is it possible to flourish while experiencing the shrinking of one’s everyday world and the passing away of close others? Aging, at least in its protracted phases, appears to become full of suffering rather than flourishing. What are the prospects of finding meaningful life projects despite old age? By making use of insight found in Heidegger and other phenomenologists the paper tries to develop a slightly different view on aging than the one found in Beauvoir, stressing the importance of embodied experiences and life choices, which not only depend upon societal oppression and being objectified by others, but also upon processes of nature and the possibilities of an intergenerational intersubjectivity. Resources for this project is found in the philosophy of affectivity developed by Heidegger and other phenomenologists of facticity, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt.

In this article I take a look at Drew Leder’s recent book The Healing Body: Creative Responses to Illness, Aging, and Affliction in view of his earlier scholarship and try to understand in what ways the author’s explorations of bodily phenomenology have developed and changed. I argue that Leder is attempting to cross breed phenomenology with critical theory (intersectionality studies) in a way that will appeal to many readers but is ultimately flawed. His attempts to marry phenomenology with eastern religious movements are also scrutinized and found more original and less problematic, although they are hard to evaluate from a secular point of view. Despite this critique, the way the book identifies various healing strategies by highlighting a number of bodily attitudes is found rewarding and helpful for persons suffering from chronic pain.

To become old means to become frail. The human body ages in ways that depend on genes, environmental-, and chance-factors, but if we do not end our lives as a result of a deadly accident or sudden onset of a lethal disease, we will all face a final phase of frailty before we die. Frailty may be caused by way of disease processes, but it can also consist in an increased sense of fragility, weakness, fatigue, and dizziness without a detected disease, which makes a person more likely to fall ill and make it harder to recover from illness. Neither phenomenologists nor existentialists have spent much time analysing frailty, except, perhaps, in the latter case, as a feature of human life to be avoided and resisted by way of a strong will and brave choices. The primary example would be Jean-Paul Sartre, but also Simone de Beauvoir is guilty of a certain contempt for bodily fragility. Arguably, the theories of some phenomenologists, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, do a good job of rehabilitating human vulnerability in general, but not in the sense of a specific frailty related to illness and ageing. Despite this lack of a phenomenology of frailty in phenomenological-existentialist philosophy there are resources in this tradition to be exploited in developing such a subject. A phenomenology of frailty could be of importance not only for philosophers and empirical researchers, but also for old people and their care takers in attempts to make frail lives more bearable. The chapter develops a phenomenology of frailty by making use of concepts and arguments developed by existentialist thinkers, but also by scrutinizing them further and turning them against their fathers and mothers.