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A philosophical defense of the idea that we can hold each other in personhood: intercorporeal personhood in dementia care

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Abstract

Since John Locke, regnant conceptions of personhood in Western philosophy have focused on individual capabilities for complex forms of consciousness that involve cognition such as the capability to remember past events and one’s own past actions, to think about and identify oneself as oneself, and/or to reason. Conceptions of personhood such as Locke's qualify as cognition-oriented, and they often fail to acknowledge the role of embodiment for personhood. This article offers an alternative conception of personhood from within the tradition of phenomenology of the body. The article presents a phenomenological analysis of joint musical activity in dementia care and outlines an intercorporeal conception of personhood based on this analysis. It also provides a philosophical basis for the idea that others can hold us in personhood, and it questions a strict one-body-one-person logic that has pertained in much personhood debate.

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Notes

  1. I thank Pia Kontos for showing this film-clip during her presentation Alzheimer expressions or expressions despite Alzheimer's?: Philosophical reflections on selfhood and embodiment at the Dementia, Identity, Personhood conference, Linköping University, Sweden (September 13–15, 2010) and for letting me describe the film-clip in this article. The clip is part of a presentation of a therapy called Validation Therapy; the therapy’s aim is to understand and affectively respond to the needs that the individual is trying to express. The film clip is available at http://www.memorybridge.org/documentary.php and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csSj_Ot8gE8.

  2. Laitinen also introduces the concepts of potential persons and potential capabilities in order to make his point, and suggests that we should recognize someone’s personhood if she belongs to the group of potential persons (and she does so if she has the potential to develop capabilities such as those above). If this is the case, we should respond to her potential personhood by recognizing her “as a person” since others’ recognition in interactions with the individual are needed for her or him to develop the capabilities in question and become a person.

  3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty first published Phénoménologie de la perception already in 1945. Hereafter, however, I will refer to one of the more recent translations of this work, published in 2006.

  4. Just like other mixed conceptions, it sees a set of capabilities and relations as necessary for someone to qualify as a person.

  5. Proponents for the view that persons per definition are capable of autonomous choice may agree with MacIntyre’s (1999:99) statement that “independent rational” individuals are also dependent upon a community that enable them to develop the capabilities necessary for making these choices in the first place (see also Friedman 2000 for a related discussion).

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible thanks to two projects: the project Dementia and Personhood, funded by the Swedish Council for Working-Life and Social Research, and the program Dementia: Agency, Personhood and Everyday Life, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. I am grateful to both of these.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Linköping University, Linköping, Spain

    Kristin Zeiler

  2. The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Kristin Zeiler

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Correspondence to Kristin Zeiler.

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Zeiler, K. A philosophical defense of the idea that we can hold each other in personhood: intercorporeal personhood in dementia care. Med Health Care and Philos 17, 131–141 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-013-9515-z

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