Art and Creativity in the Encounter between the Healthy and the Ill Person — The Moral Sense of Being Ill

Abstract

Despite all efforts to the contrary, the basically negative view and judgment of the ill person in social life, of illness itself, and of the handicapped person follows from a prejudice of society in general that is still hardly overcome. Erving Goffman designates this apparently insurmountable feeling, which the ill or handicapped person evokes in the healthy person, as a “stigma.” It seems that such a feeling expresses not only a lack of charity on the part of the strong for the weak, of the healthy for the ill, of those conscious of their strength for the frail and infirm and the elderly too, but this feeling also reveals that we, the so-called healthy, the vital specimens of the species homo sapiens, do not want to be disturbed in the process of self-realization which we have set for ourselves as our goal in life. From the vantage point of the “great health” of a Friedrich Nietzsche, the small, the weak, and the handicapped are doomed. The pathic structure of man and his suffering or afflicted existence is hardly considered worthy of regard in the social conscience or on the social scale of esteem.