Through the looking glass: good looks and dignity in care
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Through the looking glass: good looks and dignity in care Jeannette Pols
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract There are roughly two meanings attached to the concept of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to ethical and juridical notions of equality, autonomy and freedom. Much less understood is the meaning of dignitas, which this paper develops as peoples’ engagement with aesthetic values and genres, and hence with differences between people. Departing from a critical reading of Georgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’, I will analyze a case where aesthetics are quite literally at stake: women who lost their hair due to cancer treatment. The analysis shows a complicated interplay between varying evaluations of female baldness by the self and others, mediated by (often strongly negative) cultural imaginaries, and aesthetic genres depicting conventional ways of ‘looking good’. The paper concludes by arguing for a reconnection of the two notions of dignity, and for a rehabilitation of aesthetics in daily life and care as fundamental values for organizing our societies. Keywords Dignity Aesthetic in daily life Cancer Empirical philosphy
Introduction It is difficult to study dignity in everyday life and care. Dignity is a fundamental concept that refers to ‘being human’, but its meaning is far from clear. Philosophers since the eighteenth century generally distinguish (at least) two sets of meanings of dignity which I will call humanitas and dignitas (Nordenfelt 2003a, b, 2004; Edgar 2004; Pullman 2002; Gallagher 2004; Jacobson 2007; Malpas and Lickiss 2007; Leget 2012). Humanitas is the ethical principle that every human being has dignity, simply because of their being human. The concept forms the foundation for the universal declaration of human rights and principle ethics, referring to ethical and juridical principles such as equality, autonomy and freedom Pols (2013a). These values imply a notion of the individual and function as a way to protect this individual. Western philosophers disagree about the meaning of dignitas.1 I interpret dignitas as the engagement of individuals in the aesthetic genres of sociality they value, building on Meyer (2007), Meyer and Verrips (2008) Pols (2013a). Aesthetic genres are orderings in which one or more aesthetic values are central, referring to what people value or admire, find proper, stylish or tasteful. Individuals may move in and out of these genres in more or less freedom, depending on the weight they and the people they 1
J. Pols Section of Medical Ethics, Department of General Practice, AMC/UvA, Postbus 22700, 1100 DE Amsterdam, The Netherlands J. Pols (&) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
Qualitative studies of dignity in medicine tend to analyse dignity by listing its components, or the elements of dignity mentioned in a particular care situation (see e.g. Chochinov et al. 2002; Jacobson 2009; Baillie 2007). Philos
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