Sensibility and humanization in health care on the basis of the ethical relationship with the Face of the Other

DOI: 10.15343/0104-7809.2012363407415

Abstract

In humanization arising from sensibility health professionals perceive themselves as being affected by the vulnerable
body of another. Our starting point is phenomenology, which takes the body as a “zero point” of the reflection as against
the cogito thought. Edmund Husserl, an exponent of contemporary philosophy, introduces a significant difference in the
comprehension of the body as Körper (materiality and functionality) and Leib (psychical and spiritual dimension). Thus, he
associates the expression flesh and the sense of human carnality as inseparable from the subjectivity of the body. From this
distinction, one advocates for Sensibility as a category that allows approaching the action of health professionals as genuinely
human: care for one’s own body, which in its unit is a psycho-somatic-spiritual vulnerable body. Emmanuel Lévinas’s
philosophy of alterity points beyond phenomenology when it addresses Sensibility from the Face of the Other perspective.
Therefore this study aims to show, on the basis of Levinasian thought, that sensibility of face-to-face encounters establishes
the foundations of an eminently ethical way to humanize health professionals’ thinking and acting on behalf of caring for
the other suffering from a disease. Affection coming from the face-to-face encounter creates subjects identity as a reality
marked by the temporality of the flesh as an act of becoming incarnate according to the interpellation of the Face of the
Other. From this body touched by another, a body that is not indifferent to the appeal of the face / body of the other human
actions emerge that are genuine because of giving answers that protect, dignify and respect the flesh of a face that is unique
and irreducible to a material body having no identity-otherness.