“Surely not, well maybe not.” What is your answer to the “value” of illness. Is there any good in it? Does it in any way benefit us or those around us? This article in Aeon has some interesting commentary.
“But is there something valuable about sickness? In Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (2008), Carel writes that her lung disease has brought ‘plenty of bad, but also, surprisingly, some good’. Philosophers tend to celebrate humanity’s sense of truth, goodness and beauty as our most defining and elevated features. But it might be truer to say that our existence is characterized by dependence and affliction. For sure, we think, speak, create and love, but we also age, sicken and eventually die. And as humans live longer, the prospect of many years of incapacity looms larger.
‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,’ Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor (1978). ‘Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ If philosophy is about the pursuit of the good over the course of a human life, surely there’s an obligation to examine what’s worthwhile in the near-universal encounter with illness.
“Bookshops are already filled with memoirs, diaries, accounts and letters by, for and about the ill. We seem to be living through a veritable ‘golden age of pathography’, as the historian Thomas Lacqueur observed recently. The desire for life lessons from writers in extremis is certainly part of the appeal. But Lacqueur notes that asking deep questions isn’t the same as being able to answer them, or even being able to write well. That’s true of thinking, too. So our enthusiasm should not be for pathography or even illness in itself, but for those aspects of the experience that promise to yield moral growth.”
My own take is that even though illness may lead to moral growth, there are other more uplifting, less sanguine, and pleasant paths. Though illness is inevitable and we may fruitlessly rail against it or accept it, there is no cause to celebrate its arrival. Suffering may be considered to be redemptive by some, but I welcome the arrival of palliation.