Life sciences and Lebenswelt

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The biomedical or «life sciences» conceive of life as a property
of complex organic systems, and thus as an objective, thing-like
entity. They attempt to reconstruct life from its elements, while
excluding subjectivity systematically from their studies. This is opposed to our self-experience as living beings, which is characterised
by a systematic «self-withdrawal»: The process of life and the lived
body elude our immediate observation. States of hunger, thirst,
fatigue, joy, anger or others always precede their conscious awareness. Life is what befalls and affects us before we can respond to it.
It always already happens while we are trying to explore, to determine or to plan it. Biomedicine, on the contrary, by restricting
its approach to the objectifiable aspect of life, has gained a highly
efficient knowledge for intervention, but at the price of reifying
our self-experience as living beings. This is illustrated by selected
examples from reproductive medicine and neuroscience.