More Than Others See

What Husserl and Sartre can teach us about helping without turning a person into a thing

Anna is sitting at the kitchen table. In front of her lie the bread knife, a plate and the loaf she has yet to cut. The home care worker has taken off her jacket and glances at the clock. It would be quicker if she prepared breakfast herself.

“I can do that for you,” she says, reaching for the knife.

Anna places her hand on the bread.

“I’d like to try first.”

The scene is imagined, but the question is familiar: What happens when a person’s wish to act meets a professional assessment of what she can manage?

Good help requires us to understand both how another person lives in her world and what she is trying to make possible within it. Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre can each illuminate one side of this situation. Husserl’s life-world is the world we already experience and find meaningful before making it an object of scientific explanation. Sartre shows how, within this concrete world, we continually relate to possibilities, even when our circumstances are difficult.

When the Description Loses Sight of the Kitchen

The care record states: “Needs assistance with meals.”

The sentence may be accurate. It makes it possible to plan services and share necessary information among staff. But it tells us nothing about what breakfast means to Anna. It says nothing about her habit of setting the table, choosing what to put on her bread and beginning the day at her own pace.

In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl examines how scientific idealisations emerge from the experienced world and can eventually obscure their own origins. Mathematical models enable us to calculate and predict. The problem arises when we take the model to be reality itself and forget the experience on which it rests.

An assessment of functional ability is not a mathematical model of nature. Yet Husserl’s critique can help us recognise a related danger: A useful abstraction can take the place of the concrete life it was meant to help us understand.

“Needs assistance with meals” gathers many different situations into a single formulation. Anna may need help cutting the bread while still wanting to spread it herself. She may be tired one morning and have more energy the next. She may welcome help that makes her feel safer while resisting having the whole breakfast taken out of her hands.

When the assessment stands alone, such differences disappear. Husserl’s contribution is to take us back to the ground of meaning: What, exactly, is this description describing?

The Hands That Are Measured, and the Hands She Lives Through

The care worker notices that Anna’s hands are trembling. This is an important observation. But for Anna, her hands are also her way of grasping the cup, feeling the crust and guiding the knife.

In his analyses of the body, Husserl distinguishes between the body considered as a physical object, Körper, and the body as it is lived and experienced, Leib. These are different ways in which the same body appears. A hand can be examined from the outside, but it is also the hand through which I feel and act.

An examination can register reduced grip strength. Anna’s own experience also includes how she adjusts her grip and senses when she needs to stop. This familiarity may have weakened, but it may also contain skills that a brief assessment overlooks.

Good help needs both perspectives. The danger posed by the knife must be assessed, and Anna’s experience of her own hands must matter. Otherwise, we risk treating the body as a collection of functions and losing sight of the person who lives through it.

What Sartre Found in Husserl

Sartre encountered Husserl’s phenomenology around 1933 and studied it closely during his stay in Berlin in 1933–34. The decisive insight was intentionality: Consciousness is always consciousness of something.

When Anna takes hold of the knife, she is directed towards the bread and the slice she is trying to cut. Her purpose belongs to this relationship between herself and the world. It becomes difficult to understand if we look only for an inner trait such as stubbornness.

In his essay on intentionality, first published in 1939, Sartre attacks the idea that knowing swallows up the world and turns it into the inner contents of consciousness. Husserl had offered him a way out of this “digestive philosophy”: Consciousness is already directed towards the things and people around us.

This was Sartre’s early route into phenomenology. It did not pass through the analyses of the life-world in The Crisis, which were not yet available when he studied in Berlin. Husserl’s perspective on the life-world and Sartre’s philosophy of freedom can therefore illuminate Anna’s situation together, without making one the historical source of the other.

Acting, Reflecting and Being Seen

Anna positions the knife. For a moment, she is wholly absorbed in cutting. She does not also need to think: “Now I am an independent person making breakfast.”

In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre distinguishes between this immediate absorption in the world and the reflection through which I make my own experiences and myself a subject of attention. He rejects the idea that a transcendental ego must stand within consciousness as its unifying centre. The ego itself becomes something towards which consciousness can turn in reflection.

Then Anna notices the care worker’s watchful gaze.

This is a different experience. She does not first have to reflect on herself to feel uncomfortable. She may immediately experience herself as clumsy or helpless under the other person’s gaze.

This distinction matters for Sartre. In Being and Nothingness, he describes shame as an immediate experience of being visible to another person, before it may become a subject of reflection. I discover myself as someone the other can define and assess.

The gaze can fix me as something: old, unsteady, difficult. It does not literally turn me into a thing, but I experience the other as having the power to define who I am. My open possibilities recede behind particular characteristics attributed to me.

The care worker’s attention is necessary. But if she sees only the risk, Anna becomes, above all, the person who cannot manage. What she is trying to accomplish fades into the background.

Freedom Exists Within a Situation

Anna cannot choose away the trembling. Her body, her past and her material circumstances form part of what Sartre calls facticity: the given conditions we cannot simply abolish.

Yet she relates to those conditions. She tries to make breakfast, perhaps asks for support and considers what she wants to leave to the care worker. Sartre uses the term transcendence for the human movement beyond what is already given, towards possibilities. Here, it means being directed towards something one has not yet brought about.

The knife thus appears in the light of Anna’s project. It is a tool for making breakfast, but also something that may become too difficult to use. The resistance is real. Freedom offers no guarantee of success.

What exceeds the assessment’s grasp is therefore concrete: Anna has purposes, attempts and possibilities that cannot be read directly from her level of functioning.

Husserl asks what lived meaning the description has lost. Sartre asks which possibilities we overlook when we let the description determine who she is.

When the Role Becomes a Hiding Place

The care worker, too, must relate to possibilities. She has professional duties, a work schedule and other people waiting for her. But her way of proceeding does not always follow automatically from these constraints.

Sartre’s famous waiter in Being and Nothingness performs his role with almost mechanical precision. The example reveals the temptation to be one’s role in the way a thing is what it is. In bad faith, or self-deception, we may try to conceal from ourselves that we also take a position on how we act.

“I’m just doing my job” can become such a hiding place. Yet this should be a question the care worker asks herself, rather than a hasty judgement we pass on her.

A related narrowing occurs if she reduces Anna to age, impairment and risk. She then overlooks Anna’s transcendence: the fact that Anna relates to what she has become and tries to do something with her situation.

Who Has the Opportunity to Choose?

Here, the perspective of freedom needs a countervoice. There is a considerable difference between being able to relate to one’s circumstances and having real opportunities to change them.

In Old Age, first published in French in 1970 as La Vieillesse, Simone de Beauvoir examines how ageing is shaped by society’s material conditions and its treatment of older people. People can be deprived of influence and pushed out of the community long before their own wishes and abilities have disappeared. The question then also becomes political: What possibilities for living does society offer older people?

Anna’s scope for action depends on more than her own attitude. Does the care worker have time to wait? Are suitable aids available? Is the service organised so that Anna’s wishes can have practical consequences?

Kari Martinsen’s Fenomenologi og omsorg—“Phenomenology and Care”—offers a Norwegian approach to the relationship between body, experience and care. It reminds us that these questions also belong within the philosophical conversation of the caring professions themselves.

In Norwegian rehabilitation practice, attention to a person’s own goals finds clear expression in the question “What matters to you?” The Norwegian Directorate of Health emphasises that services should be adapted to what the person experiences as valuable and meaningful.

But the question must be able to change the help provided. Otherwise, it becomes just another phrase we record.

A Hand in Her Own Life

The care worker draws her hand back a little.

“What would you like to do yourself, and what would you like me to help you with?”

Perhaps Anna asks her to cut the bread. Perhaps she wants to try with support. Perhaps they discover that a different knife or a steadier position makes the task easier.

What matters is not that Anna must do as much as possible on her own. There must also be room for her wish to leave something to another person. Help should offer both scope for action and relief from effort.

Husserl helps us return from the description of functional ability to breakfast as Anna lives it. Sartre draws our attention to the fact that she is also directed towards what she still wants to do. Beauvoir reminds us that these possibilities need social and material conditions in which to become real.

Anna wants to cut a slice of bread. Within this small act lies a wish to continue having a hand in her own life.