ABSTRACT
This chapter is an initial phenomenological exploration of tiredness, fatigue, chronic fatigue and “chronic fatigue syndrome” (CFS). It falls into three sections. The first looks at tiredness and fatigue, the second section at fatigue and chronic fatigue (as suffered, inter alia, by individuals diagnosed with CFS), and the third at CFS as a biomedical diagnosis. There are two distinguishable but interrelated questions that are addressed via these investigations. First, it is somewhat curious that phenomenologists have devoted so little attention to such everyday experiences as tiredness and fatigue: both are part of everyday experience (in the case of tiredness, more or less literally “every day”), yet receive little explicit phenomenological attention (unlike, for example, pain). Might doing so lead us to uncover previously neglected dimensions of experience and even to question certain assumptions that some influential phenomenologists have made? Second, there is scope for dialogue between phenomenologists on the one hand, and those who are involved in caring for or researching chronically fatigued individuals on the other. What might we as phenomenologists have to learn from them and from individuals who suffer with chronic fatigue or CFS?
