ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of doctors with respect to the growing phobia of death and physical decline and its links with the market, stressing its ethical and environmental importance and arguing for a greater sense of responsibility towards the underlying cultural issues.
Unlike the rationality of the Greeks, which evolved in closed systems, modern science develops in open systems and, while no longer claiming to reach ‘the’ secret of being, is able to formulate universal predicates. The recognition of one’s own intrinsic limitedness is the presupposition of the falsifiability of all scientific knowledge (Karl Popper). Unlike science, technology seems to have adopted in a concretistic manner the aspirations of ancient rationality, embodying a potency which prolongs life and tends to become metaphysical rather than practical. Technology is burdened with a salvific projection which is only too human. The predominance of medical technology in the everyday life of chronic patients, while saving individuals, emphasizes the predominance of death in their lives (Jean-Luc Nancy) and makes conscious suppression desirable. In unconscious cases (repression) the doctor assumes the role of a dispensing authority, but, ironically, the metaphysical projection onto techne is destined to be defeated at the moment of death, when everyone is obliged to accept its reality. Openness to symbolic, inter-subjective dialogue with patients, authentic listening, presence at the intensity of moments, attentive observation of processes, could help them to represent the prospect of death not as a final ending, but as a transitional experience (Monika Renz).
