Chapter 1 provides an overview of the central argument of the book. Medical anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry must steer a course between realism and constructivism, integrating the useful features of both perspectives. Metaphor theory and 4-E cognitive science provide ways of integrating cognitive and socio-cultural processes. Metaphor production and comprehension involves cognitive and emotional processes embodied and enacted through rhetoric and social discourse. These practices constitute a hermeneutic circle that can be traced from body to person to social world and back. They show how symbols and things live in the same world. This work has implications for understanding the ways illness experience and healing practices are embedded in larger systems of knowledge/power. The metaphors that arise in individuals’ struggles to make sense of their predicaments and to heal from affliction are borrowed from everyday concepts of mind and body, as well as the political language of power, resistance, and dissent. Every metaphor lends power to a particular view of the world. We must judge the value of metaphors on their moral, political, aesthetic, and pragmatic implications.

Chapter 10 returns to broader issues of the cultural politics of metaphor, examining the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in illness experience and healing. While the focus on language allows us to mobilize the richness of literature to explore illness experience, in doing so we may inadvertently downplay the material circumstances that determine health disparities and inequities. Against this apparent opposition, I argue that attention to the aesthetics of language and the creative functions of imagination and poeisis can help us understand the mechanisms of suffering and affliction and devise forms of healing that better respond to the needs of individuals within and across diverse cultures and contexts. Every choice of metaphor draws from and points toward a form of life. The critique of metaphors that begins with an appreciation of the qualities they confer on experience, and then moves out into the social world to identify ways that systems and structures are configured, rationalized, and maintained. A critical poetics of illness and healing can contribute to efforts to improve our institutions and achieve greater equity not only by recognizing and respecting difference and diversity but also by engaging with the particulars of each person’s experience.

When writing Being and Time, Heidegger envisaged the project to be more extensive than the text we now have. Only about a third of the material announced in the introduction has been published. Drawing on Heidegger’s retrospective comments, this chapter lays out the philosophical reasons why he abandoned the project. In published writings, Heidegger emphasizes the continuity between Being and Time and later works: the failure of Being and Time was a turn (Kehre) necessary to further advance on the path of thought. Heidegger’s private manuscripts present a more detailed and much more critical picture. In the ‘Running Notes to “Being and Time”’ (GA 82, 3-136), Heidegger rejects several methodological and substantial commitments of the book, including the ambition to answer the question of being and the commitment to temporality as the explanatory paradigm of ontology.