Page 67 - Contribution To Phenomenology

60 RICHARD M. ZANER

should be done about it [21]: among the available options, what decision
leading to what action ought to be reached (including the respective
aftermaths each carries with it). This is shared discourse which patient
and physician pursue together in search of what the impairment means
(and, at some point perhaps, ought to mean) to the one who has it (and,
for the clinical ethicist, for those who profess to help), with the longer-
range goal of enabling patients and physicians to fit their always-evolving
narratives into the broader story (and history) Schutz terms their
respective "Ufe-plans" ([29, I], pp. 47-49, 134-154) with their respective
moral frameworks.
(3) The case I've been considering is merely one among many. To
consider it, not for its own sake, but as an example, is to practice a
specific version of free-phantasy variation: practical distantiation. It is to
leave the immediacy of clinical work and to enter the terrain of
philosophical deliberation—^where, among other issues, the concern is to
delineate what such actual encounters reveal about moral life in clinical
settings (and, possibly, more generally). It is, if you will, to learn about
moral life from the clinical circumstances of those who actually face these
difficult situations,

X. Review: The Clinical Event as Context

In these encounters, the clinician is concerned with the specific, unique
situation itself: physician and nurse seek to help, benefit, cure, perhaps
only comfort the patient and family members; the patient and family
want to get better, have the problems resolved, or perhaps begin to
grieve appropriately. The cUnical ethicist, on the other hand, is focused
on the highly individual clinical relationship itself (the encounter itself),
for its own sake (if you will, practical distantiation itself. On the other
hand, the ethicist is at any time free (beliebig) to shift attention so as to
consider any encounter as an example ([10], pp. 413, 422; [12], pp. 247-
249), where one then seeks what is "invariant" through inspection of a
range of examples—if you will, practical distantiation. Focused reflection
on a range of examples, that is, leads one to what Husserl terms the
then presented "coincidence in conflict"—to *Svhat is common" throughout
the range of examples by means of "free-phantasy variation."
From this reflective inquiry, it becomes clear that every clinical
encounter has certain common contextual themes. Each is, at a minimum,
constituted as a complex, mutual relationship between two reflexive