Commentary on "A Phenomenology of Dyslexia"

Dyslexia is a loosely defined set of conditions associated with difficulty reading and processing verbal information. It is the subject of an extensive medical literature seeking to define criteria for diagnosis, underlying causal mechanisms and therapeutic possibilities. The most widely accepted view today is that dyslexia is part of a continuum of language disorders characterized by phonological processing deficits (Snowling 1996) and variations in spatial, temporal, and auditory perception (Wright 1997). Recent research has sought to identify structural and functional abnormalities in brain function and genetic markers. The preceding article, “A phenomenology of dyslexia: The lived body, ambiguity, and the breakdown of expression”, by Matthew Philpott—who himself “suffers” from the condition—not only reflects critically on these accepted formulations of dyslexia but also raises intriguing questions about the ways in which different cognitive or perceptual styles are conceptualized.

Philpott, a philosopher, sets out “to access the experiential level of dyslexia that lies behind scientific approaches to dyslexia research,” thereby exposing the limitations of objectivist theories. He seeks to achieve this by applying techniques derived from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, which itself departed from a critical scrutiny of objectivist science, with a view to rediscovering the precognitive, lived-world experience. Philpott emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ambiguity, lived-experience of the body, and the dependence on the body of visual, spatial, and temporal perception. He concludes that “there is an unstable relationship between the sedimented layers of worldly experience and the habitual level of the lived body,” as a result of which “the dyslexic is unable to confront his/her possibilities during a specific bodily project.” Consequently, “the dyslexic body’s anonymous habituality (its facticity) fails to act as concrete background when confronting bodily possibilities.” This does not necessarily represent a deficit, but rather an existential variant: “In contrast to the non-dyslexic person, I have a radically different manner of Being-in-the-world, and not, as might be interpreted, an incomplete manner” (author’s italics).

There are several issues of methodology and interpretation that could be raised here. It is not possible to regard Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as an abstract methodological apparatus—something Philpott denies he is in fact trying to do; but nor can his descriptions of lived experience be instrumentalized and appropriated eclectically. Further, it is impossible to say whether the phenomena described from Philpott’s own experience are indeed features of his “dyslexia,” or mere chance associations. It would certainly not be surprising if he were drawn to accommodate common experiences under the global diagnosis: this could be the case, for example, when he reflects that “one of the main problems I have experienced with dyslexia is the tendency for my work to take a long time to complete as a result of the task at hand losing its meaningfulness, and hence a loss of momentum.”

These caveats aside, as a theoretically informed internal dialogue, the article raises deep questions about the ways in which variable modes of perception and experience may be conceptualized. From this vantage point, it may be considered as a member of the increasingly significant group of writings in which patients, or persons with disability or illness, reflect upon their personal and social experiences. This genre is sometimes described as “pathography,” but we would prefer to use the term “critical patient narrative.” ¹ Such writings often employ the intellectual or professional knowledge of their subjects in a critique of medical epistemology and medical practice. As an example, Robert Murphy (1987) ² uses his training as an anthropologist to analyze the behavior of his acquaintances and physicians during his physical deterioration, and S. Kay Toombs (1992), to whom the article refers, uses her phenomenological training to characterize the contrasting perceptions of doctor and patient. Such writings often illuminate social relations within the clinic from a different perspective. What makes the present essay interesting is that attention is directed not outwards towards the social world of treatment, but inwards towards the experiential world of the patient.

The degree of insight that these concepts, as the writer understands them, throw upon the...