Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slowness (2014) signals the appearance of a global movement in favor of slowness in reaction against the increasing acceleration process in our time. In order to substantiate the importance of slowness today and to better realize our present-day context, the author resorts to two different thinkers: the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han and the Italian physician and neuroscientist Lamberto Maffei. The author relates their convergent arguments to the central role played by slow reading in medical education according to narrative medicine (NM), the so-called close reading, its “signature method.” The author shows how and why slowing down the pace of reading along with the use of reflective writing are crucial in healthcare professionals' training for furthering attentive listening skills, together with self-awareness and awareness of the patient's predicament. Both close reading and reflective writing will finally be related to the triad underlying NM – attention, representation, and affiliation.
TopIntroduction
From lack of repose our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The backlash against Fast medicine is gaining momentum. Doctors everywhere are pushing for more time with their patients. Medical schools are putting a greater emphasis on talking and listening as tools for diagnostic. A mounting body of research shows that patience is often the best policy. – Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness
TopWhy Slowness?
In his work of 2004, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, Carl Honoré signals the appearance of a global movement of reaction against the increasing acceleration process in our daily lives (Honoré, 2004). He calls it a slowness movement – a means of counteracting the praise and prevalence of speed by the recovery of the concept and of the practice of slowness in diverse domains of human action, from education (Berg & Seeber, 2016) and research (Karkov 2018) to food, from medicine (Wear et al., 2015) to sex, cities and leisure.
In my most direct field of expertise and teaching, that of literary studies, I was always prone to a slow approach to texts. Trained as a philologist, I took seriously Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition of that term when he conceives of the philologist as “the teacher of slow reading.”1 Moreover, I was also very much influenced in the early seventies by the then dominant reading method in English Departments around the globe – the so-called close reading. I relied on its slow and close approach to the language of the text qua text, for its didactic and pedagogic potentialities.2 My challenge to my students was making them avoid the impulse of jumping to conclusions about the global meaning of a text without a previous thorough analysis of its language features. It was not an easy task: attempting to halt their eagerness for meaning or “transcendence”, as Jacques Derrida would say, (Derrida, 1992, pp. 44-46) – that movement away from the materiality of the text that should, in my view, be counteracted by a return to the immanence of the words on the page, to their features, charm and power.
But why slowness, one would ask, in today’s globalized society dominated by increasing speed and acceleration in the pace of daily life? In his novel of 1995, entitled Slowness, Milan Kundera wonders:
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesterday? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to the other and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows.’ A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks. (p. 2)
In order to better understand why we should recover this wandering slowness in all human spheres, but also to better realize the context we live in, where slowness has been devalued for too long, I will resort to two very different thinkers. The first is the Korean-born German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, and the other the Italian physician and neuroscientist, Lamberto Maffei. Even though they approach the topic from different angles, they complement each other and they both converge in arguing for the pertinence and the need to rehabilitate slowness in the present-day world.3