The Environment for Wellbeing: The Need for Therapeutic Places of Care and the Languages of Proportions and Colours

Abstract

In ancient Greece, the concepts of beauty (kalos) and good (agathos) were considered as one: beauty implied goodness, and, vice versa, the individual virtue spreads charm. Ethics and aesthetics blend, and in the so-called kalokagathia, the ideal of the evolution of the human people could not be separated. Likewise, the term ‘aesthetic’, which comes from the word ‘aesthesis’—sensorial perception—includes more than just the visual perception: it stands for a global perception with all given senses (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.), encompassing the impression left by what is perceived. In the original meaning of the concept, tactile and visual perception constitutes a whole, together with hearing and feeling. Even scent is part of the aesthesis, as well discernment, which is part of the aesthetic experience. If we think about something very familiar to the medical world, we might refer to the ‘anaesthesia’, i.e. simply the blocking of the body’s sensorial perception either at a general or a local level. As an oxymoron, anaesthesia seems quite to block the aesthesis, the aesthetic experience. We are definitely grateful to a group of researchers and physicians in Boston who discovered the anaesthetic gas in surgery at the end on the nineteenth century. They were not the first: probably, many centuries ago, anaesthetics herbs were used both for healing and for sacrifice. Calling in action the meaning of anaesthesia, I thought it to be powerful enough to explain deeply the roots of an aesthetic experience, something perceived by the whole body, and this something produces something good just by the fact of the engagement of our sensorial and logical system with the world around, the people around and the air around the body.