Abstract
This chapter introduces the concepts of health and well-being. These concepts can only be understood existentially, and they are absurd when defined objectively. This chapter draws on the work of American physician and philosopher of medicine, Drew Leder, who explains that when healthy, the lived body is absent from experience. There is no concrete experience of health. Health is merely the ability to become absorbed in one’s routine. This is called “well-being” by German hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer. Like Leder, Gadamer argues that health is not any special category, but the ability to carry on with one’s routines without being hindered.
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Notes
- 1.
It is here that Boss emphasizes that any medical problem is always a problem of one’s relatedness to the world. Pain is not an organic problem, but a change in one’s ability to relate to one’s world in a familiar and meaningful way.
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Whitehead, P.M. (2019). Existence and Health. In: Existential Health Psychology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_4
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