In retaliation to the rapidly growing Quantified Self movement, which uses self-monitoring technology to data mine correlations between behavior and physiological or subjective parameters, I would like to confidently assert right here and now that health is not a quantitative entity and attempts to quantify it will ultimately fail to produce health. Rather, health is qualitatively dynamic and can only be known and pursued directly and perceptually. More precisely, I want to claim that health is aesthetic!
My use of aesthetic is not as in the commonly superficial use of the word, but one much more deep and rooted in its ancient etymology. Yet, it doesn’t stop there. My appeal to the aesthetic nature of health is still more radical and, drawing from William James’s radical empiricism, I might even call the aesthetic of health a radical aesthetic.
The word “aesthetic” originates from the Greek “aisthetikos” which means sensitive and perceptive and “aisthanesthai” which is to perceive or feel. To perceive or feel, here, does not simply refer to the five senses of exteroception, the self-sensation of interoception, or the sensation of movement and position called proprioception. As will be discussed in greater detail later, perception is more that this, including confluent dimensions of emotion, thought, memory, and intuition as well. Together, we call this “feeling”. In essence, perception is the supercomposition of existential experience. Its use here is closer t0 that of sentience, which derives from the Latin “sentiens”, and refers to a complex of feeling and meaning. Aesthesia is sentience and the aesthetic is directly perceived as a sentient quality. Efficacy and resilience, the components of health, are ultimately sentient qualities and health is an exceedingly whole overflow of sensorially saturated sentience.
Aesthetically, then, what do efficacy and resilience, the components of health, feel like? The concept of efficacy is perhaps best understood as the complex of self-referential felt dispositions it often evokes. Efficacy enfolds a “sense of” or feeling of confidence, ability, skill, motivation, mobility, action, purpose, and so on. Resilience can be understood and defined aesthetically as well, as it enfolds a “sense of” or feeling of optimism, nourishment, security, trust, opportunity, potential, perseverance, and so on. Together, were ability meets opportunity, action meets potential, confidence meets trust, purpose meets nourishment, … there is the “sense of” vital wholeness, vibrant richness, existential fullness. Together, the merger of aesthetically robust efficacy and resilience is the emergence of aesthetic health. Health is an existential feeling of fullness or, in fact, over-fullness. The aesthetic vitality of health overflows and dissolves all boundaries of self-other, subject-object, past-future, as a self-transcending existence. Health is a feeling of self-transcending existential vitality that is, itself, self-evident. Like beauty, health is known non-conceptually and non-categorically. Health is a directly perceptible fact.
To briefly foreshadow our escape from the subjective-objective dichotomy, I’ll emphasize here that radical aesthetics is a participatory process of perceptual becoming and becoming precedes being. That is, what is felt is not just the worldly forms of life but the movement of change and trans-formation. The recognition of subject and object is the recognition of forms already transformed and already rolling back-forward into further transformation. Subject and object are essentially recognized in hindsight, in their perishing as ephemeral has-been forms related to one another through the process of their mutual becoming. Therefore, radical aesthetics includes and precedes the subjective and objective. Radical aesthetics feels them into actuality in actively feeling, (thus participating in) the transformative manyness-of-oneness.
If feeling precedes and fleetingly actualizes the subjective and the objective, and if health is ultimately a feeling, then feeling ones way toward health can simultaneously actualize subjective and objective health. The common fear that objective health requires subjective misery is demolished. Health is a complexly positive feeling, much like the perception of beauty. Perception of beauty here refers to a more-than-sensuous “feeling” of beauty for a radical aesthetics is perceptually amodal and complete. It is a flowing or stirring super composition of perceptual modes that is more like an infinitely textured force of feeling. Health can be felt in pieces but never separately as pieces. Parts of the feeling-experience, here, are always defined by the whole feeling-experience. The aesthetic of health is a flow, an over-flow, of perceptual layers, an over-flowing mosaic of fluid feeling that moves like a sunset. We know health as we know a season. The event of feeling aesthetically often shatters one’s experience of the world so completely that it finally comes together in wholeness. Aesthetic attunement reveals an expressive force so heavy and thick that every thing becomes no thing, only a world crying pure, complete, ephemeral feeling. The world is all feeling. Everything ever felt and everything that can be felt mingles at once not as a spectrum of colorful feelings but as the light of feeling illuminated. A radically aesthetic approach to health ultimately defines health aesthetically and pursues it aesthetically; it is a way of finding health by getting a feel for the feeling. It is feeling health directly and knowing that it is so.
Attempts to qualify and especially quantify health anaesthetically immediately suffer dissociation from its essential and true value, the living-feeling experience, and are thus doomed to conceptual and practical failure. Yet, this is exactly the approach of biomedical science due to its emphasis on the objective and the general, and the approach of much of psychology due to its emphasis on the subjective lived (not living-feeling) experience. Therefore, to effectively pursue health, a more than scientific approach is necessary. What is needed is an aesthetically individualized science, a science of artful becoming.
Therefore, health is something that is, before all, “felt” or perceived. It precedes any attempts at subjective and objective definition. It transcends its own literal definitions, it transcends language, and if it is to still be considered a concept, it is a concept only understood by a sensuously attuned, intensely sentient, and sensitive becoming. Essentially, health and life belong to the event of becoming itself, not to a body or environment, subject or object, self or other, for these forms, once recognized, are already dead. Radical aesthetics is an empirical, experimental, practice in which one gets a feel for health, a feel for living, a feel for existence. Radical aesthetics is health as a lived process. Health is not an outcome or destination, but a way and a pursuit.
I want to reiterate that, because health is aesthetic, it and its components of efficacy and resilience become every bit as difficult to define and understand as many of the aesthetic qualities it includes, such as beauty, joy, agony, awe, etc. Again, radical aesthetics extend far beyond the visual and include not just the exteroceptive, interceptive, and proprioceptive sensations of a living body but also thoughts, emotions, memories, and intuitions. Radical aesthetics does not stop there, however, but exceeds these “feelings” of the body-in-the-world to include “feeling” the body-world itself becoming. All things come together as the nexus we call a sensuous-sentient-perceiving body and continue to wash over it and flow through it all at once as a lived aesthetic. This is where health is understood. It is an art which far exceeds the arts. The art of health is an art of living, existing, and becoming. It is an aesthetic involving the active sensation of one’s self-in-the-world becoming, growing, creating, and changing. Like beauty, health can not be known reductively; it is known directly, perceptively, and completely. It is sentiently self-evident. It is unmistakably itself, as one’s existential pre-self. It is the creation and sensation of pleuri-dimensional self-exceeding self-beauty, the self as an always incomplete, defiantly true, perfectly imperfect, masterpiece. The beautiful self is the true self. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” wrote John Keats in the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Optimal health feels like one’s most true and beautiful self. As will be discussed later, this is also captured by the Greek work “physis”, essentially meaning growing as one’s true nature. As Oscar Wilde once put it, aesthetics is “ the search after the secret of life.”
If efficacy, resilience, and health as a whole is aesthetically understood, then it follows that we can, or in fact must, “feel” our way toward health just as we might feel our way through a dark room, to us an analogy. This requires aesthetic attunement, the awakening of aesthesia. Considering this, doctors of health oriented medicine would not include anaesthesiologists but aesthesiologists, or proaesthesiologists; that is teachers (doctor is from the latin docere = teacher) of a radical aesthetic; teachers of a sensitized sentience!
