ABSTRACT

Good health, like peace, is an absence of something more deleterious. Also like peace, a fully adequate understanding of good health requires an acknowledgement of its enabling conditions and its obtaining requires their sustenance, particularly when understood as part of overall well-being and when this is construed as flourishing. Good health and well-being do not exist in a vacuum. However, at its heart good health is still an absence. It is, of course, an absence of suffering and, again like peace, an absence of conflict and, in this latter respect, it is also to a large degree an experiential absence of one’s body. When accounting for the absence of illness as a major theme in literature, Virginia Woolf points to the literary erasure of the body in favour of the mind. The body, she says, “is a sheet of plain glass through which the mind looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent” (2002: 4). This is a description of the body in good health, and the healthy body’s experiential absence, or what we might term its transparency, has been a major theme in work on the phenomenology of lived experience, as has the body’s experiential resurfacing in adverse circumstances.