2023-11-26 09:49:38
by Guido Bosticco *
The answer evokes a special kind of health, which speaks to our being in relation to others
“How are you?” is the most usual and most difficult question that exists. We say this to each other many times a day, as a greeting, in all its slang variations, which are also very interesting because they open up different hypothetical scenarios: what’s up? As? How is it going? Novelty? Everything OK? Each of these conversation starters refers to a possible world, but the simplest and most direct is also the most fascinating: how are you? How are you physically, mentally, spiritually. But also what position you are in, that “how” means in what way, in what attitude compared to everything else. And we respond, often conventionally, sometimes thinking about it (usually when the answer is negative we are more aware) of all those meanings in one fell swoop. First we think about ourselves, our problems or our joys and we identify in that “being” both physical health and the state of our affairs. We almost respond to how the world is around me.
If, however, we are the ones asking it, perhaps to a teenager who we see as a little disoriented, we want to know where his mind is, rather than how. And one determines the other or perhaps is the consequence of it, so the kids sometimes seem indecipherable. And so the how, where and why of the two things have to do not so much with our health, that is, with feeling good (or bad) in the world, but with our presence, that is, with feeling good (or bad ) with the world. However, we are talking about health, whose etymology means “integrity, wholeness, salvation”, but of a special type of health, that which concerns our being in relationship with others. We perhaps think that our health is, in the first instance, an individual concept, which ends with the boundaries of our body and, if anything, of our psyche (which is still made up of body), but perhaps it makes no sense to talk about health if not in reference to others.
We live a sort of very complex, perhaps even unconscious, symbiosis, so we do not realize that our integrity is made up of ourselves plus others. Anthropologists have coined the term “con-dividual” to identify the fact that unity, when talking about human beings, is collective, cooperative, collaborative. And biologists have adopted it, to mean that our body also needs, to be intact, to relate to the environment and to others like it, in a certain form of evolved symbiosis. This is not a sophism to say that we must all love each other in this world, but the awareness that health is a collective affair, which binds us inextricably and in this sense we can read the motto “One World, one Health”. And next time we will ask the neighbor: “How are we?”.
* University of Pavia, Veronesi Foundation Ethics Committee
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November 26, 2023 (modified November 26, 2023 | 08:49)
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