The Philosophical Importance Of Health

It would be very difficult to live a stable or enjoyable life without at least some degree of health--and not just mental health, the most vital kind, but also the physical health that allows a person to remain alive in order to engage in practical and abstract pursuits alike.  While mental health is vital to experience a consistently pleasurable and fulfilling life, physical health of some extent is vital for basic survival and is nonetheless a lower aspect of human existence than than matters of philosophical reflection, introspection, and the mental health that is more closely related to the latter than it is to doing the bare minimum to merely survive.  The health of the body in at least some ways is a necessity for physical comfort and safety.

For the sake of explicit clarity, the statements that follow do apply to physical health and not mental health.  A life of constant physical pain could quickly deteriorate a person's eagerness to continue living, but a thriving love of reason, introspection, or human relationships could actually counteract this to the point that a person in great physical suffering might still wish to endure everything for their sake.  It is clear that physical health and mental health, although they can sometimes be overtly intertwined, must be addressed separately to a large extent even if some very loose similarities are shared.  For this reason, physical and mental health have different levels of philosophical significance.

Like jobs and survival in a broader sense, the former category of health is at most a mere means to an end, and the end for which it is pursued might be philosophically significant, or it might be shallow.  Someone who wishes to be healthy out of blind desire to be healthy has not displayed any inner or outer depth.  Someone who seeks health out of regard for some cultural ideal has likewise failed to have any sort of intelligent or significant basis for orienting their life around health beyond the bare minimum required to stay alive.  Rather, going beyond this with the motive of doing so for its own sake is actually a pathetic way to build a life around nothing that is even capable of having ultimate importance.

The rationalistic way to regard basic health is a condition of the physical body that does not even begin to approach the existential and epistemological status of mental health and philosophical truths.  Nevertheless, this does not mean that it is irrational or shallow to care about physical health for oneself or for others; it means that an inflated reverence for health is a sign of stupidity (due to the inherently fallacious nature of the beliefs behind this attitude) and superficiality.  Health has an important role to play in human life, yes, but, like many other things that reduce down to practicality more than more foundational matters of truth, it has a very limited scope of significance at best.  It is only a way to reach other goals which may or may not be worth pursuing.