Humane energy - about the relation between the concepts of "health", "Körperschema/connectedness" and "social spaces" from the perspective of Merleau-Pontys Gestalttheory
Abstract
This text contains a philosophical approach to the central topics of public health. It puts the question into focus how the concept of health can be understood, not by framing it in contrast to the concept of disease, but to well-being.
This is understood not as an individual feeling, but as an intersubjective form of human energy, as "connectedness". To gain a better understanding of this concept (of human energy), a paradigmatic exercise in drama education is being analysed.
The theoretical framework of this text is based on the tradition of the Gestalttheory, especially in the form in which the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty transformed it in his writings. The text concludes by pointing out some major implications for the practices of public health and its politics.
A new approach is sketched how to frame the politics of the health sector, when we really understand that the biggest threat to health worldwide no longer comes from "internal" diseases like viruses but from the way how we design our forms of intersubjective interactions, of being, moving and working together. The goal is to allow a specific form of human energy to take place in all these interactions.