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	“being well” in relation to “well-being” gary e. davis	March 16, 2020

You want a good quality of life—excellent quality is better, of course. Between good and excellent is feasibility. You want the best quality of life that high ability can make of good opportunity. High ability results from actualizing potential. Yet, even excellent opportunity implies constraints on feasible quality of life. Those paragraphs are a brief explication of the following statement (which I wrote first): One wants the feasibly best quality of life that actualization of one’s potential can make. Yet, what is “quality” here? What is “good” (as such, as well as relative to quality of life)? I would have seemed obtuse to refer to quality of being rather than quality of life. Yet, ‘being’ is a verbal-noun (being, being) that ‘life’ isn’t. The analogy would be to refer to quality of living life—quality of one’s life as quality of living. In being, being is (or results: comes to be). Is being well the same as living well? I would argue no. But each implies activeness or engagement that the statist (steady state) notion “well-being” doesn’t proximally imply. Well-being is proximally about homeostasis (or the quality of homeostasis: “poor” well-being, “better” well-being, etc.). Well-being is an observational notion or representa-tional notion—or better: an evaluative notion that can be assessed or estimated by observational critieria unrelated to one’s engagement—unless a scale of en-gagement is integral to evaluating well-being, not made behaviorally supplemental to estimating a degree of steady state. But then, what’s integral is that: activeness or engagement stipulated for the scalar meaning of ‘well-being’. However, what matters for notions of well-being should be quality of living, for reasons of intrinsic value of enjoying a high quality of life (where ‘high’ness is analogous with what’s “higher” about higher education or re: genuinely sophisticated perspectivity). Such integral mattering is better rendered by ‘being well’, particularly being well, which belongs with a life span view of being, in principle: from actualizing poten-tial during childhood through making good of opportunity in adulthood to richly enjoying later years (where ‘richly’ is cultural, not about monetary worth). Given that only particular lives enjoy (literally) then societal notions are derivative: The well-being of a society is extrapolated (usually by quantified means) from a generalizing sense of individual well-being. A society’s being well is something like chugging along with a good degree of prosperity (GDP, if not GDH: Gross Domestic Happiness). The good of a society is derivative of notions of good life that are scaled up to a social ecology. But social ecology should not be basically undersood homeostatically. (Biological notions of ecology are homeostatic.) Humanity intends to better itself, standardly in terms of more-evident higher qualities of life. Humanity progresses. A society being well evolves. All of the above reads as just-so assertion, but my intention is to introduce some themes that I intend to explicate in detail. next—> purposes of life

 

 

Be fair. © 2019, gary e. davis