ABSTRACT
What does it mean to talk of ‘well-being’ as against ‘health’? One refers to something more subjective in its designation and evaluation, less accessible to technological intervention and objective measurement. Well-being is existential rather than metrical, and other adjectives that seem to pertain include personal, momentary, sensorial and variable. I might have a sense of well-being over and against the fact that I know myself to be dying. I have a sense of well-being but is it something of which I can be long assured? Will it abide? My sense of well-being might be connected to the fact that I know the world to be a purely material phenomenon without any supernatural warrant, significance or teleology; my neighbour, contrariwise – or myself at another stage of my life – has felt that well-being attaches to the watchful eye of a personal god. I measure my well-being, perhaps, in terms of my sense of satiation; my neighbour in terms of a sense of devotion. No sense of well-being for me can exceed, perhaps, the feeling I derive from viewing the art of Stanley Spencer; for my neighbour, who is blind, well-being comes from the intellectual assurance that his family is financially catered for…. What does this diversity, personalism, sensoriality and contingency tell us? Are there generalities here to elucidate? Is there a human story of well-being to tell, or a cultural or social one, a geographical or historical one?
