Thursday, August 24, 2006

Medicine, Diet, and Individual-Personal Health

Medicine, Diet, and Individual-Personal Health
Piankhy Thompson

The difference between Individual-Personal Health and the view of health implied in such conceptions as “Health Care”, “Fitness”, “Wellness”, and various other products of mainstream and so-called Alternative medicine, are as extreme as the differences between healthy culture and sick culture generally. In a culture of apart-ness and dissociation, the vary concept of health and of wholeness--and so of “medicine”, must necessarily be distorted and fragmented out of all recognition if it is to have anything but the most tenuous viability within that dominant culture. After all, any conception of health that was at all integrated would have political and economic dimensions that would inherently challenge the status quo of any society in which the alienated Individual, rather than the Individual-Person is understood as the unit.

By saying this I don’t mean to single out capitalist or libertarian views as especially distorting of the concept of health or even as especially pathological manifestations of sick culture. A healthy, Individual-Personal, view of Health would be equally unwelcome in a more “socialist” or a more “traditional” society that downplayed Individualism in favor of one or another (or even all four) of the four other roles, which constitute the nexus of relationship and responsibility that I call “Personhood”. In other words the concept of “familial health”, or “local health” or “civic health” or even “religious or psychological health” would be just as dissociated oxymoronic, pernicious and pathological as that of “Individual health” if they are pursued in reductive isolation and understood from the dissociated point of view of sick culture.

Since, however, the dominant manifestation of sick-culture in this society is more in the capitalist vain of Individual-focused dissociation (of the dissociation of the individual from the whole nexus of that individuals' Personhood), most of the following essay will primarily address the misrepresentations of Health that derive from this. And although I could use the entire field of modern medicine to illustrate my point, in this essay I will use the relatively more progressive branch of “nutrition” as an example of what I mean. The generality of all that follows can be understood to apply “a fortiori” to Modern Medicine as a whole, though I intend to say more about modern medicines inherently hyper-anesthetic dissociated nature in other postings.

In a previous post called “Good Sense and the Meaning of Life” (now in the archives), I introduced the concept (it is also a “percept”) of “Wholesthesia”, or “the Relative Silence of Health”, contrasting it with “Anesthesia”, and explored the implications of these concepts regarding the Meaning of Life. The whole explication eventually culminated in the concept of “Callesthesia”—or “Good Sense” as what we may now understand as the equivalent in the area of general sensibility to what “life-logic” is in the more verbal or intellectual aspects of Individual-Personal culture. As I mentioned in that place, this theory of Life has innumerable applications to the various dissociated and dysintegral fields of study and endeavor within the current sick culture of the modern world. I now want to explore some of these implications it the realm of what is now called nutrition conceived both as a part of medicine and as a part of the current worldview in general.

To reiterate a little more from that essay, I pointed out there, not only the phenomenology of “wholesthesia”, but that of a continuum from Local Wholesthesia, to General Wholesthesia, to Phenomenesthesia (Awakening), to Numenaesthesia (Life) as analogous (though inversely) to the degenerative continuum going from Local to General Anesthesia to Coma to Death. I then posited “Freedom” as a goal or end even beyond this Life and “Good Sense” or “Callesthesia” as the dynamic sensibility and process leading to that end most efficaciously.

It’s easy enough, considering this progression, to conceive of a linear classification of Substances in terms of their effects on a (human) Individual-Persons metabolism as ordered along such a continuum. In other words, we can posit a continuum of substances from the more anesthetic (such as cloroform, cocaine, alcohol,many "medicines"), to the more wholesthetic substances (such as fresh air, spring water, wild raw foods).

I would put exceptional quality fresh organic cooked food somewhere near the middle of the continuum (though still on the anesthetic side), shifting toward the more anesthetic or more wholesthetic depending on details of preparation and consumption. (I hope the reader will be patient with this exposition and not reduce and dismiss this essay as raw food propaganda. The point I am getting to is much more subtle and sophisticated than that, as I hope to show.)

Now if we were to adopt a static view of the this reality, and also ignore both “Freedom” and “Good Sense” in considering the relavent analogy, then either the perfection of perfectly wholesthetic foods would be demanded (and the absence of this lamented) or a kind of “happy medium” would be invoked in which the “balanced approach” of very good quality, mostly raw, food would seem to be implied. But am not implying or recommending either of these things. What properly follows, as a recommendation, from what I have related so far, is an Individual and Personal Callesthetic diet that may or may not surpass or even closely approach the medium of good quality food, (cooked or raw), depending on the situation of the individual person involved. In other words, a Callesthetic diet is the best possible under the inner and outer circumstances and it can very extremely depending on those circumstances, which consist not only of the other aspects of the persons Individuality (mind, heart, intuition--and not just body), but the whole horizontal nexus of their Personhood as a family member, citizen of the world, neighbor and “soul”. A healthy (Callesthetic) diet then is the best one possible consistent with continuous progress in Living as in Individual-Person, rather that as a “surviving” as a dissociated Individual.

Moreover, the reason for eating as raw and as locally as is reasonably possible is not, from a Callesthetic point of view, to prolong ones life, but to remain in touch with Life; to remain aware and in balance with the other killing eating and dying beings with whom one shares ones neighborhood, ones familial venue, ones world. Such eating derives from a desire to be maximally aware, inwardly and outwardly, and to numb ones self as little as is possible or necessary. At the same time, to one-sidedly strive for perfect nutrition, even for this reason, would not be Callesthetic in most cases since it would involve a kind of fanaticism which would throw the rest of ones life out of balance.

If for example, in order afford the best and freshest food, I have to take (or keep) a meaningless, stressful, and destructive job, then I am liable to be undoing my balance as a whole individual-person even as I try to seek prefect health in that one aspect of individuality. And even that physical aspect of my wholeness is not likely to really improve in that case, because the increasing stress of my money making is likely to cancel out whatever good effects my diet adds anyway—even if I can keep it up.

On the other hand, If when have the money and/or time to spare (all other aspects of my life being suitably accounted for), or if that kind of food is readily available to me for some other reason, than it would be just as unbalanced not to increase the quality and quantity of organic or wild local food. It would also make sense as a kind of emergency detox from a previous horrendously anesthetic and processed diet, if the multidimensional causes of my adopting that numbing diet in the first place are also being dealt with to at least some extent.

The point is that the proper diet for an Individual-Person integrates, in a life-logical way, both the linear gradient (or hierarchy) involved in affirming standards of quality at the same time as it also embraces a kind of context-dependant relativity, in such a way that the dissociated and abstract ideal of perfectly “wholesthetic diet” is subordinated to the integrated Ideal of the Callesthetic (sensible-for-the-time-being-and-under-the-circumstances) diet of an Individual and Personal being that is more than a body and that therefore “does not live by bread alone” (even when its “Essene bread”).

But just in case you misunderstand, and what I have said so far seems to you to council obliviousness to ones diet, I want to reiterate that such a thing would be extremely inappropriate under most circumstances. The important use of the anesthetic-to-wholesthetic scale that I began by describing is to aid in monitoring (listening to) the extent to which one is using food or drugs to numb (anesthetize) oneself and so to maintain a state of apart-ness from the feedback of ones own body and heart inwardly, as well as outwardly, from the inherent claims and challenges of ones relationships with other beings. What one is listening for however, rather than being perfection, is sufficiency under the circumstances. For though a more anesthetic-than-necessary diet would mean a need to alter ones whole life-pattern in such a way as to naturally return to that way of eating which is consistent with the coordinated progress of ones whole life-dance as an individual-person, so might a “less-anesthetic-than-appropriate diet, which could be a symptom, as well se below, of imbalances that are just as unhealthy.

For if paradoxical subtleties pertain even when the understanding behind the motivation to eat well is itself a healthy one, they pertain even more when what is behind that motivation is really only a vain consideration of appearance, of what is called “fitness” or of self-rightiousness. Then the truly healing aspect of such eating is already negated, or rather such eating is not “eating well” at all, no matter what the quality of the food. When my concern with nutrition and with my body is really only part of my denial of what my soul knows about the reality of my ultimate end and identity, or when it’s a part of some childish or desperate conceit of my ego as to my specialness or "healthier-than-thou" self-importance, than the end result of my efforts is only going to contribute to my sickness as an Individual-Person since, in such a case I would be “feeding” my body at the expense of my mind, heart and intuition and so losing real contact with the whole of myself, however it may seem to those less discerning.

Though the above discussion is still too abstract (since a real individual-personal situation has by no means been taken up and explored in all its endless and endlessly changing specificity), I nevertheless think it helps to make the point is that Individual-Personal health means dynamic balanced awareness of, and responsiveness to, all of the changing aspects of inner as well as outer life which proceeds in a way that neither discounts nor rigidly dissociates and privileges, any one dimension or aspect (in this case nutritional health) over any of the others (since this would actually stifle progress toward a more whole and balanced life). A more concrete and example-filled sense of all this can be gleaned from a reading of the partner blog to this one: Lifedancelog.motime.com.

All of these considerations can be seen to bring into question the very idea of nutrition conceived only in one-dimensional material terms, and similar considerations could just as easily be used with regard to every other specialized preoccupation of those who conceive of health in a dissociated (and so itself unhealthy) manner. And this is true whether this happens within “medicine” or outside of it. Indeed the existence of “medicine” itself as a dissociated and circumscribed study and practice applying only to human beings is already as sign of sick culture. This is still more the case when those human beings are themselves conceived of only as “individuals”, even “psycho-physical” ones.

Though, from the point of view of the identity-politics of Individual-Personhood, one might (in a qualified way for a specific purpose) speak of “Individual health” as the degree of (relatively “vertical”) integration of the individual as mind, heart, body, and intuition and then of the kind of material nutrition that can contribute to this, it can be immediately seen that this vertical, individual axis could not even exist (either as healthy or sick) without the horizontal nexus of Personhood (as familial, local, civil, and “psycho-religious” relationship) as part of its inherent context. Speaking of the mind as the “inner-adult”, the heart as the “inner-child”, the body as the “inner-animal” and the intuition/soul as the “inner elder” helps to make it even more clear that all of these so-called subjective “psychological categories” have their equally “sociological/external” counter-parts as venues of participation and "nourishment". Nevertheless, such a differentiated way of looking at and talking about Individual-Personal health allows a kind of integral analysis in which seemly divergent areas of imbalance or distress can be placed in their proper relationship to each other and to the dynamics of the whole Individual-Persons Life.

In such a light, symptoms of “poor nutrition” and of physical illness generally can actually be seen, as valuable signs of general imbalance. Even more paradoxically, they can also be seen as, under specific circumstances, possibly useful checks against the kind of psychological (ego) inflation that derives from overly dissociated conceptions of “individual health”, such as vanity, self-rightiousness etc, that are almost always based on the competitively factional and specialized identity-politics of gender, race, class, species etc. Seen in such a light “Physical Sickness”, pain, and even death can, when rightly understood and experienced, be a chance to realize and acknowledge intrinsic non-factional Relationships and Ultimate Identity, both for the “individual” who is “ill” and for those who witness this. At any rate it is only with such a realization and acknowledgement of inherent relationship and identity that real healing can even begin. From this point of view, the so-called physically, and psychologically healthy are probably more likely to be farther from such a realization then those have been forced by “bad luck”, into closer proximity to the Living Truth of who and what they ultimately are.

Such Living Truth cannot really be totally verbalized, but it includes the realization that, inwardly and outwardly, we share both the world and our very Identity with “individual-persons” of every kind, from “atoms” and bacteria to planets,stars and the old person next door. Sickness and death, from such a point of view, are just challenges for us to realize this paradoxically shared identity and our intrinsic subjective/objective interparticipation (our dance) as only relatively distinct expressions of Individual-Personhood  with (and “as”) every other; a dance that gestures toward a Freedom that transcends identity itself. Such Living Truth includes the realization that real Individual-Personal Health is both the progressive and the actual expression of this dynamic and living process of subjective and objective integration. This realization/expression of wholeness as healing is not one of “health” as a static, private possession that can be broken up or horded along the lines of any other commodity, but an inclusively abstract, qualitative, existential, mystical, subjective and objective event in which Being Itself is strengthened, and in which Individual-Personhood, as a Living Field of Belonging, opens like a flower and receives, with welcome, with thanks, and with Good Sense, the Selfnature-quickening pollination of Spirit.

posted by: piankhy | 12:10 | comments