HEALTH, POWER, INTEGRITY: THE TENETS OF HUMAN LIFE
Contents:
As explained in The Standard of Value from Ethics from Philosophy, human life is a life wherein one is (1) both alive and desirous of life, and (2) aware and desirous of awareness. This means human life is not about range-of-the-moment existence, and realistically, it cannot be about only long-term goals. Rather, the essence of human life is the pursuit of potential (i.e. considerations with respect to life lived long-range) integrated to the actual (i.e. considerations with respect to life lived concretely, in the moment). This understanding is vital in understanding why health, power and integrity are tenets of human life.
The state of a living entity that allows and facilitates the sustenance of its life. For a human being, since the potential must be integrated with the actual, health also means a state that supports and promotes the advancement of one’s ability to live. Evidently, life is the standard of value, and health is its concrete (i.e. actual/real-time) support. Hence, health is fundamental to a living being’s long-range survival. For a human being, since the potential must be integrated with the actual, health is not a range-of-the-moment concern detached from long-range consequences, since this would contradict the pursuit of potential. Realistically, health also cannot be purely long-range, since it is a concrete support for life that has no value purely as an end goal. Hence, health must be pursued with respect to life lived long-range, while trying to ensure it is realised to its fullest extent as quickly as possible and maintained to a sufficient extent as far as possible.
The power of an entity to produce an effect is the ability of the entity to act to produce the effect. An entity’s power in general is the sum of its particular powers. For a living entity, the only power that matters to itself is the power to sustain life, which involves the power to adapt to or shape its environment. For a human being, this power involves the power to pursue potential; the fullest realisation of power is the ability to pursue potential according to one’s best rational judgement. Note here that 2 points are key: the ability to act, and rationality. Irrational judgement disregards real-life effectiveness, and judgement without the ability to act leads to no real-life effect. Implicit in rationality is the regard for reality as the standard for potential and, by extension, power; full power is not “full” with respect to an imaginary ideal (e.g. the ability to alter physics) but with respect to reality.
Power is the means by which life is sustained and advanced; health is the desired outcome and required long-range support. Hence, we see that the pursuit of health and power are integrated, with power enabling the pursuit of health and health enabling the pursuit of power. Without either one, the other becomes either unattainable or irrelevant; power without health is as precarious to one’s own life as health without power.
Implicit in both health and power (in the context of a human life) was a holistic long-range perspective, i.e. the perspective that does not regard causes and effects in isolation but with respect to how to integrated with the various aspects of life both present and future. Integrity is the tenet that makes this implicit perspective explicit. Integrity is the virtue of treating interdependent and interrelated units (be they entities, actions, facts, ideas, etc.) as a non-contradictory whole. In practice, this means: non-contradiction between one’s:
Integrity is the explicit recognition of the fact that a human life cannot be lived range-of-the-moment, but must be lived holistically, considering one’s actual and potential as an integrated whole. The virtue of integrity gives clarity to what the nature of the pursuit of health and power should be: rational, principled and consistent. In practice, this means:
Note that there is a virtuous cycle: