A new understanding of health and a healthy lifestyle: A holistic and existential-humanistic approach

Abstract

Confronting current challenges, especially the COVID-19 pandemic, and striving to create a hopeful future – an era of life and active longevity – determine an urgent global need to implement the principles of humanity and create a new understanding of health and a healthy lifestyle, correlated with a fundamental respect for the dignity of life. Based on the idea of the relationship between health and a healthy lifestyle through the inherent value of the individual, embodying the intrinsic value of life, basic contradictions were identified: the contradiction between the understanding of health as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being and a healthy lifestyle, which focuses on the physical aspect of health, omitting the spiritual component; the contradiction between the numerous proposed strategies for a healthy lifestyle and the lack of a fundamental goal that expresses its value-semantic result. In the aspect of philosophical-methodological ideas about health and a healthy lifestyle, their essential binding element was defined – the good that embodies the result of the ultimate aspiration of a person. The resolution of the basic contradictions revealed in the analysis of philosophical-methodological ideas about health and a healthy lifestyle made it possible to present new, clearer definitions of health and a healthy lifestyle: health is a good that allows a person to embody the value of life in a specific reality; a healthy lifestyle is an individual way of life, which is based on a person’s respect for the dignity of life and creates a benefit to him/herself and others, gaining the joy of existence. A new concept of a healthy lifestyle was developed, which defined the joy of existence as its fundamental goal, implemented by a person through the creation of good for oneself and others in a system of socio-cultural and natural interaction based on respect for the dignity of life.