The Practical Wisdom of Health in an Era of the Quantified Self
Zachary Daus1, Monash University North Melbourne 1Monash University, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
My paper makes two related claims. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of health, I first argue that the maintenance of health requires a skillset that is analogous to Aristotelian practical wisdom or phronesis. That is to say, our maintenance of health requires the skillful balancing of different goals, whose achievement is dependent upon our being attuned to both shifting environmental contexts as well as subjective states. After describing the maintenance of health as the practically wise balancing of these different goals, I then turn to various tracking applications that measure biometric data for the purpose of achieving health. Many of these applications treat health as a quantifiable goal, such as in the form of a certain number of steps or hours of sleep. While potentially useful in encouraging us to meet discrete health goals, I argue that they remain elusive in enabling us to maintain health more broadly. When the maintenance of health is understood in terms of practical wisdom, whether we ought to pursue a discrete health goal is determined not by how quantifiably close we are to achieving it, but how the goal stands in relation to our subjective state, environmental context, as well as other (potentially conflicting) goals. I argue that both the complexity and subjectivity of such an analysis is beyond the scope of an any present health tracking technology, and that humans should therefore not rely on tracking applications at the expense of developing their own ability to be practically wise.
Biography
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