The so-called healthy people
Kant observed that health is not an objective fact, measurable once and for all. It is easier to recognize illness than to define health positively, since health remains a silent background, perceived only when it begins to crack.
In the twentieth century, Georges Canguilhem took up this intuition again in The Normal and the Pathological: there is no universal “normal,” because the normal and the pathological are always value judgments. Health, more than mere normality, is normativity: the living being’s capacity to establish new vital norms, to reorganize its relationship with the environment even through the experience of illness. What statistics may regard as deviation can represent, for the subject, another fully viable form of life, a different way of inhabiting the world.
Along the same line, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in The Enigma of Health, described health as a “global fact” of existence: a hidden harmony involving the body, the social world, and personal biography all at once. For Gadamer, health is above all a certain way of being in the world: feeling engaged in one’s activities, immersed in relationships, capable of participating actively and satisfactorily in everyday life. Precisely because it constitutes the overall tone of our existence, health cannot be reduced to an objective indicator. The threshold between health and illness is always situated and pragmatic: only the concrete individual, within their own context and history, can say whether they are well or no longer able to sustain life’s demands.
Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society, reminded us that “a sane mind can exist only in a sane society.” Consequently, discourse on individual health cannot be separated from that on the health of society as a whole. And this is precisely where a paradox emerges today. On the one hand, health has been elevated to a new secular divinity, the fetish of a life under constant optimization. Michel Foucault showed how modern power does not merely make bodies obey, but governs life itself, intervening in health, birth rates, longevity, and risk, through an approach he defined as “biopolitical.”
From this perspective, what we might today call the religion of health is the result of an intertwining of medical knowledge, economics, and techniques of government: the health of the population becomes a central political stake and a criterion of normalization.
On the other hand, we live in a performance-driven society marked by epidemics of depression, burnout, and anxiety. Alain Ehrenberg showed how depression has become the emblematic pathology of a society in which the norm is no longer obedience to discipline, but rather initiative and individual self-realization. People no longer feel guilty; they feel inadequate. Suffering arises not so much from prohibition as from the imperative to always live up to an unlimited ideal of the self, including the ideal of being in perfect shape. Byung-Chul Han described this scenario through the apt expression “the burnout society.”
It is important to bring this paradox to light within organizational life, creating the conditions to talk about it, become aware of it, and therefore act to transform it. We need the ability to listen to singular voices that speak of health, illness, and distress, recognizing them as symptoms of a possible organizational malaise. In organizations, as in individuals, the symptom must first of all be listened to as the bearer of a truth that cannot express itself in any other way.
This, I believe, is the vocational task of diversity management and, more generally, of all those organizational functions called upon to activate what Massimo Recalcati defines as the “maternal code” of organizations: their capacity to see those who work within them not merely as numbers, but in their irreducible heterogeneity.