Health is argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of existential feelings, experienced with transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects, making it an important part of leading a good life. Illness, by contrast, involves finding oneself at the mercy of unhomelike existential feelings—such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety, and delusion—which make it harder or impossible to flourish. In illness, the lived body hurts, resists, or alienates the ill person's activities. The paper explores health and illness through enactivism, a bodily-based, worldly-engaged phenomenology, and scrutinizes biomedical, ability-based, and biopsychosocial health theories from that perspective.
Pain-related suffering involves not only bodily experiences and personal identity but also a middle layer of selfhood called the enworlded self, which connects everyday lifeworld challenges to mood and selfhood. Analyzing a chronic pain memoir reveals three damaged lifeworld regions: the work-world, the family-world, and the patient-world—the latter forming as sufferers seek medical help. Addressing all three layers of selfhood (minimal, enworlded, narrative) and their interactions could improve understanding and alleviation of chronic pain suffering through measures tailored to each individual's attuned pattern of pain experiences.