The most famous definition of health is provided by the World Health Organization (1948): “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The global acceptance of such an idealistic and nonpragmatic description of health has always surprised me.

Through this window, you see a medical utopia, with healthy people in a timeless state of complete welfare. Nobody can meet such criteria, and therefore, health remains an idea beyond the real world of deficits and desire.

The second part of the definition emphasizes the criticism of the disease-oriented representation of health. However, this positive description is as vague as the negative determinants of health, such as the absence of disease, or the silence of organs.

It seems that something is profoundly wrong with the concept of health. Health is a phantom behind a painless body which is only revealed in our wishes for health when we are in face of an illness. It is present in its absence!

Assigning a noun for a complex and dynamic self-regulatory process such as health is completely inappropriate. Health can be an attribute of an organism that indicates integrity and balance. Health can also be a verb like “healthing”; the process of co-constructing and recreating the balance of a living system.

Life is a self-referential and self-dissipative system, as Lumann explains. Life is a sustainable-unstable system, and therefore, we cannot suppose a constant reference for the balance of an organism. While homeostasis reflects the stability of an organism, autopoiesis shows how a complex organism stabilizes itself in a complex environment and recreates balance by co-emerging new orders.

Health, as an attribute of an autopoietic system, can be mentioned as a complex tendency of life to balance between these two fundamental forces towards “sameness” and “otherness”.