flourishing

is broadly concerned with both physical and spiritual wellbeing, with courage, dignity, friendship, and justice, whereby each term must be taken up as dynamic and adjustable, calibrated to actual conditions under which the terms of flourishing can be concretely specified.

Understood most broadly, flourishing ranges over physical and spiritual wellbeing, courage, dignity, friendship, and justice although the meaning of each of these terms must be re-worked and re-thought according to contemporary conditions. Such conditions are not constituted by fixed or pre-given forms. If so, they would neither be appropriate to the emergent, nor could they be useful in the work of remediation. Rather, these conditions must be taken up as dynamic and adjustable, calibrated to actual conditions under which the terms of flourishing can be concretely specified. The conditions of flourishing must be specified in a form that is amenable to intervention and amelioration under concrete arrangements. The question of what constitutes a flourishing existence, and the place of science in that form of life, how it contributes to or disrupts it, must be constantly posed and re-posed. In sum, Human Practices equipment is designed to cultivate forms of care of others, the world, things, and of ourselves in such a way that flourishing becomes the mode and the purpose of bioscientific, ethical, and anthropological inquiry and practice. (Rabinow and Bennett 2007: 25)

flourishing, n.All

flourishing