Well-being in anthropological balance: remarks on proportionality as political imagination

Abstract

In 1691, when Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Woman in blue reading a letter’ was sold at auction in Amsterdam, the catalogue noted: ‘the charming light and dark suggest a splendid well-being.’ The idea that well-being could be a matter of shadows and light is very distant from our twenty-first century concern with material and moral standings; the softness and suppleness of Vermeer’s aesthetics, very far from our current economic and political preoccupations. In this chapter I would like to suggest that there may be, however, a sense in which well-being is still today a matter of appropriate illuminations, a matter of finding the right balance between the visible and invisible elements of social life. In thinking about the place of well-being in human life, I have come to realise some of the current deficiencies of social theory. Finding an analytical place for well-being in social theory is a twofold provocation: a realisation of the limits of our theoretical tools, and a call for an imaginative way forward.