The article examines the spiritual and value meanings of the social construction of “health” and “embodiment” during wartime and the post-war periods, with a particular focus on Ukrainian society. It analyzes how war transforms public, cultural, and philosophical perceptions of health, normativity, bodily vulnerability, and dignity. The study emphasizes a shift from the biomedical to the humanitarian paradigm of health understanding, where the value of the human body is seen as a carrier of meaning, identity, and spiritual resistance.Special attention is given to the philosophical analysis of the body as a space of memory, pain, and narrative reconstruction. Central to the research are the concepts of biopower, the phenomenology of embodiment, and the ethics of vulnerability. The author highlights that in the context of war and its aftermath, the construction of embodiment takes on moral and symbolic significance, becoming a space for struggle for subjectivity, memory, and meaning.A philosophical understanding of health in wartime must extend beyond medical discourse and include ethics, hermeneutics, memory politics, and human rights. The social construction of health becomes an essential tool for existential and semantic adaptation to traumatic reality. Thus, the Ukrainian experience shapes a unique paradigm of bodily dignity, where life – despite suffering – retains meaning. In this context, the body is not merely an object of care but a moral text, bearing witness to pain, resilience, and the demand for new forms of coexistence. Health, therefore, loses its one-dimensional interpretation and gains multidimensional meaning – as a capacity for meaning-making, relationships, and being-in-the-world. Post-war Ukraine holds the potential to build a new ethic of bodily solidarity, in which bodily vulnerability is no longer concealed but becomes the basis for a new culture of trust, care, and dignity. The study employs hermeneutic, phenomenological, and narrative methods to reconstruct the bodily experience of war and post-war recovery as both a sociocultural and spiritual process. Ethical analysis is also applied to explore the value-laden content of concepts such as health, illness, bodily integrity, and dignity. The article combines philosophical reflection with cultural and social examples, uncovering new ways to comprehend the phenomena of health and embodiment. The material can be used in the fields of philosophy of medicine, social philosophy, bioethics, and cultural studies.
Olha VYSOTSKA (Tue,) studied this question.