“One hour a day: a study of health”. Prolegomena to the hermeneutics of Nietzsche’s philosophy of illness and health
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/lie.32107Keywords:
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy of health, illness, life, will to powerAbstract
This article proposes a hermeneutical interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy through the conceptual opposition of health and illness, arguing that this distinction constitutes a central and overarching key to understanding the development of his thought. Drawing on Nietzsche’s published works, correspondence, notebooks, biographical evidence, and recent medical scholarship concerning his neurological condition, the study combines textual and biographical analysis in order to reconstruct the existential horizon from which his philosophy emerged. Rather than treating health as a peripheral metaphor, the paper demonstrates that Nietzsche progressively transformed it into a fundamental anthropological and metaphysical category. Three successive perspectives on the health–illness relation are distinguished: health and illness as opposite conditions; as dynamic processes of overcoming and self-transformation; and finally as universal forces structuring human history, culture, and the will to power itself. The analysis suggests that Nietzsche’s lifelong experience of chronic suffering profoundly shaped his philosophical project, informing his concepts of self-overcoming, amor fati, great health, ressentiment, decadence, and nihilism. Particular attention is paid to the tension between Nietzsche’s ideal of “great health” and the increasing signs of psychological destabilization preceding his collapse in 1889. The article concludes that the semantic evolution of the concept of health provides a fruitful framework for interpreting both the internal unity and the historical development of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
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