Übermut
] to be all things, falls into non-Being” (55). The multiple, constantly present contradictoriness of being outside God means that man, unlike God, “never gains control over the condition, although in evil he strives to do so; it is only lent to him, and is independent from him; hence, his personality and selfhood can never rise to full actuality [
zum Aktus
]. This is the sadness that clings to all finite life.” The philosopher ends: “Hence, the veil of dejection that is spread over all nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life” (62–63).
Evil and sin are not accidental phenomena, not deformations or divestments of the good, but essential ingredients of existence. If, for the two concepts, one substitutes the concept of disease (one can do that all the more readily since Christian theology, by referring to a preoccupation with creatureliness, creates a kinship between sin and disease), the radical reevaluation of the concept of illness becomes apparent: disease is not a separation of creaturely being from the creative being latent in man (this view is based on a duality between body and soul), but a creative principle itself: through it, the ineliminable endangerment of existence is revealed, which one will never be capable of surmounting in one’s determined and determining being. Therefore, disease is not merely a temporally circumscribed condition but also the unraveling of a constantly latent possibility; its symptoms are like the tip of an iceberg: deep down, invisibly, the possibility and the reality of annihilation are entwined with survival. “There is no such thing as health per se,” Nietzsche avows, and one may add: there is no such thing as soul or body, creatureliness or creative principle per se either. “Health and disease,” to quote Nietzsche again, “be careful! The standard must always be the efflorescence of the body, the resilience, courage, and cheerfulness of the spirit — but naturally also how much morbidity it can absorb and conquer—in other words, make healthy” (quoted in Mann, “Dostoevsky — in Moderation,” xv; emphasis in the original).
According to one of the founding principles of our culture, man’s mission is to take complete possession of himself, to become entirely master of himself. Is that his way of making up for the Fall, in the course of which, as Augustine saw it, the rational soul—anima rationalis—lost its unlimited dominion over the body? We carry the tension and tribulation arising from the forced duality of body and soul down to the present day. Insight, comprehension, and the mind have the right of the last word. That is how culture seeks to persuade man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps: to break away from everything to which he owes his being, even his body, over which he has limited power. If he should succeed, however, and by raising himself into the region of the unimpressionable, untouchable mind he were able to have full command of himself, then there ought to exist a part that is foreign to him and yet homogeneous with him, that has him in its power. Yet would not the existence of a part like that, which belongs to the self and is nevertheless foreign to it, prove that man still failed to have command over himself, because he surrendered his self to universal mind, which seems to be beyond the self? Christianity may have tried to bridge that paradox, but by putting man at the mercy of God via the mediation of Jesus, it did not resolve the problem of self-determination. Nor could it, since self-determination, in itself a notion burdened with contradictions, was born of a one-sided hypothesis that had limited validity from the outset: death is not equal in rank to life but subordinate to it, and disintegration is merely a subordinate part of an organization furnished with a goal and sense. But the chaos that permeates life cannot be eliminated; it can at best be obscured. That concealment was served by introducing a general scale of values from which one could infer relatively easily that chaos and disintegration were “bad,” whereas goal-directed intelligence was “good.” Christian theology denied evil a self-standing foundation, ascribing that only to the good — the devil being just a vaudeville character. But by regarding only the beginning, and not disintegration, as definitive, did it not prevent man from contemplating himself and his world impartially? The concept of self-determination is high-sounding because hidden in it is the unspoken assumption that man is able to extricate himself from the universal chaos and flee from the completely senseless rhythm of beginning and disintegration. Nietzsche justifiably accused Christianity of having deprived humans of nihilism, but only from a standpoint of universal “censorship” and repression can one say that this nihilism suggests “pessimism.” Nihilism means acknowledgment of the unacceptable. Not its acceptance, because one instinctively protests against chaos and destruction, but only its recognition. The idea of self-determination suggests ultimate reconciliation, to which there can be at most practical (technical, political, ideological, civilizational) obstacles, and these can be overcome in principle. Nihilism, in contrast, reports on indissoluble constraints (which is no obstacle to nihilists taking part in political and other sorts of struggles, working for “progress,” etc.). According to the nihilistic (or Romantic or anarchist) viewpoint, there can be no ultimate reconciliation: man cannot have ultimate command of himself, since he does not simply exist, but existence pours through him: he is at its mercy. He lives his own life, but the death that awaits him is likewise his own.
Man is just as responsible for his illness as for his health. This ultimate self-dependency makes disease unfathomable and depressing. Man is always more than he is able to reveal of himself: everything that he says about himself is objectifiable — yet man cannot be entirely objectified. The infinity of his horizon, in the last analysis, imposes a limit on determination, and muteness is a sign of the ultimate incommunicability of personality, of the mysteriousness manifesting in individual death. Communication has validity only within the circle of objectifiability: whatever is not objectifiable about a disease is not communicable either. There can be no compromise here: the diagnosis of a bodily symptom,16 along with its objectification, is not the same as a complete understanding of the disease: by merging etiology and pathogenesis, one proclaims that man’s bodily-psychic reality is technically apprehensible.
The concept of disease is accessible, but since it belongs to the essence of man, it cannot be unraveled. This is displayed most spectacularly in connection with the suffering of a patient: the ultimate isolation and abandonment of the individual becomes evident in suffering; indeed, suffering is abandonment itself. (That is why sufferers crave to share their suffering with others.) Suffering reveals that man is in a state of being under perpetual threat. The incommunicability of suffering is a peculiarly human element: in contrast to the pain experienced by animals, it results in (not necessarily conscious) insight. Suffering, which originally meant a movement of the soul (
), is as much a psychological factor