Sickness and Freedom

Joseph Weissman

“…and how much sickness is expressed in the wild experiments and

singularities through which the liberated prisoner now seeks to demonstrate
his mastery over things!”
Human, All Too Human (7)

“To become sick in the manner of these free spirits, to remain sick for a long
time and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I mean
‘healthier’, is a fundamental cure for all pessimism… There is wisdom,
practical wisdom, in for a long time prescribing even health for oneself only
in small doses.”
ibid (9)

How should we think the relation of strength of character to the

possibility of a recovery from sickness? First, we ought to remind ourselves
that sickness is not always and only a reaction. After all, a truly positive
outlook does not entail removing or annulling suffering, as of excising a
cancer, but rather the wholesale transmutation of suffering – as of lead to
gold. If there is an alchemical sense to suffering, even to cruelty, then our
outlook on life is no longer a matter for speculative metaphysics… but
rather, a question for a materialist psychology. In any case, as to the
question of strength of character, it seems clear enough that “the idea of
pain is not the same thing as the suffering of it.” (47)
Let us agree then that there are different kinds of pain, distinguished
not only by their intensity and duration (which would be differences in
degree,) but also even by the nature of the process of recovery. Pleasure and
pain are not metric units by which we can measure suffering and desire;
rather, these ‘units’ refer only to a chance arrangement which (always and
already) dominates any process of becoming-healthy. To convalesce is not
only a postponement, merely an interruption of an already latent decay – but
the possibility of a truly new perspective, a closure of the continuum of
suffering which therefore unfolds every equivocation involved in the word
health.
Thus the question of the appropriate treatment is often social, not only
in its essential nature, but even in its eventual goal. Suffering deprograms,
and offers an opening towards a transvaluation – a window which opens itself
not before the master, but before the patient student of suffering. That we
are quite able to engage in a process of self-destruction just as easily as a
process of recovery is already the ambiguity of the cure. The sickness of a
thought is not its abnormality: rather it is just a different position with regard
to observation, not only of the beauty of health, but even of all the various
possibilities of experimentation. Medical experiments are almost universally
held to have an equal measure of science and cruelty, and this is no
accident. Insofar as the promise of science is merely an end to suffering, it is
a highly religious promise.
When Nietzsche writes that “it is in such men as are capable of that
suffering – how few they will be! – that the first attempt will be made to see
whether mankind could transform itself from a moral to a knowing mankind,”
(58) we believe that he is drawing a political distinction between the sickness
of religion and the cruelty of science. The question of health and sickness is
at once that of overcoming suffering as well as the broadest social question
of change, the possibility of a radical difference and overcoming. Thus in self-
overcoming we find a paradoxical interface between the two bodies (of God,
of the World) which is already a cataclysmic unfolding, a new way to become
healthy. We see in health a sort of eternal recurrence of the ever-different
question of social and biological adaptation, beyond the dominant
arrangement of forces.