Part of Section 2 of the Preface to the Second Edition of *The Gay Science*:
For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that
concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself
become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness.
For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy
that belongs to that person; but there is a big difference. In some it is
their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths.
The former *need* their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative,
medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is
merely a beautiful luxury -- in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a
triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic
letters on the heaven of concepts. But in the former case, which is more
common, when it is distress that philosophizes, as is the case with all sick
thinkers -- and perhaps sick thinkers are more numerous in the history of
philosophy -- what will become of the thought itself when it is subjected to
the *pressure* of sickness? This is the question that concerns the
psychologist, and here an experiment is possible. Just as a traveler may
resolve, before he calmly abandons himself to sleep, to wake up at a certain
time, we philosophers, if we should become sick, surrender for a while to
sickness, body and soul -- and, as it were, shut our eyes to ourselves. And
as the traveler knows that something is *not* asleep, that something counts
the hours and will wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will
find us awake, and that something will leap forward then and catch the
spirit *in the act*: I mean, in its weakness or repentance or resignation or
hardening or gloom, and whatever other names there are for the pathological
states of the spirit that on healthy days are opposed by the *pride* of the
spirit.
After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler
eye for all philosophizing to date; one can infer better than before the
involuntary detours, side lanes, resting places, and *sunny* places of
thought to which all suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of
their suffering; for now one knows whether the sick *body* and its needs
unconsciously urge, push, and lure the spirit -- toward the sun, stillness,
mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that
ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness,
every metaphysics and physics that knows some *finale*, some final state of
some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some
Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not the
sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of
physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely
spiritual goes to frightening lengths -- and often I have asked myself
whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an
interpretation of the body and a *misunderstanding of the body*.
Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the
history of thought, there are concealed misunderstandings of the physical
constitution -- of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those
bold insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the
*value* of existence, may always be considered first of all as the symptoms
of certain bodies. And if such world affirmations or world negations *tout
court* lack any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they are
the more valuable for the historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms of
the body, of its success or failure, its plenitude, power, and autocracy in
history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions
of the end, its will to the end.
I am still waiting for a philosophical *physician* in the exceptional
sense of that word -- one who has to pursue the problem of the total health
of a people, time, race or of humanity -- to muster the courage to push my
suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in
all philosophizing hitherto was not at all "truth" but something else -- let
us say, health, future, growth, power, life.
(English translation by Kaufmann in the Vintage edition)
For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that
concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself
become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness.
For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy
that belongs to that person; but there is a big difference. In some it is
their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths.
The former *need* their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative,
medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is
merely a beautiful luxury -- in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a
triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic
letters on the heaven of concepts. But in the former case, which is more
common, when it is distress that philosophizes, as is the case with all sick
thinkers -- and perhaps sick thinkers are more numerous in the history of
philosophy -- what will become of the thought itself when it is subjected to
the *pressure* of sickness? This is the question that concerns the
psychologist, and here an experiment is possible. Just as a traveler may
resolve, before he calmly abandons himself to sleep, to wake up at a certain
time, we philosophers, if we should become sick, surrender for a while to
sickness, body and soul -- and, as it were, shut our eyes to ourselves. And
as the traveler knows that something is *not* asleep, that something counts
the hours and will wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will
find us awake, and that something will leap forward then and catch the
spirit *in the act*: I mean, in its weakness or repentance or resignation or
hardening or gloom, and whatever other names there are for the pathological
states of the spirit that on healthy days are opposed by the *pride* of the
spirit.
After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler
eye for all philosophizing to date; one can infer better than before the
involuntary detours, side lanes, resting places, and *sunny* places of
thought to which all suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of
their suffering; for now one knows whether the sick *body* and its needs
unconsciously urge, push, and lure the spirit -- toward the sun, stillness,
mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that
ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness,
every metaphysics and physics that knows some *finale*, some final state of
some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some
Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not the
sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of
physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely
spiritual goes to frightening lengths -- and often I have asked myself
whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an
interpretation of the body and a *misunderstanding of the body*.
Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the
history of thought, there are concealed misunderstandings of the physical
constitution -- of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those
bold insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the
*value* of existence, may always be considered first of all as the symptoms
of certain bodies. And if such world affirmations or world negations *tout
court* lack any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they are
the more valuable for the historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms of
the body, of its success or failure, its plenitude, power, and autocracy in
history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions
of the end, its will to the end.
I am still waiting for a philosophical *physician* in the exceptional
sense of that word -- one who has to pursue the problem of the total health
of a people, time, race or of humanity -- to muster the courage to push my
suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in
all philosophizing hitherto was not at all "truth" but something else -- let
us say, health, future, growth, power, life.
(English translation by Kaufmann in the Vintage edition)