Abstract

This article makes the historical argument that Goethe’s conception of health was meaningfully influential on Nietzsche. Specifically, Goethe’s vision of nature as a grand competition of competing forces influenced Nietzsche’s notions of «Agon» and «Wettkampf». For both, «health» is the concomitant epiphenomenon entailed by the proper exercise of the competitive process. Conversely, «sickness» is the property that defines the failure of that same process. This article then makes the programmatic assertion that the Goethe-Nietzsche framework for considerations of health and sickness offers a potentially fruitful alternative to the general medical assumption that «sickness» is the presence of some malady and that «health» is the absence of that malady. Under the Goethe-Nietzsche framework, maladies should not be avoided or prevented, but seen, paradoxically, as the condition for the possibility of health.