Nietzsche's conception of health
the idealization of struggle
pp. 299-311
in: Babette Babich (ed), Nietzsche, epistemology, and philosophy of science II, Berlin, Springer, 1999Abstract
With Darwin, a materialistic basis was established for explaining the emergence and transformation of species, shaking to its very foundation the preceding conception of natural order. By the end of the last century, it was generally recognized that the crucial role played by Darwin was the introduction of historical analysis to the center of biological thinking. Both the species and the organism became less entities than processes, dynamically evolving and ever-different. Being was fully realized as a Heraclitean flux, a becoming. This metaphysical revolution of how we would henceforth regard time, the biological world, and most fundamentally, ourselves, was the challenge to which Friedrich Nietzsche responded; and in that response he challenged the pre-Darwinian notions of health. Specifically, what Bernard had championed as the "normal," a stable interior milieu (or what Walter Cannon would later call "homeostasis"), Nietzsche would endeavor to replace with inner turmoil as the essence of biological function. While evolutionary biologists would refer to "fitness," Nietzsche would pervade his entire philosophy with the elusive maximal adaptation of the striving organism. This struggle was directed towards some unspecified and unknowable ideal, and Nietzsche invoked this struggle as the essence of health.
