Nietzsche's Pharmacy

Author: Jonathan Dodie   

It is wise and astute to develop the philosopher's project as a physician within three specific moments: Before addressing the work of the philosopher-physician himself, it is appropriate to categorize the shared philosophical relations and interests between philosophy and medicine. The birth of philosophy, like the birth of medicine, occurred in distress and hardship, and in a state of melancholy and sorrow that humans experienced until they became ill. The philosopher, or rather the philosopher-physician, attempts to diagnose the symptoms of diseases that cause pain. This language remains common between Nietzsche's philosophy and medicine in the sense that Nietzsche uses medical discourse to speak "philosophically" about culture, civilization, modernity, ethics, or about philosophy itself. Behind this metaphor, as we will see, Nietzsche's research will take its place, and throughout this research, we hear him speak in elegant literary language as a physician. In fact, the image of the philosopher-physician represents an opportunity for Nietzsche to develop a system of thought about the concepts of health and illness, far from the ethical categories of good and evil, those categories that enclose philosophy, and medicine as well, within frameworks of stagnation and sterile inertia. Where does the idea of philosophy as medicine come from? And can Nietzsche be considered the founder of this thorny issue, or is he a product of the philosophical genealogy that influenced him?