ABSTRACT
This choice of ‘healthy’ as a cover-term of approval-and the special, though still unformulated conception of health which it carried-indicates that what Nietzsche found worthy of glorification in ancient Greece was in fact very different from what Schiller had found there. First of all, he refused to associate the Greeks with the idea of some original, unspoilt moral purity of mankind, an idea which he emphatically rejected: ‘healthy’, in so far as the term scarcely brought moral connotations along with it, was at least suitable on that score. But second, he turned his back on the notion that the Greek attitude to life was serene and unclouded [‘heiter’], holding on the contrary that they were uniquely prone to mental suffering and deeply in need of artistic and philosophical consolation (The Birth of Tragedy); and third, he was convinced that their great achievements were no products of easy growth and painless development but rather the outcome of intensely energetic struggle and competition. In other words, they were not the ‘people of harmony’ after all, but the people of superlative vigour. The term ‘health’ would only do as a designation of the glory of Greece if it was understood in a rather special way. If the term was to serve Nietzsche’s purposes in his campaign for cultural improvement, it was essential that it should be taken to imply much more than the absence of abnormality, or the unimpaired functioning of an organism, or the maintenance of a state of balance in any self-regulating system. It had to mean, above all, a high degree of vitality or organizing power, and the capacity to cope triumphantly with all manner of checks and challenges. He had to make it clear that cultural ‘health’, in his mouth, meant something very different from the anaemic brand of health claimed by his despised contemporaries, the ‘degenerate men of learning’ or Bildungsphilister. These learned folk, he says, have ‘agreed among themselves to invert the nature and names of things, and to speak henceforth of health where we can recognize sickness, of sickness and extravagance where true health confronts us’ (1, 195). ‘You may fall upon a past age in your thousands’, he exclaims to them elsewhere (CM, 111ii, 274), ‘—you will still starve as you starved before, and can pride yourselves then, if you wish, on your own brand of health-acquired-through-abstinence [‘angehungerte Gesundheit’].’
