GESUNDHEIT UND WELTVERSTÄNDNIS. HANS GEORG GADAMERS PHILOSOPHISCHE AUSEINANDERSETZUNG MIT DER MEDIZIN

Abstract

Health and World-Comprehension. Hans Georg Gadamer‘s Philosophical Approach to Modern Medicine. The text focuses primarily on Gadamer’s essays surrounding the phenomenology of health. As a starting point, health has to be defined as a philosophical problem – this is what the text does by presenting different interpretations on the concept (Friedrich Nietzsche, Aaron Antonovsky or World Health Organization). Every single attempt to define health presents either the difficulty of not being entirely free of negative determination (such as the absence of disease) or it looses it’s complete reliability by including the subjective view of the individual. What exactly causes the loss of the feeling of well-being, when the physical symptom remains absent? Gadamer’s rather complex view on the entire phenomenon “health” includes the discussion with the Greek Antiquity. The other line of tradition included in the discussion is the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Gadamer shows, leaning on Heidegger, that one very important aspect within the understanding of health is the integration of negativity: pain, anxiety or disease, the death of the other are not to be seen as strange or absurd phenomena, but as belonging to life itself. One’s “health” depends on how the individual understands this kind of negativity and integrates it into his whole view on the surrounding “world”. This, following Gadamer (and Viktor von Weizsäcker) can happen only by going through the negative experience by acknowledging it as a part of personal history and not by choosing to ignore it or simply “cure it away”: pain or disease are hermeneutical “problems” as much as medical issues and they have to be understood on both sides, as well on the side of the physician as on the patient’s side in order to be treated in a complete manner. In other words, against a technical view on the human body, Gadamer argues that it is nature itself that has to be helped and allowed to restore the fine balance between the individual and his world which, ultimately, seems to be one of the keys to the “enigma of health”