[Philo of Alexandria and his views on health and sickness]. / Gesundheit und Krankheit bei Philo von Alexandrien.

Philo of Alexandria, Torah scholar and philosopher of religion, (c. 20 BC to 50 BCE) is the first Middle Platonic philosopher whom we know through his own works. His thinking was determined by the two antitheses of God and world, and virtue and vice. The Logos (divine reason) mediates between the transcendent God and the earthly world. His thoughts on health and illness and on the possibilities and limitations of medicine are testimony to his comprehensive philosophical education as well as to his belief in God as ruler of the world and of human life. He saw human health as the reward for self-control for which one was best prepared by the classical education programme. Self-control and physical exercise were therefore, in his view, possible guarantors of health, and a coach potentially more important than a physician. Illnesses, if they result from the loss of self-control, may point to the necessity for penitence. Philo therefore saw virtuousness as the safest precondition for a healthy and cheerful life. That the life forces increase during youth and diminish in old age is part of destiny. Similarly, illness can be brought about by strokes of fate. If illness occurred in this or any other way, medicine was there to help and its success or failure depended on divine providence. Like Jesus Sirach, the Jewish scholar who taught around a hundred years earlier, Philo did not think it sinful to use medical help if one was ill, seeing that God himself had made natural remedies available. He compared the importance of physicians for their patients to that other professionals have in people's lives. Philo did not provide a compendium on the work of the physician, but he gave indications, on nutrition for instance, or on the use of laxatives and fragrances, or that complaints can be necessary stages of recovery. Philo also asked himself whether physicians were always obliged to tell patients the truth. The only case of illness he described in sufficient detail was one of leprosy, which he diagnosed in accordance with Leviticus 13:2. Philo saw physicians as helpers of God, who was the Lord of life and who would therefore decide on the fate of the healthy and sick. Faith in God, Philo thought, was vital if one was to cope with life's ups and downs. Only the wicked had to fear death, however, while the souls of the righteous returned to heaven after death.

[Friedrich Nietzsche: life and work in the struggle against his suffering]. / Friedrich Nietzsche: Leben und Werk im Kampf mit dem Leiden.

This paper examines the connection between the life, sense of mission and suffering in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. It shows that, as early as his Basel years, he wanted to become a philosopher who was willing to transmit without fear what he considered to be true to everybody, even if he would have to suffer and remain unappreciated. He was afflicted with increasing numbers of headaches and bouts of nausea from the mid-1870s and was further handicapped by constantly deteriorating vision. The ten years before his breakdown were spent as a traveller searching for a place where his suffering could be eased. The isolation imposed on him by the illness gave him the inner freedom to break the old certainties and to offer a new myth as an alternative. His failure as a writer was compensated by an intensified and, finally, gross sense of mission which ended in mental derangement in early January 1889.