Undermining the Current Concept of Health. "Untimely Meditations" between Physiology and Aesthetics

The article deals with the problem of health in Nietzsche’s philosophy. While secondary literature on this topic has been usually confined to his works posterior to 1878, this text especially focusses on an earlier work, i.e., the "Untimely Meditations". It is shown how that work is relevant to the topic, for there the author denounces for the first time the inadequacy of general formulas of health. Upon this criticism, he will eventually build his own conception of health and illness. This analysis starts with what Nietzsche called a cultural and historical illness in the early 1870s: an illness that, paradoxically, generated an inadequate notion of ‘health’. Secondly, this investigation deals with the Nietzschean reaction to that generalised illness, dwelling on the concept of health as an individual process, in the form of a connection between the aesthetic and the physiological fields. Finally, this article elucidates the problems within the concept of the innumerable healths of the body, hinting at some contemporary challenges.