The Great Healthiness by Friedrich Nietzsche

Updates, the great healthiness, and the readers that I want to have

The fact that I stopped being a researcher¹ regarding the upcoming collapse and the ways of how to prevent it, as well as how to make the world a better place, does not mean that I will stop living the great life that I already live — to the contrary, I will focus more on that, without wasting time on pointless things.

Of course, my life may not be the greatest that it could be — a life that I know is possible, I have occasionally experienced, and which not even in movies is portrayed (except, maybe, only a few of them) — but it is still a pretty good life. Also, most likely, it will get worse due to the collapsing trajectory of our world: ecologically, culturally, economically, and politically. But that is fine. I will adopt accordingly. I am, after all, an acrobat.

As far as my health is concerned, I feel much better already. To honour my recovery — a weird recovery, which took three entire weeks! — I am sharing with my beloved readers this excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche, called The Great Healthiness. It is the aphorism #382 and can be found in Nietzsche's book The Joyous Science.

Without further ado, here is the aphorism:

The Great Healthiness —— We who are new, nameless, hard to understand; we premature births of a yet untried future — we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness that is stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder and more cheerful than any healthiness hitherto. Anyone whose soul longs to experience the entire range of previous values and aspirations, to sail around all the coasts of this ideal ‘Mediterranean Sea’, who wishes to know from the adventures of his own deepest experience what it feels like to be a conqueror or discoverer of an ideal, or to be an artist, a saint, a lawmaker, a sage, a scholar, a devotee, a soothsayer, and the divine non-conformist of the old style — any such person requires one thing above all for that purpose: great healthiness. A healthiness that one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one unceasingly sacrifices it again and again, and must sacrifice it!. . .

And now, after having been long on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal – more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and damaged, nevertheless dangerously healthy, always healthy again — it seems to us as if, in compensation for it all, we have a land before us which is still undiscovered, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, something beyond all lands and corners of the ideal known so far, a world so overrich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity and our thirst for possession of it have got out of hand — ah, nothing will now any longer satisfy us!

After such outlooks, and with such a craving in our knowledge and conscience, how could we still be satisfied with the man of the present day? It may be too bad but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes, and perhaps we should no longer bother to look at them at all.

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we would not like to persuade anyone, because we would so rarely grant anyone the the right to it: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively (that is to say, not deliberately but from overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto been called holy, good, intangible, divine; to whom the highest conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value, would signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a humanly superhuman well-being and goodwill that will often appear inhuman — for example, when put alongside of all past seriousness on earth, and alongside of all past solemnities in gesture, word, tone, look, morality, and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody — and nonetheless, it is perhaps only with this that the great seriousness really begins commences, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the fate of the soul changes, the hour hand moves forward, the tragedy begins...”

Well, these are also the readers that I want to have: those courageous Argonauts who possess a great healthiness. I only want readers who can confidently say that they are emotionally, mentally, physically healthy — or, at least, that they desire to be like that and are humble and willing enough to strive for it. Those, too, are welcome. All the rest, I would much rather to never read anything that has created by me. Those who have given up in life and simply live a miserable or mediocre life, and are content with that (as if anyone can ever be content with that…); those who prefer a comfortable lie over a distressing truth; those who find comfort in all the coping means that exist today to sooth their discomfort; those who take things personally; those who think they are “the main character of their lives” and perceive themselves as “the centre of the universe”; well, those people have no place among my readers.

Cheers to the great healthiness!

1. The unfamiliar reader can read my previous article One Year of Substack.