Heidegger

—– Original Message —–
From: “Bakker, R.B.M. de”

Aristotle says that “someone can himself
be for himself cause (aitios) of [his] health, being a doctor.” But adds
immediately that the identity of doctor and patient in this case is
merely
external: kata symbebekos. Health namely is sthing natural, it has to be,
or to be regained as ‘of itself’, and not as an artefact, a doctor’s
product.

==============
Sorry, I mixed up that text with the one at the end of Physics II.8, where
Aristotle says that “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would
produce the same results by nature…. The best illustration is a doctor
doctoring himself: nature is like that.” There is compares the
self-emergence of physis to “a doctor doctoring himself,” since in that case
the medical art is actually in the patient himself. In the text to which you
refer at Physics II.8, he says that natural beings have an intrinsic
principle of motion, but “not in virtue of a concomitant attribute, because
(for instance) a man who is a doctor might cure himself. Nevertheless it is
not in so far as he is a patient that he possesses the art of medicine: it
merely has happened that the same man is doctor and patient-and that is why
these attributes are not always found together. So it is with all other
artificial products. None of them has in itself the source of its own
production.” So the doctor is only accidentally the source of his own
healing, not in virtue of what he is. A natural being, however, must be its
own source of motion and rest in virtue of what it is and not merely
accidentally like the doctor.
================

It is easily overlooked that, because Aristotle here opposes physis and
techne,
that according to him techne without physis becomes meaningless. Compare
Antiphon’s belief that a table wood, buried in the ground, starts to grow
again.

===============
nothing to do with the meaninglessness of techne without physics there -
Aristotle brings that up simply as an example of the view (which he rejects
in that chapter) that physics is *primarily* hyle of the bed (i.e., the
wood), since a planted bed grows as simply wood, not a bed.
===============

Systematic meaninglessness (nihilism) can be responsible for the
monstrosity that
the art of healing has become ESSENTIALLY a sickmaking and masskilling
art nowadays,
to which man is merely material.

The question would be: how can we get out of this murderous technological
notion of
health, back or forwards to health as physis, as Aristotle understood it.

All suggestions otherwise (incl. yours) can only strengthen the (tendency
to
total) machination inherent in technology.

Basically the same art of civil massacring as in Iraq or Chechnya.

Posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 5:50 am
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