THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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courage which is thorough in a different way and without which nothing great happens, even in the art of medicine. This courage refers in a specifically non­utopistic
way to the causal liberation from physical ills. Since the final cause here does not lie in bacilli or in the strange ‘imperialist’ growth of individual cells and groups of cells,
as with cancer, but precisely in the corruptible susceptibility and frailty of the flesh itself, the wishful dream of rebuilding it still remains inevitable and therefore — even
when we look away from it — in the background. Indeed a suspicion arises that the medical caution which is aimed to such a great extent merely at the status quo ante
is itself rather fishy. We may finally risk the proposition that precisely because the doctor, even at the individual sick­bed, has an almost crazy utopian plan latently in
view, he ostensibly avoids it. This definitive plan, the final medical wishful dream, is nothing less than the abolition of death.
The sick man who has recuperated wants to feel as if he were newborn. This means more than restored to health again, although the sick man is pleased if this is the
case all the same. Well pleased, as they say, he can now go about his business again. Restored to health again certainly, but to which Again in the course of his life? Is
there such a thing as an old state of health at all, which only has to be restored? Is it a permanent rock, firm at all times, as firmly fixed as it is firmly agreed upon? It is
not, health is a wavering notion, if not directly in medical terms, then in social terms. Health is by no means solely a medical notion, but predominantly a societal one.
Restoring to health again means in reality bringing the sick man to that kind of health which is respectively acknowledged in each respective society, and which was in
fact first formed in that society itself. Thus even for the mere purpose of restoring to health again, the goals of this Again are variable, but more than that: they are
themselves first posited as the ‘norm’ by each respective society. In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, among the Greeks it was the capability to enjoy,
and in the Middle Ages the capability to believe. Illness was then regarded as a sin (hence above all the terrible treatment of lunatics, in chains and dungeons), thus the
person with least sins was the best­developed. Thus Katharine of Siena, who is a hysteric for every bourgeois enlightened doctor of today, was regarded as absolutely
normal. It would never have occurred to any medieval doctor to want to cure this sort of thing, nor would it have been the restoration of a so­called original condition,
but the transformation into a much later one normal for the modern age, which hardly existed at that time. Even faith­healing, however much Jesus assumes the role of a
doctor here and his church that of a