THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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chemist's, would have been totally incomprehensible in religious times, as far as its notions of health are concerned. For the Middle Ages may also have counted among
its prayers those which were sudorific, laxative and sedative, but none with the goal of making a businessman efficient again. Even the so­called earthiness of that time
was, from a modern point of view, by no means a ‘prototype’ of health; for it produced the Children's Crusade, the flagellants and more besides. This sort of health
contradicts the bracing air of the forest and yet in its day it was considered as precisely that of the real Christ­child, of the real forest hermit. And what of the so­called
primitives themselves? — they rebuild their body so magically that it is hardly recognizable any more, they chisel and colour their teeth so that they do not, as they say
of the Europeans, ‘look like dogs’, they aspire to and revere a kind of health which more closely resembles that of a somnambulist than that of an athlete. A health that
is presupposed and remains constant is thus non­existent; unless in the universally materialistic, and only in this respect eternally youthful, formula: A merry head sits on
a full belly. But every text that expands on mens sana in corpore sano is not actual experience but an ideal, and furthermore a different one in each respective society.
Thus the doctor in each respective society, instead of restoring a primary general health, rather gives the sick man an additional one. He simply builds up that state of
normality again which is socially in vogue at the time, and he is able to build it up again simply because the human body is also capable of functionally changing, and
possibly improving itself. Up to now the body has been orientated solely towards limited, even dubious kinds of health, and society has also made possible a lot of
diseases (venereal, tubercular, neurotic) of which the animal world knows little or nothing at all. But then the organic wishful dream at least imagined a body on which
only pleasure, not pain is served and whose old age does not have frailty as its fate. So it is this fight against fate which links medical and social utopias in spite of
everything. The power of replacing lost parts is not so great in the human body as it is in the lower animals, but in return it is only in man that the utopian power directed
towards what he has never previously possessed takes effect. It is unlikely that this strength so fundamental to man, the strength to venture beyond and form anew,
stops at his body. The exploration of this tendency is of course impossible without knowledge of what is already predisposed towards it in the body itself; everything
else would be folly. As the body of all multicellular beings is predisposed to death, even the most secret medical plan, the abolition of death, is so far up in the air it
becomes dizzy.