illness

Often when I'm sick, and I've been feeling sick off and on for the last few weeks, I think of Darwin and Nietzsche. Mostly because both of them were sick for significant portions of their adult lives, chronically sick. Part of my interest here is that they had very different responses to their illness. Darwin comments often in his autobiography about what his illness prevented him from doing: prevented him from going on hikes, from getting work done, from being in society (though he sees some good in this).

Nietzsche, on the other hand, writes some about illness in Ecce Homo: "In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough." The obstructions and difficulties caused by sickness here are the very vehicle for surmounting other obstructions and difficulties....

Well, I don't think that's quite right, or quite what Nietzsche is getting at, but it's a starting point.