illness

People wish others health for its own sake, but development accompanies illness, pain and aches.
People ought to be aware of this insight, but why does it not appear in the general culture and daily language?
Amazing how easily our innate conservatism overrides this insight.

Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the ‘equality of men’, the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a normal diet and normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health – which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined barbarism and backwardness.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff

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