Medicine and love

Thoughts on healing

If we take as evident that our level of health or disease is the direct outcome of our way of life, and our way of life is the result of how we desire to live, then the art of healing becomes less about what is good for us, and more about how we can come to desire what is good for us in the first place. It is all-important to think about what foods one should eat, what exercise one should do, what techniques one should engage in to lower stress. But these reflections stay superficial and divorced from life, if we do not ask the question of desire. As an example, the obesity-epidemic is only superficially explained by a lack in education. How come people love some behaviour that is evidently self-destructive, more than they love the preservation of their selves? 

All thoughts remain abstracted from life, if the question of love is not asked. This is the case in all domains of human inquiry. Take philosophy, which is supposed to be the activity of ‘loving truth.’ We think endlessly about what the truth might be. But this inquiry only has meaning, if there is a prior interest in truth, a love of truth.  

And thus the question of medicine is not only, ‘what is healing?’ But also, ‘how can we come to desire healing?’ How can we come to love our own healing, more than our own sickness? 

It is said that by nature we desire our own self-preservation, ‘health’, knowledge, and all other things of any value. Just as a plant by nature desires to grow. But without sufficient nourishment, the plant won’t grow, or it will grow into some ugly aberration of a plant. It is the same with humans. By nature we desire health, but in an environment like ours —stressed, malnourished, lacking in any sense of self or community,— who can really claim that he lives according to his nature? With no light to guide it, and no water to nourish it, the plant will grow twisted, searching for what it so desperately needs but cannot find. In the same way, deprived of our natural needs, we grow twisted, searching to meet our needs where they cannot be met. And then we wonder, why there is an opioid-crisis, a depression-crisis, an obesity-crisis, and even a ‘covid-crisis’. A ‘crisis’ is a turning point in which a decision has to be made. In our case, to either keep staring at the manifestations, or to start looking at the root-cause. To keep speaking about what is good and what is bad, instead of asking why, we have come to desire what is detrimental to our selves in the first place. By nature, no human should desire his own destruction. So what is it, that has made us depart from our nature? What is it, —so deprived of nourishment for our souls— that makes us seek our nourishment in poison? 

In Plato’s Symposium, we read:

“Consider for a moment the marked difference, the radical dissimilarity, between healthy and diseased constitutions and the fact that dissimilar subjects desire and love objects that are themselves dissimilar. Therefore, the love manifested in health is fundamentally distinct from the love manifested in disease. And now recall that, as Pausanias claimed, it is as honorable to yield to a good man as it is shameful to consort with the debauched. Well, my point is that the case of the human body is strictly parallel. Everything sound and healthy in the body must be encouraged and gratified; that is precisely the object of medicine. Conversely, whatever is unhealthy and unsound must be frustrated and rebuffed: that’s what it is to be an expert in medicine.”

(Plato, Symposium, 186c)

In both health and disease, there is love. In health, there is love for what strengthens. In disease, there is love for what weakens. What could strengthen the body? Fresh air, healthy food, lack of stress, and many other things. What can weaken the body? Polluted air, poison, and a lack of silence. But with all these matters, the question concerning what is healthy and what is not, is of less importance than the love that leads us to them in the first place. Hence, the physician should be an expert in giving direction to our love. The expert physician can turn our love away from what sickens us, and guide it towards what heals us. 

Plato continues:

“In short, medicine is simply the science of the effects of Love on repletion and depletion of the body, and the hallmark of the accomplished physician is his ability to distinguish the Love that is noble from the Love that is ugly and disgraceful. A good practitioner knows how to affect the body and how to transform its desires; he can implant the proper species of Love when it is absent and eliminate the other sort whenever it occurs.”

(Plato, Symposium, 186d) 

In all, it is a matter of direction. Where does life go? Towards more life, or towards death? And where does this drive towards what sickens originate? 

No human being, by nature, should desire its own destruction. Yet this is all we do. Hence, what is it, in nature, in life, that makes us turn against life?