180172 VO Health: Ideal or Dangerous Threat? (2020W)

Objecitves: Elaboration of a differentiated, critical-reflected approach to subjects as law and politics, relation between law and politics on one hand, ethics/morals on the other hand, the possibilities of establishing authoritarian political conditions with reference to seemingly desirable goals. The lecture also intends to contribute to a clarification of terms as authoritarian, total or totalitarian rule from a philosophical as well as historical perspective.

Contents: In her dystopic novel “Corpus delicti” Juli Zeh describes a state or community, called “METHOD”, where the citizens’ health is regarded as the highest value. So, people are committed to do anything to make sure that they stay healthy, especially carrying out a sports program required by the state and keeping records of their eating habits. Supervision and repressive measures are supposed to ensure appropriate behavior. If people smoke for example or do not subsist on healthy food, they are being prosecuted and reintegrated into the society according to the community’s objective. A person who cannot be brought into line at all, may be frozen up for an indefinite period. Some individuals are rebelling against this program, partly they are forming groups and demand a right to illness. All of them are persecuted as terrorists. But independently from that concern, there may be some obvious objections against the protesters. Isn’t it indeed unbearable that human beings just demand something like a right to illness? Wouldn’t such a behavior cast doubt on the humanity of those human beings? Can’t we agree at least to the idea of living healthy as some kind of summum bonum? Even our everyday understanding says that health is “the most important thing” at all. But let us ask a different question at this point: What does it mean, this apparently main goal called “health”?
Of course, it can and does mean several things. And it is and at least has been possible to use terms like “health” or “healthy” to implement or intensify repressive structures within a certain society. For example, Hippolytus Guarinonius (1572–1654), a doctor and champion of Counter-Reformation from Hall in Tyrol, and by the way inventor of the anti-Jewish cult around the completely fictional child “Anderl von Rinn”, did so. In 1610 he published a tract on human health, called „Die Grewel der Verwüstung Menschlichen Geschlechts [The Horrors of devastation of mankind]”. The term “Gesondt” (translatable with “health” or “healthy”) is of central importance there, and it is used in far-reaching terms of catholic philosophy. Who wants to live “healthy” has, according to Guarinonius, to live in accordance with “Christian Philosophy”. Of course, there were people, who did not want that, and therefore the authorities had to force them.
So, lots of things may be unhealthy, depending on how you define “healthy”. Things may quickly turn out badly if champions of ideologies come to power who admire the “healthy body of the nation”. Regardless of that, references to “public health” may prove themselves as dangerous as soon as people are or can be forced to eat or drink certain things, practice some kinds of sport and avoid others, all for their “own good”. Unfortunately, some of them cannot or do not want to recognize that.
Even those few associations show how repressive an apparently innocent summum bonum like “health” may become under certain circumstances. All those considerations are far from being just theoretical or literary speculation. Their practical relevance can be easily proved by means of some state’s measures in connection with the Covid-19-pandemic since February/March 2020.

Didactic concepts, method: Lecture, (critical) analysis of texts and film sequences, discussion (collaboration, also a critical one, will be considered, only in a positive way), written exam.
A collection of important texts for the lecture will be offered.
Specifics of online teaching: Please see above, remarks on dates.