Formal Indication and the Landscape of Pathos: Prolegomona to an Encounter between Viktor von Weizs cker and Martin Heidegger

The relationship between Viktor von Weizs cker's psychosomatic and medical philosophy and Martin Heidegger's philosophy offers an exemplary constellation of the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry. As shown in this paper, the relevant constellation is constituted by fundamental differences regarding both the methods and kinds of questions proper to either discipline. This same constellation is thus significant not with respect to immediate influences but rather to more indirect aspects. To begin with it is here argued that in addition to articulating the phenomenonon of illness, von Weizs cker began with the dialogic, interpersonal dynamic between physician and patient. Furthermore, a significant problem is constituted by the connection between illness, deformation, or the "pathogenic" or "pathic" on the one hand and truth on the other. In this way, von Weizs cker postulates a radical renunciation of the terms of European metaphysics (and philosophy), i.e., between "Ionia and Jena," a renunciation confirmed by both the person and the philosophy of the important Jewish thinker, Franz Rosenzweig. By contrast, Heidegger's hermeneutically pre-formed phenomenology of Da-sein articulates an intensive transformation of the metaphysical thinking of 'the first beginning' [des ersten Anfangs], while remaining, nonetheless, within the horizon of metaphysics. Thus it can be shown that the transformative centre of traditional thinking is opposed in Heidegger and von Weizs cker: Whereas von Weizs cker poses fundamental questions to the principles of philosophy, showing that such principles are unable either to describe or else to clarify the structures of 'pathic' phenomena, 'medical philosophy' nevertheless insists on [or: emphasizes] the importance of the subject. In its different psycho-somatic complexity, the subject persists as the insurmountable point of departure for the psychiatric point of view. The language of Heidegger's 'Dasein' is by contrast articulated to replace both the terminology as well as the problem of subjectivity as directed towards the Being-question. The focus of the psycho-somatic problem itself ultimately illustrates these same differences. From Heidegger's philosophical perspective, the body is the fairest and least explanatory phenomenon where von Weizs cker' s thought, again by contrast, takes its key from the lines of the body (cf. Nietzsche 'Leitfaden des Leibes').The paper accordingly argues that the discussion between Weizs cker and Heidegger is constituted by a fundamental difference which also is one of its most inalien