Il patico come modo essenziale della "forma-vita"

Abstract

«Pathic» as the essential mode of "life-form"

The neurophysiologist and philosopher Viktor von Weizsäcker has, from 1930, introduced a new term in its epsitemological and ethical-medical reflection: the pathic (das Pathische).This term is used to replace the term “pathological”, to define the structural relationship of human life – and also not human – with its affective origin. In his most important theoretical works, Der Gestaltkreis (1940) and Pathosophie (1956), Viktor von Weizsäcker presents the theory of philosophical-medical anthropology (medizinische Anthropologie) within the theoretical framework of the still young “philosophical anthropology” founded by Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner. If, on the epistemological point of view, life is presented in its essential anti- logical character, the axioms of logic, as metaphorical tools produced by the antilogical life, define, from the medical-ethics point of view, the degrees of a pathische Pentagramm which consists of five modal verbs: will (will), can (kann), may (darf), have to (soll), must (muß). The form of the action depends on them and on their mutual relationship and undergoes the conditions of their balance or imbalance. The ethical task of the intersubjective doctor-patient relationship, which is the model of ethics, is to conduct the psychophysical vital forces, identified in degrees or passions of “pathic pentagram”, to restore the balance. The “healing”, at the end of therapy, howewer, reveals – as a result of each active process of life intended as “becoming” (werden) – the emergence of something new that could not have been foreseen and that trascends every act of care.