Who Is the Human Being?
In recent years, more and more people have come to understand that it may make sense to ask less about the symptoms of illness and more about the emergence of individual health.
A person who falls into the machinery of medicine may be sent from one specialist to another for years without their health problem ever truly being resolved. Why?
Presumably because none of the doctors treating them has yet thought to ask who the human being is who is supposed to be treated.
Calling Friedrich Schiller a prophet of salutogenesis may sound crazy. Schiller himself suffered from a catastrophically poor constitution. He was constantly ill, repeatedly thought to be dying, and died young.
Perhaps that is precisely why he was predisposed to bring us closer to a different understanding of health. Are we healthy when we are free from all suffering? Or are we healthy when we leave our mark on the world, fulfill ourselves, and perhaps even—as Schiller did—with our life’s work shape an entire era?
Life as a Sacred Game
Let us turn to Schiller’s ‹Aesthetic Letters›, which Schiller wrote to the Prince of Denmark out of gratitude after the prince had once again saved him from financial ruin.
In my view, the Aesthetic Letters are among the most beautiful blossoms of Western culture. In them, Schiller develops an image of the human being that has hardly been understood to this day, and which can nevertheless serve as a foundation for salutogenesis:
“Man only plays where he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only completely a human being where he plays.” (Friedrich Schiller)
These are the famous words to which the letters are often reduced. We must understand how existentially Schiller intended this playing. What Schiller calls ‹play› has nothing to do with our conventional, everyday, and trivial understanding of play.
We often regard playing as something meaningless, a waste of time, something children do. For Schiller, playing is something sacred—perhaps even something healing, as we might say today.
According to Schiller, the playing human being, homo ludens, always lives in a field of tension between two poles: our biology, our flesh, our everyday self, our becoming—everything that defines and confines us. And our potential freedom, our spirit, our individuality, which has nothing to do with the limitations imposed on us by the flesh.
Both are part of the human being. An animal and a god. A worm and a creator. A being that has become and one that is becoming. The playing human being constantly balances on the thin rope between their animal nature and their potential, their determined past and their still-open future. And for this tightrope act, we need the ‹Sense of Coherence›!
Was Schiller a Forerunner of Salutogenesis?
What does Aaron Antonovsky mean by coherence, the key concept of salutogenesis? If Antonovsky found that coherence results in health, then this is difficult to dispute. But what is coherence?
Is it what we repeatedly restore when we regularly practice, playfully, being someone else—someone we could become? When we grow toward our own design and, on the way there, repeatedly pick ourselves up, steadfast and indestructible in the sense of resilience or even antifragility? Are we then Schiller’s playing human being?
Playing, practicing being someone other than the person we have become, and thereby increasing true beauty in our lives through the realization of the sacred game. That would be a contemporary path to salutogenesis!
You can find more about the foundations of salutogenesis in What Is Salutogenesis? Understanding Health According to Antonovsky and Salutogenesis – The Ability to Become Healthy.
You can find the complete overview in our comprehensive salutogenesis overview.