Il Patico come modo essenziale della “Forma-Vita"

Pathic mode as the essential 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 defining the structural ralationschip of human life - and not a 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 anthopology (medizinische Anthropologie) within the theroretical 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 character anti-logical, the axioms of logic, as metaphorical tools produced by the antilogical life, define, from viewpoint of medical-ethics, 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 dipends on them and their mutual relationship and is subjected to 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 vital forces psychophysical, identified in degree or passions of “pathic pentagram”, to restore the balance. The “healing”, at the end of therapy, howewer, revels - as a result of ever active process of life as becoming (werden) - the emergence of something new that could not be foreseen and which trascends every act of care.