In his study about the meaning of the Aristotle's concept of physis, Heidegger seems to espouse the idea that human physical body keeps inside itself a spontaneous power of healing, that responds to the well-known notion of natura medicatrix. However, at the Zollikon seminars, he made clear that health and disease are nothing else than modes of Dasein's existential ways of being-in-the-world. Thus the body, its physiology and pathology are always submitted to the sway of the unfolding essence of Dasein; man never is nature as thinks the Cartesian ontology. This article carries through a confrontation between these two Heidegger's approaches to health. It also shows the consequences of three determinations of health in Heidegger's thought that are coherent with his fundamental ontology: a) disease is a an ontological privation; b) health is a potentiality of the being of Dasein in its unfolding essence; c) stress and disease relate to the hermeneutical circle of addresses and answers that Dasein upholds in its essential bond to the world.
Heidegger; health and nature; analytics of Dasein; phenomenology of health; philosophy of health