The issue: Self.
In the understanding my Self, what or who has authority? When has the authority? I am using words to understand myself, to where, from where do I look to have reference to meaning something so I can understand myself?
Could I understand myself without words? What would I be understanding?
Is there a better way to understand myself? With words or without? From another’s definition or my own? How could I understand my own definition if I am using words that reference another’s definition?
Why am I caring?
Even as I might ask that last question, I find that I am referencing words that I have not made myself, and relying upon a definition that I did not make. For, often enough, I say I don’t care exactly because I do care.
What I am caring about?
Where do the words lead me? Am I caring about understanding myself or about promoting myself? What are words?
And still: why would anyone care about such ridiculousness?
Mental Health and philosophy
No one really cares about this stuff. That’s just the truth of it…
Well, some people do.
To the people who profess to be philosophers who also suffer from mental issues, my question to them is:
What is the problem?
Somehow those people care because they have to, but what does it say of philosophy if I can also have a mental issue that might interfere or inform what I propose as philosophy?
It seems sensible to me that philosophy must be a subset of mental health.
As well, what does it say of philosophical assertions about topics and subjects if I am experiencing mental issues?
It would seem to me that those assertions would be more problematic than simply an addressing of expressed points; it seems to me that the points themselves would be inherently compromised.
The modern subjective solution is psychological
The way we avoid the situation I am putting forward is through the ideal of modern subjectivity. The systemization of this is called psychology, and the empirical sciences in general.
This default serves two purposes:
- the person only has responsibility to themselves in certain ways and at certain times
- it gives other people a sense of purpose
There is a further discussion to be had here, but the main point is that indeed this method works very well for Others. Or in this sense, for the system of subjectivity, what I call ‘the correlated system of ideas’ or, ideology.
In the context of mental health, as an element or feature of experience that represents real material, it is the system that subjectivity represents is psychology.
It is the logic inherent the idea of a psyche.
A psyche is a modern idea about the representation of a person.
It does not address the person to itself, but instead tends to create and distribute a route of responsibility toward what Thomas Nail called a static object. Representation is always a position.
Psychology is the representation of what is presented and the issue is that psychology poses to present itself as what presents. From the standpoint of the lived experience of being a person, this creates a rift, what Slavoj Zizek called a ‘gap’, but what other authors have spoken about in various ways. From a philosophical standpoint, the problem is presented as the event, and is typically solved by referring to something it is not as though this reference accounts for the event itself.
The event, in another context, in our context of mental health, is the person itself: that which is presented.
agencymatters.org
You. Matter.
You. are mattering.