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First…

A small contextual loop-tangent

Some, or none of you may know, this blog has gone through some name changes. Each have reflected the kind of experience of knowing that I have been involved with having at the time. I don’t remember them all; I feel like there were six, but I only remember three, including this one.

I believe I began this blog in 2013, but I could be wrong. It came out of my time hanging out on the Philosophy Now Forum …(https://forum.philosophynow.org – for whatever reason, wordpress has moved the embed function and I forgot my html – yay me!!)

…where I would spend endless hours discussing, arguing, and debating all the philosophical things in the chat forum.

After a time, the discussion answers became very lengthy. I don’t know about you, but (in a chat conversation at least) to have to type and/ or read long, long, long, paragraphs its taxing and annoying, let alone writing them for clarity a precision. And, this was on a 2010 (or there about) iPad! Oh the tedious misery a calling has us undertake!

So, I decided to create a blog around the points that I was uncovering. Constructive Undoing was basically a pure philosophy blog that centered on what typical philosophers call Continental Philosophy, though I think the distinction from analytical philosophy is a philosophical convention serving to allow the analytical philosophers to not really have to think about what they are doing. (wink!)

In any case, it is due to these kinds of arbitrary and argumentative distinctions in philosophy, and the obstinance that seems to plague those discussions everywhere we go, that brought me to ponder another way to engage philosophically.

what are we talking about?

See, despite the usual academic practice of flaunting intelligence by erudite scholarship, it is not simply that people disagree or have different opinions that we should discuss and should be open to discussing. It more often is that people have no desire to know what we are talking about. It literally is as though with some people (oddly, many people) there is some sort of unwritten rule that we are not allowed to talk about what we are talking about, like, we have to talk about anything else besides what we are trying to figure out between us or what it is that promoted us to talk about it (whateverit is).

The notion that we all just have opinions on things, I have to say, is kind of thoughtless, a sort of mindlessness. It’s not all bad, though. For sure we enter into discussions and for sure we need discuss things and be open to opinions. The issue arises because ‘discussing opinions’ is not what is actually occurring when we get into those discussions that assume a common desire for depth and comprehension, and begin to talk about the nature of the bases of those discussions.

Invariably, what happens at those ends of discussions is people begin to lose their shit.

Literally. It is as though they (and I say “they” to mean many of those I have gotten into those very deep layers of knowledge) begin to lose their ability to be present. (By the way, I am not excluding myself from the potential of ‘they’):

• They often begin to get emotional,
  • sometimes attack, sometimes just bail the discussion,
    • sometimes resort to just saying “well, that’s your opinion!”, which is really saying that they are having challenging emotions about where the topic has led.
• They (apparently) become unable to follow the discussion we have been having up till that point; they seem to cognitively ‘drop out’ but do not notice it, as though nothing of interest had happened. Like a kind of sudden obliviousness.
  • Even in patiently retracing the parts we had agreed upon to get to this point in our discussion, they appeared to suddenly be unable to take the next step, and out of nowhere seemed to simply “leave” the discussion, talk about something else as though it sensibly has pertinence to what we were discussing.
    • Yet, (often enough) if I were to ask them to recall or explain the connection, they would either be unable to recall the connection or express to me that they don’t understand what I mean.
  • They would often resort to arguments that we already discussed and agreed upon, as though they forgot we had already agreed.
    • If I then pointed out that we already discussed those parts, routinely the person would either become emotional, mad or frustrated, or would make an expression that evidenced to me that they had simply forgotten.
      • They could not even be embarrassed that they had forgotten because they seemed to be experiencing like a type of forgottenness that they were unaware of. Me pointing it out simply brought an emotional reaction from them, at that, beyond their awareness of why.

It is an extremely odd situation. It literally is as though we enter a domain of knowledge and an experience of interpersonal involvement where communication breaks down or stops and the other person is not able to recognize it.

It seems like I recognize it, but that is why it is so perplexing. For if I were to speak of it, the other person would simply reflect that they do not understand what I am talking about.

This might sound like I am a pompous, intellectual prick, but I guarantee you I am not. The discussions I am reporting upon were mutually agreed upon and the people were consensually involved, wanting to argue and discuss. Usually we were on very good terms, maybe even friends.

It is simply an odd thing that happens even with those who purport themselves as philosophically informed.

It really is as though as times the other person was simply unable to stay present with me in the discussion.

mental health philosophy and the philosophers of the break

Upon an ability to stay with the interpersonal involvement when communication is involuntarily interrupted, and to be able to notice the breakdown in communication, is where mental health is articulated.

Many philosophers and practitioners have elaborated upon this break.

Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek called this out when he asked the question:

Can there be a change that changes the way we understand change, and can we notice that change?

Here are a few Western-tradition folks that I have come across who have all written in some way about this epistemological break: :

• Socrates
• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Hegel
• Kiekegaard
• Nietzche
• Russel
• Wittgenstein
• Husserl
• Heidegger
• Frued
• Jung
• Deleuze
• Derrida
• Sartre
• de Beauvoir
• Spivak
• Lyotard
• Rorty
• Zizek
• Badiou
• Laruelle
• Harman

The list goes on….even into the Eastern traditions, and in every sort of religious texts.

What I have come across is not a fluke. It is a necessary part of the experience of being a human being intentionally involved with knowing, and the individual reactions to encountering it.

mental health philosophy

As I describe in my work, and the upcoming book Mental Health Philosophy, mental health is articulated when we bring the fact of what is happening into the act of knowing as a practice of being involved with the universe.

the solution

All mental health conceptualizations and current useful and otherwise evidence-based interventions derive their effect, sense, and usefulness from a knowable situation, but one that has been kept out of view until recently.

Stay tuned….

you are mattering.