Its is a misnomer to think that philosophy is simply an intellectual, idea-crunching, discipline. Knowledge is not mere or only thought content as opposed to emotional or sensory content. Knowledge is the thing itself that is the person experiencing things.
Philosophy is the act that is one’s Self.
…Mental health is intimately involved with one’s Self.
whole philosophy
I am currently reading Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (1979)
The beginning of chapter 3, I feel, gives a good account of what we are up against when we think about mental health, and why I say that what we are dealing with is speicifically the modern problem, not simply a human problem.
I quote at length…
The notion that there is an autonomous discipline called ‘philosophy’ distinct and sitting in judgment upon both religion and science, is of quite recent origin. When Descartes and Hobbes denounced ‘the philosophy of the schools’ they did not think of themselves as substituting a new and better metaphysics, or better ethics. Such distinctions among ‘fields of philosophy’ were not yet drawn. The idea of ‘philosophy’ itself, in the sense in which it has been understood since the subject became standardized as an academic subject in the 19th century, was not yet at hand. Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as ‘beginning modern philosophy’, but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of what Lecky was to call ‘the warfare between science and theology’…They did not think of themselves as offering ‘philosophical systems’, but as contributing to… liberating intellectual life from ecclesiastical institutions. Hobbes defined ‘philosophy’ as ‘such knowledge of effects of appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes of generation’. He has no wish to distinguish what he was doing from something else called ‘science’.
(FYI: Ratiocination is the process of logical reasoning or thinking through something in a methodical, step-by-step manner. )
the modern moment of mental health
Translating for our moment, this is nothing less than to understand the continuity of knowledge as philosophical, and to call out the problem that ensues upon a person’s understanding of what is happening in their own Being, person, and existence. When we ‘think’ that there is some sort of separated influence upon one’s experience that can be ‘treated’, as though it is a scientific object in contrast to the object that is one’s Self, we implement a problem to be solved. This is the modern way.
So I say that the problem of mental health concerns the modern subject, that content of experience which forms the issue experienced of the person itself, one’s Self.
For sure, in our moment, science is doing something, and is often helpful, but typically the problem that is arising in ones experience of mental health is due to an influence of thinking that entertains science by a sort of improper measure, for a term, as though science is dealing with something separated to be then implemented upon us — as though it has something important tell us that we do not already know or at least have access to under certain conditions.
The experiential issue concerns orientation. Every kind of mental health involvement and intervention addresses this specific issue albeit, phrased in its own theoretical manner, using its own organization of terms, as a subject of modern psychology.