psychology is content of the category of mental health.
What might it mean to have content and category? What does it mean when I say that content never achieves the category? What does this have to do with mental health?
It means psychology is content of the category of mental health.
Many of us don’t really think of things in this way. In pondering mental health, it can seem like a dumb intellectual exercise, so I’ll try to be simple without patronizing. But I’ll try to suck you into to thinking deeply without you realizing that it might have been difficult or uncomfortable as well.
Content and Category
Take anything that you know of, say, a table, but since this is a mental health and philosophy blog, we might take one’s Self, or even mental health. All these things, a Self, mental health, and a table, are things we know, or at least know of.
I wonder that given these things and entering this post this way, some might immediately see that a Self and mental health are abstract concepts, whereas a table is a concrete thing.
When we consider what content and category are, we have already found the case just right now in how we have categorized these things. We have a great example: the categories are ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, and the content are the Self, mental health, and a table.
In this way its appears content has indeed ‘reached’ the category because, it seems, that the categories were already there, inherent the items, that the table was already concrete, what we call physical, and the Self and mental health abstract, what some would call ideal content, or, they exist as ideas having no physical counterparts.
Conventional philosophy has the limit of infinity
In this way of viewing (knowing) things, the category seems like it was already there, and all it took was an occasion to notice it. And this is one of the foundations of what I call conventional philosophy. Philosophical content tumbles out of this simple awareness. I plugged this into an A.I. bot. and it gave me a list which serves as a great example of what I am talking about:
Categories of Understanding
Abstract–Concrete Distinction
Form–Content Distinction
Idealism
Conceptual Realism
Universals
Particulars
Ontological Categories
Conceptual Scheme
Mental Representation
Intentionality
Reification
Mind–World Correspondence
Epistemic Mediation
Phenomenal vs Noumenal
Immaterial Objects
Conceptual Abstraction
Semantic Categorization
Objecthood
Ontological Priority
Ideality of Meaning
Conceptual Dependence
Representation and Reference
I myself would have generated a different list, some of it overlapping with this one, but it goes to show how from this simple awareness of the situation of knowing philosophy a plethora of philosophical topics spills out. I would venture to say that there are a plethora more we could find (but this also shows how A.I. is just a calculating device more than an intelligence, but that is for a different conversation).
I’ll open another layer here: I might guess that many of these myriads of topics do not consider that the basic and most fundamental category is knowledge. I would further speculate that most of the multitudinous topics take knowledge as a task that is assumed for the task that the topics engender —but this is not merely an assumption.
The halls echo everywhere, now and throughout history with: “Of course! You buffoon. Of course we are dealing with knowledge. How could we not be?”
It strikes me so even now, how to get some entry against this ubiquitous cry. But this is the issue, for sure, of finding mental health, the thing in-itself. We are not allowed to know knowledge, so mental health is methodologically required to be derivative. We are only allowed to know items of knowledge. In fact, this cry has so permeated into our Being that we intuitively imagine and indeed double down on the common knowledge that what I might be calling out to know (which is knowledge itself) is what we call our Self.
The Self here is what knows. And, we then (exuding confidence) firmly state our conviction that what we know is, indeed, what we are dealing with. And what do we know? Content. Knowledge is the content of our knowing and we, as Selves, are the basis of knowing, such that we can know what is right and wrong of ourselves by what we think to say to express it. Indeed, we argue what we know is right, get into discussions and debates with other people who are expressing their opinions and views, i.e., themselves, about what they think is right. By this manner we develop the compendium of knowledge, which is represented by all sorts of vehicles, language, culture, books, practices, beliefs, and so on. We therefore conclude that knowledge is the collection of expressed items, and the collection is the layering of such knowledge as to more and less truth, debated and negotiated terrains and territories of discourse.
We know, and from this knowing we are the arbiters of what is able to be content and category, and everything is able to be content or category by our arbitration. Because this method has no grounding in actual things, but only the induced content of our own reason, the motion that ensues in this eternal shell game develops what we conceive as infinity. Even as I might try to argue that there is real knowledge that is not induced, I open myself up to the infinity of existential nothingness; I only assert my struggle, my angst, my despair in hopeful activity.
But how depressing!
Nonetheless, where this description of events and circumstances more or less makes sense is generally an accurate depiction of what is occurring in the greater humanity, I move to call it convention. Conventional knowledge, or conventional philosophy, is the situation of that description. But more, it is simply there, and I might even go so far as to get some backing from Martin Heidegger to say it is what is being there.
Phenomenology
This is when it gets kind of ridiculous.
If this is the case, that indeed knowledge is noticed and reckoned in this way, then I feel it is safe to say that we have a good name for the category of evident behavior. I say it is phenomenalism, and its systemization for empiricism, phenomenology. We are able to know of a category that encompasses everything that we can count as part of the biggest category for reality that we can know, as it then identifies not just knowing, but a particular way or method of knowing and thus going about asserting Being.
Now here is where it gets sticky. If indeed we are dealing only with the negotiation of expressions, then we have to account for how it is that I could be thinking things that are not expressed, for example, inner thoughts and experiences. If I can identify the methodological category by which anything and everything is known, or can count as being known or knowable, then how could I know this? Conventional philosophy has already answered this one way: everything is interconnected, intertwined, and intersectional, and that the position which could say that it has access to the greater category is a kind of illusion, a fantasy. There is no Self that is not a reflection, or at least involved —perhaps transcendently, perhaps immanently— of what is expressed; a Self, by the reckoning of phenomenology, is the constituency of what is given to appearances.
Nonetheless, I say an exception to this is only a fantasy when I orient my knowing upon that phenomenalist methodological standard for Being. And —and this is the significance of mental health — while I may indeed entertain an interest in this standard, I have no requirement to Be that way — I do not have to answer to those representations, but because it is just the way that conventional reality figures Being, and that because I can know this, I am not entirely subject to it. Indeed, I am not even subject entirely to this modern method, even as I cannot escape having to use its method in the world. The question is now only how am I able to use it, but how am I using it?
The more complete version of this, though, is, if I were to meet all those things posed by conventional reality within myself, somehow, I must be engaging with something else as well, something that I am involved with that is not those things. This must not specifically be inner thoughts and what we call personal experiences but really more like some sort of call and response from things that are outside, say, trees, air, companies, people, ducks, other opinions, and so on, that the modern method is not accounting for. By the conventional method we thus usually conclude that there must be some sort of connection between my inner world and the outer world, but this conclusion merely gets us to where we started, which was thinking about the situation at hand, and is why we are dealing with only content. It seems that the category under which content is presented is mysteriously shuffled back into the deck of content, again to be left out of the conventional situation all together.
A universe of missing things.
What is left out?
Well, this is what I mean by saying that the content does not reach the category. In the conventional world, this is What Slavoj Zizek calls the sublime object of ideology.
But hold on. What usually happens when I am writing such an essay and people are reading it, is that people often are likely to rebut or comment on this by giving different definitions of things. For example, why must the Self, or Knowledge, be left out? Why couldn’t nothing be left out? Or, why couldn’t it be consciousness or a soul?
Yes, those are possible. In reality, only the court of negotiated opinion matters. And this indeed only holds if the rebuttal does not try to resist what the description of the phenomenological convention presents by its method. Yet the resistance is part of the conventional method de facto.
So it is, a result of seriously engaging in the contradiction has yielded what we have most recently called New Materialism, New Realism, or even Object Orientation. These philosophies generally recognize the conventional problem as a problem than cannot be overcome. They then work to elaborate on the repercussions of it, just as social justice worked alongside the post-modern ideals of being incredulous toward meta-narratives from the 1970’s into the 2000’s. Still people will have something to say about what has apparently been left out. The New philosophies just say that nothing has been left out, that we are fully intersectional with material, the same situation which 50 years ago they said we are embodied in discourses.
The point here is not that we need to come up with something different; we can’t. Rather, the only way to come up with something different is to rely on the method of phenomenological resistance. Yes, it is ironic in the sense Kierkegaard developed in his oeuvre. My point is that we are completely unable to come up with anything different, that whatever convention comes up with will be temporally situated. Again, a nod to Heidegger’s thoroughness. In short, time and discourse was the last version of the phenomenological material of phenomenalism, if we want to say it that way, and hence the impetus shift from subjects to objects. But what they achieved or are achieving is really subjects of objects. No matter what we say, pose, or argue, there is always different ways to present terms in definition, a.k.a., subjects; it is less that we have overcome anything, it is more that we are just becoming comfortable in our limits, what we call modern subjectivity. The New philosophies just accept that subjectivity cannot be overcome, and then at least one guy (Graham Harman) went to talk about objects.
Despite all the linguistic, definitional repositioning, something still remains out of the picture. Regardless, people persist in trying to overcome the problem of expression by saying there is something that exists outside of specific discourses, say now, philosophical discourses, political discourses, or psychological discourses, and often people start talking about spirituality.
Yet, I wonder if even these succeed at getting to what is missing. If spirituality gets to what is indicated in expression, I wonder how it would deal with it; often enough it is more an ethical and justice issue that spirituality deals with, which end up missing something —else there would be nothing more needing of justification. So it is I say mental health is the category of what is missed by the conventional method. The conventional method indicates mental health by expression, but its expressions never get to or never achieve mental health. In this way, religion and spirituality are indeed other ways of renegotiating what is categorically absent from content into the general assumed (transcendent immanent) ideological category. Nonetheless, if they achieve the category, then they de facto must have something to do with mental health, since there would be no issue about what category or what content, i.e., it would be a spiritual issue about justice and ethics. But if they do not then they are not, since most often the priest, preistess, rabbi, pastor, cleric or what have you would refer the person with the problem to someone involved with treating mental issues. If spirituality and religion achieve the category that has been left out, then there is nothing to say about it, or the only thing that can be said about it is content.
Overall, this is because mental health deals squarely with what is missed by making no necessary presumptions or impositions upon what it is or what it should do. I say this object is the Self, because it does not work upon conventional assumptions of method, as mental issues are necessarily an issue of feeling not being included in the social convention, as it was is left out of the conventional domain. And, mental health is the only discipline which is not entirely subject to the conventional method because of how it works.
Filling in the Gap
If coming upon the sense implicit this situation is still missed, lets return to what seems more tangible and concrete. The table.
For conventional reckonings, the table exists in a different experiential and thus epistemological category than, say, ideas, mental health, or a Self.
The conventional method begins with, as we say, what is given to experience, and then works away from the experience, what I would say is by inductive reasoning. When we interact with the table and begin to ponder what the table is in reality, such induced reasoning is then returned to the person via the phenomenalist assumption of connection between the inner and the outer. The table is given to experience as a matter of course, an obvious thing, but from then on as we start to think about the table we basically lose the table, miss it, as we step away from the table itself and enter into thoughts about the table as though the thoughts about the table are more true than the table itself. Bertrand Russel famously elaborated how this goes; typically, we call this deductive reasoning.
But then his student Ludwig Wittgenstein helped us to see how we induce the table to yield ‘pieces’ of itself, and because we cannot imagine that the table is inducing anything in us except pure, unreasonable, sensory experience, we develop ‘games’ of meaning. Not only do we follow the tradition which separates experience into reason and aesthetics, but we passively accept things align along a specific semantic vector. So it is, because Wittgenstein took deduction all the way to its end, he brought about the reversal of the epistemological trajectory of philosophy to turn the historical method on its head; reason could not stand its dissolution into mere arbitrarily justified opinion, what we now call subjectivity. We see this through the 20th century in the division between the analytical and the continental schools; so stunned, one school tried to “stay put” (the analytical) while the other continued along in the attempt to reconcile the wound that Wittgenstein cut open (the continental).
Regardless, this reversal allows for the finding of the object itself, in-itself. From that vacant sensory experience are gathered thoughts, basically, by which we reassemble the table to what it “really” is. This is a method, but typically, conventionally, we just see it as natural experience, not having its veracity presented by any specific method; we just see it is a human being involved with the world, with nothing “extra” necessary. Here, knowledge as well as the Self is off limits to the method so the whole category can remain “innocent”, unscathed, unadulterated. From here we have a sound basis to begin to ponder the developmental ideal of God. As well, social justice reasonings use this kind of method to point at institutional method until the more intellectual activists begin to recognize Paulo Freire’s discussions on how both the oppressor and oppressed are constituent and co-involved in the game of oppression, which lead to some murky and sticky contradictions in activist epistemology. But our point here is not critique; it is validation —of the object itself.
The problem that plagues social justice rhetoric is the same as all conventional ideas: the object remains a subject of social linguistic definition. This is just a fact, but we don’t usually stay with facts, justifiably given the last two centuries of history, e.g., I am not oppressed because of anything I am responsible for. Here again something is missing, not being recognized.
Similarly we don’t typically stay with the table itself but instead come up with reasonable systems of justification with which we try to find things that are ‘actually’ the table, e.g., the table cannot possibility be responsible for how I know it, I therefore reduce it to nothing but things that are outside of this reason I am using. I reduce all this ‘nonsensical’ sensation to reasonable sense, again, intentionally leaving out something vital to knowledge and yet while justifying the truncation. This is in line with the phenomenalist ideal that appearances are all we have to work with, and the idea that if we find what constitutes the table, then we have found the essence of the table. In short, we take the representation of the table and work toward finding the ideal of a table of which this table (in front of me, say) is but a representation.
On one hand it is a shell game, on another this is induction because as we follow what is given to reason we either find it breaks into an infinite amount of pieces, none of which reflect the table, or we assemble all the ‘given’ pieces (hard, wood, brown, four legs, shorter than chest high, only to English speakers, and so on) and find at no time does any assemblage of the table achieve the table that is there in front of us. Again, in both directions, which are both inductive, of “building up” to a category from the content, whether as Graham Harman offers overmined or undermined, we never find the table there. We never get to the category we are seeking.
Deduction is a different beast.
But again, we have to contend with the conventional manner, because we need to be cognizant that as I am indeed writing this essay, the reader is (in general) automatically inclined to see debate, contention, difference from the category that is operating. This ever-present category is the Self, that which is missing from the discussion so often and regularly withheld as sacrosanct as rising emotional distress presses ever more into the content presented, that which should be given to knowledge, to protect its vulnerable, essential position. It is a limitation of the conventional method and why mental health is of a different manner.
At root of every conventional proposal is a covering of an embarrassment of a methodological lack. It is likely the reader could, indeed, and justifiably, refer to the definition of induction and deduction and point out various instances of their use in conventional reasoning and succeed in making the (phenomenological) argument that everything that is knowable is expressed content, i.e., discourse, and knowledge itself cannot be known or addressed except as expressed material, i.e., psychological theory and phenomenology.
Further (as I am imagining this interaction), the person sees herself as indeed being involved with the discussion through the expressions, such that there is debate to be had about whether mental health is involved with deduction and convention only with induction. We thereby keep withholding what we are actually talking about while assuming and promoting in the act that we are indeed talking about a category or categories (induction, deduction, mental health) and yet we never get there but remain asserting the propriety of expressed material subjects. We have thus succeeded in getting nowhere in the effort to move knowledge forward, but instead reiterated and rephrased knowledge as it is given, at that, under different terms and definitions which expressed the subject but miss their object. The object is induced by the effort of the subject and found to be untenable and generally absent as a thing that exists in the universe. This is the real subjective exercise of the modern phenomenalist world.
What is indicated in this is the process by which things manifest in the universe, the process that functions to avoid itself.
The Categorical Self.
This reality has been useful in the development of psychology, but it is more significant in mental health. The reason here is counter intuitive. The problem of the Existential “either/or”, of trying to ethically insert oneself into the domain that naturally excludes a Self, enacts a contradiction. In reality and for the purpose of navigating it we typically take contradiction as falsity, wrongness, and so forth; this method works well for social and modern empirical involvements. While this is wonderful for the justification of psychological problems, giving us a real basis to formulate systems of reason, this does not create or repeat the problem in mental health. Psychological problem is the result of building ideological structures which use contradictions to signal what is right and correct; mental health includes psychological problems because it permits as it creates the opening for solving them, or more precisely, that which is the state of having no problem to begin with. It is this ontological feature of knowledge that the conventional method excludes by writ for existence, as above, to say Being is never achieved by phenomenology but only asserted, hoped for, and generally guessed at through modern reason.
Psychology is a representation of conventional philosophy because it builds the pieces into ideological edifices. These subjects are then assumed to exist under the category of psychology, wherein psychology is assumed to be the category which constitutes the actual meaning of the pieces. Ironically however, the ‘pieces’ are items of knowledge that it recognizes as part of its edifice. For example, a mind is psychological because it recognizes the mind and its definitions are psychological. This is an example of what it means to be given to knowledge. If I present our table from earlier, psychology might not recognize the table itself as a psychological item, but if put into the context of a mind then the table can be a psychological item by transforming the table into psychological pieces. It is conventional because the pieces that it chooses to be psychological are assumed given to its knowledge, but because such pieces are not native to psychology but have only been ‘chosen’ to be psychological, psychology then must constantly guard the categories it creates within itself by arguing that they are the case and justified as such. We call this phenomenalism, tracing this kind of method back to Emmanual Kant, who gave people and institutions —basically all subjects —to existing to the extent and quality that they can be justified by reason.
This justification is inductive because judgement is, by its very nature, imposed, and very action that stems from judgement is in the effort to build a grand edifice that is supposed identical to that which is building it; the culmination of all the justification is (supposed) itself justice. In reality, and in the social world in general, this method is not really a problem because it indeed is ideological, based in ideas and the navigation of ideas as language is assumed to be (the potential of) the accurate expression of ideas, and for psychology as these expressions are assumed to be able to be traced back to the (original unexpressed, or indicated) idea.
The problem of psychology (the psychological problem) is that this kind of reasoning necessarily imposes artificial constraints upon what is methodologically left out and yet somehow is present. It is the ambiguity presented in human life, the contradiction inherent existence, that is overcome by promoting the primacy of psychological representation. Therefore, because this takes place in and as reality, all such linguistic ideological products are thus ontological arguments. This is so much that case that there are ontological arguments able to justifiably present a case that an ontological argument can be not merely an argument, but Being itself. The redundancy built into Kant’s method, which I say is the modern method, thus produces all the subsequent proposals that are justifiably able to exist in reality. This means that the quality of its method supposes that Being itself should be able to be comprehended, accessed, and gained by its method, that the arguments are not merely ideological propositions.
The significance of mental health is in the falling out of, or precipitation from, the edifice created by this method. Psychologically determined mental health poses a psychological condition that is gained by the coalescence and coordination of ‘pieces of a psyche’, so to speak, or psychological pieces of experience, to an ideal state, i.e. the category ‘mental health’. As we just encountered through this essay, in order for such a category to thereby exist, it must always be guarded and argued for, and always working to establish itself against the epistemological forces which resist the modern phenomenological façade. By that route mental health is only achievable by intentional effort and defensive vigilance, but even then, it is only gained by a definitional standard made from its content. Psychological mental health never achieves mental health itself, which is the practical application, result, and infamous ideal of the phenomenological method: we can never know the object in-itself. Placed in ancient monotheistic terms, thou shalt have no other God before thee, which is to say, no one shall question the veracity of the ideological façade.
Mental Health is Inclusive and Adaptive to What is Actually Happening
I say while this conventional method indeed functions and develops all sorts of valid justifications for its activity, it does not in fact comprehend what is actually happening, as I described. More importantly, however, mental health is the category that is responsible for all this activity in the first place. This does not mean reality is not real, nor that no God exists, but it does mean that they only indicate the truth, that the truth cannot be expressed in modern language, and that following content will not directly gain what it indicates.
This is the pivotal significance of mental health. It does not reject, negate, or argue against the conventional method, but rather substantiates it, accepts it, and over all validates it in an absolute justification that is gained by the mere use of the term for what we already mean when we use it.
The motion of mental health is deductive because it is oriented in what is happening, now iterable and utterable. In the attempt to forge a psychological ideal for mental health all content is up for question and the psychological categories are understood implicitly as various tentative ideal structures. This is nothing new, but now we have a pronounced, substantial and foundational philosophy which grounds involvement. Mental health, the object in-itself, is thus found at the antecedent base of our effort, that which is indeed given while the conventional method deems it moot. This is evident by how we approach treating mental issues on the ground, within the potential of application of every interventional theory. Less deconstructive than a quantitative shift, this is a disciplinary articulation for reorganization. No longer does mental health have to be guarded for, fragile and tentative, rather, it is recognized and validated already. Even the guarding is recognized and validated, as it is addressed head on for what is happening, indeed, the reaction to the psychological façade Being under threat, which is the staple understanding of psychological issue.
Mental Health Philosophy: the Talks.
You.
Are mattering.