Psychology 101

Go to a psychiatric ward now, unruly Goys! Thinking about disproportionate role of Jews in promoting diversity has been diagnosed as a mental disease. You are the subject of "first book on clinical mental healthcare at the interface of anti-Semitism". [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

DESCARTES AND MADNESS

The most influential Enlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, famously attempted to demonstrate precisely the opposite. He saw the body, the senses and the imagination as likely to lead, not only to error, but into the realm of madness. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he refers to the ‘madmen’ who trust their senses and end up imagining ‘that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass’.
There is a deep irony involved here. The symptoms he describes are characteristic of delusions that occur in schizophrenia.5 But schizophrenia is not characterised at all by trusting the senses – rather by an unreasonable mistrust of them. It entails in many cases a wholesale inability to rely on the reality of embodied existence in the ‘common-sense’ world which we share with others, and leads to a dehumanised view of others, who begin to lose their intuitively experienced identity as fellow humans and become seen as devitalised machines. One's own body becomes no longer the vehicle through which reality is experienced, but instead is seen as just another object, sometimes a disturbingly alien object, in the world that is validated by cognition alone. Sufferers from
schizophrenia have been known to see themselves as, for example, copying machines, or to contemplate cutting their wrists to find out whether they contain engine oil.

‘To lose one's reason’ is the old expression for madness. But an excess of rationality is the grounds of another kind of madness, that of schizophrenia. As Louis Sass argued in his Madness and Modernism and in The Paradoxes of Delusion,6 and Giovanni Stanghellini has further emphasised in Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, schizophrenia is not characterised by a Romantic disregard for rational thinking and a regression into a more primitive, unself-conscious, emotive
realm of the body and the senses, but by an excessively detached, hyper-rational, reflexively selfaware,
disembodied and alienated condition.
Louis Sass has demonstrated, by his comparisons of Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy with Daniel Paul Schreber's detailed accounts of his own psychotic illness (Schreber was the subject of Freud's only study of schizophrenia), that there are extensive similarities between schizophrenia and the state of mind that is brought about when one makes a conscious effort to distance oneself from one's surroundings, refrain from normal action and interaction with them, suspend one's normal assumptions and feelings about them and subject them to a detached scrutiny – an exercise which in the non-mentally ill is normally confined to philosophers. The belief that this will result in a deeper apprehension of reality ignores the fact that the nature of the attention we bring to bear on anything alters what we find there. Adopting a stance that is normally found only in patients suffering from schizophrenia is not obviously a recipe for finding a higher truth.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Descartes held that there was ‘absolutely no connection (at least that I can understand)’ between ‘that curious tugging in the stomach which I call hunger’ and the desire to eat. Even pain was a mystery: ‘why’, he asks, ‘should that curious sensation of pain give rise to a particular distress of mind?’ This seems to me to display a quite extraordinary lack of intuitive understanding. If there is, in fact, one place at which the relationship between the body and subjective experience can be intuitively understood, it is right there, in sensations such as pain and hunger. But then Descartes was not sure that he had a body at all:

Descartes wrote:

I can make a probable conjecture that the body exists. But this is only a probability; and despite a
careful and comprehensive investigation, I do not yet see how the distinct idea of corporeal nature
which I find in my imagination can provide any basis for a necessary inference that some body
exists.

Descartes's rationality led him not only to doubt the existence of others, but to see knowledge of his own body as constituted by the intellect, rather than self-evident through intuition: ‘Even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone, and … this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood.’ Thus, by an astonishing inversion, rationality becomes not merely constitutive of reason, but of intuition and the body. However, reason is not only rooted in the body, in our bodies, but in the physical and instinctual realm that we share with animals. As Lakoff and Johnson write:

Lakoff wrote:

Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals … Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from
other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them … Reason is not completely conscious,
but mostly unconscious. Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.
Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged … Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not
radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of reason are
limited. In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our
brains and we are not free to think just anything.

The very basis of abstract thought, both in its concepts and in the manipulation of those concepts,
lies in metaphors drawn from the body: ‘Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are
mapped onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.’
Descartes is one of the first and greatest exemplars of the left hemisphere's salience in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. If one thinks back to the neuropsychological literature on the appreciation of time, which has formed a significant part of my analysis of the differences between right and left hemisphere, and I believe casts light on the process of reason in early Greek paradox, one is struck by the view of time held by Descartes. According to Charles Sherover, Descartes had ‘problems with the very idea of temporal continuity, epitomised in his conviction that each moment is a somehow irreducible real self-enclosed atomic point in the structure of the universe, and is devoid of any sustaining continuity with any other moment’.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

In his book The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin lays out what it was about the Enlightenment that Romanticism later came to put in question. He refers to ‘the three propositions … upon which the whole Western tradition rested’: namely, ‘that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question'; ‘that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons'; and ‘that all the answers must be compatible with one another’. These tenets could be said to be the foundations of Enlightenment thinking. When Berlin refers to the ‘Western tradition’, he is speaking of the Western philosophical tradition, that is, that part of Western culture dealing in explicit fashion with the resolution of ‘questions’ and ‘answers’. Although philosophers in the West since the time of Plato had behaved as though these tenets, Berlin's three propositions, were true, there was, until the time of the Enlightenment, enough implicit expression of cultural wisdom through the media of poetry, drama, painting, and, above all, religious ritual – in all of which it is easily perceived as far from true that all questions can be answered, that all answers can be taught, and that all answers are mutually compatible – that these tenets, though important in philosophy, had not come to shape the culture itself. But with the heightened self-awareness of the Enlightenment, these three, obviously false, propositions came to dominate not just academic philosophy, but the business of life itself; or, to look at it another way, in what became known as the age of les philosophes, we all became philosophers malgré nous.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The emphasis on ‘light’ in ‘Enlightenment’ suggests not just clarity and precision, but of course the banishment of the darker, more ‘negative’ emotions. The optimism of the Enlightenment is based on the belief that man can control his destiny. Death is correspondingly de-emphasised. From 1681, when Nahum Tate revised it, King Lear was for 150 years performed, believe it or not, with a happy ending, and other of Shakespeare's tragedies were performed with comedy resolutions. It is hard not to see in this a degree of denial, especially when one remembers other societies in which art was compulsorily optimistic. This is in keeping with the fact that the left hemisphere sees things literally as lighter, and is more prone to ‘positive’ emotions. (I put the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, in relation to the emotions, in inverted commas, because, even though they have been naturalised in the language to such a degree that it may now be hard to see the inherent bias in the terms, they suggest in typical left-hemisphere fashion that its favoured emotions are more valuable, more productive, even more substantial, than others. Literally they suggest that one set of emotions is based on the absence of the others – ‘negative’ implying denial, or ‘no-saying’, to something else that has prior or primary existence. It may be far from true, however, that ‘negative’ emotions such as sadness are negative in any sense; indeed to be without the capacity for sadness would mean a degree of detachment from the manifestly suffering world around one which bordered on the psychopathic.)

Paul is Cobainposting.

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Satyr wrote:

A paradox produced by language.
Indifference is a measure of care, exposing a level of dependence, weakness, means that the more we need and care the less worthy we are of what we need and care for; and the less we need and care, the more worthy we are of it