Mark Rothko, "No. 14" (1960)
In my last post, I started to talk about philosophy and mental illness. The topic seemed interesting to me, because there does seem to be something counter-intuitive about lumping together mental illness, historically considered to involve the loss of reason, and philosophy, which has often centered around questions about reason. But of course it is that very counter-intuitiveness that needs prodding, for mental illness in the form of schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses often involve, as we talked about, hyperreflexivity, which is a condition of heightened self-consciousness and, in that sense, not a form of regression to primal instincts but instead a kind of overabundance of thinking.
Yet there are so many aspects of madness that I did not discuss, and one that has been on my mind recently is the way in which madness can existentially lead to a sense of nihilism or meaninglessness, and I want to talk about that today in this blog post in the context of philosophy.
I have been reading volumes 1 and 2 of Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, and one thing I have taken away from the book is that there is something nihilistic about Western philosophy if we consider Western philosophy to have been inaugurated by Plato. Why is there something nihilistic about it, and what purpose is there to even asserting such a ridiculously general statement? For Heidegger, Plato was a philosopher who emphasized the supersensuous, meaning that for Plato the real was the reality behind the appearances, something, in Kantian terms, a priori. This means that Plato valued the supersensuous over the sensuous, which in turn means that value itself was associated with a world behind this world, rather than valuing the lived world that we inhabit. Any luster of meaning the lived world took on was the product of the world behind this one. And this is how and why nihilism creeps in.
For this world is meaningless without the luster of the world behind this one. The senses are illusory, and show us only appearances. Therefore we are locked into a kind of picture - a picture that Christianity, for example, takes up in the notion of an afterlife giving this life all the meaninig it might have - that dictates the location of meaning, saying that it resides in the supersensuous, which then grants meaning to the sensuous. Without the supersensuous, we wander in a wasteland of broken images. And our values shrivel up.
Mental illness is interesting for many reasons, but one is that people who suffer with it often experience a sense of nihilism or meaninglessness. Why? I think it is because of something we could call, for lack of a better term, a form of code-switching. Code switching typically means changing the way you express yourself in different contexts, which is to say moving between languages or vocabularies. A psychotic person speaks a language, but it is a different language than the language of sanity. When the psychotic person is recovering, they are in a very real way learning a new language again, because they are emerging from their madness back into the shared social world. This process can be very confusing, since meaning resided in the psychotic world, and now meaning resides in the shared world. When that gap needs to be crossed, an intense loss of meaning can strike one, as if all color has been bleached away. When we recover, we in a very real sense lose a world. It is not necessarily a good world, or a bad world, but it is a world, and it is lost. The shared social world, to which we return, is necessary in some hard-to-describe way, because it is the world we inhabit, outside of delusions and hallucinations, but the return to that world is hard-going and, again, often involves a deep sense of meaninglessness and therefore nihilism.
How on earth do we overcome this nihilism? For nihilism corrodes life, rather than gives life. How do we overcome it?
I think one way to overcome nihilism is to find practices of thinking that ameliorate various insidious dichotomies in our culture, and that therefore perform a kind of therapy for our thought. For example, when we are psychotic, we might be experiencing a very profound sense of alienation, because we are tightly shut into a form of solipsism. This is to say that we experience a gulf between our subjective world and the shared social world. This makes sense, since we are experiencing things like hallucinations and delusions that the rest of the shared world are not. But having these kinds of experiences can then lead us to posit a yawning chasm between the subjective and objective, say, between mind and world, or between body and mind. And healing this gulf in our thought, I think, then helps us to overcome nihilism, since the experience of an enormous chasm between mind and world is a form of nihilism, a form of deep disconnect.
Heidegger is helpful in this regard, as is John Dewey, because for both thinkers, the real resides in this world, in the continuous interaction between experience and nature, or being-in-the-world. Dewey's use of intelligence instead of reason is instructive in this regard, because of its connotations of dynamics and fluidity as opposed to the stasis of reason. We are empirical inquirers into nature, which is not, as Kant posited, something we can never know in-itself, but rather something we can deeply know and understand, through human practices like science, politics, and art. Part of overcoming nihilism, I think, is knowing that we can know things, is the overcoming of an overweening skepticism that can ensue when are code switching from the language of psychosis back to the language of sanity.
I want to end this blog post with a poem by Wallace Stevens that I think captures what it means to move from nihilism to meaning, though that puts it too simply and reductively. For Stevens, there is an intimate relationship between our conjectures and our experience, and he helps us to overcome nihilism by giving us language for describing these experiences. Without further ado, here is "On the Road Home," from Parts of a World.
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter,
The fox ran out of his hole.
You...You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye";
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";
It was at that time, that the silence was largest
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest.
The poem is a meditation on truth, but it is a truth shorn of our customary appertenances. What is the truth that Stevens is revealing and concealing? He is exchanging the supersensuous for the sensuous. He is trading the ideal, or a form of the ideal, for the empirical. What is the form of the ideal in the poem that he is moving away from? Stevens is moving away from absolutes, from the Truth. As he does so, the world becomes alive. One thinks about how, in madness, or in forms of philosophy that overstress subjectivism, the world in a very real way disappears, whether that be the shared social world or the physical world itself. Stevens has written elsewhere, in "Esthetique Du Mal," that "The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world." Here, the presence of the physical world, its being, its breathing, is contingent upon how we think about it, what form it takes in our minds. The grapes grow fatter when the sensuous becomes the real, and the fox moves. The tree itself changes, as Truth is replaced by truths, into something deeply seen yet deeply mysterious. The idols are sickly - the supersensuous world enervates the sensuous, impoverishes it - but when we come into a greater contact with the world, where there is no gap between subject and object, where we are "being-in-the-world" in Heidegger's wonderful term, then the very contours of our experienced world changes, and things become larger, rounder, warmer, closer, and stronger. These are metaphors for the experience of value and care that comes when we overcome nihilism. They are what madness seeks when it is crossing the gap, switching languages, coming back to itself in a vision of things that denies solipsism for the shared world.
Comentários