Naturalizing Psychosis

There is something refreshing about reading Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Rorty or Dewey, and it goes something like this: there is no authority - not science, not the external world, not God - that has the ability, as some sort of pseudo-foundation, to ground our practices as human beings, and in so doing tell us how to be, think, behave, feel. For even the external world, while playing a causal role in what we do, cannot provide concepts for us, cannot play a normative role. As Rorty put it in Contingency, irony and solidarity, "the world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that." (6) This is to say, with Rorty, that there is no neutral starting points for thought, that where we begin is from a human place; and it is to say, with Heidegger, that any kind of investigation into anything needs to start with the one doing the investigating, that is, Dasein. If we start with Dasein, start with the human being, instead of religion, or science, or the external world, then we can see that things like religion, art, politics, and science are human creations, an insight which I think can de-idealize such things, or deflate them, and bring them down to earth, while reminding us of the agency, responsibility, and commitments we do have as human beings.

What does this have to do with psychosis? I think people who have experienced psychosis benefit from being reminded of their agency - whether this agency be social, political, artistic, scientific, religious, or what have you - because psychosis, I would argue, is something that strips us of our agency, and therefore can make us feel, in the long run, less free. Of course, when one is psychotic, one feels free from the first-person perspective - one feels like one has stumbled on a great Truth, and that they are actually for once in their lives privy to the secret roilings of this Truth, be it based on quasi-religious experiences or nefarious conspiratorial motivations. Everything comes together, everything makes sense, and this makes people who are psychotic both "free" and liable to fight for that "freedom." Sometimes when people are psychotic they becomes like rabid warriors for a social cause, because their self-image has morphed, and what they are seeing and believing are extremes of mind that reflect the extreme changes in one's self-image. But people who are psychotic are not, I would argue, free, because they are not seeing clearly, and therefore in that moment, when they are psychotic, they cannot take responsibility for their lives.

Taking responsibility for one's life means honoring one's commitments and having reasons for those commitments, and these practices and customs make us free in the positive Kantian sense. Oftentimes we think of freedom exclusively in the negative sense, as things we are free from, but we are also free for doing things, and I think that second form of positive freedom, which is a form of agency, is what is stripped from us when we are psychotic. Robert Brandom is insightful in talking about this kind of freedom. He writes, "Because the space of reasons is a normative space, it is a social space." (4) When we are psychotic, we are unable to enter into the space of reasons, and therefore unable to participate in the normative and social space. This is why agency is stripped from us. For the reasons we would give for our behavior would not hold court in the space of reasons, and devolves into solipsistic thinking. For example, when I was psychotic, I thought that I was communicating telepathically with different dead authors, and these conversations - which were actually auditory hallucinations - provided reasons for my behavior - different writings I did, podcasts, all sorts of things. But were I to bring these reasons into the tribunal that is public space, these reasons would not be believed or accepted, and rightly so. I suppose there is a kernel of truth in the notion of the mad genius, if only because genius often gives us ways of being that are somehow new, and therefore push the space of reason in new directions, and therefore also cause people to reflect on their beliefs. The difference of course is that the ideas of the genius are sooner or later accepted by the space of reason over time - think of the different interpretations of Emily Dickinson's poetry, or Moby Dick, or the work of William Blake - whereas psychosis is not really informed by a tradition or community, and can't pass muster in the space of reasons.

Because the space of reasons is a normative and social space, we are presented with the strange sense that there is an ontology of the social, and we can participate in this ontology in a way that gives us a sense of agency. In other words, our lives can make a difference in the world, and do make a difference in the world. We make a difference in the world because reality is unalterably social. Wittgenstein puts it this way: "What has to be accpeted, the given, is - one might say - forms of life." (238) For there is no given that is merely external reality shorn of the concepts with which we greet and understand external reality, and this fact in turn breathes agency into us, for we become aware of the content of our concepts, to put it in a Brandomian way, and therefore become aware of how we might revise the content of our concepts to better fit with the rest of the concepts in our holistic web of beliefs. Even if there is no sense in alternative conceptual frameworks, since translatability is always possible, there is always a sense in which we can change our beliefs and see things in a different way.

Because we do have agency, and we can and do make a difference in the world, I think that hope for the future, with Rorty, is our greatest asset, even in (and especially in) dark times. And we can experience hope not because we are naive, or refusing to see the pain and suffering in the world, but because redemptions is a social endeavor. Rorty writes, in "Philosophy as a transitional genre,"

As I am using the terms "literature" and "literary culture", a culture which has substituted literature for both religion and philosophy finds redemption neither in a non-cognitive relation to a non-human person nor in a cognitive relation to propositions, but in non-cognitive relations to other human beings, relations mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs. These artifacts provide a sense of alternative ways of being human. This sort of culture drops a presupposition common to religion and philosophy - that redemption must come from one's relation to something that is not just one more human creation. (93)

I think that when we do approach psychosis with these thoughts in tow, we begin to naturalize it, by which I mean destigmatize and de-idealize it. We can see psychosis also as something human, something that happens to human beings sometimes, something that can be tragic, but something that does not take place in isolation from the human community and the practices and customs and institutions that makes the community a community. It is not a moral error, and it is not a religious or ethical failure. It's something that happens to human beings.

When we do naturalize psychosis, I think we begin to give people who have experienced psychosis agency. Because it is no longer a moral failing, or a religious mark, but something human, and in redescribing it this way, we can see psychosis on a spectrum with other human experiences, instead of as something aberrant and isolated. If psychosis is not aberrant and not isolated, but a human experience, then we are no longer alone, but a part of a community. And when we not rely on God, for example, to make meaning in our lives, but realize that all we have, in some sense, is the finite human community, then we are empowered to contribute to that community by forming our own commitments and obligations, honoring these commitments and obligations, and finding freedom in the authority given to us when we enact our agency in the world.

Works Cited

Brandom, Robert B. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, revised 4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.