The World is A World: Reality, Reason, Psychosis

I have been reading over these blog posts, which I started about two years ago, in December of 2023. There are a lot of continuities, mostly in my interest in the overlaps between philosophy and mental illness, or philosophy and psychosis, and my finding answers to my questions about these relationships in the work of philosophers like Richard Rorty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, primarily, Martin Heidegger.

One question that comes up a lot in these blog posts is something I think is germane to Rorty, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, and that is the question, raised by my experience living with psychosis, which is "what is real?" Rorty would say that this question is not thick enough, and I think he is mostly right. It doesn't have a lot of texture, and it feels enervated. Wittgenstein might also say, similarly, that the question leads to us staring rather than looking. And he is also somewhat right. Heidegger might say that reality is the clearing, and this seems the most right to me. But let me recount something from my experience, and then we can return to these thinkers.

When you are insane, you are insane. And when you are sane, you are sane - meaning that these are total experiences. If you are sane, but have breakthrough symptoms, you are still sane. If you are insane, and have anosognosia, you are insane. But my point is that there is an ontological difference between sanity and insanity. They feel different. They are different. They constitute different sub-worlds, though with the world as the backdrop to both. But because they constitute different sub-worlds, they incorporate different forms of involvement.

Think of a painter who paints representationaly, a painter who paints abstractly, and a collage artist. Let's say each is asked to create something about the same content. Now imagine the differences that would inhere in each artist's practice. And imagine the "final product" - how different they would be. A psychotic person chews on the world, just like a sane person, but the experience of the world is vastly different. We all only have the shared world to chew on. But we spit out different things depending on our sanity or insanity.

When we ask the question, "what is real?" we raise the point that there is an ontological difference between sanity and insanity, and we also raise the evaluative point that, to my understanding, sanity is more meaningful than insanity, because it leads to a greater involvement with the world. By sanity I do not mean only reason, but a kind of healthy reason, one characterized by Heideggerian care and concern. But to invoke reason is important here, because I think sanity can help us to describe what is real. What is real?

What is real is our background practices, I think - what Heidegger called "being." Yet these background practices are not exactly "sane" or "insane." They are the how, the how by which we navigate the world. You would not call a painting "sane" or "insane," because we don't really think about paintings in that way. Similarly, our background practices are, and we can change them over time, but to relegate them to the categories "sane" and "insane" is to reduce them unnecessarily or misconstrue them or misunderstand them. Our background practices are social. But to understand these practices, I think you have to be able to work within the "space of reasons," which is a phrase from the philosopher Wilfred Sellars.

So could we say that reality shows up when we are operating from the space of reasons? Or something like that? Or that reality is constituted by our background practices? I think the latter makes more sense than the former. Saying this, I think we can say interesting things about reality, thick things, contra Rorty. But we have to do this through our notion of being, of background practices, and not through "the space of reasons," which does not have room enough, it seems to me, for art, for poetry, for poeisis, though it still is a helpful starting point. We need concepts that orient us, that help us understand where we are and what we are doing. Yet I think the "space of reasons," is one such concept, because we can then talk about normative space, which can in turn help us talk about psychotic space. For psychotic space is not normative; and saying that is probably better than saying psychosis is less meaningful than sanity, which I stupidly just said two paragraphs ago.

Psychosis is not normative. But when we say this, we have to beware of idealizing psychosis, since people hear "psychosis is not normative" and immediately think of there being something heroic about it, because it is not normative. But this, in turn, is the height of lunacy! Why?

Rorty used to always criticize a "convergent theory of truth." He wanted his truth to be closer to an understanding of freedom as divergence. But when we live normatively, in the space of reasons, there is a kind of convergence. It is not a homogenous convergence, but it is a convergence, and it happens because we do share norms, we share rules, to invoke Wittgenstein. And because we share rules, there is a certain kind of convergence that occurs when we are living in the Sellarsian space of reasons.

I suppose, in the end, that Heidegger probably had it more right than Rorty or Wittgenstein when he argued that reality is the clearing, though. Why? Well, I suppose the sheer fact that I moved from insanity to sanity suggests that the clearing is real, that there is a kind of possibility that inheres in all our acts, a possibility that is pretheoretical and preconceptual, that gives birth to what we do and how we are, and that in the end of the day our lives are more practical than theoretical, more tied to coping with the clearing than necessarily thinking about it. I started this blog post talking about reality, and I'll end by saying that psychosis is a world, but it takes place against the backdrop of the world. Yet the world is, I would argue with Heidegger, a world, since the world itself changes, as it did from ancient times to medieval times to modern times, for example. (I'm reading Charles Taylor A Secular Age currently, which describes these changes in wonderfully granular detail.) But the fact that the world is a world does not mean relativism, does not mean that psychosis, because it is a world, is just as...normative (meaningful?) as the world. It only means that we live in a unified (fragmented) world, and we can change it best through working in the space of reasons, through exploring the meaning(s) of normativity, and through using our imaginations to redescribe (thanks Rorty), er, reality.