Do Psychological Disorders Threaten the Philosophical Value of Inter-subjective Agreement?
In this post, I will argue that abnormal psychology, because of our schemas--because of our intersubjective majority agreement on philosophical conceptions of humanity--can create issues for philosophical inquiry, both for how philosophical inquirers with psychological disorders are viewed by others, as well as for the fundamental deviations from a norm of methods of inquiry.
Due to its commonality and my relatively extensive knowledge on it, I will discuss abnormal psychology primarily through the lens of depression, and because this post is the second part to another which presented the possibility that inherent in Michael Cholbi’s essay was the implication that Mersault is psychopathic or depressed or has comorbidity of the two, and that he is therefore somehow inhuman.
https://philofdeath.blogspot.com/2019/04/cholbi-on-mersault-humanity-of-mersault.html
This apparent implication in Cholbi’s essay is a testament to how people (how philosophical inquirers) with psychological disorders are sometimes viewed by others. They are lent less philosophical credence because it is believed that there is something altogether too fundamentally different about them for their them to arrive at the same conclusions as anyone else.
How do psychological disorders change philosophical inquiry for the disordered individual? Firstly, it should be noted that they may, in fact, philosophize in a way that is fundamentally different to neurotypical individuals, but I argue that humanity comes in many forms, and that these individuals are therefore no less human than anyone else, even if they have known no other state, and most disorders are transient to some extent anyway.
Severe depression changes the way the depressed engages in philosophical inquiry because, ultimately, philosophy is the application of procedure a la the scientific method but to abstract concepts. Therefore, if the depressed party has different conceptions of abstract concepts foundational to most philosophical inquiry (as, of course, they often do), then they are acting upon entirely different fundamental premises than the majority of humanity.
The precise manner of this difference in premises lies in the premises which all Hedonist arguments and almost all Stoic arguments about value are based off of, and in the premises which most of all other arguments about value are based off of as well. That is, to someone with severe and chronic clinical depression, there is no point in basing one’s philosophy on premises wherein pleasure is good and suffering is bad if one is almost entirely incapable of deriving pleasure from most all things and suffers greatly in their echo chamber of negativity at the slightest provocation.
If one values the role of intersubjective agreement in philosophy, recognizing the usefulness of the heuristic of drawing from the conclusions of other consciousnesses rather than deliberating for the same combined time as they all did for oneself, then this creates a real issue for one’s method of philosophical inquiry due to the major deviation from the intersubjective majority which depressed individuals can have. A way of imagining extending this reasoning to other psychological disorders is through analyzing schizophrenia’s interruptions to philosophical inquiry; if one is delusional, they can certainly not be logical, and even if they can draw valid logical inferences, if they hallucinate, they may have too poor a grip on reality to draw any completely logically sound conclusions from possibly-imagined evidence in the physical world.
Due to its commonality and my relatively extensive knowledge on it, I will discuss abnormal psychology primarily through the lens of depression, and because this post is the second part to another which presented the possibility that inherent in Michael Cholbi’s essay was the implication that Mersault is psychopathic or depressed or has comorbidity of the two, and that he is therefore somehow inhuman.
https://philofdeath.blogspot.com/2019/04/cholbi-on-mersault-humanity-of-mersault.html
This apparent implication in Cholbi’s essay is a testament to how people (how philosophical inquirers) with psychological disorders are sometimes viewed by others. They are lent less philosophical credence because it is believed that there is something altogether too fundamentally different about them for their them to arrive at the same conclusions as anyone else.
How do psychological disorders change philosophical inquiry for the disordered individual? Firstly, it should be noted that they may, in fact, philosophize in a way that is fundamentally different to neurotypical individuals, but I argue that humanity comes in many forms, and that these individuals are therefore no less human than anyone else, even if they have known no other state, and most disorders are transient to some extent anyway.
Severe depression changes the way the depressed engages in philosophical inquiry because, ultimately, philosophy is the application of procedure a la the scientific method but to abstract concepts. Therefore, if the depressed party has different conceptions of abstract concepts foundational to most philosophical inquiry (as, of course, they often do), then they are acting upon entirely different fundamental premises than the majority of humanity.
The precise manner of this difference in premises lies in the premises which all Hedonist arguments and almost all Stoic arguments about value are based off of, and in the premises which most of all other arguments about value are based off of as well. That is, to someone with severe and chronic clinical depression, there is no point in basing one’s philosophy on premises wherein pleasure is good and suffering is bad if one is almost entirely incapable of deriving pleasure from most all things and suffers greatly in their echo chamber of negativity at the slightest provocation.
If one values the role of intersubjective agreement in philosophy, recognizing the usefulness of the heuristic of drawing from the conclusions of other consciousnesses rather than deliberating for the same combined time as they all did for oneself, then this creates a real issue for one’s method of philosophical inquiry due to the major deviation from the intersubjective majority which depressed individuals can have. A way of imagining extending this reasoning to other psychological disorders is through analyzing schizophrenia’s interruptions to philosophical inquiry; if one is delusional, they can certainly not be logical, and even if they can draw valid logical inferences, if they hallucinate, they may have too poor a grip on reality to draw any completely logically sound conclusions from possibly-imagined evidence in the physical world.
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