Offerings, Plans, Reflections
Margaret Cavendish; Thinking like a Woman; Sartre/Szasz on mental illness
Dear all,
It has been a nice, quiet week here at Philosopher HQ. This was especially appreciated as one of my dogs just had to have a leg amputated due to bone cancer, so getting him confident on his new “tripawd” configuration is taking up much of my time right now. The operation went fine and he is doing surprisingly well, so that’s all a big relief!
Big congratulations to Dan Taylor, one of our editorial board members and writer of “On Chess”, one of the most popular essays we have published. He has just been made one of the New Generation Thinkers for 2023. So you can expect to hear a lot of him on BBC Radio 3 in the year ahead (if you like that kind of thing). Also nice to see another philosopher, Andrew Cooper, in the line-up (he is researching the work of Amalia Holst, a Wollstonecraft-like figure in the history of German philosophy).
This week, we have posted an essay on Margaret Cavendish, we are hosting an event exploring the role of four women thinkers, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and finally Rachel Doyle reflects on the work of controversial anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz through the lens of Sartre’s existentialism.
Offerings
Your Sunday Read
“Otherworldly Science: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of the Experimental Method”. This delightful essay by Peter West looks at Margaret Cavendish’s response to Robert Hooke’s 1665 book, Micrographia which introduced the world to microscopic images. For Cavendish, the kinds of “new worlds” opened up by Hooke, and the experimental method more generally, raised important questions about what purpose these otherworldly scientific journeys actually serve. As Peter puts it, “Why think that information about ‘new worlds’ can inform us about our own?”
This week, we also uploaded a new essay from our “New Basics” series: “Other” by Kris Sealey traces a history of practices of “othering” via modernity’s entanglement with anti-black, imperial violence.
Event - Tuesday 11th at 11am PST/2pm EST/7pm UK
“How to Think Like a Woman”: In this conversation with Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting (editors of the hugely influential 2020 book The Philosopher Queens), Regan Penaluna will discuss the women philosophers who rekindled her love of philosophy and awakened her feminist consciousness, including Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft, outlining an alternative history of philosophy as well as how these thinkers aided her in her own search for love and truth.
If you missed Monday’s conversation between Wendy Brown and Jana Bacevic, “Nihilistic Times”, you can watch it here.
Plans
Everything seems to be either at the offering stage or the pre-plan stage at the moment, so nothing to report here!
Reflections
Rachel Doyle sent over this reflection a while back. As we fast approach our “What is Mental Illness?” panel discussion (more on that next week), it seemed like the right time to publish it.
Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre are both typically labeled as “libertarians”, a philosophical position that denies determinism by extricating humans from the causal-deterministic nexus. Sartre is notoriously unimpressed by those who “take refuge in determinism” if their freedom is perceived as too burdensome. As he puts it in Existentialism is a Humanism: “Those who hide from this total freedom…with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards”.
Quite what it means for humans to exist outside of a causal-deterministic nexus is a matter that I shall not pursue here, although many critics of the idea suggest that it would be an experience of such disorientating randomness that there would be no greater experience of freedom than in a fully deterministic universe! Rather, libertarianism may more usefully to be understood as an attitude, a way of being in the world. The libertarian is, in short, a greater lover of freedom than the determinist, more imbued with a sense of possibility and a feeling that the world and people can and do change in unexpected and extraordinary ways. The libertarian thus denies any position that tends to undermine our sense of freedom (and moral responsibility), irrespective of whether the current weight of empirical or analytic evidence tends to point more towards determinism.
Szasz frequently maintains that his seminal slogan, “mental illness is a myth”, is an analytic truth, i.e. a truth of reason and not a truth that is provable or disprovable by empirical methods. For Szasz, the very idea of a mental illness is an oxymoron, similar to terms like “married bachelor” or “four-sided triangle”. For Szasz, a mind cannot be diseased or ill, only a brain. If mental illness is indeed brain disease, then psychiatry becomes subsumed within neurology; but as long as psychiatry and psychology assert that the mind is ill, Szasz is on call to denounce such endeavours as ideology and pseudo-science, and to demand their separation from the realm of medicine.
Rather than implying that the mind is a separate substance from the body, Szasz makes the more modest claim that conflating the brain and the mind amounts to what Gilbert Ryle famously termed a “category error”. For Szasz, mind “is a verb not an entity” and “it is a fundamental mistake to treat the term ‘mind’ as if its referent were a biological concept or entity”, while elsewhere he argues that since “the mind is not a part of the body, is not an organ – since the mind is an abstract noun that lacks a concrete referent – it cannot be sick”. This distinction between bodily and mental illnesses gets right to the heart of Szasz’s relentless critique of psychiatry. For in the attribution of the term illness to what he terms “problems in living”, we impose through the methods of the natural sciences used by medicine a causal, deterministic structure onto human behaviour so that we “mechanomorphise” or “thingify” persons and come to see the human as “a defective machine”. In so doing, we “dehumanize man by denying...the existence, or even the possibility, of personal responsibility”.
For Szasz, “to classify human behaviour is to constrain it”, and so is an act of bad faith. The entire field of psychiatry is thus taken to be a hotbed of bad faith. Szasz argues that a psychiatric label not only describes the patient’s behaviour, but also prescribes his future conduct. Like the waiter in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness who is held in bad faith by the expectations of his customers, so, Szasz argues, is the psychiatric patient “thingified” and rendered predictable by his diagnosis. However this is not necessarily a process to which the patient will object:
To be captured in a category, to be diagnosed as this or that kind of person, is here seen as an essential deprivation of personal freedom. And, of course, that it is. But most people find their freedom too much to bear. They escape it into the security of a fixed identity.
We can see in Sartre’s analysis of sadness and melancholy a strong crossover with Szasz’s position. Sartre suggests that if the universe is experienced as bleak:
...we naturally draw back into ourselves, we “efface ourselves” ... and it is precisely in order to protect ourselves from its frightful, illimitable monotony that we make some place or other into a “shelter” ... a bleak wall, a little darkness to screen us from that bleak immensity.
Sadness becomes a refuge, a role in which we have invested, and to which we return when it is needed or wanted. Sartre rejects the idea of the passivity of our emotional engagement with the world, arguing that “during emotion, it is the body which, directed by the consciousness, changes its relationship with the world so that the world should change its qualities”, including, for example, the way that the world is experienced in terms of possibilities for action. Sartre considers the “emotional crisis” experienced by a melancholic patient to be “an abandonment of responsibility, by means of a magical exaggeration of the difficulty of the world”.
It is notable that Sartre came to reject this picture of freedom. Perhaps Simone de Beauvoir told him to grow up and stop ontologizing his relatively friction-free existence as a white, wealthy, able-bodied, educated young man in a racist and misogynistic society. Szasz, by contrast, never changed. Like Ayn Rand, a fellow migrant from Eastern Europe and communism to the United States and freedom, he endorsed a model of freedom that was exaggerated to the point of absurdity. It is difficult for me to understand why anyone still takes him seriously.
Rachel Doyle is psychiatric nurse from Scotland. Her philosophical interests include philosophy of psychiatry, critical theory, and modern European philosophy.
Ending
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Wishing you all a lovely Sunday, wherever you are.
Anthony Morgan
Editor
Quite the banquet ! My appetite is whetted. What wine, brandy, cognac or whisky goes with Sartre ?
I'm getting caught up on Baruch Spinoza & I have a ways to go.