If You Can't Think Yourself Sane

Certain types of talking therapy are effective for certain mental illnesses. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy is often effective in treating for depression, ADHD, addiction, and other disorders. However, more severe disorders like schizophrenia are not well treated by CBT or other types of talk therapy (unless paired with e.g. antipsychotic medication).

This is intuitively obvious, but has troubling implications for the limits of philosophy, which is in a way a type of talking therapy. Philosophy seeks to use reason to explore reality, to think our way to truths. The limits on what talking therapy can do to treat disconnects between beliefs and reality also suggest limits on the philosophical exploration of reality.

Because of the dualist roots of our concept of mind, there’s an unstated assumption in philosophical reasoning that proper thinking can get us to the truth, and that a convincing argument about something is a test of its truth. But if we also accept that some individuals simply can’t think themselves sane, why should we assume that a ‘typical’ mind can access all truths through thinking? It’s quite possible that there remain certain questions on which we cannot think our way to sanity any more than the schizophrenic can think their way out of their delusions. And if that were the case, the failure could be invisible to us in principle.

I don’t think that at all. You have to establish that first, which you can’t, because…

There is already too much evidence to the contrary.

Show me. Psychiatrists (and priests and family members and rogue philosophers) try to help patients do this every day, they try many different techniques, and none reliably resolve serious mental illness. If you’re skeptical specifically about schizophrenia, what about dementia or Alzheimer’s?

Take, for instance, the ongoing dialogue between E and Itchy. Let Itchy be the ‘priest’ who’s attempting a religio-therapeutic approach to helping E.

What has happened? What are our observations?

E has fallen even deeper into his ‘condition’. This is due not only to organic circumstances in his brain (neurotransmitter dysfunction) and his unsocialized living conditions, but also to the nature of Itchy’s condition and the type of language and ideas that result from it. In effect, we have one functioning soft-schizo trying to help another.

As Carleas suggests, no amount of philosophy will ever snap these two out of their straightjackets.

You still owe your mom an apology before your opinion will ever matter even the slightest, mister.

But then why should we expect it to snap anyone out of anything? We too have neurotransmitters and living conditions, are they any less determinative of our beliefs?

Put that way, it shades into similar arguments about free will, but that’s not the point I want to make. I mean to suggest that our ability to recognize good reasons is fundamentally suspect, because we know that there are people for who reason is insufficient to inform them about reality. When Descartes says, “I think therefore I am”, he takes as a given that he is able to reason. But that isn’t a given, and we have reason to doubt it. Our powers of reason are suspect.

The inability to recall or communicate information does not need to be talked/thought back to sanity, but certain mental exercises (which probably involve talking) are helpful.

A medical condition does not make someone morally unhealthy or deprived of meaningfulness. Morality/meaning has to involve reason/choice (consent). Moral imbalance/privation involves an intentional loss (rejection, abandonment) of moral compass— or an undeveloped/immature moral compass. [A moral compass is the inner recognition that every person is an other that is a unique self, and acknowledging this (respecting their consent-respecting consents) in one’s thoughts, values, and behaviors.]

That sort of imbalance you can definitely talk someone back from, but they have to be willing. Asking curious questions that subtly hint at the inconsistencies leading to the loss/underdevelopment of compass is the only thing you can do for/about someone who is rejecting or not fully aware of their compass. Unless they are unjustifiably harming others.

But a smarty like Ecmandu, who has learned the art of wiggling out of one inconsistency and slipping into another… you gotta be smarter to really pin him to the floor long enough to win the match. Good luck with that.

“Why couldn’t the world that concerns us—be a fiction? And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’—couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction, too?” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 34, translation Zimmern.)

Hopefully you both see the absurdity there. Is Carleas being absurd on purpose?

Was Nietzsche, or had he (have y’all) abandoned reason?

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I see how it ends in absurdity, i.e. a chain of reasoning that undermines reason. Is that what you’re thinking?

And that absurdity can be avoided by being careful about what we think we’re proving: first, it’s a proof of uncertainty rather than of falseness falseness; and second, it doesn’t need to create uncertainty about all our reasoning, but can be limited to reasoning ‘at the margin’, e.g. where people disagree about chains of reasoning.

There’s also the possibility of getting supporting evidence from outside mere thinking, e.g. by testing our thoughts against reality. I’m not sure if this idea works, because our perceptions have the same problem as our reasoning, but if perception and reason have different margins, then we can use each to test the other.

“But a smarty like Ecmandu, who has learned the art of wiggling out of one inconsistency and slipping into another… you gotta be smarter to really pin him to the floor long enough to win the match.”

This comes with the delusion package you guys got. You two feel like you’re arguing about stuff, clearing up and sorting out conceptual problems, making sense of things, etc. Doing ‘philosophy’. In reality, a good 90 percent of the time, you two are engaged in exchanging unintelligible nonsense that can’t even be wrong because it’s so contorted and confused.

What you guys would need to do (and you can’t, obviously) is step out of yourselves and then come into one of your discussions as another person to observe how ridiculous you two sound.

And now you know what it’s like listening to how you talk to your mom.

High five, @Ecmandu! Our work here is done.