This podcast accompanies the essay “Appendix to Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Mental Health.” (links to the papers at the end of this post below). Because the discussion is specifically concerned with mental health, I want to provide some context before you listen.

The podcast itself does not speak explicitly about mental health at every point. Instead, it addresses several philosophical ideas—the modern subject, presentation and representation, François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, the “in last instance,” and the victim. These terms can sound far removed from what we ordinarily mean when we talk about mental health. My point, however, is that they are directly relevant.

Philosophically, mental health is disciplinarily distinct from psychological problems because mental health accounts for psychological problems. That distinction is important to what follows.

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Why Mental Health Requires Philosophical Context

There seems to be little reason to talk about mental health unless there is, or could be, some kind of problem with it. Even consciousness is problematic. 

Even the idea of positive mental health carries the problem within it. Why identify something as healthy unless there is also the possibility of it being unhealthy? Why defend or promote mental health unless something about mental health can go wrong?

This is not merely a problem of terminology. It points toward the issue that the podcast—and the essays it summarizes—is attempting to frame.

Mental health philosophy brings this issue to the foreground. Rather than beginning with a psychological problem and asking how we can solve it, it also asks what is happening when we identify something as a problem in the first place.

François Laruelle, Non-Philosophy, and “in the Last Instance”

This is one reason François Laruelle’s non-philosophy is relevant, particularly his notion of “in the last instance.”

The last instance points toward a limit in our attempts to understand and correct our situation. Every time I identify a problem and attempt to overcome it, there is something about the situation that necessarily escapes the framework through which I have defined the problem.

In attempting to correct the problem, I may therefore also be denying something essential about the being involved in the situation.

Mental health philosophy includes the whole of this situation. It includes what is represented as the problem, the person who encounters the problem, the framework through which the problem becomes intelligible, and also what that framework necessarily excludes. From the conventional standpoint of mental health, that excluded element appears most obviously as the psychological problem.

The Victim and the Modern Subject

Laruelle also speaks of the “victim.” Here, victim should not be understood only in the everyday sense of someone who has suffered a particular harmful event. It describes something about the condition of the modern subject itself.

The modern subject exists through a certain kind of denial. It continually attempts to establish itself by identifying, explaining, and overcoming problems. Yet the very act of overcoming the problem repeats the structure that produced the problem as something requiring a solution.

In this sense, victimhood is another way of describing being subjected to.

This is why I call it the modern subject. It is not simply another problem that we can overcome. The attempt to overcome it is itself an expression of the same structure.

Phenomenalism, Correlationism, and Mental Health

This repetition is particularly relevant to mental health. The victim describes a kind of experience internal to the modern subject: I experience myself as subjected to a world that appears to stand over and against me.

Conventional philosophy has approached aspects of this situation through phenomenalism. More recently, speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux used the term “correlationism” to identify the philosophical assumption that we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, rather than either independently.

What Is a Subject?

It is also useful to clarify what I mean by subject. A subject is a term with a meaning.

If I say, for example, that the subject I am talking about is simply the human being, I have already made a philosophical move. I have selected one meaning of “subject” and treated it as though it exhausts what the subject is.

Something has been excluded in order to establish a definite object that can then become the basis of a problem—and potentially a solution.

Mental health philosophy includes this movement within its domain rather than simply accepting the resulting subject as its starting point.

For this reason, it does not need to make another ontological argument about what the human being really is. Instead, it can view ontological arguments themselves as modern subjects: meaningful representations of what is presented.

Representation, Mental Health, and the Last Instance

This brings us back to the distinction between what is presented and what is represented.

If we understand ourselves as caught entirely within representation, with no exit from it, then we are—by definition—subjected to powers through which we must understand ourselves. We become victims of structures over which we apparently have no control, while simultaneously attempting to discover how we might finally become ourselves within those structures.

From the standpoint of mental health philosophy, recognizing the last instance of the modern subject opens another possibility.

It is not simply another solution to the psychological problem. Rather, it allows us to notice the structure through which the problem, the solution, and the subject who needs the solution are being constituted.

In this sense, to recognize the last instance of the modern subject is to find mental health.

As I discuss throughout this blog and in my other work, mental health and psychological interventions function at this level—even when they do not explicitly describe themselves philosophically.

The podcast explores this situation in relation to consciousness and artificial intelligence. The concepts above provide the specifically mental-health context for that discussion and, I hope, make some of its terminology easier to approach.