Ordinary language inherits an unsolved problem of philosophy.

This letter is a piece of a larger essay I have been working on for a while. It starts with something ordinary: why so many people are exhausted.

People are wondering why they are exhausted, why social situations require so much effort, or why they cannot simply relax around other people. The question feels modern, but the way we talk about the answer is very old. Ontology is often most powerful when it does not appear as ontology at all: of course we come across psychological problems, and the arguments I make to myself I don’t see as arguments, as they are more confirmations and expressions of what I already know. We can begin to comprehend and experience (intellectually) the lived experience of exhaustion (embodied) in the very act of having to consider the explanation of what is happening in a conceptually rigorous manner, so that the reader might understand the link between proving semantic experience and validating it.

The Peculiar Relationship Implied by the Language

We ordinarily say that we have thoughts, feelings, anxiety, a body, perhaps even a mask, without noticing the peculiar relationship implied by the language. While each theory of intervention has its own manner of speaking about the same thing, the relationship shows up in the language itself: there is the one who reflects, and that which is reflected upon. I and my anxiety. I and my thoughts. I and my body. I and my mask. I and my authentic self.

These distinctions are so familiar that they usually present themselves simply as reality, as not notable considerations, or as merely ‘interesting’. But then we could comment further how what is interesting has become the focus, giving no attention to that which is interested: the person who is suffering from lack of motivation and general apathy. A very purposeful strategy indeed!

The Failure of Philosophical Accounting

Backing up into how such a theory might even be formulated, we might say that conventional philosophy took this assumption of reality and reduced everything to expressions of language, ala Kant. The reduction of philosophy to the knower, i.e., the person, linked to the knowing of an “extension” (Cartesian res extensa), i.e., experience, presented philosophy with the task of accounting for the connection between what had thus been divided: the thinker and that which was thought. This failure of philosophical accounting re-emerges in another form in the Neo-Kantian divisions nearly two centuries later.

Psychology inherited the divided pair without accounting for it. Supported by the Empirical tradition, it recouped the ‘whole’ of the Cartesian problem into a solution by assumption and assertion, merely rejecting what offended its sensibility. The assumption was justified through the Kantian phenomenalist method of propositional ontology, and that justification, resting on selective denial, is precisely what allowed the conception of mental disorders. The budding modern scientific view was thereby grounded theoretically in what it had chosen not to see. For how the clinical view was born of this, see Michel Foucault’s history of it.

Over the next century or so the various mental disorders developed upon the ‘singular’ conceptual platform of psychology generally put forth by Freud and his cohorts, which took their impetus from the notion that the mind behaves the way it does due to brain-nerve action, but must be treated from the standpoint of the mind such nerve actions are creating. What we see now is the process of the continuing failure of that concept, which was asserted upon the linking of the physical body (brain) to the conceptual world of consciousness (mind).

The evidence for the failure is not exotic. Psychiatric medication, while helpful, is essentially hit or miss: providers give the person something from an educated-guess flowchart and wait to see whether it works, by the reports of the patient. Science has a theory of why these medications work, but no confirmation that the theory addresses human physiology accurately; the guesswork itself is the admission. In the NIMH’s large STAR*D trial, only about a third of patients reached remission on the first medication, and the odds fell with each successive attempt. And yet the rhetoric of “chemical imbalance” persists among regular people and in how they understand their experience. A 2022 umbrella review of the serotonin hypothesis (Moncrieff et al., in the journal Molecular Psychiatry) found no consistent evidence for it, but the phrase keeps doing its work. It can contribute to a confirmation bias of having problems which otherwise might not exist or could be solved more readily, both from the indoctrination standpoint, being convinced one has a problem in this particular way, and from the physiological standpoint: tolerance, and so forth. The client is placed in a position of having their agency and self-knowledge taken away from them by their ‘own knowing’.

The Differend

The effective disconnect of knowledge from the experience of knowledge created the condition for what the 20th century postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard would call the differend.

The experience of ‘the differend’ manifests in expressed problems which surpass mere social-mechanical problems. A ‘differend’, for Lyotard, is the case where the wrong cannot be phrased in the language of the tribunal that judges it. Here, it is the difference between lived experience and the expression of that experience, which arises within the discourse of expression as this expression is taken within the Cartesian phenomenalist split to which the modern person is ethically obligated to adhere, e.g., inside and outside experiences. This can then very sensibly be known as what we call mental issues.

The theory of ‘mental disorders’ (a sort of asexual conception) co-spawned the first strictly correlated mental intervention called ‘psychoanalysis’. It was the first of such psychological theoretical babies, so to speak, and this conceptualization lasted for some 60 or so years before the holes began to weaken its conceptual scaffolding; the areas of denial were beginning to show. This then refers to a conceptual “lifespan”, which perhaps Thomas Kuhn would have referred to as a ‘paradigm’.

A Paradigm in Decline

Others have observed this behavior of science better than I can. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, describes how normal science defends its assumptions against change: resistance, inability or unwillingness to adapt, denial of the change in the human being’s relationship with things. Max Planck put it most bluntly: a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up familiar with it. Something like this is visible now in the clinical-medical view that once established the philosophical-conceptual basis for a sensible psychology, and the resistance it now shows as it declines.

The Rotary Motion of Drives

We might have a way to start to understand all this in the context of the typical propositional lifespan of phenomenological concepts, which develops out of the difference between the temporal moments preceding creation and the created material, through what Žižek, following Schelling, describes as the “rotary motion of drives”. I use ‘phenomenological’ here in two senses. In the first place, it means like what the philosophical school of that name would argue. But it also means, more broadly, having to do with what psychology posits. In simple, practical terms, the difference pried into here is between idea-worlds of known phenomena and the known things (in-themselves) of the universe.

According to Žižek (at least), regardless of what terms we use, there is always a tension formed during the primordial decision between the ideas of things and their supposed reference-objects: the tension of creation, or what erupts in the act of creating. It is this unsurpassable choice that establishes what Badiou might have called the ‘count of the multiple’, which is the conceptualization of time, or time itself. Time here then arises not within the concept but, as Heidegger might say, is the “work”: the experience of the concept’s relationship to the object. For Mental Health Philosophy, this work is the trajectory of motion in the universe to Be-itself. The experience here is really no different from what Žižek describes, in his reading of Schelling, as the rotary motion of the primordial drives prior to the act of decision, which is to say, from the Mental Health Philosophical orientation, the experience of the internal action of phenomenological redundancy.

The End of Exhaustion

It is not a difficult step to accord this description to how we usually think of mental issues. Mental issues have the person caught in a cycle of internal drives which prevent the person from actualizing themselves in reality, which is to say, to live the life they would otherwise want. When the ‘self-choice’ is made (what is psychologically represented by confidence, self-esteem, and so forth) by the person in an act which somehow dispels the confining rotary action that is by definition not chosen, or, the primordial act which cannot be said to be chosen, time begins. Which is to say, the person’s life actually begins. It is the act-choice which unburdens the person from the history that confines them, such that their knowledge is the accounting for all of their history as it is manifested presently, living, as they indeed are, the life they have before them. And the experience after the fact, which is to say, after the self-choice is made, cannot really explain why or how the person was unable to make such a choice. It is thus quite similar to an act of creation or an act of God, since any explanation as to why never adequately explains why the change should have occurred at that moment, but only that it did occur.

The Reversal

Here, then, the phenomenalist concept reaches the ground from which its transcendence arose. The human being involved with the psychological bid for the transcendent solution of idealized mental issues, for which the person is but a puppet, a subject of victimhood (à la François Laruelle), is returned to itself in the universe itself, the body that establishes objects known as in-themselves as they arise in the universe. What begins with Kant as the a priori condition of phenomenal experience persists, however, through psychology as a transcendence which continues to locate its ground within the phenomenal human being. Mental health itself, however, returns us to the actual ground: the human being in connection with the universe rather than enclosed within the rotary movement of its own phenomenal world. Transcendence does not thereby disappear but persists, for example, in the form of spiritual or religious ideals for cosmogenic and cosmological explanations, and even in those of modern science. The assumed and asserted psychological cause which spawns phenomenalist representations is thus reversed, such that instead of the idealized physical explanation of experience, the experience itself becomes the category by which every explanation has any relevancy at all, and for what context the person is living their life. It is in this reversal that mental health establishes itself, and Mental Health Philosophy finds its particular activity for the broader account, which thus inevitably validates what is happening in the knowing of things.

Which brings us back to the person from the beginning of this letter: the one wondering why social situations require so much effort, why relaxing around other people has become work. What I have done today is climb, from ordinary exhaustion down into the philosophical machinery to make it speakable. What that reversal means for the tired, exhausted person, down at the ground where they live, is next time.