A Brief Note on the Psychology of Philosophy

I think, therefore I'm ill

 

I. 

 

After a recent 6/20 presentation [1], someone in the audience surprised me by saying that she didn't really wish to address the philosophical aspects of the subject (mourning), as whenever she started to think about such ideas they made her feel unwell. 

 

This raises a question that the London-based writer Sam Woolfe discussed in an interesting blog post a couple of years back: Can Philosophy Harm Your Mental Health? [2]

 

Obviously, the answer is yes - what would be the point of it otherwise? However, I'd like here to briefly pick up on Woolfe's work on the relationship between psychological traits (if they exist) and philosophical beliefs (if that isn't an oxymoron). 

 

 

II.  

 

Although I'm wary of turning philosophy into just another all too human discipline rooted in the personality and biography of the practitioner, I have to acknowledge that Nietzsche would often do this in an attempt to expose the prejudices of philosophers and demonstrate how rationality is a peculiar abberation that has grown out of unreason (i.e., the unconscious forces, flows, fears, and desires of the body) [3].  

 

However, to conclude that philosophy is simply the attempt to turn the universe into a home for man by ascribing moral logic to it via an exploration of one's own temperament - as the neo-Platonic philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch concludes - is, ironically, too depressing a thought. 

 

Ultimately, I think Ray Brassier is right to argue that philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit and that its nihilistic destiny is to acknowledge the fact that thinking has interests that do not coincide with the feelings of the philosopher (nor, indeed, with his life and wellbeing) [4]. Whilst it might be fun, therefore, to look for correlations between psychological traits and philosophical beliefs, there's more important work to be done by those courageous (or perhaps crazy) enough to do it. 

 

 

III.

 

Having said that, like Woolfe, I found it interesting to discover from the work of David Yaden and Derek Anderson [5] that those who, like me, subscribe to a model of hard determinism tend to rank higher on the depression/anxiety index [6]

 

I've certainly been feeling fed up lately and perhaps that is due (in part at least) to my philosophical pessimism. However, I'd rather be down in the dumps but intellectually honest, than happy and full of false hope as a result of only reading optimistic authors who pangloss over the tragic character of existence. 

 

And, who knows, just as one can eventually transform suffering into a form of passion via which one discovers bliss, perhaps we might also transform the darkest depression and profoundest pessimism into a form of fröhliche Wissenschaft. As Woolfe notes, "it is certainly possible and consistent to live a happy, joyful, and meaningful life while taking philosophical pessimism seriously".

 

So, my advice is keep reading Schopenhauer and Cioran, invent new reasons to live each day and, when stuck in a hole, just keep digging and discover for yourself whether there's any truth in the China syndrome. 

 

For even if Woolfe is right to conclude that some philosophical ideas - such as antinatalism, solipsism, or existential absurdism - may contribute to or worsen poor mental health [7], so what? I sometimes think better madness (or at least a few sleepless nights) than the bourgeois model of sanity (or common sense) we are expected to preserve. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the TTA Events page for an abstract to the talk 'In Praise of Mourning' (presented at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club, on 6 July 2023): click here.  

 

[2] Sam Woolfe, 'Can Philosophy Harm Your Mental Health?' on samwoolfe.com

      Whilst I'm not sure we'd agree on all that much, I admire the fact that Woolfe has maintained a blog since 2012 (the same year that Torpedo the Ark began) and that he describes himself as a writer with "a penchant for complex and challenging subjects that involve a multitude of perspectives".  

 

[3] See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In §6 of the first chapter of this work - 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers' - he famously writes: 

      

"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir [...]" 

      

I am using R. J. Hollingdale's translation of this work (Penguin Books, 1990).  

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xi. 

 

[5] See David B. Yaden and Derek E. Anderson, 'The psychology of philosophy: Associating philosophical views with psychological traits in professional philosophers', Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 34, Issue 5 (Taylor & Francis, 2021), pp. 721-755. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2021.1915972

[6] As Woolfe points out, for those who wish to posit a link between determinism and mental illness, it makes sense that a lack of belief in free will can be associated with depression, given that the latter is often characterised by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.

 

[7] What Woolfe actually says is this: 

 

"I would not go so far as to say that reading or studying philosophy is likely to be the major defining cause of a mental disorder. But I am open to the possibility that some philosophical ideas - and philosophising itself - may contribute to, worsen, or vindicate poor mental health." 

 

The fact that he adds the idea of vindication is certainly striking and something readers might like to consider for themselves.

Requiem pour un con (Was Jacques Prévert a Jerk?)

Jacques Prévert: Je ne suis pas un con!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the idiomatic expressions that I hate most is: It takes one to know one. 

 

Used by someone who wishes to point out that what they're accused of being is something which also characterises the accuser, it seems a particularly lame form of comeback; the sort of childish retort that only an individual lacking in wit or intelligence would say.    

 

However, I have to admit that when I first read the title of Michel Houellebecq's short piece 'Jacques Prévert is a jerk' [a] this was the first thing that came to mind, and, having now read the text, I'm still not convinced this is a fair thing to call one of France's most celebrated poets and screenwriters. 

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm not a devoted reader of M. Prévert, nor particularly knowledgeable about his life. But I do like some of the verses in Paroles (1946), particularly 'Déjeuner du matin' - Il a mis le café / Dans la tasse ...etc. [b] 

 

That certain intellectuals often looked down on Prévert (and his sentimentalité as they saw it) only makes me admire him a little bit more. As does the fact that he infuriated André Breton, by describing him as the high priest or pope of Surrealism after the latter expelled him from the group for not taking art seriously enough.    

 

Further, Prévert should be admired for writing against the collaborationist Vichy government during the War years, helping Jewish friends, and relaying messages for members of the Resistance, whilst never belonging to any political party himself, or feeling the need to posture like some of his contemporaries who trumpeted their own activities and commitments.    

 

 

III.

 

So, what exactly is Houllebecq's problem with Prévert? 

 

Well, in a nutshell, he seems to resent the latter's enormous success and blame him for the "repulsive poetic realism" which "continues to wreak havoc" upon French cinema. 

 

Houellebecq writes:

 

"Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom [...] He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises [...] Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert - especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed."       

 

Nor does Houellebecq care for the optimism which Prévert displays in his work; "faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit" which is, he says, boundlessly stupid and nauseating at times. Better off, he suggests, embracing Emil Cioran's pessimism. 

 

Push comes to shove, I don't disagree with this, but that needn't prevent one from listening to Yves Montand sing 'Les Feuilles mortes'. For as even Houellebecq concedes, we all need something to relax to ...    

 

And if Prévert's lyrics are a bit sickly sweet and his pun-ridden poetry mediocre - "so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it" - surely that just makes him a bad writer, not necessarily un con as Houellebecq says. However, the latter is insistent on this point and so I shall give him the last word:     

"If Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically an idiot."

Notes

 

[a] This text by Michel Houellebecq was first published as 'Jacques Prévert est un con' in Lettres françaises, No. 22 (July 1992). I am using the English translation by Andrew Brown that appears in Interventions 2020, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 1-3, even though I'm not entirely happy with the translation of the French term con with the (American-sounding) word jerk. 

 

[b] The English version of this poem, 'Breakfast', can be found in Jacques Prévert, Paroles, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (City Lights Publishers, 2001). Or click here to read on hellopoetry.com 

 

 

Musical bonus number one: Serge Gainsbourg, 'La Chanson de Prévert', from the album L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961).       One of Gainsbourg's most popular songs, it was inspired by 'Les Feuilles mortes', written by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, for the film Les Portes de la nuit (dir. Marcel Carné, 1946). Click here for the 2014 remastered version.

 

Musical bonus number two: Serge Gainsbourg, 'Requiem pour un con', released as a single in 1968 from the soundtrack to the film Le Pacha (dir. Georges Lautner, 1968), it caused a good deal of fuss at the time, with censors judging the lyrics obscene and scandalous. 

      There's no reason to imagine that the track was inspired by Jacques Prévert, but the title of Michel Houellebecq's critique of the latter obvioulsy makes one think of this song. Click here for the original '68 version and/or here for the 1991 remix.    

 

 

Ce billet a été écrit avec l'aide de Sophie Stas à qui je suis reconnaissant. 

 

 

Caitlin Doughty: Death Becomes Her

Caitlin Doughty 

Photo by Juliette Bates

LA-based queen of the alternative funeral scene and founder of The Order of the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, is a much admired, much respected, and much loved figure in thanatological circles. Her sometimes amusing, often shocking lessons from the crematorium - published as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - may not carry the philosophical weight of Heidegger's reflections on Dasein's angst-ridden confrontation with the void of non-being, but they are, in a way, just as crucial.

For they ultimately form part of the same wider project: A radical rethinking of our mortality and the practices surrounding our deaths; reclaiming the latter from those who would deny us access to the truth of being and the opportunity to ontologically grasp our own finitude by making death into something stereotyped and sentimental, rather than a thing of authentic joy and fundamental source of freedom (a liberating line of flight and inhuman becoming, rather than a judgement which condemns). 

Death is not the opposite or the end of life, so much as a violent reconciliation with the material world; a return to the actual as Nietzsche writes. And Doughty, to her great credit, is insistent that we face up to this fact and admit that, sooner or later, we are all going to die and the atoms that compose us chaotically disperse back into the universe. More than this, she encourages us to refamiliarise ourselves directly with the corpse. Perhaps not with the same degree of intimacy as she has experienced, but certainly to be on far better terms than we are presently in a world in which dead bodies are kept on ice behind stainless-steel doors and chemically embalmed so as to be made at least semi-presentable and semi-acceptable (not too gross looking, not too foul-smelling).

There's certainly nothing glamourous about corpses. Despite what certain poets and necrophiles might think, dead people "look very, very dead" [115] - i.e., horrific. But surely we needn't stigmatize them, or turn them into the stuff of nightmares and subject to taboo. When we become mad with fear and allow our revulsion to become irrational terror (zombie hysteria), then it's always a waste of sane human consciousness, as D. H. Lawrence says.

Thanks, however, to the medicalization and Disneyfication of death this is precisely what has happened. If, in the past, when death was a common daily occurrence and corpses were regularly viewed in public spaces, people became somewhat desensitized to suffering and bad odours, today we are overly-squeamish and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of mortality; the screams, the smells, the soiled sheets, etc. We want what Doughty terms direct disposal in which everything is taken care of online, with no fuss. Doughty challenges this - and I respect her for it. And I second her call for an active "interaction with death" [114] in the belief that corpses "keep the living tethered to reality" [168].

Now, let's be clear: I'm not advocating the re-opening of the city morgues and the re-staging of death-as-spectacle which, as Doughty reminds us, was immensely popular in Paris in the late 19th century. Nor do I think we should cook and eat our dead relatives, like members of the Wari' people. Neither morbid voyeurism nor mortuary cannibalism are the answer. But, somehow, we need to get back in touch with one another and with our dead. As a culture, we need to embrace death and be proud (rather than slightly sad, slightly bored, slightly embarrassed) witnesses of that moment when our loved ones take their leave and miraculously burst like Bernard Shaw's mother, "'into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame'" [64].

An atheist at heart, Doughty nevertheless realises the importance of ceremony and ritual even within a secular culture. If the old ways, historically tied to religious beliefs, have become untenable, she's all for creating new methods of body disposal that are relevant to the way we live (and die) today and "inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition" [216] via the composition of their very own Ars Moriendi, written with "bold, fearless strokes" [234].

All of this is excellent, I think, and I fully support Doughty in her efforts. Indeed, my only criticism of Doughty's book is similar to my criticism of Mary Roach's Stiff (2003); the writing style is just a little too folksy and upbeat for my tastes. I appreciate she's American and therefore culturally predisposed to this kind of thing, but to see the great European thinker and essayist Emil Cioran flippantly dismissed as a Negative Nancy is more than a little irritating. In wanting to revalue our thinking on death, Doughty seems willing at times to strip it of all darkness and negativity (of its tragic pessimism, of its obscenity, of its monstrous character). The book could do with just a little more nihilism and a little less homespun sappiness.

Having said that, it's encouraging that she openly regrets her youthful ambition of putting the fun back into funerals and recognises that holding celebration of life ceremonies sans corpse or any act of mourning - just the deceased's favourite records playing while everyone sips fruit punch - seems akin to "putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one" [64].                  
    
Doughty, we can conclude, is both a smart cookie and a good egg. And she's doing sterling work; torpedoing the ark of the corporate funeral industry and teaching people that death becomes us all if we learn to affirm it. May she live a good and happy life and succeed in all her undertakings. And then may the animals of the forest devour her body with relish ...   
         

See: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016). All page numbers in the above text refer to this paperback edition. 

Visit: The Order of the Good Death web page: click here.