common dense
“That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!”
—Bill Watterson
February 2011
“And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.”
—Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture, Ronin Pub, 1994, p. 37. (via amiquote)
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”
—Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.”
—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
“Richard Feynman on doubt and uncertainty
“If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we are going what the meaning of the universe is and so on then I think you can easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems. How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know because the whole spirit is to unders…well never mind that, anyway I don’t understand that…but anyhow…if you think of it though…I..the way i think of what we are doing is, we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we can about the world.
People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I am not. I am just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything so be it. That would be very nice discovery. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers and we just sick and tired of looking at the layers then that’s the way it is! But whatever way it comes out it’s nature, it’s there, and she’s going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it. If you said…but..the problem is why we do you find out more about it, if you thought that you are trying to find out more about it because you are going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question you may be wrong and may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of the nature.
But I don’t look it at…my interest in science is to simply find out about the world…and the more I find out and…I like to find out…and there are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we are able to do so many more things and apparently animals can do.
And other questions like that. Those are the mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them. So …altogether I can’t believe the special stories that’ve been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be…too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. The “earth,” He came to “the earth”, one of the aspects God came to “the earth!” mind you, and look at what’s out there…? how can we…? it isn’t in proportion…!
Anyway it’s no use to argue, I can’t argue. I am just trying to tell you why the scientific views that I have do have some affect on my beliefs. And also another thing has to do with the question of how do you find out if something is true? And if you have all these theories of the different religions and all different theories about the thing then you begin to wonder…once you start doubting… just like you are supposed to doubt, you asked me if science is true, no no we don’t know what is true…no no we don’t know, we are trying ……start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong, let us see, as soon as you do that you start sliding down an edge which is harder to recover from. And one…so with the scientific view or my father’s view that we should look to see what’s true and what may not be true, once you start doubting ……which I think, to me, is a very fundamental part of my soul is to doubt and to ask, when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.
You see, one thing, is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and then many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask, “Why we are here?” and what that question might mean. I might think about it a bit and then if I can’t figure it out then I go on to something else.
But I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t have to…i don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.” ” —Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, (transcript source)
“If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we are going what the meaning of the universe is and so on then I think you can easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems. How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know because the whole spirit is to unders…well never mind that, anyway I don’t understand that…but anyhow…if you think of it though…I..the way i think of what we are doing is, we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we can about the world.
People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I am not. I am just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything so be it. That would be very nice discovery. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers and we just sick and tired of looking at the layers then that’s the way it is! But whatever way it comes out it’s nature, it’s there, and she’s going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it. If you said…but..the problem is why we do you find out more about it, if you thought that you are trying to find out more about it because you are going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question you may be wrong and may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of the nature.
But I don’t look it at…my interest in science is to simply find out about the world…and the more I find out and…I like to find out…and there are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we are able to do so many more things and apparently animals can do.
And other questions like that. Those are the mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them. So …altogether I can’t believe the special stories that’ve been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be…too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. The “earth,” He came to “the earth”, one of the aspects God came to “the earth!” mind you, and look at what’s out there…? how can we…? it isn’t in proportion…!
Anyway it’s no use to argue, I can’t argue. I am just trying to tell you why the scientific views that I have do have some affect on my beliefs. And also another thing has to do with the question of how do you find out if something is true? And if you have all these theories of the different religions and all different theories about the thing then you begin to wonder…once you start doubting… just like you are supposed to doubt, you asked me if science is true, no no we don’t know what is true…no no we don’t know, we are trying ……start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong, let us see, as soon as you do that you start sliding down an edge which is harder to recover from. And one…so with the scientific view or my father’s view that we should look to see what’s true and what may not be true, once you start doubting ……which I think, to me, is a very fundamental part of my soul is to doubt and to ask, when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.
You see, one thing, is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and then many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask, “Why we are here?” and what that question might mean. I might think about it a bit and then if I can’t figure it out then I go on to something else.
But I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t have to…i don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.” ” —Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, (transcript source)
“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”
—Alan Watts
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.”
—Yogi Bhajan (via oceanofmind)
“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”
—Robert Anton Wilson
“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi
“Death is an undulation in consciousness. How would you know you’re alive unless you’ve once been dead?”
—Alan Watts, On Being God (via universoul)
“The scanning process of mans conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables the multi-dimensional processes of the universe.”
—Alan Watts
“
There are two kinds of games in the universe: finite games and infinite games. A finite game is played to win. Card games, poker rounds, games of chance, bets, sports such as football, board games such as Monopoly, races, marathons, puzzles, Tetris, Rubik’s Cube, Scrabble, sudoku, online games such as World of Warcraft, and Halo — all are finite games. The game ends when someone wins.
An infinite game, on the other hand, is played to keep the game going. It does not terminate because there is no winner.
” —Kevin Kelly (via wildcat2030)
Does Mental Health exist? The politics of consensus →
unconsciouskoine.tumblr.com
Where Mental Health is put at the service of public order, psychoanalysis tries to work out a place for each one’s own ‘craziness’. Where Mental Health tries to standardise desire to put the subject in step with the common ideals, psychoanalysis supports a claim of the right to the ‘not like everyone else’. Where Mental Health carries a trace of charity, psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, ‘decharitises’ [‘décharite’]and relieves the subject from the will of ‘the Other who wishes your good’. In effect, rather than vowing to put up with the world’s misery, the analyst comes to incarnate the cause of desire for the subject of the unconscious.
But why to put the very existence of Mental Health into question?
It is that the turns that have taken on the use of the term for a few decades are correlate to a disturbing dilution of the ‘psy’ clinic. Formerly, the confrontation between disciplines involved in the Mental Health was a source of a rigorous debate the co-ordinates of the scientific foundations of which were determined. The protagonists of this debate have not ceased to refine their clinical observations in order to found their arguments.
Today this debate is extinct. States have turned Mental Health into their affair; it is the political and economic co-ordination of their actions which is at the foreground. The figures representing the Other of Mental Health push towards a consensus there where formerly a debate of the scholars took place. Thus, in order to avoid teeth gnashing the DSM thinks itself to be ‘atheoretical’, and its drafting is measured on the scale of statistical norm and public opinion. Certain universities try to dilute the clinic of psychical suffering in the woolliness of ‘bio-psycho-social’. The definition of the Mental Health by the WHO in terms of ‘promotion of well-being’ and of ‘prevention of mental disorders’ extends its effects to everyone without any distinctions.
This consensus created an epistemic mist that moves Mental Health away from the real of the clinic. The idea of a mental disorder as objectifiable and curable moves away from the study of the symptom that combines the singular jouissance of the subject and its truth. The reference to ‘well-being’ is only a reduction of the virtues formerly promoted by the wisdoms to a hygienism that pretends to be scientific.
In this field, the woolliness is not without effects. Evaluation based on questionnaires is a parasite in the clinical encounter moved by speech and transference. The psychiatric nosography is transformed into a continuum that erases the differences between acute psychical suffering and the simple human condition. The market of psychotropic drugs doubtless benefits from this globalisation of the application field of Mental Health, becoming an ideal to attain. The cognitive-behavioural therapies, which snap at the subject of the unconscious, try to make an impact in the name of great efficacy demonstrated ‘scientifically’. We find ourselves faced with a clinical doctrine that claims that the ‘mental disorder’ is for everyone, while the unconscious is for no one. It follows that the cases presenting an acute suffering with a risk of passage to the act are often overlooked.
In Europe many practitioners resist this movement of dilution and keep on the psychoanalytical orientation. All measures are good in order to submit them to the epistemic and ethical liquidity that is set up: the call to the legislator and to the ‘scientific’ studies in order to discredit their formations and practices, and if this is not enough, denigration and even defamation.
As adherents of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we are among these practitioners. We do not give up either on our orientation or on the clinical rigour it requires. But we deplore the ravages committed in the name of Mental Health which deprived us of some serious interlocutors. Therefore, we do not claim a consensus, we claim a debate. Our question is: what does Mental Health mean today? And moreover: does it exist?
Gil Caroz - First European Congress of Psychoanalysis, here.
