This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon

20th February 2012

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Banishing Despair

From Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to Cornell West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy, there is ample documentation of the utilitarian character of American life and the extent to which the spirit of philosophy is alien to American life. In so far as scientific culture has been overwhelmingly American in its character, because of the dominance of American universities in the production of “big science,” this partly explains what I have called Fashionable Anti-Philosophy.   

This anti-philosophical anti-intellectualism has had consequences for mental health in the US, and in so far as mental health is assimilated to the medical model generally, and is contextualized by the medical-industrial complex, universal aspects of the human condition, such as melancholia, inevitably become explicated in terms of physical pathology and biological etiology.  

In forcing all forms of mental despair to fit the model of mental illness, and refusing to acknowledge the possibility existential or philosophical despair of a purely intellectual nature, the American evasion of philosophy forces all forms of despondency into a cut-and-dried pattern of biological pathology. (Searle’s biological naturalism as a philosophy of mind, even gives philosophical expression to this tendency.)

The medical model of despair also suggests that every mental pathology has a treatment, and possibly also a cure. But what cure can there be for the fact that we are born to suffer and to die?

In order to “cure” the episodic and transient melancholia that is native to the human condition, and which everyone feels in those moments when their vital energies are at a low ebb, we would need to change the human condition itself, and there are definite limits on the extent to which we can change the human condition. 

Indeed, in order to eliminate the possibility of existential despair one would have to eliminate the very possibility of Miserable and Unhappy Civilizations, which might well come about as a result of what comes after civilization, but these latter concepts constitute civilization as an historical idea; civilization as a political idea is problematic. Human agency has its limits, and in fact the same limits to human agency that make it difficult if not impossible to alter civilization by political fiat also are the source of transient despair and despondency. After all, did not Alexander the Great cry because he had no more worlds to conquer? (Or, in the alternative version, because, of the infinity of worlds, he had not conquered even one?)

Part of defending the dignity of human nature consists in the defending the dignity of human suffering, and one form that human suffering takes is existential despair. That is to say, as human beings we have an obligation to defend the dignity even of the Underground man, whether or not we are ourselves underground men.

Tagged: despairdespondencyHofstadterCornell Westmedical modelmental illness

  1. geopolicraticus posted this