Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 08:53:49 -0700 From: Mike Staples <mstaples-AT-argusqa.com> Subject: Re: Mind & Body, One More Time Michael Eldred wrote: > There’s nothing to prevent the body from being made into an object by > a certain > way of thinking, and this kind of thinking is what prevails today. As > I said to > Greg, I think it preferable to say that Dasein is essentially > embodied, and that > existence is essentially a ‘bodying’. A person is depressed. There is a mood that takes him over. At the same time there is a chemical thing going on in his head. We find the two are related. Does the mood "cause" the chemical thing, or does the chemical thing "cause" the mood? Suppose we forget about what "causes" what, and think about the depression. Now I am back to my old saw about goals. If it is the goal to get rid of the depression, there are two (at least) points of view: 1) One could approach the chemical thing...administer a drug, turn on an electrode, slice off a frontal lobe or, 2) One could approach the mood, with it's associated relationship to thinking and experiencing -- working off a bad childhood, trouble with living in a technological world, feelings of abandonment, and so on. It so often appears to me that these, or combinations thereof, are the only choices, given the goal -- "to get rid of depression". And much of the argument in psychology revolves around trying to determin which side of this two-part scenario "works" the best. In other words, the chemical-thing side will point to the emotional-thing side and say, "You can fuss around for the next 10 years trying to get rid of this guys depression, with mixed results...or we can give him Prozac and spruce him up in two days." The emotion-thing side will say, "You might be able to spruce him up in two days, but what have you really done? All you have done is anesthetize his symptom. You have not addressed the real problem." These arguments seem to fall out of our traditional metaphysical subj/obj view of reality such that we tend to align ourselves with one side of that point of view or the other...which then provides the background against which our decisions to act are formulated. With traditional metaphysics, in one sense everything is subjective, and in another sense, everything is objective. In the attempt to break through this apparently endless mess, Heidegger proposes an alternative ontology. And we have discussed the fact that much of this presentation falls to a "negative" presentation --i.e., demonstrating what "doesn't" work in the traditional viewpoint as opposed to what "does" work in the alternative. I still think that much of the issues of psychology are wrapped up in the word "goal" or its equivalent. And I very much liked what you had to say about listening to language. I keep being drawn back to this word, and asking about it again and again in one way or another (asking about 'purpose', 'teleology', asking about how you deal with the notion of purpose and God, about Aristotle's treatment of purpose and ends). If, for instance, the "goal" of psychology is simply and directly to eliminate the symptom of depression...then why not pop a Prozac? Why not? This is a wonderful technological goal-achieving solution to a simple problem. Now if you start getting fancy, a amending the goal to read something like, "...and I want the symptoms to stay gone after the drug is stopped..." then things get a bit more complicated. But it still boils down to an issue of goals (or no-goals, as the case may be). Michael Staples --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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