File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9806, message 111


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



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