The Philosopher's Disease

Money and other Imaginary Things

I was feeling the vastness of the universe in comparison to my infinitesimally small self.
How can what I do make any difference, matter at all, equal anything other than - nothing - when put next to the macro in which we live?
How can my/our suffering/joy mean a goddamned thing when put up against such gargantuan proportions and glories?

It's the Philosopher's Disease - to think long and hard about things beyond our full cognition and become so overwhelmed that we react with depression over the whole damned thing.

Another Damn Melancholic Philosopher

For centuries philosophers have considered themselves melancholics. Some of these melancholics, such as J.S. Mill, considered their dark moods as a catalyst to developing empathy and compassion for others. Some melancholics, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegard or Martin Heidegger, believed that suffering offered unique opportunities for self-creation.

PROGRESSIVE LOGIC: Framing A Unified Field Theory of Values For Progressives

Once competitive egos organize around rival ideas and personalities, all contact with the unifying field is lost. In Zen this is called "The Philosopher's Disease."

Karl R. Popper (1902-1994) on the Philosophers' Disease

[L]et us look at the case for the prosecution against philosophy. Many philosophers, and among them some of the greatest, have not done too well. Even Plato, the greatest, deepest, and most gifted of all philosophers, had an outlook on human life which I find repulsive and indeed horrifying. Yet he was not only a great philosopher and the founder of the greatest professional school of philosophy, but a great and inspired poet; and he wrote, among other beautiful works, The Apology of Socrates.

What ailed him, and so many professional philosophers after him, was that, in stark contrast to Socrates, he believed in the élite: in the Kingdom of Philosophy. While Socrates demanded that the statesman should be wise, that is, aware of how little he knows, Plato demanded that the wise, the learned philosophers, should be absolute rulers. Ever since Plato, megalomania has been the philosophers' most widespread occupational disease.

My Manic Monday

I slept little. I found myself waking up at all hours of the night, sometimes on three or four separate occasions, with thoughts rushing, churning, threshing, suffering the philosopher's disease-a kind of insomnia: too much thinking about thinking. I burned with ideas; a dense tangle of thoughts enveloped me.

Paracelsus : The Philosopher's Stone Made Flesh

Paracelsus held a different view, believing that disease 'was local in nature and directly related to bodily malfunctions which were essentially chemical in nature. (Debus) Disease was caused by agents external to the body, the causes were to be found in the mineral world and in the air, and a disease is 'determined by a specific agent foreign to the body, which takes possession of one of its parts, imposing its own rules on form and function and thereby threatening life.' (Paget)

"The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy"

To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.) Today's postmodern philosophers deny the very existence of science, nature and truth, largely because their favourite verbal abstraction of "equality" is undermined by the brute statistical reality of human biological differences. The philosopher Richard Rorty recently informed us in Atlantic Monthly that " 'The homosexual,' 'the Negro,' and 'the female' are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good." Therefore, according to Rorty, many deconstructionists "go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are [inventions] too." You have to be as eminent a philosopher as Rorty to believe that the category of "the female" is a mere social convention. Deconstructionism is the result of philosophers being shocked to learn that reality is not Platonic (e.g., races are no more sharply defined than are extended families) and thus deciding to give up believing in reality rather than in Platonism.

Fortunately, one school of philosophy has actually taught us some valuable lessons over the centuries: the anti-abstract British tradition of Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and David Hume, with its emphasis on realism, common sense and the scientific method. One of the last of this great line was the blunt-spoken Australian David Stove. Roger Kimball has collected the late philosopher's often hilarious and always politically impious essays in a new anthology titled Against the Idols of the Age.

Stove simply shreds his fellow philosophers. He turns his flamethrower on those "absolutely effortless pseudo-discoveries that philosophers make, and on which their fame rests." For instance, "Plato's discovery of 'universals' went as follows: 'It is possible for something to be a certain way and for something else to be the same way. So, there are universals!' (Tumultuous applause, which lasts 2,400 years.)"

Disease, illness, sickness, health, healing and wholeness: exploring some elusive concepts

Concepts such as disease and health can be difficult to define precisely. Part of the reason for this is that they embody value judgments and are rooted in metaphor. The precise meaning of terms like health, healing and wholeness is likely to remain elusive, because the disconcerting openness of the outlook gained from experience alone resists the reduction of first-person judgments (including those of religion) to third-person explanations (including those of science).

Philosophers and Suicide

...Here is a brief list…

# 435 B.C.E. According to legend, Empedocles leapt to his death into the crater of Etna.
# 399 B.C.E. Socrates, condemned to death for corrupting the young, drank hemlock amongst his friends. The events are described in Plato's dialogue known as 'Phaedo'. In the 'Crito', Socrates is offered a chance to escape but refuses.
# 338 B.C.E. According to legend, Isocrates starved himself to death.
# 52 B.C.E. Lucretius is alleged to have killed himself after being driven mad by taking a love potion.
# 65 Seneca was forced to commit suicide after falling out with Emperor Nero.
# 1903 Otto Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23.
# 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide with poison at the Spanish-French border, after attempting to flee from the Nazis.
# 1943 Simone Weil starved herself to death.
# 1954 Alan Turing is believed to have committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple.
# 1978 Kurt Gödel starved himself to death by refusing to eat for fear of being poisoned.
# 1979 Evald Ilyenkov committed suicide.
# 1983 Arthur Koestler committed joint suicide with his third wife, Cynthia, by taking an overdose of drugs. He suffered from Parkinson's disease and lukemia.
# 1994 Sarah Kofman, French philosopher, committed suicide on Nietzsche's birthday.
# 1994 Guy Debord, suffering from diseases brought about by excessive alcohol consumption, shot himself in his cottage in Champot.
# 1994 David Stove committed suicide after a painful struggle with disease.
# 1995 Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping out of his fourth-story apartment window.

Interestingly, these cases seem to be concentrated around the ancients and 20th century philosophers.  Obviously, the ancients did not stigmatise suicide in the same way as the Christian tradition; in fact, it was often seen as somthing supremely noble or rational.  Many of the modern suicides of philosophers are associated with the effects of world war or mental illness.

On Gout (Philosopher's Disease)

Gout was the first form of arthritis recognized to be caused by
the deposition of crystals (urate) in the joints and
periarticular tissues. The term "gout" is derived from the Latin
"gutta", a drop. It is applied to crystal-deposit arthritis
because of the false belief in ancient times that the disease was
caused by drops of bad "humor". The term "humor", in turn, refers
to the ancient Greek theory of four body humors: blood, yellow
bile, black bile, and phlegm.

The term "gout" is currently defined as a disorder of purine
metabolism, occurring especially in men, characterized by a
raised by variable blood uric acid level and severe recurrent
acute arthritis of sudden onset resulting from deposition of
crystals of sodium urate in connective tissues and articular
cartilage. Most cases of gout are inherited, resulting from a
variety of abnormalities of purine metabolism.

From the Philosophy Forum

Gray asphalt wrote:
I think that I am changing models. It seems possible
to change models quite a bit. My models of life.

Sir Frederick:
Maybe you have the philosopher's disease.

John Wilkins:
Syphillis, like Nietzsche?

Human Behavior is Unconsciously Controlled

Until proven otherwise, why not assume that consciousness does not play a role in human behavior? Although it may seem radical on first hearing, this is actually the conservative position that makes the fewest assumptions. The null position is an antidote to philosopher's disease, the inappropriate attribution of rational, conscious control over processes that may be irrational and unconscious. The argument here is not that we lack consciousness, but that we over-estimate the conscious control of behavior.

Comment to 'Toward a Post Cold-War Political Economy'

Wittgenstein once said that "the philosopher's disease is a one-sided diet of examples"--by which he meant to refer to the common practice of beginning with one or two paradigmatic intuitions about phenomena like meaning, or the right, and then building whole theories around them, without proper sensitivity to how our pre-theoretical intuitions change in a host of other cases. This impulse--he thought--was in all of us, and it can influence our attempts to understand political and economic legitimacy as well. Wittgenstein thought this made for bad philosophy.

Salvation By Paradox: On Zen And Zen-like Thought

What I am saying suggests the unease felt by many philosophers at the uncomprehending use of abstractions. As we know, Wittgenstein was particularly uneasy at the use of abstractions of the philosophical kind, which brought on, he thought, a special kind of philosopher's disease. Speaking in his name, his disciple, Renford Bambrough, insists that the normal 'yes-no' or 'either-or' standard of reasoning may not work well in philosophy. That is, it may happen that a certain statement or proposition, p, and its contradictory, not-p, may both be misleading. We may then try to say what we need without either making the crucial-seeming statement or contradicting it.

An Experiment with the Philosophical Aphorism

A philosopher's disease. To make the average person confused, that is - to make everything into a mystery. Not all things are riddles, but a philosopher tries to make them so, and in so doing becomes an ideologist for the system.

The Philosophers Disease!

The philosopher always had a very cerebral response, even as his lack of sleep and other monastery imposed factors began to weigh heavily upon him. Eventually the head of the monastery told him loudly and firmly that he had The Philosophers Disease! So it would seem that I have the philosophers disease. Dis-ease. Yes.

Hinduism & Buddhism (Bill Moyers with Huston Smith)

Smith studied Zen Buddhism in Japan. He wanted to enter a Zen monastery to undergo the training of the Zen monks. But he didn't realize what it was he was asking. The point of Zen is to cultivate a very rarified state of awareness and it is not easy to make it into these monasteries. To put a westerner into this is considered a major distraction for the monks. But Smith was accepted and at the beginning of his training, was given the third standard Koan:

A monk asked Joshu (a master back in China) does a dog have a Buddha nature? The master answered “Mu” (which means “no” in Japanese).

Smith had to go and contemplate this for 24 hours.

Every Buddhist would know that the Buddha said even grass has a Buddha nature. The dog is on a higher scale of being than grass. How can it be that the grass has a Buddha nature but a dog doesn't? So Smith fiddled with the definition of Buddha nature and returned an answer based on this fiddling. And Smith was sent back for another 24 hours to come up with a better answer.

Smith said he came up with an even more ingenious answer, but was sent back for another 24 hours. And when he approached the Roshi for the third time, the Roshi bellowed at him before he even had a chance to get the answer out of his mouth: “you have the philosophers disease.” He softened a little bit and told Smith, “There is nothing wrong with philosophy. I have a masters degree in philosophy myself and from one of the better universities. But philosophy deals with reason and reason can only work with the experience that it has to work with. Now, you obviously have the reason. What you do not have is the experience. Put reason aside and go for the experience.”

Crisis Consciousness in Contemporary Philosophy  by András Gedö

Crisis consciousness grips contemporary bourgeois philosophy in two senses: as an experience of the crisis of philosophy and as a reflection of the philosophy of crisis. While the various currents of bourgeois thinking differ considerably in describing the development and disease of philosophy and see the symptoms, origins, and essence of their own particular crisis differently, the awareness of crisis is common to logical and linguistic positivism, neo-pragmatism and phenomenology, critical rationalism and hermeneutic idealism. This awareness, therefore, presents the general frame for the many conflicting varieties of current bourgeois thought. One sign of crisis—although superficial and partly misleading—is the "process of mutual alienation and growing lack of communication among philosophers." First the possibility of discussing differences of opinion and then even of understanding one another disappear, until finally, a situation arises in which there is not even "a connection of intention . . . between two philosophers. The one not only finds the other's statements and argumentation incomprehensible, but the other's type of approach and the reason for it become a riddle." Stegmüller, who looks at this process of disintegration from the inside, from the viewpoint of late-bourgeois philosophy, declares, not without resignation, that "this process can no longer be reversed." However, this disintegration grows out of general features common to the various schools of contemporary bourgeois philosophy. In its totality, what Stegmüller describes as "the current philosophy" is drawn "into the whirlpool of the crisis of our culture." "Never before in history has there been as great and dominating a consciousness as today of the enigmatic and questionable quality of the world."