“Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what ‘health’ is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment –anything but that, as he has taken excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a ‘normal cultural man’ is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick –whether one knows it or not: ‘There is such a thing as fictitious health.’ Nietzsche later put the same thought: ‘Are there perhaps…neuroses of health?’”
Earnest Becker, in one of my favorite books. The answer to Nietzsche’s question is clear: yes, there are neuroses of health. The acquisitive and organizational urge run amok that defines consumerism, for example; or the preoccupation with a plastic aesthetic over the corporeal, with its attendant concealment of pores, sweat, hair, anything organic and unruly; or the obsession with cheeriness that makes self-esteem, a low sort of self-satisfaction, into a virtue without which one might as well be naked.
There are as many neuroses of health as there are neuroses of illness. What we must use, then, to define real mental illness, as opposed to simply characteristics that are socially undesirable, is this question: does the quality or behavior interfere with the individual’s ability to freely self-determine, to create himself as he wishes?
“A large proportion of life involves our refusing to put our ear to the mundane heart chamber, lest we die from hearing ‘the roar which lies on the other side of silence.’”
Nietzsche
“Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the ‘innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe,’ he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well…” ~ James Wood, from Holiday in Hellmouth: God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on, New York Magazine.
Thank you, Sir. I was glad to come across Wood’s article, in light of my recent ponderings on acts of God and unsustainable empathy. I’ve been thinking about this with respect to the coverage of the Myanmar cyclone, the China earthquake, embassy and suicide bombings, the Tokyo stabbings and other tragedies that have received recent widespread circulation. Will the incessant influx of bad news will soon break all the survivors into pieces?
I was talking to someone about this the other day, and they mentioned World War I. The death toll for that Great War was inconceivably higher than it is for the current war in Iraq, yet the media outlets varied significantly. How did the survivors cope? Is the answer to be determinedly ignorant?
(via bunnynico)
Ernest Becker once referred to the necessary “partializing” of our perception and consciousness that occurs as we leave early childhood: we strangle our innate awe and limitless imagination, which is spontaneous and uncontrollable, because otherwise we could never navigate the world.
There is a critical partialization of empathy, as well: if you stop and reflect on the sum of suffering in the world, and on suffering’s intransigence, empathetic collapse and despair is all but inevitable. From that broken position, not only can you not live, but you can’t even help. The partializing of empathy, which takes the form of “not thinking about” the horrors of the world, is often criticized as narcissism in the West, as indifference; but there are anthropological limits to our empathy. This world is too large; the scale of horror is too great.
What a beautiful quote.
