Nude Rabbit Descending the Staircase by HillaryWhiteRabbit with a tip of the hat to Marcel Duchamp
October, 2019. From time to time, people who are unclear about variegated nature of facts have turned their confusion into a weapon: the accusation that others are delusional. Conversation with the accusers is like talking to someone trapped in a Victorian gazing ball; they are having a dialogue with themselves that only extends to their shiny interior world. If another person has a thought that is outside of their gaze; folks of a certain bent raise the specter, actually an accusation, that this other person is delusional. There is no outreach to find commonality based on objective facts, in which these same facts that lead to divergent objective world views (in German, weltanschauung, a concept famously heralded by Max Weber) or to even learn of new thoughts, ideas and frankly, new facts. Rather the specter of delusion is bandied about against another person who does not share the same gaze: that other view and person must be irrationally wrong. Perhaps a better approximate truth is that people have different views because we all trapped inside our own gazing ball; but that would be a different discussion. [See the phenomenologists, such as Maurice Merleau Ponty and his “indirect ontology”.] This begs the question: What is the nature of delusion?
The greatest thinker about the nature of delusion is, oddly enough, the playwright Luigi Pirandello. He was a philosopher and social thinker, as well as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pirandello had a lot of personal insight about delusion. He lived with his wife of many years; who, over time, became increasingly “crazy”. He refused to put his wife away in a home. Instead, he found an accomodation to live with her in relative harmony over the decades. Pirandello’s ideas on delusions and insanity are best expressed in his most famous play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” but also such vehicles as “It is So, if You Thinks So.”
In a simplified sum, Pirandello realized the incompleteness (falsity?) of the objective, or sane person evaluating the delusions of the crazy person. In fact, the complete situation commonly consists of the following:
The delusions of the “crazy” person; and
The separate delusions of the sane person; and
The shared reality they create between them.
Obviously, Pirandello is a lyrical, literary figure. There are always extreme examples. For instance, perhaps someone out there thinks they are John the Baptist. This deluded guy thinks he is clearing the money changers from the temple to make way for his coming cousin. In truth, this Johnny-comes-lately kills innocent people sitting in a park — all in the name of God. We have now popped out of Pirandello’s analysis. However, we can still pop into the perspective of the famous psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, most famous for “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Szasz argues that except for brain damaged or chemically deranged people, most mental illness is a social construct. The brain deranged exception would include ole’ Johnny above and many other less extreme cases. The rest is not cut and dried decision making as to what is a “delusion.” A delusion is not an indelible stamp, an obvious tautology; but rather, it is a cultural or negotiated truth dependent on the perspective of those making the judgment.
This analysis of delusion rests on a divided bedrock of the social construction of reality. A person’s view of delusion will harken back to the divide, or schism in answering this question: What is real? We get to referee the fight between the two main contestants. On one side of the ring, we have the objectivists such as Durkheim, Heidegger, Marx. They have been duking it out for centuries with the nominalist-idealist including Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Weber. Just to highlight one round in this endless bout, Emile Durkheim, an objectivist, talked famously of the world’s “choseite.” This term translates to “thingyness” and points to the objective nature of reality. Reality consists of things that are out there, whether we perceive them or not. Yet, there is healthy evidence that reality is truly subjective. Just as a reductionist example: there is no certainty that the color of your blue sky is the same “blue” as my sky. [See “Your Color Red Could Really Be My Blue” https://www.livescience.com/21275-color-red-blue-scientists.html]. In fact, there are people and cultures that have no concept of color at all:
“In a Candoshi village in the heart of Peru, anthropologist Alexandre Surrallés puts a small colored chip on a table and asks, “Ini tamaara?” (“How is it?” or “What is it like?”). What Surrallés would like to ask is, “What color is this?” But the Candoshi, a tribe of some 3,000 people living on the upper banks of the Amazon River, don’t have a word for the concept of color. Nor are their answers to the question he does ask familiar to most Westerners. In this instance, a lively discussion erupts between two Candoshi about whether the chip, which Surrallés would call amber or yellow-orange, looks more like ginger or fish spawn.” https://www.sapiens.org/language/color-perception/
As to the true color of the chip, I am pulling for the fish spawn, whatever color that is.
However, the subjectivist have their limitation. There is an academic quip that even the phenomenologist (who hold there is no objective reality) will look in both directions before crossing a busy street.
Is there any hope to escape this Hall of Mirrors? We live in the hell of being limited in our own experiences by our own consciousness; of not understanding the Other. Surely, there must be a way to see beyond the kaleidoscope of the individual, and get to some greater Universal Understanding. Can we break the bonds of our personal illusions and see what is objectively, universally true. Then, can we separate that Truth from our own miserable, subjective experience? To offer us some hope out of this morass, let’s turn to the universal wisdom contained in a Spanish dicho (proverb) shared with my by Professor Ross Gandy of University of Mexico:
Aunque hayamos perdido ilusiones, nuevas vendrán a anidar nuestros corazones.
Even if we lose our illusions, new ones will come to nest in our hearts.
It’s hopeless. We are doomed to contemplate the ephemeral Universal from our own limited particle of consciousness.