Compulsive or Cognitive: A Genealogy of Self-Harm and the Double Bind of Authenticity
Abstract
Abstract
By the end of the 20th century, self-harm had become a major mental health problem. In this process, however, self-harm had to become a distinct, psychiatrically circumscribed behavior, a way for a person to act. Like how Ian Hacking has argued for the “making-up” of multiple personalities, I offer a brief account of how the important conceptual pieces of our modern concept of self-harm came to be. I show how this formation has revealed tensions in psychiatric epistemology and given rise to an interesting dilemma reported by some patients: they are caught in the difficult position of ensuring the authenticity of their self-injury, while the authenticity of their self-injury requires giving no thought to any intentions behind that self-injury. I call this a double-bind of authenticity and offer it as an indication that psychiatry is in need of a richer concept of the body, one that is not torn between the functional mind-body dualism that opposes an intending, motivated mind to a passive, motiveless body.
Hegel's Logic of the Body Politic
Abstract
In the second volume of Hegel's Science of Logic, his grand, culminating work of logic and metaphysics, he offers a critique of some major categories from the natural sciences, specifically mechanism, chemism, and teleology. Strangely, he also considers the social and political significance of these concepts. In this paper, I reconstruct what I take to be a powerful critique of instrumental rationality in the realm of politics that Hegel offers in these chapters. I further argue that it is important that this critique appear in this work of logic, as it demonstrates that the lofty questions of being, intelligibility, and freedom are inescapable concerns for investigating the nature of the state. By way of illustrating Hegel's argument, I consider Hobbes as one such target of Hegel's critique.
Abstract
In the second volume of Hegel's Science of Logic, his grand, culminating work of logic and metaphysics, he offers a critique of some major categories from the natural sciences, specifically mechanism, chemism, and teleology. Strangely, he also considers the social and political significance of these concepts. In this paper, I reconstruct what I take to be a powerful critique of instrumental rationality in the realm of politics that Hegel offers in these chapters. I further argue that it is important that this critique appear in this work of logic, as it demonstrates that the lofty questions of being, intelligibility, and freedom are inescapable concerns for investigating the nature of the state. By way of illustrating Hegel's argument, I consider Hobbes as one such target of Hegel's critique.
Kant's Missing Life Concept
Abstract
Kant's great contribution to the philosophy of biology, his "Critique of Teleological Judgment" in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, is peculiar in one major respect: he does not use "life" to refer to his object, opting instead for phrases like "organized beings." I argue for the importance of this omitted term by showing that it was precisely the ontological status of life that was in doubt during the 17th and 18th centuries. I present the elements of Kant's broader critical philosophy that made life a problematic category for him. One of the major reasons is the great gap separating the phenomenal and the noumenal domains, on which the realms of nature and morality, respectively, are situated. It is significant, I contend, that Kant would locate the problem on this point of agency, because this question of the agency of animals and the importance of biology to questions of mind would become pressing issues in the 20th and 21st century.
Abstract
Kant's great contribution to the philosophy of biology, his "Critique of Teleological Judgment" in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, is peculiar in one major respect: he does not use "life" to refer to his object, opting instead for phrases like "organized beings." I argue for the importance of this omitted term by showing that it was precisely the ontological status of life that was in doubt during the 17th and 18th centuries. I present the elements of Kant's broader critical philosophy that made life a problematic category for him. One of the major reasons is the great gap separating the phenomenal and the noumenal domains, on which the realms of nature and morality, respectively, are situated. It is significant, I contend, that Kant would locate the problem on this point of agency, because this question of the agency of animals and the importance of biology to questions of mind would become pressing issues in the 20th and 21st century.