A Kantian
Sovereignty of Attention as a Therapy for Mental Illnesses
Martín Fleitas González·
University of the Republic, Uruguay
Abstract
The article
suggests that the Kantian account of mental illnesses is part of his study of
logic in an attempt to claim, above all, that they hinder the training of
attention, which will later allow us to publicly pursue knowledge. To this, the
author elucidates the epistemic place that Kant gives to attention (Aufmerksamkeit) in his transcendental, metaphysical, and
anthropological remarks, given the important role it plays in the public elaboration
of knowledge. Addressing the place that Kant gives to mental weaknesses and
illnesses in his anthropology lessons, the article sheds light on some
correlations between these pathologies and attention, considering that mental
weaknesses, as well as, mental illnesses warp, or are caused by, the fragile
attention with which we direct our thoughts. This permits to shed light on a
Kantian ideal related to the sovereignty of our attention, understood as a
condition of possibility of the individual autonomy.
Key words
Immanuel Kant, Attention,
Sovereignty, Mental Illnesses, Mental Weaknesses.
Introduction
Attention had not been perceived as a
problem until the 19th century, when an increase in population density, the
reduction of periods of time involved in communication and transportation, and
the perceptive transformations brought about by technological advancements in
the field of entertainment —mostly in film— and in the workplace —e.g. the
mechanical conveyor belt— led to the need to train, teach, and master attention
with increasing expertise. Marx already noticed that, in his time, it was
common for workers to get to their work stations one morning to find a new
model of loom, coal or steam engine, dumbfounded as to how to use it, which
hopelessly led them to lose one of their body parts in their novel and
hard-pressed attempts to keep their jobs (Marx 1992, pp. 181-91). It was
necessary to train, teach to read and write, medicalize and bureaucratize that
enormous mass of people amid that hectic 19th century; it was necessary to come
up with an agent that could handle the new demands of social coordination and
synchronization, which is why there came an unusual need to train, catch,
direct, and even seize people’s attention (Crary
2001, pp. 11-80; Beller 2006).
Until then, this peculiar human faculty,
found at the root of every conscious activity, had gone unnoticed to a great
extent in medical, psychological, and especially, philosophical observations.
This whole matter is shown by the fact that Georg Steiner, around 1978, turns to
that painting that Jean-Siméon Chardin entitled Le philosophe lisant,
to condemn the fact that in our day and age people no longer read as they did
in the 18th century; the simple act of being constantly interrupted by a phone
call, text or voice message, or an e-mail, hinders the celebration of that
ceremony during which a philosopher exchanges pleasantries with a lengthy —and
surely expensive— book, and dressed in stylish fur, with a hat on, in the company of his hourglass,
enshrouded in silence and solemnity, takes on the task of focusing his
attention on reading, or rereading (Steiner 2009, Chap One). Our time,
however, seems to have led us by the hand to an ecstatic sort of attention,
spread over different and simultaneous activities, thus developing a
multitasker’s attention portrayed very well in Édouard Manet’s Le balcon,
where two ladies and a man observe something that is not within the frame, but
outside of it; the characters in the painting are purely non-thetic
consciousness, as Sartre would say, they are outside themselves, and it has to
be like this, considering the speed at which the hectic 19th century changes in
transportation, urban life, technology and mass society are taking place.
Anyone would claim, however, that being
able, to a certain degree, to direct our attention is part of any ideal of
autonomy, inasmuch as it is that which we pay attention to that ultimately
leads us to become who we are. Paying attention to a good, successful and happy
life coach, paying attention to human misfortune taking place all the time
across the planet, paying attention to mainstream series when we watch them
throughout the day, weeks, or entire months, being interested in Hollywood
celebrities’ personal lives, or worrying about our friends and loved ones’
concerns and joys dictates to a great extent what kind of people we ultimately
become. If, as many assert, one of the characteristics of our time has to do
with turning attention into one of the most desired and sought-after
capitalizable resources given its high profitability, then it makes sense to
wonder whether or not achieving sovereignty over our attention, choosing
what and who to grant the grace of our gaze, is perhaps one of the most
important ethical and political ideals. As David Foster Wallace put it:
The really important kind of freedom
involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in
myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day (…) The only thing that’s capital-T
True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to
consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t (…) The trick is keeping
the truth up-front in daily consciousness (Foster Wallace 2008).
In
this manner, actually, and even considering the social and spatial differences
that we are dealing with here, Kant understood, in a way, the role that attention
plays in the public pursuit of knowledge —Wissenschaft. While this is a
somewhat underlying concern, it is also true that the emphasis he places on
order, process, method, and rules necessary to think correctly is found in most
of his writing; this emphasis of his can be found throughout his
transcendental, metaphysical, as well as his anthropological observations, and
the latter, in turn, permeate his views on mental illnesses. I understand, and
this is the main suggestion that I stand by here, that his account of mental
illnesses is part of his study of logic in an attempt to claim, above all else,
that they hinder the training of attention, which will later allow us to
publicly pursue knowledge —whether it be scientific, ethical, political, or of
any other nature. In order to address this idea, I will start by elucidating
the meaning and epistemic place that Kant gives to attention in his
transcendental, metaphysical, and anthropological remarks, given the important
role it plays in the public pursuit of knowledge (1). Addressing the place that
Kant gives to mental weaknesses and illnesses in his anthropology lessons about
logic, I will shed light on some correlations between these pathologies and
attention (2), considering that mental weaknesses as well as mental illnesses
warp, or are caused by, the fragile attention with which we direct our thoughts
(3). Kant’s belief that all knowledge has to be public, and that mental
weaknesses and illnesses are, above all else, hurdles for the common pursuit of
knowledge, allows me to shed light on a Kantian ideal related to the
sovereignty of our attention: an ideal that is presented as a condition of
possibility of the individual autonomy (4), which, in our time, seems to take
on an unusual importance for social criticism (5).
1. Aufmerksamkeit and
Metaphysics.
It makes sense to start by noticing that Aufmerksamkeit,
term which Kant usually uses to refer to the act of paying attention or
focusing the mind, is ambiguous, in the same way that it occurs with equivalent
translations in other languages; Aufmerksamkeit can
be used either to mean to direct our eyes towards something, noting, in this
manner, the avoidance of some error that can be regarded as serious (note A
XIII; and A 801/B 82) or in situations where one wants to make reference to the
perceptive task of setting our eyes on an object, thus avoiding being
distracted from the experience. The second meaning is the one I am interested
in addressing, inasmuch as Kant does not always differentiate between the act
of focusing one’s attention and the act of bringing attention to
something, which is why we must be mindful of the textual and thematic contexts
in which he uses Aufmerksamkeit.
Secondly, the rupture of subjective
attention —or that of the researcher— are constantly brought up by Kant,
whether it be to show how a speculative statement —such as the existence of a necessary being— may fallaciously
captivate “the commonest human understanding,” (A 590/B 618) whether it be to
direct the young man or woman’s attention to moral law or to their own freedom
(KpV, AA 05: 159, and 161) or to explain how beauty
excites, catches, and holds —and sometimes, distracts— our attention during
rumination (KU, AA 05: §12, 222; §14, 225; §29, 266/67), Kant observes something
that we can all notice all the time, that is to say, that our mind/gaze is most
of the time directed towards elements outside of ourselves, and not by our own
will. Nevertheless, what is really important here is to delve into the
regulated and autonomous idea of attention which Kant always assumes, yet few
times actually specifies. We know very well, actually, that his idea of applied
logic “deals with attention, its hindrance and consequences, the cause of
error, the condition of doubt, of reservation, of conviction, etc.”,[1]
and thus entails rational matters as well as empirical and psychological ones
(A 55/B 79), which is why we need to stop here for a moment.
Kant understands that logic can be
general, as well as “of the peculiar use of understanding.” While the former
“contains the absolutely necessary rules of thinking (…) without regard to the
difference of the objects to which it may be directed”, the latter forms an Organon, considering it contains the set
of methodological principles and procedures that lead to the pursuit of
knowledge in a given field. Within general logic, in turn, our philosopher
differentiates pure logic, which deals with the workings of our understanding
without considering all of those empirical conditions under which it operates
—understood as a Canon of understanding and reason— from the
aforementioned applied logic, which, though general in relation to objects, is
characterized for fostering a Catarticon of
common understanding (A 53/B 77-8) which is applied in its analytics as well as
in its dialectics; while it focuses on the formal criteria of truth with
regards to the former, regarding the latter, it addresses the rules that allow
us to condemn the deceptions involved in all which superficially adjusts to
such criteria (Logik,
Introduction I and II).[2]
Bearing this in mind, it is easy to understand why Kant appeared to be so sure
about being on the right path to reinstating metaphysics; his predecessors had
completely mixed up the different dimensions of logic when they took Canon for Organon, using it with the purpose of producing a specific type of
knowledge. [3]
For this reason, the direction of attention is so important in applied logic:
it is defined, precisely, as the faculty —somewhat empirical, somewhat
transcendental— to choose empirical or mental stimuli to define an object of
attention to think of or judge, thus leaving other possible stimuli outside of
our conscious perceptive radar. In many cases, this choice of stimuli happens
automatically, yet in other cases, it happens voluntarily, which takes on a
fundamental importance. For several reasons, Kant understands that the constant
wandering of the speculative reason of his time occurs for not taking care of
the course of its ideas, and for not being aware of the proper rules and
procedures that publicly create knowledge related to metaphysics, physics and
chemistry, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Hence his interest to establish a
critique of reason that allows it to avoid, within the theoretical field, the
quagmires produced by the “natural” and “inevitable” transcendental illusions:
Logical illusion, which consists in the
mere imitation of the form of reason (the illusion of fallacious inferences)
arises solely from a failure of attentiveness to the logical rule. Hence as
soon as this attentiveness is focused on the case before us, logical illusion
entirely disappears (A 97).
We
know very well that the transcendental illusions of reason itself are
responsible for taking their theoretical function to a dead end. But the
excesses encouraged by cosmological, psychological, and theological ideas are
far from being mere metaphysical problems, inasmuch as these excesses encourage
clear political dangers, such as the establishment of institutions, groups and
schools that brag about having privileged access to those ideas, thus
privatizing that “pseudo knowledge,” and seriously hurting the publicity of
reason itself. In order to thoroughly understand how sensitive this subject is,
it is wise to remember that publicity is not a mere addition to knowledge —Wissenschaft— but
an integral part of its pursuit; Kant emphasizes time after time that all
theoretical and practical knowledge are already somehow embedded in our common
sense, even in that of the most uncultured farmer in eastern Prusia (B XXXIV). For this reason, towards the end of “The
Cannon of Pure Reason,” Kant arrives at the conclusion that the thelos of knowledge about the world is justified by
the practical idea of the highest good, clarifying something which, in a way,
already is at the core of all of people’s beliefs, that is to say, the belief
in the possibility of a future life, and the existence of God as the provider
of the moral world:
But do you demand then that cognition that
pertains to all human beings should surpass common understanding and be
revealed to you only by philosophers? (…) in what concerns all human beings
without exception nature is not to be blamed for any partiality in the
distribution of its gifts, and in regard to the essential ends of human nature
even the highest philosophy cannot advance further than the guidance that
nature has also conferred on the most common understanding (A 831/B 859).
For
this reason, Kant takes on the task of coming up with a method to take
advantage, in both a positive and a negative way —this is what the critique is
about—, of the faculties of our reason. Outlining as precisely as possible the
types of justification that our opinions about the world —cosmological idea—
ourselves —psychological idea— and what we are to expect —theological idea—
entail with regards to what we are able to do —idea of freedom—, our
philosopher thought he was contributing to some sort of therapy of pure reason,
i.e. to the reestablishment of the publicity of knowledge —remember this
redundancy: to Kant, there is no knowledge without publicity. And so, this is
how the conscious direction of our attention enters the scene.
Kant shows that we must take care of the
attention of our ideas, and at the same time, of our mental processes, so as to
avoid falling in the private realm, thus distorting the proper use of our
reason. As we will see later, the impossibility to communicate our way of
perceiving and conceptualizing the world is precisely how a weak and mentally
ill man differs from a reflexively trained man and a healthy one respectively (Anth, AA 08: §§ 45-53). The discipline of reason is the
kind of therapy Kant offers, and also urges, to use during the pursuit of any
kind of knowledge. All of chapter one of “The Transcendental Doctrine of
Method” focuses on this issue, i.e. exercising care in our reason by complying
with its own rules, without the need to deny its inherent antinomies and
paralogisms, since “Without attention to this [a priori synthetic capacity of
the human cognition] the proofs, like water breaking its bank, run wildly
across the country, wherever the tendency of hidden association may happen to
lead them” (A 783/B 811).
2. Mental illnesses and the public pursuit
of knowledge.
Some assert that mental illnesses —along
with visionaries and children’s thinking— somehow make up the counterpart of
the public aspect, and thus, the transcendental aspect, of reason that Kant
starts to develop and systematize as of his first Critique. Around the time that Michel Foucault argued in 1964 that Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View could
only be thoroughly understood opposite the transcendental subject model that
Kant presented in his first Critique,
the role that madness may or may not have played in the critical thinking of
our philosopher has become at least visible (Foucault 2008, pp. 11-79).
Additionally, Foucault’s view is still highly accepted, and it is believed that
it illustrates pretty well how Kant seems to have identified his transcendental
subject model with a view of mental health that is never explicit. Within this
interpretative chain, Monique David-Ménard (1990),
for example, has underlined that Essay on
Maladies of the Head of 1764, along with the subsequent Dreams of a Spirit-Seer… of 1766,
foreshadows Kant’s concern about protecting his beloved metaphysics from
superstitions, religious obscurantism, and especially, from dementia. In other
words, were not the claims of the rationalist metaphysics of his time too
supportive of the ones that embrace the alleged revelations of a theosophist
such as Herr von Swedenborg? (TG, AA 02: 342).[4]
Every allegedly privileged access to some object that one way or another
concerns all of human kind has to be unfounded, according to Kant, from the
very moment in which one refuses to submit its epistemic nature to public
scrutiny.[5]
We know that the general observations that
Kant holds with regards to mental weaknesses and illnesses are systematized in
his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point
of View. After taking notes of his observations regarding amentia —Unsinnigkeit— and dementia —Wahnsinn— that overestimulate imagination, and insania —Wahnwitz— and vesania —Überwitz— which
distort judgment, he asserts that:
The only universal characteristic of
madness is the loss of common sense (sensus communis) and its replacement with logical private sense (sensus privatus);
for example, a human being in broad daylight sees a light burning on his table
which, however, another person standing nearby does not see, or hears a voice
that no one else hears (Anth, AA 08: § 53).
No
adept reader of Kant’s texts would be surprised by this view, and based on
that, it may not be too relevant to insist on this otherwise essential idea.
Over and over again, the renowned philosopher from Königsberg
has stressed that every type of knowledge, whether it be theoretical or
practical, must be pursued publicly, offering reasons worthy of being shared,
discussed, reviewed, and accepted:
For it is a subjectively necessary
touchstone of the correctness of our judgments generally, and consequently also
of the soundness of our understanding, that we also restrain our understanding
by the understanding of others,
instead of isolating ourselves with
our own understanding and judging publicly
with our private representations, so to speak (Anth,
AA 08: § 53).
This
emphasis of his can be found, as I have done here, throughout his Critiques and in several of his shorter
texts, as well —Cfr. WA; WDO. However, what is often
not found in Kant’s account of mental weaknesses and illnesses is the
underlying role that attention plays. He specifically notes that a peculiar
trait of these mental conditions is to hinder our mastery of the direction of
our ideas, experiences, and decisions. Hypochondria as well as mania,
i.e. the two types of dementia that Kant finds, are characterized for
differentially partializing our control over the direction our mind takes,
sometimes hyperfocusing our attention —hypochondria—
other times seizing it by creating a rule that causes thought to be consistent
with itself, but opposing the rules of the experience —mania—, Kant
seems to always relate the inability to master our attention to the inability
to control our reason:
The defects of the cognitive faculty are
either mental deficiencies or mental illnesses. Illnesses of the soul
with respect to the cognitive faculty can be brought under two main types. One
is melancholia (hypochondria) and the
other is mental derangement (mania).
With the former, the patient is well
aware that something is not going right with the course of his thoughts, in so
far as his reason has insufficient control over itself to direct, stop, or
impel the course of his thoughts (…) – Mental derangement indicates an
arbitrary course in the patient’s thoughts which has its own (subjective) rule,
but which runs contrary to the (objective) rule that is in agreement with laws
of experience (Anth, AA 08: § 45).
As
we can see here, Kant believes there is a sort of intermediate realm between
the total focus of our attention and its total arbitrariness which could allow
us to direct the course of our thoughts healthily —a mental matter— as well as
critically —a philosophical matter. And it’s precisely what is between
attention and distraction that he intends to outline by means of applied logic,
and within it, by means of the Catarticon of
common understanding. In no way does Kant urge us to remain focused on our
thoughts all the time, for it would be neither beneficial for our health nor
practical.[6]
If I understand this correctly, he seems to be encouraging us to train our
attention so that we can use it at the right time to deal with matters that
deserve our attention, under the proper terms, and according to the proper
procedures, so we can later share our unique way of perceiving, feeling, and
interpreting the world with those we interact with: it is about one of the
conditions of possibility of the public pursuit of any kind of knowledge. And
this is precisely what I would like to interpret as an ideal of sovereignty
of our attention.
I do not believe Kant supports the ideal
of “having to take over our attention” —which I find throughout Infinite Jest as well as in the David
Foster Wallace quote I used in the introduction of this chapter— insofar as he
does not believe this is possible, or even recommendable.[7]
Rather, he seems to support an ideal related to attention which is linked to
the idea of “sovereignty,” inasmuch as the goal is not to control our own
mental or psychological matters, but to redirect
them.[8] From
this standpoint, according to Foster Wallace, it would not be about trying to take
over our attention, but rather, about being capable of redirecting
it when necessary, with regards to those objects that deserve our attention,
according to proper rules. This is precisely what the Kantian ideal of
achieving sovereignty over our attention is about, and which underlies many of
his texts.
3. The peculiar anthropological nature of
attention.
It is not by chance that it is precisely
in his anthropology lessons where Kant stops to more calmly explain what he
understands by attention. Especially given how different it is from other
disciplines which study that which nature has caused human beings to become,
Kant points out in the second introductory paragraph of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, “pragmatic knowledge
of man aims at what man makes, can, or should make of himself as a freely
acting being”.[9]
In this context of subjective self-making, Kant made it quite clear that
attention was not yet another cognitive and perceptive faculty among others,
but instead, it was actually found at the very core of one of the most
important activities of human reason: abstraction. Kant says:
For a man to be able to make an
abstraction from a sense impression, even when the sense impression forces
itself on his senses, is proof of a far greater faculty than just paying
attention, because it gives evidence of a freedom of the faculty of thought and
sovereignty of the mind in having the condition of one’s sense impressions
under one’s control (animus sui
compos). In this respect the faculty of abstraction is much more
difficult, but also more important than the faculty of perception when it
encounters sense impressions (Anth, AA 08: § 3).[10]
Kant
asserts here, as a matter of fact, that the nonsense of our attention makes us
constantly unhappy, insofar as “it is a peculiarly bad habit of our faculty of
perception to observe too closely, even involuntarily, what is faulty in other
people” and ourselves.[11]
Hence it is necessary to exercise our attention —which, in this context, means
being able to abstract those matters that define the representations with which
our mind operates— and rid ourselves of such an unsettling natural condition.
However, attention does not exactly relate to abstraction, as Kant notes that:
1.) If I raise these representations to as
high a degree of clarity as possible. Attention does this.
2.) If I extract from all the other
representations in the vicinity so much clarity that they become completely
obscured and only the one [representation] remains. That is abstraction.
Abstraction is not a lack of attentiveness; its purpose is merely negative – it
is an activity, as I keep away other representations [so] that their
impressions do not act on my consciousness (V-Anth/Mron, AA 25: 1239-40).
Hence
his assertion that: “A human being abstracts involuntarily when he pushes away
all ideas that run through his head and he clings to one so strongly that he
cannot let it go. –Hypochondriacs are this way; the human being has control over these follies only in a healthy
condition–” (V-Anth/Mron,
AA 25: 1240, highlights added). Let’s
take advantage of this fleeting assertion to see how Kant links attention
issues to mental illnesses. I quote in
extenso:
To scrutinize the various acts of the
imagination within me, when I call them forth, is indeed worth reflection, as
well as necessary and useful for logic and metaphysics. But to wish to play the
spy upon one’s self, when those acts come to mind unsummoned and of their own
accord (which happens through the play of the unpremeditatedly creative
imagination), is to reverse the natural order of the cognitive powers, since
then the rational elements do not take the lead (as they should) but instead
follow behind. This desire for self-investigation
is either already a disease of the mind (hypochondria), or will lead to such a
disease and ultimately to the madhouse. He who has a great deal to tell of
inner experiences (for example, of grace, of temptations, etc.) may, in the
course of his voyage to self-discovery, have made his first landing only at Anticyra. Inner experiences are not like external
experiences of objects in space, wherein the objects appear side by side and
permanently fixed. The inner sense sees the conditions for its definition only
in Time and, consequently, in a state of flux, which is without that permanence
of observation necessary for experience (Anth, AA 08:
§ 4, highlights added).[12]
As
we can see, forcing as well as neglecting the attention we pay to ourselves and
to our thoughts can entirely undermine the possibility to communicate the
findings of self-knowledge to others. This becomes clear because, from the
beginning, Kant explains that his concern here refers only to the logic of
thought, not to mental health as such, which is why, as Foucault suggested,
everything related to mental weaknesses and illnesses must be understood
opposite the transcendental subject model.[13] However, this suggestion
does not seem to be completely right. According to Kant, it is neither possible
nor desirable to remain in abstract focus all the time. It is necessary to
shift between the focus of our attention and recreational and healthy
distractions in what he often calls “common sense” of “bon sens”:
In order to judge men according to their
cognitive faculty (according to their understanding as such) we make a division
into two classes: those to whom must be attributed common sense (sensus communis), which certainly is not common (sensus vulgaris), and men of science. People with common
sense are familiar with the principles relating to practical application (in
concreto). Scientific people are familiar with
the principles themselves prior to their application (in abstracto).
The understanding, which belongs to the first cognitive capacity, is sometimes
called horse sense (bon sens), whereas the
understanding belonging to the second cognitive faculty we call perspicuity (ingenium
perspicax) (Anth, AA
08: § 6).
Hence,
a few lines later, he adds that our faculty to solve a problem with clarity,
order, and serenity is related to some sort of logical tact “in which
reflection looks at the object from many angles and produces the correct result
without being aware of the acts occurring within the mind during this process”
(Anth, AA 08: § 6). Kant understands that this
faculty is to be exercised, trained, and that people can not only control it
when and how it is appropriate, but they can also learn to shy away from it
through recreational activities, and above all, regenerative ones; this would
make up, in his words, a “mental regimentation” (Anth,
AA 08: § 47). Humans are rational and finite beings, which is why we cannot act
as transcendental beings wandering around for extended periods of time. We must
rest, get distracted, and recover from the tiring task that setting our eyes on
an object entails —for it is an Objekt, and not
necessarily Gegenstand—
and abstract everything related to it, dismissing all which is secondary. All
of this is particularly important, because according to Kant, few are the times
when mental weaknesses and illnesses do not correlate:
One of the mental weaknesses is to be
attached, through reproductive imagination, to an idea to which one has given
great or lasting attention, and from which one is not able to get away, that
is, one is not able to set the course of imagination free again. If this evil
is habitual and directed to one and the same object, it may possibly result in
insanity (Anth, AA 08: § 47).
While it is true that Kant considers several causes of
mental illnesses, in particular, physiological ones, and a few social ones (Anth, AA 08: § 53) I would like to examine those which
establish a sort of continuum between
mental weakness and illnesses. This is the case of weaknesses linked to
subjective attention, and of some sudden mood swings, such as melancholy [Tiefsinnigkeit] (Anth, AA 08: § 50). In this context, it is easy to tell
that mental weaknesses which could later lead to madness are developed by means
of bad habits, especially those related to stagnant social routines.[14]
The caution that Kant exercises all the time when it comes to identifying
etiological matters to explain the origin of mental weaknesses and illnesses is
intended to not hold people accountable for their own suffering, which is
actually meritorious. However, this caution does not keep him from mentioning
in one note that “It is an ordinary thing to see a merchant overextend himself and dissipate his
powers in vast schemes” (Anth, AA 08: § 53): Kant
acknowledges that some bad habits generated and regenerated in social
interactions may cause mental weaknesses that may later flourish under some
sort of dementia. If I am at least partially correct in identifying an inherent
correlation between the training of subjective attention/abstraction, mental
weaknesses, and madness, it makes sense to venture a rework of the
non-physiological —i.e. social— origins of mental illnesses based on the ideal
of sovereignty of attention that I have attempted to shed light on. Next, I
will clarify the correlation between these concepts.
4.
Sovereignty of attention and mental illnesses.
To sum up
what I have put forward so far, I have mentioned that Kant only finds one
relative universal symptom of mental illnesses: one which involves the
impossibility to publicly communicate our ideas and experiences. This evidently
entails the idea of “mental health” which pivots around our faculty of
decentration, and the possibility to imagine the points of view of those we
interact with. In Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View, as we know, Kant delves into the swamp of
casuistry to shed light on those matters that daily jeopardize or foster our
rational faculties, and by extension, our mental health. Most of our mental
distress is identified by Kant in our physiology, and in fact, he holds that
they are generally hereditary; a few other ones —in an attempt to avoid blaming
a mad man for his condition— would be social, or at least circumscribed in the
social sphere. Within the latter, Kant noted we can identify mental illnesses
caused by the persistence of some mental weaknesses, many of which are linked
to the non-training or to the systemic hindrance of subjective
attention/abstraction. In this manner, Kant also noticed that one way of
overcoming these hassles fell, as we have seen, on the act of learning and
exercising rules that regulate the correct course of our ideas, and on the
other hand, as we will see next, on the incorporation of healthy social
practices.
In his
anthropology lessons, which date back to 1784/5, and which we can now access
thanks to Mrongovious’ notes, we can read that those
distractions that seize our attention, as well as the excessive abstraction we
sometimes experience when considering a particular matter, can be mitigated by
means of specific social practices:
It is a cruel hindrance to thinking.
Involuntary abstraction reverberates for a long time, although this
reverberation consists of obscure representations. The human being is ill over
whatever abstraction it is clinging to, for it weakens the powers greatly. The
best means against it is society; the condition of [being in] thoughtless
abstraction is a [kind of] thoughtlessness (V-Anth/Mron, AA 25: 1240).
For
this reason, Kant concludes a few lines later that “Dementia thus often
arises if one always directs his attentiveness to an object for a long time.
Melancholics are like this. But it is not allowed in societies at all and is
blameworthy” (V-Anth/Mron,
AA 25: 1241).[15] The example Kant offers
here is one of his favorite: rumor has it that, once visited by a friend, who
challenged him, Isaac Newton decided to go for a walk with him, not without
eating first. Upon grabbing one of the dishes available there, and finding it
was empty, he thought he had been eating from it and decided to go for a walk
with his friend; however, his friend disclosed that he had tested his attention
by eating the food from both dishes without him noticing (V-Anth/Mron, AA 25: 1241; see also V-Anth/Friedländer, AA 25: 539, and AA 15: 227). Kant’s judgment
about this kind of mischiefs illustrates very well what I am interested in
addressing: “This is a deadly distraction from which one can escape [only] with
difficulty”. Here, our philosopher never gets tired of offering examples of
socialization, of how we find ourselves forced to be on the lookout for other
people’s viewpoints: their opinion —it is always good to be interested in
knowing how we are perceived by others, how they view us and based on which
criteria or rules they do so. Decentration, and not the externalization of
oneself, would be the opportunity that socialization offers us to be able to
direct the course of our ideas correctly and healthily. And, as far as my
understanding goes, this is the main reason why we cannot and must not give up
dwelling in the antinomy of our attention: the elastic and always dangerous
nature of subjective attention —given its tendency to dissolve as well as to
hyperfocus our gaze, and with it, our agency— lies, among other reasons, upon
our need to dwell in the world of our own experiences in connection with other
people’s views. Others question us all the time, and thus get away with seizing
our gaze, allowing us either to succumb to the most extreme heteronomy or to
establish our autonomy amid that heteronomy by means of the public use of
reason. This is the main reason why, as I have said, Kant understands that,
regarding our attention, there will always be —and there should always be—
something unavailable and uncontrollable about it, and something that
jeopardizes the possibility to develop some sort of engineering around it:
A healthy soul is always concerned with
something outside itself. A sick soul is
always concerned ever and again with itself, and thus arises fantastic beings
and enthusiasm. Through great attention one is either awkward or
affected. One is awkward when in social relations one observes too great a
punctiliousness and thus in the end excites mistrust against oneself. One does
not know how to show oneself to advantage. But all this comes from paying too
much attention to oneself. From this discomfiture it arises that the human
being makes things worse than he would have otherwise. Not to be awkward is
therefore a great advantage (V-Anth/Busolt, AA 25: 1439, highlight
added).
It
is not hard to notice that his anthropology lectures study, among other
matters, the dynamics of ordinary human cognition within the social
sphere. Hence most of his suggestions with regards to everyday knowledge
supports matters related to a good coexistence. When it comes to sensitivity,
Kant recommends killing time to stimulate the mind, developing the senses of
smell and hearing publicly only, seeking novelty to thwart monotony, and even
smoking to foster conversation. When it
comes to imagination, he suggests having some wine to stimulate it, and
avoiding novels that overexcite it, meditating, exercising affinity of ideas
and the different types of memory —mechanical, ingenious, and judicious.
Finally, with regards to understanding, he asks us to remain in silence
publicly when something cannot be closely examined, or a matter cannot be
judged from a common standpoint (Anth, AA 08:
125-230). As we can see, all of these recommendations link cognition to social
coexistence, insofar as all knowledge understood as such must be generated and
regenerated in the public sphere,[16] as I have pointed out in the first part of this
essay.
5. Final remarks about attention, mental
illnesses, and late modernity.
I have suggested that underneath his
transcendental, metaphysical, and anthropological research, Kant always alludes
to the need to train our attention in order to be able to direct our thoughts
correctly, and then communicate it to others. In this context, mental
weaknesses as well as mental illnesses seem to be linked, in one way or another,
to partializations of subjective attention, and
consequently, overcoming those conditions seems to be linked, in one way or
another, to the need to achieve sovereignty over our attention. Given these
circumstances, this reading brings on a significant amount of questions. I will
only address two of them.
Firstly, we cannot claim that it is
completely clear that the weakness of our attention can cause mental illnesses.
My rework examines those few excerpts in which Kant suggests that certain
social practices —such as those of the merchant— may cause harmful behaviors
for the learning of the “logical tact” of common sense, thus causing mental
weaknesses, and even mental illnesses. Nevertheless, and without denying what
was said earlier, we must add that in most cases, Kant seems to regard the partialization of personal attention as a consequence, and
not a cause, of mental weaknesses and illnesses.
Secondly, and as I have stated in the
beginning of this essay, no one would hesitate to argue, along with Kant and
Foster Wallace, that any kind of personal autonomy imaginable is strengthened,
at least to a certain extent, on the foundation of a reasonable development of
our faculty to direct our attention: directing and setting our eyes on those
things that indeed hold certain value to us. However, we must note that Kant
ruminates on attention in a setting marked by presence and permanence, and not
by the hysteria of our age. That Kantian ideal concerning the sovereignty of
our attention is developed within the same temporal and rhythmic brew that
Jean-Siméon Chardin illustrates in Le philosophe lisant:
it is about an 18th century attention that must attune to the presence of what
lies in front of us, and not to the dramatic turmoil that we must deal with in
our time on a daily basis. Kant develops his transcendental logic and empirical
psychology in a modernity in the making, still stable, and which was barely
beginning to be shaken by the French Revolution. This is why it is worth
avoiding the naive instrumentalization of that ideal of attention when
considering our time.
All in all, however, I suggest that Kant
has passed on to us parts of an analysis scheme for the study of mental
illnesses which is not at all insignificant: one which establishes a continuum between certain types of
social interaction and certain types of dementia by means of mental weaknesses
linked to personal attention. Updating this analysis scheme for our day and age
calls for an endeavor which, unfortunately, I cannot undertake here.
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