Is philosophy just neurosis writ large?

Jack Sagar

When I started studying philosophy at university, this was already a pressing question for me. No one expects their summer job to have a philosophical twist. Mine was to stack shelves on the twilight shift three days a week at a local supermarket. At first, everything had been fine; there was something nice about placing your headphones in, or getting to know a fellow trainee, as you raised multipacks of cola above your head and pushed them as far back as you could reach. But after three or four shifts, when the novelty wore off, I had my first intrusive thought. 

It was about free will, quite clearly it said ‘Free will doesn’t exist’. It was not the first time I had had this thought, intrusively. A few years earlier, around age fourteen, I found myself paralysed by the same thought. At that age, I loved the lyrical essays of Albert Camus, and thought myself ‘absurdist’ — though it is not clear what I had thought that meant. What was clear is that I thought that for absurdism to make sense, so must the metaphysics of free will. I was due to attend a friend’s house party, but found myself crying in my room, unable to move. I did eventually move, only, however, to reach for my phone and send an anxious email to philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett. His response was kind, if not a little opportunistic: he recommended I buy his newest book whilst promising me we had the only freedom worth having. But it was enough — I made it to the party, and forgot about it all for a few years. 

For anyone who does not identify with the experience of intrusive thinking, it is a rather common one. An intrusive thought is a random thought that pops into your head — they can be an impulse, phrase  or an image — that is unwanted, and in fact, means little to nothing about the individual who thinks it. We all have them. Ever realised whilst standing at the train station platform that you could push your friend onto the train tracks if you wished? Or, when chopping some vegetables, ever realised that you could just plunge the knife into your mother’s shoulder? These are the sorts of thoughts that we all randomly have. Most people brush them off. ‘Wow, that was odd,’ they think, and then move on with their lives. But not everyone. 

I could hardly tell my manager that the reason I was slower than the other workers, nor explain how I managed to misplace an entire box of packet crisps. What would he think if I told him it was all because I could not stop obsessing over free will? 

But what if I was meant to? What if I was predetermined to do so? I really hope I was predetermined to forget about this and move on? But I could be pre-determined to go mad thinking about free will and that’s that. 

I waited for the shift to end, and called a friend on the walk home; I cried, and he couldn’t understand, but spoke to me until we found a way for me to feel somewhat, if only slightly, better. The issue did not resolve itself until about a year later, just after I completed my first year of study in philosophy. 

There are those that seemingly think that the call to philosophy has its roots in ‘neuroses’, and that philosophical thought is just neurosis writ large. This line is arguably developed in the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, where he likens aspects of philosophy to a ‘disease’ (Philosophical Investigations §§ 133, 254, 255, 593), attributing to philosopher’s ‘queer mental states’ (On Certainty §6) analogous to madness. On Wittgenstein’s own remediative conception of philosophy, philosophy has ‘many methods, like therapies’ that are meant to set us free of these pains. For Wittgenstein, a neurosis can be anything from  a desire for generality and explanation, to a particular picture about how language works. Sometimes he speaks of unconscious pictures holding us captive, other times he speaks of dogmatism which comes easy in philosophy too. 

Consider Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. There we see a dialectic between a first-person voice and an interlocutor unfold in a series of broken up remarks, almost as if Wittgenstein was recounting fragments of conversation between himself and his students. As Wittgenstein scholar Katherine Morris notes, Wittgenstein’s dialectic is different from that of the back and forth of argument and objection. This is because the aim of philosophy, as Wittgenstein sees it, is to open up possibilities rather than argumentatively narrow in on particular ones, and it is through this active creation of subjective possibilities that the settling of philosophical issues happens. To bring into vision this conception of philosophy, Morris emphasises the person-centricity of philosophical issues. The Wittgensteinian dialectic of philosophy is not between us and a problem in the abstract or ideal realm, or between -isms which are bigger than each of us. As Gordon Baker puts it, ‘Every philosophical problem is someone’s problem’ - they exist as our personal confusions, and as the space between us. In discussing and entertaining possibilities together, in identifying the unconscious analogies and intuitions which structure and constrain the interlocutor’s thoughts as well as our own, we deal with our stupors because they rely on these myopic assumptions about what must be the case. Wittgenstein sees the philosopher’s job as to put forward articulations of what unconscious analogies and orientations seem to be at play without any of us realising, and by bringing them into the open we can undercut their hold over us. 

‘But what about truth in philosophy?’, an interlocutor might press. Wittgenstein has an answer. That is, here we do not place an emphasis on having the right arguments or interpretation of empirical data. Rather the mark of going in the right direction is that one receives assent from the interlocutor that a given unconscious analogy or desire articulated to them is in fact at play. This is something Wittgenstein thought Freud failed to grasp. If a patient did not accept Freud’s interpretation of their behaviour, he would interpret their denial as they had the behaviour — they deny him, Freud thinks, because of the very thing they deny. Wittgenstein sought to do better — hence his famous claim that we cannot advance claims in philosophy, for everyone would (if we are doing it right) agree to them (PI §124) . Hence, the dialectic between Wittgenstein and his interlocutor is something like that ideal relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand.

There is no easy way to catalogue Wittgenstein’s liberating moves, and there is a sense in which, like actual therapy, the prognoses are problem-specific. Wittgenstein employs rhetorical and psychological tricks as versatile and diverse as the functions of individual words or tools. Though we might look at how one of Wittgenstein’s liberating remarks could function to get the sense — I, unsurprisingly, like his lesser read Lecture on the Freedom of the Will. Take the uncomfortable thought Science will eventually get good enough to predict human behaviour with a high degree of accuracy, and so free will doesn't exist. Wittgenstein would ask us to consider something like this:

I predict how you are going to behave. 

If I do not tell you my prediction, it is fine.

But if I do tell you, it gets complicated. What if you don’t want to do what I say: either, you come to want it, or you don’t want to.This yields the weird results of: either, the laws happen to make me tell people whose behaviour I have predicted only in cases where they come to want what I say (does it give me power?), or we don’t even get to act on our desires where there is prediction (fatalism is true).Unless we live in a world where such predictions aren't possible or we live in a world where I would never tell people my predictions. 

The thought that I could predict how you are going to behave does not seem, on inspection, to be much of a thought at all. 

This is a train of thoughts inspired by Wittgenstein’s remarks about prediction, though his actual remarks invite us to imagine him and G.E Moore playing a game of chance that is actually, predictably unchancy: The knowledge of these laws would simply change the business. There is a truth in that. One might say: being able to calculate things we can’t calculate now would indeed change the whole situation; (and if I could calculate things I still might be said to calculate the facts of choice). If Moore and I play chess or roulette and someone else could predict what was going to happen (telling us), we would just give up playing roulette. Suppose someone said: ‘This is no game of chance at all. What makes us think it is a game of chance is only our ignorance’, I could contradict this and say: ‘No. It is a game of chance now that we are ignorant; if in the future we were no longer ignorant it would no longer be a game of chance.’ (Lecture on Freedom of the Will)This is a sketch of how an issue is settled — we start with a worry about the relationship between prediction and freedom of the will, and Wittgenstein helps us see that that worry is packed with a lot of strange ,and half-thought, implications. Wittgenstein undercuts the idea that such predicting activity could amount to anything in practice. It is not an argument, or framework; it is just a set of thoughts, but perhaps the sort that would let us put a certain anxiety to bed. 

This, admittedly, is not how I got over my free will obsessions. The truth about that is, in some ways, more clinical. That is, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and people do not know that it can manifest as obsessions over philosophical questions as much as it can manifest over cleaning. The way my free will obsessions disappeared is a complex story, and it is only partly philosophy related. The thing about being a philosopher is it does not exclude you from any of the pitfalls of being the kind of fleshy, psychological beings we are — even if it is tempting to think that it could. But was that all it was for me — OCD? Is philosophy, for me, just neuroses writ large —  does this not evidence the claim that it is as much projection and fantasy for the rest of those in the game?

I remember meeting with a philosophy tutor on my first day of university and him telling us, myself and another student, that ‘Those who come to study philosophy and theology tend to be deeply bothered by something.’ I wanted him to be wrong; I didn’t want to have to face any of my own issues. I wanted philosophy to be easier. I wanted it to have all the answers, and the promise of safety — if only I became smart enough, I could keep all tragedy at bay. That was what research grants and book deals and fellowships were for. Philosophy, at its richest, can make you swallow hard pills — perhaps this is what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote, “You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thought? The answer, I think, is: with courage.” (CV, 52)

I came to realise what bothered me was not exactly about the metaphysics of free will and determinism. It was about people’s capacity to make good decisions, and the open question of why people make bad choices when they could make good ones. Wittgenstein would say I was suffering from an implicit must: if a person makes a bad decision when a good decision is available to them, then they must not have free will. I thought that the only way that evil is made sense of is by seeing each of us as a bundle bag of Darwinian impulses. Residue from my own childhood grievances and disappointments, perhaps I could not imagine alternative options. But this does not leave me without any questions — the question of why, if good choices are available to them, people make bad ones is as good a philosophical question as any. And this is why it seems right to say there was the OCD, and the philosophy, however tangled up they are. 

This is not something Wittgenstein fails to grasp. Wittgenstein is often read as anti-philosophical, or ‘quietist’ — that is, Wittgenstein is read as saying there are no positive, constructive, projects in philosophy, only the negative task of eradicating confusions. Since I was left with a philosophical question on the other side of dealing with myself and my hang-ups, we would have reason to doubt a call to quietism from therapeutic grounds. But the first thing to point out is that there is nothing about Wittgenstein’s aim which cannot be described as ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ — the ‘quietist’ label does little to illuminate what he is doing. I had to accept that my anxiety about metaphysical questions was not really about metaphysics and yet, my interest in philosophy and its resource has only doubled down. I think we come to object better not only to each other, but to the world as well and we polish our problems. 

But another thing to note is, getting all philosophers to drop their research projects and go become mechanics or lawyers or bakers, this is not Wittgenstein’s intention. From his point of view, you are entitled to do your semantics, your metaphysics and epistemologies — his analogy between philosophy and neurotic thought is one of many analogies and it stands to inflect possible ways of looking on ourselves, practices and words. But if you insist that it does not seem possible to you that your philosophy is (in part) your own neuroses writ large, then Wittgenstein won’t press the point any further. 

***

One of the most helpful things about philosophy is knowing that other people can bear it. I would attend lectures on epistemology and still, somehow, sit their chronically anxious, unable to type notes, because all I could think about was free will still. But over time, I paid attention to all these philosophers rushing about the city on bikes and busy schedules and even those that research topics are explicitly relevant to free will sleep at night.

I took books out from the library, whilst only attempting to read small parts of them, and gained the sense that there were compatibilists and incompatibilists alike who think that free will really does exist. One was Causes, Laws, and Free Will by Kadri Vihvelin, the other A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward, each distinct and fantastic in their own right. Just their confidence and commitment to metaphysical defences for free will was enough to comfort me because I only needed to feel like it was possible. This gets to what is so radical and liberating about Wittgenstein’s methods and vision for philosophy. The extent to which it is anti-philosophical is only the extent to which it is anti-obsessional; and the extent to which it is anti-obsessional is that it takes seriously the psychological make-up of philosophical concern, and in reconfiguring the dialectic touches on a kind of comfort we can offer each other. Wittgenstein’s dialectic of inflecting or putting forward possibilities to see what, if at all, the interlocutor can do with them, or to see whether they can access such possibilities, is no different to the comfort I found in noticing that either (i) others really see some position X as the case or (ii) seeing other philosophers not be moved by what I take to be the critically high stakes of a debate between positions Y and Z.

Clinical psychologist and Wittgenstein scholar Richard Gipps notes the same point after some reflections inspired by Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. As Gipps insightfully draws out, Wittgenstein’s remarks touch on the heart of the obsessive-compulsive thought-world. There is something about the obsessive-compulsive which cannot bear particular possibilities, for fear that, as OCD-sufferer and author Rose Cartwright puts it, the ‘world might implode, I [the sufferer] must stop that from happening’. As Gipps sees it, they attempt to eliminate doubt and possibility by fighting against intrusive thoughts but it is a cruel sort of optimism because it is an attempt to make up for their pre-reflective, deeper insecurity with reflective, philosophical/scientific certainty — it involves not quite seeing the irony between the excessive doubt and the background, pre-reflective certainty in a capacity to think, to doubt, to tell a threat from a mere thought. What is required to help the obsessive-compulsive, Gipps writes, is a similar reassurance that seeing others has provided me: 

...the therapeutic action will take place at the pre-reflective level, whereby the therapist provides, in and through the manner of their own comportment in relation to the patient's worry, a reassuring pre-reflective sense that going-on-being is possible, that the world and the mind are enduring and stable enough to be born, that they will survive… (OC and OCD, Gipps, 2010) 

This all has left me thinking that it is not sensible or helpful to ask whether philosophy simply bottoms out at abnormal psychology. The better question to ask is, if aspects of your philosophy were to be motivated by or a function of your own contingent neuroses, could you bear that fact? It is not that I think this is a particularly answerable question; I am not sure the human track record for deep self-awareness, in philosophy or elsewhere, is generally that admirable. But it is a better question by way of memory and its need. We should remember that there is a difference between laying out the foundations for knowledge or agent-causation or ethics and laying out the foundations for a house. Nothing will collapse around us if we cannot get the metaphysics to work how we want it to. And if we each saw philosophy as Wittgenstein saw it, then I think we could bear our neurotic self-involvement more, partly because we would give each other permission to, partly because we see each other, and the discipline, survive if we dared to tentatively reimagine the philosophical problem as the neurotic one. 

But what if Wittgenstein’s vision does not appeal to you and you want answers? What if, even though he won’t press any further, you cannot shake the question of whether philosophy is just neurosis writ large and you crave some certainty or clarity on the matter? Of course, one thing I have not yet mentioned is how the notion of a ‘neurosis’, or the foundations of psychoanalytic theory, are as scrutinised by philosophy as philosophy is subject to scrutiny from psychoanalysis. You need not even do the scrutinising to know that philosophy’s fate is not sealed. Another option is to pay attention to the fact that the question does not trouble me too much. I thought it was simply an intriguing one. Or do an experiment: ask others and pay attention to the fact that it does not trouble everyone you might ask. 

This does not require entertaining Wittgenstein’s overall vision of philosophy, and you might feel better for it. But neither of these options will rid you of the question of whether philosophy is just neurosis writ large if you think ridding of a question means answering it with certainty, and only if you attack the foundations psychoanalysis might you, if you are luckily, scramble together a defensive sense of that certainty (thinking things like ‘Without a doubt philosophy is not neurosis writ large’). That said, that misses Wittgenstein’s general point: this will only beget more confusions, only wrack a debt of courage which needs to be paid. If it must be the case that philosophy is not neurosis writ large, and cashing that out means that p, q and r all must be the case, trouble will arise. Here is an example. As Wittgenstein keenly remarks, you can say things like ‘All the tools in a toolkit modify something’ in order to have a conceptual analysis of the notion of a tool, but then you are forced to say and think strange things like ‘A ruler modifies your knowledge of the length of something’ — why make things more difficult for yourself, he asks (PI, §14) ? 

I remember talking to my own therapist about therapeutic action and the conditions for its possibility. He told me that if he had a patient who turned up constantly to the sessions with a hostile attitude, he would simply discharge them. He said that he would be frank with them and ask, how is the process meant to work if you are not open to the possibility of the therapist having something you can work with? Now, I realise only now that I could have denied him myself; I could have always accused him of not being able to understand because he could not tell the difference between logical fatalism and causal determinism, or because he did not have a grasp on Hume’s distinction between liberty of spontaneity and liberty of indifference. Sometimes I was tempted to. My strongest obsessive themes were the existence of the self, freedom of the will and whether we should care about ethics and so I could have argued with him — he admitted these issues interested and bothered him too. But instead we had a gentle interaction, one that I think, as it should have, changed us both for the good. And why shouldn’t the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis be the same? Why shouldn’t the interactions in the philosophy room and the therapy room become a little more alike than they have historically been? 

Bibliography 

Baker, Gordon P., and Katherine J. Morris. Wittgenstein's Method : Neglected Aspects : Essays on Wittgenstein. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 

Gipps, Richard (2010), OC and OCD, http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2010/08/oc-and-ocd.html

Morris K.J. (2019) “How I See Philosophy”: An Apple of Discord Among Wittgenstein Scholars. In: Makovec D., Shapiro S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, ChamWittgenstein, Ludwig, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd Ed.] ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963. Print.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. Von Wright, and Denis. Paul. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. Print.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1977). Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1989), A Lecture on Freedom of the Will. Philosophical Investigations, 12: 85-100. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9205.1989.tb00265.x