Stop Smiling!
This is a book about a metaphor that has dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Greeks: the metaphor of light and cognates having to do with visibility, which are legion in the texts of philosophers from Plato to the present day. It used to be said in the 1970s and 80s that such abundance of visual and light metaphors meant there was something philosophers of all ages had been ignoring or neglecting, basically that we are beings with other senses beyond vision, that the senses of hearing or smell or touch or taste were being not only left behind but dominated by the eventually illegitimate and oppressive power of sight. Even thought and mental states were described using terms having to do with vision. Philosophy itself was thought of as the power of light to make everything seen and, therefore, known. Rationalist philosophers described reason and the a priori contents of the mind as clear, distinct, evident, obvious. And whenever a philosopher is not being understood by the public or by his peers, the demand for clarification immediately arises.
Plato, and his Allegory of the Cave, represent this idea that to know is to have more light with which to observe, to think is to clarify, and reason itself is a beacon of light bringing to a dark unknown world the much needed visibility to assuage our fears through knowledge.
The Allegory of the Cave can be interpreted in many ways, and it is always a pleasure to read a new or different way to make its elements have determinate meanings that we hadn’t yet thought about or given attention to. In the case of the book under consideration, Night Vision by Mariana Alessandri, almost no attention is paid to the world outside the cave, where the sun is directly seen and it is possible to see directly the many things that are, and are now seen in their truth. Her emphasis is on what goes on inside the cave, where prisoners who are forced to face forward at all times, to see shadows projected by a fire inside the cave as semblances of objects go by and are carried by puppeteers. Her leading question is ‘What if philosophy has always got Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wrong? What if Plato interpreted his own Allegory wrong?’ The answer is not really in the realm of epistemology, since exploring Plato’s Cave through dark emotions does not necessarily yield knowledge of the kind philosophers seek, clear arguments that can be seen and disputed by everyone. And neither is it in the realm of metaphysics or any other conventional philosophical subject. Obviously, a book called Night Vision might be about what seeing in the dark would allow us to know, and an exploration of the dark emotions of anger, suffering or dolor, grief, depression and anxiety might be a method to achieve such knowledge. Or it might be an affirmation and rational defence of darkness as an essential component of reality. But it is not. It is neither. Night Vision presents us with first person experiences, both of the author and of other people, and dares traditional philosophy, mainly ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, to say something that really speaks to the dark emotion at hand, to understand it rather than suggest methods to overcome or live with it. Philosophy has seen dark emotions as disturbances or false judgements to be controlled and corrected by reason for ages. It has nothing to say about the experience of the emotion itself.
We might say at this point that knowing and experiencing are basically different because of the first person perspective that is the centre of experience and the third person perspective that knowledge seeks, in order to, among other things, communicate what is known. But this is not a point that strikes at anything being said in this book about dark emotions. It is a book with no method other than the telling of particular experiences and the question put to philosophy of what it has to say or do about them. And because philosophy is always found short of a satisfactory answer, this is a book about giving value, and positive value at that, to dark emotions in a culture where light and positivity take up all the space. Going back to the Allegory of the Cave, this is a book about the puppeteers, the objects they carry and the light that projects their shadows, and those who are in chains.
It is tempting to expect this book to be about alienation, ideology, and consciousness building. And it is a bit of that in a sense, when it tries to give positive value to those dark emotions that are shunned, shamed, avoided, pathologized, ignored, and silenced in a world where being happy is an imperative. This is where the book may be said to be philosophically useful, as it challenges our values as social critique. But if a category had to be named into which to put this book, I would say it would at first seem to be a mild form of a tradition of philosophy as diagnosis, in which big subjects such as mass culture, or class, or religion, or the consequences of our universal neurosis were brought out into the light. And I say it is mild because, other than valuing dark emotions, there seems to be no other big result that it is being aimed at except for affirming the value of the concrete, individual experience of one of those emotions. The best chapter in the book is the first one, about anger, because the author does not seem to be following an intellectual plan but rather to be talking about herself, because that is an emotion the author recognizes as dominant in her own experiences.
That valuation does not assume broad metaphysical aspects as when evil, or badness, or vice are being made to square well with a rational and good object as reality, or being. But it points to a common contemporary theme, which is identity and belonging. On second thought, if I had to name the category with which to label this book’s genre, I would say it is identity politics. And the goal of identity politics is not to get rid of, treat, cure, control or hide dark emotions. It is to give them legitimacy and make them worthy of respect within the long and varied spectre of ways humans can be. It’s not by chance that the word dignity is so frequently used in the book. More than to know, understand, and make a claim about the moral value or the normalcy of dark emotions, the aim of this book is to have them recognized. To make them worthy of respect, to give dignity to the people who experience them, to preserve them.
For a person with depression, being told to learn to live with it, even if it is said with kindness, so as to be who you are, and not annul a part of yourself through the hope of treatment because that would turn you into a different person, sounds bitterly superficial. The suffering brought about by depression to the point of total lack of feeling, energy, vitality is so heavy as to be unbearable and that is why it is a condition that so often leads to suicide. Even contemplating, planning, and executing suicide is something you cannot do when you are in the full throes of it but in some other, lighter, place in your mind where you are at least capable of thinking about your own destruction. To realise there are those who think of depression as a trait of personality, who romanticise it into a species of neurodivergence, who shame people into stopping to try and get rid of it, is to find out they are doing to dark emotions exactly the same thing that the culture of positivity is doing to them: to burden whoever experiences one of them with shame, that mental state this book means to eliminate by making everything valuable. When what you say about dark emotions boils down to searching for a silver lining, it means that you still can’t see in the dark.
Prof. Alexandra Abranches is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minho who has taught courses on Ethics, Political Philosophy, History of Social and Political Ideas, Modern Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics.
Her doctoral dissertation focused on David Hume’s moral philosophy. She published the book Sentimentalismo Filosófico: a Noção de Comunidade no Pensamento de C. S. Peirce (Braga, CEH, 2004) on the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, as a version of her master’s thesis. She co-authored a book on the history of philosophy with the title As Questões que se Repetem: uma Breve História da Filosofia (Lisboa, D. Quixote, 2012). She also translated into Portuguese Burke’s A Philosophical Investigation of the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Lisbon, Ed.70, 2013).
