Jim Devine wrote:
Ted writes:I think it's a mistake to see psychopathology as ever "functional."
"Success" can't be furthered by unrealistic thinking.<
unrealistic thinking -- e.g., schizophrenia -- usually doesn't further success in capitalist enterprise, on the level of practical reason. But it does in other circumstances. Economist Robert Barro has made a profession out of embracing unrealistic thinking and has gotten big bucks. Some religious leaders are extremely unrealistic (at least on the theological, theoretical level) but have convinced large numbers of disciples to follow them and to give them money. There are lots of other examples that suggest that unrealism can be quite lucrative as long as it doesn't spill over into the nuts and bolts of practical living (managing the books, etc.) or if there's some trusted individual who will take care of those. (Even so, sometimes unrealistic thinking as the stock market soars can pay off by luck (if one sells at the peak).)
On the other hand, when I referred to "psychopathology" (or sociopathology or "antisocial personality disorder") I wasn't talking about psychopathology _in general_ but specifically about the lack of a conscience. That kind of psychopathology seems to be rewarded and thus encouraged by the structure of capitalist society. (As Ken noted, the corporation itself institutionalizes antisocial personality disorder.) The main problem for a psychopath of this sort is to keep others from knowing that he or she is one of those; this is called "public relations."
In what you’ve cut out, I pointed to Marx’s idea of life in “the realm of freedom,” i.e. life as the activity of appropriating and creating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition, as the ultimate criterion for judging “success.” Individuals are more or less successful to the extent that they manage to live such lives.
Such a life requires the kind of development indicated in the idea of the “universally developed individual.” This is the “rational” individual; an idea of rationality very different from the idea of rationality in game theory. Rationality requires a capacity to perceive truly.
Psychopathology, in the sense I’m using the term, always means irrationality of a greater or less degree, an irrationality characterized by an inability to perceive truly because of the influence of unconscious phantasy. It can’t, therefore, be functional to “success” defined in the above way.
On these foundational assumptions, individuals can hold mistaken irrational beliefs about their self-interest. This will be the case, for instance, if they are greedy. Moreover, irrationality about ends is necessarily associated with some degree of irrationality about means. This isn’t inconsistent with, for example, individuals being very successfully greedy e.g. making lots of money. Their psychopathology won’t have been functional to the achievement of this success, however. Had they been less psychopathological, they would have been more successful and, as part of this, less greedy.
This way of understanding individuals is inconsistent with understanding them as utility functions. Its understanding of rationality and psychopathology can’t be expressed in terms of the latter. Its understanding of a psychopath, for instance, can't be expressed as a utility function without a conscience.
As it understands psychopathology, the utility function conception of self and others is itself psychopathological. The conception splits self and others into externally related fragments (the "goods" that constitute the content of the function) and subjects them to obsessional control (the "mathematics"). Splitting, the attack on linking (that constitutes the fragments as externally related) and obsessional control are defences against persecutory anxiety.
The idea of "the realm of freedom" that emerges from this is radically inconsistent with Marx's. Mirowski, for instance, locates Arrow's impossibility theorem within the socialist calculation debate and interprets it as demonstrating that "dictatorial or imposed regimes" would be better able than democratic voting to realize "the realm of freedom" interpreted in utility function terms as "the welfare optima."
"For anyone steeped in the socialist calculation controversies of the 1930s, it is hard to see it [Arrow’s theorem] as anything other than a reprise of the Cowles theme that the Walrasian market is a computer sans commitment to any computational architecture or algorithmic specification; the novel departure came with the assertion that democratic voting is an inferior type of computer for calculating the welfare optima already putatively identified by the Walrasian computer." (Machine Dreams, pp. 303–04)
Ted
