[lit-ideas] Re: Mop Rumpchuck

David Ritchie wrote
Here's a clumsy version of the thoughts which caused my plea. For the introduction to my talk about shell-shock, I am thinking through how, as a director I might try to stage Lady Macbeth's most famous speech. (I know the connection between shell-shock and Lady Macbeth is not obvious; that's exactly why I think it might be interesting to begin there.)
Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes.
Lady Macbeth's dagger used to be a stock example in philosophical discussions of perception and reality although I can't just now put my finger on a a text in which it's specifically mentioned. (Ashtrays, which appear elliptical when turned in a certain way, used to be THE stock example of a difference between appearance and reality, and a which a social historian might trace the disappearance of ashtrays from the literature to a disappearance of them from academic offices because of bans on smoking in them, etc.)
Is this a REAL dagger? Lady M. seems to want to know, and she uses one sense, touch, to correct the impressions of another, sight. Her construing it as the creation of a 'heat-oppressed brain' (heat-oppressed her feelings about the 'bloody business,' anticipates very nicely not only Folk Psychology, but many quite reputable and advanced theories of How the Mind Works. Cognitive psychology today isn't much of an improvement on it, except that we think we know a bit more how the brain itself 'works' now than previously.
Those suffering from shell shock or PTSD have their own 'bloody business' haunting them; whether it inevitably results in hallucinations I do not know. I don't want to take the subject lightly, but I'm reminded that the classicist Rex Warner, once saw the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories lying like great building blocks across the room, and had to be sent down.
What we laughed at were two errors: the stage hands' ineptitude and the director's literal take on the problem of what Lady M. sees. Short conclusion: it's better if the audience doesn't share Lady M.'s fantastic vision.
I should think that the audience should NOT see it. If they did, this would certainly tell against its being a hallucination of hers—? Would it matter if she were seeing a mirage? Hard to stage, perhaps.
When Science asks whether a phenomenon is real, the question may be Lady M.'s, roughly translated, "Am I imagining the phenomenon before me?" or it might be a more technical kind of question, "Do the statistics demonstrate what you claim, or might the pattern better be attributed to chance or background noise?" When Medicine asks, "Is the disease real," both possibilities obtain: "is the patient imagining that his or her perceptions add up to something we call a disease or ailment" and "does the cluster of symptoms fall within our definition of a real ailment"?
I wonder if scientists, in asking these various things are (really) asking the same thing in each case. I especially wonder if Science itself asks the analog of Lady M's question, unless this is meant as a question about a particular researcher's sensory experiences on a particular day. Crudely: a crack in the lens may distort the appearance of an object being examined through it OR the researcher's tired brain may cause her to see brownish spots wandering across a surface that's being inspected, leading her to conclude eventually that the spots are not a real property of the surface. Yet these phenomena and this distinction are not by any means unique to Science.
Is it a 'real' disease? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been ridiculed for creating more and more mental disorders simply by taking each variation on a theme as a new disorder, and for creating 'diseases' from clusters of symptoms which, unlike measles, e.g., have no underlying 'cause,' and are 'disorders' only in socially constructed contexts. ATD-ADHD comes to mind.
I guess I was checking whether I can say that, "while philosophers might find little reason to dwell on such matters, we might profit from spending a few minutes with them, to see what they can tell us about shell-shock and its relationship to PTSD."
I'd thought that shell-shock, PTSD, and combat fatigue were simply different names for the same symptoms; that where one used to speak of shell-shock, and later combat fatigue, one now spoke of PTSD. So, I'd be interested in learning the distinctions among them.
Philosophers do sometimes have interesting and useful things to say about perception and about emotions. I haven't said any such things here. 

Robert Paul
Reed College
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