"Modern insanity"

            Throughout the ages humanity has sought after a greater understanding of existence, self, and God.  This resolute attempt to understand things has been labeled philosophy.  The development of this “love of wisdom” (translation) founded various fields of knowledge which include Epistemology, the study of how we learn or gain knowledge of anything.  In classical times, the debates raged about how the sensible impressions of things, e.g. trees, people, animals, turned into knowable concepts in the human mind.  This presumed, of course, that there really was a truly existent world outside of our mind and that we could know it.  In the early 17th century philosophy took a radical turn in this field of knowledge.  The new thinkers in philosophy (beginning with René Descartes and climaxing in the works of Immanuel Kant) began a course of speculative inquiry that began to question whether we could know the world, whether we could know of it accurately, or even if an external world existed at all. 

                In the classical understanding of mental health, a person was said to be sane if the thoughts in his mind correctly corresponded to the reality existing outside of his mind.  Conversely, a person was deemed insane if the thoughts in one’s mind failed to agree with the external reality.  Modern philosophy brought an interesting challenge to this dynamic, if we cannot be certain of anything in the external world, then ‘how can we determine if our thoughts accurately correspond to reality?’  Under these conditions, how do we determine mental health?  Our current standards of mental health depend on functionality and emotional stability that often are reduced to “feelings”.

                The result is that nobody is crazy anymore unless their mental state interrupts their functionality or interferes with someone else.  If my neighbor feels some compulsion to put on a tutu a 3:00 a.m. and ride a unicycle around the block while announcing that he is indeed the queen of France; such a compulsion is only disordered if it obstructs his ability to function or offends someone else.  Our society now shuns any evaluation of personal behavior as being judgmental.

            Nevertheless, there is some level of common sense that screams in objection to this subjectivity.  It insists that there really is a real world and objective standards of behavior.  Reality has this nasty tendency to force people to live in it.  The modern philosopher can go so far as to deny that there is a physical world, however, that evening he will grow tired, sleep and probably bath the next morning.  Reality is self-imposing upon us and to ignore it would have disastrous consequences.  So why do we think that placing all human behavior and thought into some relative category divorced from reality and objective standard will not have similar disastrous consequences?