Scattered Thoughts, Part 1

Mental Illness, Masculinity, Metaphysics, Music, and Books

I am about to undergo a life-changing experience — in the next few days (and perhaps even today) my son will be born. While the birth of any child is life-changing, there is something particularly transformative about having your first (or so I’ve been told). With the birth of your first child, you are transmogrified from an adult into a parent.

I promise I will not wax philosophical about the beauty of fatherhood, at least for a little while. I imagine that being a new father is going to be like being a new husband, meaning that I will immediately feel like an expert in all things parental, and then over the course of several years I will discover, again and again, just how little I know.

Because of this impending eucatastrophe, I will be writing slightly less for a bit. I’m letting you know now, just in case that matters to you or your budgeting decisions. But I will be writing. I’m working on two book projects — I’ve sampled one here before, and the other is a novel that I wouldn’t dare share with you yet — and I want to rededicate myself to writing in this newsletter. But the newsletter writing will be a bit more sporadic for at least a month.

In the meantime, and partly as a way to escape the anxiety of all this, I’m writing this post. Below, you’ll see a number of brief reflections. Some are answering questions from the comments section; some are occasioned by recent events; one or two are just things that I want to get off my chest.

Marcus and Mental Illness

Payton, a reader and commenter, asks:

How do you think Marcus would see mental illness? Would he say that is something out of his control?

This is a very good question, but it needs some clarification.

First: There are a variety of mental illnesses, and Marcus (and Stoicism more generally) would probably say something different about them all. So our answer to the question needs to distinguish between these mental illnesses.

Second: There is a good chance that Marcus had an inadequate understanding of mental illness, at least for modern mental illness. While madness, hysteria, etc. are all of an ancient pedigree, there seems to be a large element of historical contingency to how mental illness manifests. Is depression melancholia? Why did suicide increase in France in Durkheim’s lifetime? When did anxiety become a mental illness apart from mania, obsession, etc.? Marcus likely inherited a fairly coarse-grained understanding of mental illness by modern standards, since we really are the first culture in human history to so thoroughly document and classify disorders of the mind.

Third: We can start by answering what Marcus would say, and then we should pivot to a different sort of answer. We should figure out what we, as modern students of the Stoics, should say given our historical circumstances.