Hegel equates mental and physical illness as shared paralysis of fluid wholeness.
Evidence
Mental illness is explicable in the same way as physical illness, since they share the same cause: a paralysis in which the organism’s vitality becomes fixated onto a single aspect or part and this paralysis threatens the fluidity of the whole. … The organism finds itself ill, when one of its systems or one of its organs, troubled by a conflict with the forces of the inorganic, retreats into itself and continues to aim its own actions antagonistically against the interests of the whole, and the fluidity of the whole comprised by all the processes moving through the individual parts is thereby disturbed and brought to a halt. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 379
Categorization
- DEFINE: Offers the definitional core that illness, mental or physical, is a single part fixating against the interest of the whole — the plastic unity threatened.
- XREF: Central to the reader’s project: the organism/whole relation here maps directly onto contemporary ideas of neural plasticity and how focal deficits disturb systemic brain function. — connects to: Hegel’s subjectivity must incorporate madness, delirium and the primordial night — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 545; Illness as a psychic state exists primarily as being-for-others — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 920; Illness makes the lived body appear as an object, a given substance.
- ADDENDUM: The fixation of a single part against the whole parallels the grafted-tree and sacrifice motifs as parts subordinated to — or rebelling against — systemic wholes.
Broader Connections
- Illness makes the lived body appear as an object, a given substance.
#expands(0.82) - Illness as a psychic state exists primarily as being-for-others
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 920 - Hegel’s subjectivity must incorporate madness, delirium and the primordial night
#expands(0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 545