Comparing Two Enactive Perspectives

First, i would like to thank Drs. Gipps and de Haan for taking the time to formulate their commentaries; it is an honor to hear your perspectives on my work. Gipps presents a series of questions concerning my perspective, and seems interested in my view of rationality-based concepts. De Haan questions some of the similarities I see between our views and highlights several aspects of my perspective that she disagrees with. Both go beyond the current target article and engage with my wider perspective. There is much that could be discussed further but I will keep my responses structured and brief.

Response to Gipps

Gipps’s commentary is structured as a series of questions. I have structured my response around those same questions.

Is Your Intention Descriptive or Revisionary and Why?

My intention is largely revisionary, although as Gipps pointed out I do not wish to stray too far from the ways in which ‘mental disorder’ is currently used. A longer answer regarding my motivations can be found in my thesis (Nielsen, 2020). Ultimately, my motivation lies in the fact that I do not think there is a singular status quo concept of mental disorder from which to move on from. The many well-motivated arguments and disagreements in philosophy of psychiatry are evidence enough of this.

Why Restrict Attention to Survival and Not Reproduction?

My perspective is not evolutionary in this way. It should go without saying but to judge someone’s reproductive choices and label nuns as disordered seems to be an unacceptable expansion of the concept of mental disorder. Once we accept that all concepts of mental disorder are normative—in that they are making a claim about something being wrong in some way—we are faced with the challenge of justifying the basis on which we make such normative claims. To those that demarcate disorder based on statistics we can say—why does it matter to be normal? To the evolutionary functionalist we can say—why does it matter to be as evolution has apparently shaped us? If we are going to try and demarcate pathology in behavior and mind, then the enactive relation between organism and world seems to provide a more secure root of normativity from which to begin. Self-maintenance and adaption are processes that every cell of our body are striving to engage in every moment that we are alive. It is something fundamental to life and therefore, if we are to label someone’s behavior and thought disordered, it seems the most principled place to begin. Of course, there is a lot more to life than survival; higher structures of meaning clearly emerge. I will return to this when responding to de Haan.

Is This Close Enough to Current Concepts of Mental Disorder?

I believe it is. Gipps raises the counter-examples of extreme sports and suicide here. While we tried to specify the borders of pathology utilizing a necessary and sufficient conditions approach in Nielsen and Ward (2020a), this was an attempt to specify an ideal and is never going to be perfect—reality is far too messy for that. For example, tattoos are a form of self-injury that risk infection, but the cultural landscape surrounding this act supports its functionality. Take Gipps’s example of extreme sports such as base-jumping. Yes, this is a risky act, but by engaging in it this person may also be attaining goods that allow them to fare well in society, for example, social capital, access to a community, sense of identity, monetary reward. In such a context such behavior seems to be part of a functional mode of being in the world. If we imagine someone who does not receive such goods, and who compulsively engages with risky jumps despite this, then the behavior starts to seem more dysfunctional. Gipps’s example of suicide is a challenging one. Given my framework is tied to self-maintenance, it does view suicide as dysfunctional in all but the most...