Is mental illness overrepresented in philosophers or other famous great people?
I think every Wikipedia page I come across, for example about Nietzsche or Foucault, has a section about their years of mental illness. (And by mental illness I mean something more than having the occasional light depression, like basically everyone on the planet.)
>>1155827
Genious and madness often go hand in hand.
Lots of great leader had manic depression and would alternate between brooding and going out and do crazy stuff (napoleon, alexander, hitler)
>>1155827
I'm in the camp that Nietzsche wasn't mentally ill at all, except for the occasional spikes of egocentricity.
The hard evidence we do have suggests he was fucked up from all the medicines he needed to function, and his tragic decline resulted from a physical brain disease.
Makes one sad when pondering on it, really.
>>1155869
>I'm in the camp that Nietzsche wasn't mentally ill at all
This isn't debatable if you actually knew anything about the matter, about the letters he sent, etc.
It's not a debatable issue, anon. Get yourself together.
>>1156175
Condescending to someone isn't very polite, anon.
Opium is a powerful drug, and all the erratic ramblings I have seen in his middle years, particularly during his blowout with Salome, mimic those of opiod dependent persons I've dealt with perfectly.
He admits that explicitly in his letter to Paul Ree in December of 1882.
The only truly crazy stuff I've seen out of him was during the time of his mental breakdown, which I've already proposed was of a brain disease.
Don't ever feel entitled to talk down to people again. Especially when not only do you not address any of their initial claims, but refuse substantiate your own. Jackass.
I keep reading the title of this thread as "Philosophy as mental illness."
>>1156175
Like the other guy said, you're rude.
>>1156175
The letters he send actually support the idea of him being doped up rather than insane. They actually have coherent ideas, expressed in his poetic, metaphorical type of writing.
What you see a lot in the letters is his mind being sloppy. He is constantly crossing out words that wouldn't make sense in the sentence and trying to figure what to put in their place.
He's also talks about how horrible the "doctors" are and how painful it is. In one letter he says "they crucified me". He started calling his sickness a "cross". From that point on he started signing all his letters "The Crucified One"
Horribly tragic.
>>1155869
>eating his own feces
>spikes in egocentricity
kek
>>1155869
Nietzsche was pretty fucking nuts man.
As mental illness(outside of the realms of physical afflictions to the brain such as schizophrenia) is nothing more than behavior that is defined by society as abnormal or destructive, people who dedicate large portions of their life to explaining existence are going to have a hard time doing so without having aspects of their lives identified as abnormal or destructive. It isn't "weird" to get a job to feed yourself. Writing a book on how it is actually weird means you're not immersed in your social context, meaning you're not fitting in well with the crowd in one way or another, meaning your behavior is abnormal, meaning you're insane. Most people on this image board are insane by these standards, since "clinical depression" is treated as a mental illness when in reality it's nothing but a natural emotional response to being an animal thrust into a rigid structured setting with instincts that conflict with what you have to do to survive or what's expected of you.
also red > blue
>implying mental illness is a real thing
Philosophy is a mental illness.
People who think differently from everyone else will naturally work as a person whose job it is to think differently from everyone else.
>>1161040
>a toilet on top of a man
A man is supposed to be ON the toilet, not UNDER it
>>1157611
Just because mental illness can be ascribed to a certain drug or disease does not mean it is not mental illness. Whether you're crazy because you were bullied or beaten, or because syphilis ate holes in your brain, or because you ate too much tuna and have mercury in your neurons, you're still crazy.
