The Bright Side of Dark Moods
‘The Night Vision,’ studies the complex realm of human emotions, especially the suppressed and undesirable. Alessandri presents a trail of philosophical thoughts on understanding human behaviour, which often gets overshadowed in the glitter of Pop Psychology. The title of each essay is self-explanatory to hint that the conversations will be about the burgeoning ‘mental health problems.’ However, the book initiates unconventional and refreshingly mind-bending dialogues. Trained in Philosophy, Alessandri guides the readers through a historical voyage by drawing upon the works as well as personal narratives of philosophical luminaries like Søren Kierkegaard, Audre Lorde, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean-Paul Sartre, who understood, experienced their dark moods, and developed a ‘night vision.’
Nevertheless, the book does not aim to advocate any particular path to this ‘night vision.’ Instead, it attempts to initiate a conversation dismantling stereotypes about dark moods. For this, it transcends the discourse of Modern Psychology that has endorsed pharmaceutical intervention and Positive Psychology.
The book is timely because it questions the growing culture of positivity, medication, and self-help in the face of the worldwide mental health epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, one in eight people, which equals 970 million people globally, have lived with a mental disorder. The pandemic adversely affected these statistics. These fact sheets indicate a growing need for intervention by Psychology, Psychiatry and Social work professionals, among others. The gap between demand, supply, and the inaccessibility of professional help is making it easier for people across the globe to fall into the rabbit hole of the billion-dollar industry of Self-help and Pop Psychology. The biggest problem is the blind promotion of positivity in multiple forms like positive thinking, practising gratitude, mind training, healing, and positive behaviour. It is not that any of these things are bad, but in substitution to the professional care of dark moods, this is alarmingly dangerous. Alessandri gives personal accounts of herself, and philosophers throughout history who were repeatedly advised to inculcate positivity in different forms, and the results were not favourable. Instead, acceptance and attempting to understand these ‘unwelcomed moods’ proved helpful. Frequent mentions of Pop Psychology literature and trending books on self-help make the readers aware of the author’s extensive research in the hope of finding something useful.
For a better understanding of human behaviour, people usually look up to Psychology for help. Psychology, as a discipline, has now, more often than before, become dominated by an isolated, decontextualised understanding of human beings. This internalises existing social structures, giving the individual power to control and change but also increasing the tendency to self-blame. The discipline preferentially looks within the individual more than the context in which the individual is situated. Consequently, the individual starts looking for insufficiencies within themselves rather than taking the external factors that may be playing a relevant role into consideration. The result is an increase in autonomy and control, self-praise in victory, and self-blame in setbacks.
An addition to this misery is the prevalence of Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not just an economic doctrine but has reconfigured human activities into market logic. This has reformulated meanings of selfhood and identity. This new economic arrangement has created new subjectivities among the people. The primary characteristics of the emerging neoliberal subjectivities are autonomy, self-responsibilization, abstraction of the Self from society, and
enterprising tendencies. Neoliberalism is not a unified concept but is changing the social and psychological landscape worldwide. This has created a sense of freedom and creativity while simultaneously alienating man from his surroundings. Consequently, personality traits become commodities that can be marketed through workshops, life coaching, consulting services, and self-help tools. In the light of Neoliberalism, these dark moods emerge as lazy, weak, and a failure and hindrance to efficiency.
Under the Neoliberal framework, individuals tend to internalise social issues that result in guilt, self-blame, and even harm. Alessandri repeatedly mentions the prominent problem with this practice. A case in point being, that when a social issue like body shaming is internalised and labelled as a diagnosable disease, Bulimia, what emerges is a troubled individual and never a troubled society. When this individual is exposed to self-help tools, the ‘individual homework,’ as Alessandri puts it, replaces the real ‘societal homework’ where the root of the problem often lies.
Repeated mentions of gendered roles and norms that may impact a woman's mental health add to the argument of internalizing social issues instead of addressing them at a societal level. Alessandri’s ‘lived experiences’ add to this globally prevalent concern. While discussing her domestic life during the pandemic, Alessandri hints at some of these societal norms and expectations that put her mental health in a spot. Her juggling with writing, motherhood, and wife among other roles presents her as the “weaker sex” because society is not taught to appreciate those roles as much as the earnings of the male members of the family. She backs her arguments with evidence from philosophy. She tried to find solace in the works of her Philosopher friends Aristotle and Audre Lorde when she was unable to make sense of the trending books from Pop Psychology. Alessandri’s Covid anger was caught swinging between Lorde who helped her in “recognizing and resisting the extra expectations” being put on her and Aristotle’s approval in feeling angry if one’s not reacting to it. Her experiences speak for many more people who cannot keep up with the expectations of positivity, as preached by Pop Psychology.
This gap between psychiatric and societal narratives of mental illnesses hints at people's growing inability to relate to therapies or other treatments. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy's growing popularity is an ideal example to explain Alessandri’s crisis. CBT, like other techniques, internalises systemic issues and invalidates a person’s ‘lived experiences’ that may stem from social, political, or economic events. Now, these events impact many people altogether yet distinctively. Everyone’s uniqueness sets them apart from others in understanding and dealing with such problems. She correctly words this when she says, “Psychologists are in danger of missing the forest of societal dysfunction for the tree of dolor sitting on their couch”.
Examples to support this worry are numerous. The biomedical model on which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) runs, treatments like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are just a few of them. However, the point of the book is different. After highlighting the problem, Alessandri moves to the plausible solution, too. The light metaphor used throughout the book weaves several issues together. The reference to light and dark as perceived by society is brought under scrutiny. She proposes to stop feeling bad about feeling bad. Her ideas, backed by several philosophers, suggest that we should attempt to understand, accept, and work on these dark moods instead of suppressing them. The book's title encourages us to develop a night vision, the ability to see ourselves in darkness. Only when we adjust our eyes to the dark do we begin
to see these moods and ourselves as humans. Embracing this darkness helps one overcome the internalisation of societal issues, too. The ‘light’ metaphor extends beyond moods to issues of colour, race, and gender. One instance is when Alessandri points out that the association of wisdom with dark skin is still looked at with suspicion as much as dark moods like sadness or anger.
Another case in point is Alessandri’s reference to left-handed people in a right-hand-dominated world with depression. The biases and ignorance they undergo, especially in contemporary neoliberal times, are eye-opening. Neoliberal tendencies of autonomy and control present a person undergoing depression as lazy, unfit, and often incapable of living up to societal standards, internalising the stain and shame. This viewpoint diverts people’s attention from structural inefficiencies to unhealthy labelling of human beings.
Alessandri’s references from Philosophy do not advise us to treat ourselves from severe mental disorders but to discover new sides of these dark moods through a night vision that enabled these philosophers to produce some of their finest works, become better human beings, develop much-needed emotions of empathy, warmth, and compassion.
Through this book, Alessandri is extending upon the long tradition of thought on dark moods and human behaviour developed by her ancestors in the discipline. Historically speaking, before mental health professionals took over the job of narrating human behaviour, philosophers were the primary storytellers of the soul. This book is, therefore, a gentle reminder to the Psy disciplines to bring back the philosophical inquiry it departed from and synergise with it for humankind's betterment.
Overall, this book aptly justifies its title and intention of conveying the idea of night vision and its importance in combating the toxic positivity bred by the self-help industry and pop psychology. The author’s argument is centrally aligned throughout the book with her message to not feel bad about feeling bad. Pop Psychology literature is flooded with mental health tips and self-help, but this book is unique because it conveys a different message about mental health. The philosophical foundations of Alessandri’s arguments throughout the book are a desirable addition.
With its references from Aristotle to Sartre, the book demands the reader to have some rudimentary knowledge of philosophy. With that said, she has bravely undergone the daunting task of breaking down some of the greatest philosophical works for the reader's ease, which is one of the book's greatest strengths. Additionally, the book is timely to make people ponder upon the promotion of positivity, autonomy, and self-responsibilization that is proliferating indefinitely. Alessandri’s exploration of dark moods and their impact on our understanding of the world is thought-provoking and emotionally resonant. Her ability to captivate the reader with stories that are as much about the past as the present enhances the reading experience. This book is highly recommended to those inundated with the light and feeling light and embark on the journey of seeing themselves in darkness through night vision.
Ayushi Jolly is a PhD Scholar in Social Psychology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her areas of research include Neoliberalism, Self and Subjectivities, and Migration. Her doctoral research focuses on exploring the neoliberal subjectivities of students. Outside the academic sphere, she finds solace in mountains and the world of non-fiction.
She can be reached at ayushijolly16@gmail.com.
Another Kind of Self-Help Book
Every semester that I teach freshman composition, I assign something I call ‘the juxtaposition essay’. I use the examples of light/dark and chaos/order, and we discuss first the typical assumptions about the terms in each pair, noting that dualisms usually carry normative values and are often situated hierarchically. I ask the students which side may need to be redeemed and how both sides can be deconstructed for more nuance. Then I encourage them to allow the paired terms to swap assumptions and write their essay as an argument for one side’s ‘new’ connotations. So if ‘order’ is mapped as ‘productive, peaceful, and civilised’, then they will write their essay on how chaos can also be productive. Now I plan to assign a chapter in Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision as an incredible example of how empowering such an inquiry can be.
Alessandri’s book about redeeming the darkness and ‘seeing ourselves through dark moods’ is a book for everyone. Some will welcome the book as a much-needed self-help alternative to more light-centred books on the shelves. Others will gain insight into their friends, family members, colleagues, and students who may be in the first category, and learn how to ‘sit with them in the dark’. Night Vision is a book about dignity, shame, community, and compassion. While many people may find themselves uncomfortable with the expressions and realities of grief, anger, depression, anxiety and suffering in general, whether in their own lives or others, Alessandri argues that becoming experts in these areas increases everyone’s emotional intelligence. Telling someone to ‘cheer up’ may come from good intentions, but it can be read as dismissive and having a lack of empathy. Alessandri encourages us to not only think about the impact we have when others are hurting, but also to self-reflect and question whether we could do more growing in the dark.
One insight I felt myself immediately helped by was the two-level approach to anger. Drawing from various thinkers, such as Audre Lorde, who find uses for anger as being informative, Alessandri says that first-order anger is about communicating, that it is ‘meant to be heard and understood’. She understands anger as an epistemological tool, that when we feel it rising up within our bodies, it is a signal that is trying to get our attention. And instead of reacting, blowing up or blowing off (actually, the second level of anger), we should figure out what it has to say, and relay that message, if needed. Alessandri mentions that while many of us feel shame for anger (I have felt the need to apologise for ‘outbursts’ in the past), sometimes anger signals an injustice, that something externally demands correction. One example in the book is throwing almonds at her kids when they were fighting at the snack table. The anger was a teacher in this moment, productive and helpful because, after self-reflection, Alessandri realised she was burnt out, that she was taking on too much domestically with her family during the pandemic lockdown while still keeping up with her career. The problem with myself that I realised, is that I go immediately to the second-order of anger, which is ‘not about communicating anything. [. . .] You use it when first-order anger fails’. Raging, walking off, throwing our hands up might be a reasonable response, but only after we try to communicate with others why what they said or did had a negative impact on us. Alessandri refers to María Lugones’s perspective of second-order anger as ‘self-care’.
The other insight that I personally appreciate is Alessandri’s discussion of the chronic illness and depression that Gloria Anzaldua experienced. I remember reading Borderlands/La Frontera in graduate school and feeling inspired and moved by her powerful words, but I was not able to digest how much of that power came from her mastery of the darkness in such a material way until reading Alessandri’s book. When someone experiences chronic illness, the physical and mental intertwine, and everyday existence can feel painful. While some may wake up each day with 100 percent wellness, energy, and health, others are trying to do as much on 30 percent, with fewer days of the week to work with. This ‘lower productivity’ can translate to others as being lazy or not caring, even arrogance, which is not true at all. Alessandri quotes Anzaldua as stating ‘pain was a way of life, my normal way of life’, and ‘Dealing with my illness took all my energy.’ Alessandri tells of how Anzaldua did not just give herself over to her suffering, but how she accepted and embraced the forced rest, would ‘meditate on the darkness’, to explore and drink of the energies and knowledge of this other moonlight realm. I have experienced this as well in my own life. I have chronic sleep issues, along with mental health struggles, and have found as well that when you can find a way to work with the tiredness and the sickness, and the mental strain that comes with it, wisdom, creativity and compassion arise. People often talk about how their ‘dark night of the soul’ resulted in a spiritual awakening. It does seem that human beings can benefit from suffering, even if we wish such transformation and evolution could occur without it. Challenges prompt growth. They also prompt, along with various traditions such as Buddhism, compassion for others. I will add myself to the statistics: I became a much more empathic listener to my students when they would come to me with their own chronic illness, injuries, accidents, and depression after I experienced my own.
Empathy is essential to relational depth. It helps us hear each other, tune into each other’s frequencies so that intimacy and healing can manifest. When I encounter discussions of AI/artificial intelligence or transhumanism, this is the one area of hesitancy I have in considering how humans might choose to evolve or what other sentience we press ahead to create. Like Alessandri, I am not convinced that we will be satisfied with our spiritual and emotional growth without suffering. One day, we may be able to leave suffering, even our bodies, behind, but I believe that path might occur best by pushing through the mountain, not going around it. The mountain teaches us so much.
As someone who has been literally saved by practices of meditation, gratitude, and is a bit of a sun-worshipper (mostly to reset my circadian rhythm and because it seems to relieve my own depression), I wonder if there is not an ongoing dialectic needed, and if this book does enough to avoid diminishing the power of practices that might fall into what she sees as the more positive/light-centred side. In my class as well, I realise I should probably do more to point out that the end of their ‘reversal’ essays should not be the end of the conversation. Once we can redeem or shadow a particular concept to give it more nuance, we need to make sure the conversation doesn’t stop or rest for too long. I think Alessandri would agree with this, as she has mentioned in talks I have listened to, that she hopes one day her book is actually no longer needed because we will have learned the lessons and can go beyond the dualism itself. I hope her book will always be around and read by many because I’m not as optimistic that we can transcend past the need for it in our current state of evolution. But some readers might feel a bit called out if we are personally and quietly helped by gratitude journals, CBT, even manifestation (positive magical thinking can be a needed pendulum shift as well when habituated by decades of negative magical thinking), yoga, and using the term ‘gift’ for what we encounter as pain. It is of course not the responsibility of the text to celebrate what is already celebrated, and by selecting a focus to investigate, one is always going to be somewhat exclusive. Yet, if I felt any places were weak in the text, it was whenever Alessandri would tend toward moralising or when calling out certain practices. I felt reference to these could have been relegated to a footnote once for all. Yoga and meditation can be done in the moonlight and focus on shadow work as much as any dark practice. Calling ‘pain’ a ‘gift’ doesn’t mean we are forcing positivity or denying the debilitating effects of pain. But we simply see the other side of the coin, much like Anzaldua and others have done.
Elisabeth Schilling is a professor at Pikes Peak State College and an adjunct at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs (UCCS). Schilling teaches Literature, Ethics, and Religious Studies. She is also pursuing a B.A. in philosophy from UCCS. Schilling received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies in Religion from Claremont Graduate University in 2014.
Stop Smiling!
This is a book about a metaphor that has dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Greeks: the metaphor of light and cognates having to do with visibility, which are legion in the texts of philosophers from Plato to the present day. It used to be said in the 1970s and 80s that such abundance of visual and light metaphors meant there was something philosophers of all ages had been ignoring or neglecting, basically that we are beings with other senses beyond vision, that the senses of hearing or smell or touch or taste were being not only left behind but dominated by the eventually illegitimate and oppressive power of sight. Even thought and mental states were described using terms having to do with vision. Philosophy itself was thought of as the power of light to make everything seen and, therefore, known. Rationalist philosophers described reason and the a priori contents of the mind as clear, distinct, evident, obvious. And whenever a philosopher is not being understood by the public or by his peers, the demand for clarification immediately arises.
Plato, and his Allegory of the Cave, represent this idea that to know is to have more light with which to observe, to think is to clarify, and reason itself is a beacon of light bringing to a dark unknown world the much needed visibility to assuage our fears through knowledge.
The Allegory of the Cave can be interpreted in many ways, and it is always a pleasure to read a new or different way to make its elements have determinate meanings that we hadn’t yet thought about or given attention to. In the case of the book under consideration, Night Vision by Mariana Alessandri, almost no attention is paid to the world outside the cave, where the sun is directly seen and it is possible to see directly the many things that are, and are now seen in their truth. Her emphasis is on what goes on inside the cave, where prisoners who are forced to face forward at all times, to see shadows projected by a fire inside the cave as semblances of objects go by and are carried by puppeteers. Her leading question is ‘What if philosophy has always got Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wrong? What if Plato interpreted his own Allegory wrong?’ The answer is not really in the realm of epistemology, since exploring Plato’s Cave through dark emotions does not necessarily yield knowledge of the kind philosophers seek, clear arguments that can be seen and disputed by everyone. And neither is it in the realm of metaphysics or any other conventional philosophical subject. Obviously, a book called Night Vision might be about what seeing in the dark would allow us to know, and an exploration of the dark emotions of anger, suffering or dolor, grief, depression and anxiety might be a method to achieve such knowledge. Or it might be an affirmation and rational defence of darkness as an essential component of reality. But it is not. It is neither. Night Vision presents us with first person experiences, both of the author and of other people, and dares traditional philosophy, mainly ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, to say something that really speaks to the dark emotion at hand, to understand it rather than suggest methods to overcome or live with it. Philosophy has seen dark emotions as disturbances or false judgements to be controlled and corrected by reason for ages. It has nothing to say about the experience of the emotion itself.
We might say at this point that knowing and experiencing are basically different because of the first person perspective that is the centre of experience and the third person perspective that knowledge seeks, in order to, among other things, communicate what is known. But this is not a point that strikes at anything being said in this book about dark emotions. It is a book with no method other than the telling of particular experiences and the question put to philosophy of what it has to say or do about them. And because philosophy is always found short of a satisfactory answer, this is a book about giving value, and positive value at that, to dark emotions in a culture where light and positivity take up all the space. Going back to the Allegory of the Cave, this is a book about the puppeteers, the objects they carry and the light that projects their shadows, and those who are in chains.
It is tempting to expect this book to be about alienation, ideology, and consciousness building. And it is a bit of that in a sense, when it tries to give positive value to those dark emotions that are shunned, shamed, avoided, pathologized, ignored, and silenced in a world where being happy is an imperative. This is where the book may be said to be philosophically useful, as it challenges our values as social critique. But if a category had to be named into which to put this book, I would say it would at first seem to be a mild form of a tradition of philosophy as diagnosis, in which big subjects such as mass culture, or class, or religion, or the consequences of our universal neurosis were brought out into the light. And I say it is mild because, other than valuing dark emotions, there seems to be no other big result that it is being aimed at except for affirming the value of the concrete, individual experience of one of those emotions. The best chapter in the book is the first one, about anger, because the author does not seem to be following an intellectual plan but rather to be talking about herself, because that is an emotion the author recognizes as dominant in her own experiences.
That valuation does not assume broad metaphysical aspects as when evil, or badness, or vice are being made to square well with a rational and good object as reality, or being. But it points to a common contemporary theme, which is identity and belonging. On second thought, if I had to name the category with which to label this book’s genre, I would say it is identity politics. And the goal of identity politics is not to get rid of, treat, cure, control or hide dark emotions. It is to give them legitimacy and make them worthy of respect within the long and varied spectre of ways humans can be. It’s not by chance that the word dignity is so frequently used in the book. More than to know, understand, and make a claim about the moral value or the normalcy of dark emotions, the aim of this book is to have them recognized. To make them worthy of respect, to give dignity to the people who experience them, to preserve them.
For a person with depression, being told to learn to live with it, even if it is said with kindness, so as to be who you are, and not annul a part of yourself through the hope of treatment because that would turn you into a different person, sounds bitterly superficial. The suffering brought about by depression to the point of total lack of feeling, energy, vitality is so heavy as to be unbearable and that is why it is a condition that so often leads to suicide. Even contemplating, planning, and executing suicide is something you cannot do when you are in the full throes of it but in some other, lighter, place in your mind where you are at least capable of thinking about your own destruction. To realise there are those who think of depression as a trait of personality, who romanticise it into a species of neurodivergence, who shame people into stopping to try and get rid of it, is to find out they are doing to dark emotions exactly the same thing that the culture of positivity is doing to them: to burden whoever experiences one of them with shame, that mental state this book means to eliminate by making everything valuable. When what you say about dark emotions boils down to searching for a silver lining, it means that you still can’t see in the dark.
Prof. Alexandra Abranches is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minho who has taught courses on Ethics, Political Philosophy, History of Social and Political Ideas, Modern Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics.
Her doctoral dissertation focused on David Hume’s moral philosophy. She published the book Sentimentalismo Filosófico: a Noção de Comunidade no Pensamento de C. S. Peirce (Braga, CEH, 2004) on the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, as a version of her master’s thesis. She co-authored a book on the history of philosophy with the title As Questões que se Repetem: uma Breve História da Filosofia (Lisboa, D. Quixote, 2012). She also translated into Portuguese Burke’s A Philosophical Investigation of the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Lisbon, Ed.70, 2013).
Hello Darkness: Reflections on Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision
Optimistic/pessimistic. Rational/irrational. Light/dark. When considering our orientation towards existence, the spirit in which we navigate and interpret the world, it is all too tempting to fall back on simplistic – but undeniably evocative – binaries such as these. Given the complexity inherent in living a human life, these oppositions can arguably help us sift through the wealth of experiences and ideas assailing us every day, acting as a kind of crude filter or shorthand. But when we reify these polarisations, load them with value and hierarchise them, do we risk obscuring much of what can give life meaning, and worse, lend weight to broader structures of oppression at work across our societies? Instead of shunning experiences perceived as ‘dark’ and taking refuge in radically optimistic ideas that everything will somehow, in some way, all work out, should we instead try to sit with the darkness, and develop what Mariana Alessandri terms ‘Night Vision’?
As compelling as it is gently confronting, Alessandri’s new book addresses these and related questions with wit and compassion – as well as a welcome acknowledgement that definitive answers may evade us. Drawing on her experience teaching philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (where she is an associate professor) as well as a knowledge of existentialist thought that both encompasses and reaches well beyond the traditional pantheon, the author deftly weaves together anecdotes from home and classroom with broader reflections on what it might mean to value dark moods. The stories of many students run through this work, illustrating (and sometimes complicating) Alessandri’s wider themes. Whether relating a first encounter with Plato’s cave or a re-evaluation of what anxiety might have to teach us, with Kierkegaard’s life and ideas in mind, these vignettes help to demonstrate what is at stake in this discussion while simultaneously enriching it. Much the same can be said of the author’s autobiographical stories, with sections on parental anger and connecting with a seriously ill parent proving especially poignant. By highlighting the potential value that can be derived from such experiences – a recognition that one is unfairly overburdened and under-supported in the former, and a window for emotional vulnerability in the latter – Alessandri asks us to look again at our customary value judgements in light of real, nuanced situations.
Night Vision seems to be a work of public philosophy: looking beyond the academy while seeking to ignite discussion about what the implications of ‘dark’ moods might be for all of us. The work is divided into five main sections alongside an introduction and conclusion, with each tackling a different mood or experience: anger, sadness/pain (interpreted as dolor), grief, depression and anxiety. Each section foregrounds the pertinent ideas of a particular thinker: in turn Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa and Søren Kierkegaard. The book’s central task is, as described in the introduction, to discover whether ‘truth, goodness, and beauty reside not only in light but also in darkness’ (page 13), and to what degree answering in the negative – as many societies have encouraged us to do – may have been a grave error. Nevertheless, this is fortunately far from a polemic against the idea of dark moods being potentially harmful, or against the concept of mental illness: like a dispiriting plea for the world to swap out SSRIs for Seneca. Indeed the Stoics - both ancient and modern - come in for some relevant criticism as regards to their, in my view unrealistic, portrait of absolute control over the emotions. Instead, we might see Alessandri’s main target as being the combination of two pervasive social narratives, ‘the Light Metaphor’ and ‘the brokenness story’, which can prove oppressive on both an individual and a collective level (page 8).
According to Alessandri, we can see the Light Metaphor at work in everything from portrayals of Jesus as ‘the Light’ to the rise of self-help books like The Power of Positive Thinking – teaching us that light is ‘smarter than dark… optimism holier than pessimism’ (page 6). Under the sway of this school of thought, being ‘bright’ in mood and outlook has become a kind of social imperative, particularly in the US, with corresponding states of ‘darkness’ assessed as ugly or inadequate. Alessandri goes on to present a compelling case that such ideas may be a factor in Western societies’ grim litany of racist and colourist oppressions, with those seen as ‘dark’ cast as inferior both intellectually and morally along the lines of the Light Metaphor. The Brokenness Story is a ‘bad cop’ narrative counterpart to the Light Metaphor’s deceptive ‘good cop’. It is taken to encompass the ways that darker moods, feelings or experiences are said to represent a culpable failing, a weakness and/or self-pitying tendency that we should be able to overcome with a ready smile and some get-up-and-go. Many of us who experience dark moods, or tend to interpret the world in a critical, some would say pessimistic light, will have been confronted by such attitudes at one time or another. It also seems fair to suggest that living in an environment which treats sadness, anxiety and similar feelings as signs of brokenness will lead people to eventually view themselves as broken.
This leads us to one of the trickier areas of the book, analysing a complex interplay between dark moods and experiences, the notion of mental illness, and dignity. Reflecting on the limitations of ancient philosophical schools – such as the Epicurean prescription for tranquillity through eliminating the causes of suffering, and its echoes in later positive psychology work – Alessandri suggests instances where experiences of suffering may be enriching, not aberrant. Seeking to suppress all suffering may indeed, as Miguel de Unamuno suggested, cut off ‘opportunities for intimacy and connection’ (page 63). A section on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (a brilliantly original thinker unjustly excluded from the academic establishment of her time) outlines the role that depression played in shaping her blend of philosophy and myth, without minimising the very potent suffering involved. Considering these and other stories citied within Night Vision, we can see ways in which the Brokenness Story, and a corresponding sense that we can and should eliminate all darkness from our lives, could be misguided or damaging. This is a train of thought that could be usefully discussed in a number of contexts, well beyond the halls of the university.
Nevertheless, one area where I might diverge from Alessandri slightly is the idea that psychiatric / mental illness models of ‘darkness’ undermine one’s sense of personal dignity. Part of this may be attributable to cultural factors, and potential differences in attitude encountered in the UK as opposed to the US. But while it seems undeniable that poor treatment within psychiatric systems can cruelly strip away a sense of personal dignity, I do not personally feel that only regarding certain forms of suffering as a ‘brain disease’, or as a pathology to struggle against, necessarily makes one feel undignified. In some cases, an individual may derive a sense of dignity from viewing themselves as living with a mental disorder and yet struggling to try and attain a decent life, for example. Seeing oneself as broken could be damaging, or it could conversely relieve someone from the pressure to be ‘flawless’, and to turn healing – whatever that means to them – into a kind of motivating life project. It does not seem to me that seeing oneself as ‘battling’ mental illness, for example, is necessarily ‘degrading’ (page 10), or that ‘you can’t build a positive self-concept on brokenness’ (page 11). Regardless of this, Alessandri’s writing on mental illness – and the ambiguous line between it and regular human experience – is consistently sensitive and insightful, and it is altogether possible that I am misinterpreting her position here. Even if not, it is without doubt a useful perspective to take on board and consider, whether one endorses it or not.
Finally, Night Vision is an invaluable reminder of some ways in which academic philosophy has long resembled a gated community of the mind, with countless innovative and original thinkers finding the entrance barred because of cultural prejudice. Retelling the story of María Lugones while drawing on her insights into different forms of anger and exploring how Gloria Anzaldúa made important contributions to philosophical thought while operating (out of necessity) outside of its academic mainstream, Alessandri invites us to consider the historically exclusionary nature of the said academy. In addition, she writes powerfully on her own experiences navigating philosophy as a female academic of colour (pages 17-18), and ways in which immense, entirely justified frustrations arising from this can still end up being dismissed as neither ‘healthy’ nor rational. Both as an element of the book’s overall thesis and as standalone reflections, these sections of Night Vision should stay with many readers, and lead us to further consider how philosophy can be rendered less elitist, narrow and unwelcoming.
Overall, this is a valuable and stimulating contribution to a number of ongoing discussions – around the nature of mental health, the boundaries of what counts as philosophy and who gets to decide, and America’s culture of ‘positive thinking’ among others – that should be of benefit to readers both within and well beyond academic philosophy.
Rob Sayce is an arts journalist and postgraduate philosophy student, currently studying at King's College London. Their research interests include the intersection of ethics and mental health care, epistemic (in)justice and the potential applications of public philosophy.