Apr 27, 2023
That general craziness, though, might amount to the anomaly of personhood, which would be distinct from animality. As I've written elsewhere, what it means to be a person who's relatively autonomous is to be somewhat alienated from the world. The alienation is the flipside of personhood, and alienation generates some degree of anxiety, depression, or other neuroses. This is the point of existential psychology. As to whether we call this norm "sanity" or "craziness," that's just a matter of labels. The point is that the normal human mind differs from the normal animal one, and that makes for an important dichotomy and thus for a problem for Taoism or other kinds of monism.
