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School of Humanities invites you to the seminar day “Mental Health in the
Digital Age”.

The seminar day aims to offer a philosophical discourse that challenges the prevailing physicalist and brain-centric understanding of mental health. It offers a comparative view of philosophical discourses from Western, Indian, and East Asian traditions and encourages a comparative mapping of cross-cultural practices used to enhance and maintain mental well-being.

The seminar day offers lectures by Professor Rein Raud (Tallinn University) and Associate Professor Chiara Robbiano (Utrecht University) as well as a lecture and seminar led by Professor Thomas Fuchs (Heidelberg University). 

Agenda:
12.15-13:00 Rein Raud “Towards a Relational Understanding of Mental Well-Being” 
13.00-13.45 Chiara Robbiano “Lingering perception-expression” towards inter-bodily-mental health
13:45-14:15 Coffee break
14:15-15:45 Thomas Fuchs “Embodiment and Relation. For a New Humanism” 
15:45-16:45 Discussion round: Rein Raud, Thomas Fuchs, Chiara Robbiano 

See introductions to the lecture topics below.

The seminar day of the Baltic-German University Liaison Office is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic Germany. 

The seminar day is made possible through a project through the Baltic-German University Liaison Office and it is also accompanied by a workshop “” for professionals in psychiatry, psychology and therapy led by Prof. Thomas Fuchs on May 16. The workshop is carried out in cooperation with Estonian Gestalt & Training Centre.

This project of the Baltic-German University Liaison Office is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic Germany. 

“Mental Health in the Digital Age”

The speed and extent of the changes in the contemporary socio-cultural paradigm, especially the technological development that now affect nearly all aspects of our daily life, are having a palpable effect on the mental well-being of the people all over the world. New discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry, notably the advances in the views of the structure of the mind as well as the phenomena treated as mental disorders, have raised quite a few challenges both on the practical and the theoretical level of dealing with mental health issues. And yet most philosophy of the mind is content to carry on in the received paradigm without questioning any of its premises, and “cerebralist”, mechanical explanations of mental health as simple mechanical malfunctions on the biological level of the brain, are proliferating both in the professional and the popular discourse. Buddhist and other Asian traditions are being used in therapeutic practice by people with very scant knowledge of them, and although these systems of thought indeed have a lot to offer to enhance our understanding of how the human mind works, they are nonetheless also dangerous if applied selectively and indiscriminately.

In this situation, problems need to be formulated and discussed that would help us to move out of this impasse, and this seminar offers a modest contribution to the relevant debates. The three scholars presenting have different backgrounds and research aims, and yet we hope that from their meeting, a broader understanding of the issues at hand might result.

Rein Raud
Towards a Relational Understanding of Mental Well-Being

The severity of the mental health crisis in the world of today, the advances of neuroscience and its uses as well as misuses in therapeutic practice, the debate on neurodiversity and new forms of mental disorder as well as the boom of the psychopharmaceutical industry have all contributed to a paradigm change in our understanding of what mental well-being consists in and how it is threatened by the rapid social and cultural changes of our times. In my talk, I am going to critically address the currently still very influential “cerebralistic” paradigm, according to which all mental problems are caused by chemical imbalance in the brain and can be treated by resolving the issues on the brain level. This view, which has come under increasing criticism by philosophers and practitioners including Thomas Fuchs and Markus Gabriel, is nonetheless also adopted by popular discourses about mental problems. The second issue addressed in my talk is the potential of relational sociology and process ontology to provide a more adequate view of the human being as a psychophysical unity, whose problems are frequently caused by the difficulties in matching their internal realities with the challenging external social environment.

Prof. Dr. Rein Raud is the Distinguished Professor of Asian and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His circle of research interests is broad and ranges from cultural semiotics and sociology to process philosophy and theories of the subject on the one hand, and various aspects of Asian and Western cultural history on the other. He is of several books, both academic and literary.

Chiara Robbiano
“Lingering perception-expression” towards inter-bodily-mental health

I will introduce "lingering perception-expression", a kind of decentring that aims to bridge gaps among humans and also non-human beings towards mental health as inter-bodily-mental health. It is the practice of lingering in the in-between movement of perception, which does not express a meaning but presses out more lingering. I show its affinities with autistic and Zen Buddhist styles of perception, characterized by unfixed, flexible, and weak top-down predictions or “priors,” and an openness to weakly-filtered input. Dōgen’s concept of “expression” (dōtoku), Remi Yergeau’s “interbodily knowing,” and Erin Manning’s “minor gesture” help recognize lingering perception-expression not only in stories made of words but also in fields of pinwheels and twirling flowers. I argue that it can help enact what Thomas Fuchs calls "conviviality” as intercorporeality and inter-bodily resonance, within a porous world of shared immersion. Lingering perception-expression that can be verbal or non-verbal can work through narratologists’ “sensory interface”, “immersion” and “motor resonance”; it can lead to disorientation and reorientation, Dōgen’s awakening and Yergeau’s entelechial autistic meltdown. Lingering perception-expression fosters inter-bodily-mental health by decentring us out of our priors and opening us to the in-between space we share with interconnected others.

Dr. is Associate professor of philosophy, diversity committee chair, and lecturer in the China Studies track at University College Utrecht (Utrecht University, NL). In her most recent publications and lectures, she engages in dialogue with East Asian, South Asian, Ancient Greek, and contemporary philosophers, to develop frameworks, concepts, and embodied practices that promote valuing diversity, learning, thinking, and self-cultivation together, especially in higher education.

Thomas Fuchs
Embodiment and Relation: For a New Humanism

Man’s current view of himself is characterized by a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, humans believe they have the god-like power to create artificial intelligence, artificial life or even consciousness. On the other hand, there is a deep pessimism coupled with human self-contempt. Posthumanism, in its more radical variants, prescribes the abdication of humanity, which should ideally be dethroned by its own artificial offspring.

In my lecture, I examine the development of this ambivalence since modern times and trace it back to a vacillation between feelings of omnipotence and powerlessness, which is ultimately based on a collective narcissism. We try to compensate for an inner emptiness by creating an ideal self-image and mirroring ourselves in anthropomorphic machines, in digital intelligence and in virtual images. In the face of this development, I argue for a new humanism based on our embodiment, our intercorporeality with others and our embedding in an ecological environment of the living.

, psychiatrist and philosopher, is Karl Jaspers Professor for Philosophy and Psychiatry at the Department of General Psychiatry, Universität Heidelberg. His research areas lie at the intersection of phenomenology, psychopathology and cognitive neuroscience, with a main emphasis on embodiment, enactivism, temporality and intersubjectivity.