Yet although the senses occasionally deceive us with respect to objects which are very small or in the distance, there are many other beliefs about which doubt is quite impossible, even though they are derived from the senses — for example, that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. Again, how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapors of melancholia that they firmly maintain that they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself.

– Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, from the First Meditation (on ‘What Can be Called into Doubt’), Cambridge University Press 1996, pp. 12-13.

Q: Do you think that philosophy has anything to say about why there is this tendency to try to control the conduct of others?

MF: The way the conduct of others is controlled takes very different forms and arouses desires and appetites that vary greatly in intensity depending on the society. I don’t know anything about anthropology, but I can well imagine societies in which the control of the conduct of others is so well regulated in advance that, in a sense, the game is already over. On the other hand, in a society like our own, games can be very numerous, and the desire to control the conduct of others is all the greater — as we see in family relationships, for example, or emotional or sexual relationships. However, the freer people are with respect to each other, the more they want to control each other’s conduct. The more open the game is, the more appealing and fascinating it becomes.

– Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 300.

noun
a person able to form or recall eidetic images.

DERIVATIVES
eidetically adverb
ORIGIN 1920s: coined in German from Greek eidētikos, from eidos ‘form.’

Regarding the political (and ethical) import relationship of the self to itself:

And in this series of undertakings to reconstitute an ethic of the self, in this series of more or less blocked and ossified efforts, and in the movement we now make to refer ourselves constantly to this ethic of the self without ever giving it any content, I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.

– From The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982 (New York: Picador, 2005), 252.

In the causes of the world, reason finds enough to keep it busy with those which are revealed by sense (or at least are of the same kind as those which reveal themselves to it), without having any necessity to make use of the influence of pure spiritual beings in nature…

– Kant, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking,” AK 8:137, from the collection Religion and Rational Theology, (Cambridge University Press 2005); page 10.

…terror is not when some command and strike fear into others. There is terror when those who command tremble with fear themselves, since they know that the general system of obedience envelops them just as much as those over whom they exercise their power.

– Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), page 201.

Il y a une littérature de la peste qui est une littérature de la décomposition de l’individualité; toute une sorte de rêve orgiaque de la peste, où la peste est le moment où les individualités se défont, où la loi est oubliée…La peste franchit la loi, comme la peste franchit les corps.

– Les Anormaux, Cours du 15 janvier 1975, p. 43; (Gallimard 1999).

A lament.

DERIVATIVES
threnodial |θrəˈnōdēəl| adjective
threnodic |θrəˈnädik| adjective
threnodist |-dist| noun
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Greek thrēnōidia, from thrēnos ‘wailing’ + ōidē ‘song.’

n. – digression by a long reminiscence

Note: I discovered this word recently on a website called Luciferous Logolepsy, which is pretty great and right up my alley, but I have to admit some major reservations about it. The problem emerged when I tried to track down some source or citation for this word schizothemia. I quite like this word, or at least the idea of it, because it describes my personality excellently, or it would if it were a real English word, which is doubtful, as I’ll explain. I of course went straight to the OED, and found that there is no Oxford listing for this word, which immediate sent of some bullshit-neologism alarm bells. I went back to the site where I discovered it, only to find that there are no sources or citations listed for where people find these words, not a single quote, no dates, not even the citation-version of table scraps, nothing. Now, as you know I am no prescriptivist, so the next step was to do what the people at Language Log do and just google it to see what comes up. I found this site, which also has no citations or examples, neither did this one. I thought I might be on to something at least when I found it here on what claims to be a medical dictionary, but as you can see there are no examples given there either, and the definition does not specify that the digression has to do with telling a story or reminiscence, which is exactly what makes the word interesting in the first place. Looking again, I found this entry on reference.com, which claims to be an article about the word, but is just an article about the history of digression in literature, and which includes nothing special at all about this term — indeed, the article just uses the word ‘digression’ anyway, not schizothemia. The next three pages of google hits are nothing but more of the same (and random people’s blogs and various profiles using the word just because it sounds cool), and I quickly realized that all of the sites that are giving definitions of this word are just citing each other as their source. There are about 10 or 20 crap online “dictionaries” and sites devoted to “rare words” which contain an entry on this — none of them with examples of usage, again — and that simply link to one another by way of reference. I should also point out that the site that gave me the initial definition, the one quoted at the top of this post, actually had the word reminiscence spelled incorrectly.

So there are two problems here. First, as I’ve said, all that comes up in searches are shitty internet dictionaries, but the word is not in the OED. Even if this were some rarefied medical term — indeed, especially if it were — it should be easily found there, as the OED includes, far more authoritatively, terms from all kinds of specialized fields like medicine or whatever. So it’s appearance elsewhere, even if these entries were more substantive, does not at all help with the fact that it is missing there. “Wackywords.com” or whatever does not carry the weight that the OED has in any context, clearly. Second, these are all “dictionaries,” and not examples of usage (whether contemporary, ancient, or whatever), which would be the only thing that could really sufficiently give the claim that this is indeed an English word that English-speakers have used any credence. The only promising thing I found was this article in Polish on “Hysteria and Schizothemia,” which, precisely because it is in Polish, does not help. Clearly English is full of borrowed words, but the rule of thumb for a borrowed word entering the language is, roughly, that someone has to actually borrow it, by which I mean use it somewhere.

Finally, and as a last resort (and thanks to Wikipedia), I tried a different spelling, schizothymia, in the OED. What came up was, interestingly, the #2 definition for the prefix schizo-. But, as you’ll see, the nouns ‘schizothyme’ and ‘schizothymia, as well as the adjective ‘schizothymic’ seem to have a rather different definition (and a far more well-attested definition) than the lame internet dictionaries are claiming for the word. Here is the OED entry (there are Greek and phonetic characters, which your browser may or may not read).

schizo-

2. Psychol. With pronunc. (skts, skdz). Used to repr. SCHIZOPHRENIA, as in schizotaxia [Gr. order, arrangement], a genetically determined defect in the functioning of the nervous system which has been suggested as predisposing to schizophrenia; hence schizotaxic a. and n.; schizothyme n. and a. [Gr. mind, temper], (characteristic of) a person who is introverted and imaginative, and so regarded as tending to schizophrenia rather than to manic-depressive illness; hence schizothymic a.; also schizothymia, schizothymic constitution or temperament; schizotype, a personality type in which schizophrenia is potentially or actually present; hence schizotypal, -typic adjs.; schizotypy.

1962 P. MEEHL in Amer. Psychologist XVII. 830/1 This neural integrative defect, which I shall christen schizotaxia, is all that can properly be spoken of as inherited. Ibid., The imposition of a social learning history upon schizotaxic individuals. Ibid. 831/1 All schizotaxics become, on all.. existing social learning regimes, schizotypic in personality organization. 1966 I. B. WEINER Psychodiagnosis in Schizophrenia i. 7 Persons with schizotaxia acquire a personality organization called schizotypy that is characterized by four core behavior traits… These schizotypic traits are universally learned by all schizotaxic persons… Whereas most schizotypes remain compensated, those who are confronted with certain causal environmental influences..are likely to decompensate into clinical schizophrenia. 1974 S. ARIETI Interpretation of Schizophrenia (ed. 2) xlv. 697 A minority of schizotaxics..are ‘potentiated into clinical schizophrenia’. Ibid., Schizotaxia is a necessary but not sufficient condition in the etiology of schizophrenia.

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1925, 1932 Schizothyme [see cyclothyme adj. and n. s.v. CYCLO-]. 1936 A. HUXLEY Eyeless in Gaza viii. 87 ‘What a lot of ribs you’ve got!’ she said at last. ‘Schizothyme physique,’ he answered. 1952 H. READ Philos. Mod. Art iv. 84 If in the end we describe..Michelangelo as a typical ‘schizothyme’, the common reader is not much the wiser. 1964 I. M. SMITH Spatial Ability vii. 229 He found the creative significantly more schizothyme, self-sufficient, withdrawn, sophisticated, desurgent and radical. 1972 Encycl. Psychol. III. 180/1 The schizothyme is characterized by..‘a conscious contrast between the ego and the outside world’, ‘a touchy or indifferent withdrawal from the mass of his fellow men’, the predominance of ‘dreams, ideas or principles’.

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1940 H. G. WELLS Babes in Darkling Wood IV. ii. 335 Schizothymia, the psychoanalysts would have called this sort of dreaming. 1964 I. M. SMITH Spatial Ability ix. 287 The hyperactivity.., nervousness and anxiety seem..more closely related to introversion or schizothymia than to extraversion.

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1925 W. J. H. SPROTT tr. Kretschmer’s Physique & Char. xiii. 223 The group of wits..ironists and satirists whose nature is indicated by the names, Heine, Voltaire,..Nietzsche. This group belongs quite decidedly to the schizothymic side. 1951 Mind LX. 287 The ethical question is not whether one should be cyclothymic like Goering or schizothymic like Himmler in one’s destructiveness; rather it is whether one should be destructive at all, and, if so, towards what. 1961 Lancet 23 Sept. 712/1 Hereditary factors were more important for excitability, the cyclothymic-schizothymic scale, and super-ego strength.

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1953 S. RADO in Amer. Jrnl. Psychiatry CX. 409/2 In this sense the patient suffering from an open schizophrenic psychosis is a schizophrenic phenotype, engendered by a schizophrenic genotype in its interaction with the environment… For psychodynamic purposes I shall abbreviate the term schizophrenic phenotype to schizotype. Ibid. 410/1 The ensemble of psychodynamic traits peculiar to the schizotypes may be called schizotypal organization. 1962, 1966 Schizotypic, -typy [see schizotaxia above]. 1962 Amer. Psychologist XVII. 830/2 The most important research need here is development of high~validity indicators for compensated schizotypy. 1965 G. E. DANIELS et al. New Perspectives in Psychoanal. 109 Variants of the schizophrenic disorders likeschizoid personality, schizotypal,..and pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia. 1974 S. ARIETI Interpretation of Schizophrenia (ed. 2) xlv. 697 All schizotaxics become schizotypic in personality organization, but most of them do not decompensate and never develop a psychosis. 1978 P. O’BRIEN Disordered Mind iv. 75 Such syndromes are now officially classified as Schizotypal Personality Disorders.

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So, as much as I  think that this is a great word, I have to include this disclaimer, because by all reliable accounts and forms of accounting, it’s probably some bullshit that somebody made up and was never in general or even specialized usage. Major disappointment.