Depressive Realism
psychologytoday.com · 715 words · saved by 3 readers
Wisdom or madness?
Source: Pixabay/Shlomaster/Public domain In The Last Messiah (1933), the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, can carry or bear. So as not to go mad, ‘most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.’ It is not just that people limit the content of consciousness, but also that they fill it with less or other than the truth. In particular, most people think more favourably of themselves than is warranted: they have an inflated…
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