Précis

Night Vision

Mariana Alessandri

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA

Alessandri, Mariana. 2026. “Précis: Night Vision.” 

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 8, no. 2: 1-7. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.latesummer.1.

Abstract: Night Vision is a book about pain in five chapters. It’s about T-shirts that say “No Bad Days” or “Be Like a Proton: Always Positive.” It's about how the attempt to shed light on our dark moods often backfires, and it suggests that learning to see in the dark would help us feel more human and less broken. Night Vision describes the metaphors we use to convey our faith in the light: “love and light,” “lighten up,” “look on the bright side,” have a “lightbulb moment,” strive to “see the light at the end of the tunnel,” and try to “shed light on” a problem. Ancient philosophers taught that emotional suffering in the forms of anger, sadness, grief, depression, and anxiety, are optional. Sometimes they are said to indicate weakness in us, and other times a kind of insanity. But all humans suffer from painful moods, and existentialist philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Miguel de Unamuno can help us recognize our dignity from within them. 

Keywords: mood, mental Illness, light, dark, self-help, existentialism, toxic positivity

Night Vision is about how our linguistic emphasis on the light makes humans, whose fate is to watch each other suffer, feel broken or deficient. It suggests that instead of seeking more light, in the form of “how to overcome your anxiety,” we learn to see our dark moods in the dark, to become literate in, and able to navigate, our emotions. We’ve too long tried to understand anger, sadness, grief, depression, and anxiety by shining a light on them, but that often only makes us feel ashamed. If we continue to interpret dark moods by the lights of ancient philosophy, contemporary psychology and western medicine, we’ll likely continue to feel ill rather than intelligent.

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Night Vision is a book about how emotional pain can bring people closer, how our grief is made worse by a society that wants to see us happy, how anger isn’t something to fear but to listen to and use, how the way we talk about depression as brokenness is doing us no favors, and how anxiety is a sign of emotional intelligence. Since no one is all love and light, we’re going to have to find a way to talk about being human that honors difficult moods. Night Vision offers a way to speak better, nicer, kinder about painful moods. As long as we believe that we can be all light, we’ll continue see T-shirts that say “#NoBadDays.”

When we’re in a dark mood, it makes sense that our loved ones want to give us light. Lighten up, they say, shed light on it, illuminate the problem, have a lightbulb moment, and see the light at the end of the tunnel. In US society, light is conceived as the good, intelligence, holiness, purity, happiness, and beauty. These small metaphors contribute to the “Light Metaphor,” which in Night Vision includes any set phrase or image that conveys the idea that light is inherently superior to darkness. It’s understandable to seek out light when we’re in the dark, and for people to want to show us the light.

But if light is love, then darkness is hatred. If light is intelligence, then darkness is ignorance. If light is safe, then darkness is dangerous. In our society, darkness is said to be ugly, gloomy, painful, heavy, monstrous, sinful. The five chapters in Night Vision describe how we talk about anger, sadness, grief, depression, and anxiety. In our contemporary society, they are called disorders, mental illnesses, dysfunctions, deficiencies, diseases, pathologies, infirmities, ailments, and  maladies. Dark moods look worse in the light, so much so that they become a source of shame. Many of us are guilty of calling our anxious, angry, and depressed selves broken.

What would happen, Night Vision asks, if instead of our loved ones bringing light into our dark cave, they would come in and visit with us? What if we could sit in the dark with ourselves and each other? We might begin to develop night vision, to see dark moods more clearly. Night Vision offers some existentialist perspectives on mental illness. Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, bell hooks, Miguel de Unamuno, C.S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard all lived with one of these moods, and each one learned to see themselves in the dark. My suggestion in Night Vision is that we turn the lights way down low and learn to see difficult moods in the dark with the help of these philosophers. Under their lights, we don’t look broken, just human. 

CHAPTER 1: ANGER

In the light of ancient philosophy, anger is something we should control, suppress, or diffuse, if we can’t prevent it. Plato called anger a passion and compared it to a dark horse run amok. “I’m sorry I got angry” channels the voice of the Stoic, who believes we can stop anger from bubbling up inside of us. Aristotle believed it was acceptable to get angry as long as we didn’t act on it. “I’m sorry I yelled out of anger” is more Aristotelian than Stoic.

In the dark, anger looks different. Audre Lorde said that all women have an arsenal of anger that’s waiting for us to tap into. She said we can use anger to “excavate honesty,” to get to the heart of injustice instead of assuming there is something wrong with us for allowing ourselves to get angry. Maria Lugones also saw anger in the dark, as did bell hooks. For these Women of Color, anger is self-care, it’s information, it’s useful, it’s clear-headed. These contemporary descriptions of the uses of anger make it sound quite unlike what ancient philosophers believed.

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In the light, anger looks poisonous, and we can work to get rid of it. In the dark, anger looks like information, and we can work to listen to it. Let’s not default to “anger is irrational.”

CHAPTER 2: DOLOR

The Epicureans believed that a happy life consists of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. They wanted us to feel as little emotional pain as possible. In this chapter, I use the Spanish word “dolor” because the term captures various kinds of pain. In the light of Epicureanism and positive psychology, dolor looks unhealthy, shameful even. People talk about their dolorous selves in derogatory ways, like “having a pity-party” and “wallowing.”

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno helps us see dolor in the dark. His life was quite dark: he lost a child and suffered exile and social ostracism. But he was constantly defending himself against people who say you should keep your suffering private. Dolor, he noticed, can draw people together. He believed that, although bodies connect better in joy, souls connect better in sorrow. He also observed that suffering recognizes suffering. Stephen Colbert was once interviewed by Anderson Cooper and said something quite similar. Colbert said that the experience of losing his father and brothers as a young child made him able to recognize suffering even today, and even when someone is trying to hide it.

In the light, dolor looks self-indulgent. In the dark, dolor looks like an opening for connection.

CHAPTER 3: GRIEF

We have been taught that our pain is a burden on other people. Cicero started calling grief optional after witnessing a soldier on the battlefield not cry after losing a child. Cicero believed that indulging one’s grief was “weak and womanish.” In other words, a “strong” person gets over the death of a loved one as quickly as possible, with the help of busyness and distraction, poetry and philosophy. In a light like this, grieving people look broken. In 2010, clinical trials for grief medication began, which suggests that Cicero was not alone in some of his conclusions.

Nonetheless, there is still opposition to the idea that grief is illness. Many people who sit in the darkness of grief defend it as an extremely painful part of a non-disordered life. The British writer C.S. Lewis wrote a book on how the death of his wife shattered his faith. A Grief Observed was initially rejected for publication and then published anonymously, to poor reviews. After Lewis’s death, however, and after Lewis was revealed as the author, sales increased and haven’t fully stopped. 

In the light, grief looks like something to get over. In the dark, grief looks like love. Megan Devine is a grief expert who lost her partner unexpectedly. She wrote that grief isn't a problem to be solved, it’s an “experience to be carried.”[1]

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CHAPTER 4: DEPRESSION

Throughout history, depression has been associated with sin and laziness, and in some cultures it’s still seen as a personal weakness. In mainstream US culture, it has most recently come to be seen as an illness that takes control over the afflicted one, like alcoholism. Because of the ways society has interpreted depression in the past, if a person suffers from depression, they also likely suffer from shame. 

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana philosopher from Deep South TX, sixth generation Mexican American. She didn’t talk about her depression as a brain disease, nor did she use the term “depression” very often. She called her bouts, or the weeks she spent in a depressive episode, “The Coatlicue State.” In these times, she stopped washing dishes and seeing people, and she mostly slept and read in the dark. She got the name for her depression from Coatlicue, the Aztec mother goddess who had snakes for heads. Anzaldúa hated the Coatlicue State but she refused to call herself broken. Toward the end of her life, Anzaldúa described her depression as one stage in a seven-stage process she called “conocimiento.” Conocimiento is a deep kind of knowing that often begins with an existential earthquake and ends with personal and social transformation.

Not everyone will want to call their depression “The Coatlicue State,” and not everyone needs to. But is there a more helpful term to use for depression than mental illness? Is there a way to feel less bad by using better language, language not provided by our contemporary society?

In the light, depression is a sign that you’re broken. In the dark, depression is a sign that you are, in Anzaldúa’s words, “excruciatingly alive to the world.”[2]

CHAPTER 5: ANXIETY

Anxiety is the number one mental illness in America. My college students tell me their brains are broken, they have a chemical imbalance, and that they are mentally ill. They have a neurosis, disorder, condition. Society lacks good words for bad moods.

In Ancient Greece and Rome, anxiety was considered a case of bad reasoning. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tends to agree with the Greek Stoic Epictetus that “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.”[3] At the same time, anxiety has always also been considered a medical problem, dating back to ancient Greece. So, who gets to treat it? Cicero called philosophers “doctors of the soul,” but today we have therapists and psychiatrists. Who you go to for help will shape how you think of anxiety.

I don’t think we need to stop seeing therapists or psychiatrists, but I call upon Søren Kierkegaard to help see anxiety in the dark. Kierkegaard was extremely anxious, so much so that he called off his wedding engagement to a woman he never stopped loving. He didn’t want to condemn her to a life filled with his anxiety and depression, so he let her go.

Despite the debilitating quality of anxiety in his own life, Kierkegaard still believed that anxiety makes us human. It’s not reason, like Aristotle thought, or storytelling, or art. Kierkegaard thought anxiety makes us

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superior to animals and angels. The more anxious you are, the more human; the more anxious a civilization, he says, the more profound. Anxiety is an intelligent reaction to a world like ours, filled with violence and war and poverty, and in which we’re mostly impotent.  

For some of us, anxiety is debilitating. Medication helps. There was a book published in the 80s called Plato not Prozac. Night Vision is more like Plato and Prozac. No medication can cancel anxiety—nor would that be desirable, for Kierkegaard—but it can help turn down the volume. Once the anxiety is at a manageable level, Kierkegaard would advise us to listen to it, just as Lorde advised us to listen to our anger. Anxiety is trying to tell us something, and a lot of existentialist philosophy is devoted to the idea that we are, at bottom, terrified of death, nothingness, choice, freedom. 

In the light, anxiety is a sign that we’re irrational or sick. In the dark, anxiety is a sign that we are emotionally intelligent.

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Notes

[1] Devine, Megan. 2017. It’s OK that You’re Not OK: Meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn’t understand. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, p. 24.

[2] Anzaldua, Gloria. (1987) 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, p. 60.

[3] Epictetus, The Handbook (The Enchiridion), translated by Nicholas White (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), p. 13.

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References

1. Alessandri, Mariana. 2023. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

2. Devine, Megan. 2017. It’s OK that You’re Not OK: Meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn’t understand. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

3. Marinoff, Lou. 1999. Plato, Not Prozac!  Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems. New York, NY: Harper.

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Mariana Alessandri © 2026

Author email: mariana[dot]alessandri[at]utrgv[dot]edu