Madness and Us
Jul 13th, 2006 by guo rui
Madness is evidence of the imperfections of human reason, a constant reminder of the limit of our brain power. A mad person is annoying to us, not only because of the inconveniences has he/she caused, but also his/her mere existence. We are uneasy for this being: are we the same as him/her? To admit a mad person as a person like us requires more than overcoming an emotional barrier. We have to figure out how we can live with this fact, in other words, how we can differentiate ourselves from them after accepting his/her nature is the same as us.
Here comes the history of madness. We, the society as a whole, plotted to confine our neighbors in order to be convinced of our own sanity, as quoted by Foucault from Dostoyevsky. “Are you crazy?” One may ask. “How can you say we are mad to confine (or define, they are all the same after all) madness?” Here comes a second quotation from Pascal, “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”
Madness is an “uncomfortable truth”, to borrow from Dick Cheney. No one intends to talk about it, while everyone has made up his/her mind to embrace a certain position towards it. How do you know you are right if you just hold fast something you never examined? The truth is, we have acting with bias while we do not think we did.
“What? What the heck are you talking about? ” Slow down, slow down. Just like people under propaganda feel hard to accept the possibility of another world, we will experience difficulty in following the questioning. We are living in a world much longer than communists had fooled people under their ruling, a world trying to eliminate madness and establish the ultimate ruling of reason.
“To explore it we must renounce the convenience of terminal truths, and never let ourselves be guided by what we may know of madness. None of the concepts of psychopathology, even and especially in the implicit process of retrospections, can play an organizing role. What constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made and calm restored. What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjection of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point. ”(Foucault)
The truth of reason was found, after madness comes to stand in the place of non-reason. But backing to the initial point, we will find a different landscape. Truth did not require nailing down the non-reason as madness. And the reason is not necessarily the reason we hold today. It could be a reason without an opposite, a free-floating power without definite shape. The ship of fools motif, as Foucault suggested, represented such a reason.
—A very impressive book: Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault.
Guo Rui
July 13, 2006 in New York City Library