Dr. Freeman

In one of his earliest writings “Madness and Civilization” Foucault gave a fascinating portrait of Madness – what he also called Un-Reason. By the 19^th century Foucault observed that madness had been labeled a “mental illness” and therefore made an object for the science of psychology, which derided the mad and the non-rational under a hypocritical veil of morality and foreclosed on the original “experience of Un-Reason” through the confinement of the mad.

Now, beneath the modern psychology and psychiatry where madness is viewed as either a brain dysfunction or a moral failing lies its more essential truth. For Foucault, modern psychology cannot master the hidden truth of madness, for the voice of madness was closed off in the very constitution of modern psychology as a science. So for Foucault what we call mental illness (depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia) today is “alienated madness” – where the mad are made alien by our objectifying and dehumanizing sciences.

The brilliance of Foucault is that he wants to bring us face to face with madness in its original and un-alienated form, a form that is recognized in the modern world only in “lightening flashes” with names like Friedrich Nietzsche - as a kind of tragic split and radical freedom…

Foucault wants to let the truth of madness speak its own voice. In other words, rather than diagnosing and treating and the mentally ill with what amounts to little more than powerful anesthetics, Foucault wants to linger with madness for a while, to hear what it has to say…

So what do the mad know? Well, quite frankly It’s the sort of truth that would kill you… or drive you mad. The mad have been released from ordinary constraints and experienced a terrible truth…. They are extreme points of sensitivity to the human condition… And they are not Other than Us. The mad speak a truth for which we have neither the nerve nor the ear – they disturb us with the truth of who we are.

For Foucault, the mad offer a forceful testimony to the breakdown of Reason, Knowledge, Truth – they speak from a depth of experience in which both the reassuring structures of ordinary life and the reassuring comforts of scientific, philosophical or religious truth have collapsed. They experience the radical groundlessness of the world, the contingency of all its constructions, and they speak from a kind of irrepressible terror… and call to us from the abyss by which we are all inhabited. We are put into question by the mad, for they have set foot where the sane fear to tread…

In his typical transgressive style Foucault turns the tables and show how the world-view of science and reason is put into question by the mad, and specifically the madman as artist – the one who reveals the difficult truth of the human condition – we are inwardly divided, inhabited by an abyss, that we have to live within the tension between knowing and not-knowing, belief and skepticism, truth and the night of truth, the light of reason and the midnight hour when reason allows itself to be invaded by unreason…

Here Foucault rejects the idea of Truth with a capital T. The truth is that there is no truth, and we are better off making the humble confession that we don’t know who we are – our inner most truth is always already disturbed by untruth… and neither religion nor philosophy nor the human sciences can tell us who we are or what to do…

In the face of this radical not-knowing, for Foucault the most meaningful task is to refuse who we are, struggle against those who think they can positively identify who we are, liberate ourselves from the kind of individuality that the state and the social structure produces and open up new modes of self-invention… And in this sense, for Foucault freedom is fundamentally the capacity for being otherwise, a continual twisting loose from our the ways we have previously been constituted, a capacity for novelty and innovation refuses to be reduced to a fixed stereotype…

Madness is a disturbance and the disturbing thing about the mad is that they are attuned to some deep seated dissonance from which the rest of us seek to be protected… The mad disturb us because they are exposed to something the rest of us prefer to ignore… and so we are beset by an apprehensive-ness that our sane, healed, whole lives mask a deeper rupture… The Mad are a mirror of ourselves. They tell us who we are.

The whole problem of the mad person is that he/she cannot repress and deny the trauma of existence like ordinary people… And so when madness takes the form of schizophrenia it is only because the mad reflect the contradiction of a world in which humans can no longer recognize themselves… because the social world is itself marked by struggle, hostility, and foreignness…

And let’s not forget that the mad suffer from their attunement – from what they feel/experience/undergo. Their ruptured lives are the site of a wound. They live with terror, they wrestle with demons, they need healing… They lay claim to us, we who are whole, to help. We who are perhaps not so much whole and sane as just a little better skilled at repressing our madness… And so when we are called upon by the mad, we need not approach them as an object of information, but a subject in communication, and one to whom we turn with something to learn from.

The mad do not ask for scientific analysis by us but friendship, support, companionship… The healing gesture is not to explain away the abyss but simply to stand with the mad and affirm that they are not alone… that our common madness is a matter of degree, that we all inhabit the same night of truth…

And because of their terrible initiation into the “night of truth” the mad have a special kind of freedom, in spite of their painful symptoms. They can question in a more radical way than the rest of us, taking issue with things that most of us take for granted. The mad are in touch with fundamental truths about society, the “rational ego” is all in flux and fragmentation. The mad know that there is no such thing as a “whole person” and so simply stops trying to make sense, while celebrating “the numinous energies of existence in a joyous activity of free play.”

The message of the mad and the radical freedom that stems from the night of truth… is to let go and stop pretending not to be mad. Let yourself go and scream your own screams. In other words, take the plunge into Un-Reason and go against the grain of normalcy, the civilized madness of the average and mediocre. Such a person “produces himself as a free man, solitary, and joyous, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatsoever. He had simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. . . .” (Gilles Deleuze)

Reference John D. Caputo “More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not-Knowing Who We Are…”