Madness as philosophy, philosophy as madness

Wouter Kusters, in A Philosophy of Madness, posits that: The categories in which modern thought understands self and world, bodies and language, private and public, inner and outer, space and time, subject and object, perception and thought, etc., are all problematized in modern philosophy. The practical consequence of this problematization, if taken seriously by a person in their own lived experience, perception and thought, is psychosis. Madness draws its poetry from the way sane contemporaries of the mad think. It takes philosophical problems and makes them real ones. If psychosis or madness is rightly judged a failure, it is only because the person who lives what, if merely contemplated would be something like a work of poetry, does not think as carefully as the philosopher, whose life in the society of "normal" people has all the ennui, or boring character, of an ordinariness that is practically unproblematic, enabling him to do things that the mad person would find uninteresting. Madness is strange experience. As all of the terms and categories that enter into the mad person's thinking, as categories that for the philosopher explain how most of us live "normally," are drawn from the same fund of experience that yields the structure of perception and thinking for "normal" people living and working in the modern world, madness is only normal living made strange. It may be like being "in" a poem rather than reading it from outside and above it, so to speak. It is an experience of the world made strange, a quality is shares with works of art. Most of us treat art works we enjoy as tools; it is as if we eat them, rather than feeling ourselves being eaten by them, or as if we get lost in a labyrinth but only in a relative way from which we can easily and do return. The movie we are in ends and we leave the theater. Art is based on an "as if": the theater actor doesn't die and neither do we in the audience, when he does, doesn't feel pain when pricked, doesn't literally tear his eyes out but only seems to. The normal person retains a sense of control. He must fear becoming lost, being possessed by the art work, and believing that somehow his own eyes are being torn out, or at least that the man playing Oedipus is so torn. It was surrealist thought (Artaud, Bataille) that tried to change this. There is not too much madness, and there is little that is threatened by it, except a sense of the mastery of consciousness. People still do not lose themselves enough. Work as we know it is mostly boring, and psychiatry is a system for enforcing boredom. It may be that the good doctors could help some people, but who among them wants to help people learn and create, rather than conform, obey, and live with boredom?

The mad person's errors are all possibilities of thought that are consequences of ideas in certain philosophers who have set the agenda of thinking broadly in the sciences, including biology and psychology, and so medicine and psychiatry: Parmenides, Plato, Descartes, and Kant among them. Therefore, if madness is considered the result of a philosophical error, abnormal psychology and psychiatry offer no remedy or cure because they are driven by the same paradigm. They merely enforce what effectively is belief in the truth of certain propositions, while mad people explore possible worlds that they exclude but that are possibilities in a shared paradigm. It is difficult to see what practical solutions this could point to, apart from the development of a new philosophy. Most English-language philosophy is based on the desire to explain how the world is "normally" understood. Oxford "ordinary language philosophy" even puts it in just those terms. It is the old English idea that truth is a realization of a common sense understanding that is part of given social practices. What this excludes is revolution and any artistic or aesthetic practice that is driven by motives of transgression and innovation, as much of modern art and thought is. It is from these possibilities that philosophy should take its cues and inspiration.

In the end, the mad person is guilty only of choosing to live a more authentic life than the normal managed kind, and his manner of existence seems a failure to most of us (and possibly to himself) because the refusal of management means rejecting not only normality but something like a grammar: a disciplined use of forms. The supposed danger posed by the mad is mainly an effect of a policing, broadly considered, that fears disorder, the failure of its own projects of domination. Who today can doubt that it is the latter that pose the real threat to the society of persons?