The case that madness is philosophy in practice

I have twice undergone uninterrupted periods of roughly two months each in which I was “mad” and was diagnosed as “psychotic” by psychiatrists. Both periods are sharply etched in my memory; they differ from all the other periods in my life.

During these two periods, I experienced many thoughts, perceptions, and interpretations that were decidedly different from those I had in “normal” life. For example, I believed that everyone over 40 immediately understood all the world’s languages, which meant there were no real linguistic differences. I felt, and became convinced, that there was no gulf between thinking and being. I feared that it was my turn to be crucified. I believed that I was telepathic. I worried that the internet had been invented by my father and my uncle, and that I was being surveilled with spyware by a secret alliance (or conspiracy) of wise old men, all for the greater good. I thought that the Earth was flat and that flying was an illusion, the work of another widespread conspiracy. I was certain that God existed, and nothing but God.

Usually, it is assumed that the kind of madness I experienced is abnormal, that it should be explained on the basis of the normal, and that it is a disorder or a deviation with respect to what is taken for granted as normal.

According to this conventional wisdom, the brain is the place where we expect and hope to find sense and meaning, and to capture, control, and dominate the gruesome spirit of madness. But the simple claim that a psychosis is a “dopamine-level disruption,” for example, does not tell us anything at all about how the mad world is actually experienced — how it looks from the inside. And even if a connection were found between madness and the brain, we still would not understand what madness actually is. We might know the matter of which the mad brain consists, but we would understand nothing of its spirit, let alone its soul.

Fortunately, there have been practitioners in the history of psychiatry who were not primarily interested in MRI scans or blood test results. Numerous accounts by these doctors describe the expressions and reports of madmen not as the symptoms of a deformed hippocampus but as portals to a mad world. Since the early 20th century, a tradition and method have developed for observing the behavior and speech of the mad in an attempt to understand their world in its entirety. To understand this world, we need to follow a different route than the one paved by psychiatrists, neurologists, and pharmacologists.

The association between madness and philosophy is made far too infrequently today. This is mainly because the medical profession has succeeded in claiming madness as its own area of expertise and has gone on to turn it into a medical and even a neurobiological problem — a brain disease. In addition, a link between madness and philosophy suggests that anyone who calls himself a “thinker” or “philosopher” runs a higher risk of going mad. This is something most people try to avoid; thus, the philosopher instead takes pride in being a king or queen of insight, in a contemplative temple of clarity and light. Both doctors and philosophers prefer to keep madness at a safe distance.

Indeed, the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, seems to have constructed his grand philosophical design — an architecture of concepts and arguments — to sustain and safeguard the reliability of the world, the certainty of knowledge, and the stability of experience. Kant’s philosophy protects the reasonable individual from his mad counterpart. His system guards modern people from thoughts of bottomless skepticism, experiences of unfathomable depths, and the seductions of animal sensuality.

These ideas about madness, however, have been criticized in modern philosophy.

For French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, a mad person is not so much a person to be restrained as he is a victim of the subtle pressure exerted by the so-called reason of the Enlightenment. In Foucault’s “History of Madness,” we see the powers, forces, and ways of thinking that turned the mad into a medical case, and Foucault gives us the language and the motivation to act and speak out against them. In his work with Félix Guattari, “Anti-Oedipus,” Deleuze shows us how to understand mad experiences and expressions in an entirely different way, thereby imbuing them with a penetrating and liberating power. According to Deleuze, those who pass through the “schizophrenic process” reach a high point of thinking and experience, and escape time-bound social and cultural patterns.

Some thinkers have even had periods in their lives when they themselves went mad — or at least found themselves in an unusual mental condition.

An early example is Plotinus, a Neoplatonist philosopher from the third century CE. According to Plotinus, the highest possible goal for our souls is to make contact with “the One.” Through inner contemplation, we should be able to “ascend” from the earthly world of souls to that of pure spirit, intellect, eternity, and finally the One. For Plotinus, this upward path is one of thinking and cerebral contemplation, just as it was for Plato. But Plotinus also says that this ultimate “breakthrough” in thinking our way to the One is not something we can reflect on or discuss; we can only “experience” it. Plotinus himself went through several periods in which he experienced “contact” with the One; from a modern perspective, we might say he had an extraordinary or mystical experience, even a “psychosis.”

Even if a connection were found between madness and the brain, we still would not understand what madness actually is.

Also of note is Thomas Aquinas. This medieval philosopher and theologian had already written dozens of voluminous works when he had an “extraordinary experience.” While praying before a crucifix in 1273, Thomas received an “insight” or “vision,” after which he never wrote another word. What exactly happened, no one knows, but according to written records, Thomas said: “All that I have written seems like straw to me, compared to what has now been revealed to me.” Had madness struck? Is this comparable to a mad person’s babbling about divine revelation? Did this sudden insight — or flash of madness — mean an end to Thomas’s serious philosophy, or do these words represent the summum of Thomas’s wisdom?

Several centuries later, the French mathematician and thinker Blaise Pascal was struck by a similar bolt of madness, so to speak. During a few hours of insight and revelation, Pascal wrote a brief note that began with, “FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars. Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace.” (This note was found after his death, sewn into a pocket of his coat.) Unlike Thomas Aquinas, Pascal began to write even more after having had his “extraordinary experience,” in a tone that became increasingly theological and philosophical.

In modern times, many other well-known and lesser-known philosophers have undergone periods of madness in the broad sense of the word — thinkers such as David Hume, Georg Cantor, and Foucault, with Nietzsche as the most famous and intriguing example. Eleven years before his death, Nietzsche reportedly embraced a horse in the city of Turin, suffered a breakdown, and never recovered. Like Aquinas, he was no longer able to write or engage in philosophy, and after a while he even lost the ability to speak coherently. Unlike Aquinas, he lived for more than 10 years after the horse incident, but with few of his mental capacities intact.

In this respect, Nietzsche is a classic example of what happens when madness strikes and destroys you. We could regard Nietzsche’s madness as unrelated to his work — as the result of his syphilitic infection — but a tendency toward madness was already evident in some of his earlier work. With his merciless ridicule and cultural attacks, he was poised to be the man who would criticize the very foundations of society, but he dug so deeply and became so personally involved that he ended up shaking the ground beneath his own existence.

It would be careless to suggest that the linkage between madness and philosophy goes only as far as the many thinkers throughout history who experienced — or practiced — both. However, there is almost certainly a reason that so many great thinkers succumbed to similar fates. And I would argue that the reason for this is somewhat simple: Theoretical reflections have their practical counterpart in the breakdown of the mad. In other words, madness is philosophy lived out in practice.

When philosophers concern themselves with questions about the boundaries between the self and the world, language and concepts, finitude and infinity, they do so as a hobby or a profession, on paper or in academic dialogue. For the mad, however, dealing with these themes is a matter of bitter necessity in the struggle to simply hold their heads above water. Seemingly esoteric, academic philosophical questions such as those concerning the existence of other minds, proof of a world “outside the mind,” or the “direction” of time are concrete and urgent problems for many madmen.

Madness is a human response — be it frightening, exciting, humorous, or humiliating — to the unanswerable.

The source of astonishment and amazement, involvement and detachment, is the same for both the philosopher and the mad. The philosopher, however, knows how to address such questions in a socially acceptable and conventionally restricted manner. For a mad person, these profound questions can completely derail and dominate their life. They can draw that person into what, for others, are the invisible, obscure depths of madness.

Accepted concepts about how things vanish in madness, and the mad end up in a groundless world, an abyss, an Ungrund. This is in an existence where trees that have been uprooted grow into the heavens and where there are no boundaries — no “containment,” as psychoanalysts would call it. The mad become estranged from the world, perplexed by existential emptiness and fullness happening at the same time. The mad encounter questions of vital importance, whether they want to or not: What is life? What is good and evil? Where does time go?

As Anton Boisen, a religious thinker with firsthand experience of psychosis, wrote in “The Form and Content of Schizophrenic Thinking” (1942, 24),

In any case, he [the madman] feels himself in the realm of the mysterious and uncanny. All the accepted bases of judgment and reasoning are gone. He does not know what to believe. His state is one of utter perplexity regarding the very foundations of his being. “Who am I?” “What is my role in life?” “What is the universe in which I live?” became for him questions of life and death.

These questions, and the attempts to answer them, do not arise from a primitive longing on the part of the mad or even from a cognitive disorder. Rather, they are generated by the short-circuiting of high-powered thought, a pressure cooker of spiraling, fascinating possibilities. Something in a mad person breaks down, similar to the way Socrates, when deep in thought, “forgot the time” (according to Apollodorus) and arrived late for a banquet. We recognize the same kind of malfunction in Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his tormented hesitations and doubts as he sought clarification.

The very fact of madness can also help broaden — or even escalate — philosophical debate. In philosophy, certain arguments are simply rejected because they are said to be “unrealistic” or untenable, because they might lead, for example, to excessive skepticism or even solipsism, the theory that no other reality or world exists besides the one in your own mind or consciousness. See, for instance, the casual remark in an undergraduate philosophy textbook by Filip Buekens:

“A peculiar aspect of this philosophical discussion [about the possibility or impossibility of knowledge] is that no one (not even the skeptic) actually doubts whether knowledge is possible or not. Not a single skeptic has sullenly withdrawn from the world after having come to the conclusion that the existence of the world around us is not logically demonstrable.”

The hidden assumption here is that extreme skepticism or solipsism, taken as serious notions, would be unreal or unlivable. Many madmen do not support such ideas as theories about the world but experience them within their own world. For them, it is quite possible that doubts about the “reality of the world” oblige them to withdraw from it, which is why something like solipsism works out “in practice” in the lives of the mad.

In this way, philosophy — and thought in general — can be greatly enriched by the “data” of madness. It is not, as many suggest, a kind of philosophical terminus where communication, language, and understanding break down. It is, rather, a human response — be it frightening, exciting, humorous, or humiliating — to the unanswerable, a jumping-off point for further reasoning.

This article is featured on Big Think.