Abstract
The central idea of this paper is that Michel Foucault and Søren Kierkegaard are unexpected allies in the investigation into the relation between madness and reason. These thinkers criticize reason’s presumption of purity and call into question reason’s isolation from madness. Strategies of indirect communication and regard for paradox from Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century works find new ground in Foucault’s twentieth-century archaeological undertaking as Foucault illuminates “both-and” moments in the history of madness, uncovering points where rationalism paradoxically conceives of madness or where madness is not unreasonable. Furthermore, for both thinkers, form and content meet, as Kierkegaard and Foucault’s occasionally “delirious lyricism” (in the phrase of Dominick LaCapra) exemplifies the intertwining of logical and illogical forces.
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Notes
Lynne Huffer, who reads the History of Madness as a melodrama, describes such a bid for expression as a matter of betrayal, rather than disturbance. Referencing Foucault’s first preface, she writes, “To speak unreason is to speak in the ‘merciless’ (xxvii) language of reason. To speak unreason is to betray it” (Huffer 2013, p. 639).
Perhaps to the extent that reason and madness are fused, reason can have mad ends and madness can have rational ends.
For a lengthier introduction to the History of Madness, see Gary Gutting’s chapter “Foucault and the History of Madness” in the Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Gutting 2005, pp. 49–73). A full English translation of Foucault’s book became available in 2006; until then, Richard Howard’s highly abbreviated translation, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, delimited Anglo-American discussions of Foucault’s study.
Even as Kierkegaard’s arguments were piercingly directed to his “present age” (as the title of one of his books attests), they purport to be more than historical reporting; they presume the reach of truth, forward and backwards. To wit: nineteenth-century Denmark may have suffered from spiritlessness as a sad consequence of the leveling of crowds, but faith in Christ will always be opposed to such lack of subjective inwardness because of the personal nature of faith and because of the link between faith and the absurd.
Bicêtre was a prison that was transformed into a mental hospital in 1656.
One literally ‘spectacular’ exception is the paid Sunday pastime of showing the mad, as if they were trained monkeys (Foucault 2009, pp. 143–44).
This paradox of guilty innocence takes a slightly different form in the classical experience of madness, as innocence there is linked to animality rather than illness (Gutting 2005, p. 62).
In Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety, there are three approaches to what is called “the demonic.” As George Pattison recounts them, they are “the aesthetic-metaphysical, which regards it as a kind of fate suffered by the demonic person to whom we should therefore be essentially compassionate; the ethical, where being possessed is the moral fault of the one concerned, and therefore calls for punishment; and the medical-therapeutic, where it is to be treated as a physical illness. These are not necessarily exclusive, and Vigilius comments that this division shows that the demonic does indeed belong in all three spheres: the somatic, the psychic, and the pneumatic” (Pattison 2013, p. 70, emphasis added). These approaches to the demonic accord surprisingly well with the sense in Foucault’s History of Madness that the mad were objects of compassion under the Renaissance, received punishment under the classical age, and underwent medical treatment during the clinical period.
By contrast, Kant offers a highly rational and clearly delineated classification of mental weakness in the cognitive faculty as well as of mental ailments (Kant 2006, §§45–53, pp. 96–115). In going to press, I discovered Hannah Lyn Venable’s tightly argued “At the Opening of Madness: An Exploration of the Nonrational with Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard,” in which Venable proposes three forms of the nonrational, namely, the prerational, irrational, and suprarational (Venable 2019, p. 476).
In his reading of Climacus’s position in Philosophical Fragments, C. Stephen Evans distinguishes a formal, logical contradiction from the apparent contradiction of a paradox (Evans 1992, pp. 98, 104).
Unless otherwise specified, all references to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are to its first volume.
As we will see, Richard McCombs maintains that irrationality is a pretense that Kierkegaard uses in order to communicate rationality (McCombs 1993, p. 19).
In an especially Kierkegaardian moment, Foucault describes the madman’s instant of choice: “The liberty of the madman is only ever in that instant, that imperceptible distance that makes a man free to abandon his liberty and chain himself to his madness: it is there only in that virtual point of choice, where we elect to ‘put ourselves in the impossibility of using our freedom and correcting our mistakes’ [Boissier de Sauvages, Nosologie méthodique, VII, p. 4]” (Foucault 2009, p. 513). See also Bennington (2011) on Derrida’s quotation of Kierkegaard (“… L’Instant de la Décision est une Folie. …”) in a lecture on Foucault.
Even in Fearless Speech, the theme of political veridiction is not linked with madness. There, the person who speaks truth to power does so under the banner of servitude rather than madness (Foucault 2001, p. 32).
Subjectivity is opposed both to objectivity and to a cheap kind of sociality, which is marked by its own speech pattern, namely, chatter. See Fenves (1993).
Here, too, one finds comforting moderation; for, de Silentio offers the qualification that in the religious the ethical is not surrendered outright but is dialectically suspended: “that which is suspended is not relinquished but is preserved in the higher, which is its telos” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 54).
In a passage on the relative worth of passion and understanding, Climacus muses: “I have considered it demeaning if I were to be more ashamed before human beings and their judgment than before the god and his judgment …. And who are those people, anyway, the ones I am supposed to fear—a few geniuses, perhaps, some literary critics …? … Or what are those people compared with the god; what is the refreshment of their busy clangor compared with the deliciousness of that solitary wellspring that is in every human being, that wellspring in which the god resides, that wellspring in the profound silence when all is quiet!” (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 183). The people who drink from the “busy clangor” of the literary critic of religion will thirst again; for eternal refreshment, one must plunge in the divine silence that—please note—“is in every human being.”
Different statements in Fear and Trembling attest to the relationship between anxiety and paradox. For example: “Sweet sentimental longing leads us to the goal of our desire, to see Christ walking about in the promised land. We forget the anxiety, the distress, the paradox” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 66; cf. Kierkegaard 1983, pp. 63–4).
Kierkegaard writes similarly in his own name in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits: “When a singular thinker, who through his singularity is more related to the eternal and less to the moment of temporality, addresses his discourse to people, he is rarely understood or listened to. If, however, a garrulous adherent comes to his aid so that the singular thinker can be—misunderstood—then it never fails, then there are many who promptly understand it” (Kierkegaard 1993, p. 90).
On the relationship between inferiority, indirect communication, and being incognito, see Kierkegaard (1991, pp. 129–131). Socrates and Christ (like Abraham) would forfeit their unrecognizability as soon as they engaged in direct communication.
Silence and solitude are necessary for cultivating subjectivity, but theirs is a free necessity. That is, insane asylums and other institutions work against authentic interiority by enforcing these conditions. As Zook explains, “[s]olitude is essential for the discovery of self-hood, but it only contributes to authenticity and subjectivity if the solitude is self-imposed and voluntary—choice is absolutely essential here. This is why Kierkegaard condemned the enforced silence of solitary confinement in prisons (Pap. 47 viii I A 40; P/J 258; SKS 7, 11; CUP 8) and why he argued against the obligatory, institutionalized silence of monastic retreats (SV3 17, 60; FSE 15)” (Zook 2008, pp. 402–3).
The escapee becomes free by leaping through a window. Reading this detail with the knight of faith’s leap in mind allows for the interpretation that the madhouse represents the finite realm, out of which the knight of faith launches himself and back to which he gracefully returns (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 41).
See chapter 4, “Subjectivity,” in Kelly (2009, pp. 78–105). In particular, I wish to point out the quotation from Foucault’s Remarks on Marx, which Kelly includes on page 80. There, Foucault speaks of the simultaneity of people’s experiences in knowing an objective set of things and people’s self-formation under determinate conditions as subjects.
Among the extensive body of literature on the rhetorical choices of each thinker, see Aumann (2010), Freundlieb (1995), Megill (1990), Mooney (2013), Poole (1993), Pugh (1992), Söderquist (2013) and Taylor (1975). To the best of my knowledge, “Voices of Madness in Foucault and Kierkegaard” is the first work bringing Foucault and Kierkegaard’s literary styles directly into conversation with each other.
Kierkegaard drew inspiration for his communication style from the masters of indirection, Socrates and Johann Georg Hamann (Kosch 2008, p. 72). I wonder if God communicates slyly, too. Is the incarnation, for example, indirect communication?
Regarding Foucault’s indecipherability, Anthony Pugh asks the translator’s question of whether a line of nonsense in French should be rendered so as to make sense in English (Pugh 1992, p. 132).
Cf. Pugh (1992, p. 134): “Speaking ‘for’ but not of course quoting the mad, Foucault can only express the pathos of their plight by means of rhetoric.”
“Whereas politics offers the promise of an equality whereby we have all been leveled down, Christianity holds the promise of an equality whereby we have all been built up” (Aroosi 2016, p. 75). De Silentio seems to be in agreement with Haufniensis when he states, “[f]aith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 67). In a footnote to this passage, de Silentio quotes Lessing’s remark, denn die Leidenschaften machen alle Menschen wieder gleich, which translates “for the passions make all men equal again” (original emphasis).
Cf. Kierkegaard (1980, p. 120).
Within the limits of what remains of their self-representation, Roy Porter also features the vox insanorum in his social history of madness (2004, pp. 229–71).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Shterna Friedman, Johanna Magin, and the anonymous reviewer for engaging this piece critically and with good will.
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Funding was provided by George Fox University (Grant No. GFU2019G04).
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Ohaneson, H.C. Voices of madness in Foucault and Kierkegaard. Int J Philos Relig 87, 27–54 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09739-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09739-6