La locura en Spinoza, una aproximación foucaultiana
Abstract
In this essay I’ll connect the proposals that two philosophers have made about the matter of insanity. I want to show in what way the allusions that Spinoza has made about insanity and nonsense in the book Ethics can be laced with what Foucault calls the experience of madness in the classic period. I’ll show that these allusions refute two positions: one that establishes madness as a moral problem resultant out of a bad choice of the will, and the other one to which delirium is the product of a wrong balance between body and soul. Confronting this, Spinoza will say, in first place, that insanity is the radical expression of a mistake which already exists within morality and, secondly, that delirium is the result of incomprehension and an excess in the use of the affections. We have to note that Spinoza as well as Foucault associate delirium to insanity –and that’s why I’ll work with these terms in this essay. Nevertheless, each one of them gives shades of their own to this association; all of this according to the assumed perspective in each case to approach into the problem: As long as the first one is proposing an adequate comprehension of affections, the second one goes into an approximation of historical character that shows in which way insanity has become a decisive category in the definition of what we call today reason.