Madness in Experience and History

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Foucault’s Archaeology

Hannah Lyn Venable

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032020280
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000469530
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

Madness in Experience and History brings together experience and history to show their impact on madness or mental illness.

Drawing on the writings of two twentieth-century French philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, the author pairs a phenomenological approach with an archaeological approach to present a new perspective on mental illness as an experience that arises out of common behavioral patterns and shared historical structures. Many today feel frustrated with the medical model because of its deficiencies in explaining mental illness. In response, the author argues that we must integrate human experiences of mental disorders with the history of mental disorders to have a full account of mental health and to make possible a more holistic care.

Scholars in the humanities and mental health practitioners will appreciate how such an analysis not only offers a greater understanding of mental health, but also a fresh take on discovering value in diverse human experiences.

Part I Introducing the United Approach

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181538-1

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. [The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.]¹

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1995), Fragment 423, p. 127.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.²

2. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook Press, 2001), 17–18.

Despite his advancements in math and physics, Blaise Pascal recognizes that scientific and rational explanations are insufficient in fully capturing human experience. Pascal draws out the mysterious elements buried in the hearts of the human which no rationality can completely explain nor justify. Our rationality is essential to our humanness, but rationality itself cannot account for its own origin. There is something else behind rationality that manifests in those secret “reasons” of our hearts that the rational cannot comprehend.

In a similar way, G.K. Chesterton points to the way rationality can manifest in nonrationality when we consider the reasons that are still present in someone considered mad. It is not that a madman has entirely lost his reason; in fact, there are usually perfectly understandable reasons for his behavior, even if the reasons do not match reality. By citing examples of mental disorders, Chesterton points to the use of an extreme rationalism by the madman as an analogy for the untenable position of a rationalist skeptic. Both Pascal and Chesterton expose the influence of the rational on nonrational behavior, provoking us to reconsider our understanding of human rationality.

To begin our quest of rethinking madness and human rationality, I first define the key terms “madness,” “rational” and “nonrational,” and introduce the chosen methods, phenomenology and archaeology, that are used in this book. Next, in the first chapter, I argue for three insights that can only be gained by an approach to madness that integrates experience in history and demonstrate how these insights avoid some of the problems of modern psychology. For each insight, I draw on contributions from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Foucault’s archaeology to give an initial picture for how they can be brought together in unity.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181538-2

This project faces the challenge of analyzing madness or mental illness from two diverse perspectives: human experience and human history. No one will deny the impact that experience and history have on our view of madness, but it is rare to find an approach which sees the intertwining of experience and history as the key to a greater understanding of mental illness. I take up this approach and argue that we must integrate human experiences of madness with the history of madness in order to have a full account of mental health and to make possible a more holistic care.

For a description of the individual’s experience of madness, I draw from the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who supports his account with documented studies and observations from psychology. For an expression of the historical perspective on madness, I turn to the archaeological approach of Michel Foucault, who supports his account with selected historical records and events. To accomplish the integration between them, I pair the phenomenological insights with historical structures demonstrating how an understanding of the distorted experience of madness is further illuminated by the cultural perceptions of madness. This process brings together the phenomenological idea that madness is intrinsic to human experience with the historical awareness that madness arises out of cultural structures. We find a reciprocal relationship between how historical structures define madness and how humans express experiences of madness. The validity of this relationship is confirmed by performing an analysis on the connections between historical and current descriptions of madness.

Ultimately, this type of analysis brings to light not just a greater understanding of mental health but points us to the value found in diverse human experiences. It pushes against the medical model which often makes a stark contrast between “abnormal” and “normal” humans and shows how it stems from an even deeper philosophical division between the notions of the “rational” and the “nonrational.” While these categories can be helpful in discussion, such sharp dichotomies do not exist, neither experientially nor historically, and need to be broken down in order to have a deeper understanding of mental illness and common human experience. When we see the common way that we experience the world and the shared manner in which we are shaped by history, we are reminded of the equal value that should be given to all human life.

Exploring the role of rationality in humanity has been an important theme throughout philosophy. From Aristotle’s priority of the rational part of the human soul over the nonrational parts, to Camus’s description of the fundamental absurdity (or nonrationality) of human life, philosophers over time have grappled with how humans relate to the nonrational. Our thinkers, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, however, are primarily concerned with one particular narrative about human rationality which originated with Descartes and which has arguably influenced the modern understanding of the human more than any other. They both believe that his account of the rational, or at least the interpretation of his account, contains grave errors, leading to mistaken assumptions about the human and mistaken assumptions about the notion of nonrationality.

In his famous Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes attempts to prove his own existence by establishing that he is “a thing which thinks.”¹ The priority for Descartes is on the thinking quality of the human and thus the rationality of the human mind. Modern philosophy (often called “rationalism”) latches on to this understanding of the human such that the human is defined exclusively by its ability to think, ability to be rational, resulting in a definition which fails to consider the significance of the behavior and role of the body. Merleau-Ponty is concerned that the Cartesian split between the mind and body reduces the human to a rational mind sitting on top of a nonrational body and that this devalues the body by seeing it only in terms of an animal or a machine.² Furthermore, the Cartesian model focuses entirely on the autonomy and power of the individual human mind, neglecting how constructions and structures of society also shape the human. This problem is part of what drives Foucault’s concerns: he aims to show how the understanding of the rational and the nonrational, and even the identity of the human, change according to the shifts in history.

1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1951), Second Meditation, p. 26.

2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, ed. Dominque Seglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003). We will discuss this more in Ch. 2, A.

In addition to the Cartesian method, they are also responding to the Kantian tradition which reconfigures the split between the mind and the body into the divide between the phenomenal (material) and noumenal (immaterial) worlds. Although they see Kant as offering a good starting place, his reformulations still do not bring a unity to human experience. In the spirit of Pascal, as seen in the opening quote to Part I, our thinkers seek to demonstrate that the human cannot be defined solely by a rational mind, because the heart of the human has reasons which cannot always be explained. They use their respective investigations into madness, according to the phenomenological and archaeological approaches, to expand the definition of the rational and to go beyond the division between the rational and the nonrational itself. Merleau-Ponty calls on twentieth-century philosophers to “explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason [raison élargie].” ³ Foucault accepts Merleau-Ponty’s invitation to enlarge the rational and carries out this quest through his examination of the nonrational in the history of madness.⁴ They continue to use vocabulary related to rationality, such as reason and logic, and those related to nonrationality, such as unreason, the pre-rational and the irrational, but they do so in order to tease out the relation and tension between the rational and the nonrational and to point to a unity that transcends them in what they will later call “flesh.”⁵ In this same way, each use of “rational” and “nonrational” in this book will always be placed in its proper context and always with the purpose of expanding our vision of them, pushing back against this false binary.

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63.

4. See Frédéric Gros, Foucault et la folie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 30.

5. We will discuss their shared approach to rationality in the opening to Part IV and their shared idea of flesh briefly in Ch. 7, B.2.

A. Perspective From Experience: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Approach

Phenomenology, literally meaning the “study of phenomena,” rests on the human’s perspective of and relation to the world. Working in the phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty sees that it is only as a human that we understand the world and it is as a human that we have access to knowledge. We cannot be some kind of god, as Merleau-Ponty repeats, who is apart from the world, viewing it from above, because we are intimately “attached to [the world]” and dependent on this attachment.⁶ For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy begins and ends with the human; philosophy retains significance only as it relates to the human, because we cannot go beyond the human context of the world.

6. Maurice Merleau-P onty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 228. See also 317, 375, and 391. The phrase “is attached to it” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I Introducing the United Approach
• PART II Merleau-Ponty: Madness and the Pre-Rational
• PART III Foucault: Madness and the Irrational
• PART IV Synthesizing Merleau-Ponty and Foucault
• PART V Toward an Application
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index