If any fell wind of dark philosophy will winter the Christian culture of the West, it will drift for the dark towers of post-modern deconstructionist thought. Truly seductive is its grip on our world, and its sway is imperceptible because of its complexity. Michael Foucault is known as its chief architect, and below is a summary of his book Madness and Civilization, which I have written for class tonight. Here is the Mordor, the "bear and leafless day" into which I must sojourn to bring the light of God's truth to the abandoned academic halls of knowledge in the West. Though it only be autumn for the rest of civilization, my Providential journey leads through the frozen paths of "madness" in the strongholds of the Enemy. May Christ's Word be a "light to me in dark places, when all other lights go out." Pray for my courage.
P.S. Class went great tonight! My professor and classmates were dissatisfied with Foucault, and this gave me much opportunity to point out the flaws in his argumentation. While I am sure I will face much difficulty from the effects of deconstructionism in the future, as indeed we all do now that it is culture, I am ever trusting the the grace of Jesus Christ for my hope and the hope of the world, both in this Age and in the Age to Come.
Assignment V: Foucault:
Madness and Civilization
Post-modern deconstructionism in Foucault's Madness and
Civilization serves as a critique of the construction of ideas
and interpretations in civilizational and contra-civilizational
motifs. Foucault denies the essence of “terminal truths” in
historical events, and moves the emphasis of historical analysis to a
search for paradoxes of impressions in human perception (ix). His
work seeks to describe prejudices of civilizational segregation of
the insane, and inverts the conceptualizations of both Western
rationality and its designated “other,” madness, in order to
discover constructs of civilization within madness and madness within
mainstream civilization. Only after Western civilization consciously
adopted the philosophy of its own antithesis to rationality with
Nietzsche and Freud was the irony of its paradox lessened but did not
assure sincerity, so concludes Foucault (278, 286-289). The extent of
Foucault's intellectual history of insanity encompasses not only the
conceptualizations of civilization, but also of human perceptions of
humanity itself, of masculinity and femininity, and of minority
status.
In Faucault's estimation, from its origin, Western civilization has
always framed itself against a form of contra-civilization or
irrationality to its own construction of reason, and he cites the
expulsion of lepers from society as an example. He argues that the
Church expelled lepers from civilizational participation either
through confinement or distance. Forced sea voyages represented both
imprisonment and the openness of distance from social belonging. Long
after leprosy declined, the rules for social expulsion remained, and
as the Renaissance dawned, the category of madness grew into a
place-holder for the civilizational opposite and a substitute for the
imagery of death in literature and Apocalyptic iconography (6-7, 13,
16, 22-23). Here, argues Faulcault, madness entered the mainstream of
ecclesiastic art in its inverse. Rather than ill preparedness for the
end of the world being a sign of madness, madness served as a sign
for the end of the world. Subsequently, madness infused art with
“romantic identification,” a reach for human imagination outside
the ordinary (17, 28-29).
The Classical Age quickly silenced the liberated voice of madness of
the Renaissance by relegating madness to confinement during the
middle seventeenth century. For example, Louis XIV founded the
Hopital General in 1656 to confine the poor, unemployed,
prisoners, and the insane (39). These undifferentiated masses were
given up to sensibility in stark contrast to the privileges of
Reason. According to Enlightenment diagnosis, women were most prone
of hysteria of love within sensibility (45, 139-140). In accord with
Catholic and Classical Western tradition, these insane were assigned
to labor for moral enchantment and remedy of illness. Nevertheless,
by relegating madness to the realm of the “secret,” authorities
experienced the counteraction of shame for the insane which was
unknown during the Renaissance, provoking an irony of regret (55,
68). Passion formed the basis for philosophical possibility of
insanity, and in Diemerbroek's exploration of insanity, madness
depended on melancholy. Yet underneath Diemerbroek's concept for
melancholy, Foucault perceives a secret discourse of logic which
connects melancholy with insane actions, such as murder. Foucault
explains, “Under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order
of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense,
pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia,
is located the paradoxical truth of madness” (88, 96-97). In
Classical interpretations of insanity, Foucault sees Pinel describing
madness as a transcendence of moral nature in which the anti-nature
of madness may not longer be made into unreasonableness, being
interpreted within the scheme of the moral. This served as a catalyst
for the psychology of the nineteenth century, whereas during the
Classical age, pure physical treatment of the subject did not exist
and discourses on madness divided between the “transformation of
qualities” addressing madness as a phenomenon of nature and the
“restitution of truth” which signified madness as unreason (197).
With the institution of asylums, confinement became more sympathetic
but not liberating for insanity. Nevertheless, Faucault claims the
nineteenth century asylum moved beyond absolute contradiction (as in
the Age of Reason) to a form of mere minority status. Freud turned
the tide by directly addressing the physician-patient paradigm, and
in so doing eradicated asylum structures, madness's conceptualization
of itself, and its own condemnation. Yet, Freud's diagnosis did not
dispel the essential alienation of insanity; the doctor still remains
in psychology a condescending and alienating figure to the estranged
“subject” (252, 277-278). After Nietzsche's view of tragic art,
madness artistically worked beyond its limits of danger into the
realm of fulfillment, but still signaled judgment. As Foucault
describes, “the moment when, together, the work of art and madness
are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world
finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it
for what it is” (288-289).
Causation
Human subjectivity drives the formations of historical record in
Foucault's deconstructionism. The initiation of ideas within certain
codified systems of mores immediately begs into question the
existence of counter-ideas in the irony of the opposite. In
civilization, Foucault fishes out the notion of the “other,” and
in this “other,” Foucault concerns himself with the constraints
of the mainstream. For example, he assigns causation to passion (as a
human label) in the stereotyping of madness (as a social conclusion
to that label), but only within the limited perception of its period.
Foucault always perceives a bitter irony in the narrowness of such
perceptions: “Madness, which finds its first possibility in the
phenomenon of passion, and in the deployment of that double causality
which, starting from passion itself, radiates both toward the body
and toward the soul, is at the same time suspension of passion,
breach of causality, and dissolution of the elements of this unity”
(88-91). Foucault replaces universal causation with the causations of
perception, but how might post-modern criticism move past its own
subjective constructs to critique the perceptions of the past in an
applicable way? Foucault assumes universality in his epistemological
method, but does not grant it metaphysical legitimacy.
Progress
Progress, whether civilizational or otherwise cannot stand above the
dilemma of power in the self/other paradox. Social progress
necessarily implies a movement upward from a “backward other,”
whether it be a form of social organization or a particular sect of
society, and post-modernism cannot afford to positively espouse such
mobility. Yet, Foucault needs some form of liberal justice in order
to discuses the confines of civilizational arraignment and
responsibility (289). He implies civilizational injustice in his
construct of the “other,” and so pleads for progressive reversal.
The humorous irony of the implicit irony within post-modern
deconstructionism is that it demands a reversal of the backward
label, but it cannot do so without asking civilization to label
another form of itself as backward.
Trajectory of History
History is a continuous line of impressions, in which continuity only
exists within the framework of conceptualization itself. For such
deconstruction, historical inquiry may only validly analyze the
interpretations of source-work and not the actual events, because to
do otherwise would be to assume some universal legitimacy in the
source-work. History is historiography for the post-modern
history.
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