Blessed with Insanity

We have been tailored to believe that madness is negative.  Just the word, “madness” or any of its synonyms has a negative connotation and sends of vibrations of depression and  “abnormality.”   Interestingly enough, throughout history, as is prevalent in great works of art and literature, madness has been tied to words such as “love” and “genius.”  

Plato said “love is a form of madness.”  It is the notion that the lover would give anything to please the beloved and would go to the extent of sacrificing his or her life if uniting with the lover proved impossible; such as in the case of Shakespeare’s tragic love story of Rome and Juliet, where both tragically took their lives because they could not bear being separated from one another.  One may argue that this form of love, or “madness” as it may be called, was negative, because it killed them both.  But why is that the case?  Did it not liberate them from eternal misery?  Assuming they do not believe in eternal damnation, which is the punishment for suicide, then living on Earth without one another would have proven to be a form of death for them-  never-ending pain and suffering.

At another instant, Plato relates madness to the notion of the genius in The Republic’s allegory of the cave.  He who makes it out of the cave and “sees the light” or the true forms, commonly referred to as “Ideas” cannot “afterwards see within the cave any more, because their eyes have grown unaccustomed to the darkness;  they no longer recognize the shadow-forms correctly.  They are therefore ridiculed for their mistakes by those others who have never left that cave and those shadow-forms.” Those trapped in the cave are slaves to their ignorance, and yet they are the majority and thus the “normal” or “the they” according to Heidegger.  The person who saw the true Ideas is the genius and yet is labeled “insane” and “mad” because he is the uncommon or the “abnormal.”  

“There has been no great mind without an admixture of madness” said Aristotle as quoted by the Stoic philosopher, and slave, Seneca in De Tranquillitate Animi.  In the latter, insanity has been linked to greatness of mind, so why is it that the so-called “mad” are not taken seriously and are looked down upon as being fools and talkers of nonsense?  Once again, it is because they are not common and not traditional, aspects the “ordinary” people do not like to deal with because it would only undermine their “intelligence” and expose their true ignorance.  Was not Socrates called mad?  All he did was walk around in rags and ask people questions until they reached a point where they could not answer any more, and thus were indirectly forced to admit their ignorance.  His “repugnant” and non-conventional, as well as sometimes offensive, means of proving their “stupidity” if I may say so is what earned him the title of “insane”, eventually leading up to his death.  Ironically, till this day, Socrates is considered to be one of the greatest ancient Greek philosophers of all times, and appears on numerous accounts in the many works of Plato.

In The World as Will and Representation, another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, further elaborates on the notion of madness.  In Book III, he sheds light on the “utility,” in a sense, of insanity.  Before going on, it is important to note that madness is closely related to suffering, according to this work.  Suffering, which is always in the present, is tolerable so long as it stays in the moment it arises in.  If, however, the person suffering dwells on it and thus makes a permanent mark of it in his or her memory, it then becomes “positively unbearable.”  In the latter case, the individual succumbs to the suffering, and “the mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of its memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength.” 

To sum up his idea, madness is a form of escape provided by nature to help rescue the mind from depression.  It is a form of distraction from the pain.  By creating gaps in the thread of memory, the person becomes only actively involved in the present, yet the past, which has proven to be so painful, becomes “disconnected” or “detached” in a way.  The memory is still there, yet the connection is not, and thus without the actual relation, the agonizing incident seizes to exist.  

Furthermore, if one were to look at some of the greatest artists such as the Norwegian Expressionist painter, Edvard Munch, the American poet Emily Dickinson and others, one would notice that they were all “insane.” For Heidegger, the fact that they were diagnosed with an illness, bipolar disorder in the former and depression in the latter, is appalling.  Such an offense should not be made against geniuses, and I do not think that anyone would disagree with the fact that they were geniuses.  

And so, returning to my initial question:  Why is madness put under the category of the “negative” or the “ill”, when all those “insane” geniuses produced work that until this day is admired and appreciated?  And if madness was really “bad” then why would some of the greatest philosophers of our time and even newly created clichés link insanity with words such as “love” and “genius?”  Maybe madness is a state of happiness that only the blessed or enlightened are subject too.  Is it not possible that “ordinary” people are victims of ignorance and thus cannot be touched by madness?  If the genius and the lover are mad, should we not all wish for the same?