An Enlightened Madness

Abstract

If one believes Foucault, the advent of insanity as a category is consonant with the birth of the Enlightenment. According to the Foucault of Madness and Civilization, the juridical judgment toward madness is first evidenced in Descartes' Meditations. It is there, in the first meditation, that Descartes dis? tinguishes between reason and madness through juridical language, language that purportedly jettisons reason beyond the absurdity of madness in what will be the establishment of clear and distinct ideas.1 But this jettisoning is not so simple in the conceptual configuration of Descartes' text. As Derrida has rightly pointed out, Descartes, in effect, never argues or accepts the distinc? tion between madness and reason, at least not in the first meditation. And, even if Descartes were to simply appropriate the distinction through the employ? ment of juridical language, in this case that strategy makes no difference for what is being conceptually argued. Much to the contrary: The inability to distinguish between reason and madness is carried over into an inability to distinguish between dreaming and waking life, and further between an evil and benevolent genius, the latter being the point at which a movement between reason and madness will have been entirely fluid. Finally, once this fluidity has been established, if such can be said, the inability to determine madness so attractive for what goes under the banner "post-modernity" is matched by an equal inability to determine reason. Now, this would seem perilous for the manner in which the Enlightenment is typically portrayed. That is, reason as the ultimate court of appeal would be as abyssal as the silence of madness to which it is more often than not set in opposition. Now, it would seem that however one might choose to characterize the "first" Enlightenment, one would have to accept certain ties to the dreams of rationality, to the dream that reason be the final court of appeal. So it would seem. But, the attempt to set reason free, even within its own limits as Kant attempts to do in his "What is Enlightenment?" ? is not necessarily bound to foundational principles, especially in the manner in which the Enlightenment is often ventriloquized. Yes, principles are employed that possess the tonality of the fundamental, principles that are absolutely necessary for philosophi? cal analysis, principles that are taken to be fundamental on the way to what grounds their veracity. But, even this does not exclude the possibility ? per