Quand Platon faisait l’éloge de la folie

Abstract

In the Phaedra, written around 418 BC, Plato, rejecting madness as being always a calamity, differentiates four kinds of benevolent madness: The first one is the gift of divination. The Pythia in Delphi was able to predict the future because she was in a state of “modified consciousness” inspired by Apollo. Thus, she was connected with the “world of Ideas” and received instructions directly from the gods. The second one is the so called “telestic madness”. This kind of madness refers to the feeling of guilt coming up in a person, when a crime has been perpetrated in the previous generations and compels him to retaliation (this was the case in the Atrides family). Only a witch doctor, inspired by Dionysos, can cure this very peculiar kind of troubles because, like the Pythia, he is able to communicate with the outer world. We would call it today a chamanistic approach of the disease. The third one is easier to understand nowadays. It is the poetic inspiration. The poets themselves often admit being influenced by a muse (generally a beautiful woman in a white dress!) and even are able to be talking with her (so did Alfred de Musset in the “december night”). The last one is the “love madness”, inspired by Aphrodite ad her son Eros. Socrates explains the origins of this kind of madness in a myth, according which our soul is like a coachman trying to tame two horses going in opposite directions, a white one drawned towards the Good and the Fair, a dark one towards the Evil and the bad instincts. Love, to avoid turning into madness, must stay in the middle.