The Higher Madness of Kierkegaards Inverse Dialectic

Abstract

In his 'History of Madness' Michel Foucault sketches a bleak vision, in late medieval Europe, of a world out of joint. There, reflected in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, we find a tragic affinity between the irrationality of the mad and the truth of the world. This affinity enables a profound insight on the part of the mad, which amounts to a reason beyond reason. Foucault traces further the uncanny dialectic between reason and folly until the latter is abruptly suppressed and silenced in the Age of Reason ['l'âge classique'] by practices of confinement and by conceptualization as Unreason ['Dèraison'] - a cipher which gestures at the motley class of those excluded by an emergent bourgeois reason struggling to define itself. On Foucault's account the tragic experience of madness is then submerged until it reappears in the modern era, illuminated in the lightning flashes of works by Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Goya, van Gogh, and Artaud. Now, though, it is an experience confined in works of art, rather than the pervasive experience of a whole culture. During this time we find another appearance of "higher madness," which seems to amount to a tragic vision of reality, in the work of the religious poet Soren Kierkegaard.