Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Philosophy
I am still in the middle of reading Wouter Kusters’ phenomenal Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. This book is a must read for all interested in philosophy, mysticism and madness, and those who are open to the disturbing closeness, even overlap, of all three, like Kusters’ ideas that: Philosophy is controlled madness; Madness develops its own philosophy, which is not necessarily mad; Monist philosophies push you to mysticism, which can take a turn into madness when you see too many connections; Madness could be cured with a better, less verbal and imaginary mode of mysticism. The book is a true cornucopia of well-developed crossings and relevant to all interested in the emerging practice of philosophical counseling.
I read a big chunk of the book in mid-January at a six hour transfer at Mumbai airport, tired and high on caffeine in a sea of strangers, with some staring at me with seemingly benign wonder. Usually I’d feel uncomfortable in such a setting, but the book has a very calming effect, because, I think, the writer has something very important to share; something he knows literally inside-out as he has lived through two psychotic episodes, and takes great care to formulate. He even shares chunks of his psychotic, stream of consciousness thinking, which are both funny, absurdist and fascinating, meaningful narratives.
A special spot in the book is reserved for Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness [1], one of the deepest reflections on the possibility conditions of conscious experience, and in Kusters’ writing a handy tool to understand both normal and psychotic experiences. How do we keep consensus reality running in a semi-chaotic flow of events? And what happens when that breaks down and a psychotic manner of meaning-construction takes over? How can we best understand the interplay between memory, the just-passed (retention), the present, the just-to-come (protention) and expectations in the construction and change of reality? Kusters makes good use of the idea that much can be learned from things going wrong, like Heidegger’s broken hammer [2] and the unfortunate cases Merleau-Ponty looked into to understand behavior at its most basic moments of constitution [3].
Descriptive phenomenologies of madness and curative existential psychotherapies have earlier been developed by Merlau-Ponty, Foucault, Thomas Szaz, Ronald Laing, Ludwig Binswanger, Meddard Boss, Viktor Frankl and quite some others, and Kusters can probably be placed in this category. Arguably he moved the investigation a couple of notches further.
For another step into understanding the genesis of madness I would connect the issue with Kant’s faculty of the productive imagination, which does not result necessarily in sane, justified knowledge, and actually could explain the highly productive, but not necessarily intelligible imagination operative in madness. This highly intriguing and explanatory faculty got muffled away in the B version of the Critique of Pure Reason, only to be saved by Heidegger but for a few years just after he wrote Being and Time and developed a phenomenological reading of Kant [4]. Recently the faculty of productive imagination made a come-back with the work of Saulius Geniusas [5]. Paul Ricoeur connected it with narrativity, the very effective epistemic device involved in identity-formation [6], a theme mentioned by Kusters and to which I devoted my master thesis [7].
The subject matter also connects with an impromptu paper I delivered a week earlier at this yearly philosophy conference which was started in 1925 by Nobel laureate Tagore and philosopher and first president of India, Radhakrishnan. One of its themes was the restoration of the ecosystem. This year it was hosted by the Mahatma Gandhi University, Wardha, Maharashtra, where Gandhi had his ashram from 1936 till his assassination and where he proclaimed the ‘Quit India’ movement. We visited the enchanted place, which was silently inspiring.
I titled my presentation, for which I got ten minutes, “The Future of Consciousness: Is Krishnamurti its Prophet?”[8] It incorporates the ideas of Julian Jaynes, who also has some profound insights about the connection between madness and religion [9]. For Jaynes a lot of religious practices and manners of madness are triggered by a regression in (or by) the brain to an earlier ‘architecture’ he named bicameral, which was prevalent in the Bronze Age. This architecture had us humans obey Auditory Command Hallucinations (ACH) either originating in ourselves or in our superiors like kings and priests. It was the gods talking to us like in Homer’s Iliad with little to no space for disobedience and deliberation. According to Jaynes the ACHs originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and travel over the corpus callosum to the other side where its messages are received as if coming from outside. Ergo him naming it ‘bicameral’.
This ‘mentality’, ‘mind-set’, or ‘architecture’ increasingly disappeared with the onset of our modern sense of consciousness around 1,500 to 1,000 BCE, with its socially constructed, introspectable, inner mind space, in which metaphorical room we move around a fictive me in different scenarios in order to think through and feel out possible courses of action. The speculation is that at the end of the Bronze Age many cultures clashed and the authorities led by ACHs didn’t come up with very viable strategies. People had to literally figure things out for themselves, which ‘selves’ had to be constructed from scratch in the process, something we experience also in our own development at around age 5 or 6. This egoic awareness comes with a lot of personal choices and uncertainty, and can be made more certain by applying science and rationality. It also has a backward-looking inclination aimed at reviving the bicameral mind and its authority through religious practices like divination, ecstasies, oracles, enthusiasms, mediumship, channeling, etc. to trigger variants of command hallucinations, coming from gods, God, angels, masters or other imagined meta-empirical beings. It also derails in forward-looking hyper-individualism, scientism, technologization, ego-centered small-mindedness, neoliberalism, and the current state of global civilization on its way to economic and environmental doom.
And what has this to do with Krishnamurti and the restoration of the ecosystem? Well, I am starting to make the claim that egoic consciousness, as it started just three thousand years ago, has gobbled up all civilizations and tribes (whether bicameral or pre-bicameral) into its egoic mentality and civilizational structure named ‘central civilization’, now in its global phase [10]. This mentality and its social organization has an inbuilt vector towards disaster, which can only be challenged by a wholly different conscious architecture, of which Gautama might have been one of the earliest proponents and Krishnamurti one of the clearest later ones, with who knows how many in between. It might be this architecture which will have the required post-egoic structure and intelligent sensitivity to create a truly sustainable and just society. But that might need another 200+ years to break through to effective scale. Before that, I am sorry to say, brace yourselves. 8^(
Endnotes
[1]. Husserl, Edmund . 1964. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Churchill, James S. (Transl.). Bloomington: Indiana U.P.
[2]. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Macquerrie, John & Robinson, Edward (Transl.). New York: Harper Collins.
[3]. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
[4]. Heidegger, Martin. 1997 (1977). Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Emad, Parvis & Maly, Kenneth (Transl.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana U.P.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Churchill, James (Transl.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana U.P.
[5]. Geniusas, Saulius (Ed.). 2018. Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Geniusas, Saulius & Nikulin, Dmitri (Eds.). 2018. Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
[6]. Ricoeur, Paul. 1985. Time and Narrative. Volume 2. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
[7]. Schuller, Govert. 2019. The Possibility Conditions of Narrative Identity. Dissertation; Masters in Research in European Philosophy; Dr. Adrian Davis, Research Supervisor; University of Wales.
[8]. Forthcoming.
[9]. Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[10]. Wilkinson, David. 1987. “Central Civilization”. Comparative Civilizations Review, 17/17: Article 4. Also in: Sanderson, Stephen K., 1995, Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-historical Change, Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, pp. 46-74.
excellent article. maybe these considerations will glide into the mainstream and we can begin to heal this journey together.