From an interview with a philosopher of madness who is also a mad philosopher in the sense that he has experienced severe psychotic episodes requiring hospitalization, Wouter Kusters:
JB: So, to paraphrase again, the ‘mad person’ is grappling with the very same profound questions as the philosopher, but is doing so in more chaotic, ‘uncontained’ and perhaps, as a result, confusing way. The content — i.e., preoccupations with philosophical, spiritual, religious matters common in those so diagnosed — is not a ‘symptom’ of a disease process but indicative of a radical immersion in these immense conundrums of existence. I also take you to be saying that the mad person may have gone a little too far into this and has entered a sort of philosophical freefall. The key difference between the mad person and the philosopher, then, is not one of biology or pathology, but of the context and container in which this exploration is taking place. Is that right?
WK: Yes, that is absolutely right. But with this caveat: it could also be argued that both philosophy and madness are themselves symptoms of a disease process, the logical outcome of our endowment, since prehistory, with a consciousness that can reflect on its own emptiness. But the key difference between the mad person and philosopher still lies where you place it, yes.
As a philosophical maverick, I am neither analytic nor Continental, but someone who, conversant in both idioms, has published in both types of journals. I chop logic and engage in close analysis and argumentation, but I am also no stranger to such existential moods as Heideggerian Angst, Sartean nausée, and Camusian absurdité. Not only have I had these feelings, I am also open to their possibly revelatory value as disclosing deep truths about our predicament in this life. I am thus interested in the question of the relation of philosophy to topics the 'well-adjusted' are apt to consider border-line mad or 'pathological' and thus of no objective significance. What follows is something I wrote years ago about and against the spiritually superficial Australian positivist David Stove who has no sympathy whatsoever for the mad and mystical depths of genuine philosophy. What I wrote is perhaps too polemical. But I persist in my conviction that Stove was a deeply superficial fellow, a philosophistine, a term I will define below.
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Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,
That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says ’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)
A few comments are in order.
2. Are The Word was with God and The Word was God, taken singly, unintelligible? Not unless you are a positivist who ties intelligibility to empirical verifiability. But the principle of cognitive significance that positivists employ (according to which every cognitively meaningful statement is either logical/analytic or else empirically verifiable in principle) is itself empirically unverifiable. And since it is neither a truth of logic nor an analytic truth or logical truth, it is itself meaningless by its own criterion. Stove is hoist by his own petard, or cooked by his own stove.
3. To say or imply that no concrete thing in the world could have a proposition-like structure, and that anyone who thinks this is a lunatic, is itself a lunatic thing to say. I maintain that the world’s basic particulars are concrete facts and thus have a proposition-like structure, and I am no lunatic. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002). Closer to Australia, atheist David Armstrong, no slouch of a philosopher, and sane as far as I can tell, argues, quite sensibly, that contingent truths require truth-makers and that the latter are states of affairs, proposition-like entities. Stove’s suggestion that a view like this is insane shows that there is something deeply wrong with Stove. 'I am seated’ is true in virtue of the fact of my being seated. My being seated is a proposition-like entitiy. Insanity? Or common sense?
4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.
5. My tone is harsh. What justifies it? The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.
For more on Kusters, I refer you to the NDPR review of his book, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, Nancy Forest-Flier (trans.), MIT Press, 2020, 738pp., $39.95, ISBN 9780262044288.
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