The commemoration this year of the 400th anniversary of the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity to reflect on the changes in the conception of the human being that have taken place in our society in all this time. And one of the most relevant changes has to do with the conception of madness.
A central element of any conception of the human being is his contact with reality, how he interprets the world. For Cervantes and Shakespeare, madness was part of human nature, it was a reality inseparable from our human condition. In Foucault’s words, madness for these authors was “an integral human phenomenon”, one could not understand the human being, without understanding his madness.
Today, 400 years later, madness is for the official psychiatry linked to the dominant powers, an inopportune, stupid brain noise to be eliminated at any cost. And this vision has been transferred to public opinion through powerful media.
Is there not a great contradiction between these two perspectives of the human being? Given this situation, some questions inevitably arise. Were Cervantes and Shakespeare so wrong in their conception of the human being? Have we really advanced in these 400 years?
It should be noted that in the work of Cervantes and Shakespeare, madness occupies a very important place, constituting, as is well known, in the case of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the central theme, the axis of the work.
In Shakespeare, madness is related to reason and he considers that it can even provide richer meanings than sanity. Madness brings new perspectives on the world and the demarcation between reason and madness becomes difficult.
The complexity and conceptual richness with which Shakespeare perceives madness can be seen, for example, in “Hamlet” where each character in the play has their own explanation of what happens to the protagonist. For Horace, a friend of Hamlet, in line with Renaissance thought, madness comes from stupor, from Hamlet’s excess of emotions. For Polonius, Ophelia’s father, Hamlet’s madness comes from passion, the force of eros that he has for Ophelia, with a stoic vision linked to excess of passion. For his part, Claudio, the king, considers that madness comes from melancholy and has a Neoplatonic vision linked to imbalance.
In “King Lear”, the loyal Gloucester sees the madness of the old monarch as a consolation, as a positive experience in the face of unbearable pain. Thus he says “The king has gone mad. It is necessary that my reason be strong before the knowledge of my great sufferings. It would be better for me to be mad: then I would forget my sufferings. An imagination outside of reality makes us unaware of our ills” ( 4.7).
In Don Quixote, as we have pointed out, the meditations on madness are the essence of the book, but if I had to choose any reflection, I would choose what Sancho said to Don Quixote when he recovered his sanity, after the feeling of failure of his adventures as a knight-errant, already to die for:
“Oh! Don’t die, your grace, my lord, but take my advice and live many years: because the greatest folly that a man can do in this life is to let himself die, without more or more, without anyone killing him. ..Look, don’t be lazy, but get out of bed and let’s go to the field dressed as shepherds as we have arranged: perhaps behind a bush we will find the disenchanted Lady Doña Dulcinea” (LXXIV, last chapter of the second part).
We can see in these texts by Cervantes and Shakespeare about madness a very different vision from that of official psychiatry. Of course there are other branches of psychiatry and psychology, such as psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology and other schools that have a much more coherent and profound conception of madness, but they are being displaced by a strong current with powerful interests. within the framework of what Foucault called biopolitics.
For Foucault, psychiatric diagnosis is not something objective, neutral, but is linked to what he called “biopolitics” which would be the attempt by power to control health, hygiene, food, sexuality, birth, etc. given that they constitute political issues, fundamentally since the 18th century.
From Foucault’s perspective, in the Middle Ages madness was considered a sacred mystery that was part of the vast field of human experience. Likewise, in the Renaissance it was seen as a special form of reason of an ironic type that showed the absurdity of the world. The madness was both tragic and comic. This image crystallizes in the ship of the crazy, a group of people who were outside of society, but who were also considered pilgrims in search of reason and by extension of the reason of the world, representing the connection between order and chaos. Madness was opposed to reason, but as an alternative human mode of existence, not as its simple rejection. Until the Enlightenment, madness was seen as an imaginary place, a place of passage between the world and what lies behind it, between life and death, between the tangible and the sacred.
Thus, this 400th anniversary of Cervantes and Shakespeare constitutes an excellent opportunity to incite an in-depth debate about our conception of the human, and within it, of madness, as a central element.
I would like to end, as yet another example of the complexity and richness of this debate, by quoting what another great thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote insightfully on this subject:
“In humans, individual madness is rare, but what is in groups, parties and nations is the norm.”
For people interested in this topic we announce the following CONFERENCE:
“Cervantes-Shakespeare, two visions of the human”
Friday, April 8, 2016, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona. It will be broadcast live by streaming from the website of the University of Barcelona.
http://www.ub.edu/ubtv/es/video/cervantes-i-shakespeare-dues-visions-de-lesser-huma
Also through the home page of the University of Barcelona
All the presentations will be in Spanish.