This mule (?) seemed pretty chill, though it did have an air of quiet desperation about it. As would I, had I been given my own orange bandanna before being left at camp tied, lengthely, to a tree.
“It is still true today that our scientific and medical knowledge of madness rests implicitly on the prior constitution of an ethical experience of unreason.”
“In approximate terms, it can be said that until the Renaissance the world of ethics, beyond the great division between Good and Evil, kept its equilibrium in a sort of tragic unity, that of destiny and of providence and divine will. That unity was now to disappear, broken by the definitive split between reason and unreason. A crises in the world of ethics therefore came into being, and to the great struggle between Good and Evil was juxtaposed the irreconcilable conflict between reason and unreason, multiplyling images of the split.”
That last may be a bit much, given the setting and lateness of the hour, but it all boils down to one thing: what is reason?
I’m reading Foucault, History of Madness (Murphy and Khalfa, trans.), and the above can be found on pages 91 and 104. I’ve had a longstanding and deep-seeded suspicion of anyone or thing that purports or even looks towards human reason as being able to fully understand the world. At the same time, such a stance is too often conflated with an individual not owning up to being able to fully understand her/his own life. While it may be fact in some senses, there are ways in which an individuals life is not the world. Which goes back to the mission statement under which this blog labors.
I’ve been sleeping well recently, but having a very hard time calming my mind enough to fall asleep. A good problem to have, a promising sign.
Bedrock & Paradox 
Leave a reply to Phillip Cancel reply