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kernel of experience needed for some better or more authentic existence. This phenomenological
analysis is undeniably the driving force behind Foucault’s early work with madness.
Foucault compared pre-classical tragedy with classical tragedy to show that in the
classical
age the interaction between the tragic character and the mad character is not dialectical, is not
one of “fury” as had Nietzsche hoped for. But instead, the two interact as two mirrors facing
each other, confronting each other, “without a possible dialogue, without a common
language….”
52
Like Heidegger’s experience of wonder, Foucault’s mad person experiences
“dazzlement.”
53
To say that madness is dazzlement is to say that
the madman sees the daylight…and nothing but this daylight and nothing in it, he
sees it as void, as night, as nothing…. And believing he sees, he admits as
realities the hallucinations of his imagination and all the multitudinous population
of night.
Classical thinkers then have only a very straightforward and mathematical understanding of their
reality. “What the classical thinkers retain of the ‘world,’ what they already anticipate in
‘nature,’ is an extremely abstract law, which nonetheless forms the most vivid and concrete
opposition, that of day and night.” And this stark contrast, which had replaced “all dialectical
and all reconciliation” between “waking and dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the
nothingness of shadow,” can be attributed to Descartes. Foucault argued that
the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness.
Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness
of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman
who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, believes he sees
when he imagines.
52
Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 111.
53
Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 108.
Convention