Chapter 3 Chapter 3 Madman

From the founding of the General Hospital and the opening of the first correctional institutions in Germany and England, until the end of the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason was marked by confinement.Those incarcerated included the immoral, the squandering father, the dissolute offspring, the blasphemer, the "indulgent" and the freethinker.And through these likenesses, these strange accomplices, the age outlines its own experience of the irrational. However, we also found in each city a large number of insane inhabitants.In Paris, one tenth of those arrested and brought to the General Hospital were "crazy," "demented," "insane," "trance," or "totally insane."No distinction is made between them and others.From the registers, people housed them with the same emotion, quarantined them with the same attitude.We leave to medical archaeology whether those admitted to the institution for "moral depravity" or for "wife abuse" and several suicide attempts were patients, criminals, or madmen.

However, it should not be forgotten that these "lunatics" occupy a special place in the world of confinement.Their status is not just that of prisoners.In the general treatment of irrational emotions, madness seems to have a special tone.This sentiment is applied to the so-called lunatics, insane, insane, demented, and incontinent (these terms have no strict semantic difference). This particular emotion characterizes madness in this irrational world.It first involves scandal.In most general cases, confinement was motivated, or at least justified, by a desire to avoid scandal.This also indicates a certain important change in the consciousness of guilt.During the Renaissance, people allowed all kinds of irrationality to be freely displayed in broad daylight.Public indignation can give sin its vindicatory and atoning power.In the 15th century, Reis was accused of being "a heretic, an apostate, a sorcerer, a chicken lover, a devil-caller, a soothsayer, a murderer of nothing, an idolater, a heresy".He himself admitted in a confession outside court to crimes "enough to cause rivers of blood to flow".He repeated his confession in Latin in court, and then offered to ask: "This confession should be made public in secular language, because most people do not understand Latin. Let the public know that he is ashamed of the above-mentioned offenses, so that it is easier for him Forgiveness, God's mercy." At the public trial, he was asked to make the same confession: "The president of the court asked him to state the case in detail, and the humiliation he suffered would lessen his punishment later." Until 17 In this century, even the grossest and most brutal crimes were not dealt with and punished without being made public.Repentance and punishment aboveboard can completely counteract the darkness that produces sin.Evil must be publicly confessed and displayed before conclusions can be drawn about its eradication.Only in this way can the whole course of sin be completed.

Confinement, on the contrary, reveals a certain conscience that regards inhuman evil as a complete shame.Evil is contagious in some ways, has the power to create scandal, and publicity only makes it infinitely multiplied.Only forgetting can stop them.For example, in a poisoning case, instead of ordering a public trial, Pontchartrain directed that it be handled in secret by an asylum: "Since the case involved so many people in Paris, the King did not think that so many many of whom did not know they were committing crimes, and others who did so for the fun of it. His Majesty did so because he believed that some crimes should be completely forgotten.” In addition to preventing evil, in order to Family or religious reputation is also enough to send a person to detention.For example, a priest was sent to Saint-Lazare: "People are so keen to defend the reputation of religion and monks, so it is impossible not to hide such priests." Even in the late eighteenth century, Malseb believed that , confinement is a right for families to try to avoid stigma. "The meanness of which one speaks is among those which public order will not tolerate.  … It seems that, for the honor of a family, a man who brings dishonor to his relatives by their vices should be removed from society.  "On the contrary, when the danger of scandal disappears and the reputation of the family or the church is not tarnished, the person is released.Abbot Barzhid received a long period of confinement.He begged in every possible way, but could not be released.But in old age and frailty, there will be no scandals.Argenson wrote: "Besides, he has been paralyzed for many years, unable to write, not even to sign. I think that, out of justice and mercy, he should be released." All crimes that touch irrationality should be kept secret.Classical times were ashamed of this inhuman existence, a sentiment that the Renaissance did not have.

There is, however, one exception to this cover-up, and that is for madmen.Undoubtedly, displaying madmen was a very old custom in the Middle Ages.Some madman towers in Germany have grilled windows that allow people to see the madman locked inside.These lunatics became a scene of Chengguan.Curiously, the custom did not disappear when the doors of the asylum were closed.On the contrary, it continued to develop and almost became a characteristic institution of Paris and London.As late as 1815, according to a report submitted to the (British) House of Commons, Bethlehem Hospital exhibited mental patients every Sunday, and the visit fee was one poop.Exhibition income is as high as nearly 400 pounds per year.This means that there are as many as 96,000 visitors per year.In France, until the Revolution, visiting Bicetre and visiting madmen had been one of the weekend entertainments of the bourgeoisie in the bohemian district of Paris.Mirabeau reports in "The Travels of an Englishman" that Bisetle's madman was shown "like a rare animal" to "a great fool who would pay a coin".The caretaker's exhibition of madmen is like the monkey jugglers in the Saint-Germain market who make monkeys do all kinds of shows.Some wardens are known for making madmen perform dances, acrobatics, and of course a little whip-wielding. At the end of the 18th century, the only improvement: allowing madmen to exhibit madmen.It seems that madness bears the burden of proving itself. "We don't have to blame humanity. The English tourist was right: the exhibition of the madman goes beyond the cruelest of humanity. We have said so long ago. But where there is a problem there is a way out. It is the madman I am entrusted in my waking moments to show my companions. The latter agrees. So the steward of these unfortunates reaps the profits of the show, without ever sinking himself to the level of ruthlessness." Here madness breaks The silence of the asylum becomes a show, and thus a public scandal for the entertainment of the public.Irrationality was cloaked in the silence of the internment, but madness continued to appear on the world stage, more sensationally than ever.During the First French Empire, it quickly reached a level that the Middle Ages and Renaissance never reached.In the past, the Blue Ship Brothers had imitated the madman to perform, but now the madman in flesh and blood performed on the stage himself.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Coumier, the superintendent of Charenton, organized sensational performances, sometimes casting madmen in the roles of actors and sometimes in the roles of spectators. "These lunatics, who participate in amateur performances, become the objects of a frivolous, irresponsible, and even vicious public. The eccentricities of these unfortunates and their situation arouse ridicule and insulting pity from the audience." Madness becomes a pure spectacle of the world .The world was becoming more and more under the influence of Sade, and was becoming the pastime of a confident rational conscience, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the indignation of Royer Corral, the madman remained a monster— -The so-called monster is, in the etymological sense, what is displayed.

Confinement conceals irrationality and thus betrays its stigma.But it openly draws attention to madness, focuses on madness.If in dealing with irrationality the aim is to avoid scandal, in dealing with madness the aim is to organize it.There is a strange paradox here: the classical period surrounded madness with a comprehensive experience of irrationality, re-adopting its particular forms. (These particular forms were clearly distinguished by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and brought into the general consciousness in which madness could be associated with any form of irrationality.) At the same time, the classical period marked madness as a special mark: the mark not of disease but of glorified scandal.Yet the organized display of madness in the eighteenth century had nothing in common with the liberal display of madness in the Renaissance.In the Renaissance, madness was omnipresent, blending with experience through its image or its threat.In classical times, madness was exhibited through a fence.Wherever it appears it is kept at a distance and supervised by some kind of reason.This reason no longer sees itself connected with it, does not allow itself to bear too much resemblance to it.Madness becomes something to behold, no longer a monster contained in man, but an animal with a peculiar physiological mechanism, the bestiality that mankind has been suppressed for a long time. "I can easily imagine a man without hands, feet, and head (it is only empirical to say that the head is more indispensable than the feet). But I cannot imagine a man without a mind. Such a man would be a stone or a A beast."

In his "Report on the Care of Mad Men", Desportes described Bicetre's single cell at the end of the 18th century: "The whole furniture of these unfortunates is this straw mattress. When he lies down, his head , feet and body were against the wall. The water dripping from the cracks of the stone soaked his whole body and made him unable to sleep peacefully." Regarding Sarpetelier's solitary cell, he wrote: "When winter comes, the Places are scarier, and cause death more often. When the Seine rises, these little cells, at the same level as the sewers, are not only more unhealthy, but what is worse, they become refuges for hordes of rats. Every night , they attack the unfortunates confined here, and bite anyone they can. The hands, feet, and faces of the crazy women are bitten. The injury is so severe that several people have died from it." However, These dungeons and cells have long been reserved for the most dangerous and violent lunatics.If they were quiet, if they didn't frighten the others, they were crammed into wards of varying sizes.One of Tooke's most active followers, Godfrev Higgins, paid twenty pounds for the right to visit the York Asylum as a volunteer inspector.While visiting, he found a carefully concealed door behind which he found a room less than eight feet long and wide.There are 13 women crowded here at night.During the day they are active in another room that is not much bigger.

Particularly dangerous lunatics are bound by a certain method.This method is not punitive, but merely designed to keep the raging madman in a small circle of activity.Such people are generally chained to a wall or bed.In Bethlehem Hospital, the rampaging madwoman was shackled and pinned to the wall of a corridor.They only wear a public robe.At Bethnal Green Hospital, a disorderly woman was placed in a pigsty with her hands and feet bound.After the seizure subsided, she was tied to the bed with only a sheet covering her body.When she was allowed to move a little, an iron bar was placed between her legs, with shackles on one end and handcuffs on the other.Tuke, in his Report on the Condition of the Poor Madman, described in detail the complex method invented at Bethlehem Hospital to control the admittedly dangerous madman: the madman was chained to a long chain extending from the other side of the wall, This way the administrator can direct his activities from the outside.Around his neck was also an iron ring, which was connected by a short chain to another iron ring, which was attached to an iron bar fixed vertically to the floor and ceiling.When the Bethlehem Hospital began to reform, it was discovered that in this cell there was a man who had been locked up like this for 12 years.

When practices reach such extremes, it becomes clear that they are motivated neither by the desire to punish nor by the duty to reform. The notion of "repentance" has nothing to do with this system.However, there was a certain back-and-forth imagery that plagued hospitals of the period.Madness borrows the face of the beast.Those who are chained to the walls of their cells are no longer insane, but beasts gripped by some violent nature; And with the help of some kind of sudden force combined with the bestiality of the Nazis.This bestial mode was prevalent in the asylum, giving the asylum a cage-like, zoo-like appearance.When Cogel described Salpetelier at the end of the 18th century, he wrote: "The mad woman who went berserk was tied to the door of each cell like a dog. There was a long iron gate to separate it from the administrators and visitors. Feed and sleep straw are fed through the bars. The dirt around them is swept out with a rake." In the hospital in Nantes, this kind of menagerie is made up of individual cages.Es-quirol had never before seen "a locked door with so many locks, bolts, iron bars. ... A small window in Abang also had bars and windows The small window has an iron chain fixed to the wall. One end of the iron rice has an iron container in the shape of a wooden cone. This is used to deliver food through the iron window." In 1814, Franco. s- Emmanuel Fodere discovered an elaborate cage at the Hospital of Strasbourg; "in order to deal with troublesome and dirty madmen, in the corner of the large ward was set up a cage that could only accommodate a person of medium stature. A person's cage, or a cabin." This kind of cage has a wooden grid as the bottom, with a distance of fifteen centimeters between the bottom and the ground, and some leather is spread on the wooden poles." The madman lies naked or almost naked on it. Eating and defecating."

To be sure, it's a safety system against a maniac's frenzy.Such seizures are primarily seen as a threat to society.However, it is very important that this is considered from the perspective of the outbreak of animal nature. The negative fact that a madman is not treated as a human being has a positive content: this inhuman indifference actually contains a haunting value rooted in traditional fears.Since antiquity, and especially since the Middle Ages, this fear has given the animal kingdom incredible everyday features, horrifying grotesques, and unspeakable agitation.But this bestial fear, which is so inseparable from the idea of ​​madness in the imagination, has a very different meaning than it did two or three centuries ago.The transfigured image of an animal is no longer an overt sign of hellish power, nor is it the product of some heretical alchemy.The bestiality in man no longer has value as a sign of another world.It has become man's madness, man's madness in his natural state, concerned only with himself.This bestiality vented in the form of madness deprives man of his unique humanity.It does not turn man over to other powers, but only keeps him completely in his natural state (nature).For classicism, the most radical madness is man's direct relationship with his own bestiality, which involves nothing else and is incurable.

From an evolutionary perspective, the bestiality manifested as madness will one day be seen as a symptom, or even the essence, of a disease.But in the classical period, what it showed was the fact that the madman was not a sick person.In fact, the bestiality saves the madman from the weak, unstable, unhealthy elements of man.The dogged beastliness of madness, and the dullness borrowed from the reckless beast world, enable the madman to endure hunger, heat, cold, and pain.Until the end of the eighteenth century, it was generally believed that a madman could endure the unimaginable hardships of life.They don't need protection, they don't need to keep warm from the cold. In 1811, Tooke visited a labor house in the south (England) and saw that the single cell had only a small grilled window in the door to let in the sunlight.The women in the cells were all naked."The temperature was very low. The thermometer read minus 18 degrees the night before. One of the women was lying on the sparse straw without covering her body".This beastly cold tolerance of the madman is also a medical conclusion that Pinel believes in.He often praised "certain men and women madmen who can endure long periods of severe cold with equanimity. On some days in the three years of the Republic of China, the thermometer read minus 10 degrees, 11 degrees, and even minus 16 degrees." A madman in the hospital sat on the frozen floor of his cell without a blanket. As soon as he opened his door in the morning, he ran out into the yard in his shirt, grabbed a handful of snow and ice and pressed it to his chest, happily Watch the ice melt." When madness develops to bestial rage, it protects man from disease.It confers on man a certain immunity, just as nature predisposes to beasts certain immunity.Strangely enough, the insanity of the madman returns him to bestiality, but he receives the immediate favor of nature in doing so.

That is why extreme madness has never been associated with medicine.Nor can it be associated with reforming the field of parenting.A bestiality freed from bondage can only be harnessed with discipline and cruelty. In the 18th century, the concept of the bestial madman was actually embodied in the attempts of individual people.These people are trying to give some kind of compulsory education to the madman.Pinel cites the example of "a very famous monastery in the south of France".There, "Strict Orders to Rehabilitate" were issued to the manic madman.If he refuses to go to bed or pay for his meal, he will "be warned that if he persists in his mistakes he will be punished with ten lashes the next day." By the side of those who practice discipline", but if he always behaves slightly irregularly, he will be warned immediately and "will be beaten with a pointer".Thus, thanks to the use of some strange dialectic - which explains all these "inhuman" practices of confinement - the free animality of madness can only be tamed by a discipline that does not elevate animality to humanity, but The pure animality that brings man back to himself.Madness betrays the secret of bestiality: bestiality is what it is, and to a certain extent it can only return to bestiality.Near the middle of the 18th century, a farmer in northern Scotland was once famous.He is said to be able to cure insanity.Pinel incidentally notes that this papal figure has the physique of Hercules? "His method is to force madmen to the hardest agricultural labors, to use them like cattle and servants. They A slight resistance will result in a severe beating, which forces them to finally submit completely." In the process of being reduced to back sex, madness not only discovers its own truth, but also obtains a cure.When the madman becomes a beast, the animal manifestations in man - which constitute the scandal of madness - are annihilated.It is not that the animal nature has been suppressed, but that man himself has been eliminated.In man turned into a beast, the irrational obeys reason and its commands, and madness is cured because it is alienated in something that is its truth. From this bestiality of madness will one day be deduced a mechano-psychological idea and the idea that the various forms of madness can be attributed to the great structure of animal life.But in the factory and in the eighteenth century, the bestiality that lent its face to madness did nothing to make its manifestations a deterministic quality.Instead, it places madness in an unpredictable realm of freedom that can run amok without limit.If determinism can have an influence on it, it is in the form of limitation, punishment and discipline.Madness is not combined with the great laws of nature and life through animal nature, but with allegorical animals in various poses and with different expressions.However, it is different from the kind of poultry animals that were popular in the Middle Ages.The latter uses many symbolic images to illustrate the various forms of evil, while the former is a group of abstract allegorical animals.Here, evil no longer has a strange body, and all we can comprehend is its most extreme form, the truth of the beast.This is a truth without content.Evil has shed its rich likeness in order to preserve only a universal deterrent, a stealthy menace of bestiality.It lurks, and at a certain moment suddenly unleashes the reason for the madness, the truth of the madness.Although some people tried to construct a positive zoology at that time, this stubborn idea that animal nature was the natural nest of madness always occupied that gloomy corner of the classical period.It is this idea that creates the imagery that leads to all confinement practices with all their strangest barbarities. Undoubtedly, linking the idea of ​​madness with the iconographic relationship between man and beast has always been of great importance to Western culture.From the beginning. , Western culture does not believe that animals participate in all of nature, in its sanity and order.That concept came later, and it has only remained on the surface of Western culture for a long time.Perhaps it never penetrated the deep realms of the imagination.In fact, upon careful study, animals belong to an anti-nature, a negative aspect that threatens the natural order and, with its frenzy, the active intellect of enlightenment.The work of Lautréamon proves this point.According to the definition of Westerners, Westerners have lived as rational animals for more than two thousand years.Why should this fact necessarily mean that they admit that reason and bestiality may have a common order?Why, by this definition, should they necessarily place themselves on the affirmative side of nature?Without Aristotle's intentions, can't we think that, for the West, this divine "reasonable animal" has long been a measure of the way rational liberty operates in the lair of the irrational— —The kind of irrationality that deviates from rationality until it constitutes the antithesis of rationality?From this time on philosophy becomes anthropology, man seeks to affirm himself in a complete nature, animals also lose their negative power, thus becoming a positive evolutionary form between the determinism of nature and human reason . The "rational animal" formula has now completely changed its meaning.The irrationality it implies as the source of all rationality is completely gone.From then on, madness must obey the determinism of man, and man is regarded as the natural existence of his animal nature.If, in the classical period, scientific and medical analysis did, as will be seen, endeavor to ground madness within this mechanism of nature, the actual treatment of the madman suffices to prove that madness was still contained in the anti-natural Berserk. In short, it is this animality of madness that confinement amplifies, and at the same time seeks to avoid the shame that the immorality of the irrational man necessarily entails.This reveals the distance that the classical period established between madness and other forms of irrationality, although from a certain point of view they were previously regarded as identical or connected.If the entire field of irrationality is silenced and only madness is free to express its scandals, what can the irrational whole fail to express and what can it tell?What is the meaning of the various frenzy of the madman—the meaning that cannot be found in the, perhaps wiser, speech of other inmates?That is, in what respect is madness more unique? Since the seventeenth century, irrationality in the most general sense has no more teaching value.That dangerous convertibility of reason, still common in the Renaissance, is being forgotten, its scandals are disappearing.The great theme of the madness of the cross, which belonged to the Christian experience of the Renaissance, began to disappear in the seventeenth century, despite the Jansenism and the writings of Pascal.Rather, it continues to exist, but has changed and even in some sense reversed its meaning.It no longer requires human reason to give up pride and self-confidence to indulge in the great irrationality of sacrifice.When classical Christianity spoke of madness on the cross, it was only to shame false reason and to add to the light of eternal truth.The madness of a manifest God is but a kind of wisdom unrecognizable to the irrational man of the world. "Jesus who was crucified...was the disgrace of this world. In the eyes of people at that time, he was the embodiment of ignorance and madness." However, this world was later conquered by Christianity, and God's will through this The twists and turns of history and the madness of people are shown.It is now quite possible to say: "Christ has become the pinnacle of our wisdom." This disgrace to the Christian faith and to Christian humility--the force and value of whose revelation is still upheld by Pascals--will soon have no further impact on Christian thought. much meaning.It will probably have only one meaning, namely, among those who are outraged by this disgrace.Many blind souls are revealed in the movement: "Don't let your cross - which has conquered the world for you - remain the madness and shame of the arrogant." The irrationality of Christianity was banished to the edge of reason by Christians themselves, Because reason has been equated with the wisdom of God manifested in the flesh.During the two centuries from the Pol Royal monastery to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, one would have to wait for Christ to regain the praise of his madness, for shame to regain its power of revelation, Waiting for the irrationality to no longer be just the public shaming of reason. But at this time, Christian reason was freed from the madness which had long been a part of itself, and the sick, in their brute outbursts, acquired a unique force of proof in their bestial outbursts.The stigma of being expelled from the superhuman realm of God's incarnate manifestation seemed to reappear.It appears with great force and new lessons in the realm of man's connection with nature, with his own bestiality.The application of the lesson turns to the lower realms of madness.The cross no longer has a sense of shame; but it should not be forgotten that in his mortal life Christ always praised and sanctified madness, just as he healed disease, pardoned sin, comforted the poor with eternal riches, and thus made sickness, sin, and poverty become holy.St. Vincent reminded those who were entrusted with the care of the sick in solitary confinement, saying: "Here over them is our Lord, who decides to surround the insane, the demon-possessed, the mad, the seduced, and the ecstatic. Beside him." These beings who are governed by impersonal forces form an eternal spectacle of adoration around those who represent, and embody, eternal wisdom; and they throng praise the wisdom they reject. , and at the same time give wisdom an excuse to humiliate itself, admitting that wisdom can only come from the grace of God.Further, Christ did not merely gather around himself the insane, but he decided to make himself a madman in their eyes, experiencing all the miseries that befell mankind through his incarnation.Madness thus becomes the final form of God's human form before being crucified and carried down: "O my Lord, you like to be a disgrace in the eyes of the Jews, madness in the eyes of the heathen. You like to look like Bereft of reason, as it is said in the Bible, our Lord was thought to be insane. Dicebantuuoniaminhroremversus est. (They said he was mad.) His apostles looked up at him sometimes, as at a man enraged by thunder, who Let them have this impression, that they may prove that he has borne all our sicknesses and pains, and that they and we should be taught sympathy for those who have fallen into these misfortunes." When Christ came into the world He promised to To stamp upon oneself all the marks of the human condition and every blot of our fallen nature.From poverty to death, he has gone through a long journey of suffering.It is also the journey of the erotic, the journey of the forgotten reason and the journey of madness.Because madness is a form of suffering, in a sense the last form before death, it will now be an object of respect and sympathy for those who suffer it. To honor madness is not to interpret it as an involuntary, inevitable, sudden illness, but to recognize this minimum threshold of human truth.This boundary is not accidental, but fundamental.Just as death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, so madness is the limit of human life in the realm of animality.Just as the death of Christ sanctified death, so madness, at its most animal, is sanctified by it. On March 29, 1654, St. Vincent informed a priest, Jean Barreao, that his brother had been taken to Lazare due to insanity: "We should glorify our Lord. Those who want to bind him say that he It is madness. It is the glory of the Lord, and by it he seeks to sanctify the same condition that he has placed upon them." Madness is the lowest form of humanity that God has inherited in his flesh, by which he shows that in man there is no Nothing that is inhuman can be redeemed; this depraved culmination is to be glorified for the existence of Christ.This is the lesson that madness still taught in the seventeenth century. We see why maddening scandals can be celebrated when other forms of irrationality are carefully glossed over.Scandals of irrationality can only produce contagious examples of heresy, while scandals of insanity show how the fall of man has brought them close to bestiality, and how far God's saving mercy can go.For Renaissance Christianity, the whole lesson of irrationality and its shame is embodied in madness incarnate.For classicism, this incarnation is no longer madness, but madness is man's beastly incarnation, the pinnacle of his depravity, the most visible sign of his sinfulness, the furthest object of divine mercy, the restoration of universal forgiveness and a symbol of innocence.The whole lesson of madness and its powers must therefore be sought in this nebulous realm, in this lower sphere of human nature.In this realm man obeys nature and is both utterly depraved and absolutely innocent.Didn't St. Vincent with his Missionaries, the Brothers of Charity, and all the orders that took care of madness and brought it to the world, prominently the concern of the classical church for the madman?Doesn't it mean that the Church found in madness an incomprehensible but important revelation—that the bestiality of man is an innocent sin?This revelation needs to be read in a public display of madness.In that display the bestial outbursts of man embodied by the madman are celebrated.Paradoxically, Christian animal consciousness prepared later for madness to be regarded as a natural phenomenon; by that time the meaning of this "natural" in classical thought would have been quickly forgotten.The implication is that this "nature" is not a realm of objective analysis that is readily accessible, but a realm in which, for man, the scandal of a certain kind of madness may at times arise—madness that is both his ultimate truth and his is the abolishment of the human form. All these phenomena, these strange activities surrounding madness, these ways of celebrating madness and punishing it, reducing it to bestiality, making it a lesson in atonement, place madness in a strange position from the whole of irrationality. .In the confinement, madness and irrationality share a room.The latter surround it and determine its most general truths.But madness is again isolated and treated in a special way, as if it were irrational, but it moved through the field with a characteristic movement, constantly linking itself to the most grotesque extremes of irrationality. stand up. We are now accustomed to think that in madness there is a certain determination in which all freedom is gradually suppressed; causality and the movement of inferences (discourses) in its various forms; for madness serves only to threaten modern man with a return to the bleak world of beasts and inanimate things, to a state of liberty in bondage.In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, madness was not understood against this view of nature but against the background of irrationality; madness revealed not a biological mechanism but a freedom that ran amok in a monstrous form of bestiality.Today we can no longer understand what is irrational, only the form expressed by the adjective: irrational.This is a symbol that modifies an action or speech.It revealed to the common man the existence of madness and its various pathological symptoms.For us, "irrational" is only one of the manifestations of madness.For classicism, however, irrationality has a nominal value; it constitutes a substantive function.Madness can only be understood in relation to irrationality.Irrationality is its pillar, or rather, irrationality defines the possible range of madness.For those of the classical age, madness was not a state of nature, a human and psychological source of "irrationality."It is simply an empirical form of "irrationality".疯人复现了人堕落到兽性狂乱的极点的历程，暴露了潜在的非理性领域。这个领域威胁着人，在极大的范围内包围着人的各种自然生存形式。这不是一个是否倾向某种决定论的问题，而是一个关系到是否正在被某种黑暗所吞噬的问题。与其他类型的理性主义和今天的实证主义相比，古典理性主义能够更有效地防范非理性的隐秘危险，后者正威胁着绝对自由的空间。