“Reason is the ultimate language of madness.”
Source: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1965, 95. Related: On the fuller context of Foucault’s provocative claim:
Related: On Foucault’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook:
Reason is precisely what allows us to understand, to try to understand madness, in order to treat, to alleviate the suffering of the mad. A great suffering that Foucault does not speak of. He fantasizes about a mad, and not to confuse the mad and the illuminated. People who are affected by psychopathology, disorders that could be classified in the madness box, are people who are in very great suffering. To realize this, it is enough to visit a psychiatric hospital, to talk with the people who work in psychiatric emergencies. Mad people have never been happy, and everything that mad people can teach us is linked to human suffering. He opposes reason and madness, by affirming that it is because of reason, of rationalism, that mad people would have been rejected, which is stupid because the mad has not lost reason, and it is because he has not lost it that he suffers from his, her, situation. And all the work of the doctor will be precisely, in part, to seek the patient’s reason, because it is the patient’s reason that will explain the condition, the why and how exactly. It is found in the patient’s reason. It is precisely through reason that the mad can get better, and it is by seeking to rationalize madness that people have found ways to cure madness, to alleviate the suffering of the mad. Not to mention the family of the mad, who is also in great pain to see one of their loved ones in such a state. Foucault, concerning sexuality, does not speak of all the deadly diseases that sexuality can engender. He has also been suspected of having been a pedophile. And he is part of a movement that was against the criminalization of pedophilia.