Uncovering Filth in the Soul - The Present Life of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Madness and Civilization is the work of the writer Foucault, mainly about the modern peaceful mental world, where modern people no longer communicate with madmen. On the one hand, the rational man leaves the doctor to deal with madness, thus recognizing the relationship that can only be established through the abstract universality of disease; on the other hand, the mad man can only communicate with society through the same abstract reason.

In this book, Foucault quotes from the genealogy of the origin and development of madness and civilization, and explores the process of the definition of madness and civilization. It may be impossible to distill a definitive point in it, but Foucault's own 1961 summary of the book provides a clearer thread for understanding the book. Foucault said:

"We can say that from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, madness appeared in the social sphere as an aesthetic phenomenon or everyday phenomenon; in the 17th century, as a result of confinement, madness experienced a period of silence and exclusion. It loses the function of revealing and revealing that it once had in the time of Shakespeare and Cervantes. It becomes false and ridiculous.

Finally, the 20th century put a collar on madness, classifying it as a natural phenomenon, tied to the truth of this world. This crude appropriation of positivism has led to, on the one hand, the condescending fraternity shown by psychiatry to the madman, and, on the other, the passion for protest that can be found in the poetry of Nevar to Aalto. This protest is an effort to restore the profound and powerful revelation of the madness experience destroyed by confinement.

This summary aptly summarizes the three historical phases of madness in linear time, while also showing Foucault's purpose in criticizing modern Western civilization with rejected historical experiences. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the whole world "was particularly friendly to madness." Madness is a ridiculous symbol in the human world, misplacing the signs between reality and fantasy, making the great tragic threat only a memory. It is a life that is harassed more than harassed, an absurd social upheaval, a flow of reason. ”

After entering the 17th century, confinement "as an economic measure and a social precaution" marked the beginning of the "perception of madness from the social point of view of poverty, inability to work, and inability to integrate with groups", and thus "madness began to be classified as a problem in the city.". The new meaning of poverty, the importance of the obligation to work, and all the ethical values associated with labor ultimately determine people's experience of madness and change their course."

It was during this phase that people began to explore the scope of madness as an abnormal group in real life. Through confinement, madness is recognized as nothingness. Thus, madness has been excluded from the rationally demarcated areas during this stage, and it is also during this period that people begin to pay attention to the phases of madness, and try to classify these appearances and find the internal causes.

Towards the end of this period, a plague-like mentality began to sweep across "normal" society on a large scale. In a mixture of moral and physical pollution, ancient imagery resurfaces in the human mind with the symbolic meaning of the 18th-century familiar symbol of "uncleanness." "The reappearance of the irrational, branded with an imaginary disease, adds to its terrifying power." Thus, madness ceased to belong to a natural order, but was the product of social alienation.

Due to the demand for cheap labour by the booming machine-scale industry, madness eventually parted ways with other irrational forms: poverty changed from the sins of primitive degeneration to the wealth of the bourgeois state, and madness could not be exploited. It was isolated only, and thus, in the late 18th and 19th centuries, madness entered the era of psychiatric hospital jurisdiction.

In the new institution of the hospital, the ancient fear of madness is replaced by the guilt consciousness of the madman himself; Madness thus becomes the object of reason, subject to religious isolation or moral education, and its own marginal experience of the world is suffocated by a certain religious and moral remorse. Here, "as medical personnel gain a new status, the deepest meaning of confinement is abolished, and mental illness of modern significance is possible".

After making the above analysis, Foucault wrote in the concluding paragraph: "Because madness interrupts the time of the world, the work of art shows a void, a moment of silence, and a question without answers." It creates an irreparable gap that forces the world to question itself. The necessary profanity in the work of art reappears, and in the time when the work falls into madness, the world is forced to realize its sins. Since then, through the intermediary of madness, the world has become guilty in the face of works of art. ”

After "Madness and Civilization" was written, it won many praises and inevitably encountered many slanders. In particular, Foucault's use of rational language to describe the irrational world has been criticized. In addition, Foucault deconstructed too thoroughly, compared to the construction of few trees. But the perspective he offers allows us to think from different perspectives, putting a big question mark on the "rightfulness" that has been passed down from generation to generation.

Foucault's book borrows the name of history, but stands outside the torrent of history, using philosophical thinking as a tool for exploring truth, but never forgets to grasp the land where the problem is rooted. His works have always focused on those who have been squeezed to the margins of society, trying to justify their names and arouse resistance, while inviting people of insight to build a multicultural society in the spirit of humanitarianism and truly realize the ideal of equality for all.

Although this ideal is like a mirror flower and a moon, as long as human beings have been making progress in twists and turns, the initiators of this beautiful dream have gone to a desperate situation without regret in the soul-destroying experiment.