Insanity and Civilization

Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: This work is a cleansing and questioning of knowledge. It returns a fragment of "nature" to history, transforms madness—that which we treat as a medical phenomenon—into a civilizational phenomenon. In reality, Foucault never defined madness; madness is not an object of knowledge, and its history needs to be re-revealed. One could say, it is merely this very knowledge itself; madness is not a disease, but a sense of otherness that changes over time; Foucault never regarded madness as a functional reality, in his view, it is purely the effect produced by the combination of rationality and irrationality, the observer and the observed. Madness is not a natural object, but a product of civilization. Without the history of various cultures that did not label this phenomenon as madness and persecute it, there would be no history of madness.