Sublime

As French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) showed in his brilliant 1961 study History of Madness (Histoire de la folie), modern reason created ‘madness’ (i.e., came up with this category) and in so doing, created itself – defining itself as sane, that is, by what it was not.

Ethics represent the lens through which our intelligence is applied to inform our actions and decisions.

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them.

Reason, as Foucault would point out, was endowed with the power to legislate what counts as knowledge, a phenomenon we see every time the psychiatrists define a new ‘disorder’, thereby creating a category that passes itself off as a bit of knowledge, hitherto unknown, which allows us to pathologize what is really just a part of life and to monitor