What is madness? An accurate answer is, we don’t know. A somewhat accurate one is that madness is subjective.

But the great philosopher of philosophers, Michael Foucault, as relevant and sharp as ever, delineated the genesis, etymology, and typology of madness that goes to the heart of the matter.

In his magnum opus, Madness and Civilization, the French thinker postulated that madness was not an objective medical truth, but rather a social and cultural construct shaped by changing power structures, morality, and the demands of rational society.

Developing and elaborating on the evolution and typology of madness, Foucault periodized the nature and form of madness.

Of great interest to me personally, Foucault held madness to be an intimate and indelible aspect of human nature. This appears to have elements and features of romanticism in madness.

Now, regarding the typology and periodization of madness, the great French philosopher posited that during the Middle Ages, it was the physically disabled, the deformed like lepers and so on, who were the subjects of exclusion and marginalization by society and power structures.

But in the West’s Renaissance, given that leprosy became invisibilized, the spaces meant for lepers were reserved for the mad, or these persons were cast off in The Ship of Fools and then set adrift.

Madness, Foucault observed, was seen with a degree of familiar irony. At times, it was seen as an alternative form of wisdom or an intimate aspect of human nature.

But in the 17th century, prior to the Age of Extremes, the poor, vagrants, criminals, and the insane were locked up and institutionalized in hospitals. This condition was called by Foucault The Great Confinement.

The premise for this was the Age of Reason, where prevailing socio-moral norms equated idleness and unreason with social failure.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a so-called shift in sensibility freed the mad from chains and institutionalization. This was, among other things, a correlate or concomitant of advances in the field of psychiatry.

But the incisive Foucault held that this development had moral connotations. That is, while physical restraint was no longer normative, it was replaced by guilt trips, mass surveillance, and an........

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