The Ship of Fools
Intro & Preface & Contents
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From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders cont...
The Ship of Fools.
Foucault tacitly acknowledges that he is painting a mythic picture. In these very years, he concedes in passing, “certain madmen,” far from roaming the countryside, were “admitted to hospitals and cared for as such.” Indeed, “in the majority of the cities of Europe there existed throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance a place of detention reserved for the insane.”
It is easy to miss such scholarly qualifications, however, since Foucault directs the reader’s attention elsewhere, above all to what becomes the book’s guiding image: the Ship of Fools. This is, “of course,” as Foucault stresses, “a literary composition” -- a fanciful emblem, the subject of one of Bosch’s most famous paintings [a little surprising Foucault didn’t go with Bosch’s “Death and the Miser” instead], a “bateau ivre” or “drunken boat” more redolent, in Foucault’s hands, of Rimbaud’s poetry than of any real Renaissance practice. And yet, as Foucault emphasizes, “they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from one city to another.” “The simplest of pictures,” [there's that "simplest" again] the Ship of Fools is “the most symbolic as well,” straddling the line between dream and reality.
I have to say that it isn’t obvious to me that Bosch’s drunken boat has anything to do with madness at all, except in the pious Christian sense that it is madness to seek pleasure in this life rather than in the next. A little more searching reveals that the term “Ship of Fools” has always been used allegorically, starting with Plato. To me this is like Foucault suggesting there may have been an actual cave with actual shadows where a very confused person was chained. Or in the language of the SnarkSquad, I’m calling shenanigans.
I also can’t resist quoting this from Wiki about the Ship of Fools,
This concept makes up the framework of the 15th century book Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant, which served as the inspiration for Hieronymous Bosch's famous painting, Ship of Fools: a ship—an entire fleet at first—sets off from Basel to the paradise of fools..
May I remind the reader that, at the time he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was a professor of philology at Basel.
“The custom,” Foucault writes, “was especially frequent in Germany.... In Frankfurt in 1399, seamen were instructed to rid the city of a madman who walked about the streets naked; in the first years of the fifteenth century, a criminal madman was expelled in the same manner from Mainz.”
Using as a factual pretext these two minor recorded incidents, and intertwining an interpretation of Bosch’s imagery, Foucault constructs an intricate aquatic reverie, linking madness with water “and the dark mass of its own values.” Water “carries off,” but it also “purifies.” If solid ground has conventionally been associated with reason, water has for centuries been the symbolic element of unreason: “Madness is the liquid and streaming exterior of rocky reason,” and water an “infinite, uncertain space,” the oceanic element of “dark disorder” and “a moving chaos.”
We will return to this conception of the "oceanic" in our final part on Foucault. And may I observe how quaint it is that Frankfurt and Mainz, at that time, could be perceptibly improved by the removal of a single lunatic. Here it would require the removal of a thousand to even be noticed.
That is why the image of the ship setting sail is so well suited to evoke the daimonic forces at play in every person’s life: “Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny.” Particularly for the madman who has ironically “tamed” death, “every embarkation is, potentially, the last.” While the madman preoccupied with death has “his truth,” he can discover it only in “that fruitless expanse” beyond “the solid land, with its solid cities,” casting himself adrift like “a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desire.” Once underway on this quest, “there is no escape”: the madman is “delivered to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the most free of domains, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads.”
Was Foucault a fan of Melville one wonders? Or Conrad?
p101
The image of this emblematic “dream fleet” filled with “highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason,” Foucault argues, arises at a singular moment in Western history: a transitional [liminal?] era when the symbolism of medieval paintings and sculpture had become so complex that “the picture no longer speaks for itself.” The canvases of Bosch, with their fantastic monsters and demented forms, were meant in part to convey a theology; but to the Renaissance imagination (or is Foucault perhaps again surreptitiously referring to himself?) they communicate instead, “by an astonishing reversal,” the “phantasms of madness.”
A bestiality formerly domesticated “by human symbols and values” stands revealed as “the secret nature of man,” exposing “the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men’s hearts.” In Bosch’s “pure vision,” especially once that vision has been cut off from its symbolic association with faith, madness reveals all of its glory, and “deploys its powers. Phantasms and menaces, pure appearance of the dream and secret destiny of the world -- madness here retains the primitive force of revelation: revelation that the dream is real,” and that “the entire reality of the world will one day be reabsorbed in a fantastic Image,” in an apocalyptic commingling of “being and nothingness that is the delirium of pure destruction.”
We must now imagine the Ship of Fools sailing toward one of Bosch’s fiery and infernal landscapes -- a paradoxical paradise “where all is offered to desire,” yet torture, death, and the End of Time still looms, ever present. For “when man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness,” Foucault contends, he discovers no Rousseauian domain of innocent freedom, but rather “the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare the pitiless truth of Hell.”
This seems to me to be another aspect of Man creating God in his own image. That the Holocaust, and other 20th century abominations, were created by men precisely to fill the void left by doubt in an actual Hell with a man-made hell in this life, is not a new idea.
The Ship of Fools thus becomes, as it were, the central panel in a triptych, flanked by a picture of a desolate void on one side -- and a scene of the Last Judgement, teeming with the agonized grimaces of the damned, on the other.
A complication arises. That Renaissance thinkers regarded madness with unwonted sympathy Foucault easily shows through an interpretation of Erasmus and Montaigne. But in the humanist treatments of madness -- above all, in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly -- Foucault finds the roots of what he regards as the modern era’s condescension toward the mad: “Whereas Bosch, Brueghel [I assume he means Pieter the Elder], and Dürer were fearfully terrestrial spectators, implicated in that madness they saw surging around them, Erasmus observes it from far enough away to be out of danger.”
p102
Foucault detects a subtle fault-line. Two divergent approaches to madness are in the process of forming: the “tragic experience’ communicated by Bosch, and a “critical consciousness,” first formulated by Erasmus. “On the one hand, there will be a Ship of Fools, filled with wild faces, that little by little sinks into the night of the world, traversing a landscape that speaks of the strange alchemy of knowledge, the pressing menace of bestiality, and the end of time. On the other, there will be a Ship of Fools that forms for the wise the exemplary, and didactic, Odyssey of human faults.”
I have a couple problems with that last sentence. Why is “Odyssey” capitalized? The Odyssey is the name of a book attributed to Homer. The word “odyssey,” according to Merriam-Webster means “1 : a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune. 2 : an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest.” “Didactic” means “intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive” according to Google. “Exemplary,” again according to Google, means either “1. serving as a desirable model; representing the best of its kind...” or “2. (of a punishment) serving as a warning or deterrent.” Could this be rephrased as “On the other hand, there will be a Ship of Fools that forms, for the wise, an, exemplary and didactic, odyssey of human faults”? Even if there's a comma missing between "wise" and "the," I still don't know what this is supposed to mean.
And I will remind the reader -- as I was confused at first -- that by “the pressing menace of bestiality” Foucault has in mind men becoming more like beasts, not, and I hesitate to say this with reference to a book about Foucault, anything sexual. Or at least that's the way Miller has been using the term.
The “humanist” praise of folly, in Foucault’s view, thus inaugurates a long tradition that will seek to define, control, and ultimately “confiscate” the experience of madness. This tradition -- culminating in psychoanalysis four centuries later -- tries to make of madness an experience in which the human being is constantly confronted with “his moral truth,” revealing “the rules proper to his nature,” turning “what was formerly a visible fortress of order” into “the castle of our conscience.” The result is “not a radical destruction” -- madness and unreason persist -- “but only an occultation.” The “tragic figures” of madness painted by Bosch, and brought back to life on stage by Artaud what night in January, 1947, are cast “into the shade.”
Foucault quotes Artaud directly: “the Humanism of the Renaissance was not an enlargement, but rather a diminution of man.”
The story that Foucault will tell in the body of this book is nuanced, complex, intricate. But the allegory of the first chapter conveys its essence. For what is ultimately at stake in Madness and Civilization is as subtle as the difference between Bosch and Erasmus -- and as vivid (and problematic) as Artaud’s last public outburst.
Will figures of “tragic experience” like Artaud continue to be confined in the dungeons of modern society, held prisoner in the castles built by moral conscience?
Or will a new Ship of Fools, like that painted by Bosch before the dawn of the Age of Reason, set sail again, ferrying its cargo of contemporary outcasts (”the debauched, the dissipated, the homosexual, the magician, the suicide, the libertine”) over the boundaries of custom and morality, destination unknown?
Living, as I do, on streets of unreason, I think I can answer that last question. Just yesterday I found a great seat at a table in the Bank Cafe closest to the corner, overlooking sidewalks on two sides of the building and the intersection beyond. Whenever I looked up there seemed to be one and sometimes two obviously deranged persons navigating the crowded sidewalks. Some were ranting to themselves. Some just looked confused and overwhelmed. I would be tempted to use the word "bestial" to describe the way their lives appear to me, when we pass on the streets, but perhaps the reality is different for them.
I didn’t realize when I started this book that Foucault is the philosophical father of "Care in the Community." Madness has found a home here and we have learned to live (warily) with madness. They do keep us on our toes and add a little color and plot to our streets.
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