Freund Humanus

In September 1791, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a short piece intended for presentation at the so-called Friday-Society that had just been founded by his friend Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Herder gave his piece the title On Human Mania and Madness. Later, he included it in the 4th collection of his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity.

“No doubt, gentlemen, you have noticed when human bodies are dissected the many, infinitely fine threads that are so entangled within the brain, that the knife of the dissector can no longer follow them. The threads of mania and truth are just as finely entangled within the human psyche, perhaps more finely, so that, even after the most careful examination, it can scarcely be discerned in itself where the one is separated from the other.”

The point Herder was making has little to do with the history of cranial anatomy, in itself fascinating enough, and more with the way we choose to conceptualize evidence. For none of us can bypass mania in thinking, provided we understand mania in the way Herder did, as grounding “the greatest part of our experiences, the knowledge we learned earliest, habits we acquired early on, also our inclinations.” These all rest “either upon the testimony of our senses, or they come from other people whom we believe, whom we unconsciously mimic without noticing.”

What is more, mania “extends in particular to those things that concern a person primarily, their person and appearance, their class, their nation, their aims and character.” Mania is entangled with truth because knowledge of ourselves and the world is formed of concepts that are built out of pieces of non-knowledge. Mania, in this understanding, is like Plato’s mania in Phaedrus, a gift from the gods and not an achievement of human rational thinking. Socrates tells Phaedrus that “those men of old who invented names thought that madness was neither shameful nor disgraceful; otherwise they would not have connected the very word mania with the noblest of arts, that which foretells the future, by calling it the manic art. No, they gave this name thinking that mania, when it comes by gift of the gods, is a noble thing.” For Herder, rational thinking is not possible without mania, and it is the task of rational thinking to discern truth and distinguish it from madness.

Truth entangled with mania can lead to afflictions of the imagination, madness. “What doctors tell us in their reports concerning afflictions of the imagination, where this one thinks of his feet as straws, that one sees his buttocks as glass, and a third believes the world will be flooded when he passes water, all these stories and fairy tales tell us fundamentally less than the experience of mania found occasionally in the most reasonable of people.” Here, manic constructions are “solid castles in the air, built in earliest youth,” and they are both theoretical and practical.

Such afflictions are infectious. Like mirror neurons, the effects of entangled truth are communicated almost magically. “There is scarcely anything in the world as infectious as mania and madness. Truth must be painstakingly researched by its grounds.

Mania is adopted in good faith through mimesis, often unnoticeably, through complaisance, through the simple association with those who hold the mania, through partaking in their otherwise solid dispositions. Mania is communicated like yawning, just as facial expressions and moods are passed over to us, as one string answers another in harmony.”

This infectiousness has political implications. Power is consolidated by the ability to pass on a personal mania, a personal madness. The subordinate classes are less able to make their own personal mania look like truth. To speak of subordinate classes today implies not only social and economic subordinates, but also information subordinates. Information passes the mania of the powerful on to the passive recipients of information, unexamined, like a yawn. In the same way, mania and madness are embedded in the conventions of nations, for anything that “has taken root in a nation, whatever the people acknowledge and esteem, – how should that not be truth? Who would doubt it? Language, laws, education, forms of everyday life – all these consolidate it and all point to it. Whoever does not join in the mania is an idiot, an enemy, a heretic, a foreigner.” Mania and madness are also embedded in language. “Innocent colours, the green and the blue, the black and the white, code words that are not associated with any concept, signs that express nothing – all these, as soon as they became partisan, have confounded the minds in madness, torn apart friendships and families, murdered people and devastated countries.” Herder believes it would be possible to “derive from them a dictionary of human mania and madness.”

How then, if thinking itself follows well worn paths grounded in our own specific experiences, is it possible to untangle mania and truth? The point is, you can’t. “Mania and madness are not as far apart as one might believe. As long as mania resides in a corner of the psyche, where it assaults only a few ideas, it retains this name. If it extends its command further and reveals itself through more vivid actions, it is called madness. Who is able to determine the more and the less at all times? Particularly considering that, for individuals as well as entire nations, and according to the circumstances and the times, nothing but convention holds the scales and assigns names.” Instead, there are practical consequences to be drawn.

Lesson one for Herder is a lesson of history and tolerance. “History teaches us that such contingencies of the human spirit have played out and come to an end already thousands and thousands of times, only under different circumstances and names. And so we will be careful to tolerate harmless mania and avoid harmful mania.”

Lesson two is that human mania cannot be eradicated by force or violence. “Errors are neither countered nor eliminated by way of arms, and even the most miserable mania considers itself the truth of a martyr as soon as it stands dyed in blood.”

Lesson three is that, where mania becomes madness, an affliction of the imagination, it is highly infectious and, like a virus, can only be contained by isolation. “There are many examples of sympathetic orderlies themselves being infected with the illness they were attending, and nothing is as infectious as illnesses of the psyche. Let those who are healthy seek to remain healthy. Infections can only be contained by isolating them.”

Lesson four is that “free examination of truth from all perspectives is the only remedy against all kinds of mania and error. Let those who hold a mania defend their mania and those who hold divergent opinions defend their opinions. That is their affair. Even if neither one is healed, every contested error provides impartial people with a new ground for truth, a new perspective on it.”

In the end, “a long and much-purified mania stands as truth for humans.”