User:Jacobisq/Rational madness

Rational madness is a term used in the psychology of addiction, which sees the latter as the by-product of false beliefs and meaning systems geared to the evasion of reality.

The term is also used in the critique of Taylorism for its treatment of men and machines as equivalent and interchangeable.

Plato
Plato's idea of reason included an irrational element – that of enthusiasm and the immoderate search for happiness – so producing a kind of rational madness. In similar vein, Freud illusion

Eighteenth century
The C18th, as the age of reason was absorbed by the idea of a rational madness – of ideas rigorously pursued but from false assumptions, as with Don Quixote.

The sentimentalist philosophers, who sought to ground morality in sentiment and feeling were particularly inclined to caricature their opponents as rational madmen for seeking to derive morality from reason.

Modernism
Modernism in turn has considered much of the technocratisation of society and culture as a rational madness, delighting in manipulation for its own sake with no wider or human goals.

Santayana wrote of 'The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men', in his Little Essays (1920); and Marion Milner took up the theme in the wake of D. W. Winnicott to refer to a sort of mentality that lacked 'indwelling' – that saw head and heart rigidly separated the one from the other. In comparable fashion, Lacan wrote of the perils of 'the subject who loses his meaning in the objectifications of discourse', and of 'the resemblance between this situation and the alienation of madness'.

Postmodernism
Critics see postmodernism as the era of rational madness, where a capacity for rational control has far outstripped emotional and ethical development, and where 'rational madness' has become an all too respectable element in postmodern thought.