A good historian can offer us a meticulous and painstaking reconstruction of events long gone by, synthesizing and methodically examining the various sources to arrive at some approximation of historical truth through cold, hard, objective investigation. And yet, if we feel especially obliged to commend any work of history that succeeds in being captivating, this is because such scholarly distance is just that, a distance that all too easily appears dry and lifeless, a far cry from the thoughts and visceral emotions—insofar as these can be put in writing—of someone who lived through the events in question. In the study of psychosis, the analogy is clear enough: psychiatric literature, replete with classifications, symptoms, and even highly revered bits of neuroimaging data, would be the equivalent of a scholarly, third-person description, while an experience report by a madman would offer us a first-person account of the phenomena at hand. In this context, A Philosophy of Madness can be described as an intriguing combination of erudition and acquaintance, written by an author with two PhDs (in philosophy and linguistics, no less) and two episodes of psychosis that give him an intimate familiarity with madness from both sides of the barrier separating the closed ward from ‘normal’ life. Adding to this the fact that the second episode, twenty years after the first, happened when the author was already an acclaimed expert on madness, one can see why the perspective offered here is truly unique.

The analogy with history may be informative at first, but—as is the case with many analogies that one must resort to when attempting to explain matters beyond everyday structures of experience—it soon begins to break down irreparably. From the title and subtitle, one could get the misleading impression that one is dealing with a juxtaposition of some kind of a philosophy of psychosis (perhaps not too different from one written by a phenomenologist with no first-person access to the inside of an isolation cell) and a description of a particular kind of experience. However, just as a title and subtitle are not juxtaposed elements of a list, what one finds in the book is rather the connection or interweaving between philosophy and madness. Abandoning the common assumption that these two spheres have nothing to do with one another, while also committing to a rigorous epoché (i.e. refraining from any preconceived judgments) with regard to our implicit beliefs about psychosis as understood in the medical model, Kusters shows that there is nothing far-fetched about the interplay between philosophical speculation and psychosis. In fact, it is not just that the supposedly purely rational terrain of philosophy borders the supposedly epistemically irrelevant jungle of madness, but— somewhat worryingly for philosophers, perhaps—they are found to be not as distinct as we tend to think. Indeed, if madness is the unrestrained “passion for infinity” (xxii), whereas philosophy is a (somewhat) restrained form of the same fundamental drive, it is easy to see how there can be more than just a coincidental connection between philosophising and “cogitating your head off” (37). The book can thus be described as an itinerary of a journey through philosophy and into madness, a journey in which the two realms are more akin to intertwining Escherian dimensions than neatly separated regions, though for all that it certainly does not lack in scholarly rigour. Through in-depth discussions of authors as varied as Husserl and Plotinus, Eliade and Lacan, Kusters systematically analyses various aspects of the mad experience of space, time, self and other. This approach has the advantage of providing many a useful typology and careful description, which should be invaluable to clinicians and phenomenologists alike, but it is worth stressing that this is far from all that the book can offer.

In other words, while it can be read as a detailed analysis of psychosis, it really shines only when the multifarious types of madness are grasped as so many faces of the same crystal that doesn’t add any additional elements to one’s Lebenswelt, but rather transforms the entirety of the self-world dyad (including the seemingly self-evident fact that there is a self-world dyad that is structured a certain way) in a manner that is at once ineffable and all-encompassing.

Bearing this in mind, it should come as no surprise that mysticism plays a prominent role in the book: one of the four parts, titled “Via Mystica Psychotica,” systematically explores themes of detachment and ‘dethinking’ in mysticism and madness, though it is far from the only part pervaded by an air of mad mysticism. Of course, much more so than the relationship between philosophy and madness, discussing madness and religion would surely strike many as irreverent or downright blasphemous, but this would be the case only if we forget the epoché that we as readers are called to and that the author remains committed to throughout the book. As strange as it must seem at first glance, there is thus nothing whatsoever pejorative or reductionistic about discussing Eckhart’s writings on time (or Husserl’s, for that matter) in connection with madness, because all notions of psychosis as a pathological state that must somehow be fixed—and, ideally, reduced to a neat ensemble of neurochemical factors—are left in the hands of those who see madness as ultimately a technological obstacle to be overcome and not a mystery to be pondered. Since madness is here treated phenomenologically (and not pharmacologically), it is simply an opening into radically different structures of experience, which is why it should not be surprising that the language of mysticism is particularly apt for describing it.

There is, therefore, nothing reductionistic in the notion of mad mysticism, but it is equally important to note that Kusters avoids the other extreme, namely that of taking madness to be a royal road to a kind of complete gnosis that the philosopher, mystic or scientist cannot begin to fathom. Indeed, one overarching attitude throughout the book is the author’s methodical neutrality about such issues as the gnoseological import of madness and mysticism insofar as it concerns metaphysics and not phenomenology. In a word, this attitude can best be described as playful in the Socratic sense: in spite of the book’s systematic structure and the seriousness of the topics discussed (not merely life and death, but even being and non-being, thinking and dethinking), the way these topics are presented is wholly free from dogmatism, whether of the reductionist or the religious sort. Instead, madness is allowed to shine and refract as if through a many-sided crystal prism of wonder—fittingly seeing how it is, after all, a highly potentiated form of the same wonder that gives rise to philosophy—rather than being forced into a specific theoretical framework. In other words: what is special about this book is not only that madness is given a voice, nor that its voice is extremely well-versed in philosophy, but, just as importantly, that it is given a sense of humour.