This is the second of two parts of a paper forthcoming in Anthropos 57 (2). Please cite the published version.

3 The Language and Experience of Paradox

One question, vital to the validity of the whole undertaking of the present paper, remains unaddressed: what do we make of the paradoxicality of mad language, and how can we base any claims on the phenomenology of psychosis based on such paradoxical speech? A seemingly straightforward hermeneutic approach is to understand psychotic language as metaphorical in nature, but this has been heavily criticized recently (e.g. Gipps 2022, 167–73). In brief, the difficulty here is the following: metaphor requires that the subject making it understands the difference between its two terms (the tenor or target, to which the properties borrowed from the vehicle or source are applied), which implies an understanding of its metaphorical as opposed to literal meaning, and it also requires that the content of the metaphor be such that it can be understood, i.e. that the metaphor is apt. Neither of these requirements is fulfilled in the case of mad language; while we can understand why it is apt to say that the world is a stage (and Shakespeare surely knew that it is not literally a stage in a theatre), we cannot make any analogous sense of the free-associating “crisscross connections,” linking such things as a cup of tea, political debates, and hardware stores, that pour out in bursts in the language of madness (e.g. Kusters 2020, 221).

The metaphorical reading thus breaks down, not just because mad would-be metaphors are not apt or intelligible to others, but because the very distinction between the literal and the metaphorical (as a precondition for the latter) simply is not present in psychotic language. This in itself is not too contentious—indeed, those who underwent psychotic episodes themselves often claim that metaphor misses the mark (Kusters 2020, 221-3)—but the question then becomes where this negative conclusion leaves us. One claim would be that the psychotic subject has somehow transcended metaphor (if not language in its entirety), but this is taken by some authors to be an example of the pre/trans fallacy, i.e. the unwarranted conclusion that, just because X is not present in a particular state, X must have been transcended in that case. An alternative, which Gipps (2022, 172) takes to be more convincing, is that psychotic language is pre-metaphorical: it lacks the conditions for metaphor to even arise, let alone for it to be transcended. What this view misses, however, is that the pre side of the pre/trans fallacy is just as problematic and potentially even more misleading: while we cannot claim without further justification that the psychotic subject has transcended metaphor, it is even less plausible to claim that he or she—say, up to that point a fully-functioning adult with a perfect grasp of language—has suddenly become in this respect indistinguishable from a toddler that has not yet learned what metaphors are.^[1] Merleau-Ponty (1968, 203–4) makes a similar point when discussing Piaget. If the pre/trans fallacy thus cuts both ways, we might do better to look elsewhere for a grasp of mad language.

A promising conceptual candidate here is another one of Merleau-Ponty’s analyses, this time one developed primarily in The Phenomenology of Perception, namely the distinction between secondary or spoken speech (parole parlée) and primary or speaking speech (parole parlante), which is Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of the distinction between language and speech (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 202; 1973, 13).^[2]It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty uses three terminological distinctions, namely that between spoken speech and speaking speech, between secondary and primary speech, and, finally, between … Continue reading Briefly put, spoken speech refers to the linguistic and cultural world of already sedimented significations (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 202–3), i.e., the kind of language that one would find condensed into a dictionary. This type of language cannot be the whole story, however, since constituted meanings must have come to be constituted somehow, namely through speaking speech, where “the meaningful intention is in a nascent state,” giving rise to new significations and transforming the meaning of already established linguistic signs (ibid.). While speaking speech is perhaps most evident in poetry and literature, it is active even in the most ordinary of everyday conversations, for all expression necessarily entails the “surpassing of the signifying by the signified which it is the very virtue of the signifying to make possible” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 90, my emphasis). Language thus presupposes speech, but might it not be possible to understand some forms of mad language as forms of nascent expression that cannot be sedimented into stable significations due to the particularities of the experience in which they take shape—in other words, as speech without language?

To see what this strange designation would mean, it would be informative to consider the parallel with a different (but just as paradoxical) sort of discourse, namely that of mysticism, focusing here more specifically on the well-known example of Zen Buddhism.^[3]I use the term ‘mysticism’ to designate a particular aspect of religion, which focuses on contemplative/meditative practices and gives special attention to mystical experiences, i.e., ones in … Continue reading In the classical texts of Zen, we encounter a host of unusual expressions that are sometimes described as metaphorical, but that are just as far from being true metaphors as the paradoxical locutions of madness. Thus, while we know what is meant with Shakespeare’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we would be hard pressed to understand how Dōgen’s “one thousand eyes on top of a stick” could be a metaphor (Tanahashi 2012, 556), and yet, such expressions are far from arbitrary nonsense. Instead of designating a particular mental representation (or an amalgamation of two representations in the case of metaphors), the seemingly nonsensical language of Zen serves to point out or, better yet, symbolise certain aspects of experience that are brought about by intense meditative practice (Sivić & Vörös 2022, 173). The expressions utilised are thus not arbitrary, because they are indeed understood by those familiar with the experiences in question—even being able to evoke such experiences in those that are “on the brink,” so to speak (ibid., 174)—but their distance from ordinary everyday speech and experience makes them completely meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with Zen (Izutsu 1982, 90).

It is crucial to note here that such examples are not a kind of (speaking) speech without language: even though the genesis of each expression (most obviously in the case of kōans) must have displayed the creative power of speaking speech to bring forth new meaning to a remarkable degree, the existence of a tradition of Zen, wherein such expressions are passed down and understood centuries later, attests to the existence of a Zen language or spoken speech, albeit one that is indecipherable from the outside. What is essential for the parallel with madness is this unintelligibility or, better yet, the remarkable fact that the unintelligibility admits of exceptions. In other words, phrases as unusual as those of Zen would be described as nonsense in most contexts, even if they are bona fide attempts to describe highly unusual aspects of experience. What allows such locutions to be understood once they are uttered and thus form a sedimented part of a living tradition is the fact that both interlocutors (and, later on, an entire community) share those unusual experiences due to their shared commitment to decades of meditative practice within the same doctrinal, institutional and liturgical context. Both Dōgen and the monks to whom his talks were addressed lived in the same world, which has continued to be inhabited (or, more accurately, instituted) by Zen practitioners through the centuries.^[4]The concept of institution is meant here in Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the term, i.e., as the “establishment in an experience (or in a constructed apparatus) of dimensions (in the general, … Continue reading This, precisely, is what the psychotic subject lacks. Mad language is unintelligible not because of any inherent logical feature of the utterances themselves, but rather because the highly unusual experiential context in which it arises, and which it attempts to express through a creative act of speaking speech, is not shared by any linguistic community, rendering it speech without language—one that is destined to fall on deaf ears.

At this point an important cautionary note is in order, for the claim that mad utterances are speech without language can all to easily be mistaken for the well-known (and extremely problematic) notion of “private worlds” that is a different guise of the relativist view discussed above. Much like the notion of alternative logical schemes, the “private worlds” view would claim that the psychotic subject lives in a solipsistic world (of perception, thought and expression, complete with a private language) that is just as coherent, vivid and rich as (if not incomparably more than) any other, while being in some way incommensurable or at least inexpressible to anyone else (see Gipps 2022, 61). This, however, is not the claim being made here. For, just as the creative thrust of speaking speech is an essential aspect of expression, so too is the ability of nascent meanings to be understood and thus sediment into a language, instituting a cultural and linguistic world together with other speaking subjects. If mad speech lacks the latter function, it remains but an incomplete expression, deprived of the shared fabric of meaning through which a world can come into being. To the extent that we talk of the psychotic as living in a different world, this—much as in the case of alternative logical schemes—should not be taken too literally.

While the present view thus differs from relativism, it is also at odds with the madness-as-nonsense approach on two important counts. First, although speech without language cannot constitute complete expression, it is nevertheless not nonsense even if it is merely an attempt at expression. Indeed, on a Merleau-Pontian understanding of the centrality of expression to human experience (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 79), the claim that psychotic language is truly nonsensical would be tantamount to excluding psychotic subjects from the sphere of human experience—it would be nothing short of the claim that they are not subjects at all (i.e. the “nobody-at-home” account criticised by Gipps 2022, 92). Second, the present account does not condemn the madman or madwoman to perpetual isolation from any linguistic community; the question of whether mad speech can at least exceptionally allow for the intersubjective understanding necessary for language remains open. If such understanding is unlikely due to the peculiarity of the experience involved, it is (much as in the case of Zen) by no means impossible. Providing opportunities in which such comprehension can arise is thus an important therapeutic task, one that has already been undertaken, for example, in the work of Škodlar and Ciglenečki, where patients with schizophrenia were able—with the help of a philosophically trained psychiatrist and Parmenides’ texts—to communicate aspects of their experience that would be inexpressible in ordinary language, providing relief from the social and linguistic isolation that exacerbates psychosis (Škodlar & Ciglenečki 2021, 21–70; see also Škodlar & Henriksen 2019).

The Merleau-Pontian proposal explored in this section is thus an attempt at a middle way between the relativist view, according to which psychotic language is always a perfectly adequate form of expression, and the madness-as-nonsense view, which denies madness any form of expression whatsoever. The problematic implications of these two extremes—namely the notion of a private language on the one hand and the exclusion of psychosis from the sphere of recognisable human experience on the other—can be avoided by understanding mad speech as a form of expression, albeit one that is most often incomplete. Under favourable circumstances, at least some forms of mad speech can become bona fide language and thus function as adequate means of expression in a similar way to the seemingly paradoxical language of Zen (or the likewise difficult language of Parmenides, for that matter). If this is not possible, then expression remains incomplete, a speech without language that can rightly be termed pathological. It is, in fact, only on this view that we can give full weight to the term pathological speech (see Merleau-Ponty 1973, 17), unlike in the relativist account, which denies its pathological nature, taking it to be merely an unusual form of speech, or the madness-as-nonsense view, which denies that we are dealing with anything expressive at all, hence understanding it as a pathology without speech.

Conclusion

Psychotic experience is a wellspring of insights into the most unusual (and hence most fascinating) facets of man’s being-in-the-world, but many philosophical and clinical approaches reduce it to either just another form of experience, with nothing particularly pathological about it (relativism), or else to a simple neural or cognitive short-circuit with nothing to teach us as far as experience is concerned (the madness-as-nonsense account). In this paper, I have attempted to sketch out a middle way between these two extremes, drawing largely on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of ideality and expression, in order to account as much as possible for both the intelligible (phenomenologically informative, expressive) and the properly unintelligible (pathological, radically different) aspects of madness.

One consequence of charting such a middle way is giving up the comfort provided by both reductionist and relativist accounts, which make psychosis either not the psychiatrist’s problem per se (being merely a neurobiological issue) or not a problem at all (being merely an alternative interpretation of reality). Instead, a Merleau-Pontian acceptance of the fundamental ambiguity of psychosis puts responsibility back in the hands of the clinician, who must attempt to comprehend each individual patient in her brokenness and her human expressiveness, thus determining not just decisions about pharmacological treatment, but also such matters as whether a given mad utterance can be brought to full expression in the proper environment, perhaps to considerable therapeutic benefit (see above; Škodlar & Ciglenečki 2021, 60). Here it is often a case of comprehending “by coexistence, laterally, by the style” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 188)—an effort that is a far cry from the simple rules of reductionism, but one whose difficulty is both understandable and justified in light of its aim.

Acknowledgments

This paper is a result of work within the research program “Philosophical Investigations” (P6-0252), financed by ARRS, the Slovenian Research Agency.

Some of the arguments in this paper were presented in preliminary form at the third Too Mad to be True conference in Ghent, Belgium (October 30 and 31, 2024). I would like to thank Wouter Kusters for co-organising the conference and providing invaluable insights both through his published work and via the less tangible, but likewise philosophically vital avenue of conversation and correspondence.

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