“Just Fooling Around: Madness, Folly, and Artistic Creativity.”
Peter L Doebler
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Abstract
Ever since at least Plato a connection between the artist and madness has been made. However, in recent centuries this has focused especially on psychological disorders. While such studies are not unimportant, overemphasis on this can lead to a one-sided, rather dark view of a self-absorbed artistic “genius.” Ultimately this distracts from the real subject of art, which is the diverse beauty of the world around us. This paper will argue that a better way to think of the artist is not in terms of madness but in terms of foolishness. The artist’s closest analog is not the mad person but the fool. In fact, the artist is not merely like a fool but the artist is a fool. The paper is divided in three parts. First, three different thinkers who all discuss the artist as mad are considered, Jacques Maritain, Plato, and Schopenhauer. For all three, the association of creativity with literal madness is only an analogy and the two have no direct connection, rather the artist participates in what Plato calls “divine madness.” The second part proposes that there is a general form of madness in modern society, which is the opposite of this divine madness, the result of the subjective turn toward the self in philosophy and psychology that leads to an obsession with the self. The third part considers how viewing the artist as a fool provides a response to this particular madness, a response that goes beyond simply returning to Plato’s divine madness as a dialectical alternative.
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