| Chapter 2: | Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In Schopenhauer's opinion, madness results from the disruption of memory: “The thread of memory is broken, its continuity is disrupted, and no evenly connected recollection of the past is possible” (Schopenhauer, 2004, pp. 115–116). A madman patches up the gaps in his memory with fictions—creating illusions, fixations, and melancholy. The philosopher is talking about a different kind of memory than the one associated with recalling objects and events, for a madman is able to recognize a person that he has not seen for a long time. Schopenhauer believed that a special kind of memory is disrupted through painful and traumatic experiences, of which the death of “every friendly soul,” of “something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone” is a paramount instance. In other words, the death of a genius leads to madness. Deeply influenced by Hinduism, Schopenhauer, in turn, had a formative impact on psychoanalysis, art criticism and many men of letters. Hostile to both Christianity and nationalism, he elevated art to the status of religion, science, and imaginary descent.
The phenomenon of genius as an innate individual quality stood at the intersection of early modern philosophy and early modern psychology. The former, tackling the problem of rationality and the world, and the latter being concerned with the mind-body dichotomy. In a parallel fashion, early modern biology and nascent psychology probed their own common ground. This common ground came to be occupied by the human brain and the doctrine of hereditarianism.
The idea that the brain is the organ of the human mind and the seat of all individual emotions, thoughts and behavioral traits originated with the Greeks. But it was not salient until Franz Gall's and Johann Spurzheim's The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and the Brain in Particular, With Observations on the Possibility of Knowing the Several Intellectual and Moral Dispositions of Man and Animals Through the Configurations of Their Heads (Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en