Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
948 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
The English are a nation of merchants; a mind always occupied with speculations is continually agitated by fear and hope. Egotism, the soul of commerce, easily becomes envious and summons other faculties to its aid. Besides, this liberty is far from true natural liberty: on all sides it is constrained and harried by demands opposed to the most legitimate desires of individuals: this is the liberty of interests, of coalitions, of financial combinations, not of man, not of minds and hearts.
Spurzheim made a synthesis of all these analyses in one of the last texts devoted to them. Madness, “more frequent in England than anywhere else,” is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there, and of the wealth universally enjoyed. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. “Religious sentiments … exist without restriction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him,” and by listening to such different opinions, “minds are disturbed in the search for truth.”
For a long time, certain forms of melancholia were considered specifically English; this was a fact in medicine and a constant in literature. Montesquieu contrasted Roman suicide, which was a form of moral and political behavior, the desired effect of a concerted education, with English suicide, which had to be considered as an illness since “the English kill themselves without any apparent reason for doing so; they kill themselves in the very lap of happiness.”
Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau’s influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: “Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.” The threat of madness resumes its place among the emergencies of the century.
Sadism appears at the very moment that unreason, confined for over a century and reduced to silence, reappears, no longer as an image of the world, no longer as a figura, but as language and desire. And it is no accident that sadism, as an individual phenomenon bearing the name of a man, was born of confinement and, within confinement, that Sade’s entire oeuvre is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible Island which thus form, as it were, the natural habitat of unreason.