‘Is the madman mentally ill? No.’
(Heidegger, 1953)
Did Martin Heidegger anticipate Thomas Szasz’s
‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ by seven years?
Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 292
Sunday 11 August 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m
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| Anton Webern 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945 |
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| Georg Trakl 3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914 |
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| Martin Heidegger 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976 |
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| Thomas Szasz 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012 at his 90th-birthday seminar 13 June 2010 (Inner Circle Seminar No. 153) Photograph copyright jennyphotos.com Not to be used without permission |
On 7 October 1950 the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’), in Bühlerhöhe (near Baden Baden). The lecture focussed on a single poem by Georg Trakl, ‘Ein Winterabend’ (‘A winter evening’).
In 1953 Heidegger published an essay, ‘Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes’ (‘Georg Trakl: An Elucidation of his Poetry’), in the journal Merkur (No. 61: pp. 226-258).
In 1959 Heidegger republished his 1950 lecture and 1953 essay as the first two chapters of his book Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language), with the titles, respectively, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’) and ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht’ (‘Language in Poetry: An Elucidation of Georg Trakl’s Poetry’).
Trakl in his poetry mentions ‘der Wahnsinnige’ (‘the madman’) many times.
Heidegger asks in his second chapter (1953: p. 237; 1959: p. 53):
‘[...] der Wahnsinnige. Meint dies einen Geisteskranken? Nein. Wahnsinn bedeutet nicht [...]’‘[...] the madman. Does this mean a mentally ill man? No. Madness does not mean [...]’
The translator Peter D. Hertz, in On the Way to Language (1982 [1971]: p. 173), translates these words of Heidegger’s thus:
‘[...] the madman. Does the word mean someone who is mentally ill? Madness here does not mean [...]’
Readers could not divine from this translation that Heidegger had written:
(1) ‘Nein’ (‘No’) – he did not leave his own question unanswered;
(2) ‘dies’ (‘this’) – he did not write ‘das Wort’ (‘the word’);
(3) ‘Wahnsinn’ (‘Madness’) – he did not write ‘Wahnsinn hier’ (‘Madness here’).
The French translators of this book, Jean Beaufret and Wolfgang Brockmeier, in Acheminement vers la parole (1976: p. 56), translate this passage:
This is a little more faithful to Heidegger: an unequivocal ‘Non’ (‘No’); and ‘La démence’ (‘madness’), rather than merely ‘La démence ici’ (‘madness here’). But it also insists, without evidence, that Heidegger is discussing the ‘mot’ (‘word’) ‘madman’ or ‘madness’ rather than the madman himself or madness itself.
Do these details matter? Yes, if one wants to know what Heidegger is doing here.
Is he making a very limited statement about a particular ‘madman’ in one of Trakl’s poems?
Is he making a somewhat more general statement about ‘the figure of the madman’ in Trakl’s poems?
Or is he making a much more general statement: anticipating in 1953 the comprehensive proposition of Thomas Szasz, in his 1960 paper ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ and his 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness, that there is no ‘mental illness’?
This proposition of Szasz’s has the corollary that, in particular, if there be such a phenomenon as ‘madness’, then, whatever ‘madness’ is, it cannot be ‘mental illness’, nor can the ‘madman’, or anybody else, be ‘mentally ill’ – for the simple reason that ‘mental illness’ is a myth.
It seems unlikely that either Hertz in 1971 or Beaufret and Brockmeier in 1976 supposed that Heidegger in 1953 meant something quite so radical. But might they have felt the need to play down even what he did seem to be saying, lest it make Heidegger himself seem a bit mad?
That Heidegger himself may have thought of himself as Trakl’s ‘madman’ is suggested by Jacques Derrida in what he calls a lengthy ‘parenthesis’ in Geschlecht III, the recently reconstituted and posthumously published (2018) third part of his sustained four-part meditation, Geschlecht, on Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl essay.
But, even though Heidegger insists that the ‘madman’ is not ‘mentally ill’, but engaged in an ‘other’ kind of thinking, embarked on a different ‘way’, did he draw back from what others and even he himself may have thought of as his own ‘madness’?
Heidegger points out that Trakl appears to emphasise (by spaced lettering) only one word, only once, in his entire poetical oeuvre: the word ‘Ein’ (‘one’) in ‘E i n Geschlecht’, where the meaning of ‘Geschlecht’ is highly ambiguous, as discussed by Derrida. Heidegger claims this ‘E i n’ is the ‘Grundton’ (‘keynote’) of Trakl’s entire oeuvre.
But what justifies Heidegger’s assumption that there is a keynote, even of a single poem of Trakl’s, let alone of his poetry as a whole?
The Konkordanz zu den Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Heinz Wetzel, 1971) shows that the word ‘Grundton’ (‘keynote’) appears nowhere in Trakl’s poetry, although ‘Ton’ (‘tone’) and its cognates appear many times.
Trakl is said to have been interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music, and – although in the 1910s and early 1920s highly original but still tonal great music, such as Béla Bartók’s string quartets, Leoš Janáček’s operas, and Jean Sibelius’s later symphonies, was still being composed, and composers such as Paul Hindemith set poems of Trakl’s tonally – Anton Webern’s Opus 13 (1926) and Opus 14 (1924) atonal (though not yet serial or dodecaphonic) settings of seven of Trakl’s poems for soprano and, respectively, orchestra and instrumental ensemble, appear quite extraordinarily ‘in tune’ with this poetry. (Webern wrote to his friend Josef Humplik that they were ‘just about the most difficult in this field’ to rehearse and perform.)
No fewer than five of these seven poems set by Webern were discussed by Heidegger in his two essays on Trakl. Moreover, both the composer and the philosopher separated one Trakl poem, ‘Ein Winterabend’, from the others they selected. It is the only Trakl song in Webern’s Opus 13, of which it is the culmination, while Heidegger’s first chapter is also devoted to just this one poem. Heidegger’s second chapter, however, discusses, among many other Trakl poems, four of the six set by Webern in his Opus 14.
There seems to be an astonishing affinity – up to a point – between Webern’s and Heidegger’s intensely sensitive responses to Trakl. But Webern responded atonally, Heidegger ‘tonally’.
It is highly improbable that Heidegger knew Webern’s songs when, more than thirty years later, he wrote his essays on Trakl. François Fédier noticed, years still later, that Heidegger had the first recording of Webern’s complete published works (a boxed set of LPs conducted by Robert Craft in the 1950s, after Heidegger wrote his Trakl essays). Heidegger told Fédier that someone had given it to him but that he had got little from it; and he presumably gave it away (as he did many books and records), as it was not among the LPs inherited from Heidegger by his son Hermann and, subsequently, by his granddaughter Gertrud. (Personal communications from the late François Fédier and Hermann Heidegger, and from Gertrud Heidegger).
We shall compare Webern’s composing with Heidegger’s thinking; and we shall ask whether Heidegger opened up a polysemous approach to Trakl’s polysemy only to close it off – just as in the Zollikon seminars he encouraged or at least tolerated Medard Boss’s developing a ‘Daseinsanalysis’ that remained medicalised and retained psychiatric diagnosis: making, in the words of the existential psychotherapist Martti Siirala, the ‘violent’ and ‘absolutist’ claim to unmediated access to phenomena.
We shall continue to explore Heidegger’s decades-long explicit suspicion of, and hostility to, dialectics, from his earliest Freiburg lectures in 1919 to his last seminar in his home in 1973, and how this appears to limit his and Boss’s teaching in the Zollikon seminars and elsewhere. Might this be remedied by developing, as Heidegger himself never did, his fleeting reference, in a 1919 lecture reported by his student the philosopher Oskar Becker, to ‘diahermeneutics’?
This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.
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