Madness and the Mundus Imaginalis
Five Lecture Summer Short Course - Begins July 17
Salvator Rosa, 'The Death of Empedocles', c. 1665 – 1670
A few days ago I listened to the latest episode of the Pop Apocalypse podcast, Madness, Mysticism and Philosophy - A Talk with Wouter Kusters. I urge you all to listen to the conversation. Kusters’ second book is A Philosophy of Madness. It’s magnificent. I find it thrilling and think some of you might agree. It’s a big book, and we’ll not be able to do it justice in five lectures. But even if you only read parts of it I think you may find it transformative. Here is Kusters on the relation between philosophy and psychosis:
[T]his book contains more formulas for going mad than for avoiding madness. It is aimed more at “psychotizing” thinkers and philosophers than at re-educating or psycho-educating the mad. It is not about a specter of madness but about the seduction of madness. My approach differs from the approach of those who either provide help or seek it. By examining extreme madness in terms of its experiences and thought, I do not want to isolate, classify, or reject it so much as mobilize it productively in order to broaden normal experience and thought. The philosopher is not meant to help either the psychotic or the psychiatrist. Indeed, it is the mad person—through the psychiatrist, if necessary—who can help the philosopher by means of “thought experiments” or “world constructions.”
This fills me with the kind of expansionary relief I first got from reading James Hillman 35 yers ago. And it reminds me of two quotes from Richard Rorty that have stuck with me for decades. I paraphrase: “Philosophy is a genre of literature invented by Plato.” “People whose ideas we find useful we call geniuses. Those whose ideas we find useless we call idiots, or insane.” Kusters shows the continuity between “reason” and “madness”—they are versions of the same underlying attempt to organize experience, and they overlap and mingle in ways that make them difficult to define and disentangle. Though the basic idea here can be found, for example, in both Jung and Hillman, Kusters’ presentation is, it seems to me now, both more direct and less “psychological.” And this notion is wonderfully consistent with Suhrawardi’s claim, echoed by Corbin, that any proper philosophical training must end in mystical trnsformation. For Kusters, madness, philosophy and mysticism are indissolubly intertwined. This seems both beautiful and revelatory to me. The implications for how we experience ourselves and the world are profound.
Join me for 5 lectures over 5 weeks and help explore these remarkable ideas. Or try one and see if it’s helpful. I’m happy to have you sign on for one to see if you want to continue. Access to recordings is provided so you don’t have to come live.
The course format is 60 minutes lecture on selected aspects of the reading for the week. I try to save the last 30 minutes for Q&A. This is an immense book and we will only begin to explore it. My orientation is from the point of view of the primacy of Imagination, understood in the tradition of Jung, Hillman and Henry Corbin. Many people have adopted some version of Corbin’s mundus imaginalis and creative imagination for a variety of purposes. This provides an apt viewpoint for reading Kusters for many reasons including the obvious ones: Corbin himself makes a cameo appearance, there is much Jung and Jungian thought, and there is considerable attention to Peter Kingsley. There are also myriad connections to the work of Jeffery Kripal. We learn from the conversation with Dillon that Kusters and Kripal have been in contact since the publication of the book. This is an important part of the grand webwork of connections this book fits so beautifully into. So, we have a lot of work to do even to place this opus into the ever-shifting psycho-cosmology opened by the mundus imaginalis. The schedule of texts follows:
Week 1: Prefaces and Introduction
Week 2: Overture and Part 1: Cogitating Your Head Off
Week 3: Part 2: Via Mystica Psychotica
Week 4: Part 3: Light Mists
Week 5: Part 4: Crystal Fever
SIGN UP NOW
Our text is Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness.
FIVE Live Sessions: Thursdays 4-5:30 ET | July 17 — August 14
SUGGESTED DONATION $25 PER SESSION - $125 FOR THE SERIES
OR AS ALWAYS, PAY WHAT YOU CAN
RECORDINGS INCLUDED - YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ATTEND LIVE
TO REGISTER CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL:
tcheetham@gmail.com
Thanks for your interest - and tell your friends! See you then.
Hello,
I am very much interested in these lectures, but I live in India! As such, it would be too late in the night or early in the morning for me (if it's 4:00 pm ET, which is 1:30 am IST).
I read that the lectures will be uploaded, but do I have to donate to gain access to those? And where will they be uploaded?