Karl Jaspers : The "Psychopathology" of Genius
Dernière mise à jour : 1 mai 2023
Extracts from :
Psychopathology and the Modern Age. Karl Jaspers Reads Hölderlin
by Matthias Bormuth
"At the beginning of 1888, Nietzsche described the new fashion for discrediting unusual thinking as an expression of illness, exactly a year before he himself was overcome by mental illness in Turin:
“But a man is constantly paying for holding such an isolated position by an isolation which becomes every day more complete, more icy, and more cutting. ... They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as ‘eccentric’, ‘pathological’, ‘psychiatric’”.
Several years earlier in the first essay of his Untimely Meditations he had already struck out against the conservative educated classes, positing the huge value of psychopathology over psychological well-being in the quest for deeper knowledge:
“For it is a cruel fact that ‘the spirit’ is accustomed most often to descend upon the ‘unhealthy and unprofitable’, and on those occasions when he is honest with himself even the philistine is aware that the philosophies his kind produce and bring to market are in many ways spiritless, though they are of course extremely healthy and profitable.”
The target of his attacks was the “cultural philistine” of the Gründerjahre who had a tendency to try to ignore points of view that he considered uncomfortable and unusual, and to therefore brand them as pathological:
"Finally he invents for his habits, modes of thinking, likes and dislikes, the general formula ‘healthiness’, and dismisses the ever uncomfortable disturber of the peace as being sick or neurotic.”
It is no accident that Nietzsche responded by taking a stand for “the memory of the glorious Hölderlin,” distinguishing him from the others as a “non-philistine” with the ironic question as to “whether he would have been able to find his way in the present great age”.
(...)
Friedrich Nietzsche
("The ill Nietzsche", by Hans Olde, 1899)
Jaspers’ pathography of Nietzsche emphasizes