Social Nerves of Madness: Essay on Kant’s Approach to Mental Illnesses through the Distortions of Subjective Attention

Abstract

The article addresses Immanuel Kant’s view on mental illness through the concept of attention. In Kant’s work, there is a concern to delimit the rules of good management of the faculties of reason through the instruction of subjective attention (in his terms: “the cathartic of the common understanding”: B 78). This subjective capacity plays a capital role in the construction of personal autonomy and knowledge, which is why it appears in his transcendental, metaphysical, and anthropological reflections. In this context, the article reconstructs textual evidence that suggests that the Kantian consideration of madness conceives the possibility that certain weaknesses in individual attention can cause mental illnesses, only treatable through certain social practices.